the Assyrians in slab-sculpture, on account of not having stone either
at home or within easy reach, seem to have derived a greater variety of
architectural ornaments from that inexhaustible material of
theirs--baked clay or terra-cotta. We see an instance of it in
remnants--unfortunately very small ones, of some walls belonging to that
same city of Erech. On one of the mounds Loftus was puzzled by the large
quantity of small terra-cotta cones, whole and in fragments, lying about
on the ground. The thick flat end of them was painted red, black or
white. What was his amazement when he stumbled on a piece of wall (some
seven feet in height and not more than thirty in length), which showed
him what their use had been. They were grouped into a variety of
patterns to decorate the entire wall, being stuck with their thin end
into a layer of soft clay with which it was coated for the purpose.
Still more original and even rather incomprehensible is a wall
decoration consisting of several bands, composed each of three rows of
small pots or cups--about four inches in diameter--stuck into the soft
clay coating in the same manner, with the mouth turned outward of
course! Loftus found such a wall, but unfortunately has given no design
of it. (Figures 43 and 44.)
[Illustration: 41.--DRAIN IN MOUND. (Perrot and Chipiez.)]
29. As to the ancient Babylonian, or rather Chaldean, art in sculpture,
the last word has by no means been said on that subject. Discoveries
crowd in every year, constantly leading to the most unexpected
conclusions. Thus, it was long an accepted fact that Assyria had very
few statues and Babylonia none at all, when a few years ago (1881),
what should a French explorer, Mr. E. De Sarzec, French consul in Basra,
bring home but nine magnificent statues made of a dark, nearly black
stone as hard as granite, called diorite.[S] Unfortunately they are all
headless; but, as though to make up for this mutilation, one head was
found separate,--a shaved and turbaned head beautifully preserved and of
remarkable workmanship, the very pattern of the turban being plain
enough to be reproduced by any modern loom.[T] These large prizes were
accompanied by a quantity of small works of art representing both men
and animals, of a highly artistic design and some of them of exquisite
finish of execution. This astounding find, the result of several years'
indefatigable work, now gracing the Assyrian rooms of the Louvre in
Paris, comes from one of the Babylonian mounds which had not been opened
before, the ruins of a mighty temple at a place now called TELL-LOH, and
supposed to be the site of SIR-BURLA, or SIR-GULLA, one of the most
ancient cities of Chaldea. This "Sarzec-collection," as it has come to
be generally called, not only entirely upsets the ideas which had been
formed on Old-Chaldean art, but is of immense historical importance from
the inscriptions which cover the back of every statue, (not to speak of
the cylinders and other small objects,) and which, in connection with
the monuments of other ruins, enable scholars to fix, at least
approximately, the date at which flourished the city and rulers who have
left such extraordinary memorials of their artistic gifts. Some place
them at about 4500 B.C., others about 4000. However overwhelming such a
valuation may be at first sight, it is not an unsupported fancy, but
proofs concur from many sides to show that the builders and sculptors of
Sir-gulla could in no case have lived and worked much later than 4000
B.C. It is impossible to indicate in a few lines all the points, the
conjectures, the vexed questions, on which this discovery sheds light
more or less directly, more or less decisively; they come up continually
as the study of those remote ages proceeds, and it will be years before
the materials supplied by the Sarzec-Collection are exhausted in all
their bearings.
[Illustration: 42.--WALL WITH DESIGNS IN TERRA-COTTA CONES, AT WARKA
(ERECH). (Loftus.)]
[Illustration: 43.--TERRA-COTTA CONE, NATURAL SIZE. (Loftus.)]
FOOTNOTES:
[G] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., p. 46.
[H] Ur of the Chaldees, from which Abraham went forth.
[I] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., p. 349.
[J] Figure 10.
[K] Figure 71, p. 281.
[L] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., pp. 317 and 318.
[M] See Fig. 20, p. 63. There is but one exception, in the case of a
recent exploration, during which one solitary broken column-shaft was
discovered.
[N] G. Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., pp. 467, 468.
[O] See Fig. 33, p. 83.
[P] Figures 34 and 35, p. 84.
[Q] Figs. 37 and 38, p. 87.
[R] Fig. 39, p. 89.
[S] See Fig. 59, p. 217.
[T] See Figs. 44 and 45, p. 101.
IV.
THE BOOK OF THE PAST.--THE LIBRARY OF NINEVEH.
1. When we wish to learn the great deeds of past ages, and of mighty men
long dead, we open a book and read. When we wish to leave to the
generations who will come long after us a record of the things that were
done by ourselves or in our own times, we take pen, ink and paper, and
write a book. What we have written is then printed, published in several
hundreds--or thousands--of copies, as the case may be, and quickly finds
its way to all the countries of the world inhabited by people who are
trained from childhood to thought and study. So that we have the
satisfaction of knowing that the information which we have labored to
preserve will be obtainable any number of years or centuries after we
shall have ceased to exist, at no greater trouble than procuring the
book from the shelves of a bookstore, a public or a private library. It
is all very simple. And there is not a small child who does not
perfectly know a book by its looks, and even has not a pretty correct
idea of how a book is made and what it is good for.
2. But books are not always of the shape and material so familiar to us.
Metal, stone, brick, walls and pillars, nay, the very rocks of nature's
own making, can be books, conveying information as plainly as our
volumes of paper sheets covered with written or printed lines. It only
needs to know how to read them, and the necessary knowledge and skill
may be acquired by processes as simple as the art of ordinary reading
and writing, though at the cost of a somewhat greater amount of time and
pains.
3. There are two natural cravings, which assert themselves strongly in
every mind not entirely absorbed by the daily work for bread and by the
anxious care how to procure that work: these are the wish, on the one
hand, to learn how the people who came before us lived and what they
did, on the other--to transmit our own names and the memory of our deeds
to those who will come after us. We are not content with our present
life; we want to stretch it both backward and forward--to live both in
the past and the future, as it were. This curiosity and this ambition
are but parts of the longing for immortality which was never absent from
any human soul. In our own age they are satisfied mainly by books;
indeed they were originally the principal causes why books began to be
made at all. And how easy to satisfy these cravings in our time, when
writing materials have become as common as food and far cheaper, and
reading may be had for nothing or next to nothing! For, a very few
dollars will supply a writer with as much paper as he can possibly use
up in a year, while the public libraries, the circulating and college
libraries and the reading-rooms make study a matter more of love and
perseverance than of money.
4. Yet if the papermill and the printing press were the only material
aid to our researches into the past, these researches would stop
short very soon, seeing that printing was invented in Europe scarce
four hundred years ago, and paper has not been manufactured for more
than six hundred years at the outside. True, other materials have
been used to write on before paper: bark of trees, skins of
animals--(parchment)--cunningly worked fibres of plants--(papyrus,
byblos)--even wooden tablets covered with a thin layer of wax, on
which characters were engraved with a pointed instrument or
"style,"--and these contrivances have preserved for us records which
reach back many hundreds of years beyond the introduction of paper.
But our curiosity, when once aroused, is insatiable, and an area of
some twenty, or thirty, or forty centuries seems to it but a narrow
field. Looking back as far as that--and no kind of manuscript
information takes us much further--we behold the world wondrously
like what it is now. With some differences in garb, in manners, and a
much greater one in the range of knowledge, we find men living very
nearly as we do and enacting very nearly the same scenes: nations
live in families clustered within cities, are governed by laws, or
ruled by monarchs, carry on commerce and wars, extend their limits by
conquest, excel in all sorts of useful and ornamental arts. Only we
notice that larger regions are unknown, vaster portions of the
earth, with their populations, are unexplored, than in our days. The
conclusion is clearly forced on us, that so complicated and perfect
an organization of public and private life, a condition of society
implying so many discoveries and so long a practice in thought and
handicraft, could not have been an early stage of existence. Long
vistas are dimly visible into a past far vaster than the span as yet
laid open to our view, and we long to pierce the tantalizing gloom.
