IN 2001 THE BRITISH MUSEUM MOUNTED AN EXHIBIT TITLED “Agatha Christie and Archaeology.” Usually known better for her mystery books, including those featuring Hercule Poirot, she reportedly once said, “An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.”
Agatha Christie knew well of what she spoke. Many people have read one or more of her books, but few realize that she was married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan. He was Leonard Woolley’s right-hand man at the site of Ur, in what is now modern Iraq. In 1930, when Mallowan was twenty-six and she was forty, Agatha came to visit the site, for she—along with most of the rest of England at that time—was captivated by the announcements of their finds from the famous “Death Pits of Ur.” She had come to see them for herself but found herself even more entranced by Mallowan than she was by the Death Pits. They got married six months later. After she married him, however, Agatha was no longer welcome at the site. As a result, they left Ur soon thereafter, to start their own excavations elsewhere. From then on, she came with him on most of his digs and wrote many of her books while there, when she wasn’t helping him process the material that they were finding.
As to why she wasn’t welcome at Ur after her marriage to Mallowan, the scuttlebutt is that Woolley’s wife, Lady Katharine Woolley, didn’t want to share the attention of the men on the dig with anyone else. But Agatha seems to have quickly gotten her revenge, for Lovely Louise, the first person killed off in her book Murder in Mesopotamia, is believed by many to be based on Lady Woolley, especially since she is described as a “beautiful but difficult archaeologist’s wife.” Reportedly, those who were in the know instantly recognized Louise as Lady Katharine, who apparently didn’t really mind at all.
The site of ancient Ur is situated on the Euphrates River, just north of where the river empties into the Persian Gulf. This is the region known as Mesopotamia, a name that comes from the Greek words “meso” and “potamia,” meaning the area “between the rivers”—namely the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Ur was a site already famous in antiquity. It was continuously inhabited from about 6000 BCE until 400 BCE, when it was finally abandoned after the Euphrates River changed course. During the Bronze Age, from 3000 BCE onward, it had all the typical features of a Mesopotamian city, including religious structures known as ziggurats that reached up to the sky. Woolley identified the site with “Ur of the Chaldees,” which the book of Genesis mentions in association with the biblical patriarch Abraham, but it’s still anyone’s guess whether he was right about that.
Woolley and Mallowan began excavating in 1922, the same year that Carter found King Tut’s tomb in Egypt, but it wasn’t until the middle of their fifth field season, in 1926–1927, that they began digging the cemetery at the site. Thereafter, between 1927 and 1929, the two archaeologists uncovered the sixteen royal burials that would make them famous. All told, including the later excavations that Woolley conducted without Mallowan after 1931, there were approximately 1,850 intact burials found in the cemetery area. The royal burials thus made up only a small percentage of the graves that they excavated.
The royal burials at Ur date to about 2500 BCE, almost contemporary with the Giza pyramids. And though many of the other burials in the cemetery were very simple, the royal tombs were quite impressive. The royal tombs usually consisted of a stone chamber, either vaulted or domed, into which the royal body was placed. The chamber was at the bottom of a deep pit, with access possible only via a steep ramp from the surface. The precious grave goods were mostly found in the burial chamber with the body, and wheeled vehicles, oxen, and attendants were found in both the chamber and in the pit outside.
There were numerous attendants found in the Death Pits—one had more than seventy bodies of attendants who were killed to go with their master or mistress into the afterlife; another held more than sixty bodies; still another had forty bodies. Most were women, but there were men as well. Woolley assumed that they drank poison after climbing down the ramp into the pit, but CT scans of some of the skulls done in 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania indicate that at least some of those people had been killed by having a sharp instrument driven into their head just below and behind the ear while they were still alive. Death would have been instantaneous.
The grave goods that Woolley and Mallowan found with the royal bodies were amazing, despite the fact that many of the graves had been looted in antiquity. They found gold tiaras, gold and lapis jewelry, gold and electrum daggers, even a gold helmet—which was probably ceremonial, since gold helmets aren’t very good at stopping a sword or an ax in battle. There were also delicate sculptures, such as the pair of figures that depict a goat in a tree (frequently referred to as the “ram in a thicket” because of its similarity to the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac). One of these lovely sculptures is now in the British Museum; the other is housed at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The excavators at Ur also unearthed the remains of a wooden harp with ivory and lapis inlays, which Woolley later had reconstructed. One of the royal tombs also contained a wooden box with inlays on front and back that Woolley dubbed the Standard of Ur, thinking that perhaps it had been carried on top of a pole into battle in front of the troops, much like the Romans had their banners centuries later. He suggested this because of the scenes that are depicted, which include a possible battle followed by loot presented to the king and then a victory banquet. Among the figures in the banquet scene is a musician holding a harp, which is partially the basis for Woolley’s reconstruction. Of course, these scenes could also depict something else entirely and this might be just a simple wooden box rather than a “standard.” The discussions and debates about the interpretation of this and some of the other objects still continue today, almost a century after Woolley and Mallowan found the royal graves.
