Head of a hawk, arms and hands of a man. Into Somerville’s mind there came the memory of the picture that he had bought at the age of eighteen, which had hung first in his bedroom when he still lived with his father, then on the wall of his study in London, a copy of F. C. Cooper’s watercolor of the excavation at Nimrud in 1850, carried out by Henry Layard, depicting the entrance to the shrine of Ninurta built by Ashurnasirpal II in the ninth century before Christ. Later he had seen the originals brought to the Louvre from Khorsabad by Paul Émile Botta and to the British Museum, some years later, by Layard. But it was the painting that had fired his imagination. On either side of the portals and flanking the colossal human-headed bulls, three panels, one above the other, depicted the guardian spirits of the Assyrian kings, the middle one with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a man, right arm raised in blessing, wrist braceleted. The bracelet too was proof: Only gods and demigods and kings were empowered to wear bracelets.
What was it doing here, so far from the Tigris and the Assyrian heartlands, from Ashur and Nineveh, the great cities of Assyrian power? Somerville peered around him into the dim corners of the room, as if to interrogate all points of the compass, all quarters of the world.
Dawn was not far off when he finally succeeded in sleeping. He had lain awake through the hours of the night, possessed by the excitement of his discovery. The same tension of questioning fastened on him the moment he opened his eyes. The figure of the hawk-headed guardian came to him complete in every detail, as he had seen it first in Cooper’s painting, then among the sculptures brought back from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, slabs of gypsum carved in low relief, which had decorated the portals and walls of the palaces of Assyrian kings, scenes of hunting and warfare and ritual procession. Among them, recurring again and again, the beak, the crest, the human form, always in profile, always with its magical accoutrements, the right hand with its braceleted wrist raising a cone-shaped object toward the branches of a tree, the left lowered, holding a small bucket. Perhaps a sacred tree, the Tree of Life—no agreement had been reached on this, the time was too remote, the evidence lacking. The cone resembled a date spathe, the male flower used for fertilizing palms, but in the sculptures it was not always applied to trees, but sometimes to the king himself to give magical protection to his person, as it was in those portals of the shrine at Nimrud, built at a time when Assyria, under Ashurnasirpal, one of the cruelest and most magnificent of her kings, was about to embark on those wars of conquest that would see her, within two centuries, mistress of an empire greater in extent than any that the world had ever seen, stretching from the Taurus Mountains to the Persian Gulf and westward to Syria and Palestine and Egypt.
Nimrud—he kept coming back to that. Scene of those early spectacular discoveries of Henry Layard that had first fired him with the ambition to be an excavator in the Land of the Two Rivers and bring fresh marvels to light…
Somerville knew he should get up. He could hear his wife moving about in the adjacent bedroom. The major would be leaving early; it would be unmannerly not to be there to bid him farewell. But he lay for a while longer, in the toils of the story that had begun to knit together in his mind from the moment of recognizing the shapes in the stone. Kalhu, the ancient name, mentioned in the Bible as Calah, on the left bank of the Tigris south of Mosul, a city of great antiquity but not particularly important until Ashurnasirpal chose it for his new capital, setting thousands of men to work there and lavishing great wealth on the building of his palace. Why would he want to move away from Ashur, the old capital city, named after their father god? Pride? Fear of attacks from the desert tribes of the west? Impossible to know… Snatches from his royal inscriptions, read and reread in translation, came to Somerville’s mind as he began to make the first moves toward getting out of bed. I built a pillar over against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins… A palace of cedar, cypress, juniper and tamarisk for my royal dwelling and for my lordly pleasure for all time I founded therein… The spoil of my hand from the lands which I had brought under my sway, in great quantities I took and placed there… For all time—he had thought his palace would last forever. All those precious woods, so boastfully enumerated, burned to ash by the Medes and Chaldeans allied together when the cities of Assyria were put to the fire and their empire collapsed.
Clapping his hands, calling across the courtyard from his window for Hassan to bring him hot water, he thought: No, not stone, stone might suffer charring but would not be reduced to ash. Perhaps at the very heart of a conflagration, even stone. Ivory, yes; fire would melt ivory…
He was only just in time to bid farewell to the major, who departed with his maps and his lists of friendly rifles and his escort of Shammar tribesmen. After breakfast he felt a certain reluctance to leave for the tell and see the work started—his usual practice. The foremen were well able to take care of this, he knew; it was merely a question of assembling the groups, allotting the work—the area of excavation would be the same. And perhaps it was this, the sameness, that unsettled him, a nagging sense that these recent, unusual finds required a breaking of new ground, a shift in tactics that he felt for the moment unable to direct.
With the idea of looking once again at the carving and at the lines he had traced and placing them side by side so as to examine them in the sober light of morning, he made his way to the workroom. There was no link between the stone and the ivory as far as he could see; at least there was nothing that could associate them through points of similarity; the ivory was not Syrian work, it came from the cities of the coast or from Egypt, it was a statement of power, not a plea for magical protection.
He found Palmer, who had not been at breakfast, there before him, seated at the table, microscope in hand, a lamp at his elbow in spite of the daylight. Before him, laid down on the table, loosely fitted together, were the pieces of a clay tablet found some days before among the thick debris of mud brick. He looked up as Somerville entered. “I was hoping to see you,” he said. “It took ages to clean these up and assemble them. This is the first time I’ve looked at them properly. I didn’t feel like going over to the dig this morning, not just yet.”
“Nor did I.”
There had been something disjointed in these opening remarks of Palmer’s, a lack of consequence unusual in him. His eyes looked wider open than usual and had a slightly staring look. “Yes, quite a job,” he said. “There are some gaps, of course.”
He was silent for several moments, still looking in a curiously detached way at Somerville. Then he said, “I didn’t think much of it when they turned up. I thought it would be the usual thing, you know, some scraps from a list, an inventory, some record of an exchange of goods, perhaps Hittite or Mitannian—they both traded in this region. I didn’t believe I’d be able to make it out. In any case, the surface looked too much damaged, it was impregnated with a mixture of wood ash and mud dust, devilishly hard to move.” He paused again, looked quickly down at the fragments as if to make sure they were still there. “But I was wrong,” he said. “Some of the cuneiform is as clear as when the marks were first made. The clay has been baked hard. Thank God for fire—there’s nothing like a good blaze for preserving inscriptions. This is in Akkadian, the dialect of it spoken by the Assyrians.”