by Patrick Hunt
It was the French who first tried to find Nineveh, by sending Paul Emile Botta as their consul to Mosul. Botta found the palace of Khorsabad but not Nineveh. Because consulates were desirable posts for collectors and passionate amateur historians, an enterprising young British citizen promptly garnered a British diplomatic post in Constantinople (Istanbul). He managed to persuade the British ambassador to the Ottoman sultan there to help underwrite excavations in Mesopotamia. The young British lawyer was Austen Henry Layard (1817-94), whom we have already met, and in the year 1845 he discovered the ancient Assyrian site of Nimrud, although he mistakenly called it Nineveh. His next expedition took him to Kuyunjik mound just outside Mosul, which became his greatest archaeological success.
In 1849 - 50, after Austen Henry Layard discovered Nineveh and the palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal on Kuyunjik mound, the royal acropolis of the Assyrians, Mesopotamia’s layered history began gradually to be understood. It is unclear who first unearthed the royal library of Assyria in King Ashurbanipal’s palace—Layard or his assistant Hormuzd Rassam—but the archive room containing tens of thousands of clay tablets was preserved when Nineveh fell in 612 BC. Layard excavated the library archive, which must stand as one of the greatest treasures in world history, not the least because the recorded tablets opened up a whole ancient world previously unknown. This treasure is all the more unique in that it is not gold, silver and gems, but mere clay, and its value is in the words recorded on the tablets. So many years after the fires of 612 BC, Layard apparently knew the words of Nahum by heart, and the new clay Nineveh texts his discovery would eventually unearth would become more valuable than anything else he undertook.
Nineveh was both similar and dissimilar to the legendary biblical city
This wasn’t the same near fictive biblical city where the prophet Jonah came reluctantly with a message of repentance, an imaginary place where multiple chariots could race abreast on the broad walls, a city so large that it would take a man three days to cross it, according to the book of Jonah. Nineveh’s wall, almost fourteen miles long, enclosed more than 1,800 acres and a population that must have been well over one hundred thousand, which made it the largest city of the world at the time, larger even than Babylon. About the only part of the city that was fully stone was this enclosing wall. Many of its fifteen great gates were named after Assyrian gods—the Ashur Gate (the chief god of Assyria), the Adad Gate (the storm god), the Sin Gate (the moon god), the Shamash Gate (the sun god) and others.
David Stronach’s most recent excavations in 1989-90 uncovered quite a few skeletons surrounded by their weapons and some even skewered with arrowheads. These were a few of the Assyrian defenders who died in 612 BC in the burned rubble of the Halzi Gate.
After the tablets, perhaps the most important archaeological artifacts are the incredible reliefs unearthed, depicting scenes such as the famous siege and destruction of the Judean city of Lachish by Sennacherib around 702 BC and the Lion Hunt reliefs of Ashurbanipal. These reliefs have been called the most important masterpieces of Assyrian art. Sennacherib, the Assyrian king who sacked Judah, had an intimidating palace that was over 630 feet by 600 feet (“the palace without rival”). The walls of its nearly eighty rooms were decorated with reliefs in which vassal kings in servitude were forced to look and tremble at Assyrian military efficiency and with scene after scene of Assyrian battle prowess. Such reliefs covered several linear miles of walls.
The tablets, however, are priceless for other reasons: they tell us in amazing detail about ancient Mesopotamia—information that we would otherwise not know. We call these tablets cuneiform because of the way they are written. Cuneus in Latin means “wedge” and on these tablets a small wooden stylus was pressed into the soft clay to make an impression that looks like a wedge-shaped dent. The clay tablets were then left to harden in the hot Near Eastern sun to dry them out and make them somewhat permanent as long as they are kept out of water. If they are heated high enough by being close to or in a fire, they become almost like stone and truly permanent.
On the smaller mound at Nineveh, a tomb shrine to Jonah can still be found, perhaps to commemorate this same biblical prophet in Islamic legend. The shrine’s Arabic name is Nebi Yunas, which means “Prophet Jonah.” The people of Mosul had a legend that the larger mound of Kuyunjik to the northwest was jestingly said to be the burial site of the whale that swallowed Jonah.
When choosing the site for his city, King Sennacherib (ruling from 705 to circa 681 BC) knew the location of Nineveh was vital because it lay at the junction of two rivers. His city would also reuse the hill location of a much older site. The Tigris River flowed south along Nineveh’s city wall and the Khosr River joined from the northeast. Son of King Sargon, Sennacherib refounded the old city around 700 BC and moated the area around it for defense, also bringing in water via aqueducts. The imported water, from over eighteen separate aqueducts, was partly for his people but also for his famous gardens, some of whose trees and plants can be seen fed by these aqueducts in a palace relief.
We now know that King Ashurbanipal was motivated as much for personal reasons to create this great archive of Mesopotamian lore as for altruism. The king wanted to learn how to read, which naturally satisfied his immense curiosity, but also because he mistrusted his augurs, priests and scribes. Superstitious like all his royal predecessors, the king wanted to be free from manipulation from his clergy, who wielded immense power and could easily control a weaker-minded king. Ashurbanipal would be able to keep his handlers in check by verifying what they claimed to be reading from ancient texts in order to influence imperial policy. Assyrians loved to corroborate and emphasize their strengths by examples from their history, and this included the legacies of previous dynasties and even allies or subjugated enemies.
