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
Old Assyrian Empire Assyrian pantheon in Mesopotamian religion, worshipped mainly in Upper Mesopotamia which constituted old Assyria. Ashur was a deified form of the city of Assur, which dates from c. 2600 BC and was the capital city of the Old Assyrian Empire. During the various periods of Assyrian conquest, such as the Upper Mesopotamian Empire of Shamshi-Adad I (c. 1754 BC – c. 1721 BC) Assyrian imperial propaganda proclaimed the supremacy of Ashur and declared that the conquered peoples had been abandoned by their gods. Ashur did not originally have a family, but as the cult came under the influence of Lower