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Nineveh sails for the New World: Assyria envisioned by nineteenth-century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Extract

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.

The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:

Works on topography… tend to make us better acquainte d with every thing which exists in our native land, and are therefore conducive to the progress of real knowledge, to the diffusion of rational patriotism, and to virtuous sentiments and propensities …

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2002 

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Footnotes

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American Theological Library Association.

References

1 See Stukeley, William, Palaeographia Sacra: or, Discourses on Monuments of Antiquity that Relate to Sacred History: Number 1. A Comment on an Ode of Horace, Shewing the Bacchus of the Heathen to be the Jehovah of the Jews (London: Printed for W. Innys and R. Manby, 1736)Google Scholar; idem, Stonehenge: A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids (London: Printed for W. Innys and R. Manby, 1740); Piggot, Stuart, William Stukeley. An Eighteenth-Century Antiquary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950)Google Scholar; Haycock, David Boyd, “‘A Small Journey into the Country’: William Stukeley and the Formal Landscapes of Stonehenge and Avebury”, in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850 (ed. Myrone, Martin and Peltz, Lucy; Reinterpreting Classicism: Culture, Reaction and Appropriation; Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) 6782 Google Scholar; idem, William Stukeley: Science, Religion, and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2002).

2 Churchill, Derek D., “A Gothic Renaissance in Modern Britain”, in Modern Gothic: the Revival of Medieval Art (ed. Matheson, Susan B. and Churchill, Derek D.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 1035 Google Scholar; German, Georg, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas (trans. Onn, Gerald; London: Lund Humphries with the Architectural Association, 1972), especially 2473 Google Scholar; Aldrich, Megan, Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon Press, 1994) chapter 5Google Scholar, “Gothic Archaeology and Gothic Propriety”, 129–73; O'Donnell, Roderick, “‘An Apology for the Revival’: the Architecture of the Catholic Revival in Britain and Ireland”, in Gothic Revival: Religion, Architecture and Style in Western Europe 1815–1914 (ed. Maeyer, Jan De and Verpoest, Luc; Leuven, University Press, 2000) 3548 Google Scholar. The standard textbook on Victorian Gothic remains Eastlake, Charles L., A History of the Gothic Revival; an Attempt to Show How the Taste for Mediaeval Architecture Which Lingered in England During the Two Last Centuries Has Since Been Encouraged and Developed (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872)Google Scholar.

3 Anon., “Review of Nicholas Carlisle, Topographical Dictionary of England ”, The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 29 No. 01-April (1808) 266 Google Scholar.

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5 On the complex issue of the social movements behind the rise of modern archaeology in Victorian Great Britain, of which the Gothic Revival movement was a prime embodiment, see Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional-Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

6 Russell, Terence M., ed. The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt: Description de l'Égypte: The Monuments and Customs of Egypt: Selected Engravings and Texts (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001)Google Scholar; Reid, Donald Malcolm, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 31–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Otter, William, The Life and Remains of the Rev. Edward Daniel Clarke, LL.D., Professor of Mineralogy in the University of Cambridge (London: J. F. Dove, 1824) 477 Google Scholar, quoting a letter by Clarke. See Clarke, Edward Daniel, Travels in Various Countries of Europe Asia and Africa, Part 2: Greece Egypt and the Holy Land (2nd ed.; London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813)Google Scholar.

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9 Finden, William, Finden, Edward, and Home, Thomas Hartwell, Landscape Illustrations of the Bible; Consisting of Views of the Most Remarkable Places Mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. From Original Sketches Taken on the Spot (2 vols; London: John Murray, 1836)Google Scholar.

10 For an excellent survey on the topic, see Boase, T. S. R., “Biblical Illustration in Nineteenth Century English Art”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966) 349–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 A situation that was openly embraced by many at the time; for representative examples, see Rawlinson, George, The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records Stated Anew, with Special Reference to the Doubts and Discoveries of Modern Times. In Eight Lectures Delivered in the Oxford University Pulpit, in the Year 1859, on the Bampton Foundation (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1868)Google Scholar; idem, “Early Oriental History [review of F. Lenormant, Manuel d'histoire ancienne de l'Orient jusqu'aux guerres médiques]”, The Contemporary Review 14 No. April-July (1870) 80–100; idem, Historical Illustrations of the Old Testament (London: Christian Evidence Committee of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1871); Wiseman, Donald J., The Expansion of Assyrian Studies; An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on 27 February 1962 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1962) 11 Google Scholar; Moorey, P. R. S., A Century of Biblical Archaeology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) 124 Google Scholar. For parallels on the other side of the Atlantic, see Silberman, Neil Asher, “Between Athens and Babylon: The AIA and the Politics of American Near Eastern Archaeology, 1884–1997”, in Excavating Our Past: Perspectives on the History of the Archaeological Institute of America (ed. Allen, Susan Heuck; Colloquia and Conference Papers Vol. 5; Boston: Archaeological Institute of America, 2002) 115–22Google Scholar.

12 Paullin, Charles O., “Naval Administration under the Navy Commissioners”, United States Naval Institute Proceedings 33 (1907) 624 Google Scholar; Sha'ban, Fuad, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: The Roots of Orientalism in America (Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1991) 6581 Google Scholar.

13 Phillips, Clifton Jackson, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Harvard East Asian Monographs 32; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) 133–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sha'ban, , Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought, 83114 Google Scholar. American missionaries evince interest in European archaeological exploits in Mesopotamia (Khorsabad) as early as 1844; letter of Thomas Laurie, Mosul, August 8, 1844, Missionary Herald 41 (1845) 40–2Google Scholar. Ten years hence, with the help of Henry Rawlinson, the American missionary Henry Lobdell would procure Neo-Assyrian relief slabs and other antiquities for American colleges; Tyler, William Seymour, Memoir of Rev. Henry Lobdell, M.D., Late Missionary of the American Board at Mosul; Including the Early History of the Assyrian Mission (Boston: American Tract Society, 1859) 243–4Google Scholar; Merrill, Selah, “Assyrian and Babylonian Monuments in America”, Bibliotheca Sacra 32 No. 126 (1875) 320–49Google Scholar.

14 Patterson, Thomas C., Toward a Social History of Archaeology in the United States (Case Studies in Archaeology Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995) 23 Google Scholar. Everett strongly promoted American Protestant missionary efforts among the Greeks during the Greco-Turkish conflict; Everett, Edward, “Affairs of Greece”, North American Review 17 (1823) 398424 Google Scholar.

15 I am here thinking of the Biblical Repository and Bibliotheca Sacra, both founded by Edward Robinson, and The Princeton Review.

16 Stephens, John Lloyd, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land. Edited, and with an Introduction by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970) xxxviiixl Google Scholar.

17 Patterson, , Social History of Archaeology, 24 Google Scholar.

18 The classic early study of Native American historiography is Haven, Samuel F., Archaeology of the United States; Or, Sketches, Historical and Bibliographical, of the Progress of Information and Opinion Respecting Vestiges of Antiquity in the United States (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge Vol. 8; Washington, D.C.: 1856)Google Scholar, who patiently assembles every published theory of the origins of the mound builders in the process of permitting the most outlandish to collapse of their own weight. For details of the creation of the myth and its refutation, see Silverberg, Robert, Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (Athens, Ohio and London: Ohio University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. On the tragic hold of the ideologies of Manifest Destiny on Native American archaeology, see the brilliant study by Kehoe, Alice Beck, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology (New York and London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar.

19 Taylor, John L., “American Antiquities”, Bibliotheca Sacra 12 (1855) 433–67Google Scholar.

20 Haven, Archaeology of the United States, 32–8, 61, 129 Google Scholar; Squire, Ephraim George and Davis, Edwin Hamilton, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge Vol. 1; New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1848)Google Scholar.

21 The most up-to-date survey explorations in the Holy Land would figure in the voluminous writing career of Robinson, whose Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea. A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838, by E. Robinson and E. Smith. Undertaken in Reference to Biblical Geography. Drawn up from the Original Diaries with Historical Illustrations, first published in 1841, created in large measure the genre of the biblical archaeology report and travel-guide. Even the United States Navy financed the first full nautical exploration of the Dead Sea in the course of the voyage of Lieutenant W. F. Lynch in 1842, part of the United States Exploring Expedition, 1838–42, voyaging to South America, Oceania, and the Mediterranean; Lynch, William Francis, Narrative of the United States's Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849)Google Scholar; idem, Official Report of the United States's Expedition to Explore the Dead Sea and the River Jordan, by Lieut. W. F. Lynch, U.S.N. Published at the National Observatory, Lieut. M. F. Maury, U.S.N., Superintendent. By Authority of the Hon. Wm. A. Graham, Secretary of the Navy (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1852).

