Jeff Pearce - Winged Bull: The Extraordinary Life of Henry Layard, the Adventurer Who Discovered the Lost City of Nineveh

T he reader may notice some minor inconsistencies throughout in the spellings and use of Middle Eastern names for persons and locales. Rather than try to shoehorn names into todays conventions of transliteration into English, I have opted sometimes to render them as Layard or others of his era identified them so that they can be found more easily in his original texts. The goal was readability and the readers convenience.

In the same vein, I feel no need to be cravenly tied to British titles. Some historical figures remain well known by their peerages, such as Aberdeen or Raglan, so Winged Bull is still lousy with lords. But you wont find its pages littered with Sir So-and-So or much attention paid to the tedious minutiae of who was baron or earl of what. Traditionalists are free to grumble over my Canadian impertinence.

As well, to help todays general reader, I often use modern name equivalents wherever possible for locales, such as Istanbul, not Constantinople, and Mumbai, not Bombay, except for in quoted texts. In , I have opted to honor my hosts in Kurdistan and rely on Kurdish names rather than their Arabic ones, hence Suleimani, not Sulaymaniyah. When in Rome, etc.

Hopefully, the reader will forgive me my trespasses.

B lame Nicholas Rankin for the title. The author of Ian Flemings Commandos, Telegram from Guernica, and Dead Mans Chest didnt like the first one I came up with, made a good case against it, and so we sat ruminating over drinks in a basement bar near Londons Russell Square in 2017. Then with the bell-clear diction that comes from having worked for the BBC for about twenty years, he said, What about Winged Bull?

As a title is crucially important to a book, a tip of the hat and thanks are in order.

I must also thank Sinan Kuneralp, whom I met years ago in Istanbul when I first got down to serious work on this project and who probably knows more about Layards life and diplomatic career than anyone else. I am greatly indebted to his brilliant scholarship. Lesley Adkins, author of Empires of the Plain, a biography of Henry Rawlinson, and her husband, Roy Adkins, author of Nelsons Trafalgar, gave me wonderful encouragement and tips through e-mail correspondence, and I must thank Lesley for allowing me to cite from Empires. I am very grateful to fixer Khasraw Hamerashid Ahmed and his brother, Khoshnaw, who did a brilliant job of taking me where I needed to go in Kurdistan and showing me a few places that I would have never known about; they were also wonderful company on the road. And my sincere thanks go to Clemens Reichel, Mark Altaweel, Kamal Rasheed Raheem, Abdullah Khorseed Qadir, and Najim Abdullah Kedo for giving me their time and patience with my questions.

Thanks also go to Mogens Trolle Larsen for allowing me to briefly quote and cite from his work. Twenty-five years ago, I walked into a bookshop in Toronto and saw The Conquest of Assyria on a display table. I was intrigued, bought it on the spot, and spent many happy hours tunneling through his fascinating volume. It sparked a decades-long obsession with Layard that resulted in this modest effort.

At Prometheus Books, acquisitions editor Jake Bonar first championed this story, and so I have him to thank for my winged bull at last taking flight.

Henry Layard in Bakhtiari dress. Portrait made in 1843 in Istanbul and used as the frontispiece of the first volume of his Early Adventures.

Layard in Albanian dress. Portrait by Henry Phillips used as the frontispiece for the first volume of his Autobiography.

The Siq at Petra. Photo courtesy of the author.

The stunning Treasury at Petra.

Layard being lowered down to examine an Assyrian rock sculpture at Bavian. Monuments of Nineveh.

Ancient Nimrud, as envisioned by James Fergusson.

The hall of an Assyrian palace, as envisioned by Fergusson. Monuments of Nineveh.

Relief showing a scene of after a royal bull hunt. Photo used with permission of the British Museum.

Lady Layards necklace made with treasures found by Layard in his excavations. Photo used with permission of the British Museum.

Winged sculptures flank an entrance to part of the British Museums stunning Assyrian collection. Photo used with permission of the British Museum.

A winged bull (lamassu) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Enid Layard, wearing her Assyrian jewelry, painted in 1870 by the Spanish artist Vicente Palmaroli Gonzlez.

The exterior of the Hagia Sofia modern day. Photo courtesy of the author.

The interior of the Hagia Sofia in our modern age. ThingsToDoEverywhere.com.

Galata Bridge, Istanbul, circa 1890, what the city still looked like more or less around the time Layard left for good. A postcard colorized in the era with the Photochrom process. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress