The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, 1840-1860.

• Author: Bahrani, Zainab
• Position: Review

By MOGENS TROLLE LARSEN. New York and London: ROUTLEDGE, 1996. Pp. xiv + 390, illustrations. $35.

Mogens Trolle Larsen is an Assyriologist and an historian who, for the past decade, has been investigating the origins of the discipline of Mesopotamian studies. He has produced a series of articles on the subject, and now we have his long awaited book available in (the author's own) English translation: The Conquest of Assyria. The book retells the story of the earliest days of Mesopotamian archaeology and is written in the tradition of such classics as S. Lloyd's Foundations in the Dust (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955). The author recounts the lives of men such as Paul Emile Botta, Victor Place, and Hormuzd Rassam. The true hero of the story, however, is Austen Henry Layard, to whom the majority of the book's pages is devoted. The conquest of Assyria is thus portrayed as Layard's personal conquest of difficulties he encountered among "wild Arabs" (pp. 54, 249) in a disease infested Orient (pp. 26, 30, 276).

Larsen does not disguise his intense admiration for Layard and writes the book as a biography of the man: his childhood, his adventures, his loves, his triumphs, and travails. The source material is Layard's own published works, and a series of unpublished letters in the British Library, that provide new and interesting information regarding Layard and his viewpoints. However, Larsen often takes Layard's words at face value, failing to consider that they were meant to impress a public (in hopes of raising funds) by describing adventure and danger in an unknown land. His letters are also presented in a similar fashion. Larsen's slight of Layard's motivation in effect turns his own narrative into a hagiography. Indeed, in the closing paragraph of the book Larsen describes his own pilgrimage to the "wonderful Palazzo on the Grand Canal" where he "thinks back with some pride to the occasion a few years ago when I lectured on Assyrian matters here, in what had probably been Layard's study" (p. 363). Layard's descriptions of the Orient, we are told, are "completely free of racist overtones" (pp. 28, 55). Yet we meet with statements on the stupidity of the Arab workmen (p. 98) and the Arab propensity for theft (p. 242). William Kennett Loftus' assertion that the inhabitants of southern Iraq and Iran have tails, and are actually animals in human form (p. 282) is partially excused by Larsen as being due to Loftus' bad temper, when, in reality...