The Historians' History of the World 01

But by what miracle have such documents been preserved through all these centuries? A glance makes the secret evident. It is simply a case of time-defying materials. Each one of these Assyrian documents appears to be, and in reality is, nothing more or less than an inscribed fragment of brick, having much the colour and texture of a weathered terra-cotta tile of modern manufacture. These slabs are usually oval or oblong in length, and an inch or so in thickness. Each of them was originally a portion of brick clay, on which the scribe indented the flights of arrow-heads with some sharp-cornered instrument, after which the document was made permanent by baking. They are somewhat fragile, of course, as all bricks are, and many of them have been more or less crumbled in the destruction of the palace at Nineveh; but to the ravages of mere time they are as nearly invulnerable as almost anything in nature. Hence it is that these records of a remote civilisation have been preserved to us, while the similar records of such later civilisations as the Grecian have utterly perished; much as the flint implements of the cave-dweller come to us unchanged, while the iron implements of a far more recent age have crumbled away.

Consider even in the most casual way the mere samples that are exhibited here in the museum. This first case, the label tells us, contains tablets—sample leaves, if you will—from the famous “Creation” and “Deluge” series. That is to say, from the book which has been called the Chaldean Genesis, and which excited such a furor of attention when George Smith of the British Museum first deciphered part of its contents, because it seemed to give so striking a clew to the origin of the sacred book of the Hebrews. The Hebrew legends are very differently received to-day from what they were even fifty years ago, thanks to the advance of science; but these Chaldean stories of the creation and destruction of mankind still have absorbing interest as historical documents in the story of the mental evolution of our race, both for what they teach of the ideas of remote generations of men, and for what they taught the generation of our immediate predecessors about the true status of comparative mythology.

It will be recalled that the Assyrians were Semites closely related to the Hebrews. Indeed, tradition held that Father Abraham, in common with the ancestors of the Assyrians, came from the land of the Chaldeans. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that these sacred books of the Assyrians are replete with the same traditions and give expression to much the same cast of thought as the sacred books of the Hebrews. Thus, here we have a closely comparable account of the creation of the world out of primeval chaos and of the destruction of all but a favoured few in a universal deluge. Even the story of the sending out from the ark of first one bird and then another, until finally the raven found a place to alight, when the ark itself had stranded on a mountain top, is reproduced with such closeness of detail as practically to demonstrate a common origin of the two traditions.

Here, again, is a story of how Sargon, an early king of Agade, was cast away, Moses-like, in a basket, to be rescued from the waters of the Euphrates by a compassionate discoverer of his plight. There is even a tablet which gives intimations of the story of the building of the Tower of Babel. And with it all there is imbued the same black, dreadful view of life that actuated the authors of the Old Testament. Always we are made to feel the threat of the angry deity; always this religion is a religion of fear. Generosity, brotherly love, compassion, morality—in a broad sense these words play but little part in the terminology of the Semite. The Semitic conqueror was notorious for his cruelty. He loved to persecute his victim, to crucify him, to flay him alive. The writers of the Hebrew and of the Assyrian books alike record these deeds without a shudder. They show to the psychologist a race lacking in imagination, which is the mother of sympathy, but imbued through and through with egotism. The legends of the sacred books give further evidence of these same traits. Here before us, among the other tablets just noted, are the famous stories of the descent of Ishtar, the Goddess of Love, into the nether regions, and of the trials and perils which she encountered there, and those that fell upon the outside world because of her absence. It is recorded that when finally a messenger was sent from a superior power demanding her release, the powers of the nether world gave her up unwillingly, but retained the innocent messenger to torture in her stead; and it probably never occurred to the mind of the Assyrian soothsayer that it might have been within the power of the superior gods to release the innocent messenger as well.