Woolley and Mallowan were not the first archaeologists to find amazing things in the ancient sites of Mesopotamia. By the mid-1800s, serious excavations were underway at a number of ancient sites in the Middle East, underwritten by institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre, and conducted by people like Austen Henry Layard and Paul Émile Botta. They excavated in what is now Iraq at places like Nineveh and Nimrud, capitals of the Assyrian empire of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. They shipped magnificent pieces back to the museums, such as the colossal winged bulls, lion friezes, and other pieces currently on display at the British Museum and the Louvre. German and US museums got into the act as well, sponsoring expeditions to the region and excavating at other sites such as Babylon, Uruk, and Nippur.
Aiding the archaeologists were also epigraphers—scholars who study ancient writing—like the British scholar Henry Rawlinson, who helped to decipher cuneiform in the 1830s. Cuneiform is a wedgeshaped writing system—in fact, the very word cuneiform means “wedgeshaped.” It was used to write Akkadian, Babylonian, Hittite, Old Persian, and other languages in the ancient Middle East, much as we now use the Latin alphabet to write English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and so on.
Rawlinson, who was a British army officer posted to what is now Iran, cracked the secret of cuneiform the same way that Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics, by translating a trilingual inscription. In Rawlinson’s case, the inscription was written in Old Persian (a language that had been preserved to modern times), Elamite (another ancient Persian language, but one that had gone out of use long ago), and Babylonian. It had been carved by the imperial order of Darius the Great of Persia in about 519 BCE, four hundred feet above the desert floor into a cliff face at the site of Behistun in Iran.
The story that is often repeated is one originally told by Rawlinson himself. It seems that after spending as many as twelve years, from 1835 to 1847, copying the inscription by climbing up and down rickety ladders and scaffolding, he eventually hired a “wild Kurdish boy” to shimmy down a rope from the top of the cliff in order to copy the final lines of the long inscription. The boy had to swing from side to side and run along the vertical cliff face before somehow clinging to it in order to copy the last little bits.
By 1837, just two years into the project, Rawlinson had already figured out how to read the first two paragraphs of the part that was written in Old Persian. He presented his findings in official papers published in 1837 and 1839, just ahead of others—including an elderly Irish parson named Hincks—who had also been working on deciphering the inscription. It reportedly took Rawlinson another twenty years to decipher the Babylonian and Elamite parts of the inscription and successfully read the whole thing.
Meanwhile, in December 1842, Paul Émile Botta began the first archaeological excavations ever conducted in what is now Iraq. Although Italian-born, in his day job he was the French consul at Mosul, which was a position that essentially left him free to conduct archaeological fieldwork on behalf of the Louvre in Paris. That’s what he spent most of his time doing, with the active endorsement of his higher-ups back in France.
Botta’s first efforts were concentrated on the mounds collectively known as Kuyunjik, which are right across the river from the city of Mosul. He didn’t find much there and quickly abandoned his efforts, prematurely as it turned out. From one of his workers, he learned that some sculptures had been found at a site called Khorsabad, located about fourteen miles to the north. So, in March 1843, he began excavating there instead, with immediate success. Within a week he began to unearth a great Assyrian palace. At first he thought that he had found the remains of ancient Nineveh, but now we know that Khorsabad is the ancient site of Dur Sharrukin, capital city of Sargon II, the Assyrian king who ruled from 721 to 705 BCE.
As for Austen Henry Layard, he did not mean to undertake excavations in Mesopotamia, at least not at first. In 1839, at the age of twenty-two, he had been traveling with a friend to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), overland from England. They had gone through Turkey and had visited Jerusalem, Petra, Aleppo, and other ancient cities, when they reached Mosul in May 1840. There the archaeology bug bit him, and he became interested in digging the ancient mounds across the river from Mosul, but it was a few years before he was able to return and begin to excavate.
Layard’s initial archaeological efforts, beginning in 1845, were at the site of Nimrud, which he first thought was ancient Nineveh. It was located a few miles downstream from Mosul. In order to fool the local ruler, a one-eyed, one-eared despot named Mohammed Pasha, Layard pretended to be going on a hunting expedition, but secretly included some excavating equipment in among his supplies.
When he got to the site, he spent the first night in the hut of a local village chief, dreaming of what he might find. He described it later as “visions of palaces underground, of gigantic monsters, of sculptured figures, and endless inscriptions.” That turned out to be more of a premonition than a dream, for he found all that and more in the coming years.
The next morning he began to dig. His team consisted of six local workers, whom he split into two teams. They began digging in two areas, far apart on the mound. Before the first day ended, both groups had uncovered rooms with walls covered in carved inscriptions. But the rooms belonged to two separate palaces—in a single day, Layard had found not one, but two Assyrian palaces. Today they are usually called the Northwest and Southwest Palaces. As a result, he doubled the size of his team—to eleven workers. Later he expanded again, to a total of thirty workers.
From the inscriptions that Layard found, it eventually became clear that a ruler named Assurnasirpal II had built the Northwest Palace. Two hundred years later, another ruler, named Esarhaddon, built the Southwest Palace. There also is a Central Palace at the site, which was discovered only later, built by Tiglath-Pileser III. Shalmaneser III, the son of Assurnasirpal II, also ordered buildings and monuments constructed at the site. In all, these rulers constructed their buildings over a period of more than two hundred years, from 884 to 669 BCE.
Other archaeologists have excavated at Nimrud since Layard, almost up until the present day. It was in the news as recently as March 2015, when videos were released by ISIS militants, showing them taking a bulldozer and a sledgehammer to the ancient remains at the site and also destroying artifacts from Nimrud in the Mosul Museum.
Layard published a book about his amazing discoveries at Nimrud, among which was the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, which is a pillar more than six feet (two meters) tall covered with inscriptions detailing the king’s exploits, which includes mention of the biblical Jehu, king of Israel. The book appeared in 1849 and instantly cemented his reputation as an archaeologist, intrepid adventurer, and engaging writer. He called the book Nineveh and Its Remains, since that’s what he thought he was excavating. This was an unfortunate choice for the title, for when Rawlinson deciphered the inscriptions from the site, it became clear that the ancient city was actually Kalhu, biblical Calah, rather than Nineveh.
Kalhu was the second capital city established by the Assyrians; the first being Assur itself. Kalhu served as their capital for almost 175 years, from 879 BCE until 706 BCE. After that, Sargon II moved the capital to Dur Sharrukin for a brief period, and then Sennacherib moved it to Nineveh. But where was Nineveh? Nobody had yet found it.
In 1849 Layard returned to Mosul for another round of excavations, which lasted until 1851. This time his primary focus was Kuyunjik, the mound that Botta had abandoned seven years earlier. He now had enough money to hire up to three hundred workers at a time—ten times as many as at Nimrud.
Layard had better luck than Botta. His men immediately began unearthing walls with reliefs and images from what turned out to be a palace built by Sennacherib, who ruled from 704 to 681 BCE. At first, Layard knew it only as the “Southwestern Palace.” Within it, he found what is referred to now as the “King’s Library.” These were two large rooms in which clay tablets were piled a foot deep on the floor. When the translation of them began, the real name of the palace became clear—the “Palace without Rival.” And this time, finally, Rawlinson’s translation of the tablets found there confirmed that this was the actual site of ancient Nineveh, for Sennacherib had moved the Assyrian capital from Dur Sharrukin to Nineveh after he came to the throne.
Today, Sennacherib’s palace is probably most famous for what is called the “Lachish Room.” Here Layard found wall reliefs, with both pictures and inscriptions carved into the stone slabs, showing Sennacherib’s capture of the city of Lachish in 701 BCE. At that time, Lachish was the second most powerful city in Judah; Senneracherib attacked it before proceeding on to besiege Jerusalem.
The capture of Lachish is described in the Hebrew Bible (II Kings 18:13–14), as is the siege of Jerusalem. Layard’s discovery was one of the first times that an event from the Bible could be confirmed by what we call “extra-biblical,” or outside the Bible, sources.
Almost thirty years before Layard found Sennacherib’s palace, Lord Byron immortalized the biblical account in his poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” published in 1815: “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”
Subsequent excavations at the actual site of Lachish, in what is now Israel, in the 1930s and again in the 1970s and 1980s, confirmed the destruction of the city in about 701 BCE. They also revealed an Assyrian siege ramp, built of tons of earth and rocks, which looks very similar to ramps depicted in Sennacherib’s reliefs.
The Nineveh reliefs also are full of gruesome scenes, including captives having their tongues pulled out and being flayed alive, along with decapitated heads placed on a pole. It is universally accepted that the Assyrians practiced what they preached, and committed such atrocities, but the depiction of them in Sennacherib’s palace is most likely meant as propaganda—a means to deter other kingdoms from rebelling against the Assyrians. Foreign ambassadors were probably shown this room in the heart of the palace and then allowed to take the message back home that they shouldn’t try to rebel or cross the Assyrians in any way, shape, or form.
On the excavation of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, Layard noted, “in the magnificent edifice I had opened no less than seventy-one halls, chambers, and passages, whose walls had almost without exception been paneled with sculptured slabs of alabaster.” He estimated that his workers had dug enough tunnels to expose almost ten thousand feet—or about two miles—worth of such walls, along with twenty-seven doorways formed by colossal winged bulls and lion-sphinxes.
We should note, though, that Layard was a diplomat, not a trained archaeologist; nor was Botta, for that matter. Brian Fagan has said bluntly, “Botta and Layard were appalling excavators by today’s standards.” In particular, Layard excavated by “chasing walls,” which we don’t do in archaeology today. His men dug a trench straight down into the mound until they hit a stone wall, and then they followed the wall by digging a tunnel. When that wall met another, they turned the corner and tunneled along that wall, and so on until they had burrowed along all four edges of the room. Botta and his men did essentially the same thing.
By excavating in this manner, Layard uncovered many of the inscribed slabs that made up these walls, as well as the colossal statues. But it also meant that he frequently left the middle of the rooms unexcavated. He also wasn’t particularly interested in any of the pottery that his men uncovered during the course of their excavations. Many of the slabs were shipped back to the British Museum, where they can be seen on display today. Others, found both here and at Nimrud and Khorsabad, wound up in museum collections around the world, including some at Dartmouth and Amherst Colleges in the United States.
It took a tremendous amount of effort to get the pieces back to the British Museum, or the Louvre in the case of Botta and his successor Victor Place. Botta’s finds went on display in the Louvre in May 1847, beating Layard and the British Museum by a matter of months, since their pieces didn’t go on display until September of that year. In order to get his finds back to France, at one point Botta had a wagon built, with wheels that were three feet wide, only to find that it was too heavy to be moved, even by more than two hundred workers. Layard had similar problems in transporting his finds back to England.
Victor Place, who replaced Botta at Khorsabad, had the worst misfortune of all. It was on his watch that a major shipment—between two hundred and three hundred crates filled with antiquities—was lost in the Tigris River, while being sent to France in May 1855. Bandits intercepted the convoy as it floated down the Tigris after a stop at Baghdad. When they realized that the cargo wasn’t gold, they spitefully capsized the vessels and killed several of the crewmen. The crates of precious and irreplaceable ancient finds quickly sank straight to the bottom of the river. Nearly one hundred twenty contained antiquities from Khorsabad and another sixty-eight contained sculptures from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, which Place had been allowed to take for the Louvre, even though the British team had excavated them. There also was material from elsewhere in Mesopotamia, which had been retrieved by a French expedition to Babylonia. Only seventy-eight of the crates were eventually recovered, leading Seton Lloyd, one of the greatest British archaeologists of recent times, to call this “one of the most appalling disasters in the history of archaeology.” The remainder has never been found. Dredging the river in this location using modern remote-sensing technology might still be very worthwhile.
Man-headed winged bull, Dur Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad)
The finds kept coming. Two years before the disaster on the Tigris, in 1853 Hormuzd Rassam, a native archaeologist and Layard’s protégé and successor at Nineveh, discovered Assurbanipal’s palace at the site, right under the nose of Victor Place, who also was digging there. Assurbanipal was Sennacherib’s grandson, ruling from 668 to 627 BCE. Rassam and his workers dug secretly for three straight nights in disputed territory on the mound, and when their trenches first revealed the walls and sculptures of the palace, Place could only congratulate them on their finds.
Within the palace, it was Rassam’s turn to find a tremendous library of cuneiform texts, just as Layard had done previously in Sennacherib’s palace. It is generally considered that the state archives of Assyria, twenty-five thousand tablets in all, were split between the two palaces, even though they were two generations apart; they are now all in the British Museum.
