READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CUNEIFORM WRITING DECIPHERMMENT
ROBERT WILLIAM ROGERS
THE RECOVERY OF THE ANCIENT ORIENT
On June 17, 1912, I had the pleasure of delivering the annual Phi Beta Kappa address at Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, which I now have the temerity to commit to type. I shall not blame this boldness upon any of the kind and generous hosts who politely commended this course, but assume the responsibility alone, and thank them only that they invited me in the first instance, and then so kindly heard me. I have not re-written the words in such a form as sober art demands. They stand as they first were spoken. Here are all the innocent little arts and tricks of the man who speaks to the ears of men, and would fain induce them to listen even upon a warm summer's evening. Let the reader remember this, take the little book in the spirit of its purpose, and destroy it not with harsh criticism, lest I threaten him with the words of Hazlitt, which are these: "Those who would proscribe whatever falls short of a given standard of imaginary perfection, do so not from a higher capacity of taste or range of intellect than others, but to destroy, to 'crib and cabin in all enjoyments and opinions but their own." ROBERT W. ROGERS. Madison, New Jersey, July 17, 1912.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: By your kind and flattering invitation am I come, and by my own choice am I to speak of the only subject to which I may claim to have right of public utterance. The field of human knowledge has sensibly widened since those large days in 1776, when some of our forebears fought to found a new commonwealth, while others, even amid rumors of war in the distracted colonies, dared to meet and found a learned society. They were men who might hope to compass the field of learning as none may dare in these days, least of all one whose whole life has been given to a field circumscribed within narrow limits. When our society was founded the word "Orient" or the "East", meant simply the lands about the eastern Mediterranean, and the extent of the territory both westward and eastward was vague indeed. In our day the word "East" has swept its wide-flowing net to inclose far distant China, Japan, and the islands of the Pacific from icy Saghalien to fragrant Singapore. But, strange to say, as the term has widened eastward it has lost westward. I scarce venture to say what our founders would have set as the western limits of the East, but I do remember that when Alexander Kinglake made his famous visit to the East he began his story with Belgrade. "I had come, as it were", so he says, "to the end of this wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendor and havoc of the East". But Belgrade is not in the East for us; nay, I venture to go farther and say that Constantinople is not in the East. Her shining minarets, most beautiful expression of the aspiration of Eastern peoples, nevertheless stand upon European soil. They are in the Levant, if you will, but they are not in the East. Where, then, do you ask, does the East begin; and I fear the answer must be that I do not know. I can tell you quickly enough that Egypt is in the East; there is no disputing a geographical and ethnological fact so patent, and no desire to dispute it. Phoenicia, Palestine, Philistia these are in the East; so are Babylonia and Assyria, Elam, Media, Persia; these all are in the East. But when you seek to define its western limits one can only say that they are vague, uncertain, disputable. Somewhere across Asia Minor runs an imaginary line that bounds the East. It is not, I venture to fancy, along its western seaboard, where the sea is a deeper blue than anywhere else that I know, save only perhaps (and I insist on the perhaps) off the coast of Dalmatia. No, western Asia Minor had too much Western civilization, too deep and too rich a contact with the Greeks, to be quite Oriental in any proper sense. Even Lydia was Western at the same time that it was also Eastern, and perhaps the river Halys, where Cyrus halted his columns, may serve as a convenient boundary of the East toward the West. If that be the western limit of the Orient in the restricted sense which I now attach to the word,what is its eastern limit? It does not include China and Japan, with their island territories, nor vast Siberia; no, nor Turkestan, with its buried memorials of forgotten civilizations. I should say that where Persia's dominions touch Turkestan, there ends the Orient. From Asia Minor to Persia, and far southward to the upper cataracts of the Nile most interesting river in the world this is the territory which I call the Orient, my Orient, not because of any special property right, but because of the interest, the inspiration, the delight it has afforded me by its many-colored sights and scenes, when I have wandered over its plains and mountains and deserts; and yet more by the history and literature which it has made and sent over land and sea even unto this America, distant from it both in space and time. What a glamour, a spell, a wizard touch this Orient possesses for every cultivated man! In its gentler aspects beautiful in a certain over-powering brilliance, bathed in a sunlight too intense for human eyes during much of the year; in its fiercer and more terrible manifestations deadly in heat, shimmering in great waves over trackless deserts; in architecture, massive, solid, enduring the crash of ages, teaching even the consummate skill of the Greeks the beginnings of constructive engineering, decorative beauty, and imposing mass; in poetry, rising from passionate lyrics of human love, through ballads of war and plaints of pain, even into agonized searchings after the solution of the problem of suffering and of the mysteries of life after death; in prose, writing little labels for wine jars, making simple records of purchase, sale, exchange; lifting up panegyrics over battles fought and won, boastings of kings and conquerors, governors and despots, nay, even writing laws by which divers peoples were ruled in justice, equity, and mercy; in music, beating rude drums, screaming in wild deliriums, discovering the rhythms of the march and the dance; fashioning zithers and timbrels and searching out one medium after another until the harp was made, whose solemn beating should make melody more and more beautiful over all the Western world even to that green island in the dark Atlantic, where sounded the most famous of all harps
The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled.
Who offers apology for his enthusiasm over the Orient, modern or ancient? The spell of thousands of years is with us still; nay, is stronger than ever, more insistent, more filled with in- struction, with power to quicken emotion and enkindle life. This Orient lost for centuries the larger part of its influence. During much of the Middle Age there was little interest in any part of it save in Palestine. The Church, indeed, did her best to keep alive the memory of the historical writers, the poets, the wise men, the writers of letters and of apocalypses in her sacred books, but for most of the Orient forgetfulness dominated the minds of men. When the Renaissance burst upon Europe, it was, first of all, a new birth of interest and enthusiasm for the overpowering and exhaustless riches of Greece and Rome that first enthralled the minds of men. Petrarch, father of humanism, "first effective propagator of humanism in the world at large", in his letter to Homer wrote, sadly, "I have not been so fortunate as to learn Greek". But soon afterward, when the Calabrian Barlaam came to Italy, Petrarch became his pupil, though in a little while compelled to utter the plaint: "I had thrown myself into the work with eager hope and keen desire. But the strangeness of the foreign tongue, and the early departure of my teacher, baffled my purpose". Wherein he failed, Bocaccio, under his inspiration, measurably succeeded, and prepared the way for Manuel Chrysoloras, first real teacher of Greek in Italy, beginner of a new and better day. As this tide of learning swept over the Alps it was Erasmus who conducted it into wider channels. When his apostolate of knowledge began he could only say that among his good Netherlander a knowledge of Greek was "the next thing to heresy", but he added, "I did my best to deliver the rising generation from this slough of ignorance, and to inspire them with a taste for better studies". Interested profoundly in practical morals, inspired by an aggressive religious faith, he edited the first printed Greek Testament, and eagerly urged its translation into the great new modern languages with which Europe was then covered. "I long", he said, "that the husbandman should sing them to himself as he follows the plow, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveler should beguile with them the weariness of his journey." When the Greek Testament began thus to pass from hand to hand it was inevitable that its words should point backward, as well as forward, and its cry sound in the ears of men to open also the pages of the Old Testament and "con its strident and panting vocables." The beginnings of the study of Hebrew in western Europe were made by Johann Reuchlin, who had studied Greek at Paris, at Basel, and at Rome, only to turn aside from it in 1492, thenceforward to give all his life to Hebrew. To this dear old tongue he had come from Greek, through the New Testament, and also, strange as it may seem, from Neo-Platonism backward into the Cabbala. The Church was willing that he should study the Old Testament in Hebrew, within such limitations as from time to time might be deemed necessary by her hierarchy, but she was speedily aroused to a great dread of the Cabbala and, indeed, of all other forms of Hebrew learning. In 1509 Johann Pfefferkorn most aromatic of names a converted Jew, sought from the Emperor Maximilian a mandate for the suppression of all Hebrew books except copies of the Old Testament. Reuchlin opposed this stupid narrowness, and was promptly branded as a heretic and traitor by the energetic Pfefferkorn. Reuchlin was finally tried before an ecclesiastical court at Mainz, and acquitted, and the decision was confirmed by the Pope in 1516. It is well to remember that not all heresy trials issue in convictions. But, lest some of us rejoice overmuch, it may perhaps be well to admit that, on an appeal of the Dominicans, Rome reversed the decision in 1520. Reuchlin, however, paid no attention to the decree against him, and it fell into abeyance, and has only recently come to light again. He is the true father of those who still attempt to teach Hebrew to an unwilling world, for his book, De Rudimentis Hebraicis, a grammar and lexicon combined, based, indeed, upon Kimchi, yet original in large measure, became Europe's first textbook in Oriental languages. Reuchlin was more than a patient, laborious scholar; he was an inspiring teacher, surrounded speedily wherever he went by eager pupils. One of these was a grandson of his own sister, whose uneuphonious name, Philip Schwartzerd, he turned into the Greek form, Philip Melanchthon, and set the precocious boy upon the delectable road of learning. In the making of Germany's great teacher and Luther's friend and supporter the world may all too readily give so great glory to Reuchlin as to forget his just fame as the founder of Oriental studies in northern Europe, rival even of Erasmus in breadth and depth of scholarship. With Reuchlin begins the recovery of the Ancient Orient, and the impetus which he gave lasts to this hour. It is well to remind ourselves that the wellspring of the mighty stream of learning that encompasses and