Excavations at Nimrûd (Calah) in Ashur-naṣir-pal’s Palace
Calah (Nimrûd) was the capital of Assyria for 220 years (885-668), but at the close of that period she had to yield her pre-eminence to Nineveh, which Sennacherib rebuilt and which was the capital of the empire from his time till the end of the chapter, i.e. till about 630 B.C. Sennacherib naturally built a palace at his new capital, Nineveh, and the discovery and excavation of this palace are also due to the indefatigable efforts of the late Sir Henry Layard and his assistant Hormuzd Rassam. This palace of Sennacherib occupied the south-west corner of the northern of the two groups of mounds known as Kouyunjik which mark the site of ancient Nineveh, Ashur-bani-pal’s (668-626 B.C.) palace being located immediately to the north of it. Unfortunately Sennacherib’s palace suffered from fire when the Medes took the city in 606 B.C. in consequence of which most of his wall bas-reliefs are greatly marred. The complete excavation of this palace was the great triumph of Layard’s second campaign (1849-1851), and the bas-reliefs taken from the walls of its seventy or more halls and chambers now form, in spite of their comparatively bad state of preservation, one of the most priceless possessions of the British Museum. But one more epoch-making discovery in the annals of Mesopotamian excavations must be attributed to this world-renowned excavator.
One day Layard discovered two chambers connected with each other, and after removing the débris, he found that “to the height of a foot or more from the floor they were entirely filled with cuneiform tablets of baked clay, some entire, but the greater part broken into many fragments.”
In point of fact he had chanced upon part of the library of Ashur-bani-pal, one of Assyria’s greatest kings; the library appears to have been stored partly in the northern palace, that of Ashur-bani-pal proper, and partly in the south-western palace built by Sennacherib; it was in the latter that the rooms referred to were found; the other half of this great library of the later Assyrian kings was subsequently unearthed by Rassam. The contents of these tablets, made of the finest clay and ranging from one to fifteen inches, are as varied as the tablets themselves. Some of them contain historical records, others astronomical reports, or mathematical calculations: there are also letters of a private and public character, but the majority of the tablets deal with astrology and medicine, both of which subjects were intimately connected in the mind of the Babylonian. Prayers, incantations, psalms and religious texts in general, formed a considerable part of this library, and as a large proportion of the “volumes” or tablets are not original works but copies from earlier Babylonian productions, the value of the library,—now known under the name of the “Kouyunjik collection,”—for the study of the religious and mythological conceptions of both the Babylonians and Assyrians is more than can be adequately estimated. Many of the tablets are bilingual, the ideographic Sumerian being provided with an Assyrian interlinear translation, and these, together with other tablets of the collection containing syllabaries in which the Sumerian value, the Assyrian name, and sometimes the Assyrian meaning of different signs are given, have been of the utmost use in the rediscovery of the languages of Mesopotamia. Layard also visited Babylonia, and began to excavate at Babylon and Nippur, but his Babylonian operations were not attended with the extraordinary success of his excavations at Nineveh and Calah.
In 1851 a French expedition was sent out to Babylonia under Fresnel and Jules Oppert: they secured various relics from the ruined mounds of Babylon, among which may be especially mentioned a fine collection of coloured-brick fragments, but unfortunately all was lost through a mishap on the Tigris in 1855.
In 1852 Rassam succeeded Layard in the field, and at once had to contend with difficulties resulting from Rawlinson’s concessions to Victor Place, to whom he had transferred the right of excavating what remained to be excavated at Kouyunjik, which from Rassam’s point of view fell within the sphere of British influence, and to which therefore British excavators had a prior claim. In 1853 Rassam commenced operations at Ḳalat Sherḳât, but apart from the discovery of two clay prisms inscribed with the annals of Tiglath-Pileser I (1100-1080 B.C.), the ancient Ashur did not yield much fruit on this occasion. At Calah, the scene of Layard’s brilliant triumphs, Rassam discovered E-zida, the temple of Nebo, the god who vied with Marduk for the first place in the Babylonian pantheon of later days, and whose name is commemorated in the names of several of the kings of the first Babylonian empire, as also in three of those of the second empire, the most familiar of whom is the Biblical Nebuchadnezzar; six large statues of the god were brought to light, two of which at all events are by their inscriptions shown to be contemporaneous with the Assyrian king Adad-nirari III (812-783); a stele of King Shamshi-Adad II (825-812 B.C.), and the remains of an inscribed obelisk of Ashur-naṣir-pal complete the list of his principal finds on this site. But his name will be for ever associated with Kouyunjik; his first efforts were productive of no very great results beyond the discovery of a limestone obelisk of Ashur-naṣir-pal covered with bas-reliefs, and now in the Assyrian Transept of the British Museum, and a female torso from the palace of Ashur-bêl-kala, king of Assyria about 1080 B.C. (cf. Pl. [XXIV]). Rassam however profited by Victor Place’s omission to make use of the permission accorded to him by Rawlinson to explore the northern part of Kouyunjik, but at the same time took the precaution of making his initial operations under the cover of night. His nocturnal labours were crowned with the greatest success which the excavators of those days could have—the discovery of a new palace—and after he was satisfied on this point, the digging was allowed to proceed during the daytime, as it is a recognized rule that the discoverer of a new palace has established his claim to the complete excavation of it, as against the rest of the world. The newly-discovered palace turned out to be that of Ashur-bani-pal, king of Assyria (668-626 B.C.), in whose reign Assyria attained the height of her power both at home and abroad, extending her sway even as far as Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt, which was taken and sacked by this king in B.C. 666. But Ashur-bani-pal as well as being a great warrior, was also a great huntsman, and the bas-reliefs which he caused to be sculptured upon the walls of his palace at Kouyunjik, in commemoration of his exploits in the chase, are probably the masterpieces of Assyrian art. They thus testify not only to the sportsmanship of this king, but also to the encouragement which he gave to art, while Rassam’s further discovery of the other half of Ashur-bani-pal’s library has shown that king to have been an even greater patron of literature than there had hitherto been reason to suppose.
