ASSUR AND NINEVEH. 17D 
(2) On p. 161 Dr. Pinches speaks of the flat timbered roofs of the 
buildings ascribed to Shalmaneser II. It would seem that so 
late as the eighth century B.C. (and perhaps later) gabled roofs 
were unknown among those oriental nations of the Euphrates- 
Tigris region. This point is interesting as tending to confirm the 
surmise of Professor Ridgeway that the Celtic nations have to be 
accredited with the invention of the latter structure, through 
utilising horizontal branches of trees to support their tent-coverings 
in the primeval forests. 
(3) It is very instructive to learn that the haughty Sennacherib, 
the mighty conqueror and destroyer of cities and small states, hada 
better side to his nature as a ruler and as a benefactor of his own 
people, though the hard and stern side of his character, in his 
attempt to crush Hezekiah, appears only in Holy Writ. We too 
often perhaps overlook the more humane side of the later Nebuchad- 
nezzar shown in what he did for the later Babylon by way of founding 
a royal college and a system of competitive examinations for the 
more efficient training of higher civil servants, as recorded in 
Daniel i; a system which Cyrus (“ God’s Shepherd”) seems to have 
continued and improved upon under the régime of the Medes and 
Persians. All this goes to show progress in the humanisation of 
those heathen peoples, and that the great monarchies of antiquity 
were really far from being mere phases of tyranny and bloodshed, as 
the evidence of the monuments and the unsupplemented records of 
the Old Testament may lead us to suppose. 
(4) Intensely interesting to anthropologists is the information 
which is now given to us of the advanced working in bronze in the 
days of Sennacherib, and Dr. Pinches informs me that artefacts in 
copper and bronze (if not iron) can be traced back in those ancient 
Babylonian lands, to at least 3000 B.c.* Have we not here a clue to 
the mixed race that is incidentally mentioned (Tubal Cain in 
particular) in Gen. iv, 16-23, as having sprung from Cain and a 
pre-Adamic woman ? 
The later Hallstadt and La Tene ages (Harly and Late Celtic) 
in Europe seem to have been anticipated in Sumerian lands by at 
* This is a greater antiquity moreover than is assigned to the Minoan 
Period (“ Bronze Age”) of Crete. See Howes, Crete the Forerunner of 
Greece (1909). 
