It is only within the past half-century that the wonderful story of
early Eastern civilization has been gradually pieced together by
excavators and linguists, who have thrust open the door of the past
and probed the hidden secrets of long ages. We now know more about
"the land of Babel" than did not only the Greeks and Romans, but even
the Hebrew writers who foretold its destruction. Glimpses are being
afforded us of its life and manners and customs for some thirty
centuries before the captives of Judah uttered lamentations on the
banks of its reedy canals. The sites of some of the ancient cities of
Babylonia and Assyria were identified by European officials and
travellers in the East early in the nineteenth century, and a few
relics found their way to Europe. But before Sir A.H. Layard set to
work as an excavator in the "forties", "a case scarcely three feet
square", as he himself wrote, "enclosed all that remained not only of
the great city of Nineveh, but of Babylon itself".[4]

Layard, the distinguished pioneer Assyriologist, was an Englishman of
Huguenot descent, who was born in Paris. Through his mother he
inherited a strain of Spanish blood. During his early boyhood he
resided in Italy, and his education, which began there, was continued
in schools in France, Switzerland, and England. He was a man of
scholarly habits and fearless and independent character, a charming
writer, and an accomplished fine-art critic; withal he was a great
traveller, a strenuous politician, and an able diplomatist. In 1845,
while sojourning in the East, he undertook the exploration of ancient
Assyrian cities. He first set to work at Kalkhi, the Biblical Calah.
Three years previously M.P.C. Botta, the French consul at Mosul, had
begun to investigate the Nineveh mounds; but these he abandoned for a
mound near Khorsabad which proved to be the site of the city erected