Regardless of Layard’s actual purposes, whether religious or opportunistic, his
discoveries, together with the transcriptions of texts by the British consul in
Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, 3 made it possible to identify many kings and
cities mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures within the Assyrian texts. Layard
excavated in Nimrud, once Assyria’s second capital, known as Calah in
Genesis. In Kuyunjik—Nineveh—among many other things, he unearthed
some slabs depicting the siege of Lachish described in 2 Kings 18:13–14.
Layard popularized hisWndings mainly with his 1849 publication ofNineveh
and its Remains. In addition, in an attempt to excite the British public’s
imagination with regard to the ancient civilizations of Assyria and, more
generally, of Mesopotamia, the book was promoted by the Christian Evan-
gelicals as a conWrmation of the divine punishment of Nimrud and Nineveh
announced by the prophets in the Bible (Moorey 1991: 9). Links between the
Mesopotamian texts and the Bible continued after Layard’s, and Botta’s,
endeavours (Caygill 1992: 39, 46–8; Larsen 1996: 22, 68, 283, 309; Lloyd
1947: chs. 10–12). The names of Shalmaneser (mentioned in Kings 17:13),
Hezekiah (2 Kings 18–19), Judah (Isaiah 36–7), and Menahem of Samaria on
slabs commissioned by the Assyrian King ‘Pul’ (2 Kings 15–19) were all
identiWed around the early 1850s. In hisDiscoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh
and Babylonof 1853, Layard was able to provide a list of someWfty-Wve rulers,
cities and countries in Assyrian and Hebrew that were both in the Old
Testament and in the newly uncovered Assyrian texts (Moorey 1991).
However, archaeology in Mesopotamia was not only about the Bible; there
was much more to it. Layard’s extensive preserved writings are an invaluable
source for investigating his intentions, a task which would otherwise be
impossible (Larsen 1996; Reade 1987). They make it clear, for example, that
Layard never considered Assyrian monuments to have achieved the supremacy
reached by the Greeks; his view, shared by many others, was that Assyrian art
was an inferior ancestor to classical art. His notes also make clear that he saw
archaeology as something that would bring glory to his own nation, and the
deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions as a matter of national honour. The
involvement of Britain and France in the archaeology of Mesopotamia was felt
by him to be like a competition. ‘I think’, wrote Layard in a letter to Canning in
1845, ‘we might manage to transmit some sculpture to Europe as soon if not
sooner than the French. This would be very important for our reputation’ (in
Larsen 1996: 77). And in another letter written several months later he said, ‘if
the excavation keeps its promise to the end there is much reason to hope that
Montagu House [the British Museum] will beat the Louvre hollow’ (ibid. 96).
The rivalry reached its peak when teams sent by both countries excavated at
3 On the decipherment of Persian cuneiform see Pope (1975: ch. 4) and Adkins (2003).142 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism