In the year 1625, an Italian nobleman named Pietro della Valle went on a tour of the Middle East.

De La Valle was a prolific traveller. He journeyed around Asia, North Africa and even India.

He married an Assyrian Christian princess in Damascus and now the two of them travelled together,

journeying by horseback and camel, accompanied by local guides.

At this time, travel in this region couldn't have been more dangerous.

The Ottoman and Persian empires were at war, fighting over who would rule in Baghdad.

And meanwhile, local bandits took advantage of the chaos to pray on travellers.

In those days, lions even roamed in these hills. Due to these various dangers,

De La Valle's guides were constantly on edge. It was June 18, 1625, when they spotted

a distant group of tribesmen on the horizon. Their guides decided that they might be in danger

and began to search for a place to hide. In the distance, they spotted the looming mass

of a series of enormous ruins, as De La Valle later wrote in his memoirs.

Being suspicious of some Arabian vagrants or vagabonds, for more security we removed the mile

further and took up our station under a little hill near some ruins of buildings, which we saw

from far away. De La Valle's group stayed in those ruins for several nights, while their guides

negotiated with the local ruler asking for safe passage. During the day, under the baking Iraqi sun,

De La Valle passed his time by walking among those monumental ruins.

Our removal hence being still deferred, I went in the forning to take a more diligent view of

the ruins of the above-set ancient building. What had been I could not understand,

but I had found it have been built with very good bricks, most of which was stamped with certain

unknown letters which appeared very ancient. I observed that they had been cemented together not

with lime but with bitumen or pitch. De La Valle was fascinated by the broken fragments of writing

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