flying trips to the site of Nineveh twice that he might gather the
remaining fragments of the great library of Asshurbanabal, and he died
in the field far from home. It was he that found among Layard's tablets
the Babylonian account of the Deluge, so much like that in the Bible. He
was the first of a second generation who, following Rawlinson and
Oppert, decipherers as well as explorers, were able to read as they
found. I can only mention the names of the Englishmen Taylor and Loftus;
of the Frenchmen, Place and De Sarzec; and, later, the Americans,
Peters, Hilprecht, and Haynes, who have so faithfully explored the
extremely archaic mound of Niffer, which I had the honor to recommend
for excavation after I had visited the mounds of Southern Babylonia in
the winter of 1884-85. And now the Germans, with scientific as well as
commercial and political purpose, with their railroad to pass down the
valley through Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, which gives them predominant
influence, have sent expeditions well equipped with scholars and
engineers to the choicest sites in Babylonia, to Warka, the ancient
Erech, and to Babylon itself; and with Teuton thoroughness they are
excavating the most famous of ancient ruins and gathering fresh
treasures of archaeological research. Nor have they left the land of the
Hittites unexplored, for Germany claims the first rights, politically,
in all Anatolia, the right of succession and possession when the Turk is
expelled, and German archaeological science is bound to be first on
that field.
And now what have we found as the fruit of all this labor of
exploration? Is it worth the labor and the expense?
Let us look first--it can be only a glance--at Egypt, for Egypt was the
land first and most persistently explored. The French Government for
scores of years has been at work there. Germans and Italians have
explored the ruins; two English societies have for years kept
expeditions in the field; and just now a Californian university sends an
American Egyptologist to uncover the tombs and read the hieroglyphs of
the kings. Not only are the figured monuments of Egypt published in
princely folios, but its records have been translated and its lost
history recovered to the world's knowledge. Instead of the bare
"Pharaoh" of the Bible, a common designation for all the kings, and in
place of a bare list of names and dynasties copied from Manetho, and so
altered and corrupted in the copying as to be neither Greek nor
Egyptian, we have, on scarab, or gravestone, or pyramid, or
rock-sepulchre wall, in his own spelling, the name of almost every king
from the latest time of the Ptolemies back to the first king of the
first dynasty, five thousand--or was it six thousand?--years before
Christ. And not their names only, but the very pictures of their wars.
We see how they went up the Nile and fought the blacks of Abyssinia, and
brought back the spoils of Punt We see them sending their squadrons
into Syrian Asia, and waging a dubious battle with the Hittites before
the walls of Hamath, where Rameses in his lion-guarded chariot performs
prodigies of valor, and from which he returns not only to paint on
sacred walls the picture of his victory, but also to inscribe a copy of
the treaty of peace with the Hittite king, the earliest treaty in the
preserved annals of diplomacy. Well wrought that Rameses the Great for
eternal fame in the sixty years of his reign, fifteen centuries before
the birth of our Lord. But what fame had been his, had not explorers and
excavators and scholars dug and found and copied and translated what the
sands had covered for centuries? And to-day the curious traveller stops
in sight of the pyramids on the banks of the Nile, and enters the Bulaq
Museum, and there he sees set up before him the very mummy of Rameses
himself and of a dozen other royal personages, rifled from their tombs
and displayed for your amazement and mine. There is the very
Pharaoh--you can see his features, you can touch his coffin--who chased
the Children of Israel out of Egypt. There are the household implements,
the furniture of their homes, the jewelry their queens wore,--queens who
were also sisters of the kings, as Sarah was the sister of Abraham.
Or would you know of some great revolution in Egypt? These decipherers
of the inscriptions will tell you how the Shepherd Kings overthrew the
native dynasty, coming with their armies from Asia long before Rameses,
and changed religion and customs; under whom Jacob and his sons found
hospitable welcome, until their hated race was expelled by a stronger
native dynasty that knew not Joseph. Or they will tell you of the royal
reformer Khuenaten, son of a famous Eastern mother, a queen from the
banks of the Euphrates. Taught by her, perhaps, a purer religion, he
attempted to replace the worship of Egypt's bestial gods by the worship
of the one only great God, whose symbol was the sun. But the priestly
clan was too strong for him, and the succeeding Pharaohs destroyed his
records and chiselled out his name where it had been cut in stone that
no memory of his sacrilege might be preserved. A royal Moses there could
not be. The worshipper of one God, whether king or son of Pharaoh's
daughter, could bring no reformation to Egypt.
Or would you learn how Egypt ruled its subject territory? You can read
the correspondence of a dozen local Egyptian governors in Palestine and
Syria in the century before Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt.
There is the letter of the King of Jerusalem, where Melchizedek reigned
in the times of Abraham; and they tell of rebellions against the fading
power of Egypt, and of the fear of the advancing Hittites. The earliest
kings, those that built the pyramids, appear before us real in their
personality, emerging out of misty legend or myth, and, earlier still,
even the prehistoric races that antedated the very beginning of
civilization. Whence came that first dynasty? Who invented writing? Were
they autochthons? Hardly. These are questions left for further explorers
to answer. Probably those first messengers of civilization came from the
East, perhaps from Arabia, perhaps from Babylonia, or perhaps the first
Babylonians and Egyptians formed a common stock somewhere near the mouth
of the Euphrates. Perhaps the Bible is right in saying that the first
seat of civilized man was in Eden, and that the Euphrates was the chief
river of Paradise. Or was it from Arabia, the immemorial home of the
Semitic tribes, that land of sand and mountain and fertile valley, land
of changeless culture and tradition, so near the centres of
civilization, and yet still the most inaccessible, the least known
portion of the inhabited earth,--was it from Arabia that the wiser,
stronger multitude came that first overran the valleys of both the Nile
and the Euphrates, bringing to Egypt and Chaldea arts and letters? We do
not know. Some future explorer must teach us. But the German Glaser has
within these few years brought back from hazardous journeys a multitude
of inscriptions that tell of kingdoms that fringed its southern coast
and extended we know not how far into the interior in those early days
when one of the queens of Sheba brought presents to Solomon, and when,
earlier still, we are told there were dukes of Edom before there was any
king in Israel. They say that a railroad is to be built to Mecca; Arabia
is not to be always a closed land, neighbor as it is to Egypt. We shall
know one of these days whether, as scholars suspect, out of Arabia and
across the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, where, at the southern end of the
Red Sea, Africa almost touches Asia, there came that mighty flood of
more forceful men, bred in the deserts and hills, who, passing down the
Nile, first brought history to Egypt; and whether it was this same
Semitic people, as scholars suspect again, that spread resistlessly
eastward to the Euphrates valley, and did an equal service in conquering
and assimilating the black aborigines of these swamps and lagoons. The
spade will tell us.
Or was it still further east, in the highlands of Persia, that men first
learned how to write and record history? We cannot go back so far in the
history of Babylonia--Professor Hilprecht dares to carry us seven
thousand years before Christ--that we do not find its kings fighting
against Elam. And only in the last decade of the Nineteenth century the
Frenchman De Morgan has made marvellous discoveries in the Elamite
lands. What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery! For
Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments
and records that printing-presses have yet issued? And from that time to
this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even
while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, by special convention,
the care of its monuments and their exploration to French savants? And
before Layard removed a basketful of the earth that covered the palace
of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the
friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad; and in these late years is
it not the Frenchman De Sarzec who has brought from Telloh to the Louvre
the statues of Chaldean kings that lived almost five thousand years ago?
And so to France was given the right, for the honor and enrichment of
the Louvre, to explore Persia; and De Morgan went to Susa, to Shushan,
the palace of Xerxes and Darius, of Ahasuerus and Esther, in search of
what was far earlier than they, for another Frenchman and his wife, M.
and Mme. Dieulafoy, had already excavated the noble palace of these
Persian kings. Far below the palace of Xerxes he has found vastly
earlier remains. There is the column set up, if we can believe the
Assyriologists who trust the chronology of Nabonidus, the last king of
Babylon,--and it is not incredible,--three thousand eight hundred years
before Christ, by Naram-Sin, a Babylonian king, to commemorate one of
his raids into the land of what were perhaps his stronger enemies. It
is a noble composition, with archaic writing, and a stately figure of
the king climbing the mountains and slaying his enemies; it shows an art
that might well have developed into the best that Greece has produced.
But De Morgan has only begun to scratch the surface of the mounds of
Elam, and a multitude of scholars believe that out of Elam came the
first civilization of Chaldea. We shall find out yet; for the record is
in the earth, and only waits the man who will dig it out, and then the
man who will read it.
We are tempted to go further east and recall that in India, the land
where Alexander made his most distant conquests, a multitude of English
scholars have been searching the ruins of old temples for the earliest
memorials of the worship of Buddha. Just now they have found his
birthplace and precious relics. But that takes us too far afield, and
would tempt us to further excursions in Burmah and China. We must come
back to Western Asia and the shores of Europe.
As has been indicated, the greatest puzzle of ancient history is that of
the Hittite empire, which seems to have ruled all Asia Minor at some
uncertain time, and to have extended over Syria and Palestine. No sooner
had the greatest Egyptian kings, Thothmes and Rameses, ventured their
armies into Asia, perhaps in vengeance on the incursions of Ionian
pirates, perhaps in requital of the tyrannies of the hated Shepherd
Kings, than they learned of the Hittites on the shores of the Euphrates.
Then, a century or two later, a mass of official correspondence sent by
the Kings of Palestine and Syria, dug up in Egypt, reports that the
Hittites had appeared as invaders from the north and beseeches military
aid. But the power of Egypt had waned, and the Hittites were supreme
until the Assyrians began and carried on for five centuries the
uncertain war which ended in the utter overthrow of the Hittites and all
their allies in a great battle at Carchemish. That great mound of
Carchemish needs to be thoroughly explored. Already an English
expedition has very carelessly just opened the hill and exposed, but not
fairly published, some few as fine friezes as are to be found in the
Assyrian capitals, with unread Hittite inscriptions, and a fine statue
of the Hittite Venus; but much remains to reward the student of Oriental
history and art. At Senjirli a German expedition under Von Luschan has
done more and better work, handsomely published, but this was a smaller
Syrian town, and less was to be expected; and yet here, and near by,
were found what was not expected, steles (upright slabs or pillars) with
the portraits of kings in high relief, covered over with long
inscriptions in Aramaic, the oldest and longest as yet discovered
anywhere in that language. It was a magnificent result of very moderate
labor,--Hittite friezes, Assyrian and Aramean inscriptions all in one
little mound. But for the most part we know the art and writing of the
Hittites from what we have found above ground, in their towns and
fortresses in the hills, for little digging has been done. At Pterium
was a principal sacred capital, and there, on a natural corridor of
rock, they carved a procession of gods and kings and soldiers that
excites the wonder of scholars. As I write, the announcement comes that
Professor Sayce has at last discovered the secret of the Hittite
hieroglyphs, and we may hope that very soon it will be possible to read
them. But there is vastly more of their records yet to be disinterred.
And there remain the two lands most sacred and beloved in poetry and
history,--the land of Israel and the land of Homer. It is amazing that
so little search has been made to find out what is hidden under the soil
of Palestine. Scholars in plenty have walked over the top of it, and
have told all that is on the surface, but almost nothing has been done
underground, no such excavations as in Egypt or Assyria. I do not forget
that the English Palestine Exploration Fund has followed out, with
trenches and tunnels, the walls of Jerusalem, nor that one or two old
mounds have been partly explored. But what is this to the great work
that needs to be done? There has been found on the surface the Moabite
Stone, at the old capital of Dibon, a wonderful record of early kings
mentioned in the Bible. And there is the short account in the rock-cut
conduit of Siloam, of the success of the workmen in the time of
Hezekiah, who, beginning at the two ends, did the fine engineering feat
of having their tunnels meet correctly in the solid rock. But when
Jerusalem is fully explored, and the northern capitals of Bethel and
Tirzah and Samaria, and a hundred other mounds that mark the site of
Jewish, Israelite, Philistine, and Amorite cities, we may expect
marvellous discoveries that will illumine our Holy Scriptures.
And one region yet remains to be considered, the scattered coasts and
islands that owned the Greek speech, and that created the Greek
civilization. It is not the Greece of the Parthenon and Pericles that we
wish to discover, for that we fairly know; but the arts and the history
of those earlier Greeks and Trojans that Homer tells of, the age of
Agamemnon and Ulysses, of Helen and Hector and Priam, and of the yet
earlier tribes that sailed the Aegean, and settled the Mediterranean
islands, and sent their ships to the Egyptian coasts, and sought golden
fleeces on the Euxine Sea. All about the coast of Asia Minor they lived,
while that Hittite power was ruling the interior; and, intermixed with
Phoenician trading-posts, they held the great islands of Crete and
Cyprus and the shores of Sicily and Italy. What shall we call them? Were
they Dorians, or Heraclidae, Achaeans or Pelasgi? Were they of the same
race as the mysterious Etruscans, or shall we name them simply
Mycenaeans, as we call the art Mycenaean that ruled the islands and
coasts down to the Homeric age, and we know not how many centuries
earlier, but certainly as far back as the conquering period of the
Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty of Thothmes? Their soldiers and merchants
and their fine vases are pictured on the walls of Egypt, and their
pottery has long been studied; but we knew little of them until Dr.
Schliemann, the Greek merchant who achieved wealth in the United States,
bravely opened the great ruins of Troy, in the full patriotism of his
assurance that Homer's story of the Trojan war was history as well as
poetry. As he found one burnt and buried city under another,--for many
times was Troy destroyed,--and extended his investigations to Tiryns and
other ancient cities, one volume of splendid research followed another,
until the trader had compelled the unwilling scholar to confess that he
must dig for both history and art. To be sure, his interpretations were
quite too literal at first, but the whole world of classical scholarship
has learned from him the new method of research. Splendid have been the
results. If we are not sure which stratum represents the city of Priam,
we do learn how the people lived, and how fine was their work in silver
and gold, and how slight their knowledge of letters. Dr. Schliemann has
now a multitude of imitators. France and Germany and England and the
United States each maintain a school of archaeology in Athens, and each
conducts careful explorations. Our American School lost to the French,
for lack of money at the right time, the chance to explore Delphi, but
it has carried on careful explorations at Corinth and other places. How
wonderful was the discovery, not long ago, of a shipload of bronze and
marble statues wrecked while being transported as spoil of war from
Corinth to Rome!
But the most surprising discoveries in the realm of old Greek history
and art are those that have been made in these last two or three years
in Crete. Crete was a famous centre of ancient Greek legend. Jupiter was
born and reared on Mount Ida. From another mountain summit in Crete the
gods watched the battle on the plains of Troy. There ruled Minos, who
first gave laws to men, and who at his death was sent by the gods to
judge the shades as they entered the lower world. There was the famous
Labyrinth, and there the Minotaur devoured his annual tale of maidens
until he was slain by Theseus. Was there such a real palace of Minos as
the Greek poets sung? The magnificent palace of the Cretan kings at
Cnossus has been found, by Mr. Evans, with its friezes, its spiral
ornaments, its flounce-petticoated women, its treasuries, and its
tablets written in a script so old that it cannot yet be read, but which
will be read as surely as scholarship leaves none of its riddles
unsolved. The childhood of Greece, its mighty infancy, out of which it
grew to be the creator and the example of all the world's culture, is
even now being exposed to our view, safely kept to be recovered by the
scholars of our generation.
Of interest rather to the student of the curiosities of history are the
mounds and pyramids and temples built by the aborigines of America; for
these tribes have had absolutely no part in creating our dominant
civilization or developing its art. China and Japan are, at this late
day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility; but
the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers, the Mayas and Toltecs and Incas,
have given absolutely nothing which the world cared to accept. But this
does not argue that it is not worth while to learn what we can of the
rude civilization of the races whom we have displaced. Their arrowheads
and hatchets are in every little museum. Their mounds, sometimes shaped
like serpents or tortoises or lizards, are scattered over all the
central States, and many of them have been carefully explored with
scanty results. The cliff-dwellers have left somewhat richer remains,
more baskets and parched corn, yet nothing of artistic value. We have to
go to Mexico and Yucatan and further south to Peru, to find the
majestic capitals of the Mayas and Incas, who had really reached a fair
degree of such civilization as stone and copper, without iron, and the
beginnings of picture symbols, without letters, could provide. Humboldt
and Stephens, and Lord Kingsborough, and Squier, and Tchudi, and Charnay
have made explorations and found vast and wonderful cities, some of them
deserted and overgrown before Cortez and Pizarro took possession of the
lands for Spain and enslaved the people. Where the city of Mexico now
stands was a famous capital, from whose ruins were taken the great
Calendar stone and the double statue of the god of war and the god of
death. In Palenque and Uxmal, capitals of Yucatan, were immense palaces
and temples, with the weird ornamentation of Mayan imagination; and
equal wonders exist in the high uplands where the Incas ruled Peru. Even
their barbaric art and their unrecorded history must be recovered, to
satisfy the curiosity of the more fortunate races whose boasted
Christianity visited on them nothing better than cruel slaughter. At
least we can give them museums and publish magnificent pictures of
their ruins.
So we may bless the ashes and sand that seemed to destroy and bury the
monuments of the mighty empires of the ancient world, but which have
kindly covered and preserved them, just as we put our treasures away in
some safety-vault while absent on a long journey. The fire burned the
upper wooden walls of the city, and it fell in ruins, but under those
ruins, covered by that ashes, were preserved for two thousand, three
thousand, five thousand years uninjured, the choicest sculpture and the
most precious records of ancient nations,--retained beyond the reach of
vandal hands, until scholarship had grown wise enough to ask questions
of forgotten history, and had sent Layard and Schliemann and De Sarzec
and Evans and a hundred other men to dig with their competitive spades.
But in all the long list of enthusiasts not one deserves a higher honor
or has reaped a richer harvest than Sir Henry Layard.
AUTHORITIES.
Layard: "Early Adventures;" "Nineveh and its Remains;" "Nineveh and
Babylon;" "Monuments of Nineveh." Botta: "Monument de Ninive." Loftus:
"Chaldea and Susiana." Y. Place: "Ninive et Assyrie." Hilprecht:
"Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania;" "Recent
Research in Bible Lands." Perrot and Chipiez: "History of Art in
Antiquity." J.P. Peters: "Nippur." R.W. Rogers: "History of Babylonia
and Assyria." F. Lenormant: "Students' Manual of the Ancient History of
the East;" "The Beginnings of History." Maspero: "Dawn of Civilization;"
"Struggle of the Nations;" "Passing of the Empires;" "Egyptian
Archaeology;" "Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria." C.J. Ball: "Light
from the East." Egypt Exploration Fund's Publications. F.J. Bliss:
"Exploration in Jerusalem;" "A Mound of Many Cities." Schliemann: "Troy
and its Remains;" "Ilios;" "Mycenae;" "Tiryns;" "Troja." A.J. Evans:
"Cnossus;" "Cretan Pictographs." Tsountas and Manatt: "The
Mycenaean Age."
MICHAEL FARADAY.
1791-1867.
ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM.
BY EDWIN J. HOUSTON, PH.D.
"No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him. There is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will."
LOWELL
A man was born into the world, on the 22d of September, 1791, whose work
was born with him, and who did this work so well that he became one of
its greatest benefactors. Indeed, much of the marvellous advance made in
the electric arts and sciences, during the last half-century, can be
directly traced to this work.
It was in Newington Butts, in London, England, that the man-child first
opened his eyes on the wonders of the physical world around him. To
those eyes, in after years, were given a far deeper insight into the
mysteries of nature than often falls to the lot of man. This man-child
was Michael Faraday, who has been justly styled, by those best capable
of judging him, "The Prince of Experimental Philosophers."
The precocity so common in the childhood of men of genius was
apparently absent in the case of young Faraday. The growing boy played
marbles, and worried through a scant education in reading, writing, and
arithmetic, unnoticed, and most probably, for the greater part, severely
left alone, as commonly falls to the lot of nearly all boys, whether
ordinary or extraordinary. At the early age of thirteen, he was taken
from school and placed on trial as errand-boy in the book-shop of George
Ribeau, in London. After a year at this work, he was taken as an
apprentice to the book-binding trade, by the same employer, who, on
account of his faithful services, remitted the customary premium. At
this work he spent some eight years of his life.