Besides the extensive pictographic, cuneiform and alphabetic records of the Ashurai at the British Museum, there are also some outstanding monuments as well. They were discovered for the most part by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Layard was knighted for his work and later Hormuzd Rassam took over the work and continued excavations for the British Museum. Both men wrote on their findings.3
It is profoundly interesting for me to trace Sir Austen Henry Layard's journey to ancient Mesopotamia in the mid-nineteenth century. At the time Henry was a young man of course. His knighthood came as a result of his achievements as an excavator for the British Museum. He was headed for India to take up a military career, but decided to search for the Biblical city of Nineveh. His journey was permanently interrupted. The rest as they say is history, because Layard is greatly responsible for starting the new field of archeology in its modern sense.
On the 18th of March, 1839, Austen Henry Layard left Aleppo and headed east, through Bir Orfa, and Nisibin. The journey through Orfa and Nisibin is significant, since these two cities on the way to ancient Ashur were later to become in the first centuries after Christ centers of the Ashurai Christian scholarship and missionary enterprise.
Upon his arrival in Mosul, in the north of present-day Iraq, he began to inquire of ancient cities of Ashur, whose ruins had been reported by a few early travelers. Luckily for him, the British vice-consul in Mosul was of Ashurai heritage. In fact, he was the brother of Hormuzd Rassam. He decided to help Layard.
Mr. Rassam presented Layard to Mohammed Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Mosul at the time. Plans for excavation were approved, but preparations for excavation were delayed due to the nature of the proposed enterprise, the activity of digging up graves was viewed with much suspicion by the Turkish authorities and the Mohammedan natives in general, who seemed to feel an aversion for uncovering the past.
The Turks and Kurds were generally suspicious of Western interests. The Moslem population became increasingly jealous as the archeological excavations proceeded to uncover the roots of Civilization and Christianity. Eventually this jealousy turned to murderous rage against the Ashurai and prevented the Ashurai in maintaining their autonomous Christian communities in the entire Middle East.
Finally, everything was settled when Layard was asked to give all the gold, silver and precious stones to the Pasha and keep whatever else he found. Layard quickly agreed, since his interest was the actual discovery of the City itself, the last great capital of Ashur, Nineveh of the Bible. What jewelry or trinkets he might find were of less interest.
Not only did Layard find and excavate ancient cities of Ashur, but of more importance, as a Westerner, he rediscovered the remnant of the Ashurai nation.4
*3. Layard, A. H., The Monuments of Nineveh, 2 vols., London 1849 & 1853; Nineveh and its Remains, 2 vols., London 1850; Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, London 1850; Hormuzd Rassam, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod, New York 1897.
*4. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, vol. 1, pp. ix, x (of the Preface).