volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

94
Badger's Report on NimrM.
importance was Rich, who pubUshed a drawing of them^
and copies of the cuneiform inscriptions which he found
on fragments of Assyrian bricks lying there. Moreover,
Rich was convinced that the city buried under the
mounds was Larissa, and that the tower at the northwest
comer of the platform was the pyramidal building
which Xenophon* had seen and described. Layard
went over the mounds carefully in 1840, and he resolved
that whenever it was in his power he would " thoroughly
examine " the ruins of Nimrud. When Botta became
French Consul in Mosul, Layard wrote to him and called
his attention to the mound of Nimrud, but he declined
to consider that site because of its distance from Mosul
{20 miles), and its inconvenient position. Layard also
wrote to friends in England, but he could get no one
to take an interest in Nimrud or find money to excavate
it, and for two years nothing was done. Meanwhile
Botta was making excavations at Kuyunjik and discovered
Khorsabad, but his results only confirmed
Layard's belief that neither place was the site of Nineveh.
He was certain that the ruins of Nineveh lay under the
mounds of Nimrud, and he used every endeavour to
get excavations started there. At the moment when
this seemed hopeless his pleading received help from an
unexpected quarter. The Rev. G. P. Badger visited
Nimrud in March, 1844, and surveyed the mounds and
measured them, and made careful notes of the " cone "
{i.e., the ziggurat), and accepted Rich's identification of
Nimrud with the Larissa of Xenophon. A few months
later he was in Constantinople, and after describing to
Stratford Canning the discoveries which he and his friend
Mr. Ditell had made, the Ambassador asked him to
draw up in writing the result of their researches. This
Mr. Badger did, and on October 26th he sent to him
' Narrative, ii, p. 130.
* Anabasis, iii, 4, § 7. He says its wall was 100 feet high and 25
broad, and that it rested on a stone foundation 20 feet high ; its
circuit was two parasangs. The pyramid of stone two plethra high
and one plethron wide, which, he says, was near the city, was probably
the ziggurat.