Assyriology

Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC, to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD, so the topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria".

Although scholars can draw from a large corpus of literature, some tablets are broken, or in the case of literary texts where there may be many copies the language and grammar are often arcane.

[1][2] Originally Assyriology referred primarily to the study of the texts in the Assyrian language discovered in quantity in the north of modern-day Iraq, ancient Assyria, following their initial discovery at Khorsabad in 1843.

Subsequent research showed that during the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writing had also been used for other languages such as Ugaritic, Hurrian, Hittite or Elamite, which became subsumed under the increasingly ambiguous term Assyriology.

"[14] Abbé Beauchamp's memoirs of his travels, published in 1790, sparked a sensation in the scholarly world, generating a number of archeological and academic expeditions to the Middle East.

[15] Before his untimely death at the age of 34, Claudius Rich wrote two memoirs on the ruins of Babylon and the inscriptions found therein, two works which may be said to "mark the birth of Assyriology and the related cuneiform studies.

"[17] One of the largest obstacles scholars had to overcome during the early days of Assyriology was the decipherment of curious triangular markings on many of the artifacts and ruins found at Mesopotamian sites.

[19] From 1850 onwards, there was a growing suspicion that the Semite inhabitants of Babylon and Assyria were not the inventors of cuneiform system of writing, and that they had instead borrowed it from some other language and culture.

Layard's discovery of the library of Ashurbanipal put the materials for reconstructing the ancient life and history of Assyria and Babylonia into the hands of scholars.

After the death of George Smith at Aleppo in 1876, an expedition was sent by the British Museum (1877–1879), under the conduct of Hormuzd Rassam, to continue his work at Nineveh and its neighbourhood.

Meanwhile, from 1877 to 1881, the French consul Ernest de Sarzec had been excavating at Telloh, ancient Girsu, and bringing to light monuments of the pre-Semitic age; these included the diorite statues of Gudea now in the Louvre, the stone of which, according to the inscriptions upon them, had been brought from Magan in the Sinai peninsula.

In 1886–1887 a German expedition under Robert Koldewey explored the cemetery of El Hiba (immediately to the south of Telloh), and for the first time made us acquainted with the burial customs of ancient Babylonia.

Another German expedition, on a large scale, was despatched by the Orientgesellschaft in 1899 with the object of exploring the ruins of Babylon; the palace of Nebuchadrezzar and the great processional road were laid bare, and W. Andrae subsequently conducted excavations at Qal'at Sherqat, the site of Assur.

Even the Turkish government has not held aloof from the work of exploration, and the Museum at Istanbul is filled with the tablets discovered by V. Scheil in 1897 on the site of Sippara.

In the deepest part of the excavations, inscribed clay tablets and fragments of stone vases are still found, though the cuneiform characters upon them are of a very archaic type, and sometimes even retain their primitive pictorial forms.