The Historians' History of the World 01

And nearer yet they seem when we pass to the cases of the tablets of omens and forecasts based upon the position of the stars and planets, the actions of animals and reptiles, the flight of birds, and the appearance of newly born offspring. For when superstition is in question all races are kin, and all times are contemporary. The European of to-day who shudders when he sees the moon over his left shoulder, is brother in spirit to the Assyrian astrologer who used this “astrolabe” to forecast the events of his own immediate future. And these incantations, religious and magical rites, prayers, hymns, litanies—do they not make it clear that the Assyrian was indeed our elder brother? Does this lifted veil then show us a vista of three millennia, or only of as many generations? At least it serves to bring home to us—and I doubt if any other exhibit could do it as forcibly—how slow, how snail-like is the rate of human progress. Yet, after all, how vain this moralising; for who does not know that the day when Nineveh saw its prime was only the yesterday of human civilisation? If one doubted it before, he can doubt no longer, since he has wandered down the rooms in which the relics from the library of Asshurbanapal are exhibited, glancing thus casually at the accommodating English labels.

Naturally, the stock of material bearing upon this topic has been constantly increased by new explorations, notably by those of Oppert at Nineveh, and of De Sarzec at Telloh, by which the French Government has supplemented the early collections of the pioneer of the work, Botta; by various German exploring companies; and, more recently, by the American exploring expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, under Dr. John P. Peters, which secured such important results at Nippur. But the greatest repository of all still remains that which Layard and his assistant and successor in the work, Rassam, followed by George Smith, secured for the British Museum. The other collections afford important sidelights; but the main story of Assyrian life and history, as at present known to us, is told only by the books from the wonderful library of the palace of Asshurbanapal at Nineveh; and these can be studied only in the British Museum, or in the publications which the workers of that institution have from time to time given to the world.

After glancing at these documents for the first time, none but a heedless person can fail to have brought home to him a more vivid picture of the life of antiquity, and a truer historical perspective than he can previously have possessed. For more than two thousand years Greek culture has dominated the world, and it has been the custom to speak of the Greek as if he were the veritable inventor of art and of culture; but these documents have led to a truer view. Here one looks back, as it were, over the heads of the Greeks, and catches glimpses of a people that possessed a high civilisation when the Greeks were still an upstart nation, only working their way out of barbarism.

Now it appears to be nothing less than a law of nature that every nation should look with contempt upon every other nation which it regards as contemporary. With a highly artistic people, whose chief pride is their artistic taste, this feeling reaches its climax. The Greek attitude in this regard is proverbial. But it is just as fixed a law of nature that every nation should look with reverence upon some elder civilisation. The Romans adopted the Greek word “barbarian,” and applied it to all other nations—except the Greeks. The Greeks did not return the compliment. For them the Romans were parvenus—parvenus to be looked on with hatred and contempt. I doubt not the Athenian child gave the deadliest possible insult to his playfellow when he called him a Roman; just as the Parisian child of to-day reserves the appellation “anglais” as the bitterest anathema of his vocabulary. But when the Greek turned his eyes in the other direction, and looked out upon Egyptian and Babylonian civilisation, he was gazing into the past, and his contempt changed to reverence, precisely as with the Frenchman of to-day, who looks back with reverence upon the civilisation of ancient Greece and Rome, while utterly contemning all phases of the nineteenth-century civilisation save his own.

It was gladly admitted by the Greeks that these oriental civilisations had flowered while Greek culture was yet in the bud. Solon, the law-giver, was reported to have travelled in Egypt, and to have been mildly patronised by the Egyptian priests as the representative of an infant race. Herodotus, though ostensibly writing of the Persian war, devotes whole sections of his history to Egypt, and accepts, as did his countrymen, the Egyptian claims to immense antiquity without a scruple. Plato even resided for some years in Egypt, as Diodorus tells us, in the hope of gaining an insight into the mysteries of oriental philosophy.