ORIENTAL ARCH/EOLOGY 



unchanged, while the iron implements of a far more 

 recent age have crumbled away. 



HOW THE RECORDS WERE READ 



After all, then, granted the choice of materials, there 

 is nothing so very extraordinary in the mere fact of 

 preservation of these ancient records. To be sure, it 

 is vastly to the credit of nineteenth-century enterprise 

 to have searched them out and brought them back to 

 light. But the real marvel in connection with them is 

 the fact that nineteenth-century scholarship should 

 have given us, not the material documents themselves, 

 but a knowledge of their actual contents. The flight 

 of arrow-heads on wall or slab or tiny brick have surely 

 a meaning; but how shall we guess that meaning? 

 These must be words; but what words? The hiero- 

 glyphics of the Egyptians were mysterious enough in 

 all conscience; yet, after all, their symbols have a cer- 

 tain suggestiveness, whereas there is nothing that 

 seems to promise a mental leverage in the unbroken 

 succession of these cuneiform dashes. Yet the Assyr- 

 ian scholar of to-day can interpret these strange rec- 

 ords almost as readily and as surely as the classical 

 scholar interprets a Greek manuscript. And this 

 evidences one of the greatest triumphs of nineteenth- 

 century scholarship, for within almost two thousand 

 rs no man has lived, prior to our century, to whom 

 these strange inscriptions would not have been as 

 meaningless as they are to the most casual stroller 

 who looks on them with vague wonderment here in 

 the museum to-day. For the Assyrian language, like 

 the Egyptian, was veritably a dead language; not, 



297 



