“(series:) ir shimma dimmir Ninna.”—Complaint to the goddess Ishtar.
(The usual number of the tablet is not placed here.)
He has written and engraved it like its original.
“Palace of Asshurbanapal, king of Assyria,
Son of Esarhaddon, king of the universe, king of Assyria, ruler of Babylon,
King of Sumer and Accad, king of the kings of Ethiopia and Egypt,
King of the four regions, son of Sennacherib,
King of the universe, king of Assyria, who puts his trust in the god Asshur and the goddess Ninlil, in Nabu and Tashmit.
May the god Nabu be thy guide!”
In general, however, these signatures ran as follows:
(The first word of the tablet following.)
“Xth tablet (of the series beginning thus:).…
“Palace of Asshurbanapal, the king of the universe, the king of Assyria, to whom Nabu and Tashmit had given ear, who took clear eyes for the preparation (?) of the writing of tablets, whilst under the kings my predecessors nothing of the kind (nin shipru shu’ atu) was attempted—the wisdom of Nabu, (tikip santakki), a fullness of beauty, did I write, arrange, and engrave on tablets; to see and read it I placed it in my palace.”
After which, in some examples, there follows:
“May the light of Asshur, the king of the gods, be thy guide!
Whosoever shall write his name by my name,
May Asshur and Ninlil (Beltis) destroy him and root his name and his seed out of the land!”
The contents of the tablets in which Asshurbanapal caused the wisdom of the god Nabu (identified by the ancients with Mercury) to be written of in this fashion, were varied to an extent scarcely conceivable. They contained the primitive spells and formulas for oaths of the people of Sumer, as well as the somewhat later hymns to the gods, and penitential psalms of the Accadian population of northern Babylonia, almost all of them with interlinear translations into the Semitic language of ancient Babylon; also legends of Semitic character and epic poems almost as old as the Accadian hymns; astronomical and astrological texts; historical inscriptions (as, for instance, those of Agum-kakrime and the ancient Sargon); chronological lists, calendars, and a great deal besides; all of which was collected by Asshurbanapal and by him handed down to posterity. It is hard to say in what direction the literary pieces thus preserved fail to cast a light on the ancient Babylonians into whose cultivation the Assyrians were, indeed, once initiated, and to whom they were in all essentials indebted for their own; it is certain that we should now be acquainted with no single one of those primitive magic verses, had not Asshurbanapal had them written out afresh. And what should we know of the Sumerians and Accadians without these songs? But this is not enough. A great part of the Asshurbanapal library consists of philosophical aids to the knowledge and acquisition of the Sumerio-Accadian language, as well as of the Semitic Assyrio-Babylonian, and to the writing (the so-called syllabary) as well as to the spoken language; these aids include vocabularies, grammatical paradigms, and even collections of phrases in two languages.
Whilst Layard was exploring the southwestern palace at Kuyunjik, adding undreamt-of treasures to those acquired in his first expedition to the country, and finding quantities of new cuneiform texts of the so-called third species of the Assyrian genus, so that he seemed to have been the first to gather the materials for the deciphering of this kind of cuneiform writing, it had been already completed, at least in the main, by the labours of Saulcy (1849) and, above all, by those of Henry Rawlinson (1847-1851). Layard’s book, Nineveh and its Remains, which appeared in 1849, had already introduced us into the midst of Assyrian antiquity, although the inscriptions which accompanied the sculptures could not yet give us any further information elucidating them. But in the Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, which appeared in the beginning of 1853, we already find the correct interpretation of several Assyrian names of kings, countries, towns, and gods, and even the correct rendering of the substance of connected historical inscriptions, which Layard owed to the information communicated in the interval by Henry Rawlinson and the Irishman, E. Hincks, who had also brought great acuteness to bear on this department of study. The numerous fresh historical documents which Layard brought with him could not have appeared at a more favourable time; above all, the first of the chests containing Asshurbanapal’s library could not have entered London at a better moment. For, once a basis was established for the reading of the cuneiform writing of the Babylonian and Assyrian languages, all that was needed to advance along the path so successfully entered upon was new texts, and these now began to flow in, in abundance.c
Bas-relief representing Tiglathpileser III
(Found at Nimrud.—Layard)
LATER DISCOVERIES IN BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA
The work of exploration rested entirely between the years 1855 and 1872. Great progress was made, however, in the decipherment of inscriptions and the popularisation of the results, and the mind of the public was prepared to appreciate the greatness of the work that was to follow.
The importance of George Smith’s decipherment in 1872 of the Babylonian story of the Deluge was at once recognised, and led to his being sent to Nineveh in January, 1873, under the auspices of the Daily Telegraph. As soon as he had discovered some further fragments of the deluge story, however, the newspaper was satisfied, and he was recalled. On a second expedition, sent out in the same year by the British Museum, Smith made no startling discoveries. Smith’s work, while small in amount when compared with that of the early explorers, brought to light much valuable material, and aroused great enthusiasm in England. The British Museum sent him on a third expedition in 1876; but he was prevented from making any excavations, and died of fever on his way back.
The next expedition, that of Hormuzd Rassam in 1877, resulted, among other things, in the identification of the site of Sippar, and the discovery of numerous interesting inscriptions and of some beautifully ornamented inscribed bronze plates that had adorned the gates of the palace of Shalmaneser II.
In this same year, 1877, M. Ernest de Sarzec, then just appointed French consul at Bassorah on the Persian Gulf, began that series of brilliant explorations which he has carried on more or less continuously ever since. His enthusiasm for archæological research was backed by an extensive knowledge of the conditions of the country, and his efforts were rewarded with an unusual degree of success from the very start.