Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain

by Harvey Rachlin

  The next morning, Awad II, the host of Layard and his party, awakened Layard and presented six villagers for his crew. They walked to Nimrud, about a mile away, to the largest mound. Broken pottery abounded, and in the rubbish were all sorts of old fragments. Layard summoned the workers to start excavating, commencing the operations that could lead to the ancient city of Calah, capital of Assyria.

  After several days, as a diplomatic move, Layard returned to Mosul to report on his findings to the pasha, who without a doubt had been spying on his excavations. Gossip of momentous finds was already circulating among the townspeople of Mosul, and Layard feared interruption of his work by the insatiable pasha. But that did not happen, and Layard suggested to the pasha that he have one of his soldiers represent him at the excavations.

  Layard returned to Nimrud, where he increased his crew to thirty, consisting of both Arabs and the robust mountain-reared Chaldeans. Layard’s excavations continued before the watchful eyes of a notorious band of hundreds of horsemen who plundered villages and sometimes did the dirty work of the pasha for remuneration and booty. Soon the pasha did attempt to stop the excavation under the pretense that Layard was disturbing ancient burial grounds, but Layard was able to prevail. The fires of his quest burned deeply inside him, and he would not allow bureaucracy and political prevarication to thwart him. He knew that the most marvelous finds were still ahead.

  Several huge animal and human figures were uncovered, and it appeared that submerged deeper were even larger buildings. Layard notified Sir Stratford Canning about his findings and requested a decree from the Porte (the Ottoman government) to enable him to continue his work without further interruption. The week before Christmas Layard returned to Mosul and found the people there exultant; the pasha had been removed and replaced by a young and fair-minded general. Still, the country’s turbulent political situation made further excavation impossible, and Layard traveled to Baghdad to arrange for the removal of the objects he had already uncovered.

  Layard returned to Mosul early in 1846 and was happy to see that numerous reforms had been made by the new pasha. The population was increasing to former levels as villagers who had fled were returning. Excavation continued, and out of the rubble in deep pits came magnificently sculptured objects: huge winged bulls, human heads, lions with human heads, winged humans.

  The Black Obelisk

  November 1846, Nimrud. After a blistering summer when 115-degree-plus temperatures even in the darkened confines of the trenches brought work to a halt, the excavation continued, and on a greater scale than before. Layard now employed numerous Arabs and dozens of Nestorian Chaldeans, with the benefit of assistance from their families. With armed guards and a communal system of living, it was a very sophisticated operation. The mound—encompassing more than sixty acres—was by now divided into several alphabetically designated chambers. Inscribed slabs with interesting bas-reliefs were uncovered, as well as a pavement six feet below the rubble in one chamber.

  Around the mound’s middle, where huge bulls with wings had previously been found, Layard directed a search for a building whose entrance he believed the bulls guarded. A trench was cut and some large slabs with inscriptions were found, but no walls yet. The workers cut the trench deeper but with no results as the days passed on. Just as Layard was about to discontinue the search, one of the workers uncovered the corner of a column of marble. They quickly uncovered the rest of the object, and soon a black obelisk was fully exposed to view in the trench.

  Layard didn’t quite know what to make of this remarkable object. “From the nature, therefore, of the bas-reliefs,” he wrote, “it is natural to conjecture that the monument was erected to commemorate the conquest of India, or of some other country far to the east of Assyria, and on the confines of the Indian peninsula. The name of the king, whose deeds it appears to record, is the same as that on the centre bulls; and it is introduced by a genealogical list containing many other royal names.”

  It would be up to scholars to decipher the approximately two hundred lines of inscriptions. Layard immediately copied the lines and the bas-reliefs and had a team of his most honest workers guard it when the camp was asleep.

  By December a sufficient number of sculptures and objects had been collected to warrant another shipment to England. Early in the month, Layard traveled to Mosul to purchase materials to build another raft and securely pack the antiquities that were to be taken. He entrusted the transport of these skins, ropes, mats, felts, and other items to a team of Arabs who traveled with them by raft but camped at darkness so they could wait until daylight to cross a particular dam. A gang from a feared tribe sprang upon them during the night, beat them, and took their goods. When Layard heard of this, he went to the authorities, who said they could not help recover the materials from a desert tribe.

  After some investigating over the course of a few days, Layard determined who the thieves were and took a few of his soldiers into the desert. The tribesmen gathered as the men rode into their camp, and Layard boldly entered the sheik’s tent and asked for the return of the stolen items. While movements in other areas of the tent could be heard—obviously, Layard thought, a hasty attempt to conceal the swag—the sheik feigned ignorance of the matter. With a gesture to his formidable dragoon, Layard initiated a prearranged plan. The man grabbed the sheik and tied him to a horse, while Layard’s other men held off the tribesmen with pistols. The sheik was dragged all the way to Nimrud, where he confessed to the plundering and sent a message to his people requesting the goods be returned, with some animals for goodwill. After another stern reprimand Layard discharged the sheik, who was to cause no further problems.

