Talk at a Country House: Assyrian Arrowheads and Jewish Books

ASSYRIAN ARROWHEADS AND JEWISH BOOKS.

I KNEW that the squire took much interest in the Arrowheaded Inscriptions, so one morning I got him to talk on the subject.

Foster. Do you read the Arrowheaded Inscriptions of which I see so many volumes ?

Squire. No; I content myself with enjoying the fruits of other men’s labors ; hoping, however, that I may occasionally get from these learned men some new light on questions which may not have attracted their own attention.

Foster. Scholars now quote the records of Rameses and Sennacherib as much of course as they do the Commentaries of Csesar; but the discovery of the key to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the arrowheaded inscriptions must have seemed very wonderful at first, as indeed it was.

Squire. Yes. These keys, like photography, with the silver plate of Daguerre followed by the paper - printing of Talbot; the electric telegraph, with its development of the telephone and the phonograph; and I may add, the uses of steam by sea and land, — all these are now seen by us in the light of common day. Yet I can recollect something of the sense of the marvelous which fell upon some of us on their first discovery. It seemed a happiness only to have lived in those days, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth about the early days of the French Revolution ; only we, happily, have not had to repent, as he had to do.

Foster. The reading of the Egyptian hieroglyphics seems comparatively easy, if I rightly remember the account of the process. Was it not that the French, in 1799, found at Rosetta a stone with an inscription of Ptolemy Euergetes in Greek and in the demotic or common Egyptian writing of the period, as well as in hieroglyphics ? And then, by assuming that the vernacular Egyptian of the time of the inscription did not differ materially from the Coptic of the present day, it was found that Coptic equivalents for the several words of the Greek could be made out and read in the demotic version, so that finally the hieroglyphic inscription itself could be read. But then Ptolemy, like Pharaoh, had told his dream to the wise men, who had to interpret it. Nebuchadnezzar needed to be told his dream as well as the interpretation thereof. There was no inscription, in Greek or any other known language, was there, at Persepolis or Behistun ?

Squire. On the contrary: Diodorus said the Behistun inscription was by Semiramis, and Rawlinson found it to be by Darius. You are right in the main as to the comparative easiness of the hieroglyphic decipherment, I think, but in both cases the discoverers must have possessed and exercised no small amount of the powers of criticism and divination, which Niebuhr calls the means by which history supplies the deficiencies of its sources. But the decipherment of the arrowheaded inscriptions was no doubt by far the more difficult; and its results have, in my opinion, far surpassed the other in their interest and historical importance.

Foster. I know less about the arrowheaded than about the hieroglyphic inscriptions, and shall be glad if you will tell me something about them.

Squire. The subject is a vast one, and it continues to increase. I will show you the few pebbles I have picked up on the shore ; but if I exhaust your patience, it will not be by the knowledge of the learned Dr. Dryasdust who has recorded all that has been done or written on the subject. I have only the odds and ends which I have gathered up through many years from journals of learned societies, books of translations, monographs on fresh discoveries of lions and bulls and bricks and slabs, and so on in infinite variety.

Foster. It is a pleasant way of getting knowledge, if only a man’s memory can keep all that he so collects; but

