Hormuzd Rassam

The Rassam Cylinder, a prism of Ashurbanipal in the British Museum, is named after Hormuzd Rassam⁷. It repeats the ten kings and kingdoms of Iadnana, Cyprus, already listed on a prism of Esarhaddon (c. 680-669 BC), and places them in an army that, with Levantine rulers, is said to have marched against Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia. Knapp asks whether Ashurbanipal did anything more than copy his father's list⁶.

He was born in Mosul in 1826, an Assyrian whose grandfather had been archdeacon of the Chaldean church there¹. In 1846, aged 20, he was hired by Austen Henry Layard as paymaster at Nimrud. After 18 months of study at Magdalen College, Oxford, he went with Layard on his second expedition of 1849-51, and from 1852 to 1854 continued the work at Nimrud and Nineveh, where he found the clay tablets later deciphered by George Smith as the Epic of Gilgamesh¹.

He then entered government service at the British consulate in Aden. Sent in 1866 as envoy to the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II to free British captives, he was himself made a prisoner until the British expedition of 1868¹. From 1877 to 1882 he excavated again for the British Museum, and his finds of those years include the Cyrus Cylinder. Naturalised British, he settled in Brighton and died at Hove on 16 September 1910; one authority record gives the 15th^1,2.