The saga of Gilgamesh - the story of the archaeological discovery
The Fascinating story of the archaeological discoveries that brought to light the saga of Gilgamesh.
1842 - Botta
The first to excavate Tell Kouyunjik was Paul-Emile Botta, French consul in Mosul in 1842. The result of his first investigation was disappointing: no more than a few fragments of tablets. Botta was not discouraged but an unexpected event occurred: an Arab, passing by and selling Botta's work, which he considered senseless, suggested that he dig in another place where he could find what he wanted.
At first the French consul did not listen to him, but then, given the meager results of his work, he decided to put him to the test. On March 20, 1843, he sent some of his Arab workers to Khorsabad (Dur-sharrukin), 16 km north-east of Mosul, for an initial reconnaissance. Having confirmed the wealth of the place, he decided to move his work there. On April 5th he discovered the palace of Sargon II with its immense treasures. The fact that this building belonged to the Assyrian king who conquered Samaria and deported the Jews into exile was ascertained a few years later, causing a stir among biblical scholars: for the first time we were faced with a character mentioned in the Old Testament (cf. Isaiah 20.1).
Botta's excavations ended in 1844 and a year later he returned to France. The interim consular post was entrusted to Rouet, who was determined to defend French rights over Khorsabad and Kouyunjik.
1847 - Layard
In the same year, Henry Layard, convinced that ancient Nineveh was buried under the Tell of Nimrud, persuaded the English ambassador Sir Stratford Canning of the opportunity to survey it by privately obtaining funding from him, and thus began his great adventure. He only realized the mistake a few years later: the one he was excavating was not Nineveh, but Calah, the city conceived and built by Ashurnasirpal II.
The first results were sensational: in a few months he found in some rooms of the so-called southern palace (which will only later be attributed to Ashurnasirpal) fabulous treasures (inscribed marble orthostats, a splendid series of bas-reliefs, two immense, tall, winged lions, limestone monsters, two winged bulls, and a human-like stone head belonging to a bull-fighting colossus, etc.)
However, Layard's excavation had dubious legality. No authorization had been given by the Ottoman Government or, more exactly, it was never requested by Ambassador Canning, who did not deem it appropriate to do so at the time, having requested other permits and trusting in Layard's diplomatic ability. [...]
Only a year later, on 5 May 1846, shortly before Canning's return to London, Layard obtained not an official permit proper, but a letter from the Vizier, originally written in Turkish and translated into French by Christian Rassam, the vice-consul of England to Mosul, brother of Hormuzd Rassam:
Letter from the Grand Vizier to the Pasha of Mosul. May 5, 1846.
As Your Excellency knows, in the vicinity of Mosul there are large quantities of stones and ancient remains. There is an English gentleman who has come to these parts to look for stones of this kind and has found on the banks of the Tigris, in certain uninhabited places, ancient stones on which there are drawings and inscriptions. [...] No obstacle should be placed when he will take the stones which, according to the account that has been given, are in deserted places and are not used; or to his undertaking excavations in uninhabited places where this can be done without inconvenience to anyone [...]. The sincere friendship which firmly exists between the two governments makes it desirable that such requests be granted.
This letter on the one hand allowed Layard to work without major problems, but on the other hand, as we shall see, it will be the source of future troubles. The Vizier, in fact, among other things, left total freedom to the English "Gentleman" to dig in any uninhabited place he deemed appropriate, provided that this did not cause "inconvenience for anyone". Ambassador Canning immediately understood the importance of this permit which did not limit Layard's activity to a particular site and pointed out to him that this could ... be appropriate to secure a priority right to any place that could have made discoveries, but to behave cautiously, and with due respect not only for the rights of others, but especially taking into account their jealousy.
The others were obviously the French, the only ones excavating in that period in the Middle East in addition to the English, who had tried to block the unauthorized English excavations at Nimrud, while at the same time trying to obtain permits for that site.
Armed with that permit, in addition to continuing the excavations at Nimrud, now funded by the British Museum, Layard began surveys of other sites, including the Tell of Kouyunjik. The French consul, having learned of the letter in the meantime, became nervous and insisted on seeing it, at the same time claiming the rights to the Kouyunjik Tell. In reply Layard made him observe the enormous vastness of the Tell, whose circumference measured about a mile, and proposed that they join their efforts. Thus the French and the British excavated at Kouyunjik but it was Layard who obtained the first results, bringing to light the palace of Sennacherib (1847).
A second campaign of excavations was carried out by Layard between 1849 and 1851 both at Kouyunjik and at Nimrud, aided in his work only by Hormuzd Rassam, bringing back to England orthostats, gates, winged bulls and a considerable number of tablets.
He returned to London permanently in 1851.
1852 - Rassam
In that same year, the new French consul, Victor Place, during his four-month journey to Mosul, met the Englishman Rawlinson in Samsun, on the Black Sea, who was returning to Baghdad. Both agreed on the general conduct to be respected during the excavations: not to compete with each other and not to harm each other. Rawlinson also opened his construction site at Kouyunjik to his French colleague and, given the vastness of the Tell, proposed that they work together, each on their own site: the French to the north and the English to the south of the hill. Place, after a moment's hesitation and after seeking the minister's approval, agreed to the deal.
It goes without saying that the terms of the agreement were never respected, due to the demerit not of the two authors, but of Layard's successor in the Middle East, Rassam, his former adjutant, who in 1852 was commissioned by the British Museum to resume excavations in Mesopotamia. Rassam committed numerous improprieties to the detriment of the French, for example, taking advantage of a momentary absence from Place, he occupied the site of Assur, helped by his Arab workers, planting the English flag there.
But let's hear Rassam's version of the finding of Ashurbanipal's palace:
At the end of 1852, after reaching Mosul, I wished to excavate the north corner of the Kouyunjik hill where Sennacherib and his royal descendants had resided, as I was convinced that that part of the hill had not been fully examined. However, I learned, to my great annoyance, that Monsieur Place, the French Consul in Mosul, who at that time was engaged in exploration in Khorsabad for the French National Museum, had requested and obtained permission to excavate there from Major Rawlinson, before my arrival in Mosul; but for some reason he hadn't begun the excavation either before or after my return to Mosul.
Some scholars, including André Parrot, discoverer of the city of Mari, claim that Place was not absent at all and was indeed already digging at that site.
Rassam continues:
I must stress that Kouyunjik Hill is private property and that we were in possession of a decree from the Sultan of Turkey which allowed us to dig wherever we pleased once we obtained permission from the owner of the land. Nonetheless, there was a recognized rule of conduct among explorers: when a representative of a nation was digging in a certain Tell, the others were to refrain from digging in the same place. I was therefore jealous of the intention of the representative of the French government to meddle in our field of operations.
If this rule had always been respected, the English would never have excavated at Kouyunjik, given that the first to excavate on that site had been the French eleven years earlier with Botta, furthermore it was Rawlinson who offered Place the possibility of excavating in the northern part of the Tell and not the latter to ask for it.
Rassam resolutely admits:
[...] My aim was always the north corner of Kouyunjik, which fortunately Mr. Place had never touched, and which I was determined to explore before my return to England, whatever the consequences.When the time for departure approached, I ordered my tents to be pitched on Kouyunjik Hill, thereby showing that I was ready to leave for Europe, but the reason for this was to be able to excavate with great ease, at night, in the north corner of the hill without being discovered. After waiting for a night of full moon for some days, I selected some old and faithful Arab workmen capable of keeping the secret, with a most faithful guardian, and made an appointment for them at a certain point on the hill two hours after sunset. When everything was ready, I assigned them three different spots to dig. There were already some trenches previously dug, and I ordered the workers to dig deep into them. After checking work myself until midnight, I dropped them off at work (after telling them to stop at dawn) and went to sleep.
The following morning I examined the trenches and, seeing some traces of Assyrian remains, doubled the number of workers and made them work hard through the second night. As usual, I checked work until midnight and went to sleep. But after less than two hours, my faithful Albanian guardian ran with the news of the discovery of some broken sculptures. I hurried immediately to the excavation site, and descending into one of the trenches, I was able to see in the moonlight the undersides of two bas-reliefs, the tops of which had been destroyed by the Sassanids or some other barbarous nation who had occupied the Tell after the destruction of the the Assyrian'S empire. I was able to ascertain this thanks to my experience, examining the foundations and the brick wall that served as a base for the bas-reliefs.
In fact, Rassam's experience has often been questioned. Parrot for example, in the book Archéologie Mésopotamienne, presents him thus:
Neither draftsman, nor architect. Thus no truly serious plant was ever found, but there were numerous reliefs which, found in bad condition during the discovery, disappeared completely without the slightest trace being depicted. There was actually that object hunt which will never be too deplored. Hormuzd Rassam, moreover, must have stood out for a long time in what Hilprecht was able to call an "unscientific looting system", in addition to a total lack of scruple which very well characterizes a character who we will now find often and everywhere.
