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THE SCRAMBLE FOR ANTIQUITIES

The latter half of the nineteenth century was unfortunately characterized by an undignified scramble for antiquities, a scramble in which the representatives of all the countries in the field were involved. It is a period that no one country can truly be proud of. Their teams of archaeologists vied with each other for the antiquities, and their workers at times came near to open warfare in disputes over digging rights or ownership of discoveries.

These problems emerged from the very beginning. They were an inevitable and predictable consequence of both the British and the French archaeologists holding Ottoman firmans granting the right of excavation “in any ground belonging to the state.” These permits, simultaneously comprehensive and vague, formed the basis of continual conflict between the opposing interests.

The beginning of this period was marked by the greatest debacle in the history of Assyrian archaeology—the disaster on the Tigris in 1855. In the spring of that year most of the antiquities found by Botta at Khorsabad, filling around 120 cases, together with some sixty-eight cases of reliefs from Kuyunjik donated by Rawlinson, eighty cases of antiquities for the Prussian government, and all the results of a French expedition to Babylon, were being shipped on rafts to the port of Basra, where they were to be transported to France. Near the head of the Shatt al-Arab waterway these rafts were attacked by local tribesmen, who were convinced that the archaeologists were transporting great treasures. Having boarded the rafts and broken open the packing cases, the tribesmen, finding merely stone statues and reliefs, became infuriated. In great anger they tossed all the antiquities overboard. Only two rafts managed to escape and reach Basra with their cargoes intact. Despite considerable effort, the recovery of the objects from the riverbed proved unsuccessful; the antiquities were lost. It was a galling end for the efforts of the French team.

The man who lost most was the French archaeologist Victor Place. Since 1851 he had led the renewed expeditions to Khorsabad, but unfortunately he had never managed to achieve any form of cordial relationship with the local people, with the consequence that the French team rapidly earned themselves a reputation for deviousness in their transactions, despite the fact that the wages they paid were more liberal than those offered by the British. The French position was additionally complicated by their propensity for displaying a certain flamboyant temperament, an attitude that did little to advance their cause. At one stage, for example, a member of the French team, overexcited by some discoveries he had made, shot and killed the local sheikh. The archaeologist supposed, apparently, that the sheikh was intending to murder him for the antiquities that had been discovered. One writer records sarcastically: “the natives, who had always regarded it as a species of insanity that the Europeans should spend their time and money in digging up and carrying off old stones and bricks, were confirmed in their impression.”1

Hormuzd Rassam reappeared in Mosul in 1852, having been appointed by the British Museum as its official agent. It was his teams of unruly workmen who so often ran foul of those employed by Victor Place. At one particular site the mutual competition erupted into open hostility, and the opposing teams came to blows, scuffling with each other in the excavation trenches.

A major dilemma soon confronted Rassam over the rights to Kuyunjik: he had become increasingly certain that much more of value lay beneath the mound. Unfortunately, the part of the site that he considered most likely to prove rich in finds was already being excavated by Place. The latter had, upon his arrival in Mosul, sought permission from Rawlinson to dig at Kuyunjik—hitherto a specifically British privilege, following Layard’s groundwork. Rawlinson generously conceded to Place a large part of the mound. However, once Rassam returned to the site and began to dig, it became, in a real sense, divided by national boundaries. At first both teams managed to keep to their respective areas, and any potential disputes were averted. However, Rassam began working his men as close as possible to the boundary of the French sector, and so the possibility of friction seemed unavoidable.

Rassam’s methods were always an extension of his strong sense of independence. He operated in the field almost as a roving warlord. He seldom sought the protection of local chiefs as did the other archaeologists, who constantly found themselves in danger from groups of bandits or wild tribesmen. In contrast, Rassam always traveled with a sizable band of armed men, who generally proved effective at keeping trouble away. On one occasion, though, even the presence of this formidable group was not sufficient to prevent a fight from erupting. It was calmed only by the fortuitous arrival of a detachment of Ottoman cavalry, which just happened to be under the command of a friend of Rassam.

