RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Assyria
deer and hare may be named, while the great wild ox was not yet extinct. Of birds of prey or carrion, the eagle, vulture, and various hawks were known. Birds suitable for food were the bustard, swan, goose, duck, partridge, grouse, and plover. The common domestic animals were employed, while dogs were trained for the chase. The pine, poplar, plane, oak, sycamore, and walnut abounded. Under cultivation, though some of them were importations, were the date (of inferior quality), orange, lemon, pomegranate, apricot, mulberry, fig, and grape. Assyrian citrons were famous; melons were abundant; while cucumbers, onions, the grains — wheat, barley, and millet — and the leguminous plants were food staples. Under the careful and extensive system of irrigation in use, the agriculturist reaped a good return for his labors. Mineral resources were abundant and conveniently at hand in the shape of iron, lead, copper, alum, salt, and bitumen, while alabaster of a fine quality, limestone, and sandstone were in close proximity to the cities or easily reached from the Tigris, on which they were floated down to the places where they were required.
III. Exploration and Excavation: It may appear somewhat inconsequent that excavations in Assyria and Babylonia should be the result of the discovery and partial decipherment of inscriptions from a locality so distant as Persepolis. Yet the discovery that these were neither mere ornamentation nor arbitrary signs influenced greatly the patient toil and research which have recovered in large part the history of nations once forgotten, and have carried history back into the fifth pre- Christian millennium. The steps leading to these
results are as follows. The ruins at i. The Per- Persepolis had been mentioned in sepolis In- 1320 by Odoric, and the inscriptions scriptions. in 1611 by the friar Antonio de
Gouvea; they were first described by the Spanish ambassador of Philip III to Shah Abbas, Don Garcia Sylva Figueroa, in 1621; the guess that they read from left to right was first made in 1677 by Thomas Herbert; they were first called cuneiform in 1700 by Thomas Hyde; first decided to be in three forms of writing in 1774 by Carsten Niebuhr; declared to be in three languages in 1798 by Olaf Tychsen; and first really translated, in part, in 1815 by Georg F. Grotefend, whose work was the climax which finally stimulated to direct effort upon Assyrian and Babylonian mounds. While discussion had been going on over the Persepolis inscriptions, bits of inscriptions in the cuneiform character had been collected by the surveyors who had been observing, locating, and plotting the mounds in Assyria and Babylonia. A relationship had been asserted between these scraps and the Persepolis writing; and Niebuhr had urgently advised excavation in Babylonia and had predicted rich results.
The site of Nineveh had been correctly located as early as 1160 by the rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. Desultory digging had been done in Babylonia at various sites by Claudius Rich of the East India ^ompany, in some cases missing by only a foot or two walls which must have led him to investigate
farther and have anticipated by over a quarter of a century the real discovery of the lost empires. That was in 1811; he visited
2. Prelimi- Nineveh in 1820 and there turned up nary Explo- a few bricks with characters on them ration. Rich and bought others from the natives, and Porter, all of which were sent home and found
place in the British Museum. A visit of the artist and archeologist Sir R. K. Porter to the region, particularly to the mounds at Hillah in Babylonia, under the guidance of Rich, led to the publication in 1821-22 of a sumptuous work by Porter illustrated by his own brush. The interesting and even brilliant description of what was to be seen and inferred aroused anew the interest of Europe; so that the years which followed, as well as those which preceded his visit, were years of exploration. The sites of the mounds were visited and plotted and described until localities and names, with conjectures as to their history, became almost commonplace. The era of excavation, however, was still to come.
In 1842 a French consulate was established at Mosul, across the river from the site of Nineveh, and Paul Emil Botta was appointed consul. Botta had served in Egypt, Arabia, and Syria, and had so become well acquainted with the Arabs and their methods of working, as well as with French procedure in archeological investigation. He had met a German scholar named Julius Mohl, who had visited Babylonia and had been impressed with the opportunities which it was not in his power to grasp. By him Botta was urgently advised not to be content with mere explorations and plotting of sites, but to dig. Accordingly Botta at once began at Kouyunjik, but with results so scanty that he
transferred his operations to Khorsa-
3. Botta at bad, where speedily so large a number Khorsabad. of bas-reliefs and well-preserved inscriptions were discovered in the uncovered palace of Sargon, that upon his sober report of the facts the French government made a grant of 3,000 francs to continue the work. The local pasha meanwhile had procured an order for the cessation of the operations; but the arrival of a firman soon enabled Botta to resume, the result being the nucleus of the magnificent collection now in the Louvre, made between 1842 and 1846. In the latter year Botta was transferred, and his work as an excavator came to an end; but the results were published by the French government in five magnificent volumes which are even yet almost high-water mark.
While Botta was engaged in digging, and after some of his successes had been gained, he was visited by Austen Henry Layard, whose early reading had given him a decided bent toward archeology. Layard told the story of the mounds to Lord Stratford, who had secured the Halicarnassus marbles for the British Museum; and in 1845 the latter made a contribution of £60 which Layard was to use in excavating. Layard returned to Mosul, kept his plans from the local pasha, and began excavating at Nimrud (Calah) at two different points. His first day's work led hirn into two chambers, belonging to two palaces, lined with
Assyria