Squire. No : I will, like Time, in this case quote the general at the siege of the impregnable fortress of Bhurtpore, when he had ordered a gun up to a particular position. The officer came back, after some time, and reported that it was impossible. “ Impossible, sir ! Why, I have the order in my pocket! ” So the gun was brought up, and the fort was taken. There, at Persepolis, for two thousand years had stood that rock, rising four hundred feet above the plain, with its scarped face covered with writing which no man could read, and so looking foolishly enough, as Carlyle said of the Pyramids. The imaginative inhabitants of the land, forgetting that their own fathers had written and read those words, believed them to be the work of jins, telling of hidden hoards of gold and jewels never to be discovered, while some wise skeptic from the West pronounced them to be merely the work of worms. But there, age after age, still stood the old General Time, with the order in his pocket, waiting for the hour and the man. The beginnings of the discovery were humble and its progress was slow, but we may say that the critic and the diviner were there from the first with Philology, Archæology, and History for their tools to work with. Increasing intelligence and accuracy in copying the inscription were followed by increasing recognition of the arrangements, repetitions, and variations of the still unknown characters. They were in three columns, of which there were in one only forty-two of the little groups of arrowheads or wedges, each of which groups might be assumed to be a letter ; in another column there were four hundred of such groups, which therefore must have been ideographic: and these characters and signs, for which ample space was taken at one end of the line, were crowded together at the other, thus showing that the writing was from left to right, From each of these facts was derived an hypothesis, which, when verified, became the law of a new hypothesis, to be verified and expanded again in like manner. If these columns were used for a proclamation by a king ruling over the country in which they stood as a centre, the three columns were probably the same proclamation in the three principal languages of the monarchy, like those which the Sultan of Constantinople or the Shah of Persia still issues in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. It might be taken that, being at Persepolis, this proclamation was by some king of the once great Persian Empire ; that the language of one of its columns would be the Persian of the time ; and that, with the unchanging customs and habits of the East, the style of his proclamation would most likely be the same as that used by the Sassanian dynasty which reigned in Persia till the Muhammadan conquest. The languages of the columns with the letters or signs counted by hundreds were clearly what we call ideographic, like those of the Chinese or the Egyptians, in which each character represents a mental image; while the writing of the column with only forty-two variations of character was as plainly phonetic, in which each sign was merely a letter of an alphabet, as with ourselves. By these steps, Grotefend, in 1802, reached his position : the right-hand column is in alphabetical writing, and, assuming it to be a proclamation in the Snssanian form, beginning with the name of a king who calls himself king of kings, and son of a king with another name and the same title. Now, as to the inscription beginning with three words differing from one another, but combined with three other words, these repeated twice, the third being the same as the second, with an additional letter or letters, — I cannot put my hand on Grotefend’s paper, but I understand his reasoning to be something of this kind : Call the three first-mentioned words A, B, and C, and the sentence will run thus : A, king of kings, son of B, king of kings, son of C. The word read as king is repeated with an addition which indicates the genitive plural, while the other repeated word stands for son. But C is not called “ king of kings,” like the other two. Then the three names are Xerxes, Darius, and Hystaspes ; for the last, though father of Darius, was not a king. But to say that certain words meant son or king was not to read the words themselves, or to say to what language they belonged. Now, however, the Zend, or ancient Persian, began to be studied, and it became possible to say what those words would be if all the other assumptions were true. The other letters were hypothetically added to those which made up the names of the three kings. If Zend were the language in which the inscription was written, the words for son and king ofkings would be putra and kshayathiya, and more letters of the alphabet would be added to those in the three kings’ names. So the inscription was gradually read, found to agree with the story of Herodotus, and took its place among the records of ancient Persia.

Foster. And so a key was found, like that of the Greek version on the Rosetta stone, for reading the other Persepolis inscriptions, one of which was, I suppose, Assyrian ?

