volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

321
Missions to Egypt, the SudAn, and the Great
Oasis, 1892-1913.
In January, 1892, I was, as already mentioned
(p. 300), appointed Acting Assistant-Keeper of the
Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities.
In addition to my ordinary duties as an Assistant, I
then had to give much time each day to a general rearrangement
of the collections in accordance with the
scheme prescribed by the Trustees,^ and it was only
with great difl&culty that in October I got away to Egypt
for a few weeks and secured some valuable antiquities.
When I was made Keeper of the Department in February,
1894, I reaUzed to my great regret that I should have
to abandon all hope of repeating my visits to Mesopotamia.
As the journey to Eg5rpt and back only took
about half the time that would be required to reach
Mosul or Baghdad, the Trustees found it possible to
^ The Trustees decided to make a lecture room in the Assyrian
Basement, and to obtain the necessary floor space they ordered the
sculptures of Sennacherib to be removed to the floor above, and the
pavement and the sculptures of the Lion Hunt from Ashur-bani-pal's
palace to be built into the main waUs, just above the new iron gallery
that had recently been constructed. They also ordered the room in
which students kept their easels and drawing boards and the Phoenician
Room to be made into one, and a new roof and skylight to be
built. AH the Phcenician antiquities were removed to the Second
Northern Gallery upstairs, and thus there was plenty of wall space
for the sculptures of Sennacherib, including the Siege of Lachish, and
for a very valuable series of sculptures of Tiglath-Pileser III. These
last-named sculptures consisted of : (i) Slab with a cuneiform inscription
in huge characters, recording the conquests of the king ; (2) basreUef
representing the capture of the gods of the enemy ; (3) bas-rehef
with a figure of the king in the act of receiving the submission of
the enemy. These bas-reUefs (which came originally from the ruins
of the palace of Tiglath-Pileser III at Nimrud) had found their way
into a public institution at Bristol, where they had been built into a
wall and whitewashed. The Trustees acquired them in 1890.