But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite necromantic enough without conjuring for them a necromantic future. The story of their restoration is like a brilliant romance of history. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century the inquiring student could learn in an hour or so all that was known in fact and in fable of the renowned city of Nineveh. He had but to read a few chapters of the Bible and a few pages of Diodorus to exhaust the important literature of the subject. If he turned also to the pages of Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and Ælianus, these served chiefly to confirm the suspicion that the Greeks themselves knew almost nothing more of the history of their famed oriental forerunners.
The current fables told of a first king Ninus and his wonderful queen, Semiramis; of Sennacherib, the conqueror; of the effeminate Sardanapalus, who neglected the warlike ways of his ancestors, but perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh itself, in a self-imposed holocaust. And that was all. How much of this was history, how much myth, no man could say; and for all any one suspected to the contrary, no man could ever know. And to-day the contemporary records of the city are before us in such profusion as no other nation of antiquity, save Egypt alone, can at all rival. Whole libraries of Babylonian documents are at hand that were written twenty or even thirty centuries before our era. These, be it understood, are the original books themselves, not copies. The author of that remote time speaks to us directly, hand to eye, without intermediary transcriber. And there is not a line of any Hebrew or Greek inscriptions of a like age that has been preserved to us; there is little enough that can match these ancient books by a thousand years. When one reads of Moses or Isaiah, Homer, Hesiod, or Herodotus, he is but following the transcription—often unquestionably faulty, and probably never in all parts perfect—of successive copyists of later generations. The oldest known copy of the Bible, for example, dates from the fourth century A.D.—1000 years after the last Assyrian records were made, and read, and buried, and forgotten.
Bas-relief from an Assyrian Palace, showing Assyrian Soldiers, Prisoners being flayed alive, Cuneiform Inscriptions, etc.
As to the earlier Mesopotamian records, they date back some 5000—perhaps 7000—years B.C.: at least 1000 years before the period assigned by Archbishop Usher’s long-accepted Chronology for the creation of the world itself. Solomon, who lived about 1000 B.C., is accredited with the declaration that “of the making of many books there is no end.” Modern exegesists tell us that it was not Solomon, but a later Alexandrian interloper, who actually coined the phrase; but nevertheless it appears that the saying would have been perfectly intelligible, in Mesopotamia, not merely to Solomon’s contemporaries, but to generations that lived long before the Jewish nation, as such, came into existence. At all events, there was at least one king of Assyria—namely, Asshurbanapal—who lived only a few generations after Solomon, and whose palace boasted a library of some 10,000 volumes—a library, if you please, in which the books were numbered and shelved systematically, and classified, and cared for by an official librarian. From this library, records have come to us during the past half-century that have reconstructed the history of Asiatic antiquity.
If you would care to see some of these strange documents, you have but a little way to go from the site of the winged lion here in the British Museum. Meantime, there are other sculptures here which you can hardly pass unnoticed. As we pass the human-headed lions and enter the hall of Asshurnazirpal, we shall see other evidences of Assyrian greatness that might easily lead our thoughts astray from the writing. Here, forming the wall, are bas-reliefs on which the famous scene of the lion hunt is shown; a little farther on are all manner of war scenes; and there some domestic incidents, the making of bread or a like comestible, and its baking in an oven; and there again is the interior of a stable with a man gravely grooming a horse much as it might be done in any stable to-day.
All these must not be allowed to distract our attention, for these graphic illustrations have nothing directly to do with writing. Here, however, at the end of the hall, are some other bas-reliefs more pertinent to our present inquiry. That winged god, for example, carrying a fawn, has a fine flight of arrows across the background and figures alike, differing in the latter regard from the lion we have just left. In the hall just beyond are some illustrations of a different combination of picture and text. Here is the famous obelisk of Shalmaneser, which, like all the things thus far noted in the Assyrian collection, was found by Sir Henry Layard at Nineveh. It is virtually an illustrated book, telling in word and text of the conquest of many countries by King Shalmaneser II.
The figures of the upper row report the payment of tribute by “Sua of Gilzani, who brought silver, gold, lead, vessels of copper, horses, and dromedaries.” It will be observed, of course, that only one side of the obelisk is here shown. The other three sides in each case depict other phases of the payment of the tribute by the same conquered enemy. The second tier of figures is of peculiar interest, because it shows the payment of tribute by “Yaua, the son of Khumri.” This is, as the Bible student interprets it, “Jehu, the son of Omri.” The conquered Israelite brings “silver and gold, lead and bowls, dishes, cups, and other vessels of gold,” and the forms of these vessels, as well as the costumes of the Hebrews themselves, are well shown in the illustrations. The third row of figures represents the “payment of the tribute of the land of Musri, consisting of dromedaries, buffaloes, elephants, apes, and other animals.” The grotesque figures of the alleged apes, with their altogether human heads, are suggestive as showing how these strange foreign animals appealed to the imagination of the Assyrian artist, causing him to depart from that fine realism which he brought to bear upon the delineation of more familiar animals. The fourth set of pictures shows the payment of tribute of the land of Sukhi, and the fifth a not dissimilar tribute from the country of Patin. The inscriptions at the top and base of the obelisk give details of the conquests, recording among other things how Shalmaneser captured 1121 chariots and 470 battle horses and the whole camp of Hazael, king of Damascus.
Perhaps the most curious example of economy of material in a makeshift book that the Assyrian collection at the British Museum has to show, is illustrated in the figure of the god Nabu, which forms part of the Nineveh collection, and which stands in the hall just beyond the obelisk of Shalmaneser. Here, as a glance at the illustration will show, the skirt of the robe of the human figure is used as a ground for an elaborate inscription. The effect is rather decorative and distinctly unique. This figure has the further interest of affording an illustration of what the Assyrian artist could do when he adopted the expedient, for him unusual, of working in the round. The great masterpieces of Assyrian art were modelled in bas-relief. Occasionally, however, the artist attempted the full figure, as in the present case; but it can hardly be claimed that the success of this is at all comparable with that attained by the other method. There are low reliefs in the hunting scenes contained in the dining-hall of Asshurbanapal, as represented here in the British Museum, that are real works of art. The wounded lioness dragging her haunches, the hunted goats, the pacing wild asses, are veritable masterpieces. No such claim can be made for the god Nabu or for any other full statue that the excavations of Nineveh have revealed. But on the other hand the texture of the skirt of this god gives it an abiding interest of a unique character.
A further interest attaches to this statue, as to many others of the Assyrian monuments, because of its bearing upon the religion of that famous people. Until the discovery of these long-buried monuments, practically all that was known of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians was contained in the pages of Herodotus. Strange tales he tells of what he saw in the temples of Babylon, where, as he alleges, all the women of the city, of whatever class or rank, were obliged at least once in a lifetime to prostitute themselves for hire. The inscriptions on the monuments tell us nothing of such practical phases of worship as this, but they do show that the Assyrians were an intensely religious people, closely comparable in that regard to their cousins the Hebrews. Their religion, too, it would appear, was of that firmly grasped self-sufficient kind which puts aside all doubt; which assumes as a primordial fact that one’s own view is right; that one’s gods are the only true gods, and that all the outside world must be regarded as one’s proper prey. A further illustration of this phase of the subject will claim our attention when we come to examine the religious writings of the Assyrians a little more in detail.