But to return to Layard’s excavations which he resumed in the middle

of October, 1849, at the place where he had interrupted them two

years before. It is simply impossible within a short space to give

a clear idea of what Layard and his workmen, assisted by Hormuzd

Rassam, brought to light before the middle of the year 1850 in that

southwestern palace of Sennacherib which Asshurbanapal restored. Any

one who would form a clear idea of it must peruse Layard’s magnificent

descriptions of it for himself. Assyrian antiquity rose from the earth

and grew more and more distinct, and so intelligible was the language

of the hundreds of bas-reliefs, that, even without understanding the

inscriptions, every one was in a position to construct for himself

a tolerably clear picture of the manners and customs, the life and

occupations, in short, the whole civilisation of the ancient Assyrians,

and this merely from the illustrations in Layard’s two popular books.

But the most important discovery made in this palace, indeed the most

important in its results of all the Assyrian excavations, was the

remains of a regular library of thousands of clay tablets, which were

heaped up in two chambers, covering the floor a foot thick. These

the restorer of the palace, the accomplished king Asshurbanapal (668

B.C., the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, and Asnapper of the Bible) had

had collected, and had deposited them, partly here, partly (probably

in duplicate) in other palaces, as in particular in the northern

palace, which was also in Kuyunjik, and was discovered by Rassam.

The tablets of gray and yellow clay found in the so-called Lion Room

of Asshurbanapal’s northern palace, were in most cases broken into

smaller or larger fragments, probably because in the general ruin they

had fallen down from the upper story into the space in which they

covered the ground; many, however, were still whole. Of course only

later investigation could succeed in bringing the broken fragments

together again, and then only partially; one of these tablets, restored

by piecing together sixteen fragments, gives the Babylonian story of

the Flood, which George Smith successfully recognised from amongst

the thousands of scattered fragments; the reader will appreciate the

condition in which most of these clay book-pages (to use a paradoxical

expression) have come down to us. The size of the tablets seldom

exceeds nine by six and a half inches; but many, especially tablets

containing contracts, were considerably smaller. The greater number

bore the inscription, “Series of tablets …, tablet number …; Palace of

Asshurbanapal, king of the universe, king of Assyria …,” after which

came a series of phrases, mostly stereotyped, which indicates the

tablet in question as belonging to the library of Asshurbanapal, the

great collector of ancient Babylonian literature in Assyrian character.

In the restored tablet of the Flood, the place of the signature is

clearly recognisable on the first of the columns; it is the last of the

columns, for they are always to be counted from right to left (instead

of from left to right). But especially clear to the eye of a layman is

the addition to the signature, which represents a kind of library mark,

unlike that of the specially prized Ishtar hymn in two languages (S.

M. 954, British Museum); the latter differs somewhat from the ordinary

tenor of these signatures, inasmuch as a whole genealogy is put,

instead of the sentence usual elsewhere; translated literally it runs:

“(series:) ir shimma dimmir Ninna.”--Complaint to the goddess

Ishtar.

(The usual number of the tablet is not placed here.)

He has written and engraved it like its original.

“Palace of Asshurbanapal, king of Assyria,

Son of Esarhaddon, king of the universe, king of Assyria, ruler

of Babylon,

King of Sumer and Accad, king of the kings of Ethiopia and Egypt,

King of the four regions, son of Sennacherib,

King of the universe, king of Assyria, who puts his trust in the

god Asshur and the goddess Ninlil, in Nabu and Tashmit.

May the god Nabu be thy guide!”

In general, however, these signatures ran as follows:

(The first word of the tablet following.)

“Xth tablet (of the series beginning thus:).…

“Palace of Asshurbanapal, the king of the universe, the king of

Assyria, to whom Nabu and Tashmit had given ear, who took clear

eyes for the preparation (?) of the writing of tablets, whilst

under the kings my predecessors nothing of the kind (nin shipru

shu’ atu) was attempted--the wisdom of Nabu, (tikip santakki), a

fullness of beauty, did I write, arrange, and engrave on tablets;

to see and read it I placed it in my palace.”

After which, in some examples, there follows:

“May the light of Asshur, the king of the gods, be thy guide!

Whosoever shall write his name by my name,

May Asshur and Ninlil (Beltis) destroy him and root his name and

his seed out of the land!”

The contents of the tablets in which Asshurbanapal caused the wisdom of

the god Nabu (identified by the ancients with Mercury) to be written of

in this fashion, were varied to an extent scarcely conceivable. They

contained the primitive spells and formulas for oaths of the people of

Sumer, as well as the somewhat later hymns to the gods, and penitential

psalms of the Accadian population of northern Babylonia, almost all of

them with interlinear translations into the Semitic language of ancient

Babylon; also legends of Semitic character and epic poems almost

as old as the Accadian hymns; astronomical and astrological texts;

historical inscriptions (as, for instance, those of Agum-kakrime and

the ancient Sargon); chronological lists, calendars, and a great deal

besides; all of which was collected by Asshurbanapal and by him handed

down to posterity. It is hard to say in what direction the literary

pieces thus preserved fail to cast a light on the ancient Babylonians

into whose cultivation the Assyrians were, indeed, once initiated,

and to whom they were in all essentials indebted for their own; it is

certain that we should now be acquainted with no single one of those

primitive magic verses, had not Asshurbanapal had them written out

afresh. And what should we know of the Sumerians and Accadians without

these songs? But this is not enough. A great part of the Asshurbanapal

library consists of philosophical aids to the knowledge and

acquisition of the Sumerio-Accadian language, as well as of the Semitic

Assyrio-Babylonian, and to the writing (the so-called syllabary) as

well as to the spoken language; these aids include vocabularies,

grammatical paradigms, and even collections of phrases in two languages.

Whilst Layard was exploring the southwestern palace at Kuyunjik, adding

undreamt-of treasures to those acquired in his first expedition to the

country, and finding quantities of new cuneiform texts of the so-called

third species of the Assyrian genus, so that he seemed to have been

the first to gather the materials for the deciphering of this kind

of cuneiform writing, it had been already completed, at least in the

main, by the labours of Saulcy (1849) and, above all, by those of Henry

Rawlinson (1847-1851). Layard’s book, _Nineveh and its Remains_, which

appeared in 1849, had already introduced us into the midst of Assyrian

antiquity, although the inscriptions which accompanied the sculptures

could not yet give us any further information elucidating them. But in

the _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, which appeared

in the beginning of 1853, we already find the correct interpretation

of several Assyrian names of kings, countries, towns, and gods, and

even the correct rendering of the substance of connected historical

inscriptions, which Layard owed to the information communicated in

the interval by Henry Rawlinson and the Irishman, E. Hincks, who had

also brought great acuteness to bear on this department of study. The

numerous fresh historical documents which Layard brought with him

could not have appeared at a more favourable time; above all, the

first of the chests containing Asshurbanapal’s library could not have

entered London at a better moment. For, once a basis was established

for the reading of the cuneiform writing of the Babylonian and

Assyrian languages, all that was needed to advance along the path so

successfully entered upon was new texts, and these now began to flow

in, in abundance.[c]

[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF REPRESENTING TIGLATHPILESER III

(Found at Nimrud.--Layard)]

LATER DISCOVERIES IN BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA

The work of exploration rested entirely between the years 1855 and

1872. Great progress was made, however, in the decipherment of

inscriptions and the popularisation of the results, and the mind of the

public was prepared to appreciate the greatness of the work that was to

follow.

The importance of George Smith’s decipherment in 1872 of the Babylonian

story of the Deluge was at once recognised, and led to his being

sent to Nineveh in January, 1873, under the auspices of the _Daily

Telegraph_. As soon as he had discovered some further fragments of

the deluge story, however, the newspaper was satisfied, and he was

recalled. On a second expedition, sent out in the same year by the

British Museum, Smith made no startling discoveries. Smith’s work,

while small in amount when compared with that of the early explorers,

brought to light much valuable material, and aroused great enthusiasm

in England. The British Museum sent him on a third expedition in 1876;

but he was prevented from making any excavations, and died of fever on

his way back.

The next expedition, that of Hormuzd Rassam in 1877, resulted, among

other things, in the identification of the site of Sippar, and the

discovery of numerous interesting inscriptions and of some beautifully

ornamented inscribed bronze plates that had adorned the gates of the

palace of Shalmaneser II.

In this same year, 1877, M. Ernest de Sarzec, then just appointed

French consul at Bassorah on the Persian Gulf, began that series

of brilliant explorations which he has carried on more or less

continuously ever since. His enthusiasm for archæological research was

backed by an extensive knowledge of the conditions of the country, and

his efforts were rewarded with an unusual degree of success from the

very start.

The first four years were devoted to an extensive and systematic

excavation of Telloh, a great mound about five miles from the

Shatt-el-khai, in southern Babylonia, and now identified with the

ancient Shirpurla. The first season was marked by the discovery of

two large terra-cotta cylinders, twenty-four inches long and twelve

in diameter. The inscriptions on these cylinders, which contained

fully two thousand lines each, were the longest then known from an

early period. By the end of the four seasons of work a great temple

had been uncovered, one hundred and seventy-five by one hundred feet

in dimensions, and built on a mound from sixteen to twenty feet high.

The bricks of the outer wall, which was five feet thick, were one foot

square and bore the name Gudea. The objects found in the interior of

the temple have proved very important to early Babylonian history. One

room contained eight statues of an early period, all headless, however,

having been mutilated by barbarians of a later time.

Scarcely less important was De Sarzec’s discovery in 1894 of a chamber

in which were found thirty thousand tablets. While a considerable

proportion of them were religious documents, most of these tablets were

commercial, agricultural, and industrial archives.

The Louvre has profited greatly by the work of De Sarzec, for a large

part of his discoveries has found its way thither.

The American expeditions have been among the most successful ones in

this field. The Wolfe expedition of 1884-1885--so called from Miss

Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, who defrayed its expenses--confined its work

to a thorough exploration of the whole field, not only visiting the

sites of previous excavations, but examining many new mounds as well.

The succeeding expeditions have been sent out under the auspices of

the University of Pennsylvania. The first one, in 1888-1889, under the

direction of Dr. John P. Peters, with Professors H. V. Hilprecht and

R. F. Harper as Assyriologists, began excavations at Niffer, the site

of ancient Nippur. They had many difficulties with native tribes and

Turkish officials, but succeeded in making a trigonometrical survey

of all the mounds and obtaining a great number of antiquities of all

sorts. Dr. Peters, however, modestly characterises the expedition as

“more or less of a failure.”

In 1890 work was begun again. Thousands of tablets and various kinds

of objects were obtained, and were all sent to the Imperial Museum

at Constantinople. Professor Hilprecht was sent to Constantinople to

catalogue the finds. He did the work with great skill and tact, and the

Sultan repaid the University of Pennsylvania for his services by the

gift of a large part of the collection.

[Illustration: ASSYRIAN STELE]

The third expedition was sent out in 1893 under the direction of Mr. J.

H. Haynes, who had been the business manager of the first two. With a

single brief interruption of two months in 1894 he carried on the work

steadily until 1896, accomplishing what no European had ever ventured

to attempt before. This expedition and the fourth one, which set out

under Haynes in 1899 and was joined by Hilprecht in 1900, procured many

thousands of tablets and antiquities of other kinds. These finds have

enriched the store of Babylonian literature with vast quantities of

texts, religious, commercial, and historical.

The first German expedition, in 1897, like the first American, simply

explored Babylonia and Assyria. Then in 1899 Dr. Robert Koldewey, who

had been a member of the first expedition, accompanied by Dr. Bruno

Meissner, went out under the auspices of the German Orient Society.

They went to work at the mound of El-Kasr, Babylon, which covers the

remains of the palace of Nebuchadrezzar. Their first success was in

the finding of a new Hittite inscription and many tablets of the

Neo-Babylonian period. Great results may be expected from their future

work.

The Turks, themselves, have naturally the best opportunity for carrying

on the work of exploration, for they can count upon the support instead

of the opposition of the officials, and can keep the natives under

control. Thus far one expedition has been sent out. It was under the

direction of Father Scheil, a distinguished Assyriologist, a French

Dominican. Its complete success shows that if the Turkish government

can once be aroused to the importance of the work, greater discoveries

may be expected.

One of the most important discoveries of cuneiform inscriptions was

made at Tel-el-Amarna in Egypt in 1888. From these tablets, which are

letters and despatches of Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV and of many

monarchs of western Asia, much valuable chronological material has been

obtained, as well as much light upon social relations.

The great discoveries of the past thirty years are but an inspiration

to further exploration. The work is bound to be carried on until the

buried cities have been completely brought to light again.[ad]

THE RESULTS OF THE EXCAVATIONS

We have followed the story of the excavations in Babylonia and Assyria

with some detail because of the unique character of the record. It

remains now to examine the results of these excavations in their

bearings upon the story of history. For, of course, it is the material

supplied by the workers in this field rather than the work itself which

has pertinence in the present connection.

[Illustration: HUNTING SCENE FROM A BAS-RELIEF IN THE PALACE OF

ASSHURNAZIRPAL]

Great numbers of historical documents have been restored to us,

sufficing, as has already been suggested, to rebuild the history of the

all but forgotten nations. Such historical documents as are not to be

found in connection with Greece or Rome, or even of the civilisation of

the Middle Ages down to about the tenth century A.D., are supplied us

from the ruins of the Babylonian and Assyrian cities. These documents,

as already pointed out, are in the form of inscriptions on fragments

of brick. These inscriptions, in an altogether unknown character,

were at first enigmatic, but oriental scholarship soon availed to

decipher them. The story of this decipherment must be outlined here

for comparison with the account of the decipherment of the Egyptian

hieroglyphics, which has already been presented. In no other cases

except these two has the historian been called upon to deal with a

great mass of documents written in an absolutely dead language. It

must be remembered that the so-called dead languages of the classical

world were never really forgotten. All through the Middle Ages there

were numberless scholars who had an expert knowledge of Greek and

Latin. Indeed, these languages were the current medium of scholarly

intercourse throughout the dark ages. But the Babylonian and Assyrian

languages, like the Egyptian, were dead in the fullest significance of

the term; that is to say, they were utterly unknown to any human being

for a period of more than two thousand years. Their restoration was one

of the marvels of nineteenth-century scholarship; and while the details

of this feat of scholarship do not properly come within the province of

the historian in the narrower sense, they have such universal interest

that we shall do well to present at least their outline here.

Before turning to the story of decipherment, however, it will be well

to gain an idea as to the number and the variety and character of the

historical documents in question. And perhaps the best way to do this

will be to take a glance at the contents of the Assyrian collections

in the British Museum, giving particular attention to the marvellous

library of King Asshurbanapal, one of the last of the great rulers of

Assyria--a remarkable collection of books, the discovery of which has

been already referred to in the previous section. Nothing could give

one a more vivid realisation of the character of this ancient oriental

civilisation than the most casual glance at the sample books from this

old library. Having inspected, however casually, this marvellous set

of documents, one is prepared to take up the chronological history of

the Babylonians and the Assyrians with a fresh interest based upon

the comprehension that this people, so long regarded as scarcely more

than mythical, possessed a civilisation strangely comparable in many

essential features to the civilisation of our own time.[a]

TREASURES FROM NINEVEH

The most casual wanderer in the British Museum can hardly fail to

notice two pairs of massive sculptures, in the one case winged bulls,

in the other, winged lions, both human-headed, which guard the entrance

to the Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta stone. Each pair of these

weird creatures once guarded an entrance to the palace of a king in the

famous city of Nineveh. As one stands before them his mind is carried

back over some twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the days when

the “Cedar of Lebanon” was “fair in his greatness” and the scourge of

Israel. A wave of emotion sweeps over one when he first sees them, and

Byron’s stirring lines, reminiscent of school-day oratory, ring in the

memory:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

The Assyrian! The ruler of Nineveh! For two thousand five hundred years

he was only a name and a memory; yet here stand great monuments to

testify to the reality of his sometime greatness.

These huge lions are pertinent in the present connection because of

the inscriptions that are graven across their pedestals. A glance

reveals the strange characters in which these records are written,

graven neatly in straight lines across the stone, and looking, to

casual inspection, like nothing else so much as random flights of

arrow-heads. The resemblance is so striking that this is sometimes

called the arrow-headed character, though it is more generally

known as the wedge or cuneiform character. A strange writing this.

It seems almost incredible that it can really be susceptible of

interpretation and translation into a modern language. And, indeed,

the feat of interpreting it was one of the greatest achievements of

nineteenth-century scholarship; but of this we shall have more to say

in a moment.

But importance aside, what an interest must now attach to objects with

such a history as belongs to these! The very sculptures before us, for

example, were perhaps seen by Jonah when he made that famous voyage

to Nineveh some seven or eight hundred years B.C. A little later the

Babylonian and the Mede revolted from Assyrian tyranny, and descended

upon the fair city of Nineveh, and almost literally levelled it to

the ground. But these great sculptures, among other things, escaped

destruction, and at once hidden and preserved by the accumulating

débris of the centuries, they stood there age after age, their very

existence quite forgotten. When Xenophon marched past their site with

the ill-starred Expedition of the Ten Thousand, in the year 400 B.C.,

he saw only a mound which seemed to mark the site of some ancient ruin;

but so ephemeral is fame that the Greek did not suspect that he looked

upon the site of that city which only two centuries before had been the

mistress of the world.

So ephemeral is fame! And yet the moral scarcely holds in the sequel;

for we of to-day, in this new, undreamed-of Western world, behold these

mementoes of Assyrian greatness, fresh from their twenty-five hundred

years of entombment, and with them records which restore to us the

history of that long-forgotten people in such detail as it was not

known to any previous generation since the fall of Nineveh. For two

thousand five hundred years no one saw these treasures or knew that

they existed. One hundred generations of men came and went without

once pronouncing the names of Kings Asshurnazirpal or Asshurbanapal.

And to-day, after centuries of oblivion, these names are restored to

history, and, thanks to the character of their monuments, are assured

a permanency of fame that can almost defy time itself. It would be

nothing strange, but rather in keeping with their previous mutations

of fortune, if the names of Asshurnazirpal and Asshurbanapal should be

familiar household words to future generations that have forgotten the

existence of an Alexander, a Cæsar, and a Napoleon. For when Macaulay’s

prospective New Zealander explores the ruins of the British Museum, the

records of the ancient Assyrians will presumably be there unscathed, to

tell their story as they have told it to our generation, although every

manuscript and printed book may have gone the way of fragile textures.

But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite necromantic enough

without conjuring for them a necromantic future. The story of their

restoration is like a brilliant romance of history. Prior to the middle

of the nineteenth century the inquiring student could learn in an hour

or so all that was known in fact and in fable of the renowned city of

Nineveh. He had but to read a few chapters of the Bible and a few pages

of Diodorus to exhaust the important literature of the subject. If

he turned also to the pages of Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and

Ælianus, these served chiefly to confirm the suspicion that the Greeks

themselves knew almost nothing more of the history of their famed

oriental forerunners.

The current fables told of a first king Ninus and his wonderful

queen, Semiramis; of Sennacherib, the conqueror; of the effeminate

Sardanapalus, who neglected the warlike ways of his ancestors, but

perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh itself, in a self-imposed

holocaust. And that was all. How much of this was history, how much

myth, no man could say; and for all any one suspected to the contrary,

no man could ever know. And to-day the contemporary records of the city

are before us in such profusion as no other nation of antiquity, save

Egypt alone, can at all rival. Whole libraries of Babylonian documents

are at hand that were written twenty or even thirty centuries before

our era. These, be it understood, are the original books themselves,

not copies. The author of that remote time speaks to us directly, hand

to eye, without intermediary transcriber. And there is not a line of

any Hebrew or Greek inscriptions of a like age that has been preserved

to us; there is little enough that can match these ancient books by a

thousand years. When one reads of Moses or Isaiah, Homer, Hesiod, or

Herodotus, he is but following the transcription--often unquestionably

faulty, and probably never in all parts perfect--of successive copyists

of later generations. The oldest known copy of the Bible, for example,

dates from the fourth century A.D.--1000 years after the last Assyrian

records were made, and read, and buried, and forgotten.

[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF FROM AN ASSYRIAN PALACE, SHOWING ASSYRIAN

SOLDIERS, PRISONERS BEING FLAYED ALIVE, CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.]

As to the earlier Mesopotamian records, they date back some

5000--perhaps 7000--years B.C.: at least 1000 years before the period

assigned by Archbishop Usher’s long-accepted _Chronology_ for the

creation of the world itself. Solomon, who lived about 1000 B.C., is

accredited with the declaration that “of the making of many books

there is no end.” Modern exegesists tell us that it was not Solomon,

but a later Alexandrian interloper, who actually coined the phrase;

but nevertheless it appears that the saying would have been perfectly

intelligible, in Mesopotamia, not merely to Solomon’s contemporaries,

but to generations that lived long before the Jewish nation, as such,

came into existence. At all events, there was at least one king of

Assyria--namely, Asshurbanapal--who lived only a few generations after

Solomon, and whose palace boasted a library of some 10,000 volumes--a

library, if you please, in which the books were numbered and shelved

systematically, and classified, and cared for by an official librarian.

From this library, records have come to us during the past half-century

that have reconstructed the history of Asiatic antiquity.

If you would care to see some of these strange documents, you have but

a little way to go from the site of the winged lion here in the British

Museum. Meantime, there are other sculptures here which you can hardly

pass unnoticed. As we pass the human-headed lions and enter the hall of

Asshurnazirpal, we shall see other evidences of Assyrian greatness that

might easily lead our thoughts astray from the writing. Here, forming

the wall, are bas-reliefs on which the famous scene of the lion hunt

is shown; a little farther on are all manner of war scenes; and there

some domestic incidents, the making of bread or a like comestible, and

its baking in an oven; and there again is the interior of a stable with

a man gravely grooming a horse much as it might be done in any stable

to-day.

All these must not be allowed to distract our attention, for these

graphic illustrations have nothing directly to do with writing.

Here, however, at the end of the hall, are some other bas-reliefs

more pertinent to our present inquiry. That winged god, for example,

carrying a fawn, has a fine flight of arrows across the background

and figures alike, differing in the latter regard from the lion we

have just left. In the hall just beyond are some illustrations of a

different combination of picture and text. Here is the famous obelisk

of Shalmaneser, which, like all the things thus far noted in the

Assyrian collection, was found by Sir Henry Layard at Nineveh. It is

virtually an illustrated book, telling in word and text of the conquest

of many countries by King Shalmaneser II.

The figures of the upper row report the payment of tribute by “Sua of

Gilzani, who brought silver, gold, lead, vessels of copper, horses, and

dromedaries.” It will be observed, of course, that only one side of

the obelisk is here shown. The other three sides in each case depict

other phases of the payment of the tribute by the same conquered

enemy. The second tier of figures is of peculiar interest, because

it shows the payment of tribute by “Yaua, the son of Khumri.” This

is, as the Bible student interprets it, “Jehu, the son of Omri.” The

conquered Israelite brings “silver and gold, lead and bowls, dishes,

cups, and other vessels of gold,” and the forms of these vessels, as

well as the costumes of the Hebrews themselves, are well shown in the

illustrations. The third row of figures represents the “payment of the

tribute of the land of Musri, consisting of dromedaries, buffaloes,

elephants, apes, and other animals.” The grotesque figures of the

alleged apes, with their altogether human heads, are suggestive as

showing how these strange foreign animals appealed to the imagination

of the Assyrian artist, causing him to depart from that fine realism

which he brought to bear upon the delineation of more familiar animals.

The fourth set of pictures shows the payment of tribute of the land

of Sukhi, and the fifth a not dissimilar tribute from the country of

Patin. The inscriptions at the top and base of the obelisk give details

of the conquests, recording among other things how Shalmaneser captured

1121 chariots and 470 battle horses and the whole camp of Hazael, king

of Damascus.

Perhaps the most curious example of economy of material in a makeshift

book that the Assyrian collection at the British Museum has to show,

is illustrated in the figure of the god Nabu, which forms part of

the Nineveh collection, and which stands in the hall just beyond the

obelisk of Shalmaneser. Here, as a glance at the illustration will

show, the skirt of the robe of the human figure is used as a ground

for an elaborate inscription. The effect is rather decorative and

distinctly unique. This figure has the further interest of affording

an illustration of what the Assyrian artist could do when he adopted

the expedient, for him unusual, of working in the round. The great

masterpieces of Assyrian art were modelled in bas-relief. Occasionally,

however, the artist attempted the full figure, as in the present

case; but it can hardly be claimed that the success of this is at

all comparable with that attained by the other method. There are

low reliefs in the hunting scenes contained in the dining-hall of

Asshurbanapal, as represented here in the British Museum, that are

real works of art. The wounded lioness dragging her haunches, the

hunted goats, the pacing wild asses, are veritable masterpieces. No

such claim can be made for the god Nabu or for any other full statue

that the excavations of Nineveh have revealed. But on the other hand

the texture of the skirt of this god gives it an abiding interest of a

unique character.

A further interest attaches to this statue, as to many others of the

Assyrian monuments, because of its bearing upon the religion of that

famous people. Until the discovery of these long-buried monuments,

practically all that was known of the religion of the Babylonians and

Assyrians was contained in the pages of Herodotus. Strange tales he

tells of what he saw in the temples of Babylon, where, as he alleges,

all the women of the city, of whatever class or rank, were obliged

at least once in a lifetime to prostitute themselves for hire. The

inscriptions on the monuments tell us nothing of such practical phases

of worship as this, but they do show that the Assyrians were an

intensely religious people, closely comparable in that regard to their

cousins the Hebrews. Their religion, too, it would appear, was of that

firmly grasped self-sufficient kind which puts aside all doubt; which

assumes as a primordial fact that one’s own view is right; that one’s

gods are the only true gods, and that all the outside world must be

regarded as one’s proper prey. A further illustration of this phase

of the subject will claim our attention when we come to examine the

religious writings of the Assyrians a little more in detail.

