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Sparking the imagination: the rediscovery of Assyria's great lost city
Summary: With its exquisite palaces, vast libraries and lush gardens, Nineveh was one of the most important cities of the ancient world. Project Curator for the BP exhibition I am Ashurbanipal king of the world, king of Assyria, Carine Harmand, explores the 19th-c
With its exquisite palaces, vast libraries and lush gardens, Nineveh was one of the most important cities of the ancient world. Project Curator for the BP exhibition I am Ashurbanipal king of the world, king of Assyria, Carine Harmand, explores the 19th-century quest to locate and unearth this great lost city…
Frederick Charles Cooper. Drawing showing the winged bulls found by Layard at Nimrud. Watercolour on paper, mid-19th century.
The Museum’s current major exhibition explores the life of Assyria’s last great king, Ashurbanipal. Hugely powerful, Ashurbanipal ruled what was at the time the largest empire on earth but, within a few decades of his death, his empire had collapsed and his capital city burnt to the ground.
George Woolliscroft Rhead after Ford Madox Brown, The Dream of Sardanapalus, print, 1890.
Since classical times, writers have speculated about the fall of Assyria. Greek and Roman sources talk of the extravagant suicide of its last king Sardanapalus (believed by some to be Ashurabanipal), surrounded by his gold and his concubines. The Old Testament recounts the city's annihilation by divine wrath and, from the Middle Ages, interest in bibical evidence motivated travellers and geographers to try and locate the city.
But it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the location of Nineveh – near Mosul in northern Iraq – was confirmed.
Nationalistic rivalries
At this time, the region of Mosul was part of the Ottoman Empire. France and Britain both had a consulate in Mosul and the imperial rivalry between both countries, as well as their political interest in the region, fuelled pioneering archaeological excavations.
Frederick Charles Cooper, watercolour showing excavations at Nineveh. 1850.
Excavations began in 1842 when the French consul, Paul émile Botta, commissioned by the Louvre museum, began digging at the site of Khorsabad, where he discovered a city built by the Assyrian king Sargon II. The excavation findings were published under the title Monuments of Nineveh, as Botta wrongly believed that he had found the famed ancient city.
These discoveries captured the attention of Austen Henry Layard, a young British explorer who worked as assistant to the British ambassador in Constantinople. Layard persuaded the ambassador to personally fund excavations at the site of Nimrud. From 1845 Layard, with the invaluable help of Hormuzd Rassam, an archaeologist from Mosul, and his team began excavations at Nimrud. They soon unearthed monumental winged bulls and lions that used to flank the gates of an Assyrian palace.
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