The Arab laughed. It seemed to him a huge joke that men should be wasting their time digging in the earth for bits of broken brick. “Why, where I live there are thousands of them,” he said. “We find them when we are digging the foundations of our houses.”
Botta was told what the peasant had said. The Frenchman was very dubious. He had heard such things before, and the rumours always proved false. The diggers, however, were so insistent, that at last he sent one or two off to the village of Khorsabad, where the peasant lived, to see what they could find.
It was some little time before the diggers could persuade the villagers to allow them to sink a test hole. Eventually, the inhabitants were won over, and the excavators sank a shaft—which quickly ended at the top of a mighty wall!
Hastening at once to the spot, Botta set his men furiously to work. They unearthed an ancient Assyrian palace. Great slabs of stone were covered with sculptured scenes of war. Botta was astounded. He, nor any other modern man, had never seen the like.
They proved to be the ruins of a king’s palace, but unfortunately as soon as they were laid bare the slabs began to crumble. A huge fire had destroyed the palace. In the heat the slabs were reduced to lime, and directly they were uncovered they fell in little pieces. Nothing could be done to preserve them. They had remained hidden for thousands of years. The kindly earth had kept them intact, but directly the air played about them they decayed.
Layard was for long in close touch with Botta. More than once the Frenchman wrote to Layard about his non-success, and Layard displayed his fine character by urging the Frenchman to continue.
The Briton had studied the spot with a view to working there. All thoughts of reaching Ceylon had passed from his mind. He wrote to friends, and tried to interest them in his proposed work. He received no encouragement. Despite all this disappointment, he was great enough to encourage his rival. It throws considerable light on the character of the man who eventually accomplished so much on the banks of the Tigris.
If Layard did not make the first discovery there, he had much to do with it. But for his encouragement, Botta might have ceased digging long before the peasant stood looking down into his trenches, to tell him that there were heaps of the funny old bricks in his village of Khorsabad.
The influence of the Englishman, and the laughing words of a peasant, led to the Frenchman taking the first step back into the Assyria of the past.