  In mid-December the obelisk and several bas-reliefs were ready to be transported. Quite ponderous and capacious, they were taken to the river courtesy of the pasha’s heavy buffalo carts. Soon twenty-three cases of the ancient objects were on their way by raft, leaving the area where they had been made long, long ago.

  Layard’s satisfaction at rendering these antiquities to his sponsors in England was a bit premature, unfortunately. From Baghdad they were sent to a port city, where they remained for a year before a vessel came to take them. Then they were shipped to Bombay, where an English editor and inspector of laboratories exhibited them before the public. In April 1848 they were placed on another boat. Almost six months later they arrived in England, where they were greeted by Layard himself. More than a year later, decipherings of the cryptic message of the obelisk poured in, beginning with that of Edward Hincks, the rector of Killyleagh and an Orientalist, and the famous Assyriologist Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. (Hincks and Rawlinson deciphered the vowel system of Persian cuneiform.)

  Recorded on the obelisk were important events of the reign of the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser III. The inscription recounts operations of the Assyrian army and tells about tributes paid to the king by leaders from other nations. There are pictorial renderings of people carrying gifts and bowing down before the king. There are illustrations of various kinds of animals given to the king. And there is a description of Jehu, the same Israelite king of the Old Testament, offering precious metals and other valuable objects to Shalmaneser.

  Approximately twenty-seven hundred years after Shalmaneser III’s scribes documented his reign, it became public information for the ages and made a most valuable addition to the garland of biblical antiquities.

  LOCATION: British Museum, London, England.

  Footnote

  *The Bible literally refers to the student as the son of a prophet but that term is generally recognized by Talmudic literature and Bible scholars to mean a student prophet. Furthermore, according to the Talmud, the student prophet was Jonah, of the well-known biblical whale story.

  THE SILOAM INSCRIPTION

  DATE: Circa 700 B.C.

  WHAT IT IS: A stone inscribed in Hebrew from Hezekiah’s water tunnel in Jerusalem describing how the tunnel was cut. According to the Bible, the subterranean conduit was hewn through solid rock to c
hannel water into the city when its external water source faced being blocked off by the advancing Assyrian armies of Sennacherib.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The stone is somewhat rectangular and bears six lines of inscription.

  And when Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib was come, and that he was purposed to fight against Jerusalem, he took counsel with his princes and his mighty men to stop the waters of the fountains which were without the city; and they helped him . . . and they stopped all the fountains, and the brook that flowed together through the midst of the land, saying: “Why should the kings of Assyria come, and find much water?”

  —2 Chronicles 32:2-4

  The attack was imminent. The Assyrians were on the rampage, determined to crush Jerusalem after the recalcitrant King Hezekiah boldly terminated his country’s subservience to the mightier pagan empire. Knowing his forces were no match for his tyrannical enemy, Hezekiah desperately needed a stratagem to save his city, his people.

  The basic facts of this historical episode are as follows: At one time Israel was a united kingdom made up of twelve tribes. But under the heavy-handed leadership of Rehoboam, King Solomon’s son, ten tribes seceded, forming the northern kingdom known as Israel. Two tribes, those of Judah and Benjamin, remained in the south, forming the kingdom of Judah. Hezekiah was the thirteenth king of Judah.

  After the split, the separate kingdoms of Israel to the north and Judah to the south were both besieged by the powerful Assyrians, led by Sennacherib. Israel fell first, shortly before 720 B.C., but Judah, brought under Assyrian control, refused to yield completely.

  For years, Judah was essentially a satellite nation, with King Ahaz, Hezekiah’s father, paying tribute to the Assyrians. This practice began after Ahaz appealed to Assyria for protection against Israel and Aram (Syria), who were threatening Judah with military invasion. Ahaz’s appeal for protection to the king of Assyria brought upon him an obligation to present tribute in the form of considerable amounts of gold and silver.

  When Ahaz died and Hezekiah became ruler, the son refused to follow in the ways of his irreverent and ignoble father. He wanted to eliminate Assyrian control and join Israel and Judah in a single independent state once again. Hezekiah destroyed the Assyrian altars and invited all Israel and Judah to come to Jerusalem to the house of the Lord, the God of Israel, to celebrate Passover: “Ye children of Israel, turn back unto the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, that He may return to the remnant that are escaped of you out of the hand of the kings of Assyria” (2 Chronicles 30:6).

  Hezekiah became deathly ill and was told by Isaiah the prophet that he would die. Hezekiah then prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly. The Lord told Isaiah the king’s prayer was heard, and that he would heal Hezekiah, and more: “And I will add unto thy days fifteen years; and I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria” (2 Kings 20:6).

  Sennacherib began his assault on Judah by methodically overtaking the cities in the kingdom. It was an Assyrian tactic to conquer a city by cutting off its food and water resources, and it worked quite well. Now before the fortress city of Lachish, King Sennacherib dispatched servants to Jerusalem to urge its inhabitants not to let Hezekiah persuade them “to die by famine and thirst” with the promise that the Lord would deliver the people from the Assyrians.

