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The Rt Hon Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB (5 March 1817 – 5 July 1894) was an English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author, politician and diplomat, best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Niniveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal.
The Rt Hon Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB (5 March 1817 – 5 July 1894) was an English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author, politician and diplomat, best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Niniveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal.
Sargon II was an Assyrian king. Sargon II became the ruler of the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE after the death of Shalmaneser V. <br/><br/> In his inscriptions, he styles himself as a new man, rarely referring to his predecessors; however he took the name Sharru-kinu ('true king'), after Sargon of Akkad — who had founded the first Semitic Empire in the region some 16 centuries earlier. Sargon is the Biblical form of the name.
Assyrian king Shalmaneser I ordered the founding of Nimrud, which existed for about 1,000 years as the capital in the 13th century BCE. The city gained fame when king Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria (c. 880 BCE) made it his capital. He built a large palace and temples on the site of an earlier city that had long fallen into ruins.<br/><br/> A grand opening ceremony with festivities and an opulent banquet in 879 BCE is described in an inscribed stele discovered during archeological excavations. The city of king Ashurnasirpal II housed perhaps as many as 100,000 inhabitants, and contained botanic gardens and a zoo. His son, Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE), built the monument known as the Great Ziggurat, and an associated temple.<br/><br/> The palace, restored as a site museum, is one of only two preserved Assyrian palaces in the world, the other being Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh. Nimrud remained the Assyrian capital until 706 BCE when Sargon II moved the capital to Khorsabad. It remained a major centre and a royal residence until the city was completely destroyed in 612 BCE when Assyria succumbed under the invasion of the Medes and the Babylonians.