In the final weeks of 1932, R. Campbell Thompson's mood was turning increasingly glum. As the long-time director of the Nineveh excavations, he had spent the last few years at this northern Mesopotamian city searching for Assyrian buildings and inscriptions on behalf of the British Museum. His assistant for the 1932–3 season, Max Mallowan, had convinced Campbell Thompson to dig a deep sounding from the highest part of one of Nineveh's mounds down to sterile soil. Campbell Thompson knew that the sounding would produce the first chronological sequence for the northern Mesopotamia, but it was a dangerous endeavor that was taking workmen away from the historical levels of the site that most interested him and the museum (Gut 2002: 18). His mood darkened as the sounding went deeper and deeper into cultural fill. The daily march of buckets out of the black hole finally ended in the first days of 1933 when diggers reached sterile soil thirty-one meters below the surface (Thompson and Mallowan 1933: plate 73).

Campbell Thompson's frustration with the blasé artifacts coming out of the hole reached a crescendo midway through the sounding. As his workers dug through almost twelve meters of fill dominated by thousands of mass-produced, undecorated bowls, he despaired in a letter that “if these miserable bowls represent all that is to be found” then he would have trouble finding future sponsors for his excavations (quoted in Gut 2002: 20).