d also to
the pages of Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and Aelian, 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 Sennacherib 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 contrary, no man could ever know.
And to-day the contemporary records of the city are before us in such
profusion 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. When one reads Moses or
Isaiah, Homer, Hesiod, or Herodotus, he is but following the
transcription--often unquestionably faulty and probably never in all
parts perfect--of successive copyists of later generations. The oldest
known copy of the Bible, for example, dates probably from the fourth
century A.D., a thousand years or more after the last Assyrian records
were made and read and buried and forgotten.

There was at least one king of Assyria--namely, Asurbanipal, whose
palace boasted a library of some ten thousand volumes--a library, if you
please, in which the books were numbered and shelved systematically, and
classified and cared for by an official librarian. If you would see some
of the documents of this marvellous library you have but to step past
the winged lions of Asurnazirpal and enter the Assyrian hall just around
the corner from the Rosetta Stone. Indeed, the great slabs of stone from
which the lions themselves are carved are in a sense books, inasmuch as
there are written records inscribed on their surface. A glance reveals
the strange characters in which these records are written, graven neatly
in straight lines across the stone, and looking to casual inspection
like not