From Nineveh to New York: The Strange Story of the Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Hidden Masterpiece at Canford School, and: A.W. Franks: Nineteenth-Century Collecting and the British Museum (review)

From Nineveh to New York: The Strange Story of the Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Hidden Masterpiece at Canford School, by John Malcolm Russell; pp. 232. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997, $45.00, £32.14.

A. W. Franks: Nineteenth-Century Collecting and the British Museum, edited by Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry; pp. ix + 372. London: British Museum Press, 1997, £45.00.

Together these works display a fascinating variety of practices in Victorian antiquarianism, collecting, and display, both within and beyond the British Museum. At the same time, they display almost as clearly the different kinds of concerns, assumptions, and even anxieties brought by different contemporary scholars, as the activities of (in the best sense of the word) amateur collectors are refracted in the various lenses of modern disciplinary perspectives.

The subject matter of the two works is not only complementary, but even directly overlaps at points. The "strange story," told by the archaeologist John Malcolm Russell, is the tale of a particular group of ancient Assyrian artifacts excavated in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s, objects the fate of which was distinct from the vast majority destined for the British Museum. Rather, this particular group of ancient winged-animal statues and intricate relief scenes was sent directly by Layard to a private home, that of John and Charlotte Guest at Canford Manor in Dorset. The "Nineveh porch," which was displayed there for decades is, as Russell points out, the only major display of Assyrian antiquities that has ever been mounted outside of a museum.

Russell's goal is to trace the itinerary of these artifacts from their ancient past through their post-discovery lives. Canford was only the first stop. As he details in a later section of the book, most of the artifacts were shopped around major American museums in the earlier-twentieth century and ultimately found their way into the Metropolitan Museum. Indeed, the author is directly responsible for the strangest of all these stories, to which a final chapter is devoted. In the early 1990s, Russell visited the porch at Canford (the estate has long since been converted into a boys' school) and determined that not all the Assyrian originals had been sold off. The objects that he authenticated with experts from the British Museum were subsequently sold at auction, setting a new record price for antiquities.

Russell brings to his subject, then, not only the perspective of an archaeologist, but also a personal interest and, indeed, an active role in the very story he tells. This shapes the narrative in several ways.

Few archaeologists of the ancient Near East have written extensively on the history of Assyrian discoveries. In a field more dominated by art historians and cultural historians, Russell brings a striking and welcome exactitude in his treatment of individual artifacts, telling the reader precisely from which walls of which rooms of which ancient palaces particular artifacts were derived. Similarly, a central focus of the book is his precise reconstruction of Canford's Nineveh porch--not only the ordering of artifacts, but their complete structural and aesthetic surrounding. It is a singular and welcome achievement. At the same time, some of the concerns of the contemporary archaeologist deflect (subtly and not so subtly) the particularities of the nineteenth-century situation. Thus Russell refers to Layard's Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853) as his "second excavation report" (10), when indeed this book, and its precursor, Layard's Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), bear little resemblance to the genre today. Archaeology...