562 



NA TURE 



[April ii, 1901 



own younger days, and the questions I wanted answered : they 

 were answered negatively as a rule, and those that were posi- 

 tively so never allowed me to reconcile them with the facts 

 around me, and I have since learned that they were mostly 

 perversions of the truth, designed to secure a theological end. 

 Little wonder I ceased to think by the time I got to school, and 

 it is a matter of surprise to me that the examination system 

 which followed did not convert a state of abeyance into one of 

 absolute destruction. 



There is no need to " make " thinking men ; they are born 

 to us if we will but retain, develop and strengthen the qualities 

 that every healthy average child possesses. But to do this we 

 want, above all else, thoughtful, intelligent and well-informed 

 women who, as mothers, will recognise their duties to the State 

 and will endeavour to retain and train the natural qualities, 

 physical and intellectual alike, of the children that are to be- 

 come the nation's men and women. The old style of domestic 

 wife and mother — an uninteresting, mechanical drudge or a 

 gaudy doll — may have been good enough for our forefathers, 

 but for us it means loss of national time and energy whicli, if 

 utilised, can be converted into factors capable of retaining 

 the supreme position that we are fast losing. Granting that the 

 results of a mother's pernicious training can be remedied in later 

 life, it is obviously waste of valuable energy, time and money to 

 organise an elaborate system of education to undo that which 

 ought never to have been done. And, therefore, I urge that 

 our national progress depends very largely upon " the hand that 

 rocks the cradle " : if it rocks that with an intelligent purpose, 

 it will be well with our future men ; if not, then England, 

 like Tyre, Venice and Rome, "whose greatnesses it has in- 

 herited," " must be led, through prouder eminence, to less pitied 

 destruction." G. R Mudge. 



THE ROYAL LIBRARY AT NINEVEH> 



OUR readers who are in the position of being able 

 to recall the " discovery " of Nineveh, which was 

 announced between the years 1845 and 1854, will have 

 no difficulty in remembering that the exhuming of 

 colossal bulls and bas-reliefs from the site of the palace 

 of the great kings of Nineveh was almost contemporaneous 

 with the discovery of the means whereby the wedge- 

 shaped characters, which were found cut upon them in 

 long, symmetrical lines, could be read and understood. 

 It was a coincidence of the most remarkable kind that the 

 excavations at Nineveh yielded at that time such a large 

 mass of new material for Rawlinson, Norris and Hincks 

 to work upon, and it may be safely said that the correct 

 information concerning Bible history which they suc- 

 ceeded in producing from it convinced the general public 

 of the trustworthiness of Rawlinson's system of decipher- 

 ment more effectually than his epoch-making translation 

 of the inscription of Darius the Great, which was cut on 

 the face of the now famous rock of Behistun, would ever 

 have done. The bulls and colossal figures and bas- 

 reliefs, which Sir Henry Layard drew out of their hiding 

 places, appealed strongly to the popular imagination, 

 which already at that time saw in them the prototypes 

 of the mysterious figures that the prophets of the 

 Hebrew god Yahwe saw in their visions, but for the 

 scientific seeker after the knowledge of the long-lost 

 cuneiform language they did little. It was soon recog- 

 nised that the texts engraved upon them contained many 

 duplicates, and also that they did little more than set 

 forth, in stereotyped and vaunting phrases, the names 

 and titles which the kings of the Second Assyrian Empire 

 arrogated to themselves. But further examination of the 

 smaller objects which were found in the ruins of the 

 Assyrian palace at Nineveh resulted in the discovery of 

 a large collection of " tiles," as they were first called, 

 made of baked clay, which were inscribed with texts 

 written in cuneiform with minute characters, and this 

 "find" is, for cuneiform decipherment, probably the 



1 " Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Konyunjik Collection of 

 the British Museum." By C. Bezold. 5 vols. Printed by order of the 

 Trustees. (London, 1889-1900.) 



NO. I 64 I. VOL, 63] 



greatest which has ever been made. An investigation 

 of these minutely written texts showed that they consisted 

 of lists of cuneiform signs arranged on a definite plan, 

 of lists of words and phrases, and of connected narratives, 

 which might well come under the general description of 

 "literature" ; in fact, the thousands of tablets and frag- 

 ments of tablets which had been sent home, without the 

 least idea of their value having entered into the heads of 

 those who found them, turned out to be neither more nor 

 less than the fundamental matter upon which the whole 

 of the great superstructure of Assyriology has been built. 

 We now know of a certainty that, at the close of the 

 eighth century before Christ, Sargon, king of Assyria, 

 possessed a few tablets, the contents of which concerned 

 the business of his kingdom, and that he kept these in 

 a chamber in his palace. It seems also that his two 

 successors, Sennacherib (B.C. 705-B.c. 681) and Esar- 

 haddon (B.C. 681 -B.C. 668), added other tablets to 

 Sargon's, and that we may also regard the united collec- 

 tions of these great kings as the nucleus of the Royal 

 Library at Nineveh. 



The great literary king of Assyria was, however, 

 Ashurbanipal, and it is to him that the world is in- 

 debted for whatever knowledge of the Assyrian and 

 Sumerian language it possesses. This mighty hunter 

 and warrior found time to take an interest in the welfare 

 of the literature of his country, and he spared neither 

 pains nor expense in the formation of his library and in 

 making it to contain a truly representative collection of 

 tablets. His interest was twofold, for he was anxious 

 to preserve both the best works written in his own native 

 Semitic language and those which had come down in a 

 more or less fragmentary condition from the Sumerians, 

 a mighty people who seem to have given to the Semitic 

 inhabitants of Mesopotamia nearly all that they ever 

 possessed in the way of literature. With this object in 

 view he had copies of many of the great Sumerian 

 literary compositions made, and to these he attached 

 translations in Assyrian, arranged interlinearly, a fact 

 which seems to indicate that the knowledge of Sumerian 

 was disappearing from among his people when he began 

 to reign. Literary compositions were, however, not the 

 sole objects of his care, for he collected the materials 

 necessary for learning and teaching both the Assyrian 

 and Sumerian languages, and evidences of this are the 

 important remains of the syllabaries, sign-lists, vocabu- 

 laries, &c., compiled by his orders, which are now among 

 the most precious possessions of cur National Museum. 

 Wherever rumour declared that a valuable document 

 existed he sent scribes and messengers to take a copy, 

 or copies, of it, and the accuracy of such copies is attested 

 by the fact that defective or illegible words or passages 

 in the archetype were generally indicated as such in the 

 copy or copies made for Ashurbanipal. 



The above preliminary remarks are sufficient to indicate 

 the value of the thousands of baked clay tablets and 

 fragments which were found at Nineveh ; but it has for 

 many years' past been a problem of some magnitude to 

 Assyriologists how best to make use of the mass of 

 material which exists. It is manifestly impossible for 

 every student of cuneiform to possess the time and means 

 necessary for examining and copying texts from thousands 

 of tablets, and besides, few students are sufficiently skilled 

 in reading cuneiform from tablets to make it worth their 

 while to devote months to the work. 



The late Sir Henry Rawlinson made a noble attempt 

 to lay before Assyriologists the best of the texts in his 

 monumental publication entitled " The Cuneiform In- 

 scriptions of Western Asia," but this work, after all, only 

 contains a selection of the texts available, and at the time 

 of publication no scholar possessed the knowledge 

 necessary for arranging and classifying the various 

 documents which existed among the remains of the works 

 of the Royal Library at Nineveh. It must not be imagined 



