Hormuzd Rassam

Hormuzd Rassam was an Assyrian-born British diplomat and archaeologist whose excavations in Mesopotamia uncovered major Assyrian and Babylonian artifacts, including the Cyrus Cylinder.

Cyrus Cylinder: A clay cylinder inscribed with a Babylonian account of Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylon. Rassam’s 1879 excavation at Babylon uncovered this royal inscription.
Austen Henry Layard: A British archaeologist and diplomat whose excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh helped establish Assyrian archaeology. Rassam assisted Layard at Nimrud before leading major excavations of his own.
Mosul: A city in northern Iraq on the west bank of the Tigris River, near the ancient ruins of Nineveh. Rassam was born in Mosul, then part of the Ottoman Empire.
Cuneiform: A writing system made with wedge-shaped marks, used for several languages in ancient Mesopotamia. Rassam’s finds supplied tablets and inscriptions that scholars could read through cuneiform studies.
Balawat Gates: Bronze bands depicting military campaigns that once decorated monumental wooden gates at ancient Imgur-Enlil. Rassam found these reliefs at Balawat during his excavations in Assyria.
Edwin Norris: A British Assyriologist who helped decipher cuneiform and served as secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society. Norris supported Rassam’s work and helped publicize discoveries from his excavations.
Church of the East: A Christian tradition that developed in the Sasanian Empire and historically used Syriac as its liturgical language. Rassam was born into a Church of the East family in Mosul.
Assyriology: The scholarly study of ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and related cuneiform cultures. His excavations furnished Assyriology with monumental artifacts and large tablet collections.
Ashurbanipal Library: A collection of cuneiform tablets assembled by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Rassam’s Nineveh excavations recovered tablets from this collection, including a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
George Smith: A British Assyriologist who translated cuneiform tablets and identified a Babylonian flood story resembling Genesis. Smith studied tablets recovered in Rassam’s Nineveh excavations.

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