British Museum group of stone reliefs from the excavations of Max von Oppenheim at Tell Halaf that was purchased in 1920. More material followed from the excavations of Max Mallowan at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak in 1935–1938 and from Woolley at Alalakh in the years just before and after the Second World War. Mallowan returned with his wife Agatha Christie to carry out further digs at Nimrud in the postwar period which secured many important artefacts for the museum. The collection of Palestinian material was strengthened by the work of Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho in the 1950s and the acquisition in
Assyrian sculpture large consignments did not arrive until December 1846. Botta left the two huge "lamassu" now in the British Museum as too large to transport; Henry Rawlinson, by now British Resident in Bagdhad, sawed them into several pieces for transport in 1849. In 1849 "Monument de Ninive" was published, a sumptuously illustrated and exemplary monograph in 4 volumes by Botta and Flandin. Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) was in the early 1840s "a roving agent attached to the embassy at Constantinople", who had already visited Nimrud in 1840. In 1845 he persuaded Sir Stratford Canning, the ambassador in Constantinople, to personally fund