ORIENTAL ARCH/EOLOGY 



When one reads Moses or Isaiah, Homer, Hesiod, or 

 Herodotus, he is but following the transcription 

 often unquestionably faulty and probably never in 

 all parts perfect of successive copyists of later gen- 

 erations. The oldest known copy of the Bible, for 

 example, dates probably from the fourth century A.D., 

 a thousand years or more after the last Assyrian 

 records were made and read and buried and for- 

 gotten. 



There was at least one king of Assyria namely, 

 Asurbanipal, whose palace boasted a library of some 

 ten thousand volumes a library, if you please, in 

 which the books were numbered and shelved system- 

 atically, and classified and cared for by an official 

 librarian. If you would see some of the documents of 

 this marvellous library you have but to step past the 

 winged lions of Asurnazirpal and enter the Assyrian 

 hall just around the corner from the Rosetta Stone. 

 Indeed, the great slabs of stone from which the lions 

 themselves are carved are in a sense books, inasmuch 

 as there are written records inscribed on their surface. 

 A glance reveals the strange characters in which these 

 records are written, graven neatly in straight lines 

 across the stone, and looking to casual inspection like 

 nothing so much as random flights of arrow-heads. 

 The resemblance is so striking that this is sometimes 

 called the arrow-head character, though it is more 

 generally known as the wedge or cuneiform character. 

 The inscriptions on the flanks of the lions are, however, 

 only makeshift books. But the veritable books are 

 no farther away than the next room beyond the hall of 

 Asurnazirpal. They occupy part of a series of cases 



rot. nr.ao 295 



