The revelation of Assyrian civilization through Rawlinson’s decipherment of cuneiform and the excavations of Botta and Layard in the middle of the nineteenth century was followed by a concerted attack on Babylonia.  It was clear from the Nineveh tablets that most of the literary treasures of Assyria were merely copies of Babylonian originals; and when in 1877 de Sarzec, French Vice-Consul at Basra, bored into the mounds at Tello, the ancient Lagash, in Southern Babylonia, the most eager anticipations were surpassed.  Texts had been found which Rawlinson pronounced to be pre-Semitic; but for the purpose of history the Sumerians were discovered at Tello.  When de Sarzec died in 1901 he had opened a new chapter of history.  The palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib, at which the world had marvelled in the ’forties, appeared relatively modern beside the vast antiquity of the Chaldean city.  The chain of human experience lengthened before our eyes when it was realized that as Assyrian culture derived from Babylonia, so a large part of Babylonian culture, including the art of writing, was inherited by the Semites from the Sumerians.

While de Sarzec was busy at Tello, an American expedition was sent to Nippur under the lead of Peters and Hilprecht; and the long array of magnificent volumes which embody the results of the mission, including the thousands of tablets found in the temple library, constitutes the most important source of our knowledge of Northern Babylonia.  Still more recently a German mission under Koldewey commenced the systematic excavation of Babylon itself; but its operations were interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War.  Though no monuments have been brought to light in Babylonia comparable in magnificence to those of Khorsabad and Nineveh, Babylonian culture towers above its neighbour.  Since the discovery in the royal library of Nineveh of a cylinder containing the story of the Flood, no find has aroused such world-wide interest as that of the Code of Hammurabi, unearthed by de Morgan at Susa in 1901.  The massive block of diorite, eight feet high, containing 282 paragraphs of laws, revealed in a flash a complex, refined, and orderly civilization.  After expelling the Elamites about 2250 B.C.  Hammurabi united North and South Babylonia into a single State, and, desiring that uniform laws should prevail, issued the code which bears his name.  During the last decade the exploration of Assyria has been resumed after a long interval, and the city of Assur, the first capital, has been unearthed by the German Oriental Society.  We thus learn of Assyria before the days of its greatness, when it was still a subject province under Babylonian Viceroys.