PARIS — More than two and a half millennia ago, the Assyrian King Senaccherib descended on his enemies “like the wolf on the fold,” as the Bible tells us—and asLord Byron wrote in cantering cadences memorized by countless Victorian schoolchildren: “His cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea.”

The Assyrian and Babylonian empires appear throughout the Old Testament as examples of ruthless grandeur and godless decadence. The Bible says Sennacherib’s army was destroyed by the Angel of the Lord. The Israelites were carried off to Babylon, where they wept by the waters. And since the middle of the 19th century, archeologists have labored mightily to unearth the mythical and the verifiable past in the extraordinary cradle of civilizations they used to call Mesopotamia and now call Iraq.