Squire. The actual course of things was somewhat different. Colonel (afterwards Sir Henry) Rawlinson, containing in himself, in no common degree and in very various kinds, the qualifications of a man of action and letters, had become so familiar with arrowheaded writing, which he had studied at Persepolis, that it seems as if it had been a sort of mother tongue to him, when he says that he cannot remember and trace back the steps by which he arrived at his knowledge. On visiting Behistun, he was able to read the Persian column of the trilingual inscription there found, and to tell the world that it was a proclamation, not of Semiramis, as Diodorus had supposed, but of Darius. A copy of the text with a translation was sent to England by Rawlinson, and published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society in 1847. To employ this deciphered inscription for the purpose of reading the other inscriptions side by side with it might have been interesting to Rawlinson in any case, but a new motive for such work had arisen. Botta in 1847, and Layard in 1845, had discovered, by actual excavation, the vast remains of the palaces of Nineveh and other cities of Assyria, the existence of which, under great earth mounds, had been conjectured by King in 1818. These excavations were the beginning of a work which is still going on ; of the discovery not only of the remains of magnificent buildings, but of an almost infinite variety of written records in the arrowheaded characters. There were not only monumental inscriptions on colossal bulls and lions, and on alabaster slabs which had lined the walls of the palaces, but also on clay tablets of every size, which had been baked after the arrowheads had been impressed on them, and which tablets were eventually (as I will explain directly) found to be books of all sorts. The characters in which all these were written were recognized as those of one of the trilingual inscriptions of Persepolis and Behistun ; the genius which had read the Persian inscription of Behistun must have found it comparatively easy to read the Assyrian column, while employing Hebrew, just as Zend had been employed in the previous case, at each step of hypothesis and verification. And in 1852 Rawlinson was able to send home from Nineveh, from the Assyrian, annals of Sargon and Sennacherib themselves, whom we had till then known of only from the Hebrew history, and the still scantier Greek records. There were at first many failures and hitches, and learned men looked more or less doubtfully on the popular enthusiasm at a discovery which came home to every one who had read the Bible. Some years later a challenge was given, and accepted by Rawlinson, Hincks, Talbot, and Oppert, to translate independently of one another an inscription of which the untranslated original had been published by the British Museum ; and to submit this to the judgment of Sir George Cornwall Lewis, Dean Milman, and Mr. Grote. The versions substantially agreed, except as to the proper names ; but, if I remember rightly, Sir George Lewis remained incredulous, and Mr. Grote not quite satisfied. The key to the special mystery of these and other proper names was eventually found ; and I suppose that no one now has doubts that those who are at the trouble may learn to read Assyrian as they do Greek or Sanskrit.

Foster, A library of brickbats for books sounds funny: it must have required some courage to begin reading in it.

Squire. Yes ; and especially when the books lay in heaps by the thousand, having, as Mr. George Smith conjectured, fallen with the ruins of the building, from an upper floor.

Foster. You alluded to other special difficulties in the way of decipherment; what were they ?

Squire. If I have rightly read the earlier work in the fuller light of the later knowledge, the story is something of this kind : The Assyrians were in the main a Semitic people; their language, like their race, was allied to that of the Hebrews, and their writing, like the Hebrew, was alphabetical. But the older civilization of Babylon, from which Assyria derived much of its own, was Turanian, and its method of writing was not alphabetic, but ideographic, like that of the Chinese and several other peoples. The Assyrians, very oddly, as it seems to us, combined the two methods, using dictionaries for the purpose, some of which have been actually found in what you call the library of brickbats.

Foster. Can you give me an example ?

Squire. Here is one which I made many years ago. The Roman letter and numeral X is for many purposes an English ideograph, or character, used to express, in writing, not a mere sound, but a mental image. In a date we read it ten; after a king’s name, the tenth; between two figures, as 3x3, we read it indifferently as times, into, or multiplied by; the mathematician uses it as an unknown quantity ; and the stockbroker reads X div. as without the dividend. No one hesitates to read Xway as crossway ; and though X only represents a syllable in Xmas, Xtian, and like words, here, too, it may be called an ideograph. But now suppose that, in addition to all these uses of X in writing, we employed it also to express the sound of ten without attaching any mental image to it, and in any word in which that sound occurred as one of its joints, as in tenant, tender, tent, we indifferently wrote the full word in alphabetic letters, or substituted X for t-e-n, and so with Xant, Xder, Xt. Imagine this double method of expressing what I call a point, or points, in a word employed habitually, and with every variety of ideographic sign drawn from the Babylonian ideographic writing, and you have the usual Assyrian method of writing. This may serve as an illustration, though it is of course only a small and fragmentary one, of what was a very complicated business, though no doubt it was easy to those accustomed to it. But, as I have said, they used dictionaries or lists of ideographic characters with their equivalents in Assyrian letters.

Foster. Was it from these dictionaries that the way to read the strange forms embodied in half-spelt words was found out ?