overflows the whole of the nearer East took its rise in the study of the Old Testament, and it may be added with equal justice that much of the later enthusiasm for excavation in Babylonia and Assyria sprang from the same source. And now I must sketch such picture as I may of the scenes of bustle and confusion as men dug up forgotten cities, and laid bare to astonished eyes their palaces and temples, and of the less important scenes set in quiet libraries and yet more quiet private studies, where men sat through long hours of day and night patiently deciphering unknown tongues, or critically examining well-known biblical books to search out their origins in ancient documents. My enterprise is difficult, indeed, for it is nothing less than Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hourglass, as Shakespeare says, and I must seek to do it not with the rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence, but eager, rather, to make my simple little stream both shallow and deep like the river described by Gregory the Great, "wherein the lamb may find a footing and the elephant float at large". The proper limits of time will permit me to tell only three stories concerning the recovery of the Ancient Orient, to paint three little pictures, vignettes of patient labor and of tireless industry. The first of them has its place in the great valley of the Nile, in Egypt, the second in the valleys of the Rhine, in Germany, and of the Thames in England, and the third in the vast and lonely valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Egypt is the paradise of the archaeologist, for her incomparable climate has preserved memorials of the past, both small and great, which must have perished if less favored lands had concealed them. Travelers from dear old father Herodotus onward traversed portions of her valley, and carried away memories of her fertility and sometimes little tokens of her artistic handicrafts a scarab or a string of beads. These men were not archaeologists, and it would be difficult to say when a traveler becomes an antiquarian or an archaeologist. In 1683, however, a traveler brought to England and presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a valuable stele from the ruins of Memphis, fashioned in the period of the Old Kingdom. There can be no doubt that he was an archaeologist. This little piece of treasure trove was the harbinger of the hundreds of thousands of objects of Egyptian skill, inscribed or uninscribed, which now fill the museums of the entire civilized world. The most important of them hardly began to be made accessible until Napoleon made his great military expedition into Egypt in 1798. He was bent, indeed, upon a scheme of conquest prodigious in conception, but he was agitated also by "the desire to wrest the secrets of learning from the mysterious East", which "seems always to have spurred on his keenly inquisitive nature". He carried with him translations of Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Livy, that he might inform his mind concerning the ancient world; and the authors themselves were typical of the knowledge of antiquity then possessed by France. He was, indeed, sailing to an unknown shore, but his ship was happily named L'Orient, and upon it was a commission of savants whose business it was to study the ancient land now to be conquered. Their labors filled the superb volumes of the Description de I'Egypte, and laid the foundations upon which future generations were to build, while the richest treasure trove was the Rosetta stone, inscribed with three versions hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek of a decree of the Egyptian priests in honor of Ptolemy V (Epiphanes, B. C. 205-182), and his wife, Cleopatra. At the capitulation of Alexandria, in 1801, this object was ceded to the British government, and by regular stages passed to the British Museum. It was an Englishman, Thomas Young, a celebrated physicist, who first essayed, by its use, to decipher Egyptian. Important as his efforts were, they were soon surpassed by the brilliant French linguist, J. F. Champollion, who, in 1818, was able to transcribe the demotic names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra into hieroglyphics, and within four years had identified the name of Alexander in a cartouche, and secured no less than fourteen alphabetic signs. With these he attacked some drawings which had been brought from Egypt and read the names Rameses and Thotmes, thus proving beyond reasonable dispute that his researches had really taken the inner citadel of the language. The kings of Egypt would now live again, for speech was restored to their silent records. From that wonderful day, the fourteenth of September, 1822, the progress of decipherment was steady. Richard Lepsius in Germany, Samuel Birch in England, and Emanuel de Rouge in France took up the great task, and their successors down to Adolf Erman, of Berlin, in our own day, have made for us dictionaries and grammars until we proceed with some of the sureness with which the interpreter of Greek and Latin inscriptions labors, though even yet we can hardly claim to read Egyptian