CHAPTER X
Towithin a few years of the middle of the nineteenth century, Babylon and Assyria were only names. People read about them in the Bible, but no visible trace remained. They had vanished utterly from the face of the earth. Some thinkers, who knew how stories become distorted by the passage of time, questioned if such places ever existed, whether they were not just myths, the figments of the imaginations of some ancient scribes.
The rivers Tigris and Euphrates flowed through deserts. It seemed impossible that such lands could once have been flowing with milk and honey, that they could have supported a big population and a high civilization.
Wandering Arabs roved the plains, encamping where they listed, warring against the Sultan and each other. They drove their sheep wherever the scanty herbage offered them fodder. The spring saw the desert blossom like the rose, the summer sun changed it of a sudden to desolation, burningup everything, sometimes leaving the tribes struggling in the grip of famine.
Great mounds of sand stood up from the deserts on each side of the rivers, hills on which the Arabs used to set their black tents of goat hair, while their flocks fed on the scanty grass that clothed the mounds in spring. No sign was apparent of a previous civilization; just the great mounds humping out of the desert and the black tents of the Arabs.
Those who saw the mounds did not trouble their heads about them. They took them for natural hills. There was no reason for them to think otherwise.
No one questioned why such hills should crop suddenly out of the flat desert. The Arabs who set up a village or two of mud huts on some of the mounds did not ask themselves why they should occasionally turn up bricks among the rubbish on the hills. When things have been in existence as long as the mounds on the Tigris, and when bricks have been turned up as often as the Arabs have unearthed them, these things are accepted without question as a matter of course. Neither Turks nor Arabs troubled about the mounds. It was left to foreigners to prove that these lofty eminences were the handiwork of man, and that the mounds on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates covered all that was left of Assyria and Babylonia.
In deciphering the stone of Behistun, Rawlinson did wonderful work. He was but thirty-five when he made the announcement that astounded the scientific world. The credit of uncovering the remains of ancient Assyria rests with Austin Henry Layard, who started life by studying law, and finished by making one of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century.
Layard’s whole life was one long romance. He was endowed with a vivid imagination, which probably came from his mixed descent, for his mother was a Spanish lady and his father an Englishman. As a young man, Layard was set to studying law, but instead of attaining great legal honours, he was made a baronet for wielding pick and spade to such good purpose out in Mesopotamia, that he dug up more knowledge of the past than any one man before or since.
Layard in his teens read theArabian Nightswith avidity. All the colour, the romance of the East appealed to his mind. He dreamed dreams of bazaars and eastern palaces, with veiled ladies and their lovers. While he dreamed these dreams he was compelled to study musty legal documents, in which he took not the slightest interest. Being confined in an office he hated, his great desire was to see the scenes he had read and dreamed about. Yet there was no escape for him. His father had chosen the law for him as a profession, andhe continued his studies against his own inclinations.
Working in his uncle’s office, Layard was not much impressed by the imagination or the generosity of his relative. Often when the lawyer thought his nephew was studying in his room, Layard was chatting with refugees, listening eagerly to their tales, and filling his rooms with the smell of fried sprats.
His eagerness to travel and see the world was not wholly unsatisfied. He visited the Continent once or twice with a wealthy friend and saw much. There came a day when he made up his mind to see the land of the Tsars. He counted up his money. It was little enough, but by exercising strict economy he decided he might just manage to obtain another glimpse of the world. So he set out practically on the spur of the moment, and made his first acquaintance with Russia and Scandinavia.
This adventurous young fellow was born with the desire to wander and see new lands and peoples. To a youth of his temperament, an office was a prison. While he was poring over his law-books, the figures of theArabian Nightswere flitting through his brain. His whole life was practically influenced by these tales of the East. “To them,” he wrote, “I attribute that love of travel and adventure which took me to the East, and led me to the discovery of the ruins of Nineveh. They give the truest, most lively and most interesting pictures of manners andcustoms which still existed amongst Turks, Persians and Arabs when I first mixed freely with them.”
Despite this overwhelming desire to travel, he grappled with his legal studies, and managed to pass his final examination. At that time his uncle arrived home from Ceylon, and it may be imagined how delightedly the young man listened to accounts of life in that far-off island. With his usual impetuosity he determined to go to Ceylon, to take up the profession he had studied.
“I will travel overland,” he said. De Lesseps had still to carve the Suez Canal out of the desert sands. Why should Layard coop himself up in a ship and make his slow way all round Africa to India? It was then the usual way, but the usual way was not Layard’s way. He studied his maps and traced his route. Travelling overland would give him a splendid opportunity of seeing the world, and he hugged the secret thought in his heart that he would be able to wander in the lands of his dreams, to see Constantinople and Baghdad.
He received £600 from his mother, to set him on the road to fame and fortune. Half this sum was sent to a bank in Ceylon so that he might collect it on his arrival, the other half he carried with him to pay his expenses on the long journey half across the world. He was only twenty-two years old when he said good-bye to his mother, and set out with a friend in 1839 to make his way to Ceylon. By theautumn they were adventuring in Syria. They had no one to guide them, no servants to wait on them. They tended their own horses, and for the rest relied on their youth and their weapons.
Layard’s thoughts turned in the direction of Nineveh and Babylon, and his horse’s head was turned in the same direction. He realized that the opportunity of seeing the land might never recur. So in the spring of 1840 the two friends jogged along from Aleppo to Mosul. They were lucky to get through unscathed, for the Arabs were warring with each other on all sides. The dwellers of the deserts were raiding right and left, and Layard often happened on encampments that were picked clean by the marauders. Once or twice the young Englishmen came upon bands of the raiders, but their luck stood them in good stead and they passed on their way unmolested. The two friends made light of these adventures, yet there was always the chance that a bullet might stretch them dead on the desert sands and that they would for ever disappear in the East.
The great mounds of Nimroud, opposite Mosul, wielded a potent spell over Layard. He climbed about them, dreamed over them, picked up bits of brick with arrow-headed writing on them. Often he asked himself what lay under his feet. He saw bits of alabaster sticking out of the soil where the rains had washed them bare. The remains of a dampeeped out of the river Tigris. He asked an Arab who built it.
By courtesy of the British School at AthensEXCAVATING THE THRONE ROOM AT KNOSSOS. THE STONE THRONE MAY BE SEEN IN THE BACKGROUND (see page185)
By courtesy of the British School at AthensEXCAVATING THE THRONE ROOM AT KNOSSOS. THE STONE THRONE MAY BE SEEN IN THE BACKGROUND (see page185)
By courtesy of the British School at Athens
EXCAVATING THE THRONE ROOM AT KNOSSOS. THE STONE THRONE MAY BE SEEN IN THE BACKGROUND (see page185)
By courtesy of R. Campbell ThomsonTHE DESOLATION OF NINEVEH. THIS HILL WAS ONCE ONE OF THE WALLS OF THE CAPITAL OF ASSYRIA
By courtesy of R. Campbell ThomsonTHE DESOLATION OF NINEVEH. THIS HILL WAS ONCE ONE OF THE WALLS OF THE CAPITAL OF ASSYRIA
By courtesy of R. Campbell Thomson
THE DESOLATION OF NINEVEH. THIS HILL WAS ONCE ONE OF THE WALLS OF THE CAPITAL OF ASSYRIA
“Nimrod,” said the Arab, referring to the great mythical god of the past.
The stones of the dam were locked securely together. The waters poured over it in a cataract. Layard visioned the men in past ages building that dam, saw the waters held back and flowing into the canals to make the desert into a fertile plain. He galloped over the desert and saw traces of the silted-up canals, and he knew that the fertile land of the past and the desolate land through which he rode were one and the same. The neglect of man, the passage of time, and the absence of water were responsible for the change.
He left Mosul on a raft of goatskins, floating down the Tigris to Baghdad as men had floated down for thousands of years. As he glided by on the slow-moving river the hillocks on the banks were beckoning to him, and he vowed to lay bare the past with a spade at the very first opportunity.
It was two years before that opportunity arrived. When he got back to Mosul he found a Frenchman, M. Botta, was digging. For a long time Botta found little to encourage him to proceed with the work. A few fragments of brick and other trifles were all that turned up under the pick.
Then one day an Arab gazed down on the trenches that Botta’s workmen were digging, wonderingwhat on earth his compatriots from Mosul were searching for, and why they were going to all the trouble.
“What are you looking for?” he asked at last.
The labourer who was digging straightened his back, and glancing round among the rubbish he had turned up, picked up a piece of brick with a few cuneiform characters on it. “This,” he said.
The Arab laughed. It seemed to him a huge joke that men should be wasting their time digging in the earth for bits of broken brick. “Why, where I live there are thousands of them,” he said. “We find them when we are digging the foundations of our houses.”
Botta was told what the peasant had said. The Frenchman was very dubious. He had heard such things before, and the rumours always proved false. The diggers, however, were so insistent, that at last he sent one or two off to the village of Khorsabad, where the peasant lived, to see what they could find.
It was some little time before the diggers could persuade the villagers to allow them to sink a test hole. Eventually, the inhabitants were won over, and the excavators sank a shaft—which quickly ended at the top of a mighty wall!
Hastening at once to the spot, Botta set his men furiously to work. They unearthed an ancient Assyrian palace. Great slabs of stone were coveredwith sculptured scenes of war. Botta was astounded. He, nor any other modern man, had never seen the like.
They proved to be the ruins of a king’s palace, but unfortunately as soon as they were laid bare the slabs began to crumble. A huge fire had destroyed the palace. In the heat the slabs were reduced to lime, and directly they were uncovered they fell in little pieces. Nothing could be done to preserve them. They had remained hidden for thousands of years. The kindly earth had kept them intact, but directly the air played about them they decayed.
Layard was for long in close touch with Botta. More than once the Frenchman wrote to Layard about his non-success, and Layard displayed his fine character by urging the Frenchman to continue.
The Briton had studied the spot with a view to working there. All thoughts of reaching Ceylon had passed from his mind. He wrote to friends, and tried to interest them in his proposed work. He received no encouragement. Despite all this disappointment, he was great enough to encourage his rival. It throws considerable light on the character of the man who eventually accomplished so much on the banks of the Tigris.
If Layard did not make the first discovery there, he had much to do with it. But for his encouragement,Botta might have ceased digging long before the peasant stood looking down into his trenches, to tell him that there were heaps of the funny old bricks in his village of Khorsabad.
The influence of the Englishman, and the laughing words of a peasant, led to the Frenchman taking the first step back into the Assyria of the past.