Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/23

Rh In 1851, France decided to resume the excavations at Khorsabad, which had been abandoned on the departure of Botta. M. Place, his successor at Mossoul, continued and completed the excavations, which had been little more than begun. His labours lasted till 1855, but unhappily most of the sculptures recovered by him are now at the bottom of the Tigris. The great work in which he was helped by the skill of Felix Thomas is the most precious result of his enterprise.

The era of heroic explorations seems to have closed with Layard and Place, but during the last thirty years there has always been some English agent sounding the flanks of the Assyrian mounds. Under the surveillance of Sir Henry, then Colonel, Rawlinson, the East India Company's resident at Bagdad, many discoveries were made by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, Sir Henry Layard's collaborator, and by the late William Kennett Loftus. Finally, we must mention George Smith, who died at Aleppo in 1876, on the eve of his third journey into Assyria. He had visited that country for the first time in 1873, at the expense of the Daily Telegraph, which had placed a sum of one thousand guineas at his disposal, and had afterwards presented all the objects he had sent home to the British Museum.

We have enumerated all these dates with some dryness, and without any attempt to write a taking narrative, because we wished to impress upon our readers how recent these discoveries are, how they have followed closely one upon another, and well within the lifetime of a single man. The difficulty of our task will thus be evident. We are making a first attempt to bring the results of all these explorations into a connected form, and to present them systematically to the reader. There is one thing that stands out very strongly in the whole inquiry. The monuments, by which the art of a great vanished civilization is represented in our museums, come mainly from the ruins ofroyal dwellings. The chief idea suggested by the words Khorsabad, Nimroud and Kouyundjik, is the excavation of the magnificent palaces raised by the Assyrian monarchs within a period of something more than three centuries. Following a custom still in vogue with the native rulers of Egypt and India, of Persia and Turkey, each prince signalized his accession by the commencement of a palace which should be entirely his own. To establish