[Illustration: OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II

(Now in the British Museum)]

Another illustration of a curiously Assyrian combination of art and

letters is shown in the sculptured lion that guards the entrance

to the next hall. This lion is a memento of the same reign as that

human-headed one at the other doorway, but it is very different in

workmanship, and clearly the product of another artist. For one thing

it is a veritable lion, not a mythical compound beast, except, indeed,

that it shares with the other the peculiarity of a fifth leg. Assyrian

tastes seem to have required that four legs should be visible from

whatever point of view the statue of an animal was regarded; hence

the anomaly. For the rest, this gigantic beast shows many points of

realistic delineation, and it is artistically full of interest. The

head in particular expresses feeling in a most unequivocal way.

But the most curious characteristic of this sculpture is the way in

which the writing is carried from the slab right across the body of the

animal itself, and also across its front legs. Perhaps this was done at

the command of the king, merely as a convenient expedient that all the

desired records of the conquest might be given a place, but the effect

at a little distance is curiously as if the artist had striven to get

the feeling of hair in a stiff and formal manner, in keeping with the

conventional rendering of the mane. Again it has been suggested that

the writing has been carried across the body of the lion to safeguard

it. There was a not unusual custom among ancient monarchs of scraping

out the inscription of a predecessor and supplanting it with one’s

own. So great a monarch as Ramses II, in Egypt, did not scruple to

do this, and a remarkable case is shown on an Arabian temple where

the conscienceless monarch actually substitutes his own name for the

correct one of the builder, in a tablet claiming authorship of the

temple of which the tablet is a part. That the kings of Assyria had

occasion to fear such jugglery is shown by the inscriptions on the

book tablets in the royal library at Nineveh, where Asshurbanapal,

after telling that the books are of his library, calls a curse upon

any one who shall ever put another name beside his own. Perhaps, then,

King Asshurnazirpal thought to transmit a record of his deeds more

securely to posterity by inscribing them across the back of this lion,

for doubtless the sculpture was considered a masterpiece, and the king

felt, we may suppose, that artistic taste might prevent a sacrilege

which mere conscience would not interdict.

THE LIBRARY OF A KING OF NINEVEH

We come now to the place in the British Museum in which some of these

treasures of the old Assyrian king are guarded. They occupy part

of the series of cases placed down the centre of the room known as

the Nineveh Gallery. Perhaps it is not too much to speak of these

collections as forming the most extraordinary set of documents of all

the rare treasures of the British Museum, for it includes not books

alone, but public and private letters, business announcements, marriage

contracts--in a word, all the species of written records that enter

into the everyday life of an intelligent and cultured community.

[Illustration: DETAIL FROM THE OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II]

But by what miracle have such documents been preserved through all

these centuries? A glance makes the secret evident. It is simply a case

of time-defying materials. Each one of these Assyrian documents appears

to be, and in reality is, nothing more or less than an inscribed

fragment of brick, having much the colour and texture of a weathered

terra-cotta tile of modern manufacture. These slabs are usually oval

or oblong in length, and an inch or so in thickness. Each of them was

originally a portion of brick clay, on which the scribe indented the

flights of arrow-heads with some sharp-cornered instrument, after which

the document was made permanent by baking. They are somewhat fragile,

of course, as all bricks are, and many of them have been more or less

crumbled in the destruction of the palace at Nineveh; but to the

ravages of mere time they are as nearly invulnerable as almost anything

in nature. Hence it is that these records of a remote civilisation

have been preserved to us, while the similar records of such later

civilisations as the Grecian have utterly perished; much as the flint

implements of the cave-dweller come to us unchanged, while the iron

implements of a far more recent age have crumbled away.

Consider even in the most casual way the mere samples that are

exhibited here in the museum. This first case, the label tells

us, contains tablets--sample leaves, if you will--from the famous

“Creation” and “Deluge” series. That is to say, from the book which has

been called the Chaldean Genesis, and which excited such a furor of

attention when George Smith of the British Museum first deciphered part

of its contents, because it seemed to give so striking a clew to the

origin of the sacred book of the Hebrews. The Hebrew legends are very

differently received to-day from what they were even fifty years ago,

thanks to the advance of science; but these Chaldean stories of the

creation and destruction of mankind still have absorbing interest as

historical documents in the story of the mental evolution of our race,

both for what they teach of the ideas of remote generations of men, and

for what they taught the generation of our immediate predecessors about

the true status of comparative mythology.

It will be recalled that the Assyrians were Semites closely related to

the Hebrews. Indeed, tradition held that Father Abraham, in common with

the ancestors of the Assyrians, came from the land of the Chaldeans. It

is not surprising, therefore, to find that these sacred books of the

Assyrians are replete with the same traditions and give expression to

much the same cast of thought as the sacred books of the Hebrews. Thus,

here we have a closely comparable account of the creation of the world

out of primeval chaos and of the destruction of all but a favoured few

in a universal deluge. Even the story of the sending out from the ark

of first one bird and then another, until finally the raven found a

place to alight, when the ark itself had stranded on a mountain top, is

reproduced with such closeness of detail as practically to demonstrate

a common origin of the two traditions.

Here, again, is a story of how Sargon, an early king of Agade, was

cast away, Moses-like, in a basket, to be rescued from the waters of

the Euphrates by a compassionate discoverer of his plight. There is

even a tablet which gives intimations of the story of the building of

the Tower of Babel. And with it all there is imbued the same black,

dreadful view of life that actuated the authors of the Old Testament.

Always we are made to feel the threat of the angry deity; always this

religion is a religion of fear. Generosity, brotherly love, compassion,

morality--in a broad sense these words play but little part in the

terminology of the Semite. The Semitic conqueror was notorious for his

cruelty. He loved to persecute his victim, to crucify him, to flay

him alive. The writers of the Hebrew and of the Assyrian books alike

record these deeds without a shudder. They show to the psychologist

a race lacking in imagination, which is the mother of sympathy, but

imbued through and through with egotism. The legends of the sacred

books give further evidence of these same traits. Here before us, among

the other tablets just noted, are the famous stories of the descent of

Ishtar, the Goddess of Love, into the nether regions, and of the trials

and perils which she encountered there, and those that fell upon the

outside world because of her absence. It is recorded that when finally

a messenger was sent from a superior power demanding her release, the

powers of the nether world gave her up unwillingly, but retained the

innocent messenger to torture in her stead; and it probably never

occurred to the mind of the Assyrian soothsayer that it might have been

within the power of the superior gods to release the innocent messenger

as well.

Another famous set of tablets records the adventures of Gilgamish,

whose heroic trials and mighty deeds suggest the Hercules of the

Greeks. All in all, these religious and mythological texts give us

the closest insight into the moral nature of the Assyrian, not merely

during the period of Asshurbanapal, but for many generations before,

since these sacred books are in the main but copies of old Babylonian

ones, dating from the most remote periods of antiquity.

The tablets of the next case illustrate a different phase of

Assyrian mental activity. They are virtually books of reference, and

schoolbooks--that is, “Grammatical Tablets, Lists of Cuneiform Signs,

Explanatory Lists of Words, etc.--drawn up for use in the Royal Library

at Nineveh.” They include a tablet of “words and phrases used in legal

documents, to serve as grammatical examples; one column being in the

Sumero-Accadian language, the other an Assyrian translation; also

lists of a verbal formation, and an explanatory list of words”--a

dictionary, if you please! Even more remarkable is a tablet giving a

list of picture characters with the archaic forms of cuneiform signs

to which they were thought to correspond; this list being supplemented

by another in which the archaic forms themselves are interpreted with

the “modern” equivalent. This tablet shows that, in the belief of the

ancient Assyrian, the cuneiform character had been developed, at a

remote epoch, from a purely historical writing (as was doubtless the

case), but that the exact line of this development had faded from the

memories of men in the latter-day epoch of the seventh century B.C.

In the case beyond are tablets with lists of “Names of Birds, Plants,

Bronze Objects, Articles of Clothing, etc., for reference as an aid

to writing literary compositions.” Then lists of officials, and other

documents relating to the history of Babylonia-Assyria, including

historical inscriptions of Sennacherib. Beyond, a set of letters,

public and private, mostly inscribed on oval bits of clay, three or

four inches long, and sometimes provided with envelopes of the same

material. Of this numerous collection of letters, the one that attracts

most popular attention is that in which King Sennacherib refers to

certain objects given by him to his son Esarhaddon. This is commonly

known as the “will of Sennacherib.” Near this is another letter that

is interesting because it is provided with a baked-clay envelope, into

which the letter slipped as a kernel of a nut into its shell. The

envelope bears the inscription, “To the King, my Lord, from Asshur

Ritsua,” and it is authenticated by two impressions of the writer’s

seal.

This use of seals, by-the-bye, is quite general, particularly in the

case of official documents. Sometimes, as in the case of a contract

tablet shown here, the witness, in lieu of seal, gives the stamp of

his finger nail, this being equivalent, I suppose, to “John Doe, his

mark.” It is hardly to be supposed that the average Assyrian could

write any more than the average Greek or Roman could, or, for that

matter, the average European of a century ago. The professional

scribe did the writing, of course, whence the necessity for seals

to assure authenticity of even ordinary letters. Doubtless the

art of gem engraving, which the old Chaldeans carried to amazing

perfection, followed by the Greeks and Romans, has been allowed to

decline in recent generations largely because the increasing spread of

education--not to mention gummed envelopes--made seals less and less a

necessity. Perhaps the art may be revived in the age of the typewriter.

But if one stops to speak of seals, he could hardly be restrained

from rushing off to the wonderful collection in the gem department

of the British Museum, where the Græco-Roman intaglios would drive

all thought of other collections from his head,--though even there

the Cyprian finds would lead him back irrevocably to the Babylonian

model,--whereas, for the moment, our true concern is not with seals of

any sort, but with the documents they are purposed to authenticate.

These documents are of the strangest assortment; and yet not strange,

so precisely similar are they to the official records of modern

communal existence. Thus here is one tablet, of about the year 650

B.C., recording the sale of a house. There another tells of the leasing

of certain property, for a term of six years, for twelve shekels of

silver. And, capping the climax, here are tablets recording the loan

of money, veritable notes, with even the rate of interest--twenty per

cent--carefully prescribed. One learns that the money broker did a

thriving business in old Nineveh. How near to us those days are, after

all!

And nearer yet they seem when we pass to the cases of the tablets

of omens and forecasts based upon the position of the stars and

planets, the actions of animals and reptiles, the flight of birds,

and the appearance of newly born offspring. For when superstition is

in question all races are kin, and all times are contemporary. The

European of to-day who shudders when he sees the moon over his left

shoulder, is brother in spirit to the Assyrian astrologer who used

this “astrolabe” to forecast the events of his own immediate future.

And these incantations, religious and magical rites, prayers, hymns,

litanies--do they not make it clear that the Assyrian was indeed our

elder brother? Does this lifted veil then show us a vista of three

millennia, or only of as many generations? At least it serves to

bring home to us--and I doubt if any other exhibit could do it as

forcibly--how slow, how snail-like is the rate of human progress.

Yet, after all, how vain this moralising; for who does not know that

the day when Nineveh saw its prime was only the yesterday of human

civilisation? If one doubted it before, he can doubt no longer,

since he has wandered down the rooms in which the relics from the

library of Asshurbanapal are exhibited, glancing thus casually at the

accommodating English labels.

Naturally, the stock of material bearing upon this topic has been

constantly increased by new explorations, notably by those of Oppert at

Nineveh, and of De Sarzec at Telloh, by which the French Government has

supplemented the early collections of the pioneer of the work, Botta;

by various German exploring companies; and, more recently, by the

American exploring expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, under

Dr. John P. Peters, which secured such important results at Nippur.

But the greatest repository of all still remains that which Layard and

his assistant and successor in the work, Rassam, followed by George

Smith, secured for the British Museum. The other collections afford

important sidelights; but the main story of Assyrian life and history,

as at present known to us, is told only by the books from the wonderful

library of the palace of Asshurbanapal at Nineveh; and these can be

studied only in the British Museum, or in the publications which the

workers of that institution have from time to time given to the world.

After glancing at these documents for the first time, none but a

heedless person can fail to have brought home to him a more vivid

picture of the life of antiquity, and a truer historical perspective

than he can previously have possessed. For more than two thousand years

Greek culture has dominated the world, and it has been the custom to

speak of the Greek as if he were the veritable inventor of art and of

culture; but these documents have led to a truer view. Here one looks

back, as it were, over the heads of the Greeks, and catches glimpses of

a people that possessed a high civilisation when the Greeks were still

an upstart nation, only working their way out of barbarism.

Now it appears to be nothing less than a law of nature that every

nation should look with contempt upon every other nation which it

regards as contemporary. With a highly artistic people, whose chief

pride is their artistic taste, this feeling reaches its climax. The

Greek attitude in this regard is proverbial. But it is just as fixed a

law of nature that every nation should look with reverence upon some

elder civilisation. The Romans adopted the Greek word “barbarian,” and

applied it to all other nations--except the Greeks. The Greeks did not

return the compliment. For them the Romans were parvenus--parvenus to

be looked on with hatred and contempt. I doubt not the Athenian child

gave the deadliest possible insult to his playfellow when he called him

a Roman; just as the Parisian child of to-day reserves the appellation

“_anglais_” as the bitterest anathema of his vocabulary. But when the

Greek turned his eyes in the other direction, and looked out upon

Egyptian and Babylonian civilisation, he was gazing into the past, and

his contempt changed to reverence, precisely as with the Frenchman

of to-day, who looks back with reverence upon the civilisation of

ancient Greece and Rome, while utterly contemning all phases of the

nineteenth-century civilisation save his own.

It was gladly admitted by the Greeks that these oriental civilisations

had flowered while Greek culture was yet in the bud. Solon, the

law-giver, was reported to have travelled in Egypt, and to have been

mildly patronised by the Egyptian priests as the representative of an

infant race. Herodotus, though ostensibly writing of the Persian war,

devotes whole sections of his history to Egypt, and accepts, as did

his countrymen, the Egyptian claims to immense antiquity without a

scruple. Plato even resided for some years in Egypt, as Diodorus tells

us, in the hope of gaining an insight into the mysteries of oriental

philosophy.

Regarding the Assyrio-Babylonians, apparently hardly any story was

too fanciful to gain a measure of credence with the classical world.

Herodotus, to be sure, only credits the Assyrians with ruling for

five hundred and twenty years before the overthrow of Nineveh; and

Diodorus, following Ctesias, raises the figure only to about one

thousand four hundred years. But these figures were probably based on

a vague comprehension that Assyria proper had a relatively late period

of flowering, as was, indeed, the fact; and the rumours regarding the

age of Babylonian civilisation as a whole may be best illustrated by

recalling that Cicero thought it necessary to express his scepticism

regarding a claim, seemingly prevalent in his time, that Babylonian

monuments preserve astronomical observations dating back over a period

of two hundred and seventy thousand years. Pliny, on the other hand,

quoting “Epigenes, a writer of first-rate authority,” claims for the

astronomical records only a period of seven hundred and twenty years,

noting also that Berosus and Critodemus still further limit the period

to four hundred and eighty years. But the very range of numbers shows

how utterly vague were the notions involved; and Pliny himself draws

the inference of “the eternal use of letters” among the Babylonians,

indicating that even the minimum period took the matter beyond the

range of western history.

But for that matter nothing could be more explicit than the testimony

of Diodorus, who, writing some three centuries after what we now speak

of as the “golden age” of Greece, plainly indicates that not Greece but

Mesopotamia was looked to in his day as the classic land of culture.

And we of to-day are enabled--the first of any generation in our

era--to catch glimpses of the data on which that estimate was based,

and to understand, by the witness of our own eyes, that the fabled

glory of ancient Assyria was no myth, but a very tangible reality.

[Illustration: ASSYRIAN LETTER OF BAKED CLAY AND FRAGMENT OF ITS BROKEN

ENVELOPE

(Now in the British Museum)]

HOW THE ASSYRIAN BOOKS WERE READ

But all along we have followed the story of these strange books, taking

for granted their meaning as interpreted on the labels, and ignoring

for the moment the great marvel about them, which is not that we have

the material documents themselves, but that we have a knowledge of

their actual contents. The flights of arrow-heads on wall, on slab,

or tiny brick have surely a meaning; but how has any one guessed that

meaning? These must be words--but _what_ words? The hieroglyphics of

the Egyptians were mysterious in all conscience; yet, after all, their

symbols have a certain suggestiveness, whereas there is nothing that

seems to promise a mental leverage in the unbroken succession of these

cuneiform dashes. Yet the Assyrian scholar of to-day can interpret

these strange records almost as readily and as surely as the classical

scholar interprets a Greek manuscript. And this evidences one of the

greatest triumphs of nineteenth-century scholarship; for, since almost

two thousand years, no man has lived, previous to our century, to

whom these strange inscriptions would not have been as meaningless

as they are to the most casual stroller who looks on them with vague

wonderment here in the museum to-day. For the Assyrian language, like

the Egyptian, was veritably a dead language; not, like Greek and Latin,

merely passed from practical everyday use to the closet of the scholar,

but utterly and absolutely forgotten by all the world. Such being the

case, it is nothing less than marvellous that it should have been

restored.

It is but fair to add that this restoration probably never would have

been effected with Assyrian or with Egyptian had the language, in

dying, left no cognate successor; for the powers of modern linguistry,

though great, are not actually miraculous. But, fortunately, a language

once developed is not blotted out _in toto_; it merely outlives its

usefulness and is gradually supplanted, its successor retaining many

traces of its origin. So, just as Latin, for example, has its living

representatives in Italian and the other Romance tongues, the language

of Assyria is represented by cognate Semitic languages. As it chances,

however, these have been of aid rather in the later stages of Assyrian

study than at the very outset; for the first clew to the message of the

cuneiform writing came through a slightly different channel.

Curiously enough, it was a trilingual inscription that gave the clew,

as in the case of the Rosetta stone; though with a very striking

difference withal. The trilingual inscription now in question, instead

of being a small portable monument, covers the surface of a massive

bluff at Behistun, in western Persia. Moreover, all three of its

inscriptions are in cuneiform character, and all three are in languages

that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were absolutely

unknown. This inscription itself, as a striking monument of unknown

import, had been seen by successive generations. Tradition ascribed

it, as we learn from Ctesias, through Diodorus, to the fabled Assyrian

queen, Semiramis. Tradition is quite at fault in this; but it is only

recently that knowledge has availed to set it right. The inscription,

as is now known, was really written about the year 515 B.C., at the

instance of Darius I, king of Persia, some of whose deeds it recounts

in the three chief languages of his widely scattered subjects.

The man who, at the actual risk of life and limb, copied this wonderful

inscription, and, through interpreting it, became the veritable “Father

of Assyriology,” was the English general, Sir Henry Rawlinson. His feat

was another British triumph over the same rivals who had competed for

the Rosetta stone; for some French explorers had been sent by their

government, some years earlier, expressly to copy this inscription, and

had reported that to reach the inscription was impossible. But British

courage did not find it so, and in 1835 Rawlinson scaled the dangerous

height and made a paper cast of about half the inscription. Diplomatic

duties called him away from the task for some years, but in 1848 he

returned to it, and completed the copy of all parts of the inscription

that have escaped the ravages of time. And now the material was in

hand for a new science, which General Rawlinson, assisted by a host of

others, soon began to elaborate.

The key to the value of the Behistun inscription lies in the fact that

its third language is ancient Persian. It appears that the ancient

Persians had adopted the cuneiform character from their western

neighbours, the Assyrians, but in so doing had made one of those

essential modifications and improvements which are scarcely possible to

accomplish except in the transition from one race to another. Instead

of building with the arrow-heads a multitude of syllabic characters,

including many homophones, as had been, and continued to be, the custom

of the Assyrians, the Persians selected a few of these characters, and

ascribed to them phonetic values that were almost purely alphabetical.

In a word, while retaining the wedge as the basal stroke of their

script, they developed an alphabet; making that last wonderful

analysis of phonetic sounds which even to this day has escaped the

Chinese, which the Egyptians had only partially effected and which the

Phœnicians were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced into

the western world. In addition to this all-essential step, the Persians

had introduced the minor, but highly convenient, custom of separating

the words of a sentence from one another by a particular mark,

differing in this regard not only from the Assyrians and the Egyptians,

but from the early Greek scribes as well.

Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian language has been

practically restored about the beginning of the nineteenth century,

through the efforts of the German, Grotefend; and further advances

in it were made just at this time by Burnouf in France, and Lassen

in Germany, as well as by Rawlinson himself, who largely solved the

problem of the Persian alphabet independently. So the Persian portion

of the Behistun inscription could at last be partially deciphered.

This, in itself, however, would have been no very great aid towards the

restoration of the languages of the other portions, had it not chanced

fortunately that the inscription is sprinkled with proper names. Now,

proper names, generally speaking, are not translated from one language

to another, but transliterated as nearly as the genius of the language

will permit. It was the fact that the Greek word “Ptolemaios” was

transliterated on the Rosetta stone, that gave the first clew to the

sounds of the Egyptian characters. Had the upper part of the Rosetta

stone been preserved, on which, originally, there were several other

names, Young would not have halted where he did in his decipherment.

But fortune, which had been at once so kind, and so tantalising in the

case of the Rosetta stone, had dealt more gently with the Behistun

inscription; for no fewer than ninety proper names were preserved in

the Persian portion, and duplicated, in another character, in the

Assyrian inscription. A study of these gave a clew to the sounds of the

Assyrian characters. The decipherment of this character, however, even

with this aid, proved enormously difficult, for it was soon evident

that here it was no longer a question of a nearly perfect alphabet of

a few characters, but of a syllabary of several hundred characters,

including many homophones, or different forms for representing the same

sound. But with the Persian translation for a guide on the one hand,

and the Semitic languages, to which family the Assyrian belonged, on

the other, the appalling task was gradually accomplished, the leading

investigators being General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Mr. Fox

Talbot, in England; Professor Jules Oppert in Paris; and Professor

Eberhard Schrader in Germany; though a host of other scholars soon

entered the field.

This great linguistic feat was accomplished about the middle of the

century. But so great a feat was it, that many scholars of the highest

standing, including Ernest Renan in France, and Sir George Cornwall

Lewis in England, declined at first to accept the results, contending

that the Assyriologists had merely deceived themselves by creating

an arbitrary language. The matter was put to the test in 1855, at

the suggestion of Mr. Fox Talbot, when four scholars, one being Mr.

Talbot himself, and the others General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks,

and Professor Oppert, laid before the Royal Asiatic Society their

independent translations of an hitherto untranslated Assyrian text. A

committee of the society, including England’s greatest historian of the

century, George Grote, broke the seals of the four translations, and

reported that they found them unequivocally in accord as regards their

main purport, and even surprisingly uniform as regards the phraseology

of certain passages; in short, as closely similar as translations from

the obscure texts of any difficult language ever are. This decision

gave the work of Assyriologists an official status, so to say, and the

reliability of their method has never since been in question.

Thus it has come about that these inscribed bricks from the palace of

Asshurbanapal, which, when the first of them was discovered, were as

meaningless as so many blank slabs, have been made to deliver up their

message. And a marvellous message it is, as we have already seen.

Merely to have satisfied a vague curiosity as to the past traditions,

however, would be but a small measure of the intellectual work which

the oriental antiquities have had a large share in accomplishing. Their

message has been one of truly world-historic import. Thanks to these

monuments from Egypt and Mesopotamia, the student of human civilisation

has to-day a sweep of view that hitherto has been utterly withheld from

him. Until the crypts by the Nile and the earth mounds by the Tigris

and Euphrates gave up their secrets, absolutely nothing was known to

scholarship of the main sweep of civilisation more anciently than about

the sixth century B.C. Beyond that all was myth, fable, unauthenticated

tradition. And now the indubitable monuments of civilisation carry us

back over a period at least three times as great. Archbishop Usher’s

famed _Chronology_, which so long dominated the ideas of men, is swept

away, and we learn from evidence graven in stone and baked indelibly

in bricks that in the year 4004 B.C., which our Bible margins still

point out as the year of Creation, vast communities of people, in

widely separated portions of the earth, had attained a high degree of

civilisation. In the year when the proverbial first man wandered naked

in Eden, the actual man lived with thousands of his fellow-men in vast

cities, where he built houses and temples, erected wonderful monuments,

practised such arts as glass-making, sculpture, and painting, and

recorded his thoughts in written words. And from that day to this

stretches the thread of civilisation, unbroken by any universal flood

or other cataclysm.

Now, to be sure, we are told that Archbishop Usher and his kith and

kin were but gullible and misguided enthusiasts, to have thought they

detected chronological sequence where none such existed; but it was

rank heresy to have propounded such a view until the new monuments gave

us the rudiments of a true chronology. Other evidence had, indeed,

proven the antiquity of the earth and of man himself, but the antiquity

of civilisation still depends upon these oriental monuments alone for

its demonstration. The chronology of ancient history has no other

authenticated source; and chronology, as Professor Petrie has said, is

“the backbone of history.” To be sure, the exact chronology of remote

antiquity is not by any means as fixed and secure as might be desired.

