volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

102 The City of Ashur.
to prevent the desert Arabs from raiding passing rafts, but
they admitted that they were too few in number to check
raiding effectively. Two or three of them came down to
the raft and received with satisfaction a gift of bread-cakes
and a small 3-lb. loaf of white sugar. We dropped down
the river for two or three miles and then tied up for the
night under a high bank on the right side of the river.
The extent and importance of the ruins of Kal'at
Sharkat were first pointed out in modern times by
Rich/ who published an outline drawing of them ; he
was unable to go over them, for " owing to the violence
of the current and the eddies " his raftsmen absolutely
refused to make the attempt to land. With his glass
he saw lines of stone-masonry in the heaps of rubbish,
and on their surface fragments of buildings, and large
square bricks. One piece of stone seen by him was
" carved like the fragment of a statue." Curiously
enough he greatly underestimated the height of the
ruins, for he states that they are 20 feet high. In his
day they were regarded as the mark of the southern
boundary of the province of Mosul on the west bank of
the Tigris. They lie about 40 miles from the mouth of
the Great ZS,b, 50 miles from Nimrud, and 75 miles
from Mosul. When Layard visited them in 1840 the
natives told him of a tradition that " strange figures
carved in black stone still existed amongst the ruins,"^
but he could not find any. Later he saw there the headless
statue of Shalmaneser II and caused it to be sent to
England ; it is in the British Museum (Nimrud Central
Saloon, No. 849). Between 1849 ^.nd 185 1 he renewed
the excavations at Kal'at Sharkat " which had been
very imperfectly examined," and found fragments of a
winged bull, part of a black stone statue, pieces of a
large inscribed slab of copper, the fragments of a large
inscribed cylinder in baked clay, a copper cup, some
vases and beads, but he doubted if "an edifice containing
any number of sculptures or inscriptions ever existed on
^ Narrative, vol. ii, p. 137.
^ Nineveh and its Remains (1867 edition), p. 4.