ABSTRACT
In his final excavation report Place wrote about his relationship with English colleagues:
The Museum in London was enriched with numerous sculptures found by Rawlinson and his collaborators, with whom I count myself happy to have had the most excellent relations. I mention with pleasure the unfortunately dead Mr. Loftus and a young artist of great ability, Mr. W. Boutcher. When a common love of research unites several Europeans in such distant countries, it is more useful to science, and more honourable to themselves, to unite their efforts in a generous competition in the service of good taste than to show discord, from which no one benefits. All excavators of Nineveh have had the happy attitude to recognise this principle.
(Place 1867: I, 6–7)