Study of Ancient Mesopotamia: Archaeology, Assyriology, History, Discoveries | Middle East And North Africa

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ARCHAEOLOGY IN MESOPOTAMIA

Akkadian victory stele in the Louvre

Mid-19th century archaeologists rediscovered Mesopotamia by poking around crumbled cities in the deserts of present-day Iraq. Unlike ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, which boasted standing stone monuments, many of the remains in Mesopotamia are graves, mud brick foundations and mounds comprised of the remains of mud brick buildings. Many of these remains were either buried from the outset, have crumbled over time or have been buried by sand and soil after centuries of floods and sand and dust storms.

Most of what archaeologists and historians regard as ancient Mesopotamia is in Iraq Of Iraq's 25,000 identified sites, less than percent have been worked on. Almost no field work has been done in Iraq since the first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91 and there was relatively little during the Iran-Iraq war period in the 1980s. War and looting have left their marks. These days many new discoveries are made from artifacts purchased from smugglers and looters. New hydroelectric projects in Syria and Turkey are also disrupting archaeological work. Only recently have archaeologists started going back to Iraq but it still is a very dangerous place for them to work.

A lot the early archaeological work in Iraq was driven by attempts to find historical evidence to back up claims in The Bible. Sumer was discovered in 1853 by the British consul at Basra, J.E. Taylor, who dug into a tumulus at Tell al-Muqayyar. A clay cylinder seal with a cuneiform symbols, including one for Ur, establishing the existence of the city mentioned in the Old Testament as Abraham’s birthplace. The discovery in 1872 of tablets from Assyria, Babylonia and Sumeria that told a Noah-like flood story was a major news story in the Victorian era. The Biblical city of Ukresh was found in 1995 in northeastern Syria near the border of Turkey.

Websites on Mesopotamia: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago isac.uchicago.edu ; University of Chicago Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations nelc.uchicago.edu ; University of Pennsylvania Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations (NELC) nelc.sas.upenn.edu; Penn Museum Near East Section penn.museum; Ancient History Encyclopedia ancient.eu.com/Mesopotamia ; British Museum britishmuseum.org ; Louvre louvre.fr/en/explore ; Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org/toah ; Ancient Near Eastern Art Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org; Iraq Museum theiraqmuseum ABZU etana.org/abzubib; Archaeology Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Live Science livescience.com/

Mesopotamian Scholarship

There are only about 250 Sumerologists in the world and a similar number of Assyrianologists. There is no such thing as a Babylonologist. Professor Ake Sjöberg of the University of Pennsylvania University Museum is a head of team that is assembling a Sumerian dictionary. The first letter "B" of the dictionary was finished in 1984. The second latter "A" was finished in 1989. The entire 18-letter dictionary is expected to be completed around 2025.

There are extensive collections of cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, the Louvre, Pennsylvania University, Yale and museums in Iraq, Syria and Turkey, with additional ones at other places like Columbia University, Cornell, UCLA, the University of New York and universities in Germany. Yale's longstanding study of Mesopotamia was enhanced in 1988 with a report by Harvey Weiss, an associate professor of Near Eastern archeology, of a discovery of 1,100 cuneiform clay tablets and seal impressions covering 1740 B.C. to 1725 B.C. at the university that the university didn’t know about.

The Louvre's holdings of Mesopotamian art and artifacts are among the finest in the West, thanks to the pioneering efforts of 19th-century French archeological teams. They were the first to excavate the great Mesopotamian civilizations of Sumer, Akkad and Babylon, as well as the state of Elam to the east in present-day Iran.

Assyriology

Assyrian Cylinder seal showing a banquet at the Louvre

Assyriology is the study of the language, history, and antiquities of ancient Assyria and Mesopotamia. Most Assyriologists specialize in translating Mesopotamian cuneiform documents, mostly in the form of clay tablets, and generally covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, the Sumerians (people of Sumer), the Akkadian Empire (Akkadians), Elamites, Ebla, Babylonia (Babylonians) and Assyria (Assyrians) as well as contemporary groups such as the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians). Assyriology can also include the Persians and other people of Iran as well as Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating from as far back as 8000 B.C. to the Islamic Conquest of the A.D. 7th century. [Source: Wikipedia]

Aaron Skaist wrote in Encyclopaedia Judaica: Assyriology in its widest sense is the scientific study of all those civilizations which employed one or another of the cuneiform scripts; defined more narrowly, it is the study of the languages, literature, and history of ancient Babylonia and Assyria. Because the earliest documents were found in excavations in Assyria (northern Iraq), the discipline received the name "Assyriology." The native language of both Assyria and Babylonia (southern Iraq) was Akkadian, with "Assyrian" and "Babylonian" referring to the respective dialects. [Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

Carroll Wade Meade wrote in “Road to Babylon: Development of U.S. Assyriology” (1974): Ask ten Assyriologists to define Assyriology and, in all probability, you will get ten different answers… A philologist maintains it is the decipherment of the cuneiform tablets. To the historian the science deals with the history of Mesopotamia and Persia. The archeologist is quick to say that it is the archeology of these areas. Each is right, but only partially… The first cuneiform tablets discovered in any quantity were in Assyria. Later discoveries revealed that the people referred to their language as Akkadian. The northern dialect came to be known as Assyrian, and the southern one as Babylonian.… Gradually Assyriology began to embrace the study of the majority of the peoples of the ancient Near East who wrote in cuneiform. This included the Hittites until recently. Today most authorities tend to regard Hittitology as a separate field, now that more is known about them. One wonders if Sumerology will break away (some schools have chairs of Sumerology), but this is doubtful, as the Sumerians furnished the foundation for the culture of the Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians. Persian studies may make the break when the knowledge of the field is enriched enough to do so.

William W. Hallo wrote: The comprehension of the Bible has greatly benefited from the utilization of the results of Assyriological investigations. The following survey serves only as a collection of examples of contributions of Assyriology to biblical studies, as well as discussing Mesopotamian culture in more general terms.

Early History Assyriology and the Study of Ancient Mesopotamia

Aaron Skaist wrote in Encyclopaedia Judaica: The collapse of the Assyrian and Babylonian civilization was so complete that its cities and remains were either wiped off the earth or buried under it, and its peoples, art, languages, and writings were erased from the memory of history. The very names of its cities, rulers, and gods were forgotten except in sundry local traditions, in the neglected works of Arab geographers, and in scattered and garbled allusions in the Bible and in Greek literature. Only the finds of modern archaeology have been able to reveal the character, achievements, and enormous contribution of this civilization and its great contribution to the civilizations that came after it. [Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

In 1842, the first English and French expeditions began a determined search for the lost cities and treasures of Mesopotamia that occupied the next four decades. Its most conspicuous successes were scored in the northeastern part of the country, ancient Assyria, and the whole field of study thus newly opened soon acquired the name of Assyriology. The first spectacular discoveries were made at Khorsabad, where Paul-Emile Botta excavated Dur-Sharrukin, the great capital city built by Sargon II of Assyria at the end of the eighth century B.C. (1843–44) The paintings and drawings made in situ by E. Flandin for Botta's five magnificent volumes (1849–50), and the original sculptures with which the Louvre opened its Assyrian Gallery in 1847 opened Western eyes to the grandeurs of Assyrian archaeology. From 1852 to 1855, Victor Place resumed the French efforts at Dur-Sharrukin.

Sumerian cuneiform tablets

In the meantime an Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, had already begun to excavate the other great Assyrian capitals, beginning with Kalah (Nimrud) in 1845, Nineveh (the twin mounds of Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus) in 1846, and Ashur (Qalʿat Sherqat) in 1847. The seven seasons of excavation by Layard were crowned with very impressive discoveries of the palaces of *Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and the palace of Ashurna irpal at Kalah, of the many stone reliefs and colossal statues which stood at their gates; the great majority of these were transfered to the British Museum and elicited wide public response. Layard was succeeded in 1851 by his assistant Hormuzd Rassam, a native of Mosul.