The antiquarian in dealing with the remoter epochs must count by

centuries rather than by years. But the broad outlines of the question

are placed beyond cavil. So long as the danger mark of the flood year

stared the investigator in the face, every foot of earlier chronology

was controversial ground, and each remoter century must battle for

recognition. But now, thanks to the accumulation of evidence, all that

is past, and the most ardent partisans of Hebrew records vie with one

another in tracing back the evidences of civilisation in Egypt and

Mesopotamia, by centuries and by millennia. It is thought by Professor

Hilprecht, that the more recent excavations by the Americans at the

site of Nippur have carried the evidence back to 6000 or perhaps

even 7000 years B.C., and no one’s equanimity is disturbed by the

suggestion, except, possibly, that of the Egyptologist, whose records

as yet pause something like a thousand years earlier, and who feels a

certain jealousy lest his Egyptian of seven thousand years ago should

be proven an uninteresting parvenu.

But note how these new figures disturb the balance of history. If our

forerunners of eight or nine thousand years ago were in a noonday glare

of civilisation, where shall we look for the much-talked-of “dawnings

of history”? By this new standard the Romans seem our contemporaries

in latter-day civilisation; the “golden age” of Greece is but of

yesterday; the Pyramid builders are only relatively remote. The men who

built the temple of Bel, at Nippur, in the year, let us say, 5000 B.C.,

must have felt themselves at a pinnacle of civilisation and culture. As

Professor Mahaffy has suggested, the time of the Pyramids may have been

the veritable autumn of civilisation. Where, then, must we look for its

spring-time? The answer to that question must come, if it comes at all,

from what we now speak of as prehistoric archæology; the monuments from

Memphis and Nippur and Nineveh, covering a mere 10,000 years or so, are

records of later history.[j]

FOOTNOTES

[39] Diodorus Siculus, it will be remembered, states that the stones

of the bridge built by Semiramis across the Euphrates were united by

similar iron cramps, whilst the interstices were filled up with molten

lead.

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS

[The letter [a] is reserved for Editorial Matter]

CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE

[b] G. WEBER, _Allgemeine Weltgeschichte_.

[c] EDUARD MEYER, _Geschichte des Alterthums_.

[d] F. HOMMEL, _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_.

[e] R. W. ROGERS, _History of Babylonia and Assyria_.

[f] J. P. PETERS, _Nippur_.

CHAPTER II. OLD BABYLONIAN HISTORY

[b] HUGO RADAU, _Early Babylonian History down to the IVth Dynasty of

Ur_.

[c] A. H. SAYCE, from the article “Babylonia and Assyria,” in the New

Volumes of the Ninth Edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.

[d] E. A. T. W. BUDGE, _Babylonian Life and History_.

CHAPTER III. THE RISE OF ASSYRIA

[b] H. WINCKLER, _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_.

[c] EDUARD MEYER, _Geschichte des Alterthums_.

[d] E. BABELON, _Histoire de l’Orient_.

[e] C. P. TIELE, _Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte_.

CHAPTER IV. FOUR GENERATIONS OF ASSYRIAN GREATNESS

[b] C. P. TIELE, _Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte_.

[c] HERODOTUS, _The History of Herodotus_ (translated from the Greek by

William Beloe).

[g] E. A. T. W. BUDGE, _Annals of Shalmaneser II, Sennacherib, and

Asshurbanipal_.

CHAPTER V. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF ASSYRIA

[b] R. W. ROGERS, _History of Babylonia and Assyria_.

[c] C. P. TIELE, _Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte_.

CHAPTER VI. RENASCENCE AND FALL OF BABYLON

[b] F. HOMMEL, _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_.

CHAPTER VII. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF BABYLONIA-ASSYRIA

[b] A. H. LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_.

[c] HERODOTUS, _The History of Herodotus_ (translated from the Greek by

William Beloe).

[d] STRABO, _The Geography of Strabo_ (translated from the Greek by J.

Falconer and H. C. Hamilton).

[e] A. H. L. HEEREN, _Historical Researches into the Politics,

Intercourse, and Trade of the Principal Nations of Antiquity_ (Asiatic

Nations).

[f] JOACHIM MENANT, _La Bibliothèque du Palais de Ninive_.

CHAPTER VIII. THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS

[b] JOACHIM MENANT, _La Bibliothèque du Palais de Ninive_.

[c] L. W. KING, _Babylonian Religion and Mythology_.

[h] P. JENSEN, _Cosmologie der Babylonier_.

[i] H. GUNKEL, _Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit_.

[j] L. W. KING, _Seven Tablets of Creation_.

[m] EBERHARD SCHRADER, _Die Keilinschriften und Das Alte Testament, 3rd

edition_.

[n] A. JEREMIAS, _Izdubar Nimrod_.

[o] C. P. TIELE, _Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte_.

CHAPTER IX. BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN CULTURE

[b] A. H. LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_.

[c] HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, “The Influence of Modern Research on the

Scope of World History,” Prefatory Essay in Volume III of the New

Volumes of the Ninth Edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.

[d] DIODORUS SICULUS, _The Historical Library_ (translated from the

Greek by G. Booth).

[e] EDUARD MEYER, _Geschichte des Alterthums_.

[f] EDWARD HINCKS, from an article “On the Assyrio-Babylonian Measures

of Time,” in Volume XXIV of the _Transactions of the Royal Irish

Academy_, 1874.

[g] JOACHIM MENANT, _La Bibliothèque du Palais de Ninive_.

[h] C. P. TIELE, _Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte_.

[i] G. NAGEL, in _Beiträge zur Assyriologie_, Vol. IV.

[j] M. MONTGOMERY, _Briefe aus der Zeit Hammurabis_.

[k] C. JOHNSTON, in the “Epistolary Literature of the Assyrians and

Babylonians” in the _Journal of the American Oriental Society_, Vol.

XVIII.

[l] FRIEDRICH DELITZSCH, article “Beiträge zur Erklärung der

babylonisch-assyrischen Brieflitteratur” in _Beiträge zur

Assyriologie_, Vol. I.

[m] F. LENORMANT, _Histoire ancienne de l’Orient_.

APPENDIX A. CLASSICAL TRADITIONS

[b] ISAAC PRESTON CORY, _Ancient Fragments_.

[c] DIODORUS SICULUS. _The Historical Library_, (translated from the

Greek by G. Booth).

[d] CLAUDIUS ÆLIANUS, _The Variable History of Ælianus_ (translated

from the Greek by A. Fleming).

APPENDIX B. EXCAVATIONS IN MESOPOTAMIA AND THEIR RESULTS

[b] A. H. LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_.

[c] F. HOMMEL, _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_.

[d] R. W. ROGERS, _History of Babylonia and Assyria_.

[j] HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, _The History of the Art of Writing_.

A GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MESOPOTAMIAN HISTORY

BASED ON THE WORKS QUOTED, CITED, OR EDITORIALLY CONSULTED IN THE

PREPARATION OF THE PRESENT HISTORY, WITH CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

* * * * *

=Ælianus=, Claudius, The Variable History of Ælianus. Translated

by A. Fleming. London, 1576.--=Ainsworth=, W., Researches in

Assyria, Babylonia, and Chaldea. London, 1842; Chaldeans of Central

Kurdestan.--=Amiaud=, A., in de Sarzec’s Découvertes en Chaldée. Paris,

1814, 2 vols.; (in collab. with =F. Scheil=) Les inscriptions de

Salmanasar. Paris, 1890.--=Aures=, A., Traité de métrologie assyrienne.

Paris, 1891.

* * * * *

=Babelon=, E., Manuel d’archéol. orientale. Paris, 1888.--=Bertin=,

G., Babylonian Chronology and History. London, 1892; The

Pre-Akkadian Semites. London, 1886.--=Bewsher=, Lieut., Mesopotamia:

Sheriat-el-Beyta to Tell Ibrahim.--=Bezold=, C., The Tell-el-Amarna

Tablets in the British Museum. London, 1892; Catalogue of the Cuneiform

Tablets in the Kuyunjik collection in the British Museum. London,

1889; Überblick über die babylonisch-assyrische Literatur. Leipsic,

1886.--=Billerbeck=, A., Susa. Leipsic, 1893.--=Birch=, S., Records

of the Past. London, 1873, 12 vols.--=Bonavia=, E., Flora of the

Assyrian Monuments. London, 1894.--=Boscawen=, W. St. C., Lectures on

the History of Assyria. London, 1886; Assyria and Babylonia. London,

1836.--=Botta=, P. E., and =Flandrin=, E., Monuments de Ninive. Paris,

1849-1850, 5 vols.

_Paul Émil Botta_ was born at Turin December 6, 1802, and died

at Achères, near Poissy, France, March 29th, 1870. He was French

consul at Alexandria, and in 1842 was transferred to the office of

vice-consul at Mosul, of which he was the first titulary consul.

In December, 1842, he studied the tumulus which covered the right

bank of the Tigris opposite Mosul; superficially explored Kuyunjik;

and then at Khorsabad discovered (from March to October, 1843) the

remains of the town and palace of Doursaryonkin, founded by Sargon

II, king of Assyria. The objects found during these discoveries

were transported to France in 1846, and form the main contents of

the Musée Assyrien of the Louvre.

=Brandis=, J., Über den historischen Gewinn aus der Entzifferung der

Assyr. Inschriften. Berlin, 1856.--=Brown=, F. T., Assyriology. New

York, 1885.--=Bruce=, P., Three Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, King of

Babylonia, B.C. 625-604; In Amer. Jour. of Sem. Lang., vol. 16, p.

178. Chicago, 1900.--=Brünnow=, R. E., Classified List of All Simple

and Compound Cuneiform Ideographs. Leyden, 1887-1889.--=Bruston=,

C. A., Les inscriptions assyriennes et l’Ancien Testament. Paris,

1875.--=Budge=, E. A. W., Babylonian Life and History. London, 1884;

The History of Esar-Haddon. London, 1880; Annals of Shalmanasser II,

Sennacherib and Assurbani-Pal. London, 1880; A Guide to the Babylonian

and Assyrian Antiq. of the British Museum. London, 1900.

* * * * *

=Cara=, P. C. de, Gli Hethei-Pelasgi. Rome, 1895.--=Cartwright=, J.,

Travels through Syria, Mesopotamia, etc. London, 1911.--=Cassas=, L.

F., Voyage Pittoresque en Syrie. Paris, 1799.--=Cavaniol=, H., Les

monuments en Chaldée, en Assyrie et à Babylone. Paris, 1870.--=Clercq=,

L. de, Antiquités assyriennes. Paris, 1888.--=Cloquet=, L., L’art

monumental des égyptiens et des assyriens. Paris, 1896.

* * * * *

=Delattre=, A. J., Esquisse de géographie assyrienne. Paris, 1883; Les

inscriptions historiques de Ninive, etc. Paris, 1879; L’Asie occid.

dans les inscriptions assyriennes. Brussels, 1885; L’assyriologie

depuis onze ans. Paris, 1891; L’exactitude en histoire d’après un

Assyriologiste. Louvain, 1888.--=Delitzsch=, Friedrich, Die Entstehung

des ältestens Schriftsystems. Leipsic, 1897; Handel, Recht und Sitte

im alten Babylonien (in Velhagen and Klasing’s Monatshefte, Jahr. 13,

Vol. II, p. 47. Berlin, 1899); Assyrische Studien. Leipsic, 1874.

_Friedrich Delitzsch_, the son of Franz Delitzsch, was born

at Erlangen, September 3, 1850. Professor of Assyriology in

the University of Berlin, he devoted himself to the study of

Assyriology, and attained a wide reputation as an Assyriologist.

He was appointed Professor of Assyriology at the University of

Leipsic. His writings have been mostly upon the subject of Assyria

and ancient Assyrian life, and he has made some translations from

the works of other historians, notably George Smith’s _Chaldean

Account of Genesis_. He made a deep sensation in Germany in 1902

by his lecture on “Babel and the Bible,” in which he pointed out

the similarity of the story of Moses in the bulrushes to the

ancient legend of the birth of Sargon I, king of Babylon; noted

the Babylonian custom of resting every seventh day, the word being

shabattu (whence Sabbath), and many other points in which the

Babylonian influence is shown in the Bible.

=Dieulafoy=, J., La Perse et la Chaldée. Paris, 1887.--=Diodorus=, S.,

The Historical Library, London, 1700.--=Duncker=, M., Geschichte des

Alterthums. Leipsic, 1878, 6 vols. English translation: The History of

Antiquity. London, 1880, 6 vols.

* * * * *

=Edwards=, C., The Witness of Assyria. London, 1893.--=Epping=, C.,

Astronomisches aus Babylon. Freiburg, 1889.--=Evans=, G., An Essay

on Assyriology. London, 1883.--=Evetts=, B. T. A., Cylinders of

Sennacherib. London, 1889; Inscription of the Reign of Evil-Merodach,

Neriglissar and Laborosoarchod. Leipsic, 1892.

* * * * *

=Feer=, H. L., Les Ruines de Ninive. Paris, 1864.--=Ferguson=, J., The

Palaces of Niniveh and Persepolis Restored. London, 1857.--=Fontane=,

M., Histoire Universelle. Paris, 1881-1889, 6 vols.

_Marius Fontane_ was born at Marseilles, September 4, 1838. He was

destined to follow a commercial career, and was sent by a French

house in Marseilles to represent it in the Orient. While there

he was brought into relations with M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, and

became his private secretary. Through the efforts of M. de Lesseps,

Fontane was successively associated as secretary-general to the

Suez and Panama Canal Companies. M. Fontane was early drawn into

literary work, and in spite of his official duties found time to

devote much attention to political economy, religion, learning, and

history in all its branches. In his Universal History he devotes

much space to questions of race and primitive religions in the

historical evolution of humanity. Marius Fontane has come into

prominence largely through his writings on the subject of history,

but also through his explorations in the countries lying about the

Isthmus of Suez.

=Fradenburg=, J. N., Fire from Strange Altars. Cincinnati,

1891.--=Fraser=, J. B., Mesopotamia and Assyria, from the Earliest Ages

to the Present Time. New York, 1892.

* * * * *

=Gatschet=, A. S., Historic Documents from the XIVth Century B.C. (In

Amer. Anthropologist, vol. 10, p. 121. Washington, 1897.)--=Ginzel=,

F. K., Die astronomischen Kentnisse der Babylonier und ihre

culturhistorische Bedeutung. Leipsic, 1901.--=Goss=, W. H., Hebrew

Captives of the Kings of Assyria. London, 1890.--=Guyard=, S., Mélanges

d’Assyriologie. Paris, 1883.--=Goodspeed=, George S., A History of

Babylonia and Assyria. New York, 1903.

* * * * *

=Halévy=, J., Documents religieux de l’Assyrie. Paris, 1882; La

nouvelle évolution de l’accadisme. Paris, 1878; Aperçu grammatical

sur l’allographie assyro-babylonienne. Paris, 1885; Essai sur les

inscriptions du Safa. Paris, 1882; Recherches critiques sur l’origine

de la civilisation babylonienne. Paris, 1876.

_Joseph Halévy_, of Jewish origin, was born at Adrianople, December

15, 1827. He came to study at Paris, and became a naturalised

Frenchman. In 1868 he visited northern Abyssinia to study the

Jewish religion of the Falashas. (The Falashas are a Hamitic tribe

which professes the Jewish religion, and claims descent from Hebrew

immigrants who followed the queen of Sheba.) In 1869 he was sent

to Yemen on a mission of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles

Lettres. He remained there two years, and brought back six hundred

and eighty-three Sabaic inscriptions. In 1872 he received a gold

medal from the Société de Géographie and the Volney prize from

the Institut. He afterwards became Professor of Ethiopian at the

École pratique des hautes études. He was one of the most active

collaborators in the _Journal Asiatique_, and wrote frequently

on the most disputed questions concerning the philology and

the archæology of the East to the Académie des Inscriptions.

His theories as to the origins of the Mesopotamian peoples and

languages made a profound impression on all the scholarly world,

and while they have met with bitter opposition they are entitled

to all the consideration that is due to such deep and tireless

research.

=Harkness=, M. E., Assyrian Life and History. London, 1883.--=Harper=,

R. F., Assyrian and Babylonian Letters. London, 1892-1902, 8

vols.--=Havet=, E., Mémoire sur la date des écrits. Paris.--=Heeren=,

A. H. L., Historical Researches, etc. Oxford, 1839, 2nd ed.,

5 vols.--=Hegel=, G. W. F., Lectures on the Philosophy of

History. London, 1857.--=Helm=, O. (in collab. with =Hilprecht=,

H. V.), Chemische Untersuchung von altbabylonischen Kupferund

Bronze-Gegenständen und deren Alters-Bestimmung (in Berl. Gesellsch. f.

Anthrop. Verh.). Berlin, 1901.--=Herder=, J. G. von, Outlines of the

Philosophy of History of Man. London, 1803, 2 vols.

_Johann Gottfried von Herder_ was born at Mohrungen, East Prussia,

August 25, 1744. His education was mostly private. His first

writings appeared when he was about twenty years of age. His first

considerable work, _Fragmente über die neure deutsche Literatur_,

appeared in 1767. This work attracted the favourable attention of

Lessing, and made him widely known. In 1776 he obtained the post of

upper court preacher and upper member of the Consistory at Weimar.

At this post he passed the rest of his life. “He possessed a power

of intuition which must be considered in many cases as prophetic,

and which made him a pathfinder whose traces are followed up to

the present day.” His _Study of the Philosophy of History_ will

naturally be compared with the work on the same subject by his

contemporary Hegel. It created almost a furor of excitement in

its day, and may still be read with interest and profit by every

earnest student of history. Its essential attitude of mind appears

peculiarly archaic in our day, evidencing the utterly changed

point of view from which history is regarded in our generation.

Herder, like most other philosophical historians of his time,

saw everywhere the hand of God in history, and was firmly imbued

with the idea that all human events were but the working out of a

divine plan, the broad outlines of which had been fully revealed

to man. The modern historian tries to be a scientist rather than a

philosopher, and he finds scant proof of this basis on which Herder

worked, but views or attempts to view the course of world-history

as a candid or impartial investigator of facts and of rational

human motives, feeling by no means sure that he grasps the full

import of any metaphysical theological bearings of these facts and

motives, if such there be. Yet for this very reason the writings of

Herder have a peculiar value, as they not alone evidence the mental

grasp of the age in which they were written, but serve at the same

time to point out a significant difference between that time and

our own.

=Herodotus=, The History of Herodotus. London, 1806, 2nd ed., 4

vols.--=Heuzey=, L., Un palais chaldéen. Paris, 1888. La construction

du roi Our-Nina d’après les levés et les notes de M. de Sarzec (in Rev.

d’Assyr. et d’Archéol., vol. 4, p. 87. Paris, 1898).--=Hilprecht=,

H. V., The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania

(Old Babylonian Inscriptions), Am. Phil. Soc. Philadelphia, 1896;

Recent Researches in the Bible Lands. Philadelphia, 1896; The Recent

Excavations of the University at Nippur (in Univ. of Pennsylvania Bul.,

vol. 2, p. 87, and vol. 3, p. 373, Philadelphia, 1899).

_Hermann Hilprecht_ was born at Hohenerxleben, Germany, June 28,

1859. He is at present professor in the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Hilprecht was interested from the outset in the

expedition of the University of Pennsylvania to Babylonia, to which

we have more than once referred. At a later stage he was curator

and scientific director of the expedition, in which Mr. Haynes had

charge of the field-work, 1893-95 and 1897-1900, after Dr. Peters’

retirement. Though he spent but a month in actual field-work, he

spent several years in working up at Constantinople or Philadelphia

the ample supply of materials which the various expeditions

procured, and his results, as published from time to time, have

been noted everywhere as distinct and important additions to our

technical knowledge of Assyriology. The greatest popular interest

in these discoveries perhaps grows out of the light that they throw

on the extreme antiquity of Babylonian history. Dr. Peters and

Professor Hilprecht both assure us that the secure records gained

by the excavations of Nippur carry the history of Babylonia back to

a period at least a thousand years earlier than the date ascribed

by Archbishop Usher’s long-famed chronology for the creation of the

world, and Professor Hilprecht’s latest investigations justify the

belief that the earliest records from Nippur are not newer than the

year 7000 B.C.

=Hincks=, E., On the Assyrio-Babylonian Measures of Time. Dublin,

1874.--=Hird=, W. G., Monumental Records. London, 1889.--=Hoefer=, J.

C. F., Mémoires sur les ruines de Ninive. Paris, 1850.--=Hommel=, F.,

Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens. Berlin, 1885; Semitische Völker

und Sprachen. Leipsic, 1881; Abriss der babylonisch-assyrischen und

israel. Gesch. Leipsic, 1880; Der babylonische Ursprung der aegypt.

Kultur. München, 1892.

_Fritz Hommel_ was born at Ansbach, July 31, 1854. Professor of

Semitic Languages in the University of Munich. Professor Hommel is

a distinguished member of that band of German students who have

made orientalism their life-work. His particular studies have had

to do chiefly with the Semitic race. His history of Babylonia

and Assyria is one of the most recent and certainly among the

most comprehensive and authoritative works on the subject that

have yet been written. As Professor Hommel is yet a comparatively

young man, he very naturally belongs to the advanced school of

Assyriologists, and his work may be looked to with confidence for

an expression of the furthest present advance of research. In

particular, Professor Hommel is distinguished as an ardent champion

of the Babylonian or Chaldean origin of the Phœnician alphabet

in opposition to the theory of de Rougé, which ascribed to it an

Egyptian origin. Most of Hommel’s publications are to be had only

in the original German.

=Howorth=, H. H., The Early History of Babylonia (in Engl. Hist. Rev.,

vol. 13, pp. 1, 209, vol. 14, p. 625, vol. 16, p. 1); On the Earliest

Inscriptions from Chaldea (in Proc. Soc. Bibl. Archeol., vol. 21, p.

289, London, 1899).

* * * * *

=Jastrow=, M., The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria. Boston, 1898;

Nabopolassar and the Temple to the Sun-god at Sippar (in Amer. Jour,

of Sem. Lang.; Chicago, 1899, vol. 15, p. 65).--=Jensen=, P., Kish (in

Ztschr. für Assyriologie; Berlin, 1901, vol. 15): Assyrisch-babylon,

Mythen und Epen (in Keilschrftl. Bibl.; Berlin, 1900, vol. 6): Die

Cosmologie der Babylonier. Strassburg, 1890.--=Johnson=, C., The Fall

of the Assyrian Empire (in studies in honour of B. L. Gildersleeve;

Baltimore, 1902, p. 113): The Fall of Nineveh (in Amer. Orient. Soc.

Journ.; New Haven, 1901, vol. 22, pt. 1, p. 20).--=Justinius=, Justin’s

History of the World. London, 1875.--=Jeremias=, A., Hölle und Paradies

bei den Babyloniern. Leipsic, 1900.

* * * * *

=Kaulen=, F., Assyrien und Babylonien, nach den neuesten Entdeckungen.

Freiburg, 1891, 4th ed.--=Kennedy=, J., Early Commerce of Babylonia

with India, etc. London, 1898.--=King=, L. W., Babylonian Religion and

Mythology, London, 1899; Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi, etc.

London, 1898-1900, 3 vols.

_Leonard William King_ was born in London, December 8, 1869, and

educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge. As assistant in

the department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquity of the British

Museum, he has made very extensive studies in the literature of

Babylonia and Assyria. He has collected and arranged many series

of cuneiform inscriptions, besides adding much to the literature

on both Babylonia and Assyria. His writings are for the most part

rather technical.

=Kinns=, S., Graven in the Rock. London, 1891.--=Knudtzon=, J. A.,

Assyr. Gebete an den Sonnengott. Leipsic, 1893, 2 vols.--=Kohler=,

J., and =Peisser=, F. E., Aus dem babylonischen Rechtleben. Leipsic,

1890.--=Koldewey=, R., in Zeitschrift für Assyriologie. Dec.,

1887.--=Krall=, J., Grundriss der altorientalischen Geschichte. Wien,

1899.--=Krüger=, J., Geschichte der Assyrier und Iranier, vom XIII, bis

zum V. Jahrh. v. C. Frankfurt, 1856.

* * * * *

=Langlois=, V., Le Dunuk-Dasch, tombeau de Sardanapale à Tarsovo (in

Rev. Archéol.; Paris, 1853, vol. 10).--=Laurent=, A., La Magie et

la Divination de l’Orient. Paris, 1894.--=Layard=, A. H., Nineveh

and its Remains. London, 1849, 2 vols.; Nineveh and Babylon. London,

1853; Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. London, 1887;

Monuments of Nineveh. London, 1849-1854.

_Sir Austin Henry Layard_ was born in Paris, of English parentage,

March 5, 1817. He spent the years of his early youth in Florence.

On returning to England he began the study of law. In 1839 he

took an extended tour, chiefly within the Turkish Empire. Here

he learned Persian and Arabic. In 1842 he spent some months in

exploring the antiquities of southwestern Persia. It was during

this expedition that he became interested in the excavations

being made at the supposed site of Nineveh by M. Botta. In 1845

he returned to Mosul and began his series of researches. The

material that he gathered in this expedition greatly enriched

the oriental department of the British Museum; and by means of

the cuneiform inscriptions found the ancient oriental history

was completely reconstructed. In 1852 he made a second series of

excavations in Assyria, adding largely to his former discoveries.

The same year he was elected to Parliament. In 1854 he visited

Crimea, witnessing some battles there. He was chosen lord rector of

Aberdeen University in 1855, and in 1866 became a trustee of the

British Museum. Shortly after this he was elected foreign member

of the Institute of France. In 1869, Ambassador to Spain; in 1878,

to Constantinople. He died July 5, 1894. The name of this famous

Englishman will always be indelibly associated with the origin of

the science of Assyriology. To Layard it was chiefly due that the

once famous but long almost forgotten city of Nineveh was exhumed

and its buried treasures given to the world. The story of these

exhumations is a part of the history of Assyria-Babylonia, and has

already been told.

=Lehmann=, C., Altbabylon, Maass und Gewicht. Berlin, 1889;

Beiträge zur alten Geschichte. Leipsic, 1901; Shamasshumukin, König

von Babylonia, 668-669 v. C. Leipsic, 1892; Zwei Hauptprobleme

der altorientalischen Chronologie und ihre Lösung. Leipsic,

1898.--=Lenormant=, F., Les dieux de Babylone et de l’Assyrie. Paris,

1877; Lettres assyriologiques, 2nd series; Études accadiennes. Paris,

1879-1880; Chaldean Magic: Origin and Development. London, 1877;

Premières civilisations. Paris; in collab. with =Chevalier=, E., A

Manual of the Ancient History of the East. London, 1869-1870, 2 vols.;

in collab. with =Babelon=, E., Histoire ancienne de l’Orient. Paris,

1881-1886.

_François Lenormant_ was born in Paris 17th January, 1837; died

there 10th December, 1883. His education was private. Early in

life he showed a special aptitude and liking for the study of the

oriental languages. He travelled extensively in Egypt, Turkey, and

Greece, and became prominent for his researches in the Accadian

languages. In 1874 he was appointed Professor of Archæology at the

Bibliothèque, Paris. The son of an archæologist of distinguished

merit, Lenormant grew up in an atmosphere of scholarship, and

early evinced a keen taste for all that pertained to archæology.

He entered the field of Assyriology in its infancy, and soon

became known as a leader among the masters in that field, and his

early death was regarded everywhere as one of the severest blows

which oriental archæology could have received. Lenormant was

regarded by his fellow-workers as having a peculiar genius for his

task, and his taste for literary work was no less keen than his

scholarship. The fact that his great work on Oriental History was

at once translated into English vouches for its popular interest.

Unfortunately he did not live to complete his still more important

work on the same subject, to which the last years of his life were

devoted.

=Lincke=, A. A., Bericht über die Fortschritte der Assyriologie,

1886-1893. Leipsic, 1894.--=Lindl=, E., Die Datenliste der ersten

Dynastie von Babylon; in Beiträge zur Assyriologie. Leipsic,

1901.--=Loftus=, W. K., Chaldea and Susiana. London, 1857.--=Lotz=,

W., Die Imschriften Tiglathpileser I. Leipsic, 1880.--=Lyon=, G.,

Keilschrifttexte Sargon’s, Königs von Assyrien, 722-705 v. C. Leipsic,

1883.

* * * * *

=Maccalester=, S. H., Babylon and Nineveh. Boston, 1892.--=Macphail=,

S. E., Monumental witness to Old Testament History. London,

1879.--=Martin=, G., La campaigne de Sennakerib en Palestine, etc.

Montauban, 1892.--=Martin=, F., Textes religieux assyriens et

babyloniens. Paris, 1900.--=Maspero=, G. C. C., Histoire ancienne

des peuples de l’Orient. Paris, 1886; The Struggle of the Nations.

London, 1896; The Dawn of Civilisation. London, 1897; Life in Ancient

Assyria. London, 1892.--=Meissner=, B., Beiträge zum altbabylonischen

Privatrecht. Leipsic, 1893.--=Menant=, J., Babylone et la Chaldée.

Paris, 1875; Découvertes assyriennes. La Bibliothèque du palais de

Ninive. Paris, 1880; Empreintes de cachets assyrio-chaldéens relevés

au Musée britannique sur des contrats d’intériet privé. Paris, 1883;

Les pierres gravées de la Haute-Asie. Recherches sur la glyptique

orientale. Paris, 1883, 1886; Les noms propres assyriens; recherches

sur la formation des expressions idéographiques. Paris, 1861;

Hammourabi (King of Babylon) Inscriptions. Paris, 1873; Les langues

perdues de la Perse et de l’Assyrie. Paris, 1890; Annales des rois

d’Assyrie. Paris, 1874; Ninive et Babylone. Paris, 1888; Les fausses

antiquités de l’Assyrie. Paris, 1888.

_Joachim Menant_ was born at Cherbourg, France, 16th April,

1820. The life of this famous orientalist furnishes yet another

illustration of the practical man of affairs who finds also time

for the most abstruse scholarship. Throughout a long life until

1890, when at the ripe age of three score years and ten, he was

retired with the title of Honorary Councillor. Menant lived the

practical everyday life of a magistrate, and practised this

profession with such assiduity and judgment as to attain the

highest distinction. Yet, at the same time, he found leisure hours

enough to make himself everywhere recognised as one of the most

accomplished of Assyriologists. A comparatively young man, when

the discoveries of Botta and Layard and their successors first

brought the Assyrian treasures to the attention of the world,

Menant seemed from the very first to have been seized with a

desire to investigate the strange inscriptions from Nineveh. He

was among the first who undertook the investigation of the strange

cuneiform writing and from then till now he has kept well in the

van of the constantly growing company of Assyriologists. The list

of his works is little more than a succession of papers on one or

another of the subjects most intimately connected with this field.

Most of them are of a technical character, and, therefore, have

necessarily appeared only to a limited audience. In one or two

instances, however, and notably in the case of the little book

on the library of Asshurbanapal, he has descended to the popular

level, and has shown himself capable of handling the most abstruse

topics in a way to make them delightfully interesting to the least

scholarly of readers. Strange to say, this beautiful little book

has never been hitherto translated into English, and a like neglect

has attended nearly all the other publications of the author. It

is difficult to find an explanation of this neglect unless it be

the author’s well-known attitude towards the status of the ancient

Hebrew records. On more than one occasion he has expressed the

opinion that to single out the Jews among the peoples of antiquity

as the one important race of their time is wofully to distort the

perspective of history. Needless to say such an opinion as this

throws one counter to the prejudices of a large proportion of

people, including the mass of Assyriologists among the rest.

=Ménard=, L., Histoire des anciens peuples de l’Orient. Paris,

1883.--=Meyer=, E., Geschichte des Alterthums. Stuttgart, 1884, etc., 5

vols., in progress.--=Monaco=, A., Orientalia. Rome, 1891.--=Muecke=,

Ch., Von Euphrat zum Tiber. Untersuchungen zur alten Geschichte.

Leipsic, 1899.--=Mueller-Simonis=, P., Relations des missions

scientifiques. Washington, 1892.--=Mürdter=, F., Gesch. Babyloniens und

Assyriens. Stuttgart, 1891.

* * * * *

=Niebuhr=, B. G., Lectures on Ancient History. London, 1852,

2 vols.--=Niebuhr=, M., Geschichte Assurs und Babels. Berlin,

1854.--=Niebuhr=, C., Die erste Dynastie von Babel (in Vorderasiat.

Ges. Mitt., vol. 3, p. 43). Berlin, 1897; Studien zur Geschichte des

alten Orientes. Leipsic, 1894; Die Chronologie der Geschichte Israels,

Aegyptens, Babyloniens und Assyriens von 2000-700 v. Chr. Leipsic,

1895.--=Nikel=, J., Herodot und die Keilschriftforschung. Paderborn,

1896.

* * * * *

=Oppert=, J., Babylone et Chaldée. Paris, 1874; L’immortalité de l’âme

chez les Chaldéens. Paris, 1875; The Real Chronology of the Babylonian

Dynasties. London, 1888 (in collab. with J. =Menant=); Documents

juridiques de l’Assyrie et de la Chaldée. Paris, 1877; Histoire des

empires de Chaldée et d’Assyrie. Versailles, 1865 (in collab. with J.

=Menant=); Fastes de Sargon. Paris, 1863; Expédition scientifique en

Mésopotamie. Paris, 1859-1863, 2 vols.; Fragments mythologiques. Paris,

1882; Fragments de cosmogonie chaldéenne. Paris, 1879; La fixation de

la Chronologie des derniers rois de Babylone. Paris, 1893; La condition

des esclaves à Babylone. Paris, 1888; Les inscriptions assyriennes des

Sargonides et les fastes de Ninive. Paris, 1863.

_Jules Oppert_ was born at Hamburg, 9th July, 1825. Professor

Oppert is a German by birth but a Parisian by adoption. His

whole oriental studies have been not alone made in Paris, but

many of them under the direct auspices of the French Government,

so that Frenchmen are perhaps justified in claiming him almost

as a fellow-countryman. Professor Oppert has that comprehensive

scholarship which is characteristic rather of the German than

the Frenchman. He is a philologist and linguist of the broadest

type. Unfortunately for the general public the German cast of his

mind shows itself still further in his apparent contempt for the

literary graces. He is a scholar who works for scholars, and it is

but seldom that he has written anything which comes well within the

grasp of the general public. His is, therefore, a name which one

meets everywhere in pursuing the literature of Assyriology, but the

results of whose investigations must usually come to the general

reader, as it were, through an interpreter.

* * * * *

=Peiser=, F. E., Keilinschriftliche Aktenstücke. Berlin, 1890; Studien

zur Oriental. Alterthumskunde. Berlin, 1897. (In Vorderasiat, Ges.

Mitt. 1897, 4 vols.); Babylon, Verträge. Berlin, 1890; A Sketch of

Babylonian Society (in Smithsonian Institute. Annual Report, 1898.

Washington, 1899).--=Perrot=, G., A History of Art in Assyria. London,

1884.--=Peters=, J. P., Nippur, or Explorations and Adventures,

etc. New York and London, 1897, 2 vols.; Some Recent Results of the

University of Pennsylvania, Excavations at Nippur (in Amer. Jour. of

Archeol., vol. 10, pp. 13, 352, 439, Princeton, 1895); The Seat of the

Earliest Civilisation in Babylon and the Date of its Beginnings (in

Amer. Orient. Soc. Jour., New Haven, 1896).

_Dr. John Punnett Peters_ was formerly professor of Hebrew in the

University of Pennsylvania; at present rector of St. Michael’s

Protestant Episcopal Church, New York City. For more than a

generation after the discoveries of Botta and Layard and their

successors in Mesopotamia had been furthered by companies of

English and French and German explorers, America had taken no part

in the work, but in 1880, the University of Pennsylvania determined

to make amends for this neglect by sending out a fully equipped

exploring party. The leader of this movement, and the man who

personally conducted the explorations of the first two years in the

field, was Professor J. P. Peters. Through his energetic efforts

the numberless difficulties that such an enterprise involves were

overcome, and some most important discoveries were made. The chief

of these was the location of the Babylonian city of Nippur, the

site of that ancient temple of Bel, which was, as Dr. Peters points

out, to many generations of old Babylonians and Assyrians what

the temple of Jerusalem has been to the peoples of Christendom.

His discoveries at Nippur have added greatly to the work that has

been carried on at Babylon and Nineveh, and “helped to carry our

knowledge of civilised man two thousand years farther back than

was known less than half a century ago.” At Nippur he discovered

what is probably the oldest known temple in the world. Both his

expeditions met with very bitter and determined opposition from

government officials and wandering inhabitants in the vicinity of

Nippur, and it is mainly due to his fearless determination that

successful excavations were finally made.

=Pinches=, T. G., Religious Ideas of the Babylonians. London, 1893;

Notes. London, 1892; Sumerian or Cryptography (in Royal Asiatic Soc.

Jour.; 1900, p. 75, 1900); The Babylonian and Assyrian Cylinder-Seals

of the British Museum (in Jour. Brit. Archeol. Assoc.; vol. 41,

p. 396, London, 1885). The Bronze Gates of Balawat in Assyria (in

Jour. Brit. Archeol. Assoc.; vol. 35, p. 233, London, 1879); The

Temples of Ancient Babylonia (in Proc. Soc. Bibl. Archeol., vol. 22,

p. 358, London, 1900).--=Place=, V., Ninive et l’Assyrie. Paris,

1867-1890.--=Pognon=, H., Inscription de Meron-Nerar, roi d’Assyrie.

Paris, 1884. Les inscriptions babyloniennes du Wadi Brissa. Paris,

1887.--=Prévost-Paradol=, L. A., Essai sur l’histoire universelle.

Paris, 1890, 2 vols.

* * * * *

=Radau=, H., Early Babylonian History. New York, 1900.--=Ragozin=, Z.

A., The Story of Chaldea (Stories of the Nations). London, 1888; Media,

Babylon and Persia. London, 1889; Assyria. London, 1888.--=Ranwolf=,

L., Journey into Syria, Armenia, Mesopotamia.--=Rassam=, H.,

Excavations and Discoveries in Assyria. London; Asshur and the Land of

Nimrod. Cincinnati, 1897; Babylonian Cities. London, 1883.

_Hormuzd Rassam_ was born of Chaldean Christian parents at Mosul,

Turkey, in 1826. In 1845 he became acquainted with Austin H.

