volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

78 Visit to Tall Baldwdt.
and when they saw the stele they claimed it, saying
that it had been found on land belonging to the mosque.
I refused to give up the stele, but whilst we were arguing
the matter several soldiers appeared and said they were
ordered to take it to the PashS.'s office. They took
charge of it at once and had it taken to the Sarayah, and
I went with them to make sure that the stele did not
find its way to Nabi Yunis. The farmer told me that
he had found several such stones and that they had all
been broken up and burnt into lime.
The series of visits which I was paying to sites in
and about Nineveh was interrupted for more than a
week by heavy snowstorms, and it was impossible to
travel. The cold was intense, and the town was the
most miserable place imaginable. The narrow streets
were almost impassable, for they had turned into little
canals, and the mixture of half-melted snow and mud
in them was frequently more than a foot deep. In
many of the houses that I went into, the courtyards
were covered with the water which ran in from the
streets. Wood was scarce and very dear, and we could
only indulge in the luxury of a fire in the evenings. The
snowstorms were followed by very fine weather, and I
determined to visit Tall Balaw§.t before the melting of
the snow on Jabal Maklub made the region round about
impassable .
Tall Bal§.wat is about fifteen miles from Mosul,
on the east bank of the Tigris, and owes its celebrity to
the fact that the bronze plates made for the famous
Gates of Shahnaneser II were said to have been found
there. In the year 1876 natives from the district of
Nimrud brought some portions of these plates to the
French Consul at Mosul, who promptly sent specimens
of them to Paris and London for examination by experts.
The portions sent to Paris were acquired by the well-loiown
collector Schlumberger. In 1877 Mr. H. Rassam was
despatched to Mosul to reopen the excavations at
Kuyunjik, and whilst there he acquired the remainder,
as it was then believed, of the bronze plates from the
Gates of Shalmaneser, and a series of important fragments
from smaller gates which had been set up by