Woe to the city of blood,Full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims! The crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses and jolting chariots! Charging cavalry, flashing swords and glittering spears!
Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number,
Nahum
3:1-7
Layard's recreation of Assurnasirpal II's throne room
Nineveh was destroyed just as the prophets had foretold. It lay forgotten, buried beneath the dust of centuries. In 1847 however, the lost city's slumber was finally brought to an end and its treasures were once more destined to see the light of day. Her discoverer was at hand at last.
Layard
had learned much from the excavation of Nimrud and when he returned to Mosul he
looked once more upon the great mounds across the river with new eyes; seeing
at once where he must dig if he were to meet with success at last. Layard now
understood that the Assyrian kings had built their temples and palaces atop
great platforms of sun-dried bricks. The key therefore was to discover the top
of the platform which Layard was able to determine by observing the highest
point of the mound which corresponded to the top of the ziggurat; the great
pyramidal structure at the heart of the temple. Having unearthed a pavement of
brick at the expected height, Layard set his diggers to work and soon they
uncovered the entrance to a chamber flanked by the a colossal pair of winged
bulls. Everywhere once again the evidence of destruction by fire was clear.
Layard soon noted that all of the reliefs and sculptures in this new city were
larger than those found elsewhere. Clearly this was a case of royal
one-upmanship. Nineveh had been found.
The locals by this stage regarded the charismatic blue-eyed Layard as something of a magician and marvelled at his ability to conjure up from beneath the soil, that which they had never suspected lay under their feet. As Layard's friend the Sheikh declares:
God is great! Here are stones which have been buried ever since the time of the holy Noah- peace be with him! Perhaps they were under ground before the deluge. My father and the father of my father, pitched their tents here before me; but they never heard of these figures. For twelve hundred years have the true believers been settled in this country, and none of them ever heard of a palace under ground. Neither did they who went before them. But lo! Here comes a Frank from many days' journey off, and he walks up to the very place, and he takes a stick and makes a line here and makes a line there. Here, says he, is the palace; there, says he, is the gate; and he shows us what has been all our lives beneath our feet, without our having known anything about it. Wonderful! Is it by books, is it by magic, is it by your prophets that you have learned these things? Speak, Oh Bey; tell me the secret of wisdom.
A.H. Layard - Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh
A.H. Layard - Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh
Nineveh was
the city of Sennacherib, who had set out to comprehensively outdo his father
Sargon II. Sennacherib built himself a splendid new palace which exceeded that
constructed by his father at Khorsabad in every particular. It was by all
accounts an awe inspiring structure, a third of a mile long with a portico of
solid bronze columns standing on the backs of solid bronze lions and bulls.
Such was the wealth of Nineveh.
In the
usual Assyrian style Sennacherib chose to decorate his palace with images of
his victorious campaigns and these included depictions of his wars against the errant
Kingdom of Judaea. In 701 BC Sennacherib had set out with the intention of
capturing and destroying Jerusalem as his father had Samaria. In the path of
Sennacherib’s army lay the fortress city of Lachish. Sennacherib sought
initially to terrorise the populace into surrender by parading his army before
the walls and having a declaration read out to the listening defenders;
promising clemency if the city was surrendered and a nasty fate for the
defenders if they chose to resist. Fortified by their faith the defenders
nevertheless chose resistance and then watched with mounting trepidation as a
great earth ramp was constructed in front of the city walls. The Assyrians made
use of Jewish prisoners captured from other cities which had already fallen to
work upon the ramp. The defenders were therefore faced with the dilemma of
shooting at their own countrymen in order to prevent work on the ramp from
progressing. Iron tipped battering rams were brought up against another section
of wall and eventually succeeded in making a breach. The Assyrians poured
through the gap whilst more attacked the defenders on top of the wall by means
of a siege tower which had been rolled up the ramp. The city was swiftly
overwhelmed, the defenders put to the sword and the city leaders impaled for
daring to resist.
The siege of Lachish
The
siege of Lachish had been a fine example of cutting edge siege warfare and
Sennacherib was greatly proud of the achievement. Scenes from the storming of
the city were immortalised in the reliefs chosen to decorate his new palace and
these and many others were now uncovered by Layard. At last the mysterious
mound had given up its secrets.
Ill
health finally forced Layard to return to Europe in 1848. In Paris he received
a hero’s welcome and accompanied Botta to see his Khorsabad finds which were
now ensconced in the Louvre and were creating a sensation. Layard’s discoveries
and his account of the excavations were received with equal wonderment back in
England. A full scale recreation of an Assyrian throne room would later feature
in the reconstructed Crystal Palace following the Great Exhibition. In the
following year Layard returned once more to Mosul and reopened his excavations
at Nimrud and Nineveh and it was now that he made his most important discovery;
the library of Ashurbanipal.
Ashurbanipal
had been the last great king of Assyria, dying in 627 BC. He held the heartland
of the empire together through decades of ruinous war with the resurgent
Babylonians but the cost in manpower and gold had been ruinous. The effort had
finally exhausted Assyria and left her vulnerable. For all the slaughter and
destruction of his reign however, Ashurbanipal has in fact gone down in history
as a great scholar, which hopefully would please him. At Nineveh he constructed
a new palace more spectacular than his grandfather Sennacherib’s which included
an enormous library containing twenty four thousand cuneiform tablets covering
the history and mythology of the region. It was the discovery of this library
that opened the floodgates to the cracking of cuneiform and Layard’s friend
Rawlinson greeted the find with joy, applying himself once more to the
challenge of decipherment that he had despaired of achieving, but for which he
now had all of the material he required.
Under
Ashurbanipal Assyria had reached its greatest extent, yet only fifteen years
after his death the most powerful nation the world had yet seen would be wiped
off of the map. By the summer of 612 BC it was all over. An alliance of the
Medes and Babylonians had besieged Nineveh and finally took it by storm.
According to legend the last king Sardanapalus gathered his concubines around
him and then set fire to his throne room, perishing in the flames as his city
met with total destruction at the hands of her enemies. In revenge for the many
assaults on Babylon and for one in particular during the years of Assyrian
domination, the Babylonian conqueror Nabopolasar ordered Nineveh to be flooded.
Assyria
was no more. Her territory was divided between the conquerors, her palaces torn
down and her glory days consigned to dimly remembered history. Assyrian
civilisation would be all but forgotten until Botta and the intrepid Layard
rediscovered the remains of its cities which had been reclaimed by the pitiless
desert.
Back home, Layard’s name was
made and he was elected to parliament on the strength of his fame. He proved an
outspoken firebrand in the commons; deploring the conduct of the Crimean war
and denouncing the treatment of Britain’s Indian subjects in the aftermath of
the Indian Mutiny. He married in 1869 and in 1877 was appointed Ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire; taking up the role once occupied by his old patron Sir Stratford
Canning. In the following year he received a knighthood. Layard retired from
public service three years later and retired to Venice, living out his days corresponding
with learned men across the continent and enjoying life as a patron of the arts.
He returned to London where he died in 1894.
Layard in 1890
It is as the young explorer
rather than the grand old scholar that we should remember him however; setting
out with only the essentials he could carry in his saddlebags, careless of
danger, disease or discomfort; driven by boundless curiousity and eager to see
over the next horizon.
Layard's discovery of Nineveh
http://www.aina.org/books/dan.pdf
Siege of Lachish
http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/lachish_slides/lachish_Relief01.html
Old Testament Prophecies concerning Assyria and Babylon
http://www.netbiblestudy.com/00_cartimages/fulfilledbibleprophecy.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment