volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

and its Early Excavators. 67
he wisely contented himself with digging through parts
of the mound adjacent to the spot where Rassam made
his great " find " in 1854. In the course of Smith's three
seasons' work he recovered over three thousand tablets
and fragments, a result which in my opinion justifies his
course of action. I did not find that he attempted to
search the large heaps of debris which Rassam had
thrown up, and which in many cases had been piled up
on parts of the mound which had not been excavated
at all. In this he followed the example of Rassam, who
did not search the debris of the palace of Ashur-bani-pal
which Layard discovered in 1849 ^^^ 1850. In the course
of conversation with Ad-Da'im, the Trustees' watchman
of Kuyunjik, I learned that after heavy rains a number of
tablet fragments were frequently found by him on the
heaps of debris, and this suggested to me that the best
thing for me to do was to dig through these heaps
carefuUy before attempting to break new ground. It
was not very ambitious work, but there was no other
way of finding out if these heaps contained fragments of
tablets, and I determined to do it. I could not attempt
an examination of the entire mound ; this work would
take a very considerable amount of time to perform, for,
according to Felix Jones, who surveyed the ruins in
1852, the mound contained 14,500,000 tons of earth
and covered one hundred acres. ^ I spent two days in
going over the mound, and then we began work.
We began with fifty men and gradually increased
the number to two hundred. First of all we practically
put through a sieve the contents of all the chambers at
the south-west comer of the mound, and were rewarded
by finding about thirty fragments of tablets and a complete
Assyrian letter side by side with two inlaid silver
bracelets of the Sassanian period. * A great many of
these chambers contained the lower portions of the
limestone bas-reliefs which had lined the walls and had
* Jnl. Royal Asiatic Soc, vol. xv, p. 326.
^ See Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities, p. 223
(Nos. 220, 221).
f2