After acquiring a taste for travel and art in his youth, Austen Henry Layard quickly found his calling as a traveler and archaeologist. His wanderlust drew him from London toward Asia, and he spent a great deal of time exploring Jerusalem, Persia, and Mesopotamia. His curiosity was piqued by the ruins of Nimrud on the Tigris and the great mound of Kuyunjik near Mosul, and he began his own excavations shortly after seeing those monuments. His groundbreaking work uncovered sites in Nineveh, Babylon, and Assyria, greatly increasing our knowledge of Mesopotamian civilizations through the recovery of cuneiform tablets that detailed Assyrian and Babylonian culture and history. Layard’s extraordinary contributions to biblical archaeology changed the face of biblical research and scholarship.

In 705 BC, Sennacherib built the largest palace of his time in the newly-established Assyrian capital, Nineveh. Austin Henry Layard carefully examined the Nineveh findings and called in architecture experts from across Europe. Together, Layard and his army of experts pieced together their discoveries to create a detailed picture of this remarkable palace at the peak of its glory. The Nineveh Court in the Crystal Palace presents an intricate reconstruction of an important archaeological discovery.