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 by the Assyrian Exploration Fund, established in 1853 to dig for the benefit of British collections. Although it was not yet realized, by "the close of excavations in 1855, the hectic Heroic Age of Assyrian archaeology ended", with the great majority of surviving Assyrian sculpture found. Work has continued up to the present day, but no new palaces have been found at the capitals, and finds have mostly been isolated pieces, such as Rassam's discovery in 1878 of two of the Balawat Gates. Many of the pieces reburied have been re-excavated, some very quickly by art dealers, and others by