To within a few years of the middle of the nineteenth century, Babylon and Assyria were only names. People read about them in the Bible, but no visible trace remained. They had vanished utterly from the face of the earth. Some thinkers, who knew how stories become distorted by the passage of time, questioned if such places ever existed, whether they were not just myths, the figments of the imaginations of some ancient scribes.
The rivers Tigris and Euphrates flowed through deserts. It seemed impossible that such lands could once have been flowing with milk and honey, that they could have supported a big population and a high civilization.
Wandering Arabs roved the plains, encamping where they listed, warring against the Sultan and each other. They drove their sheep wherever the scanty herbage offered them fodder. The spring saw the desert blossom like the rose, the summer sun changed it of a sudden to desolation, burning up everything, sometimes leaving the tribes struggling in the grip of famine.
Great mounds of sand stood up from the deserts on each side of the rivers, hills on which the Arabs used to set their black tents of goat hair, while their flocks fed on the scanty grass that clothed the mounds in spring. No sign was apparent of a previous civilization; just the great mounds humping out of the desert and the black tents of the Arabs.
Those who saw the mounds did not trouble their heads about them. They took them for natural hills. There was no reason for them to think otherwise.
No one questioned why such hills should crop suddenly out of the flat desert. The Arabs who set up a village or two of mud huts on some of the mounds did not ask themselves why they should occasionally turn up bricks among the rubbish on the hills. When things have been in existence as long as the mounds on the Tigris, and when bricks have been turned up as often as the Arabs have unearthed them, these things are accepted without question as a matter of course. Neither Turks nor Arabs troubled about the mounds. It was left to foreigners to prove that these lofty eminences were the handiwork of man, and that the mounds on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates covered all that was left of Assyria and Babylonia.
In deciphering the stone of Behistun, Rawlinson did wonderful work. He was but thirty-five when he made the announcement that astounded the scientific world. The credit of uncovering the remains of ancient Assyria rests with Austin Henry Layard, who started life by studying law, and finished by making one of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century.
Layard’s whole life was one long romance. He was endowed with a vivid imagination, which probably came from his mixed descent, for his mother was a Spanish lady and his father an Englishman. As a young man, Layard was set to studying law, but instead of attaining great legal honours, he was made a baronet for wielding pick and spade to such good purpose out in Mesopotamia, that he dug up more knowledge of the past than any one man before or since.
Layard in his teens read the Arabian Nights with avidity. All the colour, the romance of the East appealed to his mind. He dreamed dreams of bazaars and eastern palaces, with veiled ladies and their lovers. While he dreamed these dreams he was compelled to study musty legal documents, in which he took not the slightest interest. Being confined in an office he hated, his great desire was to see the scenes he had read and dreamed about. Yet there was no escape for him. His father had chosen the law for him as a profession, and he continued his studies against his own inclinations.
Working in his uncle’s office, Layard was not much impressed by the imagination or the generosity of his relative. Often when the lawyer thought his nephew was studying in his room, Layard was chatting with refugees, listening eagerly to their tales, and filling his rooms with the smell of fried sprats.