However, the passage over the ridge of hills which shuts in on the south of the great Jezreel Valley was blocked by the Judean army led by Josiah, who may have considered that the Assyrians and Egyptians were weakened by the death of the pharaoh Psamtik I only a year earlier (610 BC), who had been appointed and confirmed by Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal.
In 1855, Victor Place, Botta's successor tried to send finds from Kish, Khorsabad, Nimrud and from Assurbanipal's palace in Niniveh, 235 cases all in all, from Mosul down the Tigris and the Shatt al-Arab to Basra, where they were to be loaded on a ship bound to Paris.