In the spring of 1854, funds failed and Rassam was in consequence obliged to return, but shortly afterwards he accepted a political appointment at Aden. The meanwhile, work had already been commenced in Babylonia by W. K. Loftus who carried on small excavations at Warka, the ancient Erech, the ruins of which are the largest in Babylonia, but though many interesting antiquities were unearthed, none of them are of an epoch-making character, the slipper-shaped coffins belonging to the Parthian period, being perhaps the best known. Owing to the fact that Erech has been occupied during the greater part of its history, i.e. some 5000 years, it is not a fruitful mine for early antiquities. Senkereh (Larsa) on the other hand, which has been identified with the Ellasar of Genesis xiv. 1, seems to have remained more or less unoccupied after the Persian period, and hence it is a better site for the exploration and study of the earlier history of Southern Mesopotamia. Inscribed bricks from Senkereh show that Khammurabi (the Amraphel of Genesis xiv.?), and the most famous king of the first dynasty of Babylon, repaired the ancient temple-tower there, as also did his Neo-Babylonian successor, Nabonidus, some fourteen centuries later, while the famous Nebuchadnezzar of Old Testament fame had also not neglected it in his works of restoration. The lower strata of the mound showed that Ur-Engur, King of Ur, whose reign may probably be assigned to the latter part of the third millennium B.C., had also made his presence felt in this ancient city of Larsa. Subsequently Larsa shared the fate of other early Babylonian cities, and was used as a cemetery: the tablets found near the coffins apparently belong to a much earlier date, and were probably found by the grave-diggers to whom their altered position is to be ascribed. Excavations were also conducted at the same time at Tell Sifr, which resulted in the discovery of about a hundred so-called case-tablets (i.e. tablets protected by a clay cover or envelope), belonging to the time of the first dynasty of Babylon, which in their turn led to the discovery of a hitherto unknown king of this dynasty, Samsu-iluna, the successor of Khammurabi.
When Loftus was excavating at Warka at the beginning of 1854, J. E. Taylor, the Vice-Consul at Basra, undertook excavations on behalf of the British Museum at Muḳeyyer, the site of the ancient city of Ur. He commenced operations on what appeared at the time, and what ultimately turned out to be, the principal building of the city, the temple of the Moon-god Sin, in the four corners of which he discovered four clay cylinders, and also another barrel-shaped cylinder the inscription of which is of even greater importance than those of the corner-cylinders. We learn that Ur-Engur, King of Ur, built the temple, that his son Dungi repaired it, and that Nabonidus the last King of Babylon restored it some two thousand years later. These foundation-cylinders of Nabonidus proved of great historical interest, the inscription on each of them concluding with a prayer for Bêl-shar-uṣur, the King’s son and heir, the Belshazzar of Daniel v., who was in command of Babylon at the time of the capture of the city by Cyrus. Taylor also conducted excavations on other Babylonian sites, the most important of which was Abû Shahrein, the ancient Eridu whose god Ea was one of the most illustrious as well as one of the most time-honoured gods in Babylonia. Its ruins are smaller than those of Ur, but they contain the remains of a temple-tower, consisting of two storeys, which Taylor laid bare. From the inscribed bricks recovered, the identification of this site with the ancient Eridu was established.
Towards the end of the year 1854, Sir Henry Rawlinson commenced excavating Birs-Nimrûd, the Borsippa of antiquity; he commenced digging at the four corners of what ultimately proved to be the famous E-zida, the temple of Nebo, in search of clay cylinders such as had been found at the corners of other Babylonian buildings; he recovered two such foundation-cylinders which turned out to be duplicates, together with fragmentary parts of other cylinders, all of which had been deposited there by Nebuchadnezzar.