Layard, disappointed that his own countrymen were so little
interested in his proposals, was impelled by the success of Botta
to make a strong effort to begin the work he was longing to do.
Hastening to Constantinople, he saw Sir Stratford Canning, the
British Ambassador, told him his plans, and succeeded in interesting
him to such an extent that the Ambassador advanced the amount of £60.
It was a trivial sum with which to start excavating the mounds of
the Tigris, and not many men would have undertaken the work with so
little money behind them. Layard did not hesitate for a moment. He
left Constantinople without breathing a word about his intentions,
and in less than a fortnight was back in Mosul.
The country, through misrule, was very unsettled, and the authorities
were so antagonistic that Layard dared not tell them of his project.
He knew that if he let fall the slightest word as to what he was
about, he would immediately be stopped. Keeping his plans to himself,
he collected one or two men and announced that he was going on an
expedition to shoot wild boars.
A raft was built, the goatskins were blown up to support it, and
Layard made a brave show of the guns and spears he put aboard. The
other hunting weapons were so strange that he thought it prudent to
smuggle them on to the raft. They were, in fact, picks and shovels!
It needed a man of resource to beat the wiles of the Turks. Layard
was certainly resourceful, and anything more amusing than the way he
set out to hunt wild boar with picks and shovels would be difficult
to imagine. The raft was pushed out into the stream, and for a few
hours the hunters floated slowly along, landing some distance from
the mound and spending the night with a party of Arabs.
Early next morning Layard set off with six Arabs for the mound, and
began collecting the fragments of brick he saw lying about. The
collecting of these trifles was soon discarded for a more important
task which centred round a piece of alabaster sticking out of the
soil. The Arabs tugged at it, Layard tried to drag it out, and as it
remained immovable, he set his men to dig it up. In a few hours, many
plain slabs of alabaster were laid bare, and Layard knew he was on
the track of the lost civilization of Assyria.
He possessed a peculiar genius for the task he had undertaken,
while his insight in selecting spots for his operations was almost
uncanny. Where Botta dug and found nothing, Layard dug later and laid
bare the most remarkable sculptures. As he looked at the hills of
desolation, he imagined the palaces as they must have been in their
glory, and reasoned where the walls must have stood. Sometimes he was
wrong, but more often he was right.
The Governor of Mosul, thinking the Englishman was digging for gold
and silver treasure, tried to stop his work. Sinister rumours spread
through the bazaars that the stranger was interfering with the graves
of their forefathers, and trying to release all the evil spirits that
were chained up in the mounds. The temper of the population grew very
ugly. Superstition was everywhere rife.
Layard told the Pasha the truth, and that gentleman, sympathizing
with him to his face, put all sorts of obstacles in his way behind
his back. The worst of the matter was that Layard had no permission
to dig. Until he obtained authority he knew he would meet with
opposition from the local officials. So he sent an urgent letter to
Sir Stratford Canning, urging the Ambassador to obtain an order that
would smooth away the opposition of the people in power in Mosul.
Luckily the Ambassador eventually succeeded in getting an order from
the Porte, giving permission to excavate and to ship any sculptures
discovered. To that order, and to Layard’s own indomitable will, we
owe our wonderful gallery of Assyrian sculptures now in the British
Museum.
The sullen murmurs of the mob reached Layard’s ears, and he rode into
Mosul. “You are disturbing their dead,” he was told. “It will be
wiser for you to stop before they get out of hand.”
Crossing the rickety bridge of boats, Layard rode along the bank back
to Nimroud. With him were some irregular soldiers, to see that he did
not dig any more. He dared not deliberately run counter to the wishes
of the Pasha, and was not anxious to risk an outbreak of the mob.
He talked to the Arab in charge of the soldiers to such good purpose
that the man’s tongue wagged a little more than the Pasha imagined
was possible. It revealed an amusing conspiracy which the Pasha had
hatched to stop further excavations. It was a trick worthy of the
East. The Turkish soldiers actually dug graves in the dark, in order
to point them out by day as having been violated. “We have destroyed
more real tombs of true Believers in making sham ones, than you could
have defiled between the Zab and Selamiyah. We have killed our horses
and ourselves carrying those accursed stones,” the leader confessed
to Layard.
Layard quickly hit on a simple plan of winning the soldiers over.
He employed a few to guard the sculptures he had already uncovered,
and the rest turned a blind eye to him if he happened to be digging
instead of copying inscriptions, as he was supposed to do! The
trifling sums he gave the soldiers for their nominal services were
indeed well spent.
