Austen Henry Layard



Sir Austen Henry Layard (5 March 1817 – 5 July 1894) was a British traveler, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author and diplomatist, best known as the excavator of Nimrud.

Quotes

 * Who would have believed it probable or possible, before these discoveries were made, that beneath the heap of earth and rubbish which marked the site of Nineveh, there would be found the history of the wars between Hezekiah and Sennacherib, written at the very time when they took place by Sennacherib himself, and confirming even in minute details the Biblical record?
 * Nineveh and Babylon by Sir Austen Henry Layard, (1882) pp. 51-2
 * I have always believed that successes would be the inevitable result if the two services, the army and the navy, had fair play, and if we sent the right man to fill the right place.
 * Speech in Parliament (January 15, 1855), reported in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. cxxxviii. p. 2077; this can be contrasted witho Sydney Smith's statement "The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other" in Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1806).