Interested in antiquities, and knowing about the biblical past of the area, he visited the site of ancient Babylon, a city frequently cited in the Bible, and published two books on the information he gathered. In 1821, before he left Mesopotamia, he visited, among other sites, the mounds of Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus, which together formed the site of Nineveh, near Mosul, in the north of Mesopotamia. He also copied the stone-cut cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis in Iran, and this and Nineveh were published in 1836, more than ten years after his untimely death (Larsen 1996: 9).