Assyria before the digs
By the early nineteenth century, Assyria was known to Europeans mainly through the Bible and Greek writers, and the great cities were visible only as mounds beside the Tigris. The mound opposite the modern city of Mosul, for instance, was thought to cover ancient Nineveh but had not been excavated. Archaeology, together with the decipherment of cuneiform, changed this within a few decades. The “secrets” the Assyrians left turned out to be mostly documentary: palaces, archives and libraries that can be read.
Botta at Khorsabad
The French consul at Mosul, Paul-Emile Botta, began digging at the mound of Kuyunjik (part of Nineveh) in 1842 but found little. A local suggestion directed him to Khorsabad, where in 1843 he found carved reliefs and a palace. This turned out to be Dur-Sharrukin, the city built by Sargon II. It was one of the first major discoveries of an Assyrian palace, and the finds reached the Louvre. Victor Place continued the work in the 1850s, and some material was lost when a transport raft sank on the Tigris in 1855.
Layard at Nimrud and Nineveh
The British traveller Austen Henry Layard began work at Nimrud in 1845 and uncovered the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, along with its large guardian figures and reliefs. He later excavated at Kuyunjik and found the palace of Sennacherib, including the Lachish reliefs. In 1846 his team found the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. Layard’s popular books on his discoveries brought Assyria to a general readership. His methods belong to an early period of archaeology: speed, tunnelling and the removal of sculptures were priorities, and recording of context was limited by later standards.
Hormuzd Rassam, who had worked with Layard, continued excavations at Nineveh in the early 1850s and uncovered the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, with the lion hunt reliefs. He later carried out other work in Iraq on behalf of the British Museum.
The library at Nineveh
Excavators found collections of clay tablets in the palaces at Kuyunjik, in the area of Sennacherib’s palace and in the North Palace. These came to be understood as parts of a royal library assembled mostly by Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE, and containing tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, many now in the British Museum. Their contents are wide-ranging: omen collections, medical and magical texts, hymns and prayers, lexical lists, royal letters, and literary works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Part of the library’s importance is that the tablets show a king interested in collecting and copying older Mesopotamian texts, including Babylonian ones, and the colophons record that scribes were sent to gather material. In 1872 George Smith, a British Museum assistant, read a tablet from this collection that described a flood story close to the biblical account, which caused a sensation and led to further searches. The library remains the main source for many Mesopotamian literary and scholarly works, including the Gilgamesh tablets.
Reading the evidence
All of this depended on decipherment. Work on the Persian, Elamite and Akkadian versions of the trilingual inscription at Behistun, carried out by Henry Rawlinson and others in the 1840s and 1850s, allowed scholars to read Akkadian cuneiform, and the Assyrian royal inscriptions could then be translated. The method of cuneiform decipherment gave the discoveries a historical meaning that earlier digs could not have had alone.
Ashur and the German excavations
The ancient capital, Ashur, was excavated by a German team from the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft between 1903 and 1914, directed by Walter Andrae. Andrae used a more systematic method than the early digs, recording mudbrick architecture by following walls and layers, an approach in line with later tell stratigraphy. The excavations revealed temples, palaces, the ziggurat of Ashur and a large series of royal tombs, as well as private houses.
The texts from Ashur include archives from ordinary households and officials, which give a different view from the royal inscriptions. They show merchants, scribes and priests, along with legal contracts, letters and records of business, and they allow historians to say something about daily life, including family arrangements, loans and property.
Nimrud in the twentieth century
Max Mallowan, working with a British team from 1949 to 1958, re-excavated parts of Nimrud and found large groups of carved ivories, many from furniture and showing Egyptian, Syrian and Phoenician influence. In 1988, an Iraqi team led by Muzahim Mahmud Hussein discovered royal tombs beneath the Northwest Palace containing the burials of queens, with rich gold jewellery. Study of these finds continues.
Recent work and threats
Since the late twentieth century, excavations have been affected by war and instability in Iraq. Between about 2014 and 2017, several Assyrian sites, including Nimrud and Nineveh, suffered deliberate damage, along with looting. Efforts since then have focused on documentation, conservation and digital reconstruction, with the participation of Iraqi and international teams. Satellite imagery and new surveys have also increased knowledge of the countryside around the capitals, including water channels and aqueducts built by Sennacherib.
Archaeology has also changed in its ethical emphasis, with growing attention to the ownership of artefacts and to involving local communities, a discussion that concerns material held in museums abroad. For Assyria, the combination of excavated cities, texts and reliefs remains among the richest records of any Bronze Age and Iron Age state, as part of the wider field of Mesopotamian archaeology.