Berosus’ first book dealt with the beginnings of the world and with a myth of a composite being, Oannes, half fish, half man, who came ashore in Babylonia at a time when men still lived like the wild beasts. Oannes taught them the essentials of civilization: writing, the arts, law, agriculture, surveying, and architecture. The name Oannes must have been derived from the cuneiform U’anna (Sumerian) or Umanna (Akkadian), a second name of the mythical figure Adapa, the bringer of civilization. The second book of Berosus contained the Babylonian king list from the beginning to King Nabonassar (Nabu-naṣir, 747–734 bce), a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III. Berosus’ tradition, beginning with a list of primeval kings before the Flood, is a reliable one; it agrees with the tradition of the Sumerian king list, and even individual names can be traced back exactly to their Sumerian originals. Even the immensely long reigns of the primeval kings, which lasted as long as “18 sars” (= 18 × 3,600 = 64,800) of years, are found in Berosus. Furthermore, he was acquainted with the story of the Flood, with Cronus as its instigator and Xisuthros (or Ziusudra) as its hero, and with the building of an ark. The third book is presumed to have dealt with the history of Babylonia from Nabonassar to the time of Berosus himself.
Diodorus made the mistake of locating Nineveh on the Euphrates, and Xenophon gave an account of two cities, Larissa (probably modern Nimrūd [ancient Kalakh], 20 miles southeast of modern Mosul) and Mespila (ancient Nineveh, just north of Mosul). The name Mespila probably was nothing more than the word of the local Aramaeans for ruins; there can be no clearer instance of the rift that had opened between the ancient Middle East and the classical West. In sharp contrast, the East had a tradition that the ruins opposite Mosul (in north Iraq) concealed ancient Nineveh. When a Spanish rabbi from Navarre, Benjamin of Tudela, was traveling in the Middle East between 1160 and 1173, Jews and Muslims alike knew the position of the grave of the prophet Jonah. The credit for the rediscovery of the ruins of Babylon goes to an Italian, Pietro della Valle, who correctly identified the vast ruins north of modern Al-Ḥillah, Iraq (60 miles south of Baghdad); he must have seen there the large rectangular tower that represented the ancient ziggurat. Previously, other travelers had sought the Tower of Babel in two other monumental ruins: Birs Nimrūd, the massive brick structure of the ziggurat of ancient Borsippa (modern Birs, near Al-Ḥillah), vitrified by lightning, and the ziggurat of the Kassite capital, Dur Kurigalzu, at Burj ʿAqarqūf, 22 miles west of Baghdad. Pietro della Valle brought back to Europe the first specimens of cuneiform writing, stamped brick, of which highly impressionistic reproductions were made. Thereafter, European travelers visited Mesopotamia with increasing frequency, among them Carsten Niebuhr (an 18th-century German traveler), Claudius James Rich (a 19th-century Orientalist and traveler), and Ker Porter (a 19th-century traveler).
In modern times a third Middle Eastern ruin drew visitors from Europe—Persepolis, in the land of Persia east of Susiana, near modern Shīrāz, Iran. In 1602, reports had filtered back to Europe of inscriptions that were not in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Georgian, or Greek. In 1700 an Englishman, Thomas Hyde, coined the term “cuneiform” for these inscriptions, and by the middle of the 18th century it was known that the Persepolis inscriptions were related to those of Babylon. Niebuhr distinguished three separate alphabets (Babylonian, Elamite, and Old Persian cuneiform). The first promising attempt at decipherment was made by the German philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802, by use of the kings’ names in the Old Persian versions of the trilingual inscriptions, although his later efforts led him up a blind alley. Thereafter, the efforts to decipher cuneiform gradually developed in the second half of the 19th century into a discipline of ancient Oriental philology, which was based on results established through the pioneering work of Emile Burnouf, Edward Hincks, Sir Henry Rawlinson, and many others.
Today this subject is still known as Assyriology, because at the end of the 19th century the great majority of cuneiform texts came from the Assyrian city of Nineveh, in particular from the library of King Ashurbanipal in the mound of Kuyunjik at Nineveh. Modern archaeological excavations
More than 150 years separate the first excavations in Mesopotamia—adventurous expeditions involving great personal risks, far from the protection of helpful authorities—from those of the present day with their specialist staffs, modern technical equipment, and objectives wider than the mere search for valuable antiquities. The progress of six generations of excavators has led to a situation in which less is recovered more accurately; in other words, the finds are observed, measured, and photographed as precisely as possible. At first digging was unsystematic, with the consequence that, although huge quantities of clay tablets and large and small antiquities were brought to light, the locations of the finds were rarely described with any accuracy. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did excavators learn to isolate the individual bricks in the walls that had previously been erroneously thought to be nothing more than packed clay; the result was that various characteristic brick types could be distinguished and successive architectural levels established. Increased care in excavation does, of course, carry with it the risk that the pace of discovery will slow down. Moreover, the eyes of the local inhabitants are now sharpened and their appetite for finds is whetted, so that clandestine diggers have established themselves as the unwelcome colleagues of the archaeologists.
A result of the technique of building with mud brick (mass production of baked bricks was impossible because of the shortage of fuel) was that the buildings were highly vulnerable to the weather and needed constant renewal; layers of settlement rapidly built up, creating a tell (Arabic: tall), a mound of occupation debris that is the characteristic ruin form of Mesopotamia. The word itself appears among the most original vocabulary of the Semitic languages and is attested as early as the end of the 3rd millennium bce. Excavation is made more difficult by this mound formation, since both horizontal and vertical axes have to be taken into account. Moreover, the depth of each level is not necessarily constant, and foundation trenches may be dug down into earlier levels. A further problem is that finds may have been removed from their original context in antiquity. Short-lived settlements that did not develop into mounds mostly escape observation, but aerial photography can now pick out ground discolorations that betray the existence of settlements. Districts with a high water level today, such as the reed marshes (hawrs), or ruins that are covered by modern settlements, such as Arbīl (ancient Arbela), some 200 miles north of Baghdad, or sites that are surmounted by shrines and tombs of holy men are closed to archaeological research.
Excavations in Mesopotamia have mostly been national undertakings (France, England, the United States, Germany, Iraq, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and the former Soviet Union), but joint expeditions like the one sent to Ur (190 miles south-southeast of Baghdad) in the 1920s have become more frequent since the 1970s. The history of archaeological research in Mesopotamia falls into four categories, represented by phases of differing lengths: the first, and by far the longest, begins with the French expedition to Nineveh (1842) and Khorsabad (the ancient Dur Sharrukin, 20 miles northeast of modern Mosul; 1843–55) and that of the English to Nineveh (1846–55) and Nimrūd (ancient Kalakh, biblical Calah; 1845, with interruptions until 1880). This marked the beginning of the “classic” excavations in the important ancient capitals, where spectacular finds might be anticipated. The principal gains were the Assyrian bull colossi and wall reliefs and the library of Ashurbanipal from Nineveh, although the ground plans of temples and palaces were quite as valuable. While these undertakings had restored the remains of the Neo-Assyrian empire of the 1st millennium bce, from 1877 onward new French initiatives in Telloh (Arabic: Tall Lōḥā, 155 miles southeast of Baghdad, reached almost 2,000 years further back into the past. There they rediscovered a people whose language had already been encountered in bilingual texts from Nineveh—the Sumerians. Telloh (ancient Girsu) yielded not only inscribed material that, quite apart from its historical interest, was critical for the establishment of the chronology of the second half of the 3rd millennium bce but also many artistic masterpieces. Thereafter excavations in important cities spread to form a network including Susa, 150 miles west of Eṣfahān in Iran (France; 1884 onward); Nippur, 90 miles southeast of Baghdad (the United States; 1889 onward); Babylon, 55 miles south of Baghdad (Germany; 1899–1917 and again from 1957 onward); Ashur, modern Ash-Sharqāṭ, 55 miles south of Mosul (Germany; 1903–14); Uruk (Germany; 1912–13 and from 1928 onward); and Ur (England and the United States; 1918–34). Mention also should be made of the German excavations at Boğazköy in central Turkey, the ancient Hattusa, capital of the Hittite empire, which have been carried on, with interruptions, since 1906.