Barbara Toy followed the Mediterranean coastline of North Africa, travelling through what was then French Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, to Cyprus, then down through Lebanon, Syria and then through Jordan to Iraq. While in Iraq she visited several archaeological sites, including in May 1951 Sir Max Mallowan's excavations at Nimrud where his wife Agatha Christie was helping with processing the finds. The work on the site had just finished, and the finds for that season included the stele of King Assur-nasir-pal II. Her journey home is not described in the book, although in her second book "A Fool in the
Nimrud Nimrud lie, is still the major center of Iraq's indigenous Assyrian population (now exclusively Eastern Aramaic-speaking Christians) to this day. Ruins of a similarly located city named "Larissa" were described by Xenophon in his "Anabasis" in the 5th century BC. A similar locality was described in the Middle Ages by a number of Arabic geographers including Yaqut al-Hamawi, Abu'l-Fida and Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi, using the name "Athur" near Selamiyah. The name Nimrud in connection with the site was first used in the writings of Carsten Niebuhr, who was in Mosul in March 1760. The site was described in more detail