22 Keith, Alexander, Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion, Derived from the Literal Fulfillment of Prophecy; Particularly as Illustrated by the History of the Jews, and by the Discoveries of Recent Travellers (reprint of the 6th Edinburgh ed.; New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832)Google Scholar. One example will suffice: “‘You find here [Tyre] no similitude of that glory for which it was so renowned in ancient times. You see nothing here but a mere Babel of broken walls, pillars, vaults, &c. Its present inhabitants are only a few poor wretches, harbouring themselves in the vaults, and subsisting chiefly upon fishing, who seem to be preserved in this place by Divine Providence, as a visible argument how God hath fulfilled His Word concerning Tyre’”, 240, quoting from Maundrell's Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem.

23 Edwards, Bela Bates, “Ruins of Ancient Nineveh”, The American Biblical Repository 9 No. 25 (1837) 157–9Google Scholar. Edwards' essay was obviously inspired by the posthumous publication of Rich, Claudius James, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, and on the Site of Ancient Nineveh; With Journal of a Voyage Down the Tigris to Bagdad and an Account of a Visit to Shirauz and Persepolis (ed. by his widow; London: James Duncan, 1836)Google Scholar.

24 In the forefront of the economic and imperial engagements of the West in Asia, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions dispatched two New England-born missionaries to the Nestorians of Persian Azerbaijan in 1831. A mission was established in Urmiah in 1834 led by Justin Perkins (1805–96), a tutor from Amherst College, who for the next 36 years would work among the Nestorians and publish travelogue letters filled with intriguing news about regional antiquities, ruins, and ethnographic colour. Extremely naive diplomacy and rash deeds on the part of the American missionaries upset the delicate political applecart in the region, and in 1843 Kurdish forces slaughtered hundreds of the local Nestorian Christians. American newspapers and periodicals were alive with recriminations and fierce denunciations of Catholic and Anglican meddling in a missionary field that, many fulminated, rightly belonged to American Protestants. Perkins, Justin, Missionary Life in Persia: Being Glimpses at a Quarter of a Century of Labors Among the Nestorian Christians (Boston: American Tract Society, 1861)Google Scholar; Phillips, , Protestant America and the Pagan World, 147–59Google Scholar; Joseph, John, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western Christian Missions, Archaeologists, and Colonial Powers (Studies in Christian Mission Vol. 26; Leiden: Brill, 2000) 6785 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the competition between the American and British missions to the Nestorians of Urmiah, see Coakley, J. F., The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Mission (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 3054 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Layard, Austen Henry, Nineveh and its Remains (London: John Murray, 1849) 5 Google Scholar. While in Constantinople, Layard had by 1843 filled three manuscript notebooks with an unpublished study, “An Inquiry into the Origin, History, Language and Doctrines of the Chaldean or Nestorian Tribes of Kurdistan” (British Library MSS Add. 39061, 39062, 39063); Coakley, , Church of the East, 46 Google Scholar. Layard's assistant, Hormuzd Rassam, himself a Chaldaean whose brother's father-in-law was an ardent Christian Missionary Society missionary, would play a notable role in promoting the lineal linkage between the ancient Assyrians and the modern Nestorian Christians; Rassam, Hormuzd, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod: Being an Account of the Discoveries Made in the Ancient Ruins of Nineveh, Asshur, Sepharvaim, Caleh, Babylon, Borsippa, Cuthah, and Van. Including a Narrative of Different Journeys in Mesopotamia, Assyria, Asia Minor, and Koordistan (Cincinnati and New York: Curtis & Jennings, 1897) 167–83Google Scholar; Coakley, , Church of the East, 44–6Google Scholar.

26 Fletcher, James Phillips, Notes from Nineveh, and Travels in Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Syria (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850) 188 Google Scholar. F. Bowen expressed grave doubts regarding Layard's conclusion that the Nestorians of Kurdistan are the lineal descendants of the ancient Assyrians; Bowen, F., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains' ”, North American Review 69 (1849) 140 Google Scholar.

27 Although materials from Layard's excavations first became accessible to the general public in a jammed “Antiquities Gallery” in 1848, the first room devoted solely to the objects, the “Nimroud Room”, a vacant area in the basement, opened in mid-1849. The first of the bull colossi arrived in a flurry of publicity in October 1850. The southern side gallery saw the completion of its Assyrian relief installations in 1852, whereas the south and north side galleries and the Assyrian Transept would not be complete until February 1854. The Assyrian Basement Gallery would be finished in 1859. See Bohrer, Frederick N., “A New Antiquity: The English Reception of Assyria” (Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago, 1989) 236–44Google Scholar; idem, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 114–31; Jenkins, Ian, Archaeologists & Aesthetes: In the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800–1939 (London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by the British Museum Press, 1992) 252–3Google Scholar; Curtis, John, “Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities: The British Museum, London”, in Vorderasiatische Museen: Gestern-Heute-Morgen Berlin-Paris-London-New York: Eine Standortbestimmung; Kolloquium aus Anlass des Einhundertjährigen Bestehens des Vorderasiatischen Museums Berlin am 7. Mai 1999 (ed. Salje, Beate; Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2001) 3749 Google Scholar.

28 Regarding aesthetic assessments of Assyrian art in Victorian England, see Bohrer, , “A New Antiquity”, 251–62, 282–3, 294337 Google Scholar; Jenkins, , Archaeologists & Aesthetes, 68, 155–7, 160 Google Scholar; Bohrer, Frederick N., “Inventing Assyria: Exoticism and Reception in Nineteenth-Century England and France”, Art Bulletin 80 (1998) 336–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 For the details of Murray's role in the creation of Layard's Nineveh and its Remains, see Bohrer, , “A New Antiquity”, 135–51Google Scholar, and idem, “The Printed Orient: the Production of A. H. Layard's Earliest Works”, in The Construction of the Ancient Near East (ed. Ann Clyburn Gunter; Culture & History Vol. 11; Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1993) 85–103. On the life and career of the fascinating Victorian publisher John Murray III, see Murray, John IV, John Murray III 1808–1892; A Brief Memoir (London: John Murray, 1919)Google Scholar; Paston, George, At John Murray's: Records of a Literary Circle 1843–1892 (London: John Murray, 1932)Google Scholar.

30 On the social ramifications of the recovery of ancient Assyria in the 20th century, see Bohrer, “A New Antiquity”, passim; Bohrer, , Orientalism and Visual Culture, 66271 Google Scholar; Holloway, Steven W., Aššur is King! Aššur is King! Religion in the Exercise of Empire in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 10; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar chapter one, and the bibliography cited therein.

31 Publication data is based on RLIN and WorldCat data-base queries, and physical examination of the hard copy in the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago.

32 Anon., “Nineveh and Persepolis”, Art Journal ns 2 (1850) 225 Google Scholar.

33 On his life, see Bayne, Ronald, “Rawlinson, George (1812–1902)”, in Dictionary of National Biography, Twentieth Century, January 1901-December 1911, Supplement, Vol. 3 (ed. Lee, Sidney; London: Oxford University Press, 1951) 165–7Google Scholar.

34 Publication data is, again, based on a combination of RLIN and WorldCat queries and physical inspection of the volumes.

