When in the 18th century European travellers passed through the obscure Ottoman provinces of Mosul and Baghdad, in what is now Iraq, they sometimes paused to contemplate the wreckage of Nineveh and Babylon. We know today that every Mesopotamian mound is an accumulation of history, but at the time it was far from obvious that significant relics of ancient civilizations, known on Biblical authority to have existed but at the same time condemned and destroyed by Divine justice, might still survive beneath the surface of the ground.

In 1820 Claudius James Rich, British Resident in Baghdad, investigated Nineveh and heard of sculptures that had been found among the ruins, but it was 1836 before his widow published an account of his visit. That book was the catalyst for a phase of frantic exploration, between 1843 and 1855, which led ultimately to the discovery both of ancient Assyria and of an entire civilization, that of ancient Mesopotamia, which stretched back past Babylonians and Sumerians to the very evolution of writing and the dawn of history. The discoveries were more than academic. In 1848. when the first results began to be known in Great Britain, they helped undermine some of the fundamental assumptions of established society.