The immediate outcome was that Ashurbanipal thus collected the greatest assemblage of ancient texts from all over Mesopotamia, employing hundreds of scribes to copy material sent by his command from places like Elam, old Akkad and even older Sumer, Babylon and Susa, especially older texts in temples throughout the Assyrian empire. Part of the king’s policy was to keep the original tablets, or whatever form they took; he’d have them copied at least once, then send copies back to the sources rather than the original primary text. This means that instead of storing only Assyrian texts from the seventh century, roughly around 645 BC, his library also stored—and we also now have—texts going back two and a half millennia before Ashurbanipal, in their original state and often with a copy to boot. Apparently these archives in Ashurbanipal’s palace were organized thematically, and there were also key tablets that served as filing systems for referencing all the tablets. Although not all have survived, the quantity and variety of texts from Nineveh are truly staggering.
Unearthing the Royal Assyrian Library revealed a whole history previously lost
There is some debate as to the exact timing of the discovery of the archive during the excavations of Ashurbanipal’s palace on the north portion of the Kuyunjik mound. Considerable argument continues about whether it was Austen Henry Layard or his assistant Hormuzd Rassam who found the primary archive of more than twenty-six thousand fragmentary tablets (today mostly housed in the British Museum). The total number of complete Nineveh tablets was most likely around ten thousand before Nineveh’s destruction. It is not debated that Layard excavated at Nineveh in 1849 before permanently leaving archaeology sometime in 1851 or 1852 for a career in Parliament. Some archaeological records state that Layard found the bulk of his tablets in Sennacherib’s palace but merely had them shipped from Mosul to London’s British Museum in baskets because he could not read cuneiform. Layard is not to be blamed for this ignorance since hardly anyone in 1850 could translate anything in cuneiform but the most cursory material. Georg Grotefend’s contributions from 1803 and Henry Rawlinson’s in 1837, both working from a trilingual inscription made in a cliff wall at Bisistun (then called Behistun), were still very much a collective work in progress. Hor
muzd Rassam, who followed Layard, continued to excavate Ashurbanipal’s palace for the British and also found an archive of tablets around 1852 but neither Layard’s nor Rassam’s records have made it easy to reconcile or separate Nineveh’s archives.
Therefore it is most likely that two separate archives have been merged—without adequate excavation documentation—under the rubric of Ashurbanipal’s library. On the other hand, we have good authority for the literate Ashurbanipal commissioning his own palace archive, and so he should receive most of the credit for the library.
The material from Nineveh’s archives has essentially given birth to a plethora of new disciplines that would hardly have existed to their full extent without these texts, the key to opening up lost ancient Near Eastern languages. The Assyrians preserved not only their own culture but that of their ancestors and contemporary and ancient neighbors, even those whose texts had to be translated into Assyrian. Some of these new fields include not only Assyriology but Sumerology, Akkadian studies and many more.
Layard’s exploration book, Nineveh and Its Remains, fed popular enthusiasm
Back in London after 1849, Austen Henry Layard oversaw the publication of several exploration books from his Near Eastern sojourn, including Nineveh and Its Remains around 1850. The book became an overnight bestseller, in part because it proved the existence of this biblical city to English readers of the Bible. Layard wrote well, and his books read almost like travelogues. Here he colorfully relates excavating a giant winged bull from Khorsabad:It was a moment of great anxiety. The drums and shrill pipes of the Kurdish musicians increased the din and confusion caused by the war-cry of the Arabs, who were half frantic with excitement . . . Away went the bull . . . The cables and ropes stretched more and more. Dry from the climate, as they felt the strain, they creaked and threw out dust. Water was thrown over them, but in vain, for they all broke together when the sculpture was within four or five feet of the rollers. The bull was precipitated to the ground. Those who held the ropes, thus suddenly released, followed its example and were rolling, one over the other, in the dust. A sudden silence succeeded to the clamor. I rushed into the trenches, prepared to find the bull in many pieces. It would be difficult to describe my satisfaction, when I saw it lying precisely where I wished to place it, and uninjured!
Layard’s popular accounts were in many ways better than his archaeological records, but this was in the days before the exacting artifact documentation and finds processing of a modern scientific expedition. Yet his devoted readers in London soon ate up every word, especially a young boy named George Smith a few years later around 1856 or so.
George Smith’s discovery of the Flood Tablet became a pivot for biblical studies
Perhaps the most exciting discovery in Mesopotamian texts is the “moment” when George Smith (1840-76) found the Flood Tablet in the British Museum cuneiform collection from Nineveh and translated it in 1872. The son of a laborer, George Smith did not receive a high level of education. He was apprenticed at age fourteen as an engraver of banknotes—where he honed his keen powers of observation—and soon turned to archaeology after reading Layard’s accounts of Nineveh. Smith was so intensely interested in cuneiform that like a sponge he absorbed every possible source, hanging out at the British Museum until he eventually attracted the attention of Sir Henry Rawlinson, the “Father of Assyriology,” who was one of the major decipherers of cuneiform, especially the Behistun Stone. Rawlinson had Smith appointed as an assistant in the Near Eastern Department at the British Museum and Smith, with his keen eyesight and agile mind, learned to read laborious Assyrian cuneiform when this discipline was still in its infancy.
Like one in love, the passionate Smith was always trying to piece together the many thousand fragmentary tablets, some burned in the fire of Nineveh’s destruction, some even melted, and many others in an excellent baked state from the fire of 612 BC, which actually preserved them by altering their sun-dried clay (which rain could dissolve over time) to fired ceramic. The fire in Nineveh was one of the luckier circumstances in archaeology, because a fire usually leads to ruin and loss; instead all these valuable artifacts were preserved. As he rummaged through museum boxes and baskets, some of them newly numbered and cataloged, others in their original packing from Layard or Rassam, Smith’s eye was caught by one fine tablet. The record for this particular piece said it had been excavated by Layard, and its accession and collection number was ANE K 3375—the K and the low number showing that it was an early Kuyunjik tablet. Smith blew dust off of it and bent down to read its very fine text as he ran his finger along the spidery cuneiform only a few tenths of an inch high.
Smith was immediately astonished. He quickly read it again to check himself, not believing what he read. It was an unknown account from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Assyrian that told of Utnapishtim, who built a boat at the gods’ urgent command and filled it with all life. When the rains came, the earth was flooded for six days and all humanity was destroyed except for Utnapishtim and those on his boat. Landing on a mountaintop called Nimush, Utnapishtim released a dove, then a swallow, but they came back. Utnapishtim then released a raven, which never returned, so he knew it had found dry land. Smith, like nearly everyone of the Victorian era, knew the Bible’s account of Noah and the flood, in Genesis 6-11, practically by heart. But for the first time here was another version that seemed not to come from the Bible! Smith was so agitated that he ran around the room, jumping up and down and even unbuttoning his clothes.
Smith soon presented his discovery before the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London and then to the stunned world. Sadly George Smith died young, only a few years later, while in the Near East searching for further archaeological caches of texts. No one has ever found anything as greatly revealing about a whole portion of the ancient world as the Royal Assyrian Library, but there may yet be an archive still buried that will be found and made known.
Besides its deserved status as the most famous of the entire cuneiform collection of the British Museum, why else is this tablet in Room 55, Case 10 so significant? Part of the answer lies in the obvious: it confirmed the Bible with an external unrelated artifact far from ancient Israel. But another part of the answer is that this ordinary-looking tablet also raised enormous questions about the priority of texts. Which came first and which borrowed from the other? Now we know not only that hundreds of texts from Mesopotamia parallel the familiar biblical stories that fit the Bronze Age like a hand in a glove, but that there are thousands of texts much older than the Bible. These include Sumerian accounts from 2500 BC and earlier, texts like the famous Law Code of Hammurabi and others that are later echoed in the Law of Moses. One conclusion must be that the Bible is not the only repository of ancient law and literature and it is also very much influenced by the older texts. This theory was more revolutionary in 1872 than now, and it created intellectual conflicts for many religionists in the late nineteenth century at a time when new discoveries in every field were challenging long-held beliefs and dogmas. This one small cuneiform tablet preserved from the destruction of Nineveh over 2,600 years ago, only about seven inches long and six inches wide and one inch thick, led the way to whole new textual revelations that changed the way ancient history was being taught and learned all over the world.
The library contains a huge body of Mesopotamian literature, science and medicine
The Nineveh library is now our primary textual source for understanding ancient Mesopotamian life from thousands of years ago in the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian cultures of the Bronze Age. These texts have recorded thousands of events in Mesopotamian history as well as revealed Babylonian astronomy and Mesopotamian science, medicine, geography, botany, philosophy, religion, cosmology, magic and many other fields. Ancient Mesopotamian history is no longer a closed book for us but a vibrant animated world of people so very much like us, with common fears, hopes and life experiences.
Because we have over ten thousand tablets broken into twenty-six thousand
fragments, we can now better understand ancient economies of Mesopotamia through their tax records, animal and farm inventories, legal cases, inheritance codes, recipes, medical cases, magic spells, garden lore, student copybooks and even how teachers disciplined schoolchildren. Indeed a whole world that was previously lost has been found and with it our common human history. This library soon became the proving place for reading cuneiform texts from the Ubaid culture long before Sumer (almost 6,000 years ago) to Achaeminid Persia (2,500 years ago), since they all used symbols from a long pictorial evolution that eventually became cuneiform. The library of Nineveh, preserved by the caprice of selective destruction, opened a door that is widening still with each new text translation out of the thousands of tablets.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon may actually be in Nineveh
The original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were recorded by various writers in antiquity, from Herodotus, a Greek historian (although he did not compile a list of countable wonders), to Diodorus Siculus, a Roman historian, among others. One of these original seven wonders, called the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, was said to have been built by Nebuchadnezzar around 600 BC.