A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



Germany, and Dr. E. Wallis Budge, the present head 

 of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Brit- 

 ish Museum. But the task of later investigators has 

 been largely one of exhumation and translation of 

 records rather than of finding methods. 



TREASURES FROM NINEVEH 



The most casual wanderer in the British Museum 

 can hardly fail to notice two pairs of massive sculpt- 

 ures, in the one case winged bulls, in the other winged 

 lions, both human-headed, which guard the entrance 

 to the Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta Stone. Each 

 pair of these weird creatures once guarded an entrance 

 to the palace of a king in the famous city of Nineveh. 

 As one stands before them his mind is carried back 

 over some twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the 

 days when the "Cedar of Lebanon" was "fair in his 

 greatness " and the scourge of Israel. 



The very sculptures before us, for example, were per- 

 haps seen by Jonah when he made that famous voyage 

 to Nineveh some seven 'or eight hundred years B.C. 

 A little later the Babylonian and the Mede revolted 

 against Assyrian tyranny and descended upon the 

 fair city of Nineveh, and almost literally levelled it to 

 the ground. But these great sculptures, among other 

 things, escaped destruction, and at once hidden and 

 preserved by the accumulating debris of the centuries, 

 they stood there age after age, their very existence 

 quite forgotten. When Xenophon marched past their 

 site with the ill-starred expedition of the ten thousand, 

 in the year 400 B.C., he saw only a mound which seemed 

 to mark the site of some ancient ruin; but the Greek 



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