Austen Henry Layard's Nineveh: The Bible and Archaeology in Victorian Britain

Abstract

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Austen Henry Layard uncovered parts of several ancient, buried Assyrian cities, including the capital, Nineveh, and dragged sizeable bits of them back to the British Museum. His book, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), was a Victorian sensation. This article explores some aspects of Layard's book and discoveries that captured the Victorian imagination. Many were fascinated with Assyrian remains as they related to the history of art. Layard's work was also received as having helped to illuminate or even confirm the Bible. Although some statements by Layard had helped to fuel this interest, he was not personally an orthodox Christian. Despite having been standardly portrayed this way by scholars, these early archaeologists were not Christian apologists who exaggerated the scriptural connections of their discoveries. To the contrary, subsequent developments, particular the deciphering of the cuneiform writing, revealed that Layard and his follow pioneering Assyriologist, Henry Rawlinson, had underestimated the extent to which these findings related to stories in the Bible.

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