11. botta finds nineveh

11. botta finds nineveh

The Bible tells of God's chastisement of the Jews by the Assyrians, "the rod of mine anger," of the Tower of Babel and the splendours of Nineveh, of the seventy-year captivity and the great Nebuchadnezzar, God's judgement upon the "whore of Babylon" and the chalice of His wrath to be poured by seven angels over the lands along the Euphrates. The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah pour forth their terrifying visions of the destruction to come upon "the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of Chaldees" excellency that shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah," so that "wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses and dragons in their pleasant palaces" (Isaiah 13-19, 22). Was it but a legend, or could there be any historical proof?

Flat was the land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, but here and there mysterious mounds rose out of the plain. Dust storms swirled about these protuberances, piling the black earth into steep dunes, which grew steadily for a hundred years, only to be dispersed in the course of another five hundred. The Bedouins who rested by these mounds, letting their camels graze on the meagre fodder growing at the base, had no idea what they might contain.

The man who was destined to drive the first spade into that ground was born in France in 1803. Until Paul Emile Botta was past thirty he had not the slightest intimation of the task that was to be his life's work. For it was at that age that he, then a physician, returned from an Egyptian expedition. At his arrival in Cairo he had a number of boxes among his luggage. The police demanded that they should be opened. They contained, meticulously stuck on rows of pins, twelve thousand insects.

Fourteen years later this physician and entomologist published a five-volume work on Assyria that proved no less significant a stimulus to the scientific study of Mesopotamia than the twenty-four-volume Description de l'Egypte had been for Egyptology.

Botta is still remembered as the first to disclose the remains of a culture that had flowered for almost two thousand years, and for more than two millennia and a half had slumbered under the black earth between the two rivers, forgotten by men. His fame came to him when he and his small team had just turned the first spadeful of earth, and the ancient walls had come to light. These walls, when freed of the worst of the dirt that clogged them, proved to be richly carved. There were all kinds of pictures, reliefs, terrible stone animals, and the most curious figures imaginable — bearded men, winged animals, bulls with lion heads. Very soon Botta no longer doubted that he had discovered, if not all of Nineveh, certainly one of the most splendid palaces of the Assyrian kings. Botta's finds demonstrated that a culture older than the Egyptian had once flourished in Mesopotamia to give credence to Biblical accounts. It had risen in might and splendour, only to sink, under fire and sword, into oblivion for millennia.