By 1854, the latter had succeeded in recovering the bulk of the great library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, which to this day remains the most important single source of Akkadian literature. Thereafter, the Crimean War brought all excavation in the area to a temporary halt. In 1872, George Smith, who examined cuneiform texts for the British Museum, discovered a version of the flood narrative which was recognized later as the 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, and interest in further excavations was renewed. For four years Smith continued to mine the vast treasures of the library at Nineveh until an early death overtook him on the way back to Aleppo (1876). From 1878 to 1882, H. Rassam renewed his activities in Nineveh, but interest in Assyria was for the time being exhausted as attention was directed instead to Babylonia.

Early Discoveries in Sumer, Elam and Elba

Aaron Skaist wrote in Encyclopaedia Judaica: Until the 1870s, impressive results were not had from the archaeological investigation of the southern half of Mesopotamia. However, in 1877 Ernest de Sarzec began to unearth Lagash (Tellōh) "The mound of the tablets," and by 1900 he had laid bare a whole new civilization whose very existence, adumbrated by the Assyrian tablets, had until then been a matter of dispute: the Sumerian civilization. These excavations and those which succeeded them helped to bring to light a whole new millennium in human history. American excavations at Nippur, meanwhile (1889–1900), uncovered the religious capital and center of learning of the Sumerians, with a library rivaling that of Ashurbanipal in importance, and antedating it by more than a thousand years.[Source: Aaron Skaist, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2005, Encyclopedia.com]

In the 1920s and 1930s, British and American archaeologist made great discoveries in Ur and other locations in present0day Iraq. The excavations were sponsored jointly by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the finds were divided between London, Philadelphia and Baghdad, following the tradition of the era. Robert McCormic Adams mapped Mesopotamia by land and air and laid out Mesopotamia's huge irrigation system. One Ur-era site was revealed when Saddam drained Iraq’s marshes to punish the Marsh Arabs.

The origin of the Sumerians is unknown, and their non-Semitic language seems to have no affinities with other known languages. Other Babylonian expeditions before World War I identified numerous other ancient sites apart from Babylon, such as Sippar, Borsippa, Shuruppak, Adab, and Kish. Improvements in stratigraphic techniques in the field and the cumulative evidence of the inscriptional finds permitted the gradual construction of a chronological sequence and the recognition of certain significant cultural epochs.

The extensive French excavations at Susa in Elam, begun in 1897, also proved significant, for this ancient capital of Elam was for millennia a faithful mirror of Mesopotamian influences, and the repository of some of its most precious booty, notably the "Stele of *Hammurapi." inscribed with his laws. The American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to widespread looting, illegal sale of antiquities, and the destruction of significant elements of the archaeological record.

Ebla was discovered in 1964 by Paulo Matthiae, an archaeologist from the University of Rome, who did exciting excavations at a site called Tell Mardikh in Syria. When news of Ebla was revealed, University of Chicago archaeologist Dr. Ignace J. Gelb told National Geographic, "These discoveries reveal a new culture, a new language, a new history. Ebla was a mightY kingdom, treated on a an equal footing with he most powerful states of the time." The deciphering of 300 tablets, unearthed in 1987 in Tell Leilan, Syria, have revealed information about soldier movements, regional shifts of political power and kings and their servants. These materials have remained in Syria.

Archeology and Plundering in Iraq

Bull's head from the Queen's lyre from Pu-abi's grave, in the British Museum

Iraq is home to between 10,000 and 15,000 archeological sites. These include famous Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian cities like Ur, Uruk, Babylon, Nimrud and Nineveh. In addition there are 33 museums, many of them associated with a specific archeological sites. Many of the sites are in areas controlled by certain tribes.

