Treasure Seekers: Edge of the Orient Page #4

---

I live among the ruins,

and dream of little else.

But still Layard had to face

his biggest challenge.

Somehow he had to transport

his treasures back to London.

It's quite one thing to dig up

these large human

headed lions or bas relief,

some of which weighed several tons.

And quite another thing

to take them back to London or Paris.

And this is where Layard was a genius

he had learned to improvise.

He acquired the loyalty of

the local people.

He got a cart built, and there were

wonderful pictures in his books

of luring these lions with ropes

down on to one of the carts,

and the famous occasion

when the ropes broke

and the lion fell like this.

And they thought it was broken,

but it wasn't.

And the workmen burst into

a wild dance.

And they towed this thing

to the river.

And they built a raft of timber and

supported it on inflated goatskins.

I watched the rafts

until they disappeared,

musing upon the strange destiny

of their burdens.

After adorning the palaces

of Assyrian kings,

they had been buried unknown

for centuries

beneath the soil trodden by

the Persians, the Greeks and the Arabs.

They were now to cross

the most distance seas

to be finally placed

in a British museum.

great revolutions in Europe

is the year when all of

the Assyrian stuff

that Layard had discovered was

first displayed in England,

and it was a sensation.

He was lionized by society.

He became a public figure.

A young man who had gone out East

and made good.

Look what he had bought

for Britain.

Layard wrote a best seller

about his adventures

uncovering the impressive

civilization of the Assyrians,

lost to history

for more than 2,000 years.

But he struggled to understand

the strange beasts he'd discovered,

and which had taken London by storm.

This creature stood to

either side of the doorway

of an important location in the

Assyrian world to guard the way in.

And that lion's body

will tear you apart,

and those wings of a bird of prey

will overtake you,

and that human head

will out think you.

And believe me, the Assyrians

believed that,

and would have been suitably

intimidated

just as the British were suitably

impressed

by this extraordinary exotic creature

that he brought back.

The treasures of Assyria

were trophies of Empire.

But to many people, they were more.

In the secular 19th century,

the historical validity of

the Bible was under attack.

Were its stories true,

or were they simply stories?

Perhaps the answer could be found

in the mounds of Mesopotamia.

With mounting public interest,

the British Museum decided to fund

a second expedition.

In 1849, Layard tackled a mound

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes