These microscopic sculptures, in consequence of the value of the material, and the costliness of the work, and from their smallness, and the facility of preservation, were eagerly sought after by the opulent at the very time of their production; and they have been most carefully hoarded in every age, by the same class of persons; and they have suffered far less injury in the lapse of time than antiquities of any other kind. Especially the intaglios—the indented sculptures, are, for the most part, as perfect and sharp now as they were eighteen hundred years ago. What is it, then, that these gems of art bring under our modern eyes?—it is the very same ideal personages of the same mythology;—and the symbols are the same, and the air, and the grace, and the attributes of beauty and power are the same;—there is the same sensuousness—there are the same ambiguous adventures;—there is the same poetry and the same art—poetry and art, admirable, indeed, how much soever it may be open to censure as to its moral quality.
Here then we have in view three independent, but perfectly concurrent and mutually interpretative evidences—namely, first, the sculptures, secondly, the gems, and then the books—the poetry. If, in examining one of these classes of antiquities, we find ourselves at a loss in attempting to decipher its symbols or its allusions, any such difficulty vanishes—in most instances—when we betake ourselves to another class:—as thus—the gem expounds the statue; or the poet, in a single verse, sheds his beam of light upon both. Thus it is that—with the three at our command—ANTIQUITY, throughout the rich and splendid region of its mythologies, stands unveiled before us! Must we not grant that so many coherences, and so many correspondences, and so many interpretative agreements—countless as they are—can have had their source in nothing but the realities of the age whence we believe them to have descended to modern times? But if it be so, then it is true that ancient books—to wit, the Roman poets—have been securely sent forward—thanks to the copyists!—from age to age, through all the intervening years of so many centuries.
If it were a volume that was now to be filled, instead of the few pages of this chapter, and if, instead of a morning at the British Museum, an entire season were to be diligently spent there, we should still want space and leisure for specifying a sample only of those articles which might properly be referred to in illustration of our present argument. Instead of doing so, we must move forward through the Elgin Saloon, only stopping to make this one observation—that these sculptures, and these bas-reliefs, and these inscriptions, would be to us, at this time, nothing better than a vast confusion—a mass of insoluble enigmas, if we did not carry with us the written remains of the Greek and Roman literature—the works of the historians, and the poets, and the dramatists, and the orators, which were the creations of that same age of refined intelligence, and exquisite taste, and artistic skill: but so it is, that the written memorials of that brief period are found to be available for interpreting the solid memorials of the same times, and these again for illustrating those. It was indeed a brief period: —it was a blossoming and a fruit-bearing summer month of the world’s dull millennial year; and during the long period that followed it—the autumn months, and the winter—there were none among the living who could either have written these books, or who could have chiselled these marbles; but the books in one manner, and the marbles in another, have separately floated down upon the billows of time; and here we have them, confronted under one roof—ten thousand witnesses, attesting the reality of ancient history.
From the classic antiquities we now advance, and enter the Assyrian Galleries. Everybody knows, or may easily know, in what way the sculptures, buried so many centuries, have now come to fill these long apartments, and how they thus find a resting-place under the roof of the British Museum. The places whence they have come, and the circumstances of their disinterment, are (as we must suppose) known and familiar to the visitor in whose company we are spending this morning in its saloons. This being so, and if, moreover, we may believe that he has become, in some degree, conversant with the literature of ancient Greece—especially with its historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Diodorus, and also Strabo—he will be qualified to understand what we mean in speaking of that broad confirmation of the authenticity of ancient history which it receives from a glance at the contents of the “Assyrian Galleries.”
The above-named Greek writers, and these illustrated as they are by the contemporary literature, give us a distinct image of Greece, and of its people, with their intellectuality, and their religion, and their taste; and this portraiture is quite homogeneous in itself, and, as we have already said, it is corroborated and exhibited, in ten thousand instances, by the sculptures, and other objects found in the saloons we have just now visited. But now these same writers open up to us also—sometimes formally, and sometimes incidentally—a prospect, eastward, far over the regions outstretched beyond the limits of the Greek civilisation. In those illimitable expanses there existed a civilisation; but it was quite of another aspect; there was government, and social order; but these were wholly unlike the institutions of Greece. There were religions; but they breathed another spirit: they uttered other voices; they spoke of a different national economy. There was the same human nature; but it had been developed as if under conditions proper to another world.
Now I will ask my companion to tell me with what sort of feeling it is, that, in passing from the monuments of Grecian life, and the remains of its arts, he enters these Assyrian galleries. Does there not take place an involuntary impression to this effect—as if we were here setting foot upon the soil of another world? We have crossed the threshold that divides one phase or mode of human existence from another mode of it; there are here displayed before us the indications of a different climate, a different terrestrial surface; and the vegetation that covers it is of another class, nor are the animals that roam over it the same; and the human forms, and the visages, and the costumes, and the attitudes, and the occupations, and the rites, are of another mould. In these galleries we are surrounded with the symbols and the appendages of a sombre and remorseless despotism. Greece had its warriors and its heroes, and its many orders of mind, and each freely developed; but here the one master of prostrate millions of men is the solitary being: all things follow, or precede, or revolve around him: there is one will, and it carried its purposes unchecked, alike by reason or humanity.
Here then are the monuments of a world, such as that outlying and distant eastern world whereof we find scattered notices in the extant remains of the Greek literature. These notices serve as the interpretation, so far as they go, of these ponderous remains. The historians, the orators, the poets, flourishing under a refined civilisation, look over their enclosures, and they sketch, at points, the far-off barbaric civilisation of Asia, and we recognise, in the written memorials of that ruder social life, the features and characteristics of its sculptured memorials—as they are now in view.
These coincidences are, we say, an evidence at large of the authenticity of that portion of ancient history which might seem to stand most in need of corroboration. It is a broad witnessing to the truth. We might, however, descend to the particulars, and then might verify this proof in very many of its details; but we must go on, and only fix attention, for a moment, upon a single line of these confirmatory coincidences; and it is one which carries with it a momentous inference.
There is one body of extant writings which is not only of much earlier date than the Greek literature—earlier even than its traditions, but which sprung up within the circle of the Asiatic world; it is not Grecian—it possesses not the same merits, the same graces, or merits of a kindred order; it has its own. Asiatic it is; and yet it was so much insulated, and it was so decisively national, that the report it makes of the surrounding social economies, is, in a great degree, an independent report; it looks on, as from a distance. We may expect, therefore, to find in the Hebrew literature—in its historians, poets, and prophets—a reflection of Asiatic life, rather than a native or home-made exhibition of it; and such is the fact. The monster despotisms that had their seats by the side of the Tigris and the Euphrates, appear like phantoms of destructive power, as seen from the heights of Palestine. Now, what we affirm is this; that the idea we obtain, in perusing the Hebrew literature, of the Asiatic military despotisms, and of their horrific superstitions, is conspicuously realized—it is held out to our view with a vivid force and distinctness, as we walk up and down, gazing in awe upon these monstrous sculptures. The Hebrew writers denounce these destroyers of the nations; and now let us confess that they have pictured them truly; they have not calumniated those remorseless tyrants—even the men of these colossal busts and these bas-reliefs, when they recount their deeds of blood, their spoliations, and their oppressions.
Besides and beyond this—which we have called a broad confirmation of ancient history, and which arises spontaneously from the aspect of these Assyrian antiquities—it is well known, and we are supposing our companion to be aware of the fact, that, since the disinterment of these Assyrian sculptures, great progress has been made in the work of deciphering the inscriptions which appear upon many of them. At this time it may safely be affirmed that these records, inscrutable as they were thought to be, have spoken out their meaning. It is true also that these utterances from a long unknown world have fallen in with the testimony of written history—Grecian and Biblical, and that in relation, especially, to the latter, many highly significant coincidences have presented themselves, rewarding the patient intelligence of those who have laboured on this field. But to this subject we shall have occasion to return in a following chapter.