Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan and the Desert: Being the Result of a Second Expedition Undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum (The Folio Society)

xxiii, 633 pp. Austen Henry Layard is celebrated as the discoverer of Nineveh, the legendary Assyrian city of biblical renown. His accomplishments made him a founding father of Near Eastern archaeology. Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB PC (/l??rd/; 5 March 1817 - 5 July 1894) was an English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal.