Assyria

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Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (italics).

Characters in small capitals were replaced as all capitals.

[Illustration: MONOLITH OF SHALMANESER II. (From the original in the British Museum.)]

By-Paths of Bible Knowledge. VII.

ASSYRIA ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE.

by

A. H. SAYCE, M.A.

Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology, Oxford, Hon. LL.D. Dublin, etc.

Author of 'Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments,' 'An Introduction to Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther,' etc.

London: The Religious Tract Society, 56, Paternoster Row, 65, St. Paul's Churchyard, and 164, Piccadilly. 1885.

CONTENTS. PAGE

List of Illustations 6

Preface 7

Chronological Table of the Kings of Assyria 17

Table of Biblical Dates according to Assyrian Monuments 19

I. The Country and People 21

II. Assyrian History 27

III. Assyrian Religion 55

IV. Art, Literature, and Science 86

V. Manners and Customs; Trade and Government 122

Appendix 146

Index 153

Index of Scripture References 166

ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE Monolith of Shalmaneser II. (from the original in the British Museum) Frontispiece

Assur-bani-pal and his Queen. (from the original in the British Museum) 49

Nergal. (from the original in the British Museum) 65

Fragment now in the British Museum showing primitive Hieroglyphics and Cuneiform Characters side by side. 93

An Assyrian Book. (from the original in the British Museum) 99

Part of an Assyrian Cylinder containing Hezekiah's Name. (from the original in the British Museum) 104

Assyrian King in his Chariot. 125

Siege of a City. 127

PREFACE.

Among the many wonderful achievements of the present century there is none more wonderful than the recovery and decipherment of the monuments of ancient Nineveh. For generations the great oppressing city had slept buried beneath the fragments of its own ruins, its history lost, its very site forgotten. Its name had passed into the region of myth even in the age of the classical writers of Greece and Rome; Ninos or Nineveh had become a hero-king about whom strange legends were told, and whose conquests were fabled to have extended from the Mediterranean to India. Little was known of the history of the mighty Assyrian Empire beyond what might be learnt from the Old Testament, and that little was involved in doubt and obscurity. Scholars wrote long treatises to reconcile the statements of Greek historians with those of Scripture, but they only succeeded in evolving theories which were contradicted and overthrown by the next writer. There was none so bold as to suggest that the history and life of Assyria were still lying hidden beneath the ground, ready to rise up and disclose their secrets at the touch of a magician's rod. The rod was the spade and the patient sagacity which deciphered and interpreted what the spade had found. It might have been thought that the cuneiform or wedge-shaped inscriptions of Assyria could never be forced to reveal their mysteries. The language in which they were written was unknown, and all clue to the meaning of the multitudinous characters that composed them had long been lost. No bilingual text came to the aid of the decipherer like the Rosetta Stone, whose Greek inscription had furnished the key to the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nevertheless the great feat was accomplished. Step by step the signification of the cuneiform characters and the words they concealed was made out, until it is now possible to translate an ordinary Assyrian text with as much ease and certainty as a page of the Old Testament.