From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Seventy years had elapsed from the reading by Grotefend of his epochal paper before the Göttingen Academy to the publication of Schrader’s great work on the cuneiform writing and language. From the time of Schrader, who has been called the father of early Assyriology, to the splendid achievements of his illustrious countryman, Friedrich Delitzsch, who is known as the father of contemporary Assyriology, progress in the new science has been as rapid as the activity of its countless votaries has been enthusiastic. This is evidenced by the large number of cuneiform monuments which are now found in the museums of Europe and America and by the ever-increasing number of scholars who are devoting all their time to the study of Assyrian science, religion, and literature.

It is estimated that there are now, in the divers museums of the world, more than a half million inscribed tablets. Besides the immense number of tablets found in the great library of Asurbanipal, Rassam discovered in Abu-Habba, formerly Hillah, no fewer than seventy thousand. In 1894 M. Ernest de Sarzec took from a single chamber in the ruined city of Telloh, in the alluvial plain of Babylonia, fully thirty thousand tablets, while a few years later Haynes and Hilprecht to the north of Telloh, in the ruins of Nippur, discovered more than forty thousand tablets, which have proved to be of inestimable value to the student of the history, religion, and social conditions of the inhabitants of ancient Sumer and Akkad. Still other stores of tablets were unearthed by Banks at Bismya and De Morgan at Susa. Among the precious monuments brought to light by the distinguished French explorer of Susa was the important code of Hammurabi—the oldest compilation of laws in the world—the code by which Babylonia was governed at a period which antedated the Christian era by fully two thousand years.

But the inscribed clay tablets—some baked, others unbaked—are not the only monuments of value as sources of history which have been uncovered by the pick and spade of the excavator in the tells of Assyria and Babylonia. There are also seals, statues, cylinders, and bas-reliefs innumerable which bear cuneiform inscriptions of the utmost value to the historian and the man of science. There are even numberless uninscribed monuments which are also of immense historical importance. Such are the sculptured alabaster slabs which once adorned the palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh. These marvelous bas-reliefs exhibit scenes of domestic life, the peculiar garbs of men and women, of masters and slaves, of natives and foreigners with almost photographic exactness. They likewise show spirited representations of battles and sieges, which portray in the most lifelike manner the types of the combatants, their divers instruments of warfare, the punishments inflicted by the victor on helpless captives, and long processions of the vanquished bringing tribute to the triumphant monarch of Assyria.

Without the knowledge of a single cuneiform character [declares Professor Hilprecht] we learned the principal events of Sennacherib’s government, and, from a mere study of those sculptured walls, we got familiar with customs and habits of the ancient Assyrians, at the same time obtaining a first clear glance of the whole civilization of Western Asia.[374]

The foregoing pages show the extraordinary progress that has been made in Assyriology since Botta and Layard began their famous excavations in the ruins of Nineveh in the middle of the last century. But, although much, very much, has been achieved, far more remains to be accomplished. For there are, we are assured, hundreds of ruin-mounds and earth-covered cities in Western Asia awaiting the spade and the pick of the excavator to disclose treasures that will equal, if not surpass in value any that have yet rewarded the labors of the explorer. Even such important ruins as those of Babylon and Nineveh, where such splendid results have been obtained, have so far yielded, there is reason to believe, but a part, possibly but a small part, of their precious stores. For it has been computed that to excavate Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus—the two principal mounds of Nineveh—would require the labor of a thousand men working continually for a hundred and seventy-four years. “The recent excavations and tunnelings at Kuyunjik”—the Citadel of Nineveh—“fruitful as they have been in results, have made little impression on the vast mass of ruin, and only prove how much might be gained by complete clearance.”[375]

But as the work of excavation is still almost in its infancy, so is also that of decipherment and coördination of the myriads of inscriptions now in the museums of the world. For, notwithstanding the wonderful achievements of Assyriologists during the last three-quarters of a century, many generations must yet elapse before the vast amount of material which has been already collected and to which additions are being constantly made, can be properly interpreted and made available for students who are not professional Orientalists. As yet there is in Assyrian neither a complete grammar nor a complete dictionary, and, on account of the immense number of ideograms yet undeciphered and the astonishing number of polyphonous signs in the Assyrian language—signs which have each several distinct syllabic values—it is certain that many decades will elapse before the countless difficulties can be overcome.

