Sir Austen Henry Layard was a British Assyriologist, traveller, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He was born to a mostly English family in Paris and largely raised in Italy. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal. Most of his discoveries are now in the British Museum. He made a large amount of money from his best-selling accounts of his excavations.
- Occupation
- anthropologist, diplomat, archaeologist, politician
- Position held
- Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, First Commissioner of Works, member of the 20th Parliament of the United Kingdom, member of the 19th Parliament of the United Kingdom
- Citizenship
