led 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 did not suspect that he looked upon the site
of that city which only two centuries before had been the mistress of
the world.

So ephemeral is fame! And yet the moral scarcely holds in the sequel;
for we of to-day, in this new, undreamed-of Western world, behold these
mementos of Assyrian greatness fresh from their twenty-five hundred
years of entombment, and with them records which restore to us the
history of that long-forgotten people in such detail as it was not known
to any previous generation since the fall of Nineveh. For two thousand
five hundred years no one saw these treasures or knew that they existed.
One hundred generations of men came and went without once pronouncing
the name of kings Shalmaneser or Asumazirpal or Asurbanipal. And to-day,
after these centuries of oblivion, these names are restored to
history, and, thanks to the character of their monuments, are assured a
permanency of fame that can almost defy time itself. It would be nothing
strange, but rather in keeping with their previous mutations of fortune,
if the names of Asurnazirpal and Asurbanipal should be familiar as
household words to future generations that have forgotten the existence
of an Alexander, a Caesar, and a Napoleon. For when Macaulay's
prospective New Zealander explores the ruins of the British Museum
the records of the ancient Assyrians will presumably still be there
unscathed, to tell their story as they have told it to our generation,
though every manuscript and printed book may have gone the way of
fragile textures.

But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite 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 turne