There, in that gloom, lurk the beginnings of the races whose high
achievements we admire, emulate, and in many ways surpass; there, if
we could but send a ray of light into the darkness of ages, we must
find the solution of numberless questions which suggest themselves as
we go: Whence come those races? What was the earlier history of other
races with which we find them contending, treating, trading? When did
they learn their arts, their songs, their forms of worship? But here
our faithful guide, manuscript literature, forsakes us; we enter on a
period when none of the ancient substitutes for paper were yet
invented. But then, there were the stones. _They_ did not need to be
invented--only hewn and smoothed for the chisel.
5. Fortunately for us, men, twenty-five, and forty, and fifty centuries
ago, were actuated by the same feelings, the same aspirations as they
are now, and of these aspirations, the passionate wish of perpetuating
their names and the memory of their deeds has always been one of the
most powerful. This wish they connected with and made subservient to
the two things which were great and holy in their eyes: their religion
and the power of their kings. So they built, in brick and stone, at an
almost incalculable expense of time, human labor and human life, palaces
and temples. On these huge piles they lavished treasures untold, as also
all the resources of their invention and their skill in art and
ornament; they looked on them with exulting pride, not only because they
thought them, by their vastness and gorgeousness, fit places for public
worship and dwellings worthy of their kings, but because these
constructions, in their towering grandeur, their massive solidity, bid
fair to defy time and outlast the nations which raised them, and which
thus felt assured of leaving behind them traces of their existence,
memorials of their greatness. That a few defaced, dismantled, moss-grown
or sand-choked fragments of these mighty buildings would one day be the
_only_ trace, the sole memorial of a rule and of nations that would then
have past away forever, even into nothingness and oblivion, scarcely was
anticipated by the haughty conquerors who filled those halls with their
despotic presence, and entered those consecrated gates in the pomp of
triumph to render thanks for bloody victories and warlike exploits which
elated their souls in pride till they felt themselves half divine.
Nothing doubting but that those walls, those pillars, those gateways
would stand down to the latest ages, they confided to them that which
was most precious to their ambition, the record of their deeds, the
praises of their names, thus using those stony surfaces as so many
blank pages, which they covered with row after row of wondrous
characters, carefully engraved or chiselled, and even with painted or
sculptured representations of their own persons and of the scenes, in
war or peace, in which they had been leaders and actors.
6. Thus it is that on all the points of the globe where sometime great
and flourishing nations have held their place, then yielded to other
nations or to absolute devastation--in Egypt, in India, in Persia, in
the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, in the sandy, now desert plains
of Syria, in the once more populous haunts of ancient Rome and
Greece--the traveller meets clusters of great ruins, lofty still in
their utter abandonment, with a strange, stern beauty hovering around
their weather-beaten, gigantic shafts and cornices, wrapt in the
pathetic silence of desolation, and yet not dumb--for their pictured
faces eloquently proclaim the tale of buoyant life and action entrusted
to them many thousands of years ago. Sometimes, it is a natural rock,
cut and smoothed down at a height sufficient to protect it from the
wantonly destructive hand of scoffing invaders, on which a king of a
deeper turn of thought, more mindful than others of the law which dooms
all the works of men to decay, has caused a relation of the principal
events of his reign to be engraved in those curious characters which
have for centuries been a puzzle and an enigma. Many tombs also, besides
the remains of the renowned or wealthy dead, for whom they have been
erected at a cost as extravagant and with art as elaborate as the
abodes of the living, contain the full description of their inmate's
lineage, his life, his habits and pursuits, with prayers and invocations
to the divinities of his race and descriptions or portrayed
representations of religious ceremonies. Or, the walls of caves, either
natural, or cut in the rock for purposes of shelter or concealment,
yield to the explorer some more chapters out of the old, old story, in
which our interest never slackens. This story man has himself been
writing, patiently, laboriously, on every surface on which he could
trace words and lines, ever since he has been familiar with the art of
expressing his thoughts in visible signs,--and so each such surviving
memorial may truly be called a stray leaf, half miraculously preserved
to us, out of the great Book of the Past, which it has been the task of
scholars through ages, and especially during the last eighty years, to
decipher and teach others how to read.
[Illustration: 44.--HEAD OF ANCIENT CHALDEAN. FROM TELL-LOH (SIR-GULLA).
SARZEC COLLECTION. (Perrot and Chipiez.)]
[Illustration: 45.--SAME, PROFILE VIEW.]
7. Of this venerable book the walls of the Assyrian palaces, with their
endless rows of inscriptions, telling year for year through centuries
the history of the kings who built them, are so many invaluable pages,
while the sculptures which accompany these annals are the illustrations,
lending life and reality to what would otherwise be a string of dry and
unattractive records. But a greater wonder has been brought to light
from amidst the rubbish and dust of twenty-five centuries: a collection
of literary and scientific works, of religious treatises, of private and
public documents, deposited in rooms constructed on purpose to contain
them, arranged in admirable order, in short--a LIBRARY. Truly and
literally a library, in the sense in which we use the word. Not the only
one either, nor the first by many hundred years, although the volumes
are of singular make and little like those we are used to.
8. When Layard was at work for the second time amidst the ruins along
the Tigris, he devoted much of his labor to the great mound of Koyunjik,
in which the remains of two sumptuous palaces were distinctly discerned,
one of them the royal residence of Sennacherib, the other that of his
grandson Asshurbanipal, who lived some 650 years before Christ--two of
the mightiest conquerors and most magnificent sovereigns of the Eastern
world. In the latter palace he came upon two comparatively small
chambers, the floor of which was entirely littered with fragments--some
of considerable size, some very small--of bricks, or rather baked-clay
tablets, covered on both sides with cuneiform writing. It was a layer
more than a foot in height which must have been formed by the falling in
of the upper part of the edifice. The tablets, piled in good order along
the walls, perhaps in an upper story--if, as many think, there was
one--must have been precipitated promiscuously into the apartment and
shattered by the fall. Yet, incredible as it may appear, several were
found entire. Layard filled many cases with the fragments and sent them
off to the British Museum, fully aware of their probable historical
value.
9. There they lay for years, heaped up at random, a mine of treasures
which made the mouths of scholars water, but appalled them by the
amount of labor, nay, actual drudgery, needful only to sift and sort
them, even before any study of their contents could be begun. At length
a young and ambitious archæologist, attached to the British Museum,
George Smith, undertook the long and wearisome task. He was not
originally a scholar, but an engraver, and was employed to engrave on
wood cuneiform texts for the magnificent atlas edited by the British
Museum under the title of "Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia."
Being endowed with a quick and enquiring mind, Smith did not content
himself, like most of his colleagues, with a conscientious and artistic,
but merely technical reproduction; he wished to know _what_ he was doing
and he learned the language of the inscriptions. When he took on himself
the sorting of the fragments, it was in the hope of distinguishing
himself in this new field, and of rendering a substantial service to the
science which had fascinated him. Nor was he deceived in this hope. He
succeeded in finding and uniting a large quantity of fragments belonging
together, and thus restoring pages of writing, with here and there a
damaged line, a word effaced, a broken corner, often a larger portion
missing, but still enough left to form continuous and readable texts. In
some cases it was found that there was more than one copy of this or
that work or document, and then sometimes the parts which were
hopelessly injured in one copy, would be found whole or nearly so in
another.
10. The results accomplished by this patient mechanical process were
something astonishing. And when he at length restored in this manner a
series of twelve tablets containing an entire poem of the greatest
antiquity and highest interest, the occasion seemed important enough to
warrant the enterprising owners of the London _Daily Telegraph_ in
sending the young student to resume excavations and try to complete some
missing links. For of some of the tablets restored by him only portions
could be found among the fragments of the British Museum. Of course he
made his way straight to the Archive Chambers at Koyunjik, had them
opened again and cleared them of another large instalment of their
valuable contents, among which he had the inconceivable good fortune to
find some of the very pieces which were missing in his collection.
