To within a few years of the middle of the nineteenth century,
Babylon and Assyria were only names. People read about them in the
Bible, but no visible trace remained. They had vanished utterly
from the face of the earth. Some thinkers, who knew how stories
become distorted by the passage of time, questioned if such places
ever existed, whether they were not just myths, the figments of the
imaginations of some ancient scribes.
The rivers Tigris and Euphrates flowed through deserts. It seemed
impossible that such lands could once have been flowing with milk and
honey, that they could have supported a big population and a high
civilization.
Wandering Arabs roved the plains, encamping where they listed,
warring against the Sultan and each other. They drove their sheep
wherever the scanty herbage offered them fodder. The spring saw the
desert blossom like the rose, the summer sun changed it of a sudden
to desolation, burning up everything, sometimes leaving the tribes
struggling in the grip of famine.
Great mounds of sand stood up from the deserts on each side of the
rivers, hills on which the Arabs used to set their black tents
of goat hair, while their flocks fed on the scanty grass that
clothed the mounds in spring. No sign was apparent of a previous
civilization; just the great mounds humping out of the desert and the
black tents of the Arabs.
Those who saw the mounds did not trouble their heads about them. They
took them for natural hills. There was no reason for them to think
otherwise.
No one questioned why such hills should crop suddenly out of the flat
desert. The Arabs who set up a village or two of mud huts on some
of the mounds did not ask themselves why they should occasionally
turn up bricks among the rubbish on the hills. When things have been
in existence as long as the mounds on the Tigris, and when bricks
have been turned up as often as the Arabs have unearthed them, these
things are accepted without question as a matter of course. Neither
Turks nor Arabs troubled about the mounds. It was left to foreigners
to prove that these lofty eminences were the handiwork of man, and
that the mounds on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates covered
all that was left of Assyria and Babylonia.
In deciphering the stone of Behistun, Rawlinson did wonderful work.
He was but thirty-five when he made the announcement that astounded
the scientific world. The credit of uncovering the remains of ancient
Assyria rests with Austin Henry Layard, who started life by studying
law, and finished by making one of the greatest discoveries of the
nineteenth century.
Layard’s whole life was one long romance. He was endowed with a vivid
imagination, which probably came from his mixed descent, for his
mother was a Spanish lady and his father an Englishman. As a young
man, Layard was set to studying law, but instead of attaining great
legal honours, he was made a baronet for wielding pick and spade to
such good purpose out in Mesopotamia, that he dug up more knowledge
of the past than any one man before or since.
Layard in his teens read the _Arabian Nights_ with avidity. All the
colour, the romance of the East appealed to his mind. He dreamed
dreams of bazaars and eastern palaces, with veiled ladies and their
lovers. While he dreamed these dreams he was compelled to study musty
legal documents, in which he took not the slightest interest. Being
confined in an office he hated, his great desire was to see the
scenes he had read and dreamed about. Yet there was no escape for
him. His father had chosen the law for him as a profession, and he
continued his studies against his own inclinations.
Working in his uncle’s office, Layard was not much impressed by the
imagination or the generosity of his relative. Often when the lawyer
thought his nephew was studying in his room, Layard was chatting with
refugees, listening eagerly to their tales, and filling his rooms
with the smell of fried sprats.
His eagerness to travel and see the world was not wholly unsatisfied.
He visited the Continent once or twice with a wealthy friend and
saw much. There came a day when he made up his mind to see the land
of the Tsars. He counted up his money. It was little enough, but by
exercising strict economy he decided he might just manage to obtain
another glimpse of the world. So he set out practically on the spur
of the moment, and made his first acquaintance with Russia and
Scandinavia.
This adventurous young fellow was born with the desire to wander and
see new lands and peoples. To a youth of his temperament, an office
was a prison. While he was poring over his law-books, the figures of
the _Arabian Nights_ were flitting through his brain. His whole life
was practically influenced by these tales of the East. “To them,” he
wrote, “I attribute that love of travel and adventure which took me
to the East, and led me to the discovery of the ruins of Nineveh.
They give the truest, most lively and most interesting pictures of
manners and customs which still existed amongst Turks, Persians and
Arabs when I first mixed freely with them.”
Despite this overwhelming desire to travel, he grappled with his
legal studies, and managed to pass his final examination. At that
time his uncle arrived home from Ceylon, and it may be imagined
how delightedly the young man listened to accounts of life in that
far-off island. With his usual impetuosity he determined to go to
Ceylon, to take up the profession he had studied.
“I will travel overland,” he said. De Lesseps had still to carve the
Suez Canal out of the desert sands. Why should Layard coop himself
up in a ship and make his slow way all round Africa to India? It
was then the usual way, but the usual way was not Layard’s way. He
studied his maps and traced his route. Travelling overland would give
him a splendid opportunity of seeing the world, and he hugged the
secret thought in his heart that he would be able to wander in the
lands of his dreams, to see Constantinople and Baghdad.
