The Historians' History of the World 01 [Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia]

Naturally, the stock of material bearing upon this topic has been constantly increased by new explorations, notably by those of Oppert at Nineveh, and of De Sarzec at Telloh, by which the French Government has supplemented the early collections of the pioneer of the work, Botta; by various German exploring companies; and, more recently, by the American exploring expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, under Dr. John P. Peters, which secured such important results at Nippur. But the greatest repository of all still remains that which Layard and his assistant and successor in the work, Rassam, followed by George Smith, secured for the British Museum. The other collections afford important sidelights; but the main story of Assyrian life and history, as at present known to us, is told only by the books from the wonderful library of the palace of Asshurbanapal at Nineveh; and these can be studied only in the British Museum, or in the publications which the workers of that institution have from time to time given to the world.

After glancing at these documents for the first time, none but a heedless person can fail to have brought home to him a more vivid picture of the life of antiquity, and a truer historical perspective than he can previously have possessed. For more than two thousand years Greek culture has dominated the world, and it has been the custom to speak of the Greek as if he were the veritable inventor of art and of culture; but these documents have led to a truer view. Here one looks back, as it were, over the heads of the Greeks, and catches glimpses of a people that possessed a high civilisation when the Greeks were still an upstart nation, only working their way out of barbarism.

Now it appears to be nothing less than a law of nature that every nation should look with contempt upon every other nation which it regards as contemporary. With a highly artistic people, whose chief pride is their artistic taste, this feeling reaches its climax. The Greek attitude in this regard is proverbial. But it is just as fixed a law of nature that every nation should look with reverence upon some elder civilisation. The Romans adopted the Greek word “barbarian,” and applied it to all other nations—except the Greeks. The Greeks did not return the compliment. For them the Romans were parvenus—parvenus to be looked on with hatred and contempt. I doubt not the Athenian child gave the deadliest possible insult to his playfellow when he called him a Roman; just as the Parisian child of to-day reserves the appellation “anglais” as the bitterest anathema of his vocabulary. But when the Greek turned his eyes in the other direction, and looked out upon Egyptian and Babylonian civilisation, he was gazing into the past, and his contempt changed to reverence, precisely as with the Frenchman of to-day, who looks back with reverence upon the civilisation of ancient Greece and Rome, while utterly contemning all phases of the nineteenth-century civilisation save his own.

It was gladly admitted by the Greeks that these oriental civilisations had flowered while Greek culture was yet in the bud. Solon, the law-giver, was reported to have travelled in Egypt, and to have been mildly patronised by the Egyptian priests as the representative of an infant race. Herodotus, though ostensibly writing of the Persian war, devotes whole sections of his history to Egypt, and accepts, as did his countrymen, the Egyptian claims to immense antiquity without a scruple. Plato even resided for some years in Egypt, as Diodorus tells us, in the hope of gaining an insight into the mysteries of oriental philosophy.

Regarding the Assyrio-Babylonians, apparently hardly any story was too fanciful to gain a measure of credence with the classical world. Herodotus, to be sure, only credits the Assyrians with ruling for five hundred and twenty years before the overthrow of Nineveh; and Diodorus, following Ctesias, raises the figure only to about one thousand four hundred years. But these figures were probably based on a vague comprehension that Assyria proper had a relatively late period of flowering, as was, indeed, the fact; and the rumours regarding the age of Babylonian civilisation as a whole may be best illustrated by recalling that Cicero thought it necessary to express his scepticism regarding a claim, seemingly prevalent in his time, that Babylonian monuments preserve astronomical observations dating back over a period of two hundred and seventy thousand years. Pliny, on the other hand, quoting “Epigenes, a writer of first-rate authority,” claims for the astronomical records only a period of seven hundred and twenty years, noting also that Berosus and Critodemus still further limit the period to four hundred and eighty years. But the very range of numbers shows how utterly vague were the notions involved; and Pliny himself draws the inference of “the eternal use of letters” among the Babylonians, indicating that even the minimum period took the matter beyond the range of western history.