In the earliest days of Mesopotamian archeology, most of what was found went to European museums. In 1870, the Ottoman issued an edict which stated that half could go to Europe and half to the Oriental Museum in Istanbul. The European often took more than half and in any case they took the better half which is how the Louvre and the British Museum obtained their Mesopotamian collections. When the British took over Iraq in 1921 half still went to Europe but the other half remained in Iraq.

On the plundering of the archaeological site of Babylon, Alan Cowell wrote in the New York Times: The Germans came and took the best parts and put them in the Pergamon Museum, now in Berlin. And there they seem destined to stay because the Germans will not give them back. The French had already taken the brightest ceramics, and the Turks took the bricks to build dams on the Euphrates. [Source: Alan Cowell, New York Times, September 27, 1987]

In the 1920s the National Museum was established. The museum and antiquities laws that ensured that a large portion of the artifacts found in Iraq remained in Iraq was written in 1923 by Gertrude Bell, the British traveler, archeologist and advisor to King Faisal. In 1936, an antiquities law decreed that all antiquities, more than 200 years old, found in Iraq were the property of the state. The law made it illegal to remove artifacts from Iraq without state permission. A law in 1974 ended the Ottoman tradition of dividing finds and the export of all Iraqi treasures banned

For much of the 20th century, Iraq worked hard to restore and guard its archeological treasures, prohibiting or restricting the export fo artifacts Even Saddam Hussein did his part by imposing stiff penalties on thieves.

Archaeologists or Spies

David Price wrote in Archaeology: “The romantic image of the archaeologist as adventurer is the source of much of the speculation linking archaeology with espionage, but there is documentary evidence that the two have at times been closely linked. Some of these relationships are open secrets revealed in obituaries, discussed in interviews, memoirs and histories, but documenting others requires sleuthing. Over the past decade, I've used interviews and materials from various public archives, as well as the US Freedom of Information Act to gain access to classified documents held by the CIA, the defence department and the FBI, to verify some of the relationships between archaeologists and intelligence agencies. [Source: David Price, Archaeology, 4 September 2003 ~]

Leonard Wooley and T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

“Archaeologists can move easily across borders and into the world's hinterlands. They are familiar with the attitudes of the people living where they excavate and have natural opportunities to watch troop movements, note the distribution of military hardware and bases, and even to commit sabotage. Many archaeologists are trained in deciphering dead languages, a skill useful in mastering codes.

“Western archaeologists first used fieldwork as a front for spying during the first world war. TE Lawrence's excavations with British archaeologist Leonard Woolley at the Syrian site of Carchemish mixed archaeology and surveillance. Lawrence's mission for British intelligence was to monitor German progress on the railway to link Berlin and Baghdad, which would circumvent the Suez canal and secure means of shipping oil and other vital supplies during the war. In 1914, Lawrence wrote to his mother to say that these excavations were "obviously only meant as red herrings, to give an archaeological color to a political job".

“The Egyptian explorations of archaeologist and adventurer Gertrude Bell before the war made her an invaluable resource to British intelligence's Arab Bureau. Her years of near eastern excavations provided geographic information of great importance. In 1916, she spied on Iraqi tribal activities around Basra.” ~

Archaeology and War in Iraq

Archeological work in Iraq has been greatly disrupted by the wars and sanctions. In the sanction era in the 1990s between the Persian Gulf wars there was little or no money to do archaeological work or protect sites from looters. Foreign archeologists were for the most part not allowed in the country. Many Iraqi archeologists were forced to find other kinds of work. Famous sites like Jatra were guarded by a single old man with a hunting rifle.

In the Iran-Iraq war many sits along the border of Iran and Iraq were destroyed or damaged. In the first Persian Gulf war Saddam Hussein placed two Iraqi jets next to the ziggurat of Ur. After the war looting began almost immediately and peaked in the mid 1990s.

Before the first Persian Gulf war Iraq’s antiquities department employed 2,600 people. At the time Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 there was a great deal of archeological activity taking place in Iraq . Dozens of foreign and Iraqi teams were engaged in projects. All that came to a halt after Kuwait was invaded. The shortages of funding reduced the number of people employed in the antiquities department to a few hundred. All 33 archeological museums were closed to the public. There was few resources available to police sites and people took up looting to feed their families.

