Mound at Khorsabad

This building, on its platform, accounts for the main mound at Khorsabad on the summit of which we lived. Smaller mounds covering the ruins of the gateways and the line of the city walls themselves can be seen spreading out into the cultivated plain on either side. It was one of these gateways No. 7 in the plan made by Botta’s successor, Victor Place, in which we started excavating in 1930.1

C1) This is now incorporated in the

American expedition’s fine perspective reconstruction of the whole palace

setting. G. loud. Khorscbad. VoL II. Frontispiece.

(2) Reproduced in G. Loud. Khorsabad. VoL L

Chicago 1936. Fig. L

We pegged out a careful trench across one

side of the little hill, and, as might have been expected, dug for several days

without finding anything at all.

Pierre Delougaz

At about that date our party was joined by Mr. Pierre Delougaz, who is now Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum, and afterwards it was not difficult to discern that his arrival marked the beginning of our seven years experimenting and discovery in the realm of excavating technique. In fact, so much of the effective work referred to in the remainder of this chapter must be credited to Delougaz’ insight and initiative, that it may be well here to explain his presence at that time in Iraq.

In the previous winter of 1927/28,

Breasted’s Iraq Expedition had suffered what could be regarded as an

unfortunate false start, in that Dr. Edward Chiera, who had been in charge of

it, had unhappily died almost before it had time to get under way. Chiera

himself had at first concentrated on the Khorsabad palace.

He had arrived to find the site pillaged

and neglected, with everywhere signs of the looting and destruction which had

continued throughout the long aftermath of Botta’s and Place’s excavations. The

place had to all intents and purposes become a stone quarry, from which the

sculptured slabs were extracted to be broken up and burnt into lime for local

building purposes.

There was then a village on the summit of

the main mound, and he noticed in the courtyard of the local agha’s house a

fine bearded head of one of King Sargon’s officials, retained as a curiosity

and now being used as a chopping block for wood. The sight of such vandalism

was as Chiera with remarkable restraint observed in his report  “irritating to say the least”, and he spent

the remainder of his first season in effecting such rescue work as he could

manage; packing and removing the surviving slab fragments in several of the

principal chambers, (PL. 9).

This in the end involved him in what proved

to be an almost embarrassing discovery the broken pieces of one of the largest

portal sculptures of all— a winged bull from the entry to Sargon’s throne room,

which now stands in the Oriental Institute Museum.