A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



necromantic enough without conjuring for them a 

 necromantic future. The story of their restoration is 

 like a brilliant romance of history. Prior to the middle 

 of this century the inquiring student could learn in an 

 hour or so all that was known in fact and in fable of the 

 renowned city of Nineveh. He had but to read a few 

 chapters of the Bible and a few pages of Diodorus to 

 exhaust the important literature on the subject. If he 

 turned also to the pages of Herodotus and Xenophon, 

 of Justin and ^Elian, these served chiefly to confirm the 

 suspicion that the Greeks themselves knew almost 

 nothing more of the history of their famed Oriental 

 forerunners. The current fables told of a first King 

 Ninus and his wonderful queen Semiramis ; of Sennach- 

 erib the conqueror; of the effeminate Sardanapalus, 

 who neglected the warlike ways of his ancestors but 

 perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh itself, in 

 a self-imposed holocaust. And that was all. How 

 much of this was history, how much myth, no man 

 could say; and for all any one suspected to the con- 

 trary, no man could ever know. And to-day the con- 

 temporary records of the city are before us in such pro- 

 fusion as no other nation of antiquity, save Egypt 

 alone, can at all rival. Whole libraries of Assyrian 

 books are at hand that were written in the seventh 

 century before our era. These, be it understood, are 

 the original books themselves, not copies. The author 

 of that remote time appeals to us directly, hand to eye, 

 without intermediary transcriber. And there is not a 

 line of any Hebrew or Greek manuscript of a like age 

 that has been preserved to us ; there is little enough that 

 can match these ancient books by a thousand years. 



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