Joyfully he returned to England twice with his treasures, and hopefully
set out on a third expedition of the same kind. He had reason to feel
buoyant; he had already made his name famous by several works which
greatly enriched the science he loved, and had he not half a lifetime
before him to continue the work which few could do as well? Alas, he
little knew that his career was to be cut short suddenly by a loathsome
and brutal foe: he died of the plague in Syria, in 1876--just thirty-six
years old. He was faithful to the end. His diary, in which he made some
entries even within a very few days before his death, shows that at the
last, when he knew his danger and was fast losing hope, his mind was
equally divided between thoughts of his family and of his work. The
following lines, almost the last intelligible ones he wrote, are deeply
touching in their simple, single-minded earnestness:--"Not so well. If
Doctor present, I should recover, but he has not come, very doubtful
case; if fatal farewell to ... _My work has been entirely for the
science I study...._ There is a large field of study in my collection. I
intended to work it out, but desire now that my antiquities and notes
may be thrown open to all students. I have done my duty thoroughly. I do
not fear the change but desire to live for my family. Perhaps all may be
well yet."--George Smith's death was a great loss, which his
brother-scholars of all countries have not ceased to deplore. But the
work now proceeds vigorously and skilfully. The precious texts are
sorted, pieced, and classified, and a collection of them, carefully
selected, is reproduced by the aid of the photographer and the engraver,
so that, should the originals ever be lost or destroyed, (not a very
probable event), the Museum indeed would lose one of its most precious
rarities, but science would lose nothing.
11. An eminent French scholar and assyriologist, Joachim Ménant, has the
following picturesque lines in his charming little book "_La
Bibliothèque du Palais de Ninive_": "When we reflect that these records
have been traced on a substance which neither fire nor water could
destroy, we can easily comprehend how those who wrote them thus thirty
or forty centuries ago, believed the monuments of their history to be
safe for all future times,--much safer than the frail sheets which
printing scatters with such prodigious fertility.... Of all the nations
who have bequeathed to us written records of their past life, we may
assert that none has left monuments more imperishable than Assyria and
Chaldea. Their number is already considerable; it is daily increased by
new discoveries. It is not possible to foresee what the future has in
store for us in this respect; but we can even now make a valuation of
the entire material which we possess.... The number of the tablets from
the Nineveh Library alone passes ten thousand.... If we compare these
texts with those left us by other nations, we can easily become
convinced that the history of the Assyro-Chaldean civilization will soon
be one of the best known of antiquity. It has a powerful attraction for
us, for we know that the life of the Jewish people is mixed up with the
history of Nineveh and Babylon...."
[Illustration: 46.--CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTION. (ARCHAIC CHARACTERS.) (Perrot
and Chipiez.)]
12. It will be seen from this that throughout the following pages we
shall continually have to refer to the contents of Asshurbanipal's royal
library. We must therefore dispense in this place with any details
concerning the books, more than a general survey of the subjects they
treated. Of these, religion and science were the chief. Under "science"
we must understand principally mathematics and astronomy, two branches
in which the old Chaldeans reached great perfection and left us many of
our own most fundamental notions and practices, as we shall see later
on. Among the scientific works must also be counted those on astrology,
i.e., on the influence which the heavenly bodies were supposed to
exert on the fate of men, according to their positions and combinations,
for astrology was considered a real science, not only by the Chaldeans,
but by much later nations too; also hand-books of geography, really only
lists of the seas, mountains and rivers, nations and cities then known,
lastly lists of plants and animals with a very rude and defective
attempt at some sort of classification. History is but scantily
represented; it appears to have been mostly confined to the great wall
inscriptions and some other objects, of which more hereafter. But--what
we should least expect--grammars, dictionaries, school reading-books,
occupy a prominent place. The reason is that, when this library was
founded, the language in which the venerable books of ancient sages were
written not only was not spoken any longer, but had for centuries been
forgotten by all but the priests and those who made scholarship their
chief pursuit, so that it had to be taught in the same way that the
so-called "dead languages," Latin and Greek, are taught at our colleges.
This was the more necessary as the prayers had to be recited in the old
language called the Accadian, that being considered more holy--just as,
in Catholic countries, the common people are even now made to learn and
say their prayers in Latin, though they understand not a word of the
language. The ancient Accadian texts were mostly copied with a modern
Assyrian translation, either interlinear or facing it, which has been of
immense service to those who now decipher the tablets.
[Illustration: 47.--INSCRIBED CLAY TABLET. (Smith's "Assyria.")]