Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894)

Sir Austen Henry Layard in Bakhtiyari Costume (pictured left). His travel mate was Edward Mitford, a British colonial administrator in Ceylon, Mitford is often considered a sober Christian Zionist. They also find a man called Hormuzd Rassam [1] who during the Russo-Turkish War went on a mission of inquiry to report on the condition of the Christian communities of Asia Minor and Armenia. What a bunch of Archeologists.


See also: Discoveries among the ruins  of Nineveh and Babylon; with travels in Armenia, Kurdistan, and the desert: being the result of a second expedition undertaken for the Trustees of the British museum. By Austen H. Layard.

Mavi Boncuk |

Austen Henry Layard (5 March 1817 – 5 July 1894) was a British traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author and diplomatist, best known as the excavator of Nimrud. He was born in Paris.

The Layards were of Huguenot descent. Through his mother, a daughter of Nathaniel Austen, banker, of Ramsgate, he inherited Spanish blood. His uncle was Benjamin Austen, a London solicitor and close friend of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1820s and 1830s.

A. H. Layard at Kuyunjik. Drawing by Solomon Caesar Malan, 1850

This strain of cosmopolitanism must have been greatly strengthened by the circumstances of his education. After spending nearly six years in the office of his uncle Benjamin, he was tempted to leave England for Ceylon, and he started in 1839 with the intention of making an overland journey across Asia. After wandering for many months, chiefly in Persia, and having abandoned his intention of proceeding to Ceylon, he returned in 1842 to Constantinople, where he made the acquaintance of Sir Stratford Canning, the British ambassador, who employed him in various unofficial diplomatic missions in European Turkey. In 1845, encouraged and assisted by Canning, Layard left Constantinople to make those explorations among the ruins of Assyria with which his name is chiefly associated. This expedition was in fulfilment of a design which he had formed, when, during his former travels in the East, his curiosity had been greatly excited by the ruins of Nimrud on the Tigris, and by the great mound of Kuyunjik, near Mosul, already partly excavated by Paul-Émile Botta.

Layard remained in the neighbourhood of Mosul, carrying on excavations at Kuyunjik and Nimrud, and investigating the condition of various peoples, until 1847; and, returning to England in 1848, published Nineveh and its Remains: with an Account of a Visit to tile Chaldaean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Painters and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians (2 vols., 1848–1849).

To illustrate the antiquities described in this work he published a large folio volume of Illustrations of the Monuments of Nineveh (1849). After spending a few months in England, and receiving the degree of D.C.L. from the university of Oxford, Layard returned to Constantinople as attaché to the British embassy, and, in August 1849, started on a second expedition. His record of this expedition, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, which was illustrated by another folio volume, called A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh, was published in 1853. During these expeditions, often in circumstances of great difficulty, Layard despatched to England the splendid specimens which now form the greater part of the collection of Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum.
[1] Hormuzd Rassam (1826–1910) was born in Mosul, Iraq, and educated in England. He acted as an assistant to Layard at Nimrud. Rassam continued the excavations for the British Museum from 1852 to 1854. He worked on the citadel in the central area and in the eastern sector, where he uncovered the remains of the Nabu Temple. In 1878, Rassam returned briefly to Nimrud and excavated in the vicinity of the ziggurat, or temple tower. His archaeological work resulted in many important discoveries and the collection of valuable epigraphical evidence.One of his greatest discoveries were the clay tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh, the worlds oldest literature.

Ada Alexandria (née Julius), Lady Layard (born 1849), Wife of Sir Charles Peter Layard; daughter of Alfred Alexander Julius.
Mavi Boncuk

21 September 1878 — Therapia


Saturday. 21st September [1878]. The steam cutter went down to bring up Lady Dickson & May Boyd. The latter went to Mrs W. Hansons till Monday as we cannot take her in. I had my Turkish lesson. We lunched at 1. Musurus Pasha came to call & lunched with us. Directly after Henry & all the party excepting me went away in the Salamis. The Admiral to return to the “Alexandra.” The young people to go to a cricket match at Kadi-keui & Henry, the Burrs & Lady Hornby to go to the Scutari burying ground. At 3½ I went out in the carriage to pay visits. Went to Buyukdéré but found no one at home. As I was looking for Mme Moussafer Bey’s she drove by in a pony carriage & stopped to tell me she had been twice to see me &c. I told her I was in the act of looking for her house but I would return another day. I then drove to Yeni-keui to call on Mme Fernandez who was out so I came in & had tea & waited for fishing time. Virginia P. came to say her father wd fetch me so I dressed and then later she came to say he could not get a caique so I settled to read. A few minutes after she fetched me in the found caique & we went out but caught nothing & when we saw the Salamis come in we did the same.

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