Botta

Botta, PAUL EMILE, a distinguished archaeologist and traveller, the son of the preceding, was born at Turin in 1802. After extensive travels in the New World and in Egypt, he became in 1833 French consul in Alexandria, and thence undertaking a journey to Arabia, published the results in his Relation d'un Voyage dans l'Yémen (1841). He was soon after appointed consular agent at Mosul, and commenced a series of discoveries which form an epoch in archaeological science. Early in the spring of 1843 Botta began his diggings in the heaps of ruins near the Tigris for monuments of Assyrian antiquity; and the Journal Asiatique soon contained accounts of his enterprise, and disquisitions on the cuneiform writing, which afterwards appeared as a separate publication under the title, Mémoires de l'Écriture Cuneiforme Assyrienne (1848). The French government took up the matter warmly, and a commission of learned men was appointed to conduct the publication of the magnificent archaeological work, Monuments de Ninive (1847-50). In 1848 he published Inscriptions découvertes à Khorsabad. In 1846 Botta was appointed consul-general at Jerusalem, and in 1857 at Tripoli. He returned to France in 1868, and died at Achères, near Poissy, 18th April 1870. See ASSYRIA, BABYLONIA.