volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

22 Further British Museum Excavations at Nineveh.
As the result of the intensive study of the Kuyunjik
tablets that went on among Assyriologists all over the
world between 1872 and 1887, there was a demand for a
further examination of the mound of Kuyunjik, and the
Trustees of the British Museum decided to apply to the
Porte for a permit to re-open the excavations there.
The permit was, in due course, obtained, as I have already
stated (seeVol. I., p. 360) , and I found myself at Mosul in the
middle of January, 1889, ready to begin work. I started
with a limited number of men, which I increased up to
two hundred. From what has been said above, it will be
readily understood that there was small hope of making
any great discovery in a mound which had been dug
through by Botta, Ross, Layard, Rassam, Loftus and
Smith, and from which so many bas-reliefs and other
sculptures and cuneiform tablets had been
My task was a humble one, and consisted
extracted.
chiefly in
searching through the debris in the palaces of Sennacherib
and Ashur-bani-pal, and the heaps of earth outside
them. I should have liked to carry away to a distance all
the debris in the chambers, and sift it carefully, but the
materials for a light railway and the necessary plant
were not available, and we therefore had to do all our
work with shovels and baskets only. The work went on
steadily from the third week in January until the end
of June, 1889, and from November, 1890, until January,
1891, and from first to last we recovered from the mound
about 590 tablets, fragments of tablets,' and other
objects.
Twelve years later the Trustees of the British Museum
decided to re-open the excavations at Kuyunjik, and they
sent out one of their officials, Mr. L. W. King, to carry out
the work. Mr. King left Constantinople on December
22nd, 1902, and arrived in Mosul on January 26th, 1903,
and he dug from March 3rd to July i8th, and from September
9th of that year till April i8th, 1904. He was
relieved by another official from the Museum, Mr. R. C.
* Descriptions of these will be found in Bezold, Catalogue, vols,
i-v, London, 1889-99.