Considering, however, the complexity of the problem which confronted Orientalists at the beginnings of their researches, it is, indeed, a wonder that their achievements during the last two generations have been so fruitful and of so far-reaching importance. For in a few decades they have changed completely our conception of the ancient peoples of Assyria and Babylonia and shown that their civilization “stands before us in all its ramifications as one of the great forces in the ancient history of mankind, the direct or indirect influence of which is to be seen in many a phase of our modern culture.”[376] They have proved that the Assyrian language was not only the speech of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia but that it was also long used as the language of diplomacy by the Hittites and the Egyptians and by the peoples of Syria and Palestine. More than this, it was a kind of lingua franca from the Euxine to the valley of the Nile and from Cyprus to the plateau of Susiana. This fact is most strikingly proved by the priceless collections of cuneiform inscriptions which, only a few years ago, were found in Tel-el-Armana, Egypt, and in Boghaz-Keui, Asia Minor. These finds are indications that there are other, probably many other, similar discoveries to reward the patient and well-directed excavations of the explorer in the ruin-spread lands of the Near East.

How often, while wandering among the ruins of Kuyunjik, Nebi Yunus, and Khorsabad, have I not had brought home to me the far-reaching changes in our knowledge of the Near East, which have been effected by the startling discoveries that were made three-quarters of a century ago in the palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib and Asurbanipal! But nothing impressed me more than the first question which Scriptural students always make regarding these discoveries, “How do they bear on the Bible”? It is the same question which has so often been asked about the revelations of geology in their bearings on the Sacred Text. Something is discovered which at the first blush is regarded as militating against the accuracy of the Sacred Scriptures. After further investigation, this same discovery is viewed as being strongly confirmatory of the Bible, while still more careful examination shows that the teachings of the new science not only do not but, by their very nature, cannot question, much less impeach the veracity of the Book of Books.

It is true that one’s view of the Bible may be enlarged with one’s advancing years; that one’s understanding of it may be improved by more profound study, and by the progress of research; but science, whether it appear in the guise of geology, or Assyriology, or of what has falsely been called the science of evolution, can never invalidate a single one of the fundamental teachings either of Scripture or of the Church of Christ.

This thought was borne in upon me with unwonted force as I stood one day above the ruins of Asurbanipal’s library. Gazing at a cluster of keleks—skin rafts—bearing their light traffic down the historic Tigris, as they did when Assyria ruled the East, and recalling the pictures I had formed of “Nineveh the great city” when as a boy I read my first history of the Bible—a book that was to exert so paramount an influence on the studies and thoughts of my after life—I asked myself, “In what respect does my faith to-day differ from that which I held three score years ago”? I had then, as Pasteur once said of himself when at the zenith of his fame and mental vigor, the faith of a Breton peasant.[377] Since that far-off time when I delighted to picture the glories of Nineveh and Babylon and dwell on the famous campaigns and victories, the superb palaces and entertainments of Sennacherib and Assuerus and Nebuchadnezzar, I have striven to keep abreast with the intellectual movement of my time and, in so doing, I have never found anything in any of the new sciences that could by any legitimate interpretation be construed as being at variance with the teachings of the religion of my boyhood. We now know incomparably more about the history, the social and economic condition of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians than we did before the explorer brought to light the literary treasures of Nippur, Telloh, Abu-Habba, and Nineveh; but we have discovered nothing which is competent to discredit any of the eternal verities on which our faith is founded. The higher criticism may, indeed, cause us to modify some of our views regarding literary or textual problems, but as to the basal truths of Scripture, they stand absolutely in all their divine immutability untouched and absolutely unassailable. It was, indeed, with a feeling of joy and gratitude that I could, sixty years after my first acquaintance with Nineveh, feel, while contemplating the ruins of the famous city, that there was still in my soul nothing changed of that faith of a Breton peasant—a faith which, as it was my most precious inheritance in early youth, has ever continued to be my greatest consolation from then to beyond the Scriptural age of three score years and ten.