as we read the classical authors. Contemporaneously with the processes of decipherment has gone the assembling of materials to be read. In the years 1842-1845 Richard Lepsius, under the patronage of the Prussian government, explored Egypt and Nubia as far as Khartum, and brought back copies and squeezes of hundreds of inscriptions which were soon to be read. After him Mariette became director of the "Service of Antiquities", and began the collection of archaeological objects, and the preservation of such as could not be moved from their sites. A museum of Egyptian antiquities founded first at Bulak, and thence removed to a deserted palace at Gizeh, is now splendidly housed in a great building at Kasr-en-Nil, and under the wise administration of Maspero has risen to preeminent rank among all its competitors, housing collections which are the wonder and admiration of every cultivated man whose joy it is to see them. From the unsurpassed riches of Egypt many other museums in Berlin, Paris, and London have been filled with objects of surpassing beauty or of skillful adaptation to varied practical uses. A few universities sadly few have established professorships of Egyptology, and patient scholars have restored to our thought the hopes and aspirations, as well as the achievements, of the gifted people who lived in the valley of the Nile. There is no more romantic story in the brilliant annals of the progress of human knowledge than this story which I have thus inadequately portrayed. It began with the conquests of the greatest military genius the world has ever known. The physical power which he wielded over Egypt has passed to other hands, but this great contribution to human knowledge has survived the wreck of all his fortunes. Well may we remember Bonaparte's noble words to the magistrates of the Ligurian Republic: "The true conquests, the only conquests which cost no regrets, are those achieved over ignorance". I have said enough, within the limitations which are now properly upon me, of Egypt. I turn to the recovery of Israel, and especially to the recovery from her wonderful literature of the true story of her history, and a more fruitful interpretation of her heritage to all the ages. We have seen that Johann Reuchlin in the period of the Renaissance became the founder of a new school of Hebrew and Oriental study. Over the names of hundreds of his successors I must pass without a word of comment, as I search for that which is immediately significant, and at the same time of wide-reaching importance. Many of these made contributions to our knowledge of Israel's literature, or history, or antiquities; some of them were men of daring invention and of great power; some failed to set out upon new lines only because the time was not yet come. But whatever the cause, centuries passed and the Old Testament continued to be studied with much the same tools and with much the same result. But now behold the beginnings of a new epoch, the discovery of new methods of research, the reconstruction of our view of Israel's history and literature. To see this we must turn our eyes from the broad Nile to the narrow stream of a simple pastoral river in Germany, the river Leine. There in the city of Gottingen lived from 1803 to 1874, save only for the sad years of exile, 1837-1848, Georg Heinrich August Ewald as a student and as a professor. There he began his career as an investigator by the study of the meters of Arabic poetry, but passed speedily over to Hebrew, writing a grammar in which he laid the foundations of the historico-comparative method in Semitic philology. With this sound grammatical foundation he moved over into more distinctively literary study, and in 1840-1841 appeared his great work on the prophets (Die Propheten), the second edition of which was published so recently as 1867. In 1859 he finished his History of the People of Israel. Into that one supreme effort the greatest Orientalist of his day, the greatest living Hebrew grammarian, had poured the whole fruitage of his life. Well might Dean Stanley declare that it was "as powerful in its general conception as it is saturated with learning down to its minutest details." The book was, indeed, based upon a defective criticism of its sources, but it rested upon sound and often brilliant exegesis. While Ewald was busy at Gottingen, the University of Halle had a distinguished Old Testament expert in Hermann Hupfeld, who in 1853 published a great work, The Sources of Genesis and the Mode of their Combination Investigated Anew. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of that book. By the labors of his predecessors the world of learning was beginning to be familiar with the Jehovist, the Elohist, and the Deuteronomist, who were believed to have written the original documents from which the Pentateuch was composed. But the explanation of the manner in which they were united to form the present book of Genesis was a subject of much dispute. The two regnant theories had been known as the fragmentary and the supplementary. Ewald had smitten the former theory with all his tremendous learning and energy, and it displayed few signs of life afterward. And now Hupfeld, having rediscovered in Genesis a source then called the second Elohist, which Ilgen had previously found, proceeded to show that each of these three sources in Genesis was formerly a separate work. That demonstration made an end of the supplementary theory and the ground was cleared for a larger generalization, for a newer and better theory which Hupfeld was not able to produce. He had done his work in a fine spirit. His faith in the supernatural was deep and strong, for the older rationalism to which he was born he had left far behind, yet he did not escape persecution. In 1865 he was reported to the Prussian government as "an irreverent critic of the divine revelation"; but it is pleasant to remember that the entire theological faculty at Halle supported him, including the saintly Tholuck. In the very next year he passed to his reward. And now my story approaches its climax. While Hupfeld was lecturing and writing at Halle, in the simple little valley of the Saale, Edward Reuss was professor of Old Testament Theology at Strassburg, then a city of France, in the noble valley of the Rhine, fairest river of Europe. Reuss had thought long and diligently upon the Old Testament and had arrived at conclusions so different from all that his predecessors had announced that he dared not publish them. But he set them forth to his students from time to time, and in that wonderful lecture room they were heard by two young men, Karl Heihrich Graf and August Kayser, who gave to them a publicity which their author had not dared. The conclusion that Reuss planted in his students' minds came to him, so he said, almost as an intuition. It was startling enough, surely, though he stated it in simple words: "The prophets are earlier than the law, and the Psalms are later than both." In 1865 Graf published a book entitled The Historical Books of the Old Testament: Two historico-critical Investigations. That book has revolutionized the discussions of the Old Testament, partly because the way before it had been admirably prepared by the work of John William Colenso, Anglican Bishop of Natal, the first volume of whose great book on the Pentateuch and Joshua, Critically Examined, had appeared in 1862, with a second edition following in the next year. This book made clear to many minds that the old views of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and its unassailable historical accuracy in small as well as in great were alike untenable. For this service to learning he was quite naturally accused of heresy, tried, convicted and formally deposed by the Bishop of Cape Town, but on an appeal to the Privy Council was restored, and, having labored long and successfully for the spiritual emancipation of the Zulus, and not less successfully in biblical criticism, he died (in 1883) upon his mission field, leaving an imperishable name. Neither Graf nor Colenso could have successfully carried this great cause but for the exposition, extension, and defense of their theses by two men so extraordinary in learning, in insight, and in power of generalization as Abraham Kuenen and Julius Wellhausen. These two men made the new era. In 1869 there appeared in Leiden Kuenen's Religion of Israel (Godsdienst van Israel), which came to a second edition in 1887. Accused of a dangerous naturalism, though his attitude was rather psychological, Kuenen's contribution to a proper appraisement of Israel's religion, when compared with that of her neighbors, made a new road into the heart of antiquity. Meanwhile, between these two editions of Kuenen's monumental work, in the year 1876 there had begun a series of papers by Julius Wellhausen on the Composition of the Hexateuch, published together in 1885 and in an enlarged form in 1889. Then in 1878 Wellhausen published his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, a second edition of which was issued in 1883. In these books the development hypothesis of Vatke was courageously applied to the whole Old Testament history; the documents were analyzed with a thoroughness never attempted before, while every feature of the religious life and ceremonial was studied in its several relations to the history. There is nothing that I can say which could possibly exaggerate the importance of these works of Kuenen and Wellhausen. Whether you agree with them or not, in whole or in part, matters little indeed, but to go on with Old Testament research without taking heed to them is absolutely impossible. They have filled the whole world with a new discussion. No commentary can be opened without finding some allusion, direct or indirect, to the position which they set forth and defended. Their fundamental thesis is simple enough. They accepted the results which their predecessors had achieved in separating the first six books of the Old Testament into four great original documents known as the Jehovistic or Judaistic, the Elohistic or Ephraimistic, the Deuteronomist, and the Priest-Code, and they sought to prove that they had been produced in the order J., E., D., P., and that the last, the Priest-Code, was composed during the Babylonian exile. The view of Israel's history