Treasure Seekers: Edge of the Orient Page #2

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Layard persuaded the British ambassador

to fund a trial excavation

at his mound at Nimrud.

Within weeks, he was ready to begin,

instructed to keep a low profile.

On the 8th of November 1845,

having secretly procured a few tools,

and carrying with me a variety of

guns, spears and other weapons,

I declared that I was going to hunt

wild boars in a neighboring village,

and floated down the Tigris

on a small raft.

It was dark by the time Layard

arrived at the mound.

Five years had passed

since he'd first laid eyes on it.

His head was filled with excitement.

He found it almost impossible

to sleep.

Visions of palaces underground,

of sculptured figures and endless

inscriptions floated before me.

After forming plan after plan

for removing the earth

and extricating these treasures,

I fancied myself wandering

in a maze of chambers

from which I could find no outlet.

At dawn the next morning,

the resourceful young Englishman

assembled his team and set to work.

He had no experience,

very little money,

and no guarantee of success.

He really had no expertise in what he

was doing, except his natural talent.

And he was rushing

because the French were competing,

and their influence over

the Turks could mean that

his license to be digging

would quickly be cut off.

And he needed a good find quickly

because he knew that's what would

bring the support

from the British government,

or from the British Museum,

from the British community

to enable him to go on.

Amazingly, on the very first day of

digging, Layard hit pay dirt.

A piece of alabaster appeared

above the soil.

We could not remove it,

and on digging downward it proved

to be the upper part of a large slab.

The men shortly uncovered ten more.

It was evident that the top of

a chamber had been discovered.

Digging along the walls of the chamber,

within weeks the men uncovered

a series of splendid sculptured panels.

Layard was captivated by

their beauty.

But he knew they wouldn't be enough

to get the British Museum to fund him.

He was looking for

the spectacular sculpture,

which would dazzle the public,

and give him fame in London.

I say this not out of

a criticism of Layard.

He was penniless.

This was his way to fame and fortune.

And he knew it.

A few months later,

Layard was on his way

to visit a local sheik

when two horsemen caught up with him.

"Hasten, O Bey," they cried.

"Hasten to the diggers,

for they have found Nimrod himself."

Rising out of the earth was

a gigantic head.

The workmen were terrified of

this colossus they called Nimrod,

and ran off to spread the news.

But Layard was elated.

He'd only been digging a few months,

and here was treasure

the French would envy.

Unfortunately, the resulting uproar

gave the Ottoman Turks the excuse

they'd been looking for

to shut down the dig.

Layard suspected

the hand of the French.

Quietly he kept a few men on

who unearthed two gigantic sculptures

strange and awe inspiring.

With his knowledge of art history,

Layard knew that he had found

an entirely new style of art.

The British Museum agreed and finally

gave him the money he needed.

A year after he'd begun,

Turkish permission in hand,

Layard launched full scale

excavations at Nimrud.

Every day produced

some new discovery.

My Arabs entered with alacrity

into the work,

and felt almost as much interested in

its results as I did myself.

Tunneling along the walls of

what turned out to be a palace,

they found hundreds of

alabaster sculptures,

some disintegrating from

ancient fires.

Layard drew what he could,

working from dawn until dusk.

In the evening,

after the labor of the day,

I often sat at the door

of my tent and gave myself up

to the full enjoyment imparted to

the senses by such scenes as these.

I live among the ruins,

and dream of little else.

But still Layard had to face

his biggest challenge.

Somehow he had to transport

his treasures back to London.

It's quite one thing to dig up

these large human

headed lions or bas relief,

some of which weighed several tons.

And quite another thing

to take them back to London or Paris.

And this is where Layard was a genius

he had learned to improvise.

He acquired the loyalty of

the local people.

He got a cart built, and there were

wonderful pictures in his books

of luring these lions with ropes

down on to one of the carts,

and the famous occasion

when the ropes broke

and the lion fell like this.

And they thought it was broken,

but it wasn't.

And the workmen burst into

a wild dance.

And they towed this thing

to the river.

And they built a raft of timber and

supported it on inflated goatskins.

I watched the rafts

until they disappeared,

musing upon the strange destiny

of their burdens.

After adorning the palaces

of Assyrian kings,

they had been buried unknown

for centuries

beneath the soil trodden by

the Persians, the Greeks and the Arabs.

They were now to cross

the most distance seas

to be finally placed

in a British museum.

great revolutions in Europe

is the year when all of

the Assyrian stuff

that Layard had discovered was

first displayed in England,

and it was a sensation.

He was lionized by society.

He became a public figure.

A young man who had gone out East

and made good.

Look what he had bought

for Britain.

Layard wrote a best seller

about his adventures

uncovering the impressive

civilization of the Assyrians,

lost to history

for more than 2,000 years.

But he struggled to understand

the strange beasts he'd discovered,

and which had taken London by storm.

This creature stood to

either side of the doorway

of an important location in the

Assyrian world to guard the way in.

And that lion's body

will tear you apart,

and those wings of a bird of prey

will overtake you,

and that human head

will out think you.

And believe me, the Assyrians

believed that,

and would have been suitably

intimidated

just as the British were suitably

impressed

by this extraordinary exotic creature

that he brought back.

The treasures of Assyria

were trophies of Empire.

But to many people, they were more.

In the secular 19th century,

the historical validity of

the Bible was under attack.

Were its stories true,

or were they simply stories?

Perhaps the answer could be found

in the mounds of Mesopotamia.

With mounting public interest,

the British Museum decided to fund

a second expedition.

In 1849, Layard tackled a mound

the French had given up on,

near the banks of the Tigris River.

Tunneling deep inside,

he uncovered indisputable evidence

that would prove he had found Nineveh,

the biblical capital of Assyria.

Nearly two miles of

sculptured alabaster panels

proclaiming the bloody conquests

of its kings.

A great library which would unlock

the lost history of the Assyrians.

And most extraordinary of all,

evidence of the bloody siege

of the Israelite city of Lachish

that was depicted in the Bible.

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