All the time Layard was digging he ran continual risk of being raided
by the Arabs. He was compelled to organize defences, and more than
one pitched battle took place between the hostile Arabs and those who
guarded the mound of Nimroud. Often the excavator had to call his
diggers out of the trenches to beat off marauders who coveted the
belongings of the stranger within their gates.
It was extraordinary the way Layard followed the workings of the
Oriental mind. In this direction he had a unique gift, and with such
tact and judgment did he treat those with whom he came into contact,
that his reputation soon spread abroad among the Arab tribes. Many
of the chiefs held him in high esteem, and were dominated by his
personality. In those days Layard exercised as much power among
the Arabs, and went among them as freely, as did Colonel Lawrence
during the Great War. He possessed a determination and intuition that
carried him through everything. He lived with the Arabs, and liked
them.
At his behest great slabs all carved with sculptures and inscribed
with cuneiform characters saw the light of day once more, after
lying beneath the soil for three thousand years. There were quaint
figures, beautifully carved with the bodies of men and the heads
of birds, while wings were attached to the shoulders. These were
the ancient gods of the Assyrians. Winged lions were found partly
destroyed by the fire which had raged over the palace. Great carvings
of campaigns were found in a similar state.
One day, as he was riding towards the mound on his return from Mosul,
some Arabs galloped up to him like madmen.
“Hasten, O Bey! hasten to the diggers, for they have found Nimrod
himself. Wallah, it is wonderful, but it is true. We have seen him
with our eyes. There is no God but God!” they cried, and turning
their horses they pounded away to the black tents of their tribe.
When Layard got to the trench he saw something concealed by Arab
cloaks and baskets. The diggers tore the coverings off as he
approached, and Layard beheld the giant head of a sculptured figure
buried up to the neck in the soil. It was a human head, nearly as
tall as a man, and belonging to one of those fine human-headed winged
bulls now in the British Museum.
One Arab was so terrified of the monster that he dropped his basket
and ran madly to Mosul. He babbled the most alarming tales of the
terror that the stranger was releasing from the earth, and the
rumours quickly spread through the bazaars. People for miles around
rushed to the scene to gaze on the idol of the infidels.
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of the British Museum_
ONE OF THE COLOSSAL, HUMAN-HEADED, WINGED FIGURES, TWICE AS TALL AS
A MAN, WHICH SIR A. H. LAYARD DUG OUT OF THE MOUNDS ON THE TIGRIS,
AND WHICH REVEAL THE HIGH CIVILIZATION TO WHICH THE ANCIENT ASSYRIANS
ATTAINED. IT IS COVERED WITH AN INSCRIPTION IN CUNEIFORM CHARACTERS,
AND A NOTABLE FEATURE IS THE FIVE LEGS]
The diggers were delighted at the discovery, and under Layard’s
direction they managed to uncover the top of another head a dozen
feet away. The men worked in a half frenzy, digging away and running
to and fro with the baskets of rubbish like mad creatures.
To celebrate the find, Layard gave a great feast. Sheep were killed,
musicians made music. Figures whirled hither and thither in the
flicker of the campfires, dancing wildly over the desert in front of
the goat-hair tents, shouting and leaping until far into the night.
If by a miracle the clock could have been put back twenty-five
centuries, the simple tents would have changed to noble palaces and
the feasting Arabs into Assyrian courtiers, with King Sennacherib
drinking out of a golden goblet! As it was, the Arabs were stamping
the past under their feet.
Wonder after wonder was laid bare by the picks of Layard’s diggers.
He found three palaces, all of different ages, some of which had been
built with slabs of alabaster taken from earlier edifices. It was
plain that the latest had been destroyed by fire, the vengeful fire
which led to the final obliteration of Assyrian civilization.
In the days of their glory the palaces were magnificent, standing
on massive platforms about 20 feet high, built of sun-dried bricks,
with fine wide terraces and sculptured halls. The Tigris flowed by
the walls, and mighty winged lions and bulls guarded the entrances.
The ancient sculptors who carved these figures were no mean artists.
Their art was highly developed, and their skill in carrying out the
details and ornamentation quite remarkable. They had arrived at a
better idea of perspective than the Egyptians, and their figures were
more lifelike, especially the animals, the muscles of which were
carved very faithfully.
The irrigation works engineered by the ancient Babylonians and
Assyrians were more wonderful than those carried out in Egypt. The
deserts of Mesopotamia were intersected with an intricate network of
canals. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates were dammed at intervals, to
hold back the waters and direct them into the canals, feeding the
fertile lands of the country round about. The banks of the rivers
and canals were tended with scrupulous care, and heavy fines were
inflicted on those who were responsible if the banks gave way.
Mesopotamia in those days was the finest granary in the world. Here
was the Garden of Eden, the fairest, most fruitful land under the
sun, where, according to the Bible, the story of Man began, the land
of the rivers of which the Bible says: “And the fourth river is the
Euphrates.” Here Adam and Eve wandered in the Land of Plenty, until
they were cast out for eating of the Tree of Knowledge.
Now the smiling land is a waste. When Layard found these relics of a
glorious past, the descendants of those who builded and carved were
wanderers over the face of the desert, nomads, barely civilized,
living in mud huts and tents. The difference between the past and
present of Mesopotamia is stupendous, almost incredible.
Before Layard started digging at Nimroud, relics of Assyria
practically did not exist. All that were known might have been
carried about comfortably in a kit-bag. In a short two years he
crowded discovery on discovery. The past was revealed at his touch as
if by magic.
Even the Arabs realized the wonder of it. “God is great! God is
great!” exclaimed an aged sheik to Layard. “Here are stones which
have been buried ever since the time of the holy Noah—peace be with
him. Perhaps they were underground before the Deluge. I have lived
on these lands for years. My father, and the father of my father,
pitched their tents here before me; but they never heard of these
figures. For twelve hundred years have the true believers been
settled in this country, and none of them ever heard of a palace
underground. Neither did they who went before them. But lo! here
comes a Frank, from many days’ journey off, and he walks up to the
very place and he takes a stick, and makes a line here, and makes a
line there. ‘Here,’ says he, ‘is the palace; there,’ says he, ‘is the
gate;’ and he shows us what has been all our lives beneath our feet,
without our having known anything about it. Wonderful! Wonderful! Is
it by books? Is it by magic? Is it by your prophets that you have
learnt these things? Speak, O Bey! Tell us the Secret of Wisdom.”
The passing of the years has not diminished the wonder. All the time
Layard carried his life in his hand. He took risks no native of
the country would face. Once he was hunting a wolf, when his horse
slipped and threw him right on top of the animal he was hunting.
Layard picked himself up, by which time the startled wolf had made
off. Often he rode boldly into the tents of unfriendly Arabs, and
came out unharmed. With his imperious words he brought insolent
chiefs to heel, made them feel the strength of his personality, and
sometimes the strength of his arm.
He lived a strenuous life, slaving on far into the dreadful heat of
summer, erecting a bower of branches beside the river to sleep in.
The ruins were infested with scorpions, yet he escaped their sting.
He was not so lucky with the mosquitoes. Nothing alive could escape
these winged pests. He had attack after attack of malaria. Often he
was so stricken with fever that he found it impossible to work at
all. In spite of all these drawbacks and difficulties, he triumphed.
Once when he was investigating the ruins of Babylon, a Turkish
governor presented him with an unruly lion! Another time he was
travelling over the desert under the escort of an Arab chief, when a
thief stole two of his horses. Taking the blame on himself, the chief
vowed solemnly to recover the animals, no matter how long it took,
even if it meant going to the ends of the earth. Layard parted from
the chief at the end of his journey, and gave no further thought to
the incident. For six weeks the chief relentlessly tracked the stolen
horses from place to place, and one day he quietly rode into Layard’s
encampment and left the two horses for their owner. Without waiting
for thanks, he rode swiftly away.
Extraordinary results were achieved by Layard with the little
money at his command. Certainly his scale of wages would not now
be considered very extravagant. He paid his diggers sixpence a
day; those who filled the baskets fourpence a day, the labourers
threepence, and the boys twopence. It seems little enough, but the
tent-dwellers had no rent, rates or taxes to pay, and in those days
they could buy 240 lb. of corn for two shillings. To many of them,
living on the border line of starvation, a settled wage of two or
three shillings a week meant affluence.
Layard himself had a host of duties to perform, not least of which
were sketching the sculptures as they were revealed and making
immediate copies of all inscriptions found. Such work had to be done
at once for fear the stone crumbled to pieces, for much of it only
lasted a short time after being uncovered.
At Kouyunjik he found the palace of Sennacherib, buried 30 feet
deep under an accumulation of debris and soil, so deep, in fact,
that it was quite impossible to open trenches from the top, owing
to the prodigious quantities of soil to be removed. Layard met this
difficulty by driving tunnels, and the whole mound was in time
honeycombed with his gloomy passages. Occasionally a shaft was opened
to the top to let in light, and the faint glimmer that filtered down
lit up the most astounding sculptures ever seen by human eyes. Thus
was Nineveh found lying in its grave, so overwhelmed that Layard had
to mine a way into it.
