And more than all this, all through the débris of earth now filling chamber after chamber, and more abundantly towards the bottom, the explorers found countless fragments of terra-cotta or baked clay tablets, bearing generally cuneiform inscriptions on both sides. Some of those fragments were not an inch in length or breadth; others were even a foot square or larger. It was possible sometimes to fit a number of fragments together. They had been found lying near together, and had originally formed one piece, that was broken when it fell. A thorough examination of the character of the material and of the work, and their present condition, made it clear that originally they were slabs or tablets of fine clay, well kneaded and pressed into form. While still comparatively soft, they had received the inscriptions at the hands of skilled scribes. This the marks of the metal tool or style used in inscribing the letters on the yielding clay made quite evident. The tablets so inscribed were then hardened by baking, and were placed in upper rooms of the palace devoted to the purposes of a library. When at last the palace itself was destroyed by fire, the heat may have cracked or otherwise injured some of them. Their fall, as the rooms were destroyed and the slabs precipitated into a heated mass of ruins in the lower masonry chambers, must have broken most of them into fragments. The spade and mattock, as men overturned again and again this mass of débris to recover gold and silver and jewelry
buried in it, may have continued the work of destruction; and perhaps time has since done more than all these agencies. For the yearly rains of twenty-five centuries, sinking into this soil and taking up chemical agents from the mass on every side, would in turn react on these plates of clay, producing crystals in every minutest fissure or cavity, and slowly but surely dividing them into minuter and minuter fragments. However, the fragments are there, covered with writing. In the mound of Kouyunjik alone there may be, it is judged, twenty-five or thirty thousand of them. How many more may be found in other mounds of Ninive? And as to the mounds of Babylon and its vicinity, so little as yet has been done to them in comparison with the work at Ninive that we may say they are still almost untouched.
If the Assyrians had libraries, and if those libraries have come down to us, be it even only as tattered leaves and torn volumes, may we not yet gather together these fragments, or at least some portion of them, decipher what is written, and so become acquainted with something of this ancient Assyrian literature? What did men then know? What did they believe? What did they write? It was hoped that we were on the very eve of discoveries equalling, if not far surpassing, in extent and in importance, those made in the earlier half of this century by the discovery of how to read the ancient hieroglyphs of Egypt. We cannot say that these hopes have so far been fully realized. Far from it. We are still at the beginning of the work; but the work goes bravely on.
Attention was at first, and naturally, directed to the grander and more prominent public monuments
and inscriptions. From them much has been learned of the series of Assyrian monarchs and concerning their deeds, and light has been thrown on many obscure points of chronology. The statements of the Holy Scriptures in reference to the relations of the Jewish people with Babylon and Ninive during the thousand years preceding Christ, and Biblical references to the character and customs of the Assyrians and Babylonians, have been wonderfully illustrated.
Other classes of inscriptions, on fragments of the terra-cotta tiles or tablets, gave accounts of the divisions of the empire, the character, and almost the statistics, of the provinces. The laws and usages then in force, and the peculiarities of their domestic life, are sometimes presented with a vividness that startles us.
Strange to say, and equally to the surprise and the delight of those now laboring in the work of deciphering this enigmatical writing, quite a number of tablets were found written for the special purpose of explaining to the ancient students of Assyria, in simpler and more legible, or rather more pronounceable, characters, the meaning and the sound of the more abstruse and ideographic characters so frequently occurring in the texts of the inscriptions. These supply us to-day with what we may call, and what is in reality, a dictionary of their hard words, giving their correct pronunciation and their meaning.
Still other tablets were devoted to astronomy, to astrology, to medicine, to sorcery, to hymns of religion and prayers of sacrifice, to history, to geography, to poetry, and to whatever might be embraced by the term Assyrian belles-lettres.
Acceptable as all this is, something more was expected. Was there nothing to illustrate the earlier history of mankind, nothing in relation to those earlier events which are narrated by Moses as having occurred in this very land? They are dear to us because intertwined with our religious and moral training. Was it possible that there was no trace whatever of them, not even an allusion to them, to be found in all this mass of Assyrian writings?
Berosus, a Babylonian priest of the time of Alexander the Great, about three hundred years before Christ, wrote a history of Babylon. The work itself has perished; but we have some accounts of it in sundry Greek writers. According to them, Berosus distinctly stated that accounts were carefully preserved in Babylon in which were recorded the formation of the heavens, the earth, and the sea, the origin of man, and the chief memorable events of the early history of the world. Why had we come across nothing of all this? Was it because Berosus spoke of ancient tablets at Babylon, and the tablets whose fragments we were scrutinizing are, for the most part, from Ninive, and, in their present form at least, date back generally only seven, eight, or nine centuries before Christ?