Early explorers and excavators knew only biblical and classical accounts, some of them garbled and confusing. They were unaware that Babylon had an advanced literate culture. Mud-brick ruins contrasted unfavourably with marble, and the sprawling site of Babylon had many separate mounds, with the Tower of Babel indistinguishable amid the rubble. As Babylon’s power grew, quarters of the citadel were named after more ancient cities, and branches of temples to deities in other cities became established there. Early travellers from the twelfth century onwards brought back to the west their accounts of what they saw. In the seventeenth century, cuneiform writing on stone was identified at Persepolis. In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, cuneiform inscriptions from Mesopotamia increasingly arrived in Europe and a few national museums were soon built to house the items discovered by travellers, dilettante collectors, and informal excavators. Decipherment then began to excite public interest, but literal understanding gave way only slowly to appreciation of symbolism and rhetoric. Official excavations in Babylon took place under German leadership between 1899 and 1917. A chronological sequence for the history still has a few unsolved problems. Cuneiform writing unexpectedly lasted into Roman times.

This chapter examines the career of Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot, the violinist-turned-collector of French medieval and Renaissance art, who became one of the prime donors to the Louvre in the nineteenth century. It reconstructs his social networks of collectors in the immediate post-revolutionary period and examines how their purchases were identified as a salvage crusade. It points out the ambivalence of Sauvageot’s cabinet as both a domestic space and a semi-public urban attraction and explores the mixed motives that prompted his unprecedented decision to donate his artworks to the Louvre in 1856. To that extent, it explores not only why the Second Empire witnessed a growing convergence between private collectors and state cultural institutions, but also the ongoing tensions created by this new partnership. It traces the fate of Sauvageot’s bequest after his death and suggests why the reputation of his collection was soon overtaken by other developments in the 1860s in the taste for the fine and decorative arts.