Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andy Schmitt and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
1901
The great nation which dwelt in the seventh century before our era on thebanks of Tigris and Euphrates flourished in literature as well as in theplastic arts, and had an alphabet of its own. The Assyrians sometimeswrote with a sharp reed, for a pen, upon skins, wooden tablets, or papyrusbrought from Egypt. In this case they used cursive letters of a Phoeniciancharacter. But when they wished to preserve their written documents, theyemployed clay tablets, and a stylus whose bevelled point made animpression like a narrow elongated wedge, or arrow-head. By a combinationof these wedges, letters and words were formed by the skilled andpractised scribe, who would thus rapidly turn off a vast amount of "copy."All works of history, poetry, and law were thus written in the cuneiformor old Chaldean characters, and on a substance which could withstand theravages of time, fire, or water. Hence we have authentic monuments ofAssyrian literature in their original form, unglossed, unaltered, andungarbled, and in this respect Chaldean records are actually superior tothose of the Greeks, the Hebrews, or the Romans.
The literature of the Chaldeans is very varied in its forms. The hymns tothe gods form an important department, and were doubtless employed inpublic worship. They are by no means lacking in sublimity of expression,and while quite unmetrical they are proportioned and emphasized, likeHebrew poetry, by means of parallelism. In other respects they resemblethe productions of Jewish psalmists, and yet they date as far back as thethird millennium before Christ. They seem to have been transcribed in theshape in which we at present have them in the reign of Assurbanipal, whowas a great patron of letters, and in whose reign libraries were formed inthe principal cities. The Assyrian renaissance of the seventeenth centuryB.C. witnessed great activity among scribes and book collectors: modernscholars are deeply indebted to this golden age of letters in Babyloniafor many precious and imperishable monuments. It is, however, only withinrecent years that these works of hoar antiquity have passed from thesecluded cell of the specialist and have come within reach of the generalreader, or even of the student of literature. For many centuries thecuneiform writing was literally a dead letter to the learned world. Theclue to the understanding of this alphabet was originally discovered in1850 by Colonel Rawlinson, and described by him in a paper read before theRoyal Society. Hence the knowledge of Assyrian literature is, so far asEurope is concerned, scarcely more than half a century old.
Among the most valuable of historic records to be found among themonuments of any nation are inscriptions, set up on public buildings, inpalaces, and in temples. The Greek and Latin inscriptions discovered atvarious points on the shores of the Mediterranean have been of pricelessvalue in determining certain questions of philology, as well as inthrowing new light on the events of history. Many secrets of language havebeen revealed, many perplexities of history disentangled, by the wordsengraven on stone or metal, which the scholar discovers amid the dust ofruined temples, or on the cippus of a tomb. The form of one Greekle