Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

DURING 19 CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 131
identified with Semiramis], lady of the palace, his mistress."
In another room of the same building he came
upon the well-preserved stele of Samsi-Adad IV. (825-
8 12 b. c.) 3
father of the former and son of Shalmaneser II. J
1
while among heaps upon heaps of broken sculptures in the
so-called central palace he unearthed fragments of an inscribed
black obelisk of Ashurnasirapal II., which when
complete must have exceeded any other "Assyrian obelisk
so far discovered in size. But his principal work was carried
on at Qoyunjuk. Shaft after shaft was sunk in the
ground to find traces of a new palace — the one desideratum
above others in those early days of exploration. As Victor
Place never excavated in the northern half of the mound,
so liberally allotted to him by Rawlinson, 2
Rassam profited
by his absence, and placed some of his Arabs very close to
the line of demarcation drawn by his chief, in order to obtain
some clue as to the probable contents of that forbidden
section. But his endeavors did not prove very successful.
Meanwhile he had also opened trenches in the English
southern half of the mound, which yielded a white obelisk
nearly ten feet high, covered with bas-reliefs, and an inscription
of Ashurnasirapal II., the upper half of a similar
monument, and the torso of a female statue from the palace
of Ashurbelkala, son of Tiglath-Pileser I.
Valuable as all these and other recovered antiquities were
in themselves, they shrank almost into insignificance when
compared with the character and mass of Layard's accumulated
treasures. Rassam felt this very keenly, and was dis-
1
That even Shalmaneser II. himself built at the temple of Nebo was shown
later by George Smith, '* Assyrian Discoveries," 3d ed., New York, 1876,
pp. 73, seq.
2
Who, after Botta's and Layard's fruitless attempts, very evidently did
not regard that section worth keeping. For on other occasions he took quite
a different attitude both against Place and Loftus in his vigorous defence of
the interests of the British
Museum.