ABSTRACT
At this time Layard was busy excavating more reliefs for the Museum, making surprising and unique discoveries in these months. The palace at Kuyunjik was a lively place where room after room was being uncovered — or at least the walls which the tunnels were following were cleared, and a kind of plan began to reveal itself. Large halls, some of them perhaps interior courtyards, surrounded by suites of smaller rooms constituted a series of pivotal points in the plan of the palace, and these complexes were connected by way of narrow corridors. All walls were covered with reliefs, but many were very badly damaged; of those which were well enough preserved to allow a true impression of the large landscape scenes, one group in particular impressed Layard. There was a series of reliefs which showed the large bull colossi being transported all the way from the quarry to Nineveh where they were installed in the palace (see figure 25.1). In great detail he could study the technological feats of the ancient Assyrians and conclude that their handling of the extremely heavy bulls was almost precisely identical with his own.
