some thirty centuries before the captives of Judah uttered lamentations on the banks of its reedy canals.  The sites of some of the ancient cities of Babylonia and Assyria were identified by European officials and travellers in the East early in the nineteenth century, and a few relics found their way to Europe.  But before Sir A.H.  Layard set to work as an excavator in the “forties”, “a case scarcely three feet square”, as he himself wrote, “enclosed all that remained not only of the great city of Nineveh, but of Babylon itself".[4]

Layard, the distinguished pioneer Assyriologist, was an Englishman of Huguenot descent, who was born in Paris.  Through his mother he inherited a strain of Spanish blood.  During his early boyhood he resided in Italy, and his education, which began there, was continued in schools in France, Switzerland, and England.  He was a man of scholarly habits and fearless and independent character, a charming writer, and an accomplished fine-art critic; withal he was a great traveller, a strenuous politician, and an able diplomatist.  In 1845, while sojourning in the East, he undertook the exploration of ancient Assyrian cities.  He first set to work at Kalkhi, the Biblical Calah.  Three years previously M.P.C.  Botta, the French consul at Mosul, had begun to investigate the Nineveh mounds; but these he abandoned for a mound near Khorsabad which proved to be the site of the city erected by “Sargon the Later”, who is referred to by Isaiah.  The relics discovered by Botta and his successor, Victor Place, are preserved in the Louvre.

At Kalkhi and Nineveh Layard uncovered the palaces of some of the most famous Assyrian Emperors, including the Biblical Shalmaneser and Esarhaddon, and obtained the colossi, bas reliefs, and other treasures of antiquity which formed the nucleus of the British Museum’s unrivalled Assyrian collection.  He also conducted diggings at Babylon and Niffer (Nippur).  His work was continued by his assistant, Hormuzd Rassam, a native Christian of Mosul, near Nineveh.  Rassam studied for a time at Oxford.

The discoveries made by Layard and Botta stimulated others to follow their example.  In the “fifties” Mr. W.K.  Loftus engaged in excavations at Larsa and Erech, where important discoveries were made of ancient buildings, ornaments, tablets, sarcophagus graves, and pot burials, while Mr. J.E.  Taylor operated at Ur, the seat of the moon cult and the birthplace of Abraham, and at Eridu, which is generally regarded as the cradle of early Babylonian (Sumerian) civilization.

In 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson superintended diggings at Birs Nimrud (Borsippa, near Babylon), and excavated relics of the Biblical Nebuchadrezzar.  This notable archaeologist began his career in the East as an officer in the Bombay army.  He distinguished himself as a political agent and diplomatist.  While resident at Baghdad, he devoted his leisure time to cuneiform studies.  One of his remarkable feats was the copying of the famous trilingual rock inscription of Darius the Great on a mountain cliff at Behistun, in Persian Kurdistan.  This work was carried out at great personal risk, for the cliff is 1700 feet high and the sculptures and inscriptions are situated about 300 feet from the ground.