But let's listen again to Rassam and his account:
So I ordered the workers to free the lower part of the sculptures and it became clear that the slabs belonged to the new building; but digging around these we found bones, ash and other debris and no trace of other sculptures. On the third day of my nocturnal excavation, the secret leaked out in the city of Mosul, which did not surprise me as all the families of the workers engaged in the work knew that they were clandestinely digging somewhere, and furthermore the other workers must have noticed the their colleagues leave the tents and not show up for work the following day.Not only did I fear that the French consul would find out about it and arrive to prevent me from excavating what he believed to be his territory, but even worse that the Turkish authorities and the people of Mosul might think that I was looking for a treasure, since they always imagined that we were getting rich with the discovery of fabulous treasures: therefore on the third night I increased the number of workers and decided to stay in the trenches until morning. [...] After less than three hours of excavation a bench fell and revealed an almost perfect bas-relief in which was represented an Assyrian king (who after him proved to be Ashurbanipal) in his chariot chasing lions. [...] I had no doubt that this was a new building. During the day we cleaned Ashurbanipal's lion hunting room, which is now exhibited in the basement of the British Museum, and in the center of this large room or corridor were piles of inscribed tablets; I think that the famous Flood tablet was found among these. No doubt this was Ashurbanipal's library.
The news of the discovery of a new palace in Kouyunjik spread like wildfire in the city of Mosul and its vicinity in a few hours and attracted hundreds of spectators curious to see the new discovery... Monsieur Place was then busy with the French excavations at Khorsabad and of course as soon as he heard of my discovery he came to the excavation site and protested my intrusion into his legally recognized possession. To alienate a part of the land which did not belong to him, and that the owner of the hill had been indemnified by us and that what I had discovered rightfully belonged to the British nation, he seemed to accept my arguments and before leaving me he congratulated me on my success.
In reality Rassam did not appease Place's wrath since a short time later Rawlin offered his indignant colleague the possibility of choosing some, and not a few, orthostats among those left in the trenches. A small compensation that Place did not refuse.
1852 - How the events actually unfolded...
So far the official version, or at least that of Rassam on how the matter unfolded, but there is another one told by scholars.
Here it is.
Rassam, convinced that in the northern part of the Tell, the one assigned to the French, there must be treasures and that the credit for their discovery belonged to His Majesty's country, summoned the chief worker of the French mission, an Arab of Albanian origin who had previously worked for Layard, with the intention of entrusting him with a delicate task: he had to inform him every evening of what the French had brought to light during the day.
The French mission, unaware of Rassam's maneuvers, continued to dig despite the initial unsatisfactory results. But their patience and tenacity was rewarded by luck. Descending to a depth of three meters, they came across a room whose walls were all decorated with sculpted orthostats. They depict scenes of war and above all hunting. Place ordered all workers to remain silent until the substance of the discovery was ascertained. Then at night he went, accompanied by three workers, to the site of the excavation and entered the second room, also decorated like the first. Now there were no more doubts: Place had come across Ashurbanipal's royal palace.
A week later there was strangely great commotion on Kouyunjik Tell. Not only were the French digging there, but also the English had reopened their construction site. The French, having penetrated the fifth room of the palace, and having removed the dirt on the right, discovered a door which led to another room full of burnt and broken tablets; the library. The discovery was made on a Thursday; the next day was a day of celebration and so the excavations were interrupted. Rassam, hearing the news, decided to hire, as quickly as possible and in the utmost secrecy, a team of 50 workers. During the night, by candlelight, while the French were sleeping, he had a tunnel dug, starting from the place assigned to the British, which reached the rooms of the palace that the French were laboriously bringing to light.
Great was the surprise of the latter when, on Saturday morning, they found not only the room, which they had glimpsed, completely empty; but also the other rooms in which the Royal Library of Nineveh was gathered. The official protests of the archaeologists first and then of the French government came to nothing. Rassam denied and perjured that he had not looted. Until two months later the tablets from the Ashurbanipal Library arrived at the British Museum, where they are still kept today.
