In 1872, George Smith gave a lecture to the recently founded Society of
Biblical Archaeology in which he announced his reconstruction of a tablet
in which the Great Flood was mentioned. This event greatly revived the
interest in Mesopotamian archaeology. For Rassam this discovery would
cause archaeology to occupy most of his latter active years. However, this
time would be tainted by accusations by Wallis Budge, aWgure already
mentioned in Chapter 5, who at the time was an assistant at the British
Museum. Budge charged Rassam with having stolen cuneiform tablets during
the excavations to sell to dealers in Baghdad. The antiquities market was
raging with this type of material. It has been calculated that in the 1880s the
Baghdad antiquities market put on sale between 35,000 and 40,000 cuneiform
texts (Andre ́n 1998: 46). Disbelieving Budge’s accusations, Rassam’s old
supporter, Layard, wrote to a friend accusing Budge of having spread his lies
to supplant Rassam, one of the most honest and straightforward fellows I ever knew,
and one whose great services have never been acknowledged—because he is a ‘nigger’
and because Rawlinson, as his habit, appropriated to himself the credit of Rassam’s
discoveries.
(Larsen 1996: 355).Although Rassam’s name was cleared in court, he received a much smaller
compensation than he had claimed. Budge, however, was promoted in the
museum to help him pay his legal fees (Larsen 1996: 366).
Parallel to this research, between 1877 and 1900 several French archaeologists
excavated in sites in Iraq and Iran which were somehow connected to the Bible.
The main scholars involved were Sarzec, Loftus, Dieulafoy, and de Morgan. In
Iraq, the French vice-consul in Basra, Ernest de Sarzec (1832–1901) excavated in
Tello, ancient Girsu. This was one of the most important capital city-states
in ancient Sumer, one of the oldest civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia. Sumer
had several urban centres such as Eridu, Nippur, Ur and Uruk (Erech in the
Bible) in the delta of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. In 1881, Sarzec sold aWrst
collection ofWgurines, cylinders, seals, and inscribed slates to the Louvre. Osman
Hamdi Bey, nevertheless, would stop his excavations until an agreement was
reached for theWndings to go to Constantinople. French diplomacy, however,
managed still to obtain favours from the Sultan Abdu ̈lmecid when excavations
resumed in 1888 (Eldem 2004: 136).
Some of the other archaeologists coming from France excavated in Iran.
There, the reigning shah for most of the second half of the nineteenth century
was Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96). He continued with his predecessors’
eVorts at controlled Westernization—for example, the telegraph was intro-
duced in the 1860s—, but fears of its consequences led to extreme diYculties
for Europeans in obtaining economic concessions. Nasir al-Din Shah even
144 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism