ORIENTAL ARCH/EOLOGY 



did not suspect that he looked upon the site of that 

 city which only two centuries before had been the 

 mistress of the world. 



So ephemeral is fame! And yet the moral scarcely 

 holds in the sequel ; for we of to-day, in this new, un- 

 dreamed-of Western world, behold these mementos 

 of Assyrian greatness fresh from their twenty -five 

 hundred years of entombment, and with them records 

 which restore to us the history of that long-forgotten 

 people in such detail as it was not known to any pre- 

 vious generation since the fall of Nineveh. For two 

 thousand five hundred years no one saw these treasures 

 or knew that they existed. One hundred generations 

 of men came and went without once pronouncing the 

 name of kings Shalmaneser or Asurnazirpal or Asur- 

 banipal. And to-day, after these centuries of oblivion, 

 these names are restored to history, and, thanks to 

 the character of their monuments, are assured a per- 

 manency of fame that can almost defy time itself. It 

 would be nothing strange, but rather in keeping with 

 their previous mutations of fortune, if the names of 

 Asurnazirpal and Asurbanipal should be familiar as 

 household words to future generations that have for- 

 gotten the existence of an Alexander, a Caesar, and a 

 Napoleon. For when Macaulay's prospective New- 

 Zealander explores the ruins of the British Museum 

 the records of the ancient Assyrians will presumably 

 still be there unscathed, to tell their story as they 

 have told it to our generation, though every manu- 

 script and printed book may have gone the way of 

 fragile textures. 



But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite 



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