Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela (c.1127-c.1173) travelled in the Middle East, India and Central Asia. He described how a bridge across the Tigris River connected Mosul with the ancient ruins of what had been the city of Nineveh. Pietro della Valle (1586-1652) was the first modern European traveller to visit the ruins of Ur and in 1616 he identified the remains of Babylon. In 1786, Pierre-Joseph de Beauchamp (1752-1801) carried out the first known excavations at Babylon. In the early nineteenth century Claudius James Rich (1787-1821) made surveys of Babylon and Nineveh. In the 1840s sporadic digging gave way to the extensive excavations by Paul Emile Botta (1802-70) at Nineveh and Khorsabad, and by Austen Henry Layard (1817-94) at Nineveh.
The trilingual inscription carved about 90 metres (≈300 ft) above the ground on the rock face at Behistun in Iran, describes the triumph of Darius-1 the Great (64; r.522-486 BC) over his enemies. The text was repeated in the Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite languages and this allowed Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-95) to initiate the successful decipherment of cuneiform scripts.
The mass of tablets discovered at Nineveh by Layard came to the British Museum (est.1753) in 1854/5. In 1866 the trustees of the Museum employed George Smith (1840-1876) to assist Rawlinson in sorting the fragments. In 1872 Smith published his translation of the Chaldean account of the Great Flood, known today as the final chapter of the Epic of Gilgamesh (27th century BC). Interest was worldwide and the proprietors of The Daily Telegraph (est.1855) decided to fund Smith to go to Nineveh. In May 1873 Smith recovered a fragment of a tablet that fitted into the only place where there was a serious blank in the story.
Excavations at Assyrian sites uncovered thousands of tablets and inscriptions dating from the first millennium BC. The vast majority were written in Akkadian (Semitic) but it was discovered that some were in a non-Semitic language. In 1869 Jules Oppert (1825-1905) suggested the language be called Sumerian from the title ‘King of Sumer and Akkad’ that appears in numerous inscriptions.
In 1877 Ernest de Sarzec (1832-1901) heard of the existence of deposits of cuneiform tablets at Telloh, about 140 miles (≈225 km) southeast of Baghdad. His excavations revealed for the first time the character of the Sumerian civilisation and he recovered many important pieces of Sumerian art, e.g. the Stele of Vultures and statues of Gudea (r.c.2144-c.2124 BC). The site has been identified as Girsu, the capital of the early Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
Robert Koldewey (1855-1925) is known primarily as the excavator of Babylon, where his digs revealed the foundations of the Temple of Marduk, the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II (c.69; r.605-562 BC) and the Ishtar Gate.
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley (1880-1960) is best remembered for his work at Ur which was the burial site of many Sumerian royals. Inside the tombs were large paintings of ancient Sumerian culture at its zenith along with gold and silver jewellery, cups and other furnishings. The most extravagant tomb was that of ‘Queen’ Puabi (around 2500 BC), amazingly untouched by looters.
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