After the first Persian Gulf war excavation work did not begin again into 1997. Then work was only done at only 32 sites, with archeologists protected by armed guards. Onlly four sites were worked by foreign archeologists.

George Smith and the Discovery of the Story of Gilgamesh

George Smith

After the fall of the Assyrian Empire in the 6th century B.C., the first great library of the world — which contained the Gilgamesh story — was also lost. In 1844,Sir Austen Henry Layard, a British lawyer and pioneering archaeologist, began the first excavations of the Assyrian and Babylonian ruins in Nineveh and Nimrud and the great library — the library of Ashurbanipal — was found. Many of the actual discoveries were made by Hormuzd Rassam, an Iraqi archaeologist, who was friend and protege of Layard and who excavated Nineveh and Nimrud through the 19th century, making many great discoveries only to have the credit taken by Englishmen, whose acceptance and admiration he greatly craved. [Source: The New Yorker]

Thousands of tablets from the library were taken to the British Museum, where they were examined by an amateur linguist named George Smith, who had ended his formal education at 14 and taught himself to read Akkadian. One day in 1867 during his lunch break from his day job as a printer’s engraver he was combing through the tablets — which were mostly records of business and government transactions — he came across what seemed to be a narrative of the Biblical flood and with that began the rediscovery of “The Story of Gilgamesh”.

Many of the tablets that contain the flood story were painstakingly assembled from fragments. After Smith made his initial discovery from a small fragment he had to wait a few days for restorer Robert Ready to show to reconstruct the tablet and make it easier to read. On the wait and the Eureka moment his friend E.A. Wallis Budge later recalled, “Smith was constitutionally a highly, nervous man, and his irritation at Ready’s absence knew no bounds.” When Ready finally did show up and Smith could read the text, Budge said, “Smith took the tablet and began to read over the lines that Ready had brought to light and when he saw that they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there, he said: “I am the first man to read after more than two thousand years of oblivion.” Setting the tablet on the table, Smith jumped and rushed around the room in a greats state of excitement.” He is said to have been so excited he tore off his clothes.

Smith had studied the shards of cuneiform tablets for around ten years before his discovery. Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker: In George Smith’s time, the British Museum lacked not only electrical light, but gaslight as well. (The management was afraid of fire.) Some of the higher-up staff had lanterns, but George Smith was not a higher-up. If it was a foggy day and the windows did not admit enough light to read by, he had to go home. On other days, though, he was at his post. “With devotion and patient application,” Michael Schmidt writes, these scholars “deciphered the languages, finding human voices in the clay, and a king terrified of dying came back to the long half-life of poetry.”

The Gilgamesh flood story could support the truth of Genesis, or so it seemed to Smith. “And to others. In 1872, when Smith presented his findings to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, even William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, was in attendance. The discovery became front-page news across Europe and the United States. Soon, London’s Daily Telegraph gave Smith a grant to go to the region to see if he could add to his findings. Within days, he hit pay dirt — a shard that appeared to complete the flood story — and the British Museum financed two further trips for him. On the second of these, he died of dysentery in Aleppo, at the age of thirty-six. He never lived to understand that, in fact, he had not proved the truth of the Old Testament with his clay tablet. (Both flood narratives could have been descended from older sources, quite possibly fictional.) He had done something else, though. He had discovered what was then, and still is, the oldest long poem in the world, “Gilgamesh.”

Smith wrote the first true history of the Assyrians, painstakingly translated important Babylonian texts and became the world’s foremost expert on the Akkadian language and its exceedingly difficult script. He also discovered passages from an older flood story than the one in “Gilgamesh”, dating back to 1800 B.C. , during his own archaeology work, excavating in Nineveh. He worked furiously and wrote eight important books on the Assyrians before he died in Aleppo in 1877, a decade after making his initial discovery.

