Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1817
- Died
- 1894
- Works
- 119
Top works
- La questione romana alla Camera dei comuni in Inghilterra
- Nineveh and its remains
- Hanes poblogaidd am ddarganfyddidau yn Ninefeh
- The Right Hon. A.H. Layard and the Anti-Slavery Society
- Discoveries in the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon
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Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
Works in European collections
6 objects attributed to Austen Henry Layard, held across European museums, libraries & archives · via Europeana
Article
Sir Austen Henry Layard (/lɛərd/; 5 March 1817 – 5 July 1894) was a British Assyriologist, traveller, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He was born to a mostly English family in Paris and largely raised in Italy. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal. Most of his discoveries are now in the British Museum. He made a large amount of money from his best-selling accounts of his excavations.
He had a political career between 1852, when he was elected as a Member of Parliament, and 1869, holding various junior ministerial positions. He was then made ambassador to Madrid, then Constantinople, living much of the time in a palazzo he bought in Venice. During this period he built up a significant collection of paintings, which due to a legal loophole he had as a diplomat, he was able to extricate from Venice and bequeath to the National Gallery (as the Layard Bequest) and other British museums.
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1817 births1894 deaths19th-century British archaeologists19th-century British diplomats19th-century English writersAmbassadors of the United Kingdom to SpainAmbassadors of the United Kingdom to the Ottoman EmpireArchaeologists of NinevehBritish expatriates in the Ottoman EmpireBurials in DorsetEnglish AssyriologistsKnights Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath