14. Things began greatly to change towards the end of the last century. Yet the mounds of Assyria and Babylonia were still suffered to keep their secret unrevealed. This want of interest may be in part explained by their peculiar nature. They are so different from other ruins. A row of massive pillars or of stately columns cut out on the clear blue sky, with the desert around or the sea at their feet,—a broken arch or battered tombstone clothed with ivy and hanging creepers, with the blue and purple mountains for a background, are striking objects which first take the eye by their beauty, then invite inspection by the easy approach they offer. But these huge, shapeless heaps! What labor to remove even a small portion of them! And when that is done, who knows whether their contents will at all repay the effort and expense?
15. The first European whose love of learning was strong enough to make him disregard all such doubts and difficulties, was Mr. Rich, an Englishman. He was not particularly successful, nor were his researches very extensive, being carried on entirely with his private means; yet his name will always be honorably remembered, for he was the first who went to work with pickaxe and shovel, who hired men to dig, who measured and described some of the principal mounds on the Euphrates, thus laying down the groundwork of all later and more fruitful explorations in that region. It was in 1820 and Mr. Rich was then political resident or representative of the East India Company at Baghdad. He also tried the larger of the two mounds opposite Mosul, encouraged by the report that, a short time before he arrived there, a sculpture representing men and animals had been disclosed to view. Unfortunately he could not procure even a fragment of this treasure, for the people of Mosul, influenced by their ulema—(doctor of the law)—who had declared these sculptures to be "idols of the infidels," had walked across the river from the city in a body and piously shattered them to atoms. Mr. Rich had not the good luck to come across any such find himself, and after some further efforts, left the place rather disheartened. He carried home to England the few relics he had been able to obtain. In the absence of more important ones, they were very interesting, consisting in fragments of inscriptions, of pottery, in engraved stone, bricks and pieces of bricks. After his death all these articles were placed in the British Museum, where they formed the foundation of the present noble Chaldea-Assyrian collection of that great institution. Nothing more was undertaken for years, so that it could be said with literal truth that, up to 1842, "a case three feet square inclosed all that remained, not only of the great city Nineveh, but of Babylon itself!"[A]
16. The next in the field was Mr. Botta, appointed French Consul at Mosul in 1842. He began to dig at the end of the same year, and naturally attached himself specially to the larger of the two mounds opposite Mosul, named Koyunjik, after a small village at its base. This mound is the Mespila of Xenophon. He began enthusiastically, and worked on for over three months, but repeated disappointments were beginning to produce discouragement, when one day a peasant from a distant village happened to be looking on at the small party of workmen. He was much amused on observing that every—to him utterly worthless—fragment of alabaster, brick or pottery, was carefully picked out of the rubbish, most tenderly handled and laid aside, and laughingly remarked that they might be better repaid for their trouble, if they would try the mound on which his village was built, for that lots of such rubbish had kept continually turning up, when they were digging the foundations of their houses.
17. Mr. Botta had by this time fallen into a rather hopeless mood; yet he did not dare to neglect the hint, and sent a few men to the mound which had been pointed out to him, and which, as well as the village on the top of it, bore the name of Khorsabad. His agent began operations from the top. A well was sunk into the mound, and very soon brought the workmen to the top of a wall, which, on further digging, was found to be lined along its base with sculptured slabs of some soft substance much like gypsum or limestone. This discovery quickly brought Mr. Botta to the spot, in a fever of excitement. He now took the direction of the works himself, had a trench dug from the outside straight into the mound, wide and deep, towards the place already laid open from above. What was his astonishment on finding that he had entered a hall entirely lined all round, except where interruptions indicated the place of doorways leading into other rooms, with sculptured slabs similar to the one first discovered, and representing scenes of battles, sieges and the like. He walked as in a dream. It was a new and wonderful world suddenly opened. For these sculptures evidently recorded the deeds of the builder, some powerful conqueror and king. And those long and close lines engraved in the stone, all along the slabs, in the same peculiar character as the short inscriptions on the bricks that lay scattered on the plain—they must surely contain the text to these sculptured illustrations. But who is to read them? They are not like any known writing in the world and may remain a sealed book forever. Who, then, was the builder? To what age belong these structures? Which of the wars we read about are here portrayed? None of these questions, which must have strangely agitated him, could Mr. Botta have answered at the time. But not the less to him remains the glory of having, first of living men, entered the palace of an Assyrian king.
18. Mr. Botta henceforth devoted himself exclusively to the mound of Khorsabad. His discovery created an immense sensation in Europe. Scholarly indifference was not proof against so unlooked-for a shock; the revulsion was complete and the spirit of research and enterprise was effectually aroused, not to slumber again. The French consul was supplied by his government with ample means to carry on excavations on a large scale. If the first success may be considered as merely a great piece of good fortune, the following ones were certainly due to intelligent, untiring labor and ingenuous scholarship. We see the results in Botta's voluminous work "Monuments de Ninive"[B] and in the fine Assyrian collection of the Louvre, in the first room of which is placed, as is but just, the portrait of the man to whose efforts and devotion it is due.
19. The great English investigator Layard, then a young and enthusiastic scholar on his Eastern travels, passing through Mosul in 1842, found Mr. Botta engaged on his first and unpromising attempts at Koyunjik, and subsequently wrote to him from Constantinople exhorting him to persist and not give up his hopes of success. He was one of the first to hear of the astounding news from Khorsabad, and immediately determined to carry out a long-cherished project of his own, that of exploring a large mound known among the Arabs under the name of Nimrud, and situated somewhat lower on the Tigris, near that river's junction with one of its chief tributaries, the Zab. The difficulty lay in procuring the necessary funds. Neither the trustees of the British Museum nor the English Government were at first willing to incur such considerable expense on what was still looked upon as very uncertain chances. It was a private gentleman, Sir Stratford Canning, then English minister at Constantinople, who generously came forward, and announced himself willing to meet the outlay within certain limits, while authorities at home were to be solicited and worked upon. So Mr. Layard was enabled to begin operations on the mound which he had specially selected for himself in the autumn of 1845, the year after that in which the building of Khorsabad was finally laid open by Botta. The results of his expedition were so startlingly vast and important, and the particulars of his work on the Assyrian plains are so interesting and picturesque, that they will furnish ample materials for a separate chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Layard's "Discoveries at Nineveh," Introduction.
[B] In five huge folio volumes, one of text, two of inscriptions, and two of illustrations. The title shows that Botta erroneously imagined the ruins he had discovered to be those of Nineveh itself.