which this rearrangement of the sources compels is indeed far different from that which the priests of Jerusalem had taken when the Books of Chronicles were written, and it is small wonder that it awakened doubt in many quarters, stern opposition in others, and heated repudiation in still others. That it has made enormous and astounding headway against all opposition none can deny. It has found acceptance of its main conclusions nearly all over the world, and the opposition to it is now more an opposition to details, such as to the date which it assigns to certain documents, than to its fundamental contentions. There still remains, indeed, a respectable body of scholars, adherents of the new astral theories of Babylonian religion, who find more fundamental objections. Whether it will overcome all opposition remains to be seen, and I shall not venture upon specific prediction; but it may be regarded as certain, I think, that its mark upon the study of the Old Testament is permanent. No matter how much the theory may be changed by later research, we shall never again go back to the view of the Old Testament which it displaced. Perhaps I ought also to say that the Old Testament, in its real significance, in its own very self, has not suffered one whit in the process. It is better and truer and richer than ever. The theories which have been built about it and over its essential truths have indeed suffered, and may suffer more. Your ideas and mine have suffered or experienced change a process most wholesome, and proof of our life, for life is change. Theology by the achievement and by the acceptance of these new results has proved itself worthy of holding its place with all the great sciences which have broadened man's view of the world, cleared his cities of desolating pestilences, and helped his creatures to a better life. The real message of the Old Testament is in no more danger from the explorations of the most rigid and searching criticism than is God's universe from the investigations of astronomy or geology. Old Testament Criticism has had its share in the recovery of the Ancient Orient. I must now turn to my third story, the story of the recovery of Babylonia and Assyria. In romance it is not behind the story of Egypt's recovery; in surprises it far surpasses it; in the extent of its results and in the wide extent of their influence it excels it much. No such rich plunder of written documents in inscription and tablet and monument ever before came out of the earth. I must speak of it with some restraint, lest my enthusiasm put you too much upon your guard and prevent even the proper acceptance of my story. In the year B. C. 607 or 606 the city of Nineveh was destroyed and deserted, the walls of its palaces toppled in, and the unburned bricks of which they were partly composed dissolved into formless masses under the rains, while the sands of the desert drifted over them and turned them into big mounds. The very site of the city was forgotten so completely that a cultivated Greek led his retreating ten thousand by the mounds and never knew that beneath them lay the remains of antiquity's most powerful city. In similar fashion Babylon, with all its splendor, was reduced to heaps and mounds, standing in solemn silence by the slow-flowing course of the Euphrates. From these mounds must be excavated the records of their civilization and these be deciphered before we should be able to recover a picture of their life, an appreciation of their culture, or a knowledge of their contributions to civilization. It fell to the lot of an Englishman to begin that great work of excavation which was to restore to modern knowledge the ancient civilization of Babylonia and Assyria. It was on December 10, 1811, that Claudius James Rich saw for the first time the great mounds that marked ancient Baby- lon's grave. Here is what he had to say of his first impressions: "From the accounts of modern travelers I had expected to find on the site of Babylon more, and less, than I actually did. Less, because I could have formed no conception of the prodigious extent of the whole ruins, or of the size, solidity, and perfect state of some of the particular parts of them; and more, because I thought that I should have distinguished some traces, however imperfect, of many of the principal structures of Babylon. I imagined I should have said: 'Here were the walls, and such must have been the extent of the area. There stood the palace, and this most assuredly was the tower of Belus.' I was completely deceived; instead of a few insulated mounds, I found the whole face of the country covered with the vestiges of building; in some places consisting of brick walls surprisingly fresh, in others merely of a vast succession of mounds of rubbish of such indeterminate figures, variety, and extent as to involve the person who should have formed any theory in inextricable confusion and contradiction". He did not attempt excavations, but secured from the natives tablets written in the cuneiform character, which neither he nor indeed anyone could read, but which were later to become intelligible to men. Nine years later he entered the city of