Chapter LVIII: Appendix: B. Excavations in Mesopotamia, and Their Results (2)

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.

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.

(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]