ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PRECEDING STATEMENTS:--A MORNING AT THE BRITISH
MUSEUM.
And now, at this stage of our progress, let the reader indulge the
author to the extent of a page of metaphor or allegory.--Imagine then
that we are standing on the margin of a mighty river, the opposite
shore of which is scarcely visible; and as to the origin of this world
of waters, it is far remote and is unknown:--as to the ocean into which
it shall at length empty itself and its treasures--this is distant
also, nor do we find it anywhere laid down in our maps. The flow of
this river is tranquil--its surface is glassy; but upon this surface
there float samples and fragments, innumerable, of the products of
each of the countries which it has watered in its course:--here come
rafts, laden with well-packed bales, and there, confusedly mingled, are
things more than can be counted--torn away--rent--shattered--coated
with rust--wrapped around with weeds. Moving onward, we see the symbols
and the devices of nations long ago extinct, and the utensils of a
forgotten civilisation, and the products of lands--thousands of miles
up the stream; and these entangled with the symbols, the devices,
the rare and curious products, of some country next above us. On the
bosom of this mighty river there float samples of all things, and these
commingled in all imaginable modes.
This is our day-dream:--now for the interpretation of it. We have
imagined ourselves to be stationed in any one of the saloons of
the British Museum; or that we are passing up and down, from one
of these halls to another: and at length are coming to a rest in
the centre of the New Reading-room. The countless collections of
antiquities--marbles--coins--gems--utensils--weapons--costumes--the
manuscripts--the illuminations, and the printed books--what are all
these things, but so many relics of remote ages which, favoured by
various chances, have floated down to this, our own era, upon the broad
surface of the River of Time?
But are these tens of thousands--these hundreds of thousands of
individual objects, are they so many disjointed and disconnected
particles?--this is far from being the fact. It is a very small number
of things, in this vast collection, concerning which an instructed
Curator would acknowledge his ignorance, as to what it is, and to what
age it belongs, and of what country or people it is a relic. As to
a thousand to one of all the single contents of the British Museum,
each of them links itself, either nearly, or remotely, with the nine
hundred, ninety and nine, of its neighbours--right and left; or perhaps
with some articles that are exhibited in the opposite wing of the
building: as for instance--here is a coin, the legend upon which we
should have failed to read, or to understand, had it not been that
a Greek writer, of whose works a sole manuscript has come down to
modern times, incidentally mentions a fact concerning some obscure town
of Asia Minor, and its history, under the Roman emperors, of which
otherwise we should have been ignorant.
Let us avail ourselves of another supposition, remote as it may be
from the fact; and it is this--That the author, and the reader, of
this book, whom we imagine to be now pacing together the saloons of
the Museum, are possessed of that universality of learning, and that
vastness of antiquarian accomplishment, which enables the gentleman at
the centre table of the Reading-room to answer all inquirers, and to
aid and guide them all in carrying forward their various researches.
If, then, the author and the reader were gifted in any such manner
as this, we might then, with a sort of second sight, or a veritable
_clairvoyance_, look upon the countless stores around us as if they
were all falling into an appointed order, or were obeying some natural
law of mutual attraction and cohesion: as thus--there goes an almost
illegible manuscript, attaching itself to a colossal sculpture--much
as feathers stick themselves on to an electric conductor:--there are
coins, arranging themselves spontaneously, like a crown of laurel
leaves, around the brows of busts:--there are weapons and fragments of
armour, edging themselves on to a copy of Polybius:--there are bits of
a pediment, or the chippings of a column, claiming a standing-place
upon the Greek text of Procopius--and why? it is because these
fragments belong to an edifice of the times of Justinian, which he
has described. And now, as to the printed books, and the manuscripts,
whence many of the printed books drew their existence, if we will give
way to the ideal for a few moments, we shall see them floating out from
their shelves, in this vast circus, and knowingly arranging themselves,
in a sort of pyramidal form, as if to exhibit their real relationship
of quotation, and of reference, in the order of time--the more recent
to the more ancient--the many to the few;--until the pile--made up of
a million of books, is surmounted by the two or three that quote none
older than themselves, and that are quoted by all.