  To prepare Jerusalem for Sennacherib’s attack, Hezekiah fortified the city and armed his soldiers with new weapons. He also prepared for the Assyrian food impedance by storing large amounts of grain within the city walls. But how could he stop the Assyrians from cutting off the water supply? Nothing short of rearranging nature would save the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

  Enacting a bold strategy to prevent Sennacherib’s armies from cutting off Jerusalem’s water supply, Hezekiah stopped up the fountains outside the walls and had two teams of men, one at the Gihon Spring, which lay east of Jerusalem, the other at the Siloam Pool, inside the city walls, dig underground toward one another. Once they were connected, water could be piped into the city, and the spring could be obstructed from view by stones and rubble. Meanwhile, the warring Assyrians would be stopping up the old canal, thinking the city’s inhabitants would eventually capitulate before they died of dehydration. But the people would actually be enjoying an unending supply of water channeled underground: “He made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city” (2 Kings 20:20).

  Now, putting the scriptures aside, we move to A.D. 1838, when the first serious investigation of an amazing man-made, rock-cut underground canal in the Holy Land commenced. The tunnel, running from the Gihon Spring to the Siloam Pool in Jerusalem, had been known of since at least the seventeenth century and was considered highly intriguing, but no serious study had been made of it. American biblical scholar Edward Robinson, a forty-four-year-old professor at Union Theological Seminary, decided to measure the tunnel to get a precise picture of ancient engineering principles. Entering at the pool, where the tunnel’s height reached twenty feet, Robinson and a companion began traversing the dark, wet passageway shoeless and by candlelight. About eight hundred feet through the black corridor, the tunnel ceiling became so low that the only way to move was on hands and knees. They were not prepared for this type of exploration, so with their clothes wet and muddy, they marked the spot where they had stopped and returned outside.

  When Robinson and his companion continued their exploration three days later, they entered the tunnel from the Gihon side. At certain points the opening was so small that they could move forward only by propelling themselves prostrate with arms and feet. They forded winding passages until they came to the spot they had marked at the time they had entered on the opposite side.

  Robinson made some peculiar observations. Above the surface, the two ends of the tunnel were 1,200 feet directly apart. But by Robinson’s measurements, the underground passage was about 1,750 feet long. The extra footage was the result of the winding nature of the passage—there was also an S-shaped curve as the two passageways converged—but why did the hewers cut through this way? They would have been perfectly capable of cutting in a direct line, which certainly would have been more expedient, especially in light of Sennacherib’s impending attack. No definitive answer has ever been given for this, although explanations that the workmen were following rock faults or trying to avoid hitting the tombs of embedded kings have been offered.

  The Gibson Spring

  The Siloam Pool, into which water flowed from the Gibson Spring via the Siloam tunnel.

  Robinson also observed chisel marks going in opposite directions at the opposite ends of the tunnel. This led him to conclude that the tunnel was not quarried straight through at one end but dug by two separate teams who had begun at opposite ends and were working toward each other.

  In the world of archaeology, the keen eyes of professional explorers occasionally miss significant artifacts—sometimes owing to happenstance, other times to the random forces of nature shielding the reposing treasures—and their discovery is eventually made by unwitting civilians.

  One day in 1880 some children were wading in the Siloam Pool when one ventured into the canal and fell. Touching the wall as he clambered to his feet, he felt some unusual impressions. They looked like writing. When he got out he reported what he had found, and his discovery immediately became a source of great interest. A scholar copied the inscription and made a cast of it. There were six lines. Enough of the original text remained to learn its raison d’être. The inscription had been made to commemorate the jubilation that two teams, cleaving the tunnel from opposite ends, had felt when they finally cut through to each other. It is translated thus in The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, edited by James B. Pritchard:

  [. . . when] (the tunnel) was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through:—While [ . . . ] (were) still [ . . . ] axe(s), each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be cut through, [there was heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellow, fo
r there was an overlap in the rock on the right [and on the left]. And when the tunnel was driven through, the quarrymen hewed (the rock), each man toward his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits, and the height of the rock above the head(s) of the quarrymen was 100 cubits.

  The Siloam Inscription. Ancient quarrymen probably never imagined their subterranean wall memorial engraving would endure for thousands of years.

  The inscription was confirmed to be in old Hebrew. Its characters belonged to a Semitic alphabet also used by the Phoenicians and Moabites. Not only was it a superb example of ancient Hebrew writing, but it is the oldest known example of Hebrew writing save the Gezer Calendar, which predates it by about a couple of centuries.

  From the writing, scholars were able to determine that the inscription was in fact made about the time Hezekiah was king of Judah. That it was found in a water tunnel appears to support the biblical passages about King Hezekiah building a pool and a conduit to bring the waters of the Gihon Spring down into the city.

  There was one odd thing about the inscription on the tunnel wall: its location. Instead of being roughly halfway between the two end points, the writing was engraved near the tunnel’s Siloam entrance.

  In 1890, after it had lain undisturbed for centuries, a plunderer cut the rock bearing the ancient engraving from the tunnel. It was later found in Jerusalem in the possession of a Greek, broken into sections. Turkish officers, who occupied the land at the time, seized the damaged relic and dispatched it to a museum in their country.