Once Layard gained enormous prestige among the Arabs, by telling
them that the sun would be eclipsed, and the day grow dark. Sure
enough the sun began to grow dim, and the Arabs, who thought that
devils had caught hold of the planet, took up all the pots and pans
they possessed, and nearly knocked the bottoms out of them in their
endeavours to frighten the evil spirits away!
The removal of the sculptures from the ruins and their safe
transport to England, was not the least of the many problems that
Layard had to solve. The river Tigris was the only highway to the
sea, and as it was too shallow to allow steamers to steam up to
Mosul, it was necessary to build rafts to float the sculptures down
to Basra, where they could be transhipped to the vessels that were
to take them to England. It needed a deal of persuasion to induce a
native to build a raft big enough to support the weighty lion and
the bull. The raft was eventually constructed and supported by six
hundred sheep and goat skins, every one of which had to be blown up
by the mouth of the raftsman and tied securely. It was a task which
must have severely tested the lungs and temper of the blower.
Layard made his plans carefully. As no timber was available, a man
was sent high up the river to cut down mulberry trees to make a
rude cart for transporting the bull and lion to the river edge. The
trees were floated down the Tigris, and four solid wooden wheels
a foot thick were cut out of the trunks and bound with iron. Big
beams formed the body of the cart, and when it was ready half the
population of Mosul crowded to see the buffaloes drag it over the
bridge of boats spanning the river.
The bull was buried 20 feet deep in the earth. Layard had no tackle
for lifting a weight of fifty tons, so his diggers cut a sloping
road from the statue to the edge of the mound, paving it with planks
of wood. The bull, which stood upright, was to be lowered on its side
to a frame of strong planks. The ropes were placed round the bull,
and over a mighty rock some distance away. Scores of men slowly paid
out the ropes, while the bull canted over on its side. The statue was
about 5 feet from the ground, when all the ropes broke, the men fell
backwards in a heap, and the bull descended with a crash.
Layard rushed down from his post expecting to find it shattered, but
it proved to be quite uninjured by its fall. Then the men began to
haul the bull over rollers to the edge of the mound. The noise made
by the onlookers was deafening. They danced and shouted and behaved
like mad people. Gradually the bull was pulled up the incline until
it stood just above the cart, which had been placed in an excavation
to bring it on a level with the end of the road. The earth was dug
away from under the bull, and it slowly settled in the cart.
That was the beginning of a few strenuous days full of troubles. The
buffaloes, upon being harnessed up, refused to pull. Cracking whips
and the shouts of Arabs alike failed to have any effect, so at last
they were taken out, and three hundred natives caught hold of the
ropes and began to drag the cart to the river. The road had been
carefully surveyed to make sure that there were no secret holes in
which the villagers were wont to store their corn, but unluckily one
was overlooked. A perverse fate directed the cart straight to it, and
before any one realized what was happening a wheel suddenly sank into
the covered hole, nearly capsizing the rough cart.
Spades and timbers were brought to the spot, and the natives dug and
hauled with all their might, but it was night before the cart was
extricated. The next day saw the long lines of Arabs straining at the
cart once more, and this time progress was stopped by a bed of soft
sand in which the wheels sank. Not until the third day was the great
bull brought down to the water’s edge.
Here it remained until the melting snows on the Kurdish mountains
made the river rise, and when there was a sufficient depth of water
to float the bull down to Basra, the final task was undertaken. A
slipway of poplar beams was first of all built from the bull to the
top of the raft. This was thoroughly greased, just as the slipways
are greased when a battleship is launched, and down this slipway
Layard began to lower the bull. For a moment he thought all his
carefully laid plans were to end in disaster. The natives hung on
to the ropes in their attempt to check the descent of the bull. It
was too much for them. Getting out of hand, the bull dropped with a
thud on to the raft. The raft gave a terrific lurch, but luckily it
withstood the impact, and all was well.
Before the bull was embarked, Layard was faced with the prospect of
being defeated by the marauding Arabs. He ordered all the felts and
ropes and other materials to be brought down to Nimroud on a raft,
but the raft, owing to its late start from Mosul, was unable to reach
the mound before dark, so the Arabs in charge tied up to the bank to
pass the night. In the middle of the night a raiding party swarmed
down on them and stripped the raft of everything.
Layard was quickly stirred to action. Directly he discovered who the
culprits were he galloped off to their camp, and in the very face of
the hostile tribe seized the sheik and carried him off. Under the
lash of Layard’s tongue that worthy soon repented, and ordered all
the missing articles to be returned.
