Personalities · Introduction

Toma Shishman's discovery while the boss was away

In 1853, while Layard was away on business, his supervisor Toma Shishman kept digging in Sennacherib's palace and found rooms whose floors were covered a foot deep in clay tablets.

The real treasure was the archive.

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Sennacherib is the king who besieged Jerusalem in the Bible. Shishman's team had stumbled into the state archive of the Assyrian Empire.

Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. 4

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