Nimrud ivories that followed the death of Sargon II in 705 BC or when Nineveh fell and was destroyed in 612 BC. Mallowan's wife was the famous British crime novelist, Agatha Christie (1890–1976), who was fascinated with archaeology, and who accompanied her husband on the Nimrud excavations. Christie helped photograph and preserve many of the ivories found during the excavations, explaining in her autobiography that she cleaned the ivories using a fine knitting needle, an orange stick and a pot of face cream. The collection of ivories uncovered by Mallowan were divided between Iraq and Britain, where they remained at the British
Nimrud lens to be of much use. The ancient Assyrians saw the planet Saturn as a god surrounded by a ring of serpents, which Pettinato suggests was their interpretation of Saturn's rings as seen through a telescope. Other experts say that serpents occur frequently in Assyrian mythology and note that there is no mention of a telescope in any of the many surviving Assyrian astronomical writings. According to his book, Layard found the lens buried beneath other pieces of glass which looked like the enamel of an object, perhaps made of wood or ivory, which had disintegrated. The British Museum curator's notes