volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

George Smith's Excavations at Kuyilnjik. ig
appoint Loftus^ to carry on further excavations with the
new grant which they had obtained from the British
Government. Loftus opened various parts of the mound
of Ku5mnjik, and discovered bricks, tablets, and a few
slabs, but he seems to have done little more than to continue
the clearing of trenches made by his predecessors.
No further excavations were carried out at Kuyunjik
until 1873. Between 1854 and that year scholars had
had time to examine the mass of cuneiform tablets in the
British Museum, to complete their system of decipherment
of the cuneiform inscriptions, and to begin the
publication of Assyrian and Babylonian texts. George
Smith had searched through the collections from Nineveh,
and had managed to collect a series of fragments of the
" Deluge Tablet " from among them, and to translate
them. The publication of his paper on the " Chaldean
Account of the Deluge " created world-wide interest, and
everyone was anxious that further search should be made
at Nineveh for the missing fragments of the Assyrian story
of the Flood. The proprietors of the Daily Telegraph
recognized the great vaJue of Smith's discovery, and
offered to spend one thousand guineas on excavations at
Nineveh, provided that the Trustees of the British Museum
would allow him to conduct the excavations, and to
supply them from time to time with accounts of his
journeys and discoveries. The Trustees accepted this
generous offer, and gave Smith leave of absence for six
months. He left London on January 20th, 1873, and
arrived in Mosul on March 2nd. As the PashS, prevented
him from beginning work, he went by raft to Baghdad, and
paid a visit to Babylon and Birs-i-Nimrud, and purchased
1 William Kennett Loftus, born about 1821, died 1858. He
served as geologist on the staff of Sir W. Fenwick Williams's Turco-
Persian Frontier Commission from 1849-1852. In 1853 he was sent
out to Mesopotamia by the Assyrian Exploration Fund, and spent
the two following years in excavating ancient sites in Babylonia and
Assyria. He published the results of his Babylonian work in Travels
and Researches in Chaldcea and Susiana, London, 1857. He resumed
his work on the Frontier Commission in India in 1856, but overwork
and ill-health
England.
compelled him to resign, and he died on his way to
c a