Squire. No. I think the first discovery was by help of one of those happy accidents which come to men of genius, and which they know how to seize and make their own. An inscription was found in duplicate. In one copy Rawlinson came to a word which, if read phonetically and as if the language were Hebrew, gave good sense ; in the other copy, this word was expressed by one which, if so read, would give no sense, and was in fact no word. This, then, was the ideographic equivalent of the real word. The clue was followed, and the labyrinth was traversed in and out. But, as I said just now, these are only the pretty pebbles I have picked up on the shore of the great sea. If you would explore the sea itself, you must put yourself under the guidance of Rawlinson, Schrader, Sayce, and George Smith ; and indeed I might easily add other names.

Foster. It is curious that while the Hebrews were using leather and the Egyptians papyrus to write on, the Assyrians should have used clay.

Squire. It is fortunate that they did so. They did, however, also use some perishable material, no doubt leather; for seals have been found with the holes for the strings which fastened them to the scrolls, and even the remains of the strings themselves. These seals are of clay, often with two impressions, one of which has Phœnician characters, showing them to belong to contracts between two parties. Some of these deeds of sale between Phœnician and Assyrian traders have also been found, and have helped to throw light on the question of language. But the most interesting of all the seals is one which bears the Egyptian hieroglyphics which had been already read by Egyptologists as the name Sabaco II., king of Egypt, and also an Assyrian device of a priest ministering before the king, which is reasonably supposed to be the royal signet of Sennacherib, the contemporary of Sabaco. It is manifestly the seal of a treaty between these two monarchs, whom we know to have met in battle not many miles from Jerusalem.

Foster. Has the discovery of the Egyptian and Assyrian records given much help in the study of Hebrew history and literature ?

Squire. A good many facts, more or less important, and much general light, in which the old facts may be seen more plainly than before. A second history, especially if it be a contemporary history, always gives a greater sense of reality to the first one. One of the uses of two eyes is that each eye sees a little more of one side of the object than does the other; and thus the object is seen to be, what it is, a solid, and not a flat object. A photograph represents an object as seen with one eye ; and when two such photographs are brought together into one picture by the stereoscope, we immediately perceive an effect of roundness instead of flatness. We may and do know that an object is solid, though we look at it with only one eye, but we only see it to be so when we look at it with both. Critics with the historical imagination of Grotius and Gesenius could infer and make out from the discourses of Isaiah the military and political position of Jerusalem when its little territory was becoming the battlefield on which the rival monarchies of Egypt and Assyria met to fight for empire. But the picture is made still more lifelike when, alongside of the actual speeches by which Isaiah sustained and directed the energies of his king and countrymen in the supreme hour, are read the annals in which Sennacherib tells what he and his army were doing at the same time, within the sight of the men who, from the walls of the city, could see the valleys and plains full of Assyrian horsemen.

Foster. And besides these military and political annals, are there not some considerable remains of literature of the kind which reflects the general moral and intellectual culture of a nation ?

Squire. Yes, and this too throws much light on the history and literature of the Jews. Now that we know that the people of Israel, at the period to which they carried back the life of their national ancestor Abraham, were in the midst of nations which had not only reached a high degree of civilization, but knew how to record that civilization in writing, we should be wholly unreasonable if we doubted the claim of the Jews to the possession of equally early written records. The old orthodox belief that Moses was miraculously enabled to write the Pentateuch, and the preposterous modern adaptation of the old rabbinical legend that it was the work of Ezra after his return from the exile, are equally unnecessary.

Foster. Are you not rather unfair to these modern critics ? I recollect a J and E as well as a P C in the list of what I suppose you would call their imaginary documents. And then, is not “ preposterous ” rather a strong, or, as Jeremy Bentham would have said, “ dyslogistic ” word ?

Squire. When Burke was called to order for using the word “preposterous” in one of his speeches in the Warren Hastings trial, he justified himself by observing that the word only meant putting the cart before the horse. I cannot but think that this is a common habit of mind in our modern Biblical critics; though I respect the wonderful minuteness and industry of their learning, and have no doubt that it often throws new light on the subject they treat of.

Foster. Then you do not accept as conclusive the decision of Professor Wellhausen that the Old Testament, as we have it, was edited and published in the year 444 B. C. ?

