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The Black Obelisk dates back to 827 B.C. The Black Obelisk is a magnificent biographical monument depicting battles and other events during the reign of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria from 858 to 824 B.C. The structure adds credence to the Bible with its mention of Jehu, the Israelite king who is written about in 1 to 2 Kings of the Old Testament. The four-sided obelisk is made of black limestone and measures almost seven feet in length. There are 190 lines of cuneiform text, and on each side, five rows of relief sculptures.
Late October 1845, Mosul, Ottoman Empire, later part of modern Iraq. Having departed Constantinople by steamer and traversing mountains on foot and valleys and plains on horseback, Austen Henry Layard, a twenty-eight-year-old French-born Englishman, arrived at this city on the west bank of the Tigris. On earlier journeys he had seen huge mounds in the deserts that seemed to promise the remains of ancient civilizations somewhere within their depths. Arab inhabitants of the land reported that in digging foundations for their homes they had unearthed many of the kinds of objects that Europeans came to search for so passionately. Proper excavation could yield dramatic results.
At that time the Ottoman Empire was in precipitous decline. Saved from conquest by Egypt some years earlier by a treaty prompted by international powers, the sultan embarked on a series of reforms. At Mosul. Layard proffered letters of introduction from the British embassy at Constantinople to the governor, Mohammed Pasha. It would have been dangerous for Layard to reveal the true nature of his mission; ostensibly he was there to hunt wild boars. The people were so terror-stricken by the pasha, the Turkish title for a governor, that the mere presence of a foreigner offered hope. But the pasha was cunning and mindful that a stranger could stir thoughts of rebellion within the souls of the discontented, and so in a test of their loyalty he feigned his own death. The pasha grinningly emerged in the broad light of day to the shock of the people and used the insult of their bliss over his reported passing to usurp property he somehow previously overlooked.
Such was the climate of politics and the oppressed conditions of the territory in which Layard traveled. On November 8 Layard and a small party, armed with an arsenal of weapons, ventured on a raft down the Tigris for Nimrud. When in Nimrud they walked to the largest mound. Broken pottery abounded, and in the rubbish were all sorts of old fragments. Layard summoned the workers to start excavating; commencing the operations that could lead to the ancient city of Calah, capital of Assyria.
After several days, as a diplomatic move, Layard returned to Mosul to report on his finding to the pasha, who without a doubt had been spying on his excavations. Gossip of momentous finds was already circulating among the townspeople of Mosul, and Layard feared interruption of his work by the insatiable pasha.
Layard returned to Nimrud, where he increased his crew to thirty, consisting of both Arabs and the robust mountain reared Chaldeans. Layard’s excavations continued before the watchful eyes of a notorious band of hundreds of horsemen who plundered villages and sometimes did the dirty work of the pasha for remuneration and booty. Soon the pasha did attempt to stop the excavation under the pretense that Layard was disturbing ancient burial grounds, But Layard was able to prevail. He knew that the most marvelous finds were still ahead.
Several huge animal and human figures were uncovered, and it appeared that submerged deeper were even larger buildings. Layard notified Sir Stratford Canning about his finding and requested a decree from the Porte, the Ottoman government, to enable him to continue his work without further interruption. The country’s turbulent political situation made further excavation impossible and Layard traveled to Baghdad to arrange for the removal of the objects he had already uncovered.
Layard returned to Mosul early in 1846 and was happy to see that a new pasha had made numerous reforms. The population was increasing to former levels as villagers who had fled were returning. Excavation continued, and out of the rubble in deep pits came magnificently sculptured objects: huge winged bulls, human heads, lions with human heads, and winged humans.
In November 1846 in Nimrud, after a blistering summer, when one hundred and fifteen degree plus temperatures even in the darkened conditions of the trenches brought work to a halt, the excavation continued, and on a greater scale than before. With armed guards and a communal system of living, it was a very sophisticated operation.
The mound encompassing more than sixty acres was by now divided into several alphabetically designated chambers. Inscribed slabs with interesting bas-reliefs were uncovered, as well as a pavement six feet below the rubble in one chamber. Around the mound’s middle, where a huge bull with wings which had previously been found. Layard directed a search for a building whose entrance he believed the bulls guarded. A trench was cut and some large slabs with inscriptions were found, but no walls yet. The workers cut the trench deeper but with no results as the days passed on. Just as Layard was about to discontinue the search, one of the workers uncovered the corner of a column of marble. They quickly uncovered the rest of the object, and soon a black obelisk was fully exposed to view in the trench.
It would be up to scholars to decipher the approximately two hundred lines of inscriptions. Layard immediately copied the lines and the bas-reliefs and had a team of his most honest workers guard it when the camp was asleep. By December a sufficient number of sculptures and objects had been collected to warrant another shipment to England. In mid-December the obelisk and several bas-reliefs were ready to be transported. They were taken to the river courtesy of the pasha’s heavy buffalo carts. Soon twenty-three cases of the ancient objects were on their way by raft, leaving the area where they had been made long, long ago.
Approximately twenty-seven hundred years after Shalmaneser III’s scribes documented his reign, it became public information for the ages and made a most valuable addition to the garland of biblical antiquities.
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