89 

THE ASSYRIAN GALLERIES AND SALOONS 
OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 
(ILLusTRATED By THE LANTERN.) 
By Rev. T. R. PICKERING. 28th November, 1905. 
Museums are often looked upon as dry and unpopular places, 
many of the objects there having passed through fire in the 
sacking and burning of old palaces, the views of them are apt to 
be a little monotonous, and could not be so pleasing as scenery 
or views of beautiful buildings or majestic ruins. These 
Assyrian Galleries and Saloons, however, were interesting as 
representing a civilization of a bygone age, and spoke of kings, 
whose names were familiar to us from childhood as the result of 
Assyria and Babylon coming into contact with Egypt and 
Palestine in Bible history. The great cities of Nineveh and 
Babylon have disappeared; the denunciations of the prophets 
that these cities would become a desolation, have been literally 
fulfilled. Nineveh, that ancient capital of fabulous splendour and 
magnitude, that wonderful assemblage of palaces and temples, 
surrounded by high and massive walls and ramparts, the ‘‘rejoic- 
ing city that dwelt carelessly,” that said in her heart, “I am, 
and there is none beside me,” had vanished, ‘‘swallowed up in 
time's abysses, scattered o’er a sandy plain.” 
The museums of Europe only showed a few fragments of pottery, 
terra cotta cylinders, and seals with undecipherable symbols, and 
inscribed slabs that no one could read. These were all that were 
known until seventy years ago. Then the explorers went to seek 
the grave of this long-buried city. Botta and Layard, and other 
excavators dug down into the sepulchre of the buried city, which 
had lain in its unknown grave 2,000 years, and threw off its 
shroud of sand, and revealed to an astonished and curious world 
her temples, palaces, and idols—the representations of war and 
the chase, the cruelties and luxuries of the ancient Assyrians. 
