DISCO VEKIES IN MESOPOTAMIA. 539 



There the f urioiLs beasts fasten their teeth in the chariot spokes or writhe 

 wounded upon the ground. Especially to be noted is a relief of a dying 

 lioness, whose perfectly realistic character has made it famous in the 

 history of art. On the floor of the lion apartment and of the adjoin- 

 ing rooms lay in thick layers fragments of the royal library, a collec- 

 tion of tablet l)ooks and documents once arranged in the upper rooms, 

 but which at the collapse fell through, crushed into thousands of large 

 and small pieces. Baked clay tablets of all sizes, inscribed on both 

 sides with fine Assyrian cuneiform characters, which, after being freed 

 from dirt and dust can be as distinctly read as if they were but yes- 

 terday impressed into the soft clay, constituted this unique royal library. 

 As if presaging the approaching collapse of the Assyrian Empire, 

 Sardanapalus ordered that the most important books and documents 

 from all the libraries in Babylonia should be collected, copied, some 

 even in duplicate, and incorporated in his own library. Thus through 

 the library of Sardanapalus there came to us a great part of the older, 

 and indeed of the most ancient, works of Babylonian literature, and, 

 as might be expected, only the most important works were consid- 

 ered worthy of admission into the royal library. It contained histor- 

 ical works with information as to the relations, now peaceful, more 

 often warlike, of Assyria with its mother country. Babylonia; chro- 

 nological lists accurately fixing the reigns of all those ancient kings, 

 Shalmaneser, Tiglathpileser, Sardanapalus, and for a long period 

 recording the most important event of each year; penitential psalms 

 and hj'uins of praise, epics and myths that reveal the religious thought 

 as well as the poetical endowment of the Babj^lonian people; large 

 grammatico-lexicographical works that for many decades to come will 

 be an inexhaustible mine for Semitic philologj^; astronomical, astro- 

 logical, and magical tablets, the original works from which the wise 

 men of the East^the Babylonian Magi — drew their learning which 

 they afterwards spread over Greece and Rome; in addition a multi- 

 tude of letters addressed to the great king of Assyria from the kings 

 of Elam, from the generals abroad in hostile lands, from the court 

 astronomers who report to the king the happenings in the starry 

 heavens, eclipses of the sun and moon, from the Magi, who, on the 

 basis of the flight of birds, or the entrails of sacrificial animals, advise 

 the royal majest}^ what to do and what to leave undone; letters from the 

 royal physicians, petitions and entreaties from captives; besides copies 

 of the letters and proclamations of the king himself. Four royal- 

 octavo volumes, with 1,952 pages, are required for the catalogue of the 

 thousands of clay tablets and prisms or fragments thus far transferred 

 from Nineveh to the British Museum. And what a mass of knowledge 

 and multitude of new points of view for religious and profane his- 

 tory, for linguistics and geography, for archeology in all its branches. 



