Mysterious Mesopotamia: discovering an ancient world (Artefacts series: 3)
- Anna Tietze
- Oct 23
- 8 min read
The nineteenth century was a time of major archaeological discovery in Egypt and the near East, but it is striking that the European discovery of Egypt’s past preceded that of the region’s oldest civilization, that of Mesopotamia (Iraq), by some years. Why was this?
The remains of ancient Egypt had always had a place in Western consciousness. Collected and written about by the ancient Greeks and Romans, they had found their way into Europe from the earliest days. The remains of Mesopotamia were, by comparison, lost in the mists of time. References to ancient Mesopotamian places such as Nimrud, Nineveh and Babylon were notable in the Old Testament, but this was all; apart from some small relics, the larger physical evidence of these places was almost completely absent.
A major reason for this was that while the ancient Egyptians had built in durable stone, the Mesopotamians had made much use of mud-bricks, softer and more friable. The wetter climate of the region had also played its part, hastening the inexorable decay of buildings and monuments. While Egypt’s massive pyramids and even some of its smaller structures were still visible – although substantially buried by drifting sands – the palaces and ziggurats of Mesopotamia had disappeared. All that remained were large mounds of earth in the middle of otherwise flat land. These mounds, named tells, in fact told little of what lay beneath.
The discovery timelines were different, but the story of how Mesopotamia was discovered is, like that of ancient Egypt, a story of complex inter-relationships between politics, economics and intellectual endeavour. Both regions were governed, distantly, by the Ottoman Empire, but both were perceived to be ripe for more immediate exploitation by European powers. In the case of Egypt, the French bid under Napoleon to gain control of the country was driven by competition with Britain and its burgeoning empire. And the British haste to stop Napoleon and his army in its tracks in Egypt was driven by a concern that French control of Egypt might complicate access to India, the jewel in the imperial crown.
India was a factor, again, in the British urge to explore Mesopotamia. With its grand rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – it promised a potentially useful inland-river route to India via the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. British exploration was carried out from the 1830s to access these rivers for steamship traffic. A profitable British-owned service was established soon afterwards, though for internal traffic, for in addition to the region’s usefulness for accessing India, it was viewed as offering potential benefits of its own, with its rich agricultural possibilities in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (oil came later).
As in Egypt, the early days of exploration in Iraq were a battle between Britain and France - and again one played out again between governments at the highest levels, as well as between their representatives on the ground. Those who explored the ancient Iraqi sites in fact occupied an interesting position. They were often, in their primary capacity, employed by their respective governments as diplomats, or had some connection with the diplomatic service. This service, before the arrival of demanding entrance requirements at the end of the 19th century, was still largely an aristocratic gentleman’s club, staffed by men who did not necessarily have wide political experience. What they often had instead, however, was a scholarly interest in the regions they were posted to, and an acquaintance with their languages. Diplomats in the near East were often avowed Orientalists, serious scholars with knowledge of the history of the area, and a keen interest in furthering this knowledge while in their posts. Archaeology, in its infancy and not yet professionalised, was the obvious route to this. With local overlords offering relatively little resistance to the removal of artefacts, and museums at home eager to receive them, the diplomats had considerable freedom to indulge their scholarly interests, and a good deal of political power to help gain their ends.
The first of Britain’s notable diplomat-explorers in Iraq was Orientalist Claudius James Rich (1786-1821) who served as British Resident in Baghdad for six years in the early nineteenth century. The official political work of Rich, as of those who came after him, was to further Britain’s policy of keeping Russian interests contained, maintain trade routes to India, and help support the governors of the Ottoman Empire territories against Russian and any other threats. But in addition to this diplomatic work, Rich pursued his real interests, researching the country’s ancient history, writing on this, and building up a personal collection of ancient artefacts (small objects such as coins and manuscripts – these the first cuneiform texts to be brought back to Europe). Rich’s extensive collection, and his published studies of ancient Mesopotamia (Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811 [1815] and the posthumously-published Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan and on the Site of Ancient Nineveh etc [1836]) both had a posthumous influence he could not have predicted at the time of his early death. Much of his collection was sold by his widow to the British Museum to become the basis of its Mesopotamian collection, while his publications were read widely by the small but growing band of European Orientalists.
One such Orientalist was the German Julius von Mohl, who spent much of his life in Paris and served as president of the Asiatic Society. When Mohl read Rich’s accounts of Mesopotamia he was persuaded that France needed to join the exploration of this little-known land and in particular the area around Mosul in the north, where it was known that the famous Nineveh and Nimrud and other sites of the Neo-Assyrian empire (10th-7thc BC) had been located. The French government was advised by Mohl to appoint Paul-Emile Botta (1802-70) as French consul to Mosul in 1842. Botta was originally a naturalist but was proficient in near Eastern languages so was appointed to this position which was, again, only partly to do with political representation of his country. Another, and ultimately much more influential part of Botta’s portfolio, was to explore Iraq for its ancient treasures.
Botta served in Mosul for only a few years in the 1840s. In that short time, however, he oversaw extensive French digs at Dur-Sharrukin (present-day Khorsabad, just north of Mosul), capital of the neo-Assyrian empire under King Sargon II in the 8thc BC. With active French governmental support, ongoing advice from Mohl, and the help of government-supplied artist Eugene Flandin, Botta’s team was able to achieve much. And the competition with British teams was a constant.
Botta’s chief British rival was Austen Henry Layard (1817-94). Layard had already travelled extensively in the near East when in 1842 he met the British Ambassador to the Ottoman empire, Stratford Canning, in Constantinople. Canning gave Layard employment at the embassy but also encouraged him to explore the Mosul region for ancient Assyrian remains. Layard was also supported by Sir Henry Rawlinson, Baghdad-based political agent to the British government (1847-9) and a keen Orientalist and specialist in near Eastern languages. From 1845 until 1852, with the backing of these officials, Layard’s teams dug extensively at Nineveh and Nimrud, often – in the early years – in close competition with Botta’s teams.
Semi-friendly lines were drawn in the sand to demarcate French and English dig sites, but lines were sometimes crossed and artefacts taken from the rival country’s zones. In the relatively short time that Layard was in Iraq, his teams, like Botta’s, made major discoveries and in 1848 he published his illustrated study Nineveh and its Remains. This work had a readership far beyond the narrowly scholarly, an abridged version published by John Murray giving it a wide appeal and helping create a popular interest in all things Assyrian. Layard, meanwhile, had moved into politics, first in Britain and then overseas, where he served as part of the diplomatic service. He ended his working life as British ambassador at Constantinople.
While figures like Botta and Layard won fame for their discoveries, it was large contingents of poorly-paid local men who did the actual digging. Someone who bucked this trend was the Iraqi Hormuzd Rassam (1826-1910) who seems to have been the first locally-born archaeologist of the region. Through his brother, British vice-consul at Mosul, Rassam met Layard who hired him as an assistant supervisor at Nimrud. With excellent understanding of local conditions and intimate acquaintance with the local people, Rassam was able to make highly informed guesses about potentially rich sites.
After Layard had left Iraq in the early 1850s, Rassam continued to work on site in the Mosul area. He made fabulous discoveries of King Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh (including the discovery of the eponymous Rassam cylinder, and tablets narrating the Epic of Gilgamesh). And he was not alone. Although Botta had left, his replacement, French consul Victor Place, oversaw continued digs at Khorsabad (1852-4), while Orientalist scholar Fulgence Fresnel, French consul at Baghdad, supervised work on ancient Babylonian sites. Finds from the British and French contingents were destined for the British Museum and Louvre respectively.
Rassam’s work as an archaeologist halted briefly in the 1860s when, mirroring the career trajectory of so many in this world of exploration, he served for a while as a diplomat to the British government, carrying out missions in Yemen and Ethiopia. It was as an archaeologist, however, that he had his greatest successes. Returning to Iraq in the 1870s, he began to excavate again on behalf of the British Museum and made further important discoveries. It helped enormously that his long-time friend, Layard, was now British ambassador in Constantinople and had concluded a beneficial arrangement with the Ottoman Sultan regarding ownership of finds. There were further important artefacts uncovered at Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon, including, at the latter, the Cyrus cylinder (c.539 BC) which announced Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylon on behalf of Persia. The British Museum was again the beneficiary of these, as of the artefacts uncovered by Basra-based vice-consul John George Taylor, working further south in the ancient region of Ur.
From its beginnings in the nineteenth century, then, European exploration of ancient Mesopotamia had seen intellectual interest in the distant past entwined with very contemporary interests in commerce and power. Diplomats – British and French – had played a very important part in this. They were selected for their interest in and knowledge of the area and its history and they bridged the gap between the worlds of historical scholarship and politics, while the artefacts they collected, transported back to Europe, served as a status symbol for their respective governments.
The same interplay of interests was to be true in the early twentieth century, as exploration in Iraq and the wider region continued. But now, if anything, the explorers and researchers were even more deeply embedded in the politics of their day. As archaeology acquired a new scientific rigour, important figures such as Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley were to advance the cause of ancient history with significant discoveries and research, while also performing official and sometimes highly covert duties for the British government. But this is a twentieth-century story and forms another chapter in the history of ancient artefacts of the near East.
Comments