Misfit Objects: Layard’s Excavations in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Biblical Imagination in mid-nineteenth Century Britain’

摘要

In 1852, an engraved image caught the attention of the readers of the Illustrated London News. The engraving showed the impressive entrance of the newly-built British Museum in London (see Fig. 1). A large ramp leads up to the museum entrance and is surrounded by workmen and gentlemen, presumably curators, who witness a spectacular scene: on the ramp, an enormous sculpture of a winged lion is being trundled into the museum. This image became iconic for the successful integration of such archaeological finds into the British Museum. What the engraving did not depict are the difficulties and the failures the excavators and trustees of the British Museum were facing at the excavation site and in the museum. The winged lion was uncovered as part of the excavations of the British adventurous explorer and collecting antiquarian Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) in Ancient Mesopotamia, a land previously mainly known through the Bible. 1 Layard undertook his first excavation in Nimrud (that he first mistook for Nineveh) in 1845. The shipping of artefacts to Britain, especially of the Great Bull and Lion, was documented as a national event in the Illustrated London News. For its readers in Victorian Britain, the lion was thus much more than an impressive and colossal statue. The sculpture was the first of a row of materialised proofs – the most valuable of which were excavated objects bearing inscriptions – that were meant to confirm what had hitherto been subject to peoples' imagination and religious belief. In October 1848 the first cargo arrived at the British Museum. Layard returned to England in the same year, where his book Nineveh and its Remains (1849) became a bestseller. 2 Reviews of Layard's book in the popular press promoted the idea that the Victorians were uncovering their own past by digging in the archaeological remains of places mentioned in the Bible. Above all, the book conveyed the impression that the excavations were designed as a purposeful enterprise with a clear goal. In contrast to the parallel French excavations, for which museum display and the expansion of the national collection was entirely the driving focus, in Britain the enterprise was a mission to trace biblical accounts