From the Middle Ages most Europeans only knew about Mesopotamia through references in the Old Testament. The stories of Creation, Flood, Tower of Babel and Ur of the Chaldees were all located in Mesopotamia. There were also accounts of invasions of the Holy Land by the Assyrians and Babylonians and of how the people of Judah were carried off into exile to Mesopotamia. Educated people could also read about Mesopotamia from the writings of classical Greek and Roman authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon and Strabo. Babylon, especially, was known as the location of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

It was interest in the biblical world that stimulated some of the first excavations in Mesopotamia. Other reasons were political and economic. By 1800 Britain had established political and trade links with India and the Far East. Before the Suez Canal was built, travellers could sail east around Africa, but this was a long and dangerous voyage and they preferred to sail to Alexandria, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, travel overland to Suez and then take a ship across the Indian Ocean. In 1798, during the Napoleonic Wars, the French conquered Egypt and the British were no longer able to use this route. They therefore investigated overland routes to the Indian Ocean through Syria and Iraq, which were then part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1808, Claudius James Rich was appointed Resident in Baghdad for the British East India Company. He was only 21. He was interested in every aspect of life in Mesopotamia, including the archaeology. He visited Nineveh and Babylon and many other sites, and he kept records of his travels. He also amassed a huge collection of antiquities which was sold to the British Museum in 1825. This was the foundation of the Museum's Mesopotamian collections.

Many travellers to the East adopted the overland route, and interest in Mesopotamia grew. A young traveller on his way to Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) stopped in 1840 to visit the ruins of Nimrud and Nineveh and ended up excavating both sites between 1845 and 1851. He was Austen Henry Layard. He discovered Assyrian palaces buried under mounds of rubble. Layard tunnelled into these mounds and found the remains of huge sculptures of guardian figures: winged human-headed bulls and lions. He also found the large stone slabs which decorated the walls of the main rooms of the palaces. Many of these were transported to the British Museum.

Perhaps of more significance was the discovery at Nineveh of a huge royal library of cuneiform tablets which illuminated the world of Mesopotamia. The beginnings in deciphering cuneiform writing had already been accomplished by scholars like Henry Rawlinson in the 1830s. Gradually the languages of the ancient Near East could be understood and the texts translated.

Dates of important archaeologists who are mentioned in the website:

1787-1820 Claudius James Rich
1802-1870 Paul-Emile Botta
1810-1895 Henry Rawlinson
1817-1894 Austen Henry Layard
1818-1875 Victor Place
1826-1910 Hormuzd Rassam
1855-1925 Robert Koldeway
1880-1960 Leonard Woolley
1902-1996 Seton Lloyd