Early December 1853 saw Place’s trenches slowly creeping toward an area on the mound of Kuyunjik that the local residents, invariably quietly knowledgeable in such matters, had always regarded as potentially valuable. Rassam was determined to be the first to dig in this area, but forbidden as he was by the “gentlemen’s agreement” between Rawlinson and Place, he decided to operate clandestinely by digging at night. Thus, on the evening of December 20, Rassam’s team secretly set to work. By the third night of excavation, they had uncovered a large and exquisitely executed stone relief, which depicted a king standing in his chariot, about to leave for a hunting expedition. Further excavation revealed that Rassam’s workers had broken into one of the galleries of a royal palace, a gallery that had walls lined with intricately carved reliefs showing scenes of a royal lion hunt. The artistic achievement that these represented was astounding and of extraordinary quality. Today they can be admired in a special section of the Assyrian Gallery in the British Museum, where they have been reerected in their original order. Rassam’s men had discovered the palace of King Ashurbanipal, who had reigned over Assyria during the seventh century BCE from his capital, Nineveh—the remains of which lay beneath the mound of Kuyunjik. Having made this discovery Rassam relaxed, for he knew that he could now operate openly by day. It had become an established convention that whenever a new palace was discovered, other archaeologists would not interfere.

It was not long before word of his discovery reached the local populace. It rapidly caused considerable excitement in Mosul, and hundreds of curious onlookers flocked to Kuyunjik to watch the digging. Place, who had been supervising his other excavation at Khorsabad, rushed immediately back to Kuyunjik the moment he heard the news. He could be forgiven a certain amount of anger over what had happened, but he showed considerable good grace by accepting the fait accompli and, indeed, congratulated Rassam upon his good fortune.

There can be no doubt that Place felt cheated out of a discovery that, in time, would surely have been his. Later, in 1867, when he published his lavish three-volume work on Nineveh, Place chose to ignore the role of Hormuzd Rassam completely. The latter too seems to have retained a certain unease about the questionable tactics he had employed to obtain this discovery. In his autobiography, published near the end of the century, Rassam had as a frontispiece a photograph of himself not, as might be expected, by the ruins of Nineveh, but rather holding an illustration of the Balawat gates—today also on display in the British Museum. The discovery of these gates, at least, had indisputably been the result of his own initiative and expertise.

The ancient gallery that was broken into by Rassam’s workers was found to contain something of even greater value than the lion hunt reliefs, something that was to add flesh to the worn and broken bones from the past so far discovered.

The gallery was rectangular—some fifty feet long—and, as Rassam’s workers cleared it of rubble, they saw piled down the center of the gallery tens of thousands of small clay tablets, most of which bore the miniature cuneiform script of the period. They had uncovered the complete royal library of King Ashurbanipal, with written records dating from Old Testament times in a repository whose destruction took place during the teaching of the prophet Jeremiah.

All these tablets were subsequently shipped back to the United Kingdom, where they all too often arrived in very bad condition, partly due to the haphazard packing of them and partly as a result of Rassam’s rough methods of retrieval. His men would simply shovel the delicate clay tablets into buckets, which were, in turn, emptied into boxes for shipping. Nevertheless, despite this lack of care, many of the tablets did arrive complete, and many more, broken into pieces, were later fitted together so that they could be read. The scholars soon discovered that they had been supplied with a treasure trove. To great excitement it was discovered, for example, that among the wealth of information contained in this library were tablets giving ancient prebiblical accounts of the creation and the flood.

These discoveries, appearing at the same time that Charles Darwin was propagating his ideas on evolution and the Church was having its foundations rocked by the critical approach to scripture of Modernist theological scholars, who were calling into question the literal truth of biblical texts, caused a frisson of panic to move through the conservative Church. As a result, orthodoxy moved to shore up its position. In 1870 the Pope had himself voted “infallible,” thus investing his pronouncements with divine sanction and enabling him to ignore actual history when mythologized Church history was involved.

In 1875 George Smith published his revelations of the Babylonian creation myth, which first appeared in a British newspaper. This, along with other discoveries of early Babylonian myths that were so clearly similar to, or identical with, those recorded in the Old Testament, created an intense interest on the part of both scholars and the lay public.

Some saw these discoveries as supporting the critical Modernist approach, while, conversely, others saw them offering a means of proving the Bible to be true, lending support to a literal interpretation of scripture. Vested interests, far beyond the concerns of history or linguistic scholarship, then conspired to create a huge and impatient public demand for ever more information about ancient Mesopotamia. The field grew controversial and, for some, glamorous and exciting.

Adding to the sense that great mysteries were yet to be revealed, the year before, in 1874, Professor Archibald Sayce had published the first study of the astrology of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians.*1 Sayce, an expert in translating Akkadian—indeed, an author of a book on the subject—then collaborated with Smith on a new edition of the creation epic, which appeared to an eager public in 1880. During the subsequent two decades, works regularly appeared with translations of the more controversial religious and cultic texts that had been revealed by the excavations: works on Assyrian and Babylonian magic, divination, and astrology. The floodgates were opened upon those very ancient ideas that, it was now realized, had given birth to so many “modern” religious and philosophical concepts.