And thou thyself art not changed; like me art thou.”
Chambers of Records at Nineveh.—The Semites who, as the sacred historian informs us, left the land of Shinar to found Nineveh and the neighboring cities, carried with them the civilization and literary culture of the Chaldeans. The earliest permanent seat of letters was Ca’lah (see Map, p. 105), where, during the reign of Shalmane’ser II. (860-824 B.C.) many clay tablets borrowed from the Babylonians were copied by Assyrian scribes. This same king erected at Calah an obelisk of black marble—one of the few Assyrian monuments of its kind commemorative of national triumphs.
The library thus begun at Calah was enlarged under succeeding kings. Removed at length to Nineveh, it there attained vast proportions through the efforts of that munificent patron of letters, Sardanapa’lus (Assur-bani-pal), (668-626 B.C.). The number of engraved tablets reached ten thousand.
Here were grammars[12] and lexicons, law-books and scientific treatises, histories, astronomical and arithmetical works, songs, prayers, hymns sometimes approaching the Hebrew sacred lyrics in sublimity, books of charms and omens, natural histories, botanies, and geographies—a complete encyclopædia of ancient literature. The books of this curious collection were carefully arranged according to their subjects, numbered, catalogued, and placed in charge of librarians. They were public property, intended for the instruction of the people.
Such was the library of Sardanapalus—principally copied from Babylonian texts; such, it was buried beneath the ruins of the palace when “the gates of the rivers were opened and Nineveh became a desolation;” such, it lay amid the débris for centuries, “while the cormorant and the bittern lodged in the upper lintels.”
But the mounds that so long covered the site of Nineveh have recently surrendered their treasures. Clouds that environed the history of the past have been dissipated; ancient nations, for ages wrapped in obscurity, we no longer “see through a glass, darkly;” and the narrative of the inspired writers of the Bible has been in many places confirmed by the inscriptions disentombed in the East. Among the most interesting fragments found scattered through the ruined “Chambers of Records” of the Assyrian palace are the tablets relating to the Creation, the Fall of Man, and the Deluge, copied from Babylonian records hundreds of years older than the Pentateuch.
FROM THE CHALDEAN ACCOUNT OF THE DELUGE.
(Compiled originally about 2000 B.C.)
“The flood reached to heaven: the bright earth to a waste was turned. It destroyed all life from the face of the earth, the strong deluge over the people. Brother saw not brother, they did not know the people. In heaven, the gods feared the tempest and sought refuge: they ascended to the heaven of the King of angels and spirits.
Six days and nights passed; the wind, deluge, and storm, overwhelmed. On the seventh day, in its course, was calmed the storm; and all the deluge, which had destroyed like an earthquake, quieted. The sea he caused to dry, and the wind and deluge ended.