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]
Chapter I. Land and People
b G. Weber, Allgemeine Weltgeschichte.
c Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums.
d F. Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens.
e R. W. Rogers, History of Babylonia and Assyria.
f J. P. Peters, Nippur.
Chapter II. Old Babylonian History
b Hugo Radau, Early Babylonian History down to the IVth Dynasty of Ur.
c A. H. Sayce, from the article “Babylonia and Assyria,” in the New Volumes of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
d E. A. T. W. Budge, Babylonian Life and History.
Chapter III. The Rise of Assyria
b H. Winckler, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens.
c Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums.
d E. Babelon, Histoire de l’Orient.
e C. P. Tiele, Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte.