volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Boundary Stele of Sennacherib. 77
rejoiced to have such excellent limestone to bum. On
our way back to Baibukh I began to persuade the shekh
to let me take the altar of Sargon to Mosul to prevent
it from being smashed and burnt into lime, but he did
not seem willing to do so. A little later in the day he
agreed to hand it over to me provided that I would pay
men to drag it to Mosul. This I undertook to do, and
a rough sledge was soon made and the altar tied on it,
and the gang of powerful men employed by the shekh
worked with such vigour that before night the altar was.
in Mosul. I handed it over to the Delegate in order to
keep it out of the hands of the local authorities, who
promptly tried to take possession of it, and I intended
to make an arrangement for its acquisition from Hamdi
Bey later on.
The day after my return from Baibukh a native
who farmed a little land between Kuyunjik and Nabi
Yunis came and told me that at a certain spot in one of
his fields there was a large fiat stone with figures and
writing upon it, and he asked me to buy it from him.
Taking a few men with digging tools and baskets Nimrud
and I went with him, and in a short time we uncovered
a stele about 40 inches high and nearly 20 inches wide.
Having washed the face of it we saw that several figures
of gods and divine emblems were sculptured on the
upper part of it, and below these were several lines of
cuneiform text, which stated that the stele had been
set up by Sennacherib (b.c. 705-681). As some of the
sculptured figures and emblems resembled those which
are seen on Babylonian boundary stones, I concluded
that the stele was one of several which marked the
boundary of the grounds of the palace which Sennacherib
built on the spot now called Nabi Yunis. ^ We got the
stone up out of the hole in the ground and were dragging
it away on a sledge, when suddenly a number of men
and some of the officials connected with the mosque on
the mound of Nabi Yunis came running towards us,
^ There is a somewhat similar stele on the wall at the northern
end of the Nineveh Gallery in the British Museum. (See the Guide,
p. 38, No. 44.)