Ur Archaeology

Andrew Lawler wrote in National Geographic: “In the 1920s and 1930s, British archaeologist Leonard Woolley dug up some 35,000 artifacts from Ur, including the spectacular remains of a royal cemetery that included more than 2,000 burials and a stunning array of gold helmets, crowns, and jewelry that date to about 2600 B.C. At the time, the discovery rivaled that of King Tut’s tomb in Egypt.” [Source: Andrew Lawler, National Geographic, March 11, 2016 -]

“But Ur and most of southern Iraq has been off limits to most archaeologists during the past half-century of war, invasion, and civil strife. A joint U.S.-Iraqi team reopened excavations there last fall, digging at the site for ten weeks. The work was supported in part by the National Geographic Society. Unlike earlier generations, today’s archaeologists are less interested in breathtaking gold objects than in clues like the bit of ebony that will help them understand more fully this critical time in human history.” -

map of Ur excavations in 1900

“Most digs in the past, including Woolley’s, focused on the temples, tombs, and palaces. But during the recent excavation, the team uncovered a modest-sized building dating to a couple of centuries after Ur’s peak. “This is a typical Iraqi house,” said Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the senior Iraqi archaeologist on the project, who grew up in the area. He gestures at the mud-brick walls. “There are stairs to the roof and rooms around a courtyard. I lived in a house just like this. There’s a continuity in the way people live here.” -

“That hints, Stone and Hamdani said, at a society that wasn’t under the control of a small tyrannical minority. By bringing such analysis to bear on common objects like grains, bones, and less flashy artifacts, the team hopes to shed light on how workers lived, the role of women in the wool factories, and how environmental changes might have impacted the eventual decline of Ur’s power.” -

Agatha Christie at Ur, Nimrud and Nineveh

The English mystery writer Agatha Christie met archeologist, Max Mallowan, 15 years her junior, at an archaeological dig at Ur. Later they were married after Christie made Mallowan promise that he wouldn't play golf or run off with other women. The couple got on quite well. He liked "digging the dead." She wrote about "copses and stiffs.” He often took her on his expeditions to Egypt and the Near East. It was the second marriage for Christie. Her first was to an English army officer, Achier Christie, who she met when she was 22 and married in the middle of World War I. After Agatha became successful, Archie spent most of his time on the golf course. The marriage fell part when he confessed he loved another woman, Teresa Neele. They were divorced in 1928.

Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan

Christie caught the eye of Mallowan when she visited to Ur, They were married in 1930.. Michael Taylor wrote in Archaeological magazine, “ Katherine Woolley quickly came to detest Christie, who was subsequently banished from the dig. Mallowan lamented that "there was only room for one woman at Ur," and spent the first dig season after his marriage separated from his bride.”

Christie and Mallowan participated in the archaeological work at Ur and searched in vain for the lost city of Ukresh. Mallowan served as an assistant to Woolley between 1925 and 1930. Agatha Christie wrote her 1936 mystery “ Murder in Mesopotamia” based on her experiences in at Ur. In the novel an archaeologist's sickly wife, Mrs. Leidner, is brutally murdered. Similarities between the victim and Katherine Woolley are said to have been more than a coincidence.

Mallowan and Christie worked at the Assyrian sites of Nimrud and Nineveh in the 1950s. Amy Davidson wrote in The New Yorker: “Mallowan was the reason that Hercule Poirot, in one novel, visits Aleppo. (He was also the source for a classic Daily Mail headline: “British Museum buys 3,000-year-old ivory carvings Agatha Christie cleaned with her face cream.”) In her autobiography, in which she talks about the face cream, she writes about how “times in Baghdad were gradually worsening politically,” and so, for a few years, there were no new excavations in Iraq; instead, “everyone went to Syria.” [Source: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker , February 27, 2015]