In France, meanwhile, Place was recovering a small revenge, as Rassam observes in a note to his book:
The loss of this loot had a bad effect on the mind of Monsieur Place who in the research book published in 1866-69, under the title of Nineveh et l'Assyre he completely ignored my findings, but gave the impression that Mr. Loftus, and even its draftsman, Mr. Boutcher, were the lucky explorers.
What happened to the tablets "discovered" by Rassam and piled up in the warehouses of the British Museum?
It is not known whether due to bad organization or to hide the real extent of the theft of the Library of Ashurbanipal, these tablets were mixed with those previously found by Layard not in the palace of Ashurbanipal, but in that of Sennacherib, so that today it is difficult to know which ones belonged to one building and which to another. Also where did Smith found the fragment containing the 17 missing lines of the Flood table? In the palace of Sennacherib discovered by Layard or in that of Ashurbanipal? it is certain that it was found in the palace of Ashurbanipal, where Smith also found two fragments of the VI table of the epic of Gilgamesh and a syllabary. But then how many libraries were there in Nineveh? A real one, from the palace of Ashurbanipal, and a kind of Archive, in that of his grandfather Sennacherib.
In any case, scholars all agree in believing that the Epic of Gilgamesh partially found by Smith comes from the Library of King Ashurbanipal as this is remembered in the colophons written at the end of each tablet.
Insights and Notes
Paul-Emile Botta, doctor and naturalist, was French consul in Alexandria in 1833. In 1840 he was consular agent in Mosul, a city located on the upper Tigris. He was struck by the magical atmosphere of a desert populated by nomads and shepherds of whose history only the Bible spoke, full of strange hills smoothed by time where the Bedouins stopped their caravans, and from which the shepherds took bricks, vases, clay shards with strange wedge-shaped marks. Those were the traces of ancient civilizations whose deeds had by now been forgotten in those depopulated deserts. Botta began to buy everything he could but when he begged the men to show him where those shards came from he always received the same answer "Allah is great and he has scattered a little everywhere".
Botta saw that he was unable by interrogating the natives to identify a particularly rich excavation site and it was decided to begin excavations on the first hill that came to hand, near Kujundshik. After a year of digging he found nothing, so he felt he had started in the wrong place. In reality, if he had dug further he would have found the palace of Assurbanipal (the Sardanapalus of the Greeks), but it was others who had the good fortune and therefore the merit of this discovery.
However, another fortune happened to Botta. An Arab, whose name is never known, learned of the Frenchman's desire and came to find the camp of Kujundshik trying to convince the consul to follow him to a place where he would find all the marvels he was looking for. While distrusting the strange individual, who said he wanted to help him because he loved the French, Botta sent some of his men with him. The locality was 16 km from Kujundshik and was called Khorsabad. A week after Botta had sent his men to reconnoiter he received an excited message that as soon as the spade sank in Khorsabad they had come outside the walls. And as soon as these had been cleaned of the grossest filth, inscriptions, figures, frightening animals had appeared. Having rushed to the site, Botta immediately realized the exceptional nature of the discovery and soon recalled all his workers from Kujundshik. The excavations of him thus brought to light an entire palace and therefore the irrefutable proof of the existence of an advanced and ancient civilization.
The news went around the world, in fact until now it was believed that Egypt was the cradle of civilization because nowhere else could one go back as far as in the land of the pyramids. Only the Bible had spoken of Mesopotamia, which for 19th century science represented only a "collection of legends". What were these legends about? There was talk of the divine scourge of the Assyrians, of the tower of Babel, of the seventy years of captivity of the Jews and of King Nebuchadnezzar, of God's vengeance on the "great whore", of the vials that his wrath that seven angels poured on the lands of the Euphrates. The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah described their terrifying visions of the destruction of the most beautiful of kingdoms, of the splendid magnificence of Ur of the Chaldeans overwhelmed like Sodom and Gomorrah. And there was also talk of the splendid Nineveh that Botta had just brought to light! In the centuries of Christian faith the word of the Bible was sacred and unassailable. The Age of Enlightenment produced historical criticism. But the criticism now turned into doubt and they began to pay more attention to the scant reports of the ancient writers, which were not unbelievable, but were often contradictory and often disagreed with the data of the Bible.
France was thrilled by the idea of discovering a powerful and rich civilization, ancient and perhaps older than that of Egypt, and probably consumed more than by time, by iron and fire. Botta thus received ample funds to continue the work. He excavated for three years, from 1843 to 1846, bringing to light a new building built on vast terraces. Scholars recognized it as the home of the Assyrian king who conquered Babylon, Sargon, mentioned in the sentences of Isaiah, a summer residence, a kind of Versailles, on the edge of Nineveh and dating back to 709 B.C. The palace was full of rooms brightly decorated with frescoes and bas-reliefs reproducing scenes of domestic life, war and hunting. There were also richly decorated doorways, a terraced tower and even a tripartite harem.
Henry Layard began working in 1839 at the English embassy in Constantinople. He arrives in Mosul and visits the great stone mountains on the east coast of the Tigris, generally believed to be the ruins of Nineveh. Here riding through the desert he encountered new hills, notably that of Kalah Shergat, on the Tigris 50 miles south of its junction with Little Zab. On that trip he spent the night in a small Bedouin village and from the top of an artificial hill he saw a vast plain from which he was separated only by the course of the river. The plain was bounded to the east by a series of earthen hills, one of which was higher and pyramidal in shape; beyond it the course of the waters of the Zab could hardly be distinguished, but its position allowed it to be easily identified. It was the pyramid described by Xenophon, where the 10,000 had been expected. They were the same ruins that the Greek general had seen 22 (?) centuries before, which were already then the ruins of an ancient city.
Xenophon had mistaken the name spoken by a foreign people with the familiar one of Larissa. But tradition mentions the origin of the city, and attributing its foundation to the same Nimrud whose name these ruins still bear, connects it to the first settlements of mankind. In chapter X of book I of Moses (ie Genesis) it is said, in fact, that Chus, son of Ham, begat Nimrud. Ham's father was Noah, who with his three sons, their wives and all kinds of livestock, began to reproduce, after the Universal Flood, the lineage of men.
"and Chus begat Nimrud, who began to be mighty on Earth. He was a mighty hunter in the sight of the Eternal; therefore it is said: "Like Nimrud, a mighty hunter before the LORD." And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Akkadi, and Chalne in the land of Sinear. From that country he went to Assur and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir and Kalach; and, between Nineveh and Kalach, Resen, the great city".
Back in Constantinople he convinces the English ambassador, thanks also to Botta's recent discoveries near Khorsabad, to finance the excavations on the Nimrud hill which began in November 1845
Unfortunately compared to 5 years before the country had changed and was in revolt. The territory between the two rivers was under Turkish domination and a new despotic and cruel governor had been appointed. The country rose up and all the peoples who lived in the steppes around Mosul rose up. And they did it their way. Incapable of organized revolution, they opposed looting to looting; there was no longer a quiet road, no stranger could be sure of his life. The state of the country was not long hidden from Layard. After a few hours, he had already understood that in Mosul he should not have let anything of his plans leak out.
He asked for labor from the leader of a Bedouin tribe waiting near the hill of Nimrud who provided him with six excavators and began digging a tunnel in the hill. The first objects they found after a few hours were some stone slabs placed by right. It was a plinth of the so-called orthostats, that is, the covering of the walls of a room which, due to the richness of its decoration, could only belong to a palace. In the sudden doubt that there could be even richer excavation sites, and also in the hope of ending up on intact walls (those just discovered showed traces of fire), he ordered three of his men to work on a completely different point of the hill. What the second team managed to find was grand: a wall covered with carved slabs, separated by a frieze with inscriptions. He had come across the corner of a second building!
The darkness in which Mesopotamia was shrouded in the eyes of the European world suddenly dissipated: in 1843 Rawlinson was in Baghdad intent on deciphering the Behistun inscription. In the same year Botta began excavations at Kujundshik and Khorsabad, and in 1845 Layard excavated at Nimrud. How many clarifications the work of those years brought can be deduced from the fact that the Behistun inscription alone offered a far more precise knowledge of the lords of Persepolis than that which all the ancient authors combined had handed down to us.
Meanwhile the governor of Mosul had fallen and so Layard was able to continue the work more freely and brought to light a gigantic head of a winged lion carved in wonderfully well preserved alabaster. We know today that he was one of the Assyrian astral gods who reside in the four corners of the world: Marduk as a winged bull, Nebo as a man, Nergal as a winged lion, and Ninurta as an eagle.
New sculptures were then brought to light and soon no less than 13 pairs of lions and winged bulls appeared, two of which were sent to Europe. In the splendid building which Layard slowly unearthed on the NW corner of Nimrud hill, he later recognized the palace of Ashurbanipal II (884-859 BC), the king who had moved his residence from Assur here to Kalchu.
