BY THE Rev. A. H. SAYCE PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY, OXFORD PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE GENERAL LITERATURE COMMITTEE SECOND EDITION—REVISED LONDON SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C.; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. Brighton: 129, North Street New York : E. S. GORHAM 1908 Richard Clay & Sons, Limited , BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK....

The first six chapters which follow, embody the Rhind Lectures in Archæology which I delivered at Edinburgh in October 1906. The seventh chapter appeared as an article in the Contemporary Review for August 1905, and is here reprinted by the courtesy of the Editor to whom I render my thanks. The book is the first attempt to deal with what I would call the archæology of cuneiform decipherment, and like all pioneering work consequently claims the indulgence of the reader. For the sake of clearness

The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was the archæological romance of the nineteenth century. There was no Rosetta stone to offer a clue to their meaning; the very names of the Assyrian kings and of the gods they worshipped had been lost and forgotten; and the characters themselves were but conventional groups of wedges, not pictures of objects and ideas like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The decipherment started with the guess of a classical scholar who knew no Oriental languages and had

The modern science of archæology has been derisively called “the study of pots.” As a matter of fact, the study of ancient pottery occupies a prominent place in it, and we cannot turn over the pages of a standard archæological work without constantly coming across photographs and illustrations of the ceramic art or reading descriptions of vases and bowls, of coloured ware and fragmentary sherds. Questions of date and origin are made to turn on the presence or absence of some particular form of p

Among the first results of the decipherment of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions was one which was so unexpected and revolutionary, that it was received with incredulity and employed to pour discredit on the fact of the decipherment itself. European scholars had long been nursing the comfortable belief that the white race primarily, and the natives of Europe secondarily, were ipso facto superior to the rest of mankind, and that to them belonged of right the origin and development of civilizati

In dealing with the question of origins, science is constantly confronted with the problem of unity or polygeneity. Has language one origin or many; are the various races of mankind traceable to one ancestor or to several? Do the older civilizations presuppose the same primeval starting-point, or were there independent centres of culture which grew up unknown to one another in different parts of the world? Under the influences of theology the belief long prevailed that they were all sprung from

A very few years ago Palestine was still archæologically an unknown land. Its history subsequent to the Israelitish conquest could be gathered from the Old Testament, and Egyptian papyri of the age of the Nineteenth dynasty had told us something about its condition immediately prior to that event. Thanks to the Palestine Exploration Fund, the country had been carefully surveyed, and the monuments still existing on its surface had been noted and registered. But the earlier history of the people,

If it has been a surprise to learn that Palestine was once within the circle of Babylonian culture, it has been equally a surprise to learn that Asia Minor was so too. It is true that Herodotus traced the Herakleid dynasty of Lydian kings to the gods of Nineveh and Babylon, that Strabo knew of a “mound of Semiramis” in Cappadocia, and that in the Book of Genesis Lud is called the son of Shem. But historians had long agreed that all such beliefs were creations of a later day, and rested on no sub

It is now nearly twenty years ago since the archæological world was startled, not to say revolutionized, by the discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt. Nor was it the archæological world only which the discovery affected. The historian and the theologian have equally had to modify and forsake their old ideas and assumptions, and the criticism of the Old Testament writings has entered upon a new and altogether unexpected stage. The archæologist, the historian and the B