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TREASURES FROM NINEVEH

The most casual wanderer in the British Museum can hardly fail to notice two pairs of massive sculptures, in the one case winged bulls, in the other, winged lions, both human-headed, which guard the entrance to the Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta stone. Each pair of these weird creatures once guarded an entrance to the palace of a king in the famous city of Nineveh. As one stands before them his mind is carried back over some twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the days when the “Cedar of Lebanon” was “fair in his greatness” and the scourge of Israel. A wave of emotion sweeps over one when he first sees them, and Byron’s stirring lines, reminiscent of school-day oratory, ring in the memory:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

The Assyrian! The ruler of Nineveh! For two thousand five hundred years he was only a name and a memory; yet here stand great monuments to testify to the reality of his sometime greatness.

These huge lions are pertinent in the present connection because of the inscriptions that are graven across their pedestals. A glance reveals the strange characters in which these records are written, graven neatly in straight lines across the stone, and looking, to casual inspection, like nothing else so much as random flights of arrow-heads. The resemblance is so striking that this is sometimes called the arrow-headed character, though it is more generally known as the wedge or cuneiform character. A strange writing this. It seems almost incredible that it can really be susceptible of interpretation and translation into a modern language. And, indeed, the feat of interpreting it was one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century scholarship; but of this we shall have more to say in a moment.

But importance aside, what an interest must now attach to objects with such a history as belongs to these! The very sculptures before us, for example, were perhaps seen by Jonah when he made that famous voyage to Nineveh some seven or eight hundred years B.C. A little later the Babylonian and the Mede revolted from Assyrian tyranny, and descended upon the fair city of Nineveh, and almost literally levelled it to the ground. But these great sculptures, among other things, escaped destruction, and at once hidden and preserved by the accumulating débris of the centuries, they stood there age after age, their very existence quite forgotten. When Xenophon marched past their site with the ill-starred Expedition of the Ten Thousand, in the year 400 B.C., he saw only a mound which seemed to mark the site of some ancient ruin; but so ephemeral is fame that the Greek did not suspect that he looked upon the site of that city which only two centuries before had been the mistress of the world.

So ephemeral is fame! And yet the moral scarcely holds in the sequel; for we of to-day, in this new, undreamed-of Western world, behold these mementoes of Assyrian greatness, fresh from their twenty-five hundred years of entombment, and with them records which restore to us the history of that long-forgotten people in such detail as it was not known to any previous generation since the fall of Nineveh. For two thousand five hundred years no one saw these treasures or knew that they existed. One hundred generations of men came and went without once pronouncing the names of Kings Asshurnazirpal or Asshurbanapal. And to-day, after centuries of oblivion, these names are restored to history, and, thanks to the character of their monuments, are assured a permanency of fame that can almost defy time itself. It would be nothing strange, but rather in keeping with their previous mutations of fortune, if the names of Asshurnazirpal and Asshurbanapal should be familiar household words to future generations that have forgotten the existence of an Alexander, a Cæsar, and a Napoleon. For when Macaulay’s prospective New Zealander explores the ruins of the British Museum, the records of the ancient Assyrians will presumably be there unscathed, to tell their story as they have told it to our generation, although every manuscript and printed book may have gone the way of fragile textures.

But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite necromantic enough without conjuring for them a necromantic future. The story of their restoration is like a brilliant romance of history. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century the inquiring student could learn in an hour or so all that was known in fact and in fable of the renowned city of Nineveh. He had but to read a few chapters of the Bible and a few pages of Diodorus to exhaust the important literature of the subject. If he turned also to the pages of Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and Ælianus, these served chiefly to confirm the suspicion that the Greeks themselves knew almost nothing more of the history of their famed oriental forerunners.

The current fables told of a first king Ninus and his wonderful queen, Semiramis; of Sennacherib, the conqueror; of the effeminate Sardanapalus, who neglected the warlike ways of his ancestors, but perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh itself, in a self-imposed holocaust. And that was all. How much of this was history, how much myth, no man could say; and for all any one suspected to the contrary, no man could ever know. And to-day the contemporary records of the city are before us in such profusion as no other nation of antiquity, save Egypt alone, can at all rival. Whole libraries of Babylonian documents are at hand that were written twenty or even thirty centuries before our era. These, be it understood, are the original books themselves, not copies. The author of that remote time speaks to us directly, hand to eye, without intermediary transcriber. And there is not a line of any Hebrew or Greek inscriptions of a like age that has been preserved to us; there is little enough that can match these ancient books by a thousand years. When one reads of Moses or Isaiah, Homer, Hesiod, or Herodotus, he is but following the transcription—often unquestionably faulty, and probably never in all parts perfect—of successive copyists of later generations. The oldest known copy of the Bible, for example, dates from the fourth century A.D.—1000 years after the last Assyrian records were made, and read, and buried, and forgotten.

Bas-relief from an Assyrian Palace, showing Assyrian Soldiers, Prisoners being flayed alive, Cuneiform Inscriptions, etc.

As to the earlier Mesopotamian records, they date back some 5000—perhaps 7000—years B.C.: at least 1000 years before the period assigned by Archbishop Usher’s long-accepted Chronology for the creation of the world itself. Solomon, who lived about 1000 B.C., is accredited with the declaration that “of the making of many books there is no end.” Modern exegesists tell us that it was not Solomon, but a later Alexandrian interloper, who actually coined the phrase; but nevertheless it appears that the saying would have been perfectly intelligible, in Mesopotamia, not merely to Solomon’s contemporaries, but to generations that lived long before the Jewish nation, as such, came into existence. At all events, there was at least one king of Assyria—namely, Asshurbanapal—who lived only a few generations after Solomon, and whose palace boasted a library of some 10,000 volumes—a library, if you please, in which the books were numbered and shelved systematically, and classified, and cared for by an official librarian. From this library, records have come to us during the past half-century that have reconstructed the history of Asiatic antiquity.

If you would care to see some of these strange documents, you have but a little way to go from the site of the winged lion here in the British Museum. Meantime, there are other sculptures here which you can hardly pass unnoticed. As we pass the human-headed lions and enter the hall of Asshurnazirpal, we shall see other evidences of Assyrian greatness that might easily lead our thoughts astray from the writing. Here, forming the wall, are bas-reliefs on which the famous scene of the lion hunt is shown; a little farther on are all manner of war scenes; and there some domestic incidents, the making of bread or a like comestible, and its baking in an oven; and there again is the interior of a stable with a man gravely grooming a horse much as it might be done in any stable to-day.