volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

British Museum Excavations at NimrHd. vj
left M6sul he (with the approval of the Trustees of the
British Museum) handed over the excavations to the care
of the British Vice-Consul, Mr. Christian Rassam, who
was instructed to keep the works at Kuyunjik going on
a small scale until Layard's return. Layard went back
to Assyria in 1849, ^.nd at once devoted all his energies
to Kuyunjik, where work went on steadily until he left
the East finally in 1851. The buildings which he excavated
in the years 1849-51 are marked on Rassam's
plan,^ and a good idea of the vast amount of work which
he accomplished during this period in the palace of Sennacherib
alone may be obtained from his own summary of
it. He says : "In this magnificent edifice I had opened
no less than seventy-one halls, chambers, and passages,
whose walls, almost without an exception, had been
paneUed with slabs of sculptured alabaster. By a rough
calculation, about 9,880 feet, or nearly two miles of
seems to have been M. Rouet, the French Consul at Mosul, who was
taken there by some natives in 1846 or 1847. Mr. Ross iollowed him
in the winter of 1847-48, and drew up a description of the sculptures
and inscribed tablets, which was printed by Layard in his " Nineveh
and its Remains," vol. ii, pp. 142, 143. When Layard returned to
Assyria in 1849 he went to Bavian, and spent two days there in copying
the inscriptions and exploring the ruins {Nineveh and Babylon,
p. 216); he travelled thither by Ross's route, via Bazaani and over
the Maklub and Missuri hills. The sculptures are cut in relief on
the side of a rocky ravine on the right bank of the river Gomel. They
consist of a series of tablets of various sizes, three of which are inscribed,
and some large figures of gods standing on the backs of dogs,
with two kings before them, and a series of smaller figures of Sennacherib,
with divine emblems above him. In the river at the foot of
the Umestone cliff are several other sculptures, some very badly
broken. Sketches of the sculptures were published by Layard in
Monuments of Nineveh, 2nd series, pi. 51, and in Nineveh and Babylon,
p. 210 ff. The famous Bavian Inscription of Sennacherib was pub-
Ushed by RawUnson, Cuneiform Inscriptions, vol. iii, pi. 14. A popular
description of the sculptures is given by Wigram, Cradle of Mankind,
p. 121-4. Bavian was next visited by Victor Place about 1851, and
it was claimed in the French papers that it was he who had first
discovered the sculptures, which consisted of complete series *of
bas-reliefs sculptured with portrait figures of all the Assyrian kings
from Tiglath Pileser I to Sennacherib.
^ See Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch., vol. vii, p. 37.