ledge that had been
forgotten for more than two millenniums. Yet the Victorian era was
scarcely ushered in before the work of rehabilitation began, which was
to lead to the most astounding discoveries and to an altogether
unprecedented extension of historical knowledge. Early in the 'forties
the Frenchman Botta, quickly followed by Sir Henry Layard, began making
excavations on the site of ancient Nineveh, the name and fame of which
were a tradition having scarcely more than mythical status. The spade of
the discoverer soon showed that all the fabled glories of the ancient
Assyrian capital were founded on realities, and evidence was afforded of
a state of civilization and culture such as few men supposed to have
existed on the earth before the Golden Age of Greece. Not merely were
artistic sculptures and bas-reliefs found that demonstrated a high
development of artistic genius, but great libraries were soon
revealed,--books consisting of bricks of various sizes, or of cylinders
of the same material, inscribed while in the state of clay with curious
characters which became indelible when baking transformed the clay into
brick. No one was able to guess, even in the vaguest way, the exact
interpretation of these odd characters; but, on the other hand, no one
could doubt that they constituted a system of writing, and that the
piles of inscribed tablets were veritable books. There were numerous
sceptics, however, who did not hesitate to assert that the import of the
message so obviously locked in these curious inscriptions must for ever
remain an absolute mystery. Here, it was said, were inscriptions written
in an unknown character and in a language that for at least two thousand
years had been absolutely forgotten. In such circumstances nothing less
than a miracle could enable human ingenuity to fathom the secret. Yet
the feat pronounced impossible by mid-century scepticism was
accomplished by contemporary scholarship, amidst the clamour of
opposition and incredulity. Its success contains at once a warning to
those doubters who are always crying out that we have reached the
limitations of knowledge, and an encouragement and stimulus to would-be
explorers of new intellectual realms.

In a few words the manner of the discovery was this. It appears at a
glance that the Assyrian written character consists of groups of
horizontal, vertical or oblique strokes. The characters thus composed,
though so simple as to their basal unit,