Archaeology in Assyria

In in the mid 19th century British explorer-quasi-archaeologists began rummaging around what is now Iraq look for ruins and artifacts related to ancient cities mentioned in The Bible. In 1844, Sir Austen Henry Layard, a British lawyer and pioneering archaeologist, began the first excavations of the Assyrian and Babylonian ruins in Nineveh and Nimrud. As a 28-year-old British diplomat stationed in Baghdad, he became convinced that a series of earth mounds along the Tigris River might be an ancient capita. He secretly hired Arab tribesmen to dig in the mounds and immediately found an ancient palace compound complete with murals, ivories and wall carvings. He assumed wrongly it was the ancient Biblical city of Nineveh

Austen Henry Layard

Layard discovered the remains of 9th and 7th century B.C. palaces and an immense statue of a winged bull. He had many of the things he excavated sent via camel, river raft and ship to London, where they are now on display in the British museum. He was knighted for his discoveries Back in Iraq Layard’s tools were stolen and he kidnaped a man to get them back. After Layard left, archaeologists descended on Nimrud and took everything the could find, including more extraordinary reliefs that are scattered around the globe in museums in Mumbai, Baghdad, London and New York.

Amy Davidson wrote in The New Yorker: Layard: “has extensive descriptions of local Yazidis in his book “Nineveh and Babylon,” published in 1849. (Yezidi girls, he says, wore a garment “like a Scotch plaid.”) Layard writes that parts of the winged bull were designed “with a spirit and truthfulness worthy of a Greek artist,” but that others were only roughly outlined, “as if the sculptors had been interrupted by some public calamity.” He brought one of the bulls to the British Museum. (There is another at the Metropolitan Museum, in New York.) [Source: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker , February 27, 2015]

Many of the actual discoveries were made by Hormuzd Rassam, an Iraqi archaeologist, who was friend and protege of Layard and who excavated Nineveh and Nimrud through the 19th century, making many great discoveries only to have the credit taken by Englishmen, whose acceptance and admiration he greatly craved.

Paul-Emile Botta, a French diplomat, worked in the Nineveh around the same time as Layard. Between them, Botta and Layard uncovered the remains of five Assyrian palaces. Many of Botta’s find are now in the Louvre. When monumental sculptures of winged bulls and bas-reliefs of Assyrian conquests were first displayed the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, they drew huge crowds. “Nivenah and Its Remains”, Layard chronicle of his work, became a bestseller.

Archaeological Excavations and Disfigurement of Babylon

The magnificent Processional Way and Ishtar Gate from Babylon now lies Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, Germany. Built during the reign of Nebuchadnezar II, it taken piece by piece from Iraq between 1899 and World War II, rebuilt inside the museum. The magnificent crenelated walls of the gate and walkway are made of blue, gold and red tiled bricks and features rows and walking bulls, lions, dragons and long-necked dogs. Most of the bricks were made in Germany but the animals were pieces from original Babylonian bricks. A cuneiform inscription read, "Nebuchadnezzer, King of Babylon, the pious prince.

In the 1980s, Saddam spent millions to restore Babylon on a dry plain near the Euphrates. Layers of earth were removed and construction began on a 600-room replica of Nebechadnezzar's palace, built using bricks stamped with Saddam’s name, a smaller-than-real replica of the famous Ishtar Gate (the original was taken to Berlin in 1903). Construction was halted at the beginning of the second Persian Gulf War and never resumed. The Ishtar Gate is already crumbling. The walls of Saddam’s palace in full of cracks as result f the salty, moist soil.

The Babylon ruins and reconstructions are reached after walking up a modern staircase. Visitors walk through the towering Ishtar gates, adorned with bulls and lions, and move past the city wall decorated sculpted lions, bulls and griffons and once covered in purple- and gold- glazed tiles. The enormous lion is carved from a block of basalt and rests on top of a reclining human figure, whose left hand is clenched in the lions’s mouth. The 14th century B.C. Lion of Babylon was part of Nebuchadenezzarls art collection.

The ruins of Babylon are situated not far from the Euphrates. The site was excavated by German and British archeologists, who took much of the best stuff they found—including murals and treasures—back to museums in their home countries. Most of the original structures were made of mud brick and wattle and have not held up against time, sand storms and floods. All that remains from the original ancient city are crumbling baked brick walls and stone foundations and a huge, weathered lion. The other buildings are reconstructions.

