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
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