Soon after Rassam’s return from Assyria in the year 1854, Loftus entered the service of the Trustees of the British Museum, and was sent out to continue the excavation of Kouyunjik. Loftus ably followed up the work of his predecessor; new reliefs were brought to light, the most celebrated of which perhaps is that of Ashur-bani-pal and his queen reclining at meat in the garden (cf. Pl. [XXI]), but again though the spirit was willing, the funds were weak, and Loftus had to abandon all hope of completing the excavation of the palace of Assyria’s most famous king.
The abundant harvest, yielded by these numerous excavations in Mesopotamia, and stored away in the Museums, afforded a supply of material copious enough to occupy the intellectual acumen of the savants for some time to come, while the general public whose interest in these archæological expeditions depended on the tangible results forthcoming, were inclined to await the decipherment and publication of the accumulated mass of clay tablets, monuments and stelæ already to hand, before furnishing the necessary funds for any fresh expeditions, and it was not till 1873 that George Smith, the able assistant of Sir Henry Rawlinson, whose discovery of the Babylonian account of the Deluge had alike won for him great fame, and also kindled again the enthusiasm of the public in the cause of excavation, was enabled, thanks to the munificence of the proprietors of the “Daily Telegraph,” to personally conduct an expedition to Mesopotamia. In the January of that year Smith set out for Mosul, but on his arrival, he found to his dismay that the requisite firmân had not as yet been granted by the Turkish Government, and he accordingly journeyed southward, examining the ruined mounds of Nimrûd and Ḳalat Sherḳat on the way. In northern Babylonia he spent but a short time which he employed in visiting the sites of Babylon, Borsippa (Birs-Nimrûd) and other ancient ruins, but by the beginning of April, he obtained the necessary permission to excavate in Assyria, and accordingly returned at once to Mosul. His attention was first of all directed to Nimrûd, the scene of so many of Layard’s triumphs, but his predecessors in the field had reaped their harvest to the full, and the gleanings which remained were poor and meagre.
In the following month he transferred the seat of his operations to Kouyunjik, with a view to discovering the remainder of Ashur-bani-pal’s library. The work was far from easy owing to the complete state of confusion in which the ruins then were, partly owing to the work of earlier excavators, partly owing to the builders of the bridge at Mosul who had made use of the remains of Assyria’s ancient buildings for the construction of the bridge, and partly owing to the instability of some of Layard’s tunnels, which had the meanwhile collapsed. Here too, the harvest was past and the summer of Assyrian excavations was ended, but the object which the “Daily Telegraph” proprietors had in view was realized in the discovery of another fragment of the Babylonian account of the Deluge, which proved to fill in the chief lacuna in the story. Smith had entertained the hope that this all-important discovery would be an inducement to his financiers to grant an additional sum for the continuation of the work, but they declined. Smith accordingly had reluctantly to set his face westward and return to London, but before the year was out he was on his way back to the Orient, the Trustees of the British Museum having voted £1000 for another expedition thither. He arrived at Mosul on New Year’s Day 1874, and recommenced his quest for tablets, but the time at his disposal was short, his firmân expiring in the ensuing March; this notwithstanding, in the three months spent at Kouyunjik on these two expeditions, he brought to light some three thousand tablets dealing with a variety of different subjects, and providing invaluable material for the student of Babylonian and Assyrian astronomy, theology and chronology. To him is due not only the rediscovery of the Babylonian story of the Flood, but also of portions of the Creation legends, and of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero of Babylonian folk-lore, while to the student of Old Testament History, his discovery of Sargon’s own account of his campaign against the city of Ashdod recorded in the twentieth chapter of Isaiah is of paramount importance. In the spring of 1876 Smith conducted his third and last expedition to Assyria, under the auspices of the British Museum, the value of whose collections he had already so greatly enhanced. But he arrived to find the cholera rampant all over the country, and confusion and disorder reigned everywhere. To excavate under such circumstances was an impossibility, but Smith spared no effort in his futile endeavour to overcome the impossible, boldly facing all dangers and difficulties, but he ultimately succumbed to the disastrous effects of climate and exposure, and died at Aleppo in August 1876, a martyr to the cause of science. George Smith was not only an excavator, but also a scholar, and his scholastic achievements are the more praise-worthy, when it is recollected that he was practically a self-educated man, who by dint of his extraordinary perseverance and indomitable will succeeded where other men of perhaps greater ability failed, and who on that account alone is entitled to the prominent place which he occupies in the annals of Assyriology.