On another occasion a sudden flood swept away many Arabs, and
sent one of his rafts of sculptures swirling through a break in
the bank into the swamps, from which they were rescued with the
utmost difficulty. Even in those days lightning strikes were not
unknown, for Layard contended with one on the part of his Arabs. His
sculptures were all waiting to be placed aboard the raft, when the
Arabs, who knew he dare not miss the spring floods, told him they
were moving camp, thinking to induce him to give them more money for
the work. Layard bade them good-bye, and galloped off into the desert
to get helpers from another tribe. When the strikers came back,
finding their bluff of no avail, they were already superseded.
It is rather a striking commentary on the progress that has been made
in three thousand years, to know that Layard’s methods in removing
the bulls were almost identical with those of the ancient Assyrians
who placed them in position. One of the sculptured slabs uncovered by
Layard at Kouyunjik, furnished full particulars of how the ancients
tackled the difficulty of moving such masses.
The original huge block was brought from the quarry in the hills on
rafts supported by skins, just as the bull was sent down to Basra.
It was dragged ashore by bands of slaves, and the sculptor carved
the block into the form of the man-headed winged bull, giving the
statue five legs, as was the general practice in Assyria, so that
four might be seen from the side and two from the front. The bull was
then placed on a sledge, something like that used by the Egyptians
for moving similar masses, and dragged and levered along, the lever
used being a great pole to which ropes were attached for men to throw
their weight upon. A sloping road was built up to the place where the
bulls were to stand, and up this the statues were gradually hauled
and pushed. The man directing the operations of the army of workmen
is clearly shown, though whether he is signalling by blowing on a
trumpet, or shouting through the first megaphone ever invented, is
an open question. He appears to be using a trumpet, but for aught we
know it might have been something to magnify the voice.
There were carved ivories, Egyptian cartouches, sculptured sphinxes,
to link Babylon and Assyria with ancient Egypt, to show that
intercourse existed between the two peoples, just as the monuments
of Egypt indicated. Three thousand years ago letters written in
cuneiform characters on clay tablets were regularly passing to and
fro between the two countries. Apparently at that time the cuneiform
characters could be read equally well by Egyptians and Babylonians
and Assyrians, as is proved by the Tell el Amarna tablets discovered
in Egypt. Some of the clay letters of those days are very similar
to puppy biscuits in colour, shape and size; others might easily be
mistaken for oblong tablets of toilet soap.
Whether the civilization of Egypt and that of Mesopotamia developed
simultaneously independent of each other is a question that is
still unsettled. The general opinion is that the beginnings of
all civilization are to be found in Mesopotamia, but men who have
spent their lives studying ancient Egypt give precedence to the
civilization of the Nile. These are things which may never be solved.
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of the British Museum_
THIS CLAY SPELLING BOOK OF BABYLON WAS THE FORERUNNER OF THE MODERN
SPELLING BOOK]
[Illustration: IN OLDEN DAYS LEGAL DOCUMENTS WERE GRAVED IN STONE
AND WRITTEN IN CLAY. THIS CLAY TABLET WITH ITS QUAINT CUNEIFORM
CHARACTERS IS A DEED RECORDING THE SALE OF A PIECE OF LAND]
[Illustration: MODERN ENVELOPES FOR LETTERS WERE ANTICIPATED BY THIS
RARE BABYLONIAN ENVELOPE OF CLAY WHICH ENCLOSED THE DEED]
The evidence seems to indicate that the original inhabitants of
Babylonia were the Sumerians, who were already possessed of a fair
culture. They were able to read and write, and their writing, in
archaic cuneiform characters, was the writing out of which the
Babylonian cuneiform characters in the course of time developed.
Later variants of it were the Persian and the Median cuneiform, which
were carved by order of Darius on the rock at Behistun.
A peaceful, pastoral people, the Sumerians lived by agriculture and
not by war, and they were swamped by invading Semites, who adopted
the culture of the Sumerians they had conquered. The conquerors made
Babylon the first city of the world. The same people left their
impress on Egypt, and their characteristics—dark eyes, big lips and
hook noses—are well preserved for us in the sculptures of Assyria.
The power of Babylon waxed and waned. The Assyrians, seizing their
opportunity, threw off their bondage, and, sweeping across country,
conquered the walled city of mighty Babylon itself. Sennacherib razed
the city to the ground. For a time Nineveh blossomed as the first
city of the East. Then came the Babylonians with fire and sword, and
utterly destroyed Assyria and its civilization.
There are few more remarkable romances than that of the young
lawyer, who went out to the East to practise law, and dug up Babylon
and Assyria instead; or of the young English soldier, who wrested the
secret of an unknown writing from the rock at Behistun.