One of the supreme glories of the British Museum are the Assyrian antiquities brought from the near East in the middle of the nineteenth century by Sir Austen Henry Layard and whatever the rights and wrongs of this, we can only give thanks that so much of this civilization is safely preserved for now here in London (and also for other artefacts brought to Paris by Layard’s French contemporary Emile Botta).  The discovery of these antiquities is described in Layard’s most famous works: Nineveh and its remains (1849) and Nineveh and Babylon (1853).