Soon after the death of George Smith in 1876, the Trustees of the British Museum requested Rassam to resume his long-abandoned labours in Assyria, and after some unavoidable delay, operations were commenced in January 1878. The work was greatly facilitated by the presence of Sir Henry Layard as British special representative at Constantinople, for the latter having always been on friendly terms with the Turkish Government, was consequently able to secure concessions which might well have been denied to anyone else. Rassam’s marching orders were sufficiently explicit, he was sent out to continue the excavation of Nineveh, but his heart was bent on the discovery of palaces and temples rather than on the comparatively unexciting task of searching for tablets, the importance or non-importance of which could never be determined off-hand, without a detailed study of the contents. His ambition was satisfied shortly after his arrival: a year before his resumption of the work of Assyrian exploration two portions of a bronze door-panel covered with figures and cuneiform characters had been sent to him by a friend, and immediately on his return to Assyria he made enquiries as to where these pieces of worked metal had been unearthed. He soon discovered that they formed part of a large bronze door-panel discovered quite accidentally by a peasant in a mound, some fifteen miles east of Mosul, called Balâwât. Accordingly, his immediate desire was to discover the remainder of this unique monument of ancient metallurgy, and with that end in view he determined to explore the Balâwât mound. He discovered that the site had been used as a cemetery by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and was consequently outside the limits of his firmân, but disregarding the risk of a collision with the authorities and the still more imminent risk of inciting the native population to open resistance, for no people civilized or uncivilized are in the habit of passively acquiescing in the disinterment of their dead, he determined to hazard everything in pursuit of his prize. Success attended his efforts, and very soon after the cutting of the first trenches, fragments of bronze plates similar to those which had previously come to light, were unearthed. In the course of a short time, the remaining panels were duly restored to the light of day: these panels had once upon a time decorated the wooden gates of a large building, to which they were affixed. The scenes portrayed thereon represent incidents in the life and campaigns of Shalmaneser II (860-825 B.C.), the successor of Ashur-naṣir-pal, and the first Assyrian king who is known to have come into immediate contact with Israel. In the course of his excavation of the mound, he came across the ruins of a small temple, and a large coffer made of marble containing two tablets made of the same material and bearing inscriptions of Ashur-naṣir-pal. Rassam’s work at Kouyunjik and Nimrûd was also far from fruitless, though Nimrûd certainly failed to yield a harvest in any way comparable to that of bygone days, a few bas-reliefs, a number of clay tablets and some enamelled tiles practically comprising all that Nimrûd contributed to the study of Assyrian antiquity on this occasion. So too at Kouyunjik, clay inscriptions were the chief and indeed practically the only fruits of the excavations carried on by Rassam during his four expeditions (1878-1882). The most epoch-making of these inscriptions consisted in a ten-sided baked clay prism containing the annals of Ashur-bani-pal, and four barrel-shaped cylinders inscribed with an account of Sennacherib’s various campaigns. Rassam further attempted the complete exploration of Nebi Yûnus, the second large mound which marks the site or part of the site of ancient Nineveh, but he did not meet with the success which his indefatigable efforts deserved, owing to the innate factiousness and aptitude for intrigue which lie dormant in the Oriental breast even at the best of times, and which on this occasion so far from being dormant, showed themselves in all their pristine vigour, the result of which was the cessation of Rassam’s labours, and the final dissipation of all his hopes.
PLATE V
Déc. en Chald., Plate 53, ii
Doorway at Tellô, erected by Gudea; on the left a later building of Seleucid period