He received £600 from his mother, to set him on the road to fame and
fortune. Half this sum was sent to a bank in Ceylon so that he might
collect it on his arrival, the other half he carried with him to pay
his expenses on the long journey half across the world. He was only
twenty-two years old when he said good-bye to his mother, and set out
with a friend in 1839 to make his way to Ceylon. By the autumn they
were adventuring in Syria. They had no one to guide them, no servants
to wait on them. They tended their own horses, and for the rest
relied on their youth and their weapons.
Layard’s thoughts turned in the direction of Nineveh and Babylon,
and his horse’s head was turned in the same direction. He realized
that the opportunity of seeing the land might never recur. So in the
spring of 1840 the two friends jogged along from Aleppo to Mosul.
They were lucky to get through unscathed, for the Arabs were warring
with each other on all sides. The dwellers of the deserts were
raiding right and left, and Layard often happened on encampments
that were picked clean by the marauders. Once or twice the young
Englishmen came upon bands of the raiders, but their luck stood
them in good stead and they passed on their way unmolested. The two
friends made light of these adventures, yet there was always the
chance that a bullet might stretch them dead on the desert sands and
that they would for ever disappear in the East.
The great mounds of Nimroud, opposite Mosul, wielded a potent spell
over Layard. He climbed about them, dreamed over them, picked up bits
of brick with arrow-headed writing on them. Often he asked himself
what lay under his feet. He saw bits of alabaster sticking out of
the soil where the rains had washed them bare. The remains of a dam
peeped out of the river Tigris. He asked an Arab who built it.
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of the British School at Athens_
EXCAVATING THE THRONE ROOM AT KNOSSOS. THE STONE THRONE MAY BE SEEN
IN THE BACKGROUND (_see page 185_)]
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of R. Campbell Thomson_
THE DESOLATION OF NINEVEH. THIS HILL WAS ONCE ONE OF THE WALLS OF THE
CAPITAL OF ASSYRIA]
“Nimrod,” said the Arab, referring to the great mythical god of the
past.
The stones of the dam were locked securely together. The waters
poured over it in a cataract. Layard visioned the men in past ages
building that dam, saw the waters held back and flowing into the
canals to make the desert into a fertile plain. He galloped over the
desert and saw traces of the silted-up canals, and he knew that the
fertile land of the past and the desolate land through which he rode
were one and the same. The neglect of man, the passage of time, and
the absence of water were responsible for the change.
He left Mosul on a raft of goatskins, floating down the Tigris to
Baghdad as men had floated down for thousands of years. As he glided
by on the slow-moving river the hillocks on the banks were beckoning
to him, and he vowed to lay bare the past with a spade at the very
first opportunity.
It was two years before that opportunity arrived. When he got back to
Mosul he found a Frenchman, M. Botta, was digging. For a long time
Botta found little to encourage him to proceed with the work. A few
fragments of brick and other trifles were all that turned up under
the pick.
Then one day an Arab gazed down on the trenches that Botta’s workmen
were digging, wondering what on earth his compatriots from Mosul
were searching for, and why they were going to all the trouble.
“What are you looking for?” he asked at last.
The labourer who was digging straightened his back, and glancing
round among the rubbish he had turned up, picked up a piece of brick
with a few cuneiform characters on it. “This,” he said.
The Arab laughed. It seemed to him a huge joke that men should be
wasting their time digging in the earth for bits of broken brick.
“Why, where I live there are thousands of them,” he said. “We find
them when we are digging the foundations of our houses.”
Botta was told what the peasant had said. The Frenchman was very
dubious. He had heard such things before, and the rumours always
proved false. The diggers, however, were so insistent, that at last
he sent one or two off to the village of Khorsabad, where the peasant
lived, to see what they could find.
It was some little time before the diggers could persuade the
villagers to allow them to sink a test hole. Eventually, the
inhabitants were won over, and the excavators sank a shaft—which
quickly ended at the top of a mighty wall!
Hastening at once to the spot, Botta set his men furiously to work.
They unearthed an ancient Assyrian palace. Great slabs of stone were
covered with sculptured scenes of war. Botta was astounded. He, nor
any other modern man, had never seen the like.
They proved to be the ruins of a king’s palace, but unfortunately
as soon as they were laid bare the slabs began to crumble. A huge
fire had destroyed the palace. In the heat the slabs were reduced to
lime, and directly they were uncovered they fell in little pieces.
Nothing could be done to preserve them. They had remained hidden
for thousands of years. The kindly earth had kept them intact, but
directly the air played about them they decayed.
Layard was for long in close touch with Botta. More than once the
Frenchman wrote to Layard about his non-success, and Layard displayed
his fine character by urging the Frenchman to continue.
The Briton had studied the spot with a view to working there. All
thoughts of reaching Ceylon had passed from his mind. He wrote to
friends, and tried to interest them in his proposed work. He received
no encouragement. Despite all this disappointment, he was great
enough to encourage his rival. It throws considerable light on the
character of the man who eventually accomplished so much on the banks
of the Tigris.
If Layard did not make the first discovery there, he had much to do
with it. But for his encouragement, Botta might have ceased digging
long before the peasant stood looking down into his trenches, to tell
him that there were heaps of the funny old bricks in his village of
Khorsabad.
The influence of the Englishman, and the laughing words of a peasant,
led to the Frenchman taking the first step back into the Assyria of
the past.