Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2014
Several Assyrian cities contained free-standing obelisks or other monuments of stone with registers of carved decoration. This article presents fragments of such monuments now in the British Museum Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, with references to others known to me.
Layard (1849: II, 53, 58) records that, during his brief soundings at Assur in 1847, one of his workmen “also picked up, amongst the rubbish, … several bits of black stone with small figures in relief, which appeared to have belonged to an obelisk, like that dug up at Nimroud”, and that his trenches, somewhere on the mound, produced “bits of basalt, with small figures in relief”. The British Museum has the following two fragments, from this period of Layard's work in Assyria, which are indeed entered in the original acquisitions register of the then Department of Antiquities as coming from Kalah Shergat, i.e. from Assur.