Dropping a bull.

I know I'm not going to have time or energy to write much tonight, so I thought I'd at least show you what's been occupying me all day--introducing one group of my students to the events being depicted in the image below: the lowering of one of the great winged bulls at Nimroud, so that it could be shipped to London and housed in the British Museum, where it remains today. (The bull at right, on the other hand, lives at the Met in Manhattan.) That guy at the top of the cliff, standing all by himself, directing things? That's Austen Henry Layard, for whose Nineveh and Its Remains (1849) this image was the frontispiece. Layard's book has been in print in some version or another ever since its first publication. The things he excavated are now all over the world.


source for tonight's images: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.