Excerpt from Assyrian and Babylonian Literature: Selected Translations, With a Critical Introduction After a lapse of twenty years, in the spring of 1840, Austen Henry Layard visited the ruins of Nineveh as iden tified by Rich. In 1842 Layard returned to Mosul without having made any excavations. Here he met P. C. Botta, the French consul, who had been interested in this work by the Orientalist Mohl, at that time professor in Paris. Layard, being without the means necessary to carry on the excavations, strongly urged Botta to direct his attention to the work. Botta himself was without means at this time, but in 1843 he was enabled to begin, and he continued until 1845, during which time he laid bare the city walls of Khorsabad and discovered many valuable inscriptions. In I849 he published his Monuments of Nineveh, by order of the French Government, in which are to be found 220 pages of inscriptions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.