To tell the story of the further excavations is unnecessary.  It is all given in Layard’s two splendid volumes, “Nineveh and its Remains,” and “Babylon and Nineveh;” and the bas-reliefs, statues, bronzes, ivories, and inscriptions are magnificently reproduced in great folio volumes.  From Nimroud he went back to Mosul, and there opened the two mounds opposite of Kuyunjik and Neby-Yunus, the site of old Nineveh.  There more palaces and friezes were found of other kings.  Then he went back to London, closing his successful campaign, more profitable if not more glorious than those of war, and published the story of his work.  Its effect was marvellous.  No such popular book of travels had ever appeared; for it was a story of adventure, and also of strange discovery.  Mr. Layard had not suspected that he had the literary gift, but he had it in rare measure.  He had gained an inner view of the heart of tribes, Moslem and Christian and semi-pagan, by his sympathy with them and his knowledge of their tongues.  He had lived in their tents and huts.  He had saved them from persecution by Turkish governors.  Their gratitude to him was beyond words, and he told their story with affection and enthusiasm.  Then his discoveries were in the lands made historic not only by the campaigns of Xenophon and Alexander, but made almost sacred by the Bible history.  These were the lands whence came the armies that fought with Israel.  These were the kings whose wars are told in the Jewish records; and the annals of these kings were found in their palaces, and they gave full accounts of wars of which the Bible had given the outline.  Piety and learning joined to give extraordinary interest to these discoveries and to this report of them.  Mr. Layard found himself famous, and the monuments he was bringing to the British Museum were, and still are, the most extraordinary and fascinating in all its corridors.

Of course, a new grant was made in behalf of the British Museum, and of course he went back to continue and extend his researches.  Now he wished to go further south, beyond Nimroud to Kalah Shergat, the yet earlier capital of Assyria; and yet further to Babylon, that he might see and test the multitude of mounds of ancient Chaldea, the real land of Nimrod, the seat of Eden, and the Tower of Babel, far more ancient than any one of the three capitals of Assyria.  While he did scarce more than to visit and report on the Babylonian mounds, his diggings in Nineveh itself were of vast importance, for there he found the library of Asshurbanabal, on clay tablets, which has given us our chief knowledge of the literature and learning of the ancient East.  In 1852 he returned to England to publish his “Monuments of Nineveh,” and left the further exploration to his able lieutenant, Mr. Rassam, and to a noble succession of explorers who should follow, and to a no less noble line of scholars who should interpret the inscriptions and recover the history of the nations; so that we now know more exactly the history of Babylonian and Assyrian kings, and from more authentic records, and more completely the social condition and business life of the countries, than we do the history of Greece, or the life of the Greeks even of the time of Pericles, and that, too, for a period of three thousand years.