In the south-west palace Smith excavated at the grand entrance to see if any records remained under the pavement, but there were none. This part of the pavement had been broken through, and anything under it had long ago been carried away. He sank some trenches in the grand hall and found a fragment of inscription, and further on in the palace several other fragments. His principal excavation was, however, carried on over what Layard called the library chamber of this palace. Layard, who discovered the library chamber, describes it as full of fragments of tablets, up to a foot or more from the floor. This chamber Layard had cleared out and he had brought its treasures to England, but Smith thought on examining the collection at the British Museum that not one-half of the library had been removed, and steadily adhered to the belief that the rest of the tablets must be in the palace of Sennacherib. On excavating he found nearly three thousand fragments of tablets in the chambers round Layard's library chamber, and from the position of these fragments he was led to the opinion that the library was not originally situated in these chambers but in an upper story of the palace, and that on the collapse of the building they fell into the chambers below. Some of the chambers in which he found inscribed tablets had no communication with each other, while fragments of the same tablets were in them; and looking at this fact, and the positions and distribution of the fragments, he was convinced that the tablets were scattered over a wide area and resolved to excavate over an extensive section of the palace.