Layard, who was then exploring Assyrian ruins, and becoming much

interested in the work of Layard, he accompanied him to England

in 1847, continuing his studies in that country. In 1864 he was

sent by the British Government on a mission to Abyssinia to

secure the release of several Europeans who were held prisoners

by King Theodore, but he was himself imprisoned for two years

by that king. Shortly after securing his release he visited the

Babylonian-Assyrian region for the British Museum, and while on

this expedition and others following, he made many important

discoveries. Notable among these discoveries are the bronze gates

of Balawat, from the time of Shalmaneser II (858-824 B.C.), and

the Abu-Habba tablet, recording the restoration of the temple

by Nabu-apal-iddin, a contemporary of Shalmaneser II. The name

of Rassam is associated with that of Layard, and with the early

history of Assyriology. Rassam was primarily an explorer; he

assisted Layard in his earlier work at Nineveh, and himself

carried on the investigations for the British Government after

Layard had been called to other fields. Rassam has never become an

Assyriologist in the technical acceptance of the term, contenting

himself generally with securing the material on which the

investigations of numerous scholars have been based. The greatest

single feat which he accomplished was the discovery of the now

famous library of Asshurbanapal. He has himself told the story

of his discoveries in books that are not so widely known as they

deserve to be.

=Rawlinson=, G., The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient World. 2nd

ed. London, 1871; A Manual of Ancient History. Oxford, 1869; Herodotus.

London, 1858-75, 4 vols.; Papers in Jour. Royal Asiatic Soc.; vols.

X, XI, XII. London, 1885; The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia.

London, 1861-1891.

_George Rawlinson_ (brother of Sir Henry Rawlinson) was born at

Chadlington, Oxfordshire, England, in 1815. He was educated at

Swansea and at Ealing School. He graduated from Trinity College,

Oxford, with classical honours, in 1838. He was elected Fellow of

Exeter College in 1840. In 1859, as Bampton Lecturer, he delivered

his famous lecture on _Historical Evidences of the Truth of the

Scriptural Records_. He was chosen Camden Professor of Ancient

History in 1861, and in 1872 was made Canon of Canterbury. His

historical writings cover nearly the entire history of the Ancient

Orient. Some one has said of Canon Rawlinson that his scholarship

is of a peculiarly German type, and the criticism would seem to

be essentially just. Few other Englishmen of our generation have

covered so wide a field of history, and covered it so thoroughly as

has Professor Rawlinson. The whole field of southwestern Asia in

antiquity he has made peculiarly his own, and in a series of widely

circulated books he has imparted his knowledge to the world, some

of them, as that on the Parthian Monarchy, dealing with nations

that other historians had very much neglected. All of this work,

as has been said, is based upon scholarly investigations that

might justly be said to be profound. If in his estimate of certain

portions of this history, in particular as regards the newer ideas

of the chronology of the remoter periods, Professor Rawlinson has

hardly kept pace with the leaders of the newest generation, this

is certainly not more than one should expect in one whose memories

carry him back to the very beginnings of the “time” controversy.

The Canon died in 1902.

=Rawlinson=, H. C., Outline of the History of Assyria. London,

1852.--=Records of the Past= (=Birch=, S.). London, 1873, 12

vols.--=Revue d’Assyriologie=. Paris, 1886, etc.--=Rich=, C. I.,

Babylonia and Persepolis: Memoirs on the Ruins of Babylon. London,

1818.--=Robertson=, H. S., Voices of the Past from Assyria and

Babylonia. London, 1900.--=Rogers=, R. W., History of Babylonia and

Assyria. London, 1901, 2 vols.

* * * * *

=Sachau=, E., Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien. Leipsic, 1885; Am

Euphrat und Tigris. Leipsic, 1900.--=Sarzec=, G. C. E., de, Découvertes

en Chaldée. Paris, 1884-1893, 2 vols.

_Gustave Charles Ernest Chocquin de Sarzec_ was born 11th August,

1836. After the discoveries of Botta and Layard had shown the

scientific world what neglected treasure-houses were to be found

in Mesopotamia, it was natural that explorers should seek out

the other fields of ancient activity, in particular those to the

south in Old Babylonia, and yet older Chaldea. Among those who

went into the latter field most successfully was M. de Sarzec. His

explorations at Tello, one of the oldest seats of Mesopotamian

civilisation revealed a vast quantity of most interesting

antiquities of a type in many ways different from those of the

comparatively recent Assyrian period. In particular the statues

in the round, which seem to have been a common form of artistic

expression with the ancient Chaldeans, have interest because of

their difference from the bas-reliefs that were the favourite

sculptures of the artists of Nineveh. In the interpretation of the

large store of material which De Sarzec secured he had had the

assistance of M. Layon Heuzey and M. Amiaud.

=Sayce=, A. H., Lectures on the Religions of Ancient Assyria and

Babylonia. London, 1888; Ancient Empires of the East. London, 1884;

Assyria: its Princes, Priests, and People. London, 1882; Babylonians

and Assyrians: Life and Customs. New York, 1899; Social Life among

the Assyrians. London, 1893; Primer of Assyriology. London, 1894; The

Races of the Old Testament. London, 1891; Fresh Light from the Ancient

Monuments. London, 1884.

_Archibald Henry Sayce_, born at Shirehampton, near Bristol, 25th

September, 1846. Deputy Professor of comparative Philology at

Oxford from 1876 to 1890; at present Professor of Assyriology at

Oxford. The well-known Oxford Professor has been one of the most

versatile and active of orientalists. He seems equally at home

whether the field be Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Assyria, and he is a

writer of such indefatigable industry that scholarly works on one

subject or another are constantly coming from his pen. Professor

Sayce is by no means a closet student only but is a traveller of

wide experience, and latterly it has become his custom to spend his

winters and springs house-boating in Egypt. He has a rare merit

of combining the utmost scholarship with a capacity for clear

presentation of his subject, and his works are therefore almost as

well known to the general reader as they are to the specialist.

In each generation there are but a few men who combining these

traits act as interpreters between the land of scholarship and the

abiding place of ordinary mortals and among these in our generation

Professor Sayce takes a foremost rank.

=Saulcy=, L. F. J. C., de, Recherches sur la chronologie des empires

de Ninive, de Babylone et d’Ekbatane. Paris, 1854.--=Schäfer=, B.,

Die Entdeckungen in Assyrien und Aegypten in ihrer Beziehung zur

heiligen Schrift. Wien, 1896.--=Schmidt=, V., Assyriens of Aegyptens

gamle Historie. Copenhagen, 1872-1877.--=Schrader=, E., Cuneiform

Inscriptions and the Old Testament. London, 1873, 2 vols.; Die

Höllenfahrt der Istar ein altbabylon. Epos; Giessen, 1874; Eine

Sammlung von Übersetzungen der wichtigsten Texte (Keilinschriftliche

Bibliothek). Berlin, 1889-1901, vols. 1-6; Keilinschriften und

Geschichtsforschung. Giessen, 1878.

_Eberhard Schrader_ was born at Brunswick, Germany, 5th January,

1836. He studied at the gymnasium in Brunswick and in the

University at Göttingen. Shortly after finishing his studies

in Göttingen he was appointed Professor of Hebrew and Semitic

Languages at Zürich, and later he filled corresponding chairs

at Giessen and Jena. In 1875 he was given a professorship and

made a member of the Royal Academy at Berlin. He also edited

_Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek_. Only a few of his works have

been translated into English, most notable among these being _The

Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament_.

=Smith=, G., Assyrian Discoveries. London, 1875; Assyria, from

the Earliest Times. London, 1875; The Chaldean Genesis. London,

1881; The History of Babylon. London, 1877; History of Sennacherib

(from inscriptions). London, 1878; History of Asshurbanipal (from

inscriptions). London, 1871; Assyria from the Earliest Times to the

Fall of Nineveh. New York, 1876.

_George Smith_ was born in London, England, 26th March, 1840. He

is said to have first become interested in Assyriology from having

to engrave some cuneiform plates for publication. He at once took

up the study, and a little later was appointed to a position

in the Assyrian department of the British Museum. He very soon

became one of the great promoters of Assyriology. With Sir Henry

Rawlinson he edited vols. III-IV of _The Cuneiform Inscriptions

of Western Asia_. In 1872 he discovered among the clay books of

the British Museum fragments of a story of the Deluge, similar to

the biblical version. Soon after this he visited Nineveh to make

further search for clay books in Asshurbanapal’s palace, and his

expedition was very successful. The Deluge story proved to be

part of a great poem written on twelve tablets. He made two other

expeditions for the Museum, but on the last one was stricken with

fever and died at Aleppo, 19th August, 1876. George Smith was

known among orientalists as a man who had a peculiar instinct for

the translation of obscure texts. He devoted his entire life to

oriental studies, and came to be recognised as one of the foremost

of orientalists.

=Spiegel=, F., Die altpersischen Keilinschriften 2nd ed. Leipsic,

1881.--=Strabo=, The Geography of Strabo. London, 1854, 3

vols.--=Strassmaier=, J. N., Babylonische Texte. Leipsic, 1889;

Inschriften von Nabuchodonosor, König von Babylon (609-561). Leipsic,

1889.--=Streck=, M., Die alte Landschaft Babylonien nach den arabischen

Geographen. Leyden, 1900, 2 vols.

* * * * *

=Talbot=, W. H. Fox (in Records of the Past). London, 1856, 18 vols.;

Inscription of Tiglath Pileser I, King of Assyria, B.C. 1150 (in Jour.

Royal Asiatic Soc.). London, 1857.

_William Henry Fox Talbot_ was born 11th February, 1800, at Laycock

Abbey, near Chippenham, England. He was educated at Harrow and at

Trinity College, Cambridge, gaining the Porson prize there in 1820.

Contributed papers to the Royal Society in 1822, and in the same

year began a series of optical researches and experiments which

afterward played an important part in photography. In connection

with his scientific studies he devoted much of his time to the

study of archeology, and in later life gave his entire time to it.

He shares the honour with Sir Henry Rawlinson and Dr. Hincks of

being one of the first to decipher the cuneiform inscriptions of

Nineveh. He died at Laycock Abbey, 17th September, 1877. Talbot was

a master in the field of Assyriology. He was, indeed, one of the

first to gain distinction in this line, and in a peculiar sense one

of the founders of the science.

=Taylor=, W. C., Students’ Manual of Ancient History. London,

1882.--=Tiele=, C. P., History of Assyria. London, 1886; Eastern Asia

according to the most recent Discoveries. London, 1894; Comparative

History of Egyptian and Mesopotamian Religion; Babyl.-assyr.

Geschichte. Gotha, 1886-1888, 2 vols. (in Records of the Past). London,

1873, 18 vols.

_Cornelis Petrus Tiele_ was born at Leyden, Holland, 16th December,

1830. He was educated in the university of that city, giving

especial attention to the study of philosophy and history. In

1877 he was appointed to the chair of History and Religion in the

University of Leyden. His numerous publications on history and

philosophy have been widely translated. Professor Tiele enjoys

the distinction somewhat rare among his countrymen of a quite

cosmopolitan reputation. As an authority on ancient religions he

has no superior, and his writings are almost as well known in

Germany, France, England, and America as in his native Holland.

* * * * *

=Valbuena=, R. F., Egipto y Asiria resucitados la parte. Madrid,

1895.--=Van den Berg=, E., Petite histoire ancienne des peuples de

l’Orient. Paris, 1883.--=Vaux=, W. G. W., Nineveh and Persepolis.

London, 1880.--=Vigoroux=, F., La Bible et les découvertes en Assyrie.

Paris, 1887.

* * * * *

=Wachsmuth=, C., Einleitung in das Studium d. alten Geschichte.

Leipsic, 1895.--=Wahrmund=, A., Babylonierthum und Christenthum.

Leipsic, 1882.--=Ward=, W. H., Notes on Original Antiquities.

Baltimore, 1887; Report on the Wolfe Expedition to Babylonia. Boston,

1886; The Babylonian Caduceno (in Amer. Orient. Soc. Jour., vol. 14).

New Haven, 1890; The Story of the Serpent and the Tree (in Amer.

Antiq. and Orient. Jour., vol. 20, p. 211). Chicago, 1898.--=Weber=,

G., Allgemeine Weltgeschichte. Leipsic, 1857-1880, 15 vols.--=Weiss=,

J. B. von, Geschichte des Orients. 1886.--=Weissbach=, F. H., Zur

Lösung der sumerischen Frage. Leipsic, 1897; Über einige neuere

Arbeiten zur babyl. pers. Chronologie (in Deutsche Morgenland. Ges.

Zeitch., vol. 55, p. 195. Leipsic, 1901).--=Wernicke=, C., Geschichte

des Alterthums. 1890.--=Wilberforce=, R. F., The Five Empires.

London, 1899.--=Winckler=, H., Sammlung von Keilschrifttexten.

Leipsic, 1893-1894; Untersuchungen zur altorientalischen Geschichte.

Leipsic, 1889; Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens. Leipsic, 1892;

Altorientalische Forschungen, Leipsic, 1893-1897; Völker und Staaten

des alten Orients. Leipsic, 1900.--=Woltmann=, A. K., History of

Painting. London, 1880, 2 vols.--=Wood=, R., The Ruins of Palmyra.

* * * * *

=Zimmern=, H., The Babylonian and the Hebrew Genesis. London, 1901.

[Illustration: BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA.

BORMAY & CO.]