Squire. I know that a German professor is, like the prophet Habakkuk in the opinion of Voltaire, and the father of a family according to Napoleon, “ capable de tout.” Yet I have looked at that date again and again, and wondered how any one could believe it possible to evolve out of his inner consciousness the exact year, more than twenty-three centuries ago, of an event of which there is no record that it happened at all; and why that odd number of 4, or even 44, when dealing with so many hundreds, and even thousands ? I can only compare this conscientious accuracy to that of the man who refused to imperil his immortal soul by saying that he had killed the round number of an hundred canvas-back ducks when in fact it was only ninety-nine.

Foster. But, squire, you just now quoted with approval Niebuhr’s two qualifications for the historian, — criticism and divination. Will you not allow his countrymen and their English followers the use of these things in the study of Hebrew literature?

Squire. If they only would use them more than they do! The true critic is a judge. His business is to bring all the ascertainable facts of the case into clear light and order, and then either to pronounce a judgment, or to declare that no judgment is possible for want of sufficient evidence. He is not, in the latter case, to make up the deficiency by fancies drawn from his inner consciousness to supply the lack of facts.

Foster. Is not this the divination of Niebuhr ?

Squire. No, no. I believe Niebuhr himself may have sometimes mistaken the one for the other, but they are not the same thing. Divination in history is seeing into the life of things, not the dissection of a dead body and the labeling of the several parts. But there is another saying of Niebuhr’s which is more to the point. He says that, when in Rome, you may often see existing walls with marble fragments of columns and cornices built into them; and it is equally certain that these are the portions of some older buildings, temples or palaces perhaps, but it is impossible to say what those buildings were. A like illustration might be drawn from some of our old churches and manor houses; and we know what woeful work our own learned modern architects have made of their so-called restoration of these. The churchwardens’ whitewash has done far less harm. I have no difficulty in seeing, with Astruc, the plain marks in Genesis of two records, marked by the names of Elohim and Jehovah respectively ; but I cannot follow Wellhausen in the ideal reconstruction of his so-called prophetic and priestly documents elaborated out of the early books, and duly docketed J E and P C.

Foster. I see your shelves full of the commentators you so scoff at.

Squire. I not only respect, but profit by their learning and industry, which are very great. I gladly use their books, though I do not like to wear their chains. There are some words of Grote on a like question in Greek literature which deserve to be written in letters of gold, and to be ever before the eyes of the student of the Old Testament. He says : “ The lesson must be learnt, hard and painful though it be, that no imaginable reach of critical acumen will of itself enable us to discriminate fancy from reality in the absence of a tolerable stock of evidence.... In truth, our means of knowledge are so limited that no man can produce arguments sufficiently cogent to contend against opposing preconceptions, and it creates a painful sentiment of diffidence when we use expressions of equal and absolute persuasion with which the two opposite conclusions have been advanced.”

Foster.

It seems a pity ; is nothing left for us but this luminous mist ?

Squire. The books themselves ; read the commentaries with them. You will not understand the books without their help. Only, read the commentaries for the sake of the books, and not the books for the sake of the commentaries, as has been always, and still is, the habit of too many, from the days of the Talmud and before down to our own.

Foster. You remind me of Bacon’s advice : “ Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”

Squire. You can have no better instruction for the use of the commentaries. And for the books themselves, the more you read them for their own sake, the more you will find worth reading in them. People often think it clever to say that the Bible should be treated like other books. I wish it got a little more such treatment. Those who believe that it really differs in some respects from other books ought to be the most convinced that the more clearly you bring out the resemblances, the more distinctly will the differences come out, too. Read the books as they are, and let the likenesses and the unlikenesses come out as they may.

Foster. Will you give me some illustration of your method ? I will ask no questions as to the authorship of the book of Genesis, but what do you say of its account of the Creation, when the modern sciences of astronomy, geology, and ethnology have shown us that the beginnings of all things are lost in infinite distances of time and place ?

