Discoveries in 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. With Maps, Plans and Illustrations.
Classics of Exploration Series, Time Life Books, 1985, 665 pages, facsimile reprint of the Memorial Edition (1894), full brown faux leather binding with gilt and red titling and decorations, all edges gilt, many fold-out maps and illustrations, condition: as new.
Sir Austen Layard ( 1817 1894) was an English Assyriologist, traveller, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He was born to a mostly English family in Paris and largely raised in Italy. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known'. He is credited with discovering the Library of Ashurbanipal.
His record of this expedition, "Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon", was published in 1853. During this 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.
This book is part of the Classics of Exploration Library . The books in the library have been out of print for decades, and therefore not accessible to the public. Now brought back into print after many decades, the material have been copied in facsimile from the original editions, with each title meticulously hand curated.
The book is as close as possible to the original work.