hing so much as random flights of arrow-heads. The resemblance
is so striking that this is sometimes called the arrow-head character,
though it is more generally known as the wedge or cuneiform character.
The inscriptions on the flanks of the lions are, however, only makeshift
books. But the veritable books are no farther away than the next room
beyond the hall of Asurnazirpal. They occupy part of a series of cases
placed down the centre of this room. Perhaps it is not too much to speak
of this collection as the most extraordinary set of documents of all the
rare treasures of the British Museum, for it includes not books alone,
but public and private letters, business announcements, marriage
contracts--in a word, all the species of written records that enter into
the every-day life of an intelligent and cultured community.

But by what miracle have such documents been preserved through all these
centuries? A glance makes the secret evident. It is simply a case of
time-defying materials. Each one of these Assyrian documents appears to
be, and in reality is, nothing more or less than an inscribed fragment
of brick, having much the color and texture of a weathered terra-cotta
tile of modern manufacture. These slabs are usually oval or oblong in
shape, and from two or three to six or eight inches in length and
an inch or so in thickness. Each of them was originally a portion of
brick-clay, on which the scribe indented the flights of arrowheads
with some sharp-cornered instrument, after which the document was made
permanent by baking. They are somewhat fragile, of course, as all bricks
are, and many of them have been more or less crumbled in the destruction
of the palace at Nineveh; but to the ravages of mere time they are as
nearly invulnerable as almost anything in nature. Hence it is that these
records of a remote civilization have been preserved to us, while the
similar records of such later civilizations as the Grecian have utterly
perished, much as the flint implements of the cave-dweller come to
us 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 w