The texts found by Rassam in Assurbanipal’s palace came from what is often called the Royal Library. Apart from the state documents, which provided a comprehensive portrait of the politics, economy, and social conditions of the Assyrian empire, they include religious, scientific, and literary texts that Assurbanipal had instructed his scribes to collect or copy from all over the empire. They formed one of the great libraries of the ancient world, perhaps to be mentioned in the same breath with the much later libraries at Pergamon and Alexandria. Among the tablets were copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian Flood story.
The Flood story was first translated by George Smith, a banknote engraver in London who also moonlighted as an amateur Assyriologist at the British Museum. It was in 1872, nearly twenty years after Rassam first found the tablets, that Smith began piecing together a large fragmentary tablet. He was astonished to realize that it was an account of a Great Flood, very similar to the Deluge account in the Hebrew Bible—the one that Noah had survived. In the account that Smith now held, which turned out to be the eleventh tablet from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the survivor was not Noah, but a man named Utnapishtim. When he announced his discovery at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in December 1872, all of London was abuzz with excitement.
The problem, though, was that a big piece was missing from the middle of the tablet, right at the part where everything gets interesting. And so, the Daily Telegraph, one of the newspapers of the day, promised a thousand British pounds to anyone who would go look for the missing fragment. Smith himself decided to take them up on the offer, even though he had never been to Mesopotamia and had no training as an archaeologist. Within a week after he arrived at Nineveh, he found the missing piece.
How on earth could he have done that? It turns out that it was very simple. He reasoned that perhaps the workers who had found the other fragments had missed this big one. So, rather than digging into the mound again, he searched through the “back dirt pile,” as it is called by archaeologists—that is, the huge artificial mound created by archaeologists and their workers when they dump out the earth while excavating a site.
The dirt in these piles should be devoid of ancient objects, but the pile at Nineveh was full of them, because the workers had dug so fast and were frequently careless in picking out the pieces that they came across, whether they were pottery or clay tablets. Not only did Smith find the missing piece that he had come for, but he found something like three hundred other pieces from clay tablets that the workers had also missed and thrown out. When he got back to London, the missing piece fit perfectly into his Flood tablet.
But this was only one of many accounts of a flood. Most recently, an Assyriologist at the British Museum, Irving Finkel, announced in 2014 that he had found another example of a different version of the Flood story. In this version, the survivor is a man named Atrahasis. What is interesting about Finkel’s tablet is it appears to describe the ark as being round in shape, as opposed to the way that we usually think of it. The tablet is in a private collection. The owner first brought it to Finkel in 1985 but wouldn’t leave it with him long enough for him to translate it. It was only in 2009 that Finkel was able to gain access again and began translating it.
The nineteenth-century excavations at Nimrud, Nineveh, and Khorsabad, and then at Ur, Babylon, Nippur, Uruk, and other sites, began an era of excavation in the region that continues to this day. The archaeology and textual work done in Mesopotamia has shed light on the origins of Western-complex culture and the way such early beginnings largely shaped how our societies function today, from politics and laws to mathematics, medicine, education, taxes, and everything in between.
Looking back now at these early archaeologists, some scholars have discussed whether they should be considered as having been part and parcel of European colonialism at the time and therefore disparaged as part of a European effort to co-opt the history of nations other than their own, or if they were simply part of a competition or contest sponsored and underwritten by museums for their own gain. Even if those were the underlying motivations, however, the end result is that investigators like Layard, Botta, and others helped bring to light previously unknown, or unexcavated, civilizations such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Sumerians and contributed to enlarging our understanding of the origins of Western civilization. The additional question of whether such objects should now be returned to their countries of origin, which is a legitimate one, must also take into consideration the turmoil that has wracked the Middle East since at least the early 1990s and which continues today, from Iraq to Syria.
As recently as 1988, spectacular discoveries were made at Nimrud by local Iraqi archaeologists. There they uncovered the graves of several Assyrian queens from the time of Assurnasirpal II in the ninth century BCE; the grave goods included incredible gold necklaces, earrings, and other treasures. These disappeared during the Second Gulf War but turned out to be hidden in a bank vault and have since been safely recovered and now published. Work elsewhere in the region has now resumed as well, after being suspended since the early 1990s. It will be interesting to see what the next century of archaeological expeditions uncovers.
