From 1845 to 1851 the English diplomat and adventurer Austen Henry Layard, with his assistant Hormuzd Rassam, excavated Nimrud and then Kuyunjik, the mound of ancient Nineveh opposite Mosul in Iraq, and uncovered the palaces of the Assyrian kings, with huge winged bulls and reliefs, which were shipped to the British Museum. In the ruins of Sennacherib's palace Layard found from 1849 thousands of clay tablets, and Rassam's later digging in the North Palace of Ashurbanipal in 1853 added more, together the library of Ashurbanipal, about 30,000 fragments in all. They included the Epic of Gilgamesh and astronomical texts. The discoveries made Assyria and Mesopotamian civilisation known.
Before and after
- 19th centuryPublication of Rigoletto
- 1850Publication of David Copperfield
- from 1850 to 1940Rise of first-wave feminism
- from 1850 to 1910Selknam genocide
- c. 1850Layard unearths the royal library of Nineveh
- 3 January 1850Birth of Sofia Kovalevskaya
- 7 March 1850Birth of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
- 6 June 1850Birth of Karl Ferdinand Braun
- 9 July 1850Death of Zachary Taylor
More in Civilizations & archaeology
- from 1760 to 1820Industrial Revolution
- 15 July 1799The Rosetta Stone is found
- 3 May 1841Founding of New Zealand
- 1891Discovery of Gundestrup cauldron
- 17 December 1907Founding of Bhutan
- 7 August 1908Discovery of Venus of Willendorf
The era
This moment belongs to the Industrial era (1760 CE to 1914 CE), steam, factories and revolutions. You can also browse everything in the 19th century.