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
Selma Al-Radi National Museum of Iraq. Along with her cousin Lamya Gailani, they were the first women in Iraq to go on archaeological excavations as representatives of the archaeological service. One of her first assignments was to accompany the team led by David Oates (the husband of her tutor), which discovered a large cache of the celebrated Nimrud Ivories, many of which were restored by Selma, giving her a first taste of restoration. She then obtained her master's degree in Art History and Archeology at Columbia University in New York in 1967 under the tutelage of Edith Porada. On her return, she