When Dr. Richard Barnett died in 1986, the manuscript of Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh (here abbreviated to swps) was to all intents and purposes complete and in order, yet it was not until twelve years later that the book was eventually issued in 1998, and this as a result of the “generous support” of Asahi Shimbun of Japan. On an initial check of the new publication, I noticed that three of Layard’s small and very sketchy yet important sketch plans had been inadvertently and unfortunately omitted, and I therefore planned a short article in the journal Iraq to make good this omission and any other similar errata. Still smarting from our failure to identify Layard’s “fair copy” of his field notes LN 3, which in the meanwhile John Russell had found in the Layard Papers now housed in the British Library, formerly the library of the British Museum, I started my researches by going through the relevant volumes of that archive more thoroughly and with greater care, and quickly discovered that there was here still a wealth of as yet untapped material which neither Dr. Barnett nor myself had unearthed in the course of our original work on Sennacherib, this mainly in Layard’s diaries, pocket note-books and in the copies Layard made of his letters to the Trustees and Principal Librarian of the British Museum and to Sir Stratford Canning the British ambassador in Constantinople, etc., et alia. There was here far too much to include in a short article in such a journal as Iraq (vide my 2001 article primarily on Col. Williams of the Turco-Persian Boundary Commission and on Layard’s friend Henry Ross in Iraq 63), and so I now made new plans to write a series of four or five articles with details of the discoveries made by Layard in Sennacherib’s palace in the course of his second campaign, October 1849–April 1851; but in turn it was all too soon apparent that this information could not be summarised in articles of a length that Iraq would be prepared to publish. Thus already fifteen years ago the germs of the present book were sown, yet at that time I had little idea that the work would snowball so extensively, howbeit a very interesting and pleasant task, which necessitated almost monthly visits on the Eurostar from Brussels to London.
As can be seen in my 2003 article in Iraq 65, in the early stages of this study I believed that the greater part if not almost all the relevant primary sources were to be found in the Layard Papers in the British Library, and but to a lesser extent in the archives of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities in the British Museum. In the latter especially important are the Original Drawings of the reliefs from Sennacherib’s palace made by Layard, Cooper, Bell and Hodder, together with Layard’s Manuscript Plan of the palace from his second campaign, some items in L.W. King’s notebooks, and King’s and Campbell Thompson’s large contour plan of Kuyunjik. I realized that for the work carried out on Kuyunjik after Layard’s departure to England in April 1851 and until Rawlinson left Baghdad in February 1855, it would also be necessary to consult the Central Archives of the British Museum, these in effect the papers of the Trustees and Principal Librarian/Director of that institution. However I had put this off till the last moment as I had been forewarned that it was not so easy to gain admittance to these archives due to the unhelpful attitude of the one in charge. In 2008 I asked Dr. Paul Collins, at that time in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities in the Museum and who helped me with whatever I needed to see in that Department’s archives, if he could make the necessary enquiries of the Central Archives, which he did but was told that the lady in question was away that day but would put out the relevant documents for me to work on. This she kindly did and I was able to meet her on my next visit to London, Miss Stephanie Clarke (later Mrs. Alder), a trained and most competent archivist, who had only recently been engaged by the British Museum. From the very start Stephanie and I got on like a house on fire, resulting in a very pleasant and productive working relationship, and over the next few months, or rather years, until 2014 when she left the Museum (eventually sorting out the archives of the Manchester City Football Club, her home town) I spent hours in the airless vaults of the Museum going through the many volumes of the Original Papers, and then the Officers’ Reports, the Letter Books where necessary, as likewise the Minutes of the Committee Meetings of the Museum’s Trustees, etc., et alia. None of these volumes are indexed as such, the Original Papers containing all the letters, various documents and other correspondence addressed to the Trustees and/or to the Principal Librarian, as well as other sundry papers. Of course only a few of these were relevant in any way to my own researches, but many were of great interest otherwise and fascinating to go through. As a result of these “researches” in the Central Archives, I extended my study to include any work carried out on Kuyunjik after Layard’s return to England in April 1851, that is by the vice-consul Christian Rassam and his English wife Matilda, by Layard’s trusted assistant the younger brother Hormuzd Rassam, and finally by Loftus and the artist Boutcher, this work on Nineveh in effect a direct continuation of that of Layard and inextricably connected with it, that is until February 1855 when Rawlinson left Baghdad nursing a complicated broken collar bone and finally Loftus probably in March 1855. At the same time I also extended my studies by including the results of Layard’s excavations of the Throneroom Suite of Sennacherib’s palace at the end of his first campaign in 1847, in addition to which there are the invaluable photographs and drawings made by John Russell of the surviving reliefs and sculptures in 1989 and especially in 1990.
The present book is in many ways the sequel of the preceding 1998 British Museum publication Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, but in no way attempts to improve upon Erika Bleibtreu’s excellent Catalogue of the Sculptures which makes up the main part of vol. I, a near impossible task, but where apposite to add any further information that has since come to light. Likewise of vol. II with some 520 plates of which 500 are of the surviving reliefs and other sculptures excavated in Sennacherib’s palace, together with photographs of previously unpublished relief fragments, some probably or possibly from Sennacherib’s palace, but also from other buildings, this an opportunity to publish as much such material as possible; and reproductions of the Original Drawings of reliefs and other sculptures executed by Layard, Cooper, Bell and Hodder. This incomparable and almost comprehensive collection of plates is widely referred to in the present work, thus making it unnecessary in most cases to re-illustrate yet once again these images. In the British Museum publication of Sennacherib the photographs of the original reliefs and of the Original Drawings have been reduced where possible to the same scale, or as close as feasible, this the painstaking and arduous work of Miss Ann Searight, but which is not fully acknowledged in Sennacherib and not realized and appreciated by many who use the book. This was achieved without the most recent technological developments and advances in electronic reproduction, which would have made her task so much easier, and where apposite as illustrated in the present work where when possible the reliefs, either the originals thereof or the drawings, have been reduced to the one scale of 1:20, which is about the smallest scale to reduce such reliefs and still see what is carved thereon.
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The present book opens with a chapter listing the sources drawn on for this work, that is in the main the manuscript and as yet mostly unpublished primary sources which are to be found in the Layard Papers now in the Department of Manuscripts of the British Library, formerly the library of the British Museum, in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum, and in the Central Archives of the British Museum. This chapter is thus supplementary to the primary sources detailed in my article in Iraq 65 (2003), but with the important addition of the British Museum’s Central Archives, of which I was in effect totally unaware at that time. New transcriptions are then given of Layard’s field notes, LN 1 from his first campaign of 1847, and of LN 2C, LN 2E and John Russell’s fair-copy version LN 3 all from Layard’s second campaign; this followed by attributions of the Original Drawings to the artists Layard, Cooper, Bell and Hodder, and also to Churchill who made drawings for Col. Williams of the Turco-Persian Boundary Commission in the spring of 1849.
Chapter 1 gives details of Layard’s first excavations on Kuyunjik, starting in April 1847, that is towards the end of his first campaign in Assyria when he was still working at Nimrud, but on 17 May Layard reported to the British Museum, “The sculptures & buildings at Nimroud are now nearly reburied … and [I] can now devote all my time to Kouyunjik”, where he excavated the Throneroom Suite of Sennacherib’s palace, the records of these discoveries supplemented by the important corpus of photographs and drawings made by John Russell of the reliefs still extant in 1989 and 1990. Layard left Mosul on 24 June 1847, returning there at the end of September 1849, yet in the meanwhile small scale excavations continued on the site of Sennacherib’s palace on Kuyunjik, first under the supervision of Layard’s young friend H.J. Ross, a businessman/entrepreneur based in Mosul, who continued Layard’s investigations in Forecourt H to the east of Throneroom B(I) and then on the western edge of the mound, but here on account of the depth of the ruins Ross was forced to work in tunnels, a sometimes perilous method. Ross in turn left Mosul in mid-July 1848, leaving the work on Kuyunjik under the foreman Toma Shishman and under the overall supervision of the British vice-consul Christian Rassam and his English wife Matilda. In late March 1849 while these excavations were still in progress on the south side of Court I(VI) Col. Williams of the Turco-Persian Boundary Commission passed through Mosul, and became so engrossed with the discoveries that he set up camp on Kuyunjik and in effect took control of the operations, staying until mid-April and sending detailed reports of the investigations to Layard, who was already in Constantinople on his way back to Mosul for his second campaign.
Chapters 2–5 deal with the discoveries made by Layard in his second campaign, October 1849-April 1851, these described in the sequence that they took place, divided by lengthy trips that Layard found time to make in the meanwhile. Thus Chapter 2 covers the first six months of this campaign until late March 1850 when Layard left for the Khabour, 366 typed pages and thus hardly suitable for a single article in the journal Iraq as I had originally intended. Chapter 6 deals with the investigations on the west side of the palace, Col. Williams’ “the western & detached galleries”, these treated here together as being more practical, the first work in this area that of Ross in early 1848 and finishing with L.W. King’s and R. Campbell Thompson’s final British Museum seasons in 1903–1905, when the enigmatic “New bull entrance” was discovered. Chapter 7 covers the post-Layard work on Kuyunjik, that is following Layard’s return to England on 28 April 1851 and until Rawlinson in turn left Baghdad in February 1855 and lastly Loftus in March the same year, or thereabouts.
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It would be nigh impossible to find the right words to express the inestimable gratitude and heart-felt thanks to my wife Petra for her unfailing encouragement and assistance in writing this book, but I trust that she will realize that without her help to complete it this work would have been almost beyond my own resources and capabilities. This the more necessary as I do not use a computer and thus do not have access to the internet, which sadly has become such a part of communications in the modern world, for instance in my correspondence with John Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, with members of the British Museum’s Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, and not least with Stephanie Clarke and her successor Francesca Hillier in the Central Archives.
To exasperate matters it was discovered in mid-2016 that I am suffering from an inoperable cancer which added tremendously to Petra’s burdens; but at the same time John Russell kindly agreed to act as “editor” and assist in the preparation for publication of my original typed manuscript of this study. He has already done much work on and published accounts of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh.
Geoffrey Turner