volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

and the Palaces under the Mosque of Jonah. ii
and Nabi Yunis ; and it is equally clear from the antiquities
which he collected, and his remarks about them,
that he realized their general importance. At Nabi
Yunis he saw men digging up hewn stones which had
been laid in bitumen, and recognized that they formed
part of the substructure of a building, and he was present
when Husen Aga found a square stone slab with a cuneiform
inscription in the wall of a house there ; he secured
it for his collection. The natives of Nabi Yunis showed
him underground chambers and corridors near the socalled
Tomb of Jonah, and through his " curiosity
hunter," Delli Samaan, he acquired many objects from
the mound close to it, including whole bricks and fragments
of slabs covered with cuneiform inscriptions.
The greatest treasure which he obtained from Nabi Yunis
was a baked clay hollow cylinder, fourteen inches long,
inscribed with a cuneiform text describing the building
operations which Sennacherib (b.c. 705-681) carried out
on that site during the first two years of his reign. ^ At
Kuyunjik he obtained several fragments of inscribed
tablets, and these must have been dug up by the natives
^ This is presumably the famous "Bellino Cylinder" now in the
British Museum (No. 22502). A very accurate copy of the text,
made by Mr. Bellino, was sent by Rich to Grotefend, who published
it in the " Abhandlungen " of the Academy of Sciences at Gottingen.
Another copy of it was published by Layard, Inscriptions in the Cuneiform
Character, London, 185 1, plates 63 and 64, but according to
Fox Talbot, Bellino's copy is the more accurate, and is the " most
wonderful instance of patient accuracy which is to be found in the
whole range of archaeological science." See the prefatory remarks of
Fox Talbot to his translation of the cylinder in Jnl. Roy. Asiatic Soc,
vol. xviii, 1861, p. 76' ff. BeUino was a friend and companion of
several of the English travellers in Mesopotamia, and he possessed
naturally the faculty for copying cuneiform inscriptions accurately.
Ker Porter says that he is indebted to his learned and persevering
friend, Mr. Bellino, for the scrupulous accuracy of copies of texts
which he publishes (vol. ii, p. 394). Bellino is mentioned several
times by Buckingham (e.g., vol. ii, pp. 233, 251), and in Rich's
Residence, vol. ii, p. 126, he is described as a "young man of a singularly
affectionate disposition, whom no one could know and not love,"
and as Mr. Rich's "amiable and accomplished young friend." He
was attacked by fever during a journey to Hamadan, and he died
at Mosul in November, 1820.