Mosul, on the banks of the Tigris, and spent four months in sketching and planning the great mounds which he considered formed the remains of the city of Nineveh. The beginning was made, but it was long before actual excavations were begun, and the honor of undertaking them fell to France and not to England. On May 25, 1842 a fateful day in the history of Assyriological research Paul Emil Botta entered upon his duties as vice-consul of France at Mosul. Soon afterward he began excavations upon one of the great mounds of Nineveh, but met with only very moderate success. He then dispatched some of his workmen to try the mound of Khorsabad, fourteen miles away. The resolve was fortunate, and in three days word was brought to him at Mosul that antiquities and inscriptions had already been found. He went to the scene and there beheld a sight which thrilled him. Before his astonished eyes was an excavation which had laid bare the marble floor of one part of some great room and on its surface lay fragments of marble sculptures, calcined by fire, and numbers of well-preserved inscriptions. He knew that the discovery was important, but he did not know that he had lighted upon the remains of a vast and imposing palace erected by one of the greatest kings who had ever ruled in Assyria, Sargon II (B. C. 721-705), conqueror of Samaria, destroyer of the northern kingdom of Israel. Cheered by this, Botta pushed on with dogged persistence until he had laid bare much of the palace, and drawn from their concealment scores of inscriptions, chiefly upon stone, and monumental in character. The results far exceeded his fondest dreams, and the materials thus retrieved and sent off to Paris laid the foundations of one of the great Assyrian collections of the world, in the museum of the Louvre. In 1845 Austin Henry Layard, an Englishman, followed Botta and succeeded on the mounds at Nineveh where Botta had been least fortunate. He and his disciple, Hormuzd Rassam, uncovered the buried library of Ashurbanipal (B. C. 668-625), last of the great Assyrian kings, and poured into the British Museum a flood of thou- sands of clay books, in which were to be found examples of almost every phase of literature known to the ancient world. This was but the beginning of excavations. Others followed in quick succession, and France, England, America, and Germany vied with each other in an honorable search for the memorials of an ancient civilization. It was the French who were first (1852) in the field with brilliantly suc- cessful excavations at Khorsabad and at the site of ancient Babylon, whose results were, unfortunately, lost by the overturning of the raft in the Tigris, though happily not until they had been critically examined and partially copied by Jules Oppert -clarum et venerabile nomen- who thus early gave promise of the distinguished career which was to come. Long after (1877-1881) the French were again successful in the person of M. Ernest de Sarzec, who brought out of one mound in southern Babylonia the remains of a fine temple whose outer walls were one hundred and seventy-five feet long and one hundred feet broad, and from whose inner cells and rooms came statues and inscriptions fashioned by the great Sumerian people, whose culture had preceded the Semitic in the great valley. Between these last two expeditions the English people were well represented in explorations by William Kennet Loftus, J. E. Taylor, who first struck a spade into the mound covering Ur of the Chaldees, and by George Smith, who, doubly famous in decipherment and in excavation, finally laid down his life at Aleppo (August 19, 1876), faithful in the pursuit of knowledge to the last. Incited by the example of the older peoples, America joined the company in 1889, and John P. Peters, J. H. Haynes, and H. V. Hilprecht laid bare a large part of the ancient city of Nippur, at whose famous temple men had worshiped when written history was still in its youth. As these all had done their share, it was fitting that the youngest of the great empires, Germany, should also manifest her interest. Even while I speak, at Asshur, oldest city of the Assyrian world empire, and at Babylon, seat of the most ancient culture, the Germans are at work with the same devotion to a precision in things small and great which has given them the world's leadership in science. Here now were the stores of written records, and they were just as silent as though buried, until the key to set free their speech was found. This was a task requiring patience, persistence, and a certain almost uncanny genius in the "showing of dark sentences and dissolving of doubts". Let me show in a few sentences only what these qualities brought to fruition. In 1765 Carsten Niebuhr brought from the table land of Persia, where once had stood the city of Persepolis, made beautiful and imposing by Darius the Great (B. C. 521-485), a series of trilingual inscriptions all written in the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters, but each somewhat different in form. In 1802 George Friedrich Grotefend, a master in the Gymnasium at Frankf ort-on-the-Main, set himself definitely to the apparently hopeless task of comparing three unknown languages in order to the solution of one, and its reading. The first of each group of these was an- cient Persian, and by the archaeological method of comparison Grotefend picked out the signs which spelled the great names Darius, Xerxes, and Cyrus - and the key was found! Even while he was thus patiently at work, Sir Henry Rawlinson, in far-away Persia, was climbing the perilous rocks at Behistun to copy a large inscription of Darius, also in three languages, which he forthwith began to decipher, using precisely the same method as Grotefend. It was these two men, partly independently and partly by mutual assistance, who gave men the ability once more to read Persian. The second language in each group was Susian, and the third Babylonian. The last yielded first to the decipherment, and the glory of it fell to Edward Hincks, a country clergyman in a tiny fishing village in Ireland. To him also and to Jules Oppert in Paris was it given to lay the foundations of Assyrian grammar, which were later to find full exposition at the skillful hand of Friedrich Delitzsch, general director of the German excavations of which I was speaking but a few minutes ago, and founder of a school of Assyriologists, whose labors abound and to whom belongs in large measure the present leadership of the science. Excavation had produced the material and decipherment had made its reading possible. Almost in the very beginnings of the newborn science of Assyriology points of contact with Israel developed. George Smith, at work in the British Museum, found upon Assyrian tablets the names of Hebrew kings, and in a short time followed that up by finding the Babylonian story of the flood, which bore such marked resemblance to the narrative in Genesis that none could doubt that some relationship existed between them. There began a discussion which continues with almost unabated intensity and interest until this present moment. Soon thereafter the early decipherers produced out of the mass of Assyrian documents inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria, an account of one of his campaigns into the West, in which he claimed a great victory over Bir-idri (Ben-Hadad) of Damascus, with his allies, and names as one of them Ahab, king of Israel. That one discovery related the history of Israel to the wider history of the ancient Oriental world, and gave men their first real opportunity to grasp its significance as a history among histories. And when, a little later, religious texts from Babylonian mounds began to appear, it slowly dawned upon the minds of thinking men that the religion of Israel was likewise a religion among religions, and that the problem of its investigation had become enormously complicated, at the same time that it became far more interesting. While these investigations were in progress the tide of exploration rose higher. New Assyrian collections were formed in Berlin and in Philadelphia, and their assembled objects mounted into the tens of thousands, while scores of smaller collections were scattered over the world from Upsala in Sweden to Buenos Aires in Argentina. Assyriology was divided into specialties. One man gave most of his time to grammar, another to lexicography; one to historical, another to religious texts. The language of Nineveh and of Babylon disclosed relationships with Arabic on the one side and with Hebrew on the other. The comparative grammar of the Semitic languages began to be written. Comparative religion was almost overwhelmed with facts demanding a new synthesis. The ancient Oriental world was recovered in so far that it was now possible to view its details of life and thought in the light of its whole history, political, social, and economic. My story is told; my little pictures are drawn. Suffer me but a moment while I make a bold claim. I have spoken of the recovery of Egypt, of Israel, of Babylonia. These are but typical instances. I have said naught of Phoenicia, of the Hittites, of Persia, of Chaldea, of Armenia. I am bold to say that in the realm of history and of letters, these are the most remarkable achievements of the human mind during the last century. Even though they have brought to us no art, and no letters equal to those of Greece or of Rome, they have set in new and clearer relationships the classical literature of religion, which is Hebrew, and this is not less precious to us than the best that Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence, has bequeathed to us. Our minds have been broadened by the process, we see further into the mysteries of human life; we are richer than our fathers; and glorious as all this is, before us lies the promise of yet more fruitful days, for the end of the recovery of the Ancient Orient is not with us, but with the generations still unborn.
Cuneiform parallels to the Old Testament
New Light on the Bible and the Holy land, being an account of some recent discoveries in the East
CLAY'S Light on the Old Testament from Babel
SCHRADER'S The cuneiform inscriptions and the Old Testament
Cuneiform Parallels To The Old Testament |
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