In 1840 Henry Layard arrived in Mosul and was intrigued by the ruin mounds on the east bank of the river Tigris. The encounter kindled in him an ambition to excavate them. This he did with singular success in the years 1845–51, aided by Hormuzd Rassam, a young Assyrian Christian from Mosul.
Layard opened excavations on Kuyunjik, the main mound of Nineveh, in 1846 and in the next spring began to uncover chambers belonging to a vast building, which would turn out to be the palace of king Sennacherib, who ruled Assyria in 704–681 bc. The real success of this first campaign of excavations in Assyria was the exploration of the mound at Nimrud, south of Mosul, which brought to light a ninth-century palace full of sculpture. When funding was exhausted Layard returned to London with samples of this sculpture, which brought him immediate renown and, eventually, funding for a second campaign. During 1847 and 1848, his workmen continued to investigate the palace on Kuyunjik, but major advances were not made until his return in September 1849. By the time Layard left for the second time, in April 1851, the palace was thoroughly explored.
From this building Layard shipped back to London a set of eye-catching antiquities that outdid even the sculptures from Nimrud. The palace's interior walls were lined with limestone slabs carved in bas-relief, and its gateways guarded by vast sculptures of mythical animals. The Assyrian sculptures depicted the religion, culture, court life and military successes of a great Mesopotamian empire in the ninth to seventh centuries bc. Like the Egyptian tomb-paintings and funerary sculptures, they opened a window on a whole new world of art.
Deep inside Sennacherib's palace, Layard's workmen made another remarkable find: many thousands of clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform writing. From these tablets, and others found in 1853 by Hormuzd Rassam in a second palace on Kuyunjik, the discipline of cuneiform studies was born. It was called Assyriology in recognition of the location whence came the first major finds of tablets.
Despite his success at Kuyunjik and Nimrud, Layard did not continue with archaeology. He published popular accounts of his excavations but never wrote up an academic report, as became standard practice among later archaeologists. Instead, the notes, letters, drawings and other papers in which he documented the daily progress of the excavations, and described what he found there, remained unpublished and little known.
By the mid-twentieth century, art historians and archaeologists were curious to understand how the palace at Nineveh functioned architecturally and to recreate the context and sequence of its wall reliefs. In this they were handicapped by the lack of an excavation report for specialists. No one could see this more clearly than the late Geoffrey Turner, who had collaborated in compiling two monumental works on the sculptures of the palaces on Kuyunjik. In continuing his study of Layard's unpublished notes and drawings, Turner's original plan was to present his findings in a series of journal articles, but such was the vastness of material that he ended up writing the book under review. After his death in 2018 the task of bringing his typescript to publication fell to John Russell, the foremost expert on the current state of preservation of the archaeological remains at Sennacherib's palace. No one could have been better qualified to edit Turner's typescript and see it through the press.
The resulting volume begins with an introduction to the documentary sources: Layard's notes, plans and sketches. The central part of the book is a narrative account of the excavations, in five chapters organized chronologically, beginning with Layard's arrival in Mosul in October 1845 and ending with his return to England after his second series of excavations in June 1851. Chapter 1 is devoted to the initial, unproductive attempts at Kuyunjik, which led Layard to switch attention to Nimrud, and to the final six weeks of this first campaign, when he returned to Kuyunjik and uncovered Sennacherib's throne room.
Chapters 2–5 cover Layard's second campaign of excavation at Nineveh, from September 1849 to April 1851. The division of this narrative into chapters coincides with Layard's three periods of absence: in the Khabour (spring 1850), at Lake Van (summer 1850), and in Baghdad (winter 1850–51). During these 18 months Layard's workmen, led by his foreman Toma Shishman, worked through all the seasons without a break. They exposed, mostly by tunnelling beneath the surface of the mound, several miles of interior and exterior walls in Sennacherib's palace, and in this way recovered the plan of the major part of it. Though the building had been emptied and burnt, much sculpture remained, and, dumped in a bathroom, lay the clay tablets that accelerated the decipherment of cuneiform and revealed the political, cultural and socio-economic history of ancient Mesopotamia.
Chapter 6 is a study of the excavation of a suite of chambers called the Southwest Terrace Wing. Much of this was explored not by Layard but by his successors, especially L.W. King in 1903. This part of the palace still presents formidable problems in interpretation. A seventh chapter is a general account of the excavations at Nineveh immediately after Layard had departed, supervised by Christian and Hormuzd Rassam and Henry Rawlinson. The book is concluded with plates, plans, bibliography and indexes.
The outcome of Turner's research is a report of Layard's two campaigns of excavation at Nineveh that reliably describes in minute detail and with critical acumen what Layard found and where. The exact archaeological context of many of the finds thus emerges for the first time. Between them, Turner and Russell have given present and future scholars a magnificent resource that must be the starting point of all future study of the excavations at Nineveh and the discoveries made there. In effect, this is the specialists’ report on the earliest archaeological investigations at Nineveh that has been lacking for so long.