What then is our inference? It is this: that as to the persons
and the events--the doings and the notions--the thoughts and the
ways--the customs and the manners--the philosophy--the literature--the
religion--the politics--the civilisation, of the nations of all those
ages which are comprehended within the limits of what is called the
historic period--these innumerable matters are assuredly, known to us,
at this time;--and they have become known to us with this degree of
certainty (in the main) not by the precarious and insulated testimony
of a few writers, whose works have reached modern times--we know not
how; but very much otherwise than thus; for it is by means of the
inter-related, and the mutually attestative evidence of thousands of
witnesses--witnesses in stone and marble, in metallic substances, coins
and brass plates, in membranous records, and in writings upon every
other material, and in every imaginable fashion; and all these things
are so netted together and so welded, and dove-tailed, and linked,
and glued, and sealed, into a vast conglomerate, as that the combined
testimony thence accruing in support of our voluminous historic beliefs
is not less solid than are the granitic ribs of a continent; and is as
various, and as rich, as all the products of its surface--its faunas
and its floras.
So much for a momentary glance at the treasures, the vast accumulations
of the British Museum;--but now we might usefully take the SYNOPSIS in
hand, and give attention to some few of the articles that are named
in it. What we are in search of are those attestations of ancient
_written_ evidences, touching the persons, the events, the manners, the
religions, of ancient nations, which come upon us--we might say, by
surprise, and which are derived from sources altogether and in every
sense independent, and unconnected, one with another.
Take with you, in one hand, your Tacitus, Sallust, Dion Cassius;--and
in the other hand, your Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid. These
writers--the one set as historians, the other set as poets, build up to
our view the throne, and its personages, of the Imperial Times--say,
of two centuries, reckoned back from the life-time of the last of
them. But through what channels have _the books_ come into our hands?
The editors of the printed copies assure us that there had come into
their possession, in each instance, one, two, three manuscripts, that
had been raked out of the forgotten heaps of this or that monastery,
or other conservatory of curious articles. As to the greater number
of these manuscripts, they could not be assigned to an age much
beyond the ninth century; therefore, on the supposition that they are
genuine works--the products of a time seven hundred, or a thousand
years earlier, what the editor had under his eye must have been
nothing better than a copy--from a copy--or perhaps, from several in
succession! Is not this line of proof somewhat precarious? Ought we to
trust ourselves to it?
Advance toward the left hand, from the entrance hall, and by the time
you have moved on a dozen steps, the volumes in your hands, if they
were gifted with consciousness, would begin to twitch and to jerk
themselves about, as if uneasy in being held away from their old
friends, right and left, whom they recognise, perched on the pedestals,
and fixed to the walls. Whence is it that these solid antiquities
have been brought hither? Not from those same lumber-vaults in the
monasteries, or the royal libraries of Europe, whence we have received
the aforesaid manuscripts;--not so, but from deep under-ground--from
cavities--from underneath pavements, sixty feet or more lower than the
present surface: they have been picked up in cornfields; they have been
sifted from out of heaps of rubbish; they have been taken from the
recesses of the houses of a city, buried by a volcanic eruption, many
centuries ago. These manifold samples of an ancient civilisation have
been fished up from the beds of rivers and the bottoms of lakes; and
these recoveries have been effected in all these and many other modes
over the extent of Europe, and of Southern and Western Asia, and of
North Africa. There is no possibility therefore of calling in question
this million-tongued testimony; we must not gainsay what is affirmed by
these tongues of stone and of brass, of silver and of gold.
And the more, in any instance, the coincidence is slender and remote,
or, as one might say, frivolous or unimportant, so much the surer, and
the more to be relied upon is it, in what it does affirm: as thus--Look
to your Synopsis, page 87, Compartment III.:--“A pig of lead, inscribed
with the name of the Emperor Domitian, when he was consul for the
eighth year, A.D. 82, weighing 154 lbs. It was discovered in 1731
underground, on Hayshaw Moor, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, half-way
between an ancient lead-mine, north of Pately Bridge, and the Roman
road from Ilkley (_Olicana_) to Aldborough (_Isurium_).” This pig had
slept where he was dropped about 1,650 years.
“A pig of lead, inscribed with the name of the Emperor Hadrian,
weighing 191 lbs.; found in 1796 or ’97, at Snailbeach Farm, parish of
Westbury, 10 miles south-west of Shrewsbury.” Then follow some other
pigs, whose slumbers underground have been more or less prolonged and
profound.
“A pig of lead, inscribed with the name of L. Aruconius Verecundus, and
the letters METAL. LVTVD., probably the mine of _Lutudæ_. Found near
Matlock Bank, in Derbyshire.”
“A pig of lead, inscribed CL. TR. LVT. BR. EX. ARG.; found with three
other pigs and some broken Roman pottery, at Broomer’s Hill, in the
parish of Pulborough, Sussex, January 31, 1824, close to the Roman
Road, Stone Street, from London to Chichester.”
“A pig of lead, inscribed with the name of Britannicus, the son of the
Emperor Claudius; found on the Mendip Hills, Somersetshire.”
So much for these pigs. What is it which they might say, if we were
to bring them into court? Something of this sort: At this time, in
the streets of the stannary towns in Cornwall, there are to be seen
blocks--pigs of tin, stamped in a manner similar to the lettering of
these pigs of lead in the British Museum. This stamping is effected
for the purpose of securing the dues of the Duchy of Cornwall, and the
symbols and the letters indicate the political fact that the Prince
of Wales, as Duke of Cornwall, lays a hand upon every pound of tin
that is smelted in the county; and thus, too, the stamping of the
produce of the lead-mines of Britain gives evidence of the fact that
the Romans were not merely resident in Britain at the time, but were
masters also of the island, and the lords of its mineral products. Then
the lettering itself finds its interpretation in the Roman imperial
history, and this history comes into our hands, partly as it has
been narrated by the Roman historians above mentioned; partly in the
form of sculptures, statues, busts, and bas-reliefs; and partly, and
very copiously, in the unquestionable form of the coins of the same
emperors, which alone would suffice for putting us in possession of
the series of events, greater and smaller, through a course of many
centuries. But what the reader should here keep in view is this: that
as our present thesis is--the safe and sure transmission of ancient
books, by the means of often-repeated copyings, through the lapse of
ages, an evidence to this effect--and it is the most conclusive that
can be imagined or desired, is afforded us when, in passing through
collections, such as those treasured in the British Museum, THE BOOKS
in question are found to furnish a coherent, and a continuous, and an
exact interpretation of these palpable and ponderous antiquities. Yet,
it is manifest that, unless the books were in the main genuine, they
could not have supplied any interpretations, such as are those which we
find in them.
Go on now to the historical sculptures--the statues, and the busts
of the imperial times. These, for the most part, are susceptible of
authentication by means of the coins of the same emperors, which may be
seen--by “order”--in another department of the Museum; the likenesses
are indisputable, and the historic reality of the two samples of Roman
art is thus far made good. But beyond this we may safely go. From the
Roman writers--specially Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion Cassius--we
acquire what we need not doubt to be a true idea of the individual
character, the temperament, the education, the public and private
behaviour, and the style of the series of imperial persons, from Julius
Cæsar, onward, to the times of each of these writers. What then is the
verdict of our physiognomical instincts, when we compare the busts
or statues, for instance, of Augustus and of Tiberius, of Nero and
of Trajan? We could no more take these, one for the other, than we
could misname the portraits of Philip of Spain, or the Duke of Alva,
put by the side of George Washington, or John Howard; or misjudge
those of Oliver Cromwell, and John Milton; or of Admiral Blake, and
Alexander Pope. We need not wait until a science of physiognomy has
been concocted before we may risk a guess in writing the names under
portraits of Lord Chatham, Dr. Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith. Mistakes,
in single instances, may be made, but not in the long run; and when,
on the one hand, we take the entire series of royal portraits, eastern
and western, from the first of the Ptolemies to Charlemagne, and, on
the other hand, the _books_ of the series of contemporary historians,
we shall receive, from this large collation of independent evidences,
an irresistible conviction of the general authenticity of the latter;
and therefore we must cease to entertain doubts on this question of the
secure transmission of ancient books to modern times.
It would be of little avail here to cite a few single instances of the
agreement of Roman coins with written history, for such instances are
countless. The reader who would wish to inform himself, in whole, or in
part, on this extensive subject, should take in hand a Medallic History
of Imperial Rome, which, as compared with the medallic treasures of
the British Museum, will give him aid in following the train of public
events through five or six centuries, exhibited and verified by the
double line of testimonies--the metallic and the literary. Or he may be
content to take, as a sufficient sample of this species of proof, the
facts he will find brought together in a small volume, “Akerman on the
Coins of the Romans relating to Britain.”
There is another field upon which a gleaning, and more than a
gleaning, may easily be made by help of the Roman poets as our
guides. These writers--and we need name only Ovid, Horace, Virgil,
and Propertius--are undoubtedly believed to have lived and flourished
as the contemporaries of Julius Cæsar, Augustus, Tiberius. Their
writings, as we have them now in our hands, are accepted as genuine;
for the criticism which demonstrates the general integrity of the
text (exceptions allowed for) is too erudite and careful to be called
in question. Consequently, these writings have safely traversed a
period of fifteen hundred years, ending with the date of the earliest
printed editions: but this transit has been made by no other means
than that of the copyists; and therefore, if, as we shall see, a
super-abundance of various and independent evidences removes the
possibility of our doubting the fact, then this mode of transmission,
precarious as it may seem, is found to be trustworthy, and our main
point is established--namely, That ancient books have indeed come down
to modern times--whole and entire. Let us look, for a moment, to this
corroborative evidence--such as we find it offered to the eye, in
passing through the saloons of the British Museum.
The Roman poets were not, perhaps, themselves very firm believers
in the Grecian mythology--considered religiously or historically:
nevertheless, they took it up--such as it had come into their
hands--and it was a splendid inheritance--a boundless treasury of
bright conceptions of superhuman power, beauty, grace; a scheme of
elegant sensuousness, with a touch of sublimity. Its fables, far
more available for poetic purposes than any system of serious truths
could have been, opened before the Roman poets a broad meadow land,
in roaming through which the imitative, more than originative turn of
the Roman mind, might gather fruits and flowers, ripe and gay, and
which asked only to be taken and enjoyed. So it is, therefore, that in
every imaginable mode of lengthened poetic narrative, and of transient
allusion, and of direct and of allusive reference, the gods and the
goddesses, and the demi-gods, and the heroes of Greece come up upon
the stage of the Roman poetry. These repetitions--these borrowings or
plagiarisms, and these flashing glances, are countless:--sometimes
they are formal; sometimes they are informal:--they are broad daylight
views in some places, and in places innumerable they are as sparks
only--visible for an instant.
Now with what objects is it that these mythologic passages are in
harmony?--with what is it that they correspond? Our answer is--With
tens of thousands of relics of ancient art which, through channels
altogether independent of those through which the books have reached
us, have come, at this time, to fill, and to over-fill the cabinets and
museums of Europe--and thus, also, our British Museum.
But then this mass of ponderable and visible evidences is inter-related
in a very peculiar manner, which should be borne in mind. We have
just now referred to the correspondence which connects the historic
sculptures--the statues and the busts of Roman personages, male and
female, and the likenesses of the same men and women which are so
copiously supplied in collections of the Roman imperial mintage. But
now we pass on to the Græco-Roman saloons--the first, the second,
and the third, as well as the basement-room. These are filled
with mythologic sculptures--recovered from the soil of Italy and
Greece:--they show us, in inimitable marbles, those same divinities,
the principal and the subordinate, which the mind of Greece had
imagined, and which the Roman artists adopted: these beautiful
creations we at once recognise as the celestial _personæ_ with whom we
have made acquaintance in the pages of the Roman poets: the conception
of superhuman grace and power is the very same; and the attendant
symbols are the same. And now furnish yourself with the requisite order
for inspecting the collection of antique gems--precious (often) as
to their material--precious, incalculably more so, by means of that
exquisite taste and that inimitable executive skill which have made
them what they are.
These microscopic sculptures, in consequence of the value of the
material, and the costliness of the work, and from their smallness,
and the facility of preservation, were eagerly sought after by the
opulent at the very time of their production; and they have been most
carefully hoarded in every age, by the same class of persons; and they
have suffered far less injury in the lapse of time than antiquities of
any other kind. Especially the _intaglios_--the indented sculptures,
are, for the most part, as perfect and sharp now as they were eighteen
hundred years ago. What is it, then, that these gems of art bring under
our modern eyes?--it is the very same ideal personages of the same
mythology;--and the symbols are the same, and the air, and the grace,
and the attributes of beauty and power are the same;--there is the same
sensuousness--there are the same ambiguous adventures;--there is the
same poetry and the same art--poetry and art, admirable, indeed, how
much soever it may be open to censure as to its moral quality.
Here then we have in view three independent, but perfectly concurrent
and _mutually interpretative_ evidences--namely, _first_, the
sculptures, _secondly_, the gems, and then the books--the poetry. If,
in examining one of these classes of antiquities, we find ourselves
at a loss in attempting to decipher its symbols or its allusions, any
such difficulty vanishes--in most instances--when we betake ourselves
to another class:--as thus--the gem expounds the statue; or the poet,
in a single verse, sheds his beam of light upon both. Thus it is
that--with the _three_ at our command--ANTIQUITY, throughout the rich
and splendid region of its mythologies, stands unveiled before us! Must
we not grant that so many coherences, and so many correspondences, and
so many interpretative agreements--countless as they are--can have had
their source in nothing but the realities of the age whence we believe
them to have descended to modern times? But if it be so, then it is
true that ancient books--to wit, the Roman poets--have been securely
sent forward--thanks to the copyists!--from age to age, through all the
intervening years of so many centuries.
If it were a volume that was now to be filled, instead of the few pages
of this chapter, and if, instead of a morning at the British Museum, an
entire season were to be diligently spent there, we should still want
space and leisure for specifying a sample only of those articles which
might properly be referred to in illustration of our present argument.
Instead of doing so, we must move forward through the Elgin Saloon,
only stopping to make this one observation--that these sculptures,
and these bas-reliefs, and these inscriptions, would be to us, at
this time, nothing better than a vast confusion--a mass of insoluble
enigmas, if we did not carry with us the written remains of the Greek
and Roman literature--the works of the historians, and the poets, and
the dramatists, and the orators, which were the creations of that same
age of refined intelligence, and exquisite taste, and artistic skill:
but so it is, that the written memorials of that brief period are found
to be available for interpreting the solid memorials of the same times,
and these again for illustrating those. It was indeed a brief period:
--it was a blossoming and a fruit-bearing summer month of the world’s
dull millennial year; and during the long period that followed it--the
autumn months, and the winter--there were none among the living who
could either have written these books, or who could have chiselled
these marbles; but the books in one manner, and the marbles in another,
have separately floated down upon the billows of time; and here we
have them, confronted under one roof--ten thousand witnesses, attesting
the reality of ancient history.
From the classic antiquities we now advance, and enter the ASSYRIAN
GALLERIES. Everybody knows, or may easily know, in what way the
sculptures, buried so many centuries, have now come to fill these
long apartments, and how they thus find a resting-place under the
roof of the British Museum. The places whence they have come, and the
circumstances of their disinterment, are (as we must suppose) known
and familiar to the visitor in whose company we are spending this
morning in its saloons. This being so, and if, moreover, we may believe
that he has become, in some degree, conversant with the literature of
ancient Greece--especially with its historians--Herodotus, Thucydides,
Xenophon, Diodorus, and also Strabo--he will be qualified to understand
what we mean in speaking of that _broad confirmation_ of the
authenticity of ancient history which it receives from a glance at the
contents of the “Assyrian Galleries.”
The above-named Greek writers, and these illustrated as they are by the
contemporary literature, give us a distinct image of Greece, and of
its people, with their intellectuality, and their religion, and their
taste; and this portraiture is quite homogeneous in itself, and, as we
have already said, it is corroborated and exhibited, in ten thousand
instances, by the sculptures, and other objects found in the saloons
we have just now visited. But now these same writers open up to us
also--sometimes formally, and sometimes incidentally--a prospect,
eastward, far over the regions outstretched beyond the limits of the
Greek civilisation. In those illimitable expanses there existed a
civilisation; but it was quite of another aspect; there was government,
and social order; but these were wholly unlike the institutions of
Greece. There were religions; but they breathed another spirit: they
uttered other voices; they spoke of a different national economy.
There was the same human nature; but it had been developed as if under
conditions proper to another world.
Now I will ask my companion to tell me with what sort of feeling it is,
that, in passing from the monuments of Grecian life, and the remains of
its arts, he enters these Assyrian galleries. Does there not take place
an involuntary impression to this effect--as if we were here setting
foot upon the soil of another world? We have crossed the threshold
that divides one phase or mode of human existence from another mode of
it; there are here displayed before us the indications of a different
climate, a different terrestrial surface; and the vegetation that
covers it is of another class, nor are the animals that roam over it
the same; and the human forms, and the visages, and the costumes, and
the attitudes, and the occupations, and the rites, are of another
mould. In these galleries we are surrounded with the symbols and the
appendages of a sombre and remorseless despotism. Greece had its
warriors and its heroes, and its many orders of mind, and each freely
developed; but _here_ the one master of prostrate millions of men is
the solitary being: all things follow, or precede, or revolve around
him: there is one will, and it carried its purposes unchecked, alike by
reason or humanity.
Here then are the monuments of a world, such as that outlying and
distant eastern world whereof we find scattered notices in the
extant remains of the Greek literature. These notices serve as the
interpretation, so far as they go, of these ponderous remains. The
historians, the orators, the poets, flourishing under a refined
civilisation, look over their enclosures, and they sketch, at points,
the far-off barbaric civilisation of Asia, and we recognise, in the
_written_ memorials of that ruder social life, the features and
characteristics of its sculptured memorials--as they are now in view.
These coincidences are, we say, _an evidence at large_ of the
authenticity of that portion of ancient history which might seem to
stand most in need of corroboration. It is a broad witnessing to the
truth. We might, however, descend to the particulars, and then might
verify this proof in very many of its details; but we must go on,
and only fix attention, for a moment, upon a single line of these
confirmatory coincidences; and it is one which carries with it a
momentous inference.
There is one body of extant writings which is not only of much earlier
date than the Greek literature--earlier even than its traditions,
but which sprung up within the circle of the Asiatic world; it is
not Grecian--it possesses not the same merits, the same graces, or
merits of a kindred order; it has its own. Asiatic it is; and yet
it was so much insulated, and it was so decisively national, that
the report it makes of the surrounding social economies, is, in a
great degree, an independent report; it looks on, as from a distance.
We may expect, therefore, to find in the Hebrew literature--in its
historians, poets, and prophets--a _reflection_ of Asiatic life,
rather than a native or home-made exhibition of it; and such is the
fact. The monster despotisms that had their seats by the side of the
Tigris and the Euphrates, appear like phantoms of destructive power,
as seen from the heights of Palestine. Now, what we affirm is this;
that the idea we obtain, in perusing the Hebrew literature, of the
Asiatic military despotisms, and of their horrific superstitions, is
conspicuously realized--it is held out to our view with a vivid force
and distinctness, as we walk up and down, gazing in awe upon these
monstrous sculptures. The Hebrew writers denounce these destroyers of
the nations; and now let us confess that they have pictured them truly;
they have not calumniated those remorseless tyrants--even the men of
these colossal busts and these bas-reliefs, when they recount their
deeds of blood, their spoliations, and their oppressions.
Besides and beyond this--which we have called a broad confirmation of
ancient history, and which arises spontaneously from the aspect of
these Assyrian antiquities--it is well known, and we are supposing our
companion to be aware of the fact, that, since the disinterment of
these Assyrian sculptures, great progress has been made in the work
of deciphering the inscriptions which appear upon many of them. At
this time it may safely be affirmed that these records, inscrutable
as they were thought to be, have spoken out their meaning. It is true
also that these utterances from a long unknown world have fallen in
with the testimony of written history--Grecian and Biblical, and
that in relation, especially, to the latter, many highly significant
coincidences have presented themselves, rewarding the patient
intelligence of those who have laboured on this field. But to this
subject we shall have occasion to return in a following chapter.
The marvels of the Egyptian galleries might lead us away even into yet
another world; but we have already touched upon the subject (pp. 146,
_and following_), and therefore hasten forward, making a momentary
stop at one object only, namely, the celebrated “Rosetta stone,” thus
described in the Synopsis:--
“The Rosetta stone, containing three inscriptions of the same import,
namely, one in hieroglyphics, another in a written character, called
demotic or enchorial, and a third in the Greek language. These
inscriptions record the services which Ptolemy the Fifth had rendered
his country, and were engraved by order of the Synod of Priests,
when they were assembled at Memphis for the purpose of investing him
with the royal prerogative. It is the key to the decipherment of the
hieroglyphical and demotic characters of Egypt. This stone was found
near Rosetta, and it appears to have been placed in a temple dedicated
to Atum by the monarch Nechao, of the twenty-sixth dynasty: it is of
basalt.”
The industry and the sagacity of a succession of learned men have
so far availed (greatly by aid of the threefold inscriptions of the
Rosetta stone) as that the history of Egypt, up to a very remote
age, has been recovered, and has been carried to its place, so as to
synchronize with that of the surrounding nations. Every such conquest,
or, as we may call it, inroad upon the dark regions of bygone ages,
gives a further confidence to our belief in the general trustworthiness
of ancient written history. The ancient historians were indeed
sometimes misinformed, or perhaps negligent in putting together their
materials; nevertheless, on the whole, they have acquitted themselves
as honest and intelligent witnesses.
In ascending the north-west staircase, we must not fail to notice
several framed and glazed specimens of Egyptian writing, which enliven
the walls. These manuscripts are on the Egyptian papyrus, the texture
of the material in several instances being quite discernible. These
should be looked at as furnishing the best possible illustration of the
statements already made in general terms (Chapter V.). What we have
there spoken of may here be (not handled indeed, but) seen.
It will now be time to bring our visit to the Museum to a close, lest
we should be allured by its multifarious treasures--the memorials of
all ages, to wander too far from our proper subject. Yet a glance must
be had at the manuscripts that are exposed to view in cases in the
saloons on the eastern side of the Museum. These manuscripts, to some
of which we must hereafter make a reference, bring under the eye all
those varieties of material, of decoration, and of character as to
the writing, which already have been briefly mentioned. Among them we
may find samples of the writer’s art, and of the art of the writer’s
brother--the decorator, as seen in the illuminations; some of them
are in the highest degree sumptuous and magnificent; others are more
business-like:--a few that have held their integrity as books through
sixteen hundred years, and many, during a thousand years. The summers
and the winters--times of war and devastation--times of peace:--years
of narrow risks from spoliation, conflagration, barbarian recklessness;
and centuries, perhaps, when, throughout noiseless days and nights
not a breath, not a hand, moved the dust that was always coming to
its long rest upon the cover! So it has been that a safe transmission
of the inestimable records of mind has had place, notwithstanding the
mischances, the storms, the violences, the ignorance, and the neglects,
of so many years.