Little remains of the broad Processional Way and the temple dedicated to Marduck, Babylon's chief God. The Tower of Babel, once at the center of a complex of temples, is only a stump. What used to purportedly be the Hanging Gardens is hardly discernable as such. In the a museum are bricks inscribed by Nebuchadnezzar and other artifacts. Gifts shops sell minitaute plastic statues of the Lion of Babylon and T-shirts with cuneiform writing, Overlooking the site is a modern palace built for Saddam Hussein on top of man-made Saddam Hill. It was constructed from white marble after the first Persian Gulf War. A festival called “Babylon: From Nebuchandnezzar to Saddam.” was held in a replica of an ancient amphitheater. It featured poetry, dance and parades.

Processional Way from Babylon in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin

Restoration Ruins Babylon

On the restoration of Babylon by the Iraqi Government for an international cultural festival in the fall of 1987, Alan Cowell wrote in the New York Times: “1,800 foreign workers — the Iraqi workers are at the war front — buckled down and laid 14 million bricks to rebuild walls and turrets in what was believed to be the likeness of the city that began its flourishing 6,000 years ago. The result, some critics say, shows the haste. Moreover, some of the restored stone-work has been erected on top of areas not yet fully excavated, so further burrowing through history's layers will be difficult. [Source: Alan Cowell, New York Times, September 27, 1987 /~]

“In Baghdad, some people call it the ''massacre of Babylon,'' asserting that crude workmanship has done no justice to a place supposed to have yielded one of the seven wonders of antiquity, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. ''It is said that the walls they constructed thousands of years ago were straighter than the walls they are putting up now,'' said a Western diplomat in the Iraqi capital, 70 miles north of here. Those charged with restoring the site, said a Western archeologist working in Iraq, are ''wrestling with being archeologists and at the same time providing something to see for their masters.'' The current restoration, Wahhabi Abdul Razak, the project director, said, began eight years ago, although excavations by Iraqi archeologists has been going on for around a quarter century. /~\

“One problem, a Western archeologist said, is that there are few original pictures of the city that, at its zenith, had a population of one million and covered an area of nearly 8 square miles. ''Most of the restoration is being done from the imagination of those responsible,'' the archeologist said, and from watercolors left by the Germans who excavated between 1899 and 1912. Mr. Razak has other problems, too. Since the days of old when the Euphrates provided one of the city's defenses, the river has changed course and the water table has risen so that, 12 yards down, the workings begin to flood.

“Most of old Babylon, he said, was made of sun-dried brick. But that construction cannot be imitated these days because of high salt levels in the water. So the restoration uses kiln-baked brick that gives the rebuilding an air of modernity not normally associated with archeological reconstruction. That quandary, said Jeremy Black, a British archeologist, reflects a wider problem with the sites of Mesopotamia, compared with other civilizations whose granite and marble has survived the centuries. ''All these Mesopotamian sites look the same to the untrained eye,'' he said. ''They look like mounds of mud.'' /~\

“That impression might not be disputed by visitors scrutinizing the unrestored parts of Babylon, questing in vain for such relics as the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens. According to Mr. Razak, the foundation of the Tower of Babel has been located, measuring 99.5 yards around the base. Since the measurement of the square or rectangular base was supposed to be the same as its height, archeologists have concluded that the Tower also stood 99.5 yards high. /~\

Saddam Hussein's Palace at Babylon

“The Hanging Gardens present more of a problem. As the story goes, a King brought a Queen from mountainous lands, where there was greenery, and the Queen pined for that verdancy. So the King had his subjects build a terraced garden for his Queen, and it became one of the wonders of the ancient world. ''The Germans fixed a place'' where they believed the garden was, Dr. Razak said. But that site has not been proven. ''Until now,'' he said, ''we haven't found it.'' /~\

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated July 2024