ineteenth century, and a few
relics found their way to Europe. But before Sir A.H. Layard set to
work as an excavator in the "forties", "a case scarcely three feet
square", as he himself wrote, "enclosed all that remained not only of
the great city of Nineveh, but of Babylon itself".[4]

Layard, the distinguished pioneer Assyriologist, was an Englishman of
Huguenot descent, who was born in Paris. Through his mother he
inherited a strain of Spanish blood. During his early boyhood he
resided in Italy, and his education, which began there, was continued
in schools in France, Switzerland, and England. He was a man of
scholarly habits and fearless and independent character, a charming
writer, and an accomplished fine-art critic; withal he was a great
traveller, a strenuous politician, and an able diplomatist. In 1845,
while sojourning in the East, he undertook the exploration of ancient
Assyrian cities. He first set to work at Kalkhi, the Biblical Calah.
Three years previously M.P.C. Botta, the French consul at Mosul, had
begun to investigate the Nineveh mounds; but these he abandoned for a
mound near Khorsabad which proved to be the site of the city erected
by "Sargon the Later", who is referred to by Isaiah. The relics
discovered by Botta and his successor, Victor Place, are preserved in
the Louvre.

At Kalkhi and Nineveh Layard uncovered the palaces of some of the most
famous Assyrian Emperors, including the Biblical Shalmaneser and
Esarhaddon, and obtained the colossi, bas reliefs, and other treasures
of antiquity which formed the nucleus of the British Museum's
unrivalled Assyrian collection. He also conducted diggings at Babylon
and Niffer (Nippur). His work was continued by his assistant, Hormuzd
Rassam, a native Christian of Mosul, near Nineveh. Rassam studied for
a time at Oxford.

The discoveries made by Layard and Botta stimulated others to follow
their example. In the "fifties" Mr. W.K. Loftus engaged in excavations
at Larsa and Erech, where important discoveries were made of ancient
buildings, ornaments, tablets, sarcophagus graves, and pot burials,
while Mr. J.E. Taylor operated at Ur, the seat of the moon cult and
the birthplace of Abraham, and at Eridu, which is generally regarded
as the cradle of early Babylonian (Sumerian) civilization.

In 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson superintended diggings at Birs Nimrud
(Borsippa, near Babylon), and excavated relics of the Biblical
Nebuchadrezzar. This notable archaeolo