Squire. Whatever discoveries the mind of man has made in all these directions,— and I do not question their reality or their importance, — they have neither ascertained nor satisfied man’s demand for some ideal of a Creation, the work of a Creator. And this is just what the Hebrew story of the Creation supplies. David Hume, lifting his eyes to the sky on a starry night, said to Adam Ferguson, “ Oh, Adam, how can a man look at that and not believe in a God ! ” Some three thousand years before, the same faith was perhaps awakened by the same sight in the mind of the Hebrew, whoever he was. The institutions of his country had accustomed him to think of work and duty with the rules of law and order as the highest and noblest forms of life, and therefore those ideals in which his belief in a Creator must centre itself. It must be work and it must be good, worthy of the highest workman. But, there are method, law, and order in all the higher kinds of work. One of the most ancient of his national institutions, held to have been given to his people by the Divine King himself, was that work was regulated by the week, — the division of time into six days of work and one of rest.

Foster. Then do you go on to discuss such questions as whether these days in Genesis are actual days or geological periods ; and if the latter, whether they have any claim to represent accurately those periods in our modern science ?

Squire. I repeat that I certainly like to read such disquisitions, but not either to contradict and confute, nor to believe and follow. I prefer the treatment of Seneca and Cicero, of Addison and Wordsworth, as well as that of the Hebrew psalmists and prophets themselves. There is, too, if I remember rightly, a fine passage in Luther’s Commentary on Genesis to the like effect. The concrete forms of the imagination are not less natural than our logical or scientific abstractions, and are much more needful to our moral life. And when you show me that Hebrew imagination and modern science and logic do not run together exactly on all fours, and that there has been no miraculous interposition to give the first the same kind of accuracy as belongs to the others, I say, so much the better. Logical skepticism, like that of Hume and John Mill, recognizes the conceivableness of a miracle where there is a reasonable ground for expecting it; but here the account of Creation is all the more human because it in no way anticipates Newton’s Principia or Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Nor is any claim it, may have to be held to be superhuman affected by the showing that it is not preferor non-human.

Foster. Do not the readers of the arrowheaded inscriptions find that the Assyrians divided the lunar month into four weeks, with days of rest named the Sabbath, and an account of the Creation in six days ?

Squire. We are told so, with other things of a like kind. If they were confirmed, they suggest the question whether the Hebrew traditions, which are so infinitely nobler in moral and intellectual as well as literary character, are developments of the ruder and coarser beliefs, or are themselves the older, and were afterwards degraded from their earlier simplicity. The Hebrew account of the migration of their traditional ancestor. Abraham, will fall in with either supposition. The germs of national life, civil and religious, which he brought with him, and which eventually grew into so great a tree, may have been mere germs, or they may have already grown up somewhat, though in very inferior forms, in Babylon and Assyria. The question is interesting, yet it is perhaps incapable of any answer but what the individual habit of mind of the inquirer may give it.

Foster. I understand you, then, to hold that there is so little evidence as to the early or late date of the Hebrew books, and so much probable, at least plausible argument on either side, that the reasonable course is to keep the mind in suspense on the subject. I like to hear both sides ; and yet when I have heard one, I always feel like the judge who, when he had heard the plaintiff, stopped the case, because he said he saw it very clearly as it was, and should only be puzzled if he heard more.

Squire. So do I; but there is no help for it. Anyhow, these prose epics of the Hebrews keep their ground, age after age, in all lands : and that because, for simplicity, pathos, grandeur, and, in a word, humanity, there is nothing equal to them. They, and not Latin and Greek, are the literœ humaniores of the world. Milton was a competent judge, for he knew all alike, and he expressed his preference for the Hebrew above all other literature. Of its lyric poetry, after speaking, in the preface to his second book on the Reason of Church Government, of “ those magnific odes wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy,” he says, “ But those frequent songs throughout the law and the prophets, beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made to appear, over all the kinds of lyric poetry, to be incomparable.”

Foster. Does Milton anywhere speak of the book of Job ?

