‘Misfit Objects: Layard’s Excavations in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Biblical Imagination in mid-nineteenth Century Britain’

Abstract

In 1852, an engraved image caught the attention of the readers of the Illustrated London News. The engraving showed the impressive entrance of the newly-built British Museum in London (see Fig. 1). A large ramp leads up to the museum entrance and is surrounded by workmen and gentlemen, presumably curators, who witness a spectacular scene: on the ramp, an enormous sculpture of a winged lion is being trundled into the museum. This image became iconic for the successful integration of such archaeological finds into the British Museum. What the engraving did not depict are the difficulties and the failures the excavators and trustees of the British Museum were facing at the excavation site and in the museum. The winged lion was uncovered as part of the excavations of the British adventurous explorer and collecting antiquarian Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) in Ancient Mesopotamia, a land previously mainly known through the Bible. 1 Layard undertook his first excavation in Nimrud (that he first mistook for Nineveh) in 1845. The shipping of artefacts to Britain, especially of the Great Bull and Lion, was documented as a national event in the Illustrated London News. For its readers in Victorian Britain, the lion was thus much more than an impressive and colossal statue. The sculpture was the first of a row of materialised proofs-the most valuable of which were excavated objects bearing inscriptions-that were meant to confirm what had hitherto been subject to peoples' imagination and religious belief. In October 1848 the first cargo arrived at the British Museum. Layard returned to England in the same year, where his book Nineveh and its Remains (1849) became a bestseller. 2 Reviews of Layard's book in the popular press promoted the idea that the Victorians were uncovering their own past by digging in the archaeological remains of places mentioned in the Bible. Above all, the book conveyed the impression that the excavations were designed as a purposeful enterprise with a clear goal. In contrast to the parallel French excavations, for which museum display and the expansion of the national collection was entirely the driving focus, in Britain the enterprise was a mission to trace biblical accounts. In 1800, the Bible was a virtually unchallenged canonical text in the intellectual and religious life of the western world (geology being the only, but not uncontested, challenger, with respect to the age of the earth). Alongside classical sources the Bible remained the main source for a history of Mesopotamia until 1845 when excavations started. The Victorian view on the biblical land was also shaped by artistic depiction of Mesopotamia: paintings and drawings focussing mainly on Babylon's ambivalent role. The mid nineteenth-century therefore materialised the Bible to a hitherto unknown extent. Besides the excavated objects, photographs of biblical sites also helped shape and alter the imagination of the biblical land. 3 These objects and depictions enhanced and prohibited biblical imagination at the same time. On the one han...

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“…The Illustrated London News celebrated the arrival of lamassu at the British Museum and their display to a curious public. 36 In political cartoons of the 1850s, Layard as or with lamassu variants was a recurring theme. 37 39 Lawrie would also feature lamassu in his designs for the entrance to the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale (architect: James Gamble Rogers, taking over from an initial design by Goodhue), the decorations around his Bronze Doors for the Library of Congress Annex (architect: Paul Cret), and for the 'Statue of Civilization' for Goodhue's Los Angeles Central Library.…”