One morning, as he was going to the scene of operations--they were digging in the mound of Nimroud--two Arabs galloped up to him, and said, “Hasten, O Bey, hasten to the diggers, for they have found Nimrod himself! Wallah, it is wonderful, but it is true; we have seen him with our eyes! There is no God but God!” What they had seen was a sculptured human head, which, upon removing more earth, was seen to belong to a winged quadruped--one of those colossal “bulls” since deposited at the British Museum. A “bull” we say, but really a monster with the body of a bull (sometimes the body of a lion), the head of a man, and the wings of an eagle--the Assyrian idea of the cherubim. Many of these objects were surrounded by writing in the curious cuneiform or arrow-headed character.
[Illustration: WINGED HUMAN-HEADED BULL. (N.-W. Palace, Nimrod.)]
Besides these so-called bulls, Mr Layard found obelisks of black basalt, with figures in low relief representing tribute being brought to the Assyrian kings. On the black obelisk in the British Museum--found in the central mound of Nimroud, amid the ruins of Shalmaneser’s palace--occurs the name and figure of Jehu, king of Israel, as bringing tribute to Shalmaneser II. (about B.C. 842). “I have received the tribute of Jehu, the son of Omri; silver, gold, bowls of gold, chalices of gold, cups of gold, pails of gold, lead, sceptres for the hand of the king, (and) spear-shafts.” The mistake indeed is made of calling him “Jehu, son of Omri;” Jehu sat upon the throne of Omri, but he was a usurper and not of Omri’s house. The tribute bearers on this obelisk carry golden cups and goblets, bars of the precious metals, and other valuable things. Rev. H. G. Tomkins, speaking of these Assyrian sculptured portraits of Jehu and his princes, says they have “strong aquiline features, and that peculiar shrug or quirk of the nostril which gives a shrewd and sinister look to many a Jew of London streets. In drawing one of these familiar faces from the monument, I was ready to believe that it belonged to a lineal ancestor of the London ‘Clo’ men.’ The bag falling down the stooping back deepened this impression.”[51]
In addition to these things Mr Layard brought home a large number of alabaster slabs sculptured with battle scenes, lion hunts, and the representation of sacred trees to which winged figures are making mysterious offerings. It was the custom of these Assyrian kings to have the halls and chambers of their palaces lined with plain alabaster slabs, and after each new victory to have the story engraved in a separate room, so that in one chamber we get an account of a battle in Babylonia, in another the story of the siege of Lachish near the Philistine country, and so on.