Squire. I do not remember that he does. He calls the Song of Solomon a pastoral drama; and no one would have gainsaid him if he had declared that the book of Job embodies in the purest poetry the true idea of the tragic drama. — the riddle of the Sphinx of Greek tragedy. And then you know as well as I do his comparison of the Hebrew poets and prophets with the Greek and Roman poets and orators. But let me hear you read what one can never be tired of. Foster (reads).

Do you think that their political philosophy was so instructive and important as he says ?

Squire. I have written a volume to try to answer the question, Yes, as to one of the prophets, Isaiah. But still I continue to ask it of myself. My doubt is less whether it is true than how and when it can and will be shown to be true. Our political moi’ality is not veryhigh ; yet we live and move, if only half consciously, in a religious atmosphere unknown to the Greeks and Romans, but without which we could not breathe. And this atmosphere is the belief in the God made known to the Hebrews in the plain of Mamre and the Temple of Jerusalem.

Foster. I suppose the differences and contrasts between the Jewish and the Assyrian religions are greater than their resemblances ?

Squire. Infinitely greater. There is much simplicity in the Jewish ritual, notwithstanding the daily Temple services, which stands in marked contrast to the swarms of gods, devils and spirits of all kinds, good and bad, with the rites and ceremonies appropriate to them all. It is indeed a puzzle how great military conquerors like Tiglath-Pileser, Sargon, and Sennacherib could have found time for them.

Foster. I suppose it was chiefly a mechanical work which their priests could do for them, — a sort of live praying-machine, not essentially different from the Tibet praying-machines, which they work, as travelers tell us, by hand or by water-power, for private or public worship, as the case may be. But Isaiah speaks of these conquerors as if they had no religion at all, but were mere atheists.

Squire. Not unnaturally, though a nineteenth-century philosopher like yourself may know better. But I am reminded of a curious parallel between the language in which Sennacherib describes his treatment of Merodach-Baladan, king of Babylon, and that of Isaiah as to the fashion of the conquest of one of Sennacherib’s predecessors. The Assyrian king says, “ All his broad country I swept like a mighty whirlwind. Over their cornfields I sowed thistles.” “ He himself — for the fury of my attack overwhelmed him — lost heart, and like a bird fled away alone, and his place of refuge could not be found.” And the Jewish prophet, I might almost say rejoins, though his words are a little earlier in date, “ For he saith, By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom ; for I am prudent: and I have removed the bounds of the people ; . . . and as one gathereth eggs that are left, have I gathered all the earth ; and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.”

Foster. Should you say that the Assyrians had much civilization, in an ordinary use of the word ?

Squire. Possibly as much as the Romans had before they conquered Greece. Like the Romans, they loved great public works; and the remains of their buildings amply confirm us in supposing that Sennacherib said truly, “ Of all the kings of former days, . . . though the central palace was too small to be their royal residence, none had the knowledge nor the wish to improve it. . . . Then I, Sennacherib, . . . by command of the gods resolved in my heart to complete this work.” From this and other passages it is evident that Sennacherib was what the Romans called a great ædile. Then the Assyrians kept historical Annals of the Empire, the truth of which is proved by their records of eclipses, which have been verified by modern astronomers.

Foster. But, granting without reserve that our Assyriologists have really recovered the language and read the inscriptions, are we bound to believe all they tell us of the poetry, religion, and literature of this ancient country as fluently as if they were giving us an account of modern China or Japan ?

Squire. Hafiz says that the leader of the caravan cannot be without information about the road and the customs of the wayside halting-places; and these learned men must know much more than we, and be able, as we are not, to look at things with eyes trained to use in twilight. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may a little overrate what has been in fact a very wonderful discovery, or series of discoveries. I confess that when reading in good modern English the Assyrian story of the Creation or the Deluge, I have felt a certain relief, a sense of having a bit of firm ground under my feet, when I have come to the statement that from here the tablets are missing, or some lines of the writing are so mutilated as to defy decipherment.

Foster. Like Sydney Smith’s admiration for Macaulay’s occasional flashes of silence. But I am sure you will be glad of more than a flash of silence after all this long talk.

Edward Strachey.