Mosul who jostle there: Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Iraqi Jews, Kurdish Jews, Iraqi Turkmens, Armenians, Yazidi, Mandeans, Romani and Shabaks. The Mosul Museum contains many interesting finds from the ancient sites of the old Assyrian capital cities Nineveh and Nimrud. The Mosul Museum is a beautiful old building, around a courtyard and with an impressive façade of Mosul marble containing displays of Mosul life depicted in tableau form. Recently, On February 26, 2015, IS militants destroyed the ancient Assyrian artifacts of the museum. The English writer Agatha Christie lived in Mosul whilst her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, was involved 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