Of the world’s youth; nor when the moon
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades
Suspended he that task, but ever gazed
And gazed
on precious monuments before him which he knew full well contained
The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.[365]
The identification of the site of Nineveh and the unearthing of its long-concealed monuments marked the beginning of a new era in Oriental research. But nothing gave so great a stimulus to the study of all things Assyrian and Babylonian as the discovery of the precious library of Asurbanipal. For this wonderful collection of documents was destined to disclose much of the history, science, literature, and politics of the famous land bounded by the Tigris and the Euphrates, and to show—what would not otherwise have been possible—the relation of this land to the other great nations of the Near East.
But who was to decipher the cuneiform tablets which were thus so unexpectedly brought to the light of day? That was the question that was on the lips of everyone. Until this could be accomplished the countless books of the royal library would be of little more value than so many useless curiosities.
That the work of decipherment would eventually be achieved, scholars had no doubt. That the languages in which the mysterious inscriptions were written would one day be read with ease and certainty, all investigators were convinced. The achievements of Champollion in deciphering the hieroglyphics of Egypt and of De Sacy in reading Pehlevi gave an assurance that eventually the mysterious Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions would also be elucidated and that the long-forgotten documents of Asurbanipal’s library would then become the chief sources of our knowledge of the most ancient and most powerful empires of western Asia.
Nothing in the entire history of intellectual advancement is more interesting and romantic than the story of the gradual decipherment of those strange cuneiform inscriptions whose interpretation long baffled the powers of the greatest linguistic geniuses of Europe.