Rich’s assistant was a talented German by the name of Karl Bellino. He accompanied Rich on his visits to the sites and greatly impressed him by his scholarship. One of the important objects discovered by Rich and Bellino was a clay cylinder with an inscription of Sennacherib, King of Assyria.

Bellino made one particularly important contribution to scholarship before his early death. He invented a clear and accurate style of making hand drawings of inscriptions. Photography did not yet exist, and the small group of international experts hungered for new texts as they tried to decipher the ancient scripts.

Already in the earliest days of exploration, fake objects were being produced and sold in the Middle East. This type was made by pressing genuine tablets into new clay, thus making a limitless supply of plausible-looking (but backwards-written) tablets.

Claudius James Rich ushered in a new era in Middle Eastern archaeology. He was appointed to the new position of Resident of the East India Company in Baghdad, promoting British trade, and countering French manoeuvres for influence. During his posting, he explored archaeological sites and published the first accurate map of Babylon. His finds constitute the core of the British Museum’s collections.

1854 photo by English engraver and photographer James Robertson of the Byzantine Hippodrome in Istanbul. Robertson began his career as an engraver at the Royal Mint in London. In 1841, he moved to Istanbul to help with the modernisation of the Imperial Mint. During his 40 years there, he served no fewer than four sultans. He was also a painter, and became a leading photographer in the 1850s.

A frequently employed device in Robertson’s Istanbul photographs is the inclusion of one or more people in the foreground. This both creates a more natural scene and gives an idea of scale. Robertson’s photographs are concentrated mainly in and around the districts known today as Sultanahmet, Beyoğlu, Galata and Tophane. This photo captures Saliha Sultan Fountain in Galata.

Robertson’s Istanbul photographs are concerned primarily with historical monuments. They reveal the city’s magnificent Byzantine and Ottoman structures from different aspects, and with close-ups, taken using a quite aesthetic approach. In this photo, the monuments in the Hippodrome are surrounded by protective fences.