The Historians' History of the World 01

A further interest attaches to this statue, as to many others of the Assyrian monuments, because of its bearing upon the religion of that famous people. Until the discovery of these long-buried monuments, practically all that was known of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians was contained in the pages of Herodotus. Strange tales he tells of what he saw in the temples of Babylon, where, as he alleges, all the women of the city, of whatever class or rank, were obliged at least once in a lifetime to prostitute themselves for hire. The inscriptions on the monuments tell us nothing of such practical phases of worship as this, but they do show that the Assyrians were an intensely religious people, closely comparable in that regard to their cousins the Hebrews. Their religion, too, it would appear, was of that firmly grasped self-sufficient kind which puts aside all doubt; which assumes as a primordial fact that one’s own view is right; that one’s gods are the only true gods, and that all the outside world must be regarded as one’s proper prey. A further illustration of this phase of the subject will claim our attention when we come to examine the religious writings of the Assyrians a little more in detail.

Obelisk of Shalmaneser II

(Now in the British Museum)

Another illustration of a curiously Assyrian combination of art and letters is shown in the sculptured lion that guards the entrance to the next hall. This lion is a memento of the same reign as that human-headed one at the other doorway, but it is very different in workmanship, and clearly the product of another artist. For one thing it is a veritable lion, not a mythical compound beast, except, indeed, that it shares with the other the peculiarity of a fifth leg. Assyrian tastes seem to have required that four legs should be visible from whatever point of view the statue of an animal was regarded; hence the anomaly. For the rest, this gigantic beast shows many points of realistic delineation, and it is artistically full of interest. The head in particular expresses feeling in a most unequivocal way.

But the most curious characteristic of this sculpture is the way in which the writing is carried from the slab right across the body of the animal itself, and also across its front legs. Perhaps this was done at the command of the king, merely as a convenient expedient that all the desired records of the conquest might be given a place, but the effect at a little distance is curiously as if the artist had striven to get the feeling of hair in a stiff and formal manner, in keeping with the conventional rendering of the mane. Again it has been suggested that the writing has been carried across the body of the lion to safeguard it. There was a not unusual custom among ancient monarchs of scraping out the inscription of a predecessor and supplanting it with one’s own. So great a monarch as Ramses II, in Egypt, did not scruple to do this, and a remarkable case is shown on an Arabian temple where the conscienceless monarch actually substitutes his own name for the correct one of the builder, in a tablet claiming authorship of the temple of which the tablet is a part. That the kings of Assyria had occasion to fear such jugglery is shown by the inscriptions on the book tablets in the royal library at Nineveh, where Asshurbanapal, after telling that the books are of his library, calls a curse upon any one who shall ever put another name beside his own. Perhaps, then, King Asshurnazirpal thought to transmit a record of his deeds more securely to posterity by inscribing them across the back of this lion, for doubtless the sculpture was considered a masterpiece, and the king felt, we may suppose, that artistic taste might prevent a sacrilege which mere conscience would not interdict.

THE LIBRARY OF A KING OF NINEVEH

We come now to the place in the British Museum in which some of these treasures of the old Assyrian king are guarded. They occupy part of the series of cases placed down the centre of the room known as the Nineveh Gallery. Perhaps it is not too much to speak of these collections as forming the most extraordinary set of documents of all the rare treasures of the British Museum, for it includes not books alone, but public and private letters, business announcements, marriage contracts—in a word, all the species of written records that enter into the everyday life of an intelligent and cultured community.

Detail from the Obelisk of Shalmaneser II