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Just before this trash cut loose and occupied the banks of Upper Mesopotamia I just happened to re-read first hand accounts of the region written in the 1850's by an Anglican minister of his survey of the ancient Christian congregations in and around Mosul. Among the persons he met along the way was Sir Henry Rawlinson, at that time well into his work on the Nineveh tel.

Naturally, I followed Rev. J.P. Fletcher's narrative using modern mapping and photography, learning a great deal along the way about conditions in 1850 and those conditions immediately before these clowns became the latest army to burn and pillage the ancient Christians and their artifacts. Alexander even fought a battle nearby, and his bunch could be considered Modern.

The Mar Jacob Church in Nisibis seemed pretty much the way it looked in 1850, no old the dust and debris outside had half buried the ground floor. And that's just one example, from the Cenotaph of Jonah to a thousand mounds still waiting to be dated.

If there were really important clay tablets or artwork to be easily found and within the range of these idiot's sledge hammers and dynamite, it's very unlikely they aren't already carted off to the British Museum, or to Berlin, or Paris, or Chicago, long before World War I, discounting the cuneiform equivalents to scratch pads and loose leaf school notes or shopping lists.

That's a good thing. Without it we wouldn't have deciphered the older Akkadian and then the Sumerian kings lists. Grave robbing goes back a long way.

Anyway, I highly recommend Rev. Fletcher's 1850 narrative for anyone interested in the area, and the Christians who had lived under Muslim occupation since the seventh century. Even Catholicism was just then doing mission work there. Both Volumes of his highly readable work can be found and downloaded at archive.org

Narrative of a Two Years' Residence at Nineveh,
and Travels in Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Syria
Vol. 1 & Vol. 2
By The Rev. J.P. Fletcher - London 1850