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Hormuzd Rassam and his discoveries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Julian Reade
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Extract

About 1965 I gave a lift to an old villager somewhere near Shergat in northern Iraq. Hearing that I was English, he said that he remembered the English and produced, instead of some casual polite remark, the very specific comment: “they were just people, they introduced fair courts.” It was, though he could hardly have known it, a reference to the remarkable work of Sir Edgar Bonham-Carter, who in the early days of the Mandate founded Iraq's School of Law and re-established the machinery of justice, drafting a great deal of the necessary legislation himself and creating a system which in principle still exists. He was one of those British officials whose services in Iraq are indeed memorable, and it is a great honour for me to be giving the eighth Bonham-Carter Memorial Lecture today.

We in the small archaeological world, however, think of Sir Edgar especially as a leading spirit in the establishment of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, first chairman of the Executive Committee, and husband of course of Lady Bonham-Carter who is still one of the School's best friends. So I thought it appropriate that I should devote this lecture to another man who also, in his own way, bridged two cultures (Figs. 1, 2) and who was in fact the first Iraqi archaeologist, with great achievements and discoveries to his credit.

Yet Hormuzd Rassam, instead of being crowned with the honours that were his due, ended his life in disappointment and relative obscurity. His reputation has never fully recovered from the malicious attacks made upon it in his lifetime, and from the failure then to acknowledge his contribution to our knowledge of ancient Iraq. His reputation as an archaeologist in particular has suffered from the vastly improved archaeological techniques which were developed in Iraq a generation after he himself had left the field. He is condemned for not recording and publishing his excavations properly, and for being a treasure-hunter rather than a seeker after truth, when such criticisms might more reasonably be directed

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 55 , October 1993 , pp. 39 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1993

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References

1 Lady Bonham-Carter died a few months after this lecture was delivered. It was the last occasion on which I spoke with her at any length, and I should like to pay my own tribute here to an indomitable personality. She was physically small but possessed enormous presence. Some knew her as Lady BC, but I doubt if they dared say it to her face. I first met her at one of the parties which, with characteristic generosity, she used to give after Iraq School meetings. It was at the Anglo-Belgian Club in Belgrave Square; then entering her eighties, she regaled us with an account of a camping trip she had just made to Afghanistan. Discussions such as this would be interrupted by some other engagement, a first night at the theatre or a performance of modern dance; she might well have been travelling there by underground, and returning before the end of dinner. Even from her wheel-chair, the very last time I saw her, greeting friends at the memorial service for Stewart Perowne, Charlotte radiated more vitality than many people half her age.

2 I have listed the sources for Rassam's life, in so far as they are known to me, in my introduction to the Catalogue of the Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, Vol. VI (1986), xiii–xiv Google Scholar (henceforward Catalogue); a short account of his life, using a source now lost, appeared in the second supplement of the Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. III, 158–161 Google Scholar, and is reprinted in Vol. VII, xii–xv, of the same Catalogue. The sources consist largely of his own published writings, and of letters and reports in the archives of the British Museum and the British Library. There is some more elsewhere, including family papers about which Mr Clive Rassam, great-grandson of Hormuzd, has kindly spoken to me, but the crucial diaries and the unpublished autobiography appear to have perished, by fire and flood, in the 1950s.

The present paper is based primarily on the sources listed above. Specific references have been given below only for direct quotations.

3 Quoted by Waterfield, G., Layard of Nineveh (1963), 197–8Google Scholar.

4 Gadd, C. J., The Stones of Assyria (1936)Google Scholar, remains perhaps the best account of the Assyrian excavations of 1846–1855.

5 Rassam, H.. Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (1897; henceforward Asshur), 1 Google Scholar.

6 Waterfield, op. cit., 143.

7 Asshur, 23.

8 Transactions of the Society for Biblical Archaeology 7 (1882), 39–40 Google Scholar.

9 Asshur, 27.

10 Rawlinson, G., The History of Herodotus, Volume I (1858), 484 n. 7Google Scholar.

11 Narrative of the British Mission to Theodore, King of Abyssinia (1869). There is an excellent general account of this affair by Moorehead, Alan, The Blue Nile (first published, 1962)Google Scholar.

12 Asshur, 54.

13 Catalogue, xvii.

14 Translation: e.g. Fish, T., in Thomas, D. Winten (ed.), Documents from Old Testament Times (1958), 92–4Google Scholar.

15 Asshur, plan opposite p. 224.

16 Catalogue, xix.

17 Transactions of the Society for Biblical Archaeology 7 (1882)Google Scholar, plans following pp. 52 and 56.

18 De Meyer, L. (ed.), Tell ed-Dēr III (1980), plan 3Google Scholar.

19 Peters, J. P., Nippur (1897), I, 221; II, 110–1Google Scholar.

20 Asshur, opposite pp. 222, 226, 376.

21 Asshur, 200.

22 Asshur, 284.

23 Catalogue, xxiv.

24 Waterfield, op. cit., 478.

25 Mallowan, M. E. L., Twenty-five Years of Mesopotamian Discovery (1956), 79–80 Google Scholar.