the same sites in the early 1850s. TheWrst major pieces of sculpture staged at
the British Museum arrived in 1852 and were soon perceived as serious
competition to those housed in the Louvre. As with the archaeology of the
classical world, including Egypt, in Mesopotamia archaeology had become an
arena for imperial rivalry. The importance conferred by the heritage author-
ities was reXected in the creation of a new department of Oriental Antiquities
at the British Museum in 1860 (Caygill 1992: 38).
OYcial resistance to the imperial appropriation of the Mesopotamian
heritage seems to have been minimal to begin with. Although permits had to
be sought, the literature does not highlight impediments similar to those seen
in the case of Turkey (Chapter 6). During the nineteenth century there is no
information concerning an interest in archaeology being developed by local
scholars. The only native archaeologist seems to have been Hormuzd Rassam
(1826–1910), of whom it has been said that he became ‘perhaps more English
than the English themselves’ (Reade 1993: 59). As he once stated, his ‘aim was
to discover unknown ediWces, and to bring to light some important Assyrian
monument for the gratiWcation of theBritishpublic, especially those who
valued such discoveries for their biblical or literary studies’ (in Reade 1993: 59,
my emphasis). Hormuzd Rassam learnt the techniques of archaeologicalWeld-
work—and the combatant attitude towards the French—from Layard. Rassam
continued for a few years after Layard stopped hisWeldwork. In the early 1850s
he worked directly for the consul in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, the major
decipherer of the cuneiform script (together with Edward Hincks (Adkins
2003: ch. 13; Larsen 1996: ch. 20; Pope 1975: ch. 4) and Franc ̧ois Lenormant
(1837–83)), making discoveries such as that of the palace of Ashurbanipal.
Rassam would come back to archaeology in the 1870s, and the conXicts
that arose then assist us in exploring the rise of racism in European archae-
ology. After a period of almost twenty years working elsewhere for the British
government, in 1877 Hormuzd Rassam was asked to lead an archaeological
expedition to Assyria and Babylonia. This was related to George Smith’s
(1840–76) discovery of a clay tablet from Nineveh in which the Deluge was
alluded to. In 1866 Smith had been employed in the British Museum as a
‘repairer’ with the aim of searching the tablet collections andWnding joins
between fragments. He was mainly self-trained in Assyriology, and perhaps
theWrst to admit the complexity of making correlations between the Old
Testament and the Assyrio-Babylonian sources. As he said:
I must confess that the view held by the two Rawlinsons and the German professors is
more consistent with the literal statements of the Assyrian inscriptions than my own,
but I am utterly unable to see how the biblical chronology can be so far astray here as
the inscriptions lead one to suppose.
(Moorey 1991: 12).Biblical Archaeology 143