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36 Anon., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains ”, Littell's Living Age 20 (1849) 358–67Google Scholar; Anon., “Review of Layard, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon ”, Littell's Living Age 37 (1853) 423–7Google Scholar; Anon., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains ”, Littell's Living Age 21 (1849) 1943 Google Scholar; Anon., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains ”, The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review 24 No. 127 (1849) 355–62Google Scholar; Bowen, F., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains ”, North American Review 69 (1849) 110–42Google Scholar: “We cannot account for the sudden stinginess of John Bull in this matter [British Museum financing], as on other occasions he has shown great munificence in patronizing learning and art. The whole world will cry shame on the present Whig administration, if it allows the noble work to stop short of completion which a British subject has so admirably begun. Parliament gave £50,000 to pay Lord Elgin for robbing the Parthenon, an enterprise in which his lordship incurred no risk but that of covering his own name with eternal opprobrium, for plundering what even the Goths and the Turks had spared; will it not give at least a quarter as much to unearth the precious remains of Assyria?” (132); Anon., “Story of Ancient Nineveh”, The National Magazine: Devoted to Literature, Art, and Religion 1 (1855) 226–34Google Scholar; Anon., “A Day in Nineveh”, The National Magazine: Devoted to Literature, Art, and Religion 2 (1853) 247–52Google Scholar; Anon., “The Buried Palaces of Nineveh”, The National Magazine: Devoted to Literature, Art, and Religion 1 (1852) 108–12Google Scholar; Anon., “News from Nineveh”, The International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science and Art 1 (1850) 476 Google Scholar; Anon., “Austen Henry Layard, LL.D.”, The International Magazine of Literature, Art, and Science 2 No. 4 (1851) 433–5Google Scholar; Larned, W. A., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains ”, The New Englander 7 (1849) 327–8Google Scholar; Bacon, L. W., “Review of A. H. Layard, Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (Putnam edition)”, The New Englander 11 (1853) 457–70Google Scholar; Hawks, F. L., “Review of A. H. Layard, Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon ”, Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art 1 (1853) 498509 Google Scholar: “We have been so long accustomed to hear ourselves denounced by the English press, as an all-grasping, unprincipled, and ‘annexing’ race, wandering over the face of the earth for no purpose but that of plunder or traific; that it is quite refreshing to encounter a story told by an English gentleman of what he has seen done by Americans, who, in a holy cause, have entered upon, and successfully labored in, a field to which English philanthropy in the East has not even found its way. Let us hear what Mr. Layard has to say of our American missions in the East” (503); Anon., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains (Putnam edition)”, Methodist Quarterly Review 31 No. 4 (1849) 577–94Google Scholar; R. Davidson, “Review of W. Osburn, Ancient Egypt, Her Testimony to the Truth of the Bible; F. L. Hawks, The Monuments of Egypt; E. W. Hengstenberg, Egypt and the Banks of Moses; Layard, A. H., Nineveh and its Remains”, The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 22 No. 2 (1850) 260–79Google Scholar; Collins, C., “Review of A. H. Layard, Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (Harper & Brothers edition)”, Methodist Quarterly Review 36 No. 1 (1854) 113–31Google Scholar; Chapin, A. B., “Review of A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains (Putnam edition)”, The Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register 2 No. 2 (1849) 245–63Google Scholar; Anon., “Austen Henry Layard”, National Magazine: Devoted to Literature, Art, and Religion 8 (1856) 556–60Google Scholar.

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50 Kitto, John, Daily Bible Illustrations; Being Original Readings for a Year on Subjects from Sacred History, Biography, Geography, Antiquities, and Theology, Especially Designed for the Family Circle (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1871) 1: 84–5Google Scholar.

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52 See, for example, Peloubet, Francis Nathan, ed., Select Notes on the International Sabbath School Lessons for 1878. Explanatory, Illustrative, and Practical. With Four Maps, a Chronological Chart, and Table of the Signification and Pronunciation of Proper Names (Boston: Henry Hoyt, 1878) 5965 Google Scholar, the lesson for March 17, 1878, “Hezekiah and the Assyrians”, which provides a mostly accurate etymology of Sennacherib's name, details about his palace in Nineveh, and quotations from his annals. An accurate sketch of the geography of the Assyrian heartland follows, together with a succinct résumé of modern excavations, and an account of Sennacherib's siege of Lachish. The sophisticated tone of this line-by-line commentary, harmonizing as it does excavations, Assyrian texts, and reconstructed biblical history, is indistinguishable from a host of twentieth-century historico-critical commentaries, such as the Anchor Bible volume on 2 Kings, Cogan, Mordechai and Tadmor, Hayim, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible Vol. 11; Doubleday & Company, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Barrows, Elijah Porter, Sacred Geography, and Antiquities. With Maps and Illustrations (New York: American Tract Society, 1875) 312–13Google Scholar.

54 Bissell, Edwin Cone, Biblical Antiquities: A Hand-Book for Use in Seminaries, Sabbath-Schools, Families and by All Students of the Bible (Green Fund Book Vol. 5; Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1888)Google Scholar, passim.

55 Yaggy, L. W. and Haines, T. L., Museum of Antiquity: A Description of Ancient Life: The Employments, Amusements, Customs, and Habits, the Cities, Palaces, Monuments and Tombs, the Literature and Fine Arts of 3,000 Years Ago (Kansas City: Wever & Company, 1882) 435 Google Scholar.

56 For examples of early British “Assyromania” in the guise of porcelain, jewellery, and prints, see the catalogue of the superb exhibition mounted in the British Museum during the 49th RAI, McCall, Henrietta and Tubb, Jonathan, I Am the Bull of Nineveh: Victorian Design in the Assyrian Style (London: PDC Publishers (privately printed), 2003)Google Scholar, and Bohrer, , Orientalism and Visual Culture, 174–8Google Scholar.