Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era — Sir Austen Henry Layard, Part 3

Or would you learn how Egypt ruled its subject territory?

You can read the correspondence of a dozen local Egyptian governors in Palestine and Syria in the century before Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt.

There is the letter of the King of Jerusalem, where Melchizedek reigned in the times of Abraham; and they tell of rebellions against the fading power of Egypt, and of the fear of the advancing Hittites.

The earliest kings, those that built the pyramids, appear before us real in their personality, emerging out of misty legend or myth, and, earlier still, even the prehistoric races that antedated the very beginning of civilization.

Whence came that first dynasty?

Who invented writing?

Were they autochthons?

Hardly.

These are questions left for further explorers to answer.

Probably those first messengers of civilization came from the East, perhaps from Arabia, perhaps from Babylonia, or perhaps the first Babylonians and Egyptians formed a common stock somewhere near the mouth of the Euphrates.

Perhaps the Bible is right in saying that the first seat of civilized man was in Eden, and that the Euphrates was the chief river of Paradise.

Or was it from Arabia, the immemorial home of the Semitic tribes, that land of sand and mountain and fertile valley, land of changeless culture and tradition, so near the centres of civilization, and yet still the most inaccessible, the least known portion of the inhabited earth,--was it from Arabia that the wiser, stronger multitude came that first overran the valleys of both the Nile and the Euphrates, bringing to Egypt and Chaldea arts and letters?

We do not know.

Some future explorer must teach us.

But the German Glaser has within these few years brought back from hazardous journeys a multitude of inscriptions that tell of kingdoms that fringed its southern coast and extended we know not how far into the interior in those early days when one of the queens of Sheba brought presents to Solomon, and when, earlier still, we are told there were dukes of Edom before there was any king in Israel.

They say that a railroad is to be built to Mecca; Arabia is not to be always a closed land, neighbor as it is to Egypt.

We shall know one of these days whether, as scholars suspect, out of Arabia and across the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, where, at the southern end of the Red Sea, Africa almost touches Asia, there came that mighty flood of more forceful men, bred in the deserts and hills, who, passing down the Nile, first brought history to Egypt; and whether it was this same Semitic people, as scholars suspect again, that spread resistlessly eastward to the Euphrates valley, and did an equal service in conquering and assimilating the black aborigines of these swamps and lagoons.

The spade will tell us.

Or was it still further east, in the highlands of Persia, that men first learned how to write and record history?

We cannot go back so far in the history of Babylonia--Professor Hilprecht dares to carry us seven thousand years before Christ--that we do not find its kings fighting against Elam.

And only in the last decade of the Nineteenth century the Frenchman De Morgan has made marvellous discoveries in the Elamite lands.

What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery!

For Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments and records that printing-presses have yet issued?

And from that time to this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, by special convention, the care of its monuments and their exploration to French savants?

And before Layard removed a basketful of the earth that covered the palace of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad; and in these late years is it not the Frenchman De Sarzec who has brought from Telloh to the Louvre the statues of Chaldean kings that lived almost five thousand years ago?

And so to France was given the right, for the honor and enrichment of the Louvre, to explore Persia; and De Morgan went to Susa, to Shushan, the palace of Xerxes and Darius, of Ahasuerus and Esther, in search of what was far earlier than they, for another Frenchman and his wife, M. and Mme.

Dieulafoy, had already excavated the noble palace of these Persian kings.

Far below the palace of Xerxes he has found vastly earlier remains.

There is the column set up, if we can believe the Assyriologists who trust the chronology of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon,--and it is not incredible,--three thousand eight hundred years before Christ, by Naram-Sin, a Babylonian king, to commemorate one of his raids into the land of what were perhaps his stronger enemies.

It is a noble composition, with archaic writing, and a stately figure of the king climbing the mountains and slaying his enemies; it shows an art that might well have developed into the best that Greece has produced.

But De Morgan has only begun to scratch the surface of the mounds of Elam, and a multitude of scholars believe that out of Elam came the first civilization of Chaldea.

We shall find out yet; for the record is in the earth, and only waits the man who will dig it out, and then the man who will read it.

We are tempted to go further east and recall that in India, the land where Alexander made his most distant conquests, a multitude of English scholars have been searching the ruins of old temples for the earliest memorials of the worship of Buddha.

Just now they have found his birthplace and precious relics.

But that takes us too far afield, and would tempt us to further excursions in Burmah and China.

We must come back to Western Asia and the shores of Europe.

As has been indicated, the greatest puzzle of ancient history is that of the Hittite empire, which seems to have ruled all Asia Minor at some uncertain time, and to have extended over Syria and Palestine.

No sooner had the greatest Egyptian kings, Thothmes and Rameses, ventured their armies into Asia, perhaps in vengeance on the incursions of Ionian pirates, perhaps in requital of the tyrannies of the hated Shepherd Kings, than they learned of the Hittites on the shores of the Euphrates.

Then, a century or two later, a mass of official correspondence sent by the Kings of Palestine and Syria, dug up in Egypt, reports that the Hittites had appeared as invaders from the north and beseeches military aid.

But the power of Egypt had waned, and the Hittites were supreme until the Assyrians began and carried on for five centuries the uncertain war which ended in the utter overthrow of the Hittites and all their allies in a great battle at Carchemish.

That great mound of Carchemish needs to be thoroughly explored.

Already an English expedition has very carelessly just opened the hill and exposed, but not fairly published, some few as fine friezes as are to be found in the Assyrian capitals, with unread Hittite inscriptions, and a fine statue of the Hittite Venus; but much remains to reward the student of Oriental history and art.

At Senjirli a German expedition under Von Luschan has done more and better work, handsomely published, but this was a smaller Syrian town, and less was to be expected; and yet here, and near by, were found what was not expected, steles (upright slabs or pillars) with the portraits of kings in high relief, covered over with long inscriptions in Aramaic, the oldest and longest as yet discovered anywhere in that language.

It was a magnificent result of very moderate labor,--Hittite friezes, Assyrian and Aramean inscriptions all in one little mound.

But for the most part we know the art and writing of the Hittites from what we have found above ground, in their towns and fortresses in the hills, for little digging has been done.

At Pterium was a principal sacred capital, and there, on a natural corridor of rock, they carved a procession of gods and kings and soldiers that excites the wonder of scholars.

As I write, the announcement comes that Professor Sayce has at last discovered the secret of the Hittite hieroglyphs, and we may hope that very soon it will be possible to read them.

But there is vastly more of their records yet to be disinterred.

And there remain the two lands most sacred and beloved in poetry and history,--the land of Israel and the land of Homer.

It is amazing that so little search has been made to find out what is hidden under the soil of Palestine.

Scholars in plenty have walked over the top of it, and have told all that is on the surface, but almost nothing has been done underground, no such excavations as in Egypt or Assyria.

I do not forget that the English Palestine Exploration Fund has followed out, with trenches and tunnels, the walls of Jerusalem, nor that one or two old mounds have been partly explored.

But what is this to the great work that needs to be done?

There has been found on the surface the Moabite Stone, at the old capital of Dibon, a wonderful record of early kings mentioned in the Bible.

And there is the short account in the rock-cut conduit of Siloam, of the success of the workmen in the time of Hezekiah, who, beginning at the two ends, did the fine engineering feat of having their tunnels meet correctly in the solid rock.

But when Jerusalem is fully explored, and the northern capitals of Bethel and Tirzah and Samaria, and a hundred other mounds that mark the site of Jewish, Israelite, Philistine, and Amorite cities, we may expect marvellous discoveries that will illumine our Holy Scriptures.

And one region yet remains to be considered, the scattered coasts and islands that owned the Greek speech, and that created the Greek civilization.

It is not the Greece of the Parthenon and Pericles that we wish to discover, for that we fairly know; but the arts and the history of those earlier Greeks and Trojans that Homer tells of, the age of Agamemnon and Ulysses, of Helen and Hector and Priam, and of the yet earlier tribes that sailed the Aegean, and settled the Mediterranean islands, and sent their ships to the Egyptian coasts, and sought golden fleeces on the Euxine Sea.

All about the coast of Asia Minor they lived, while that Hittite power was ruling the interior; and, intermixed with Phoenician trading-posts, they held the great islands of Crete and Cyprus and the shores of Sicily and Italy.

What shall we call them?

Were they Dorians, or Heraclidae, Achaeans or Pelasgi?

Were they of the same race as the mysterious Etruscans, or shall we name them simply Mycenaeans, as we call the art Mycenaean that ruled the islands and coasts down to the Homeric age, and we know not how many centuries earlier, but certainly as far back as the conquering period of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty of Thothmes?

Their soldiers and merchants and their fine vases are pictured on the walls of Egypt, and their pottery has long been studied; but we knew little of them until Dr. Schliemann, the Greek merchant who achieved wealth in the United States, bravely opened the great ruins of Troy, in the full patriotism of his assurance that Homer's story of the Trojan war was history as well as poetry.

As he found one burnt and buried city under another,--for many times was Troy destroyed,--and extended his investigations to Tiryns and other ancient cities, one volume of splendid research followed another, until the trader had compelled the unwilling scholar to confess that he must dig for both history and art.

To be sure, his interpretations were quite too literal at first, but the whole world of classical scholarship has learned from him the new method of research.

Splendid have been the results.

If we are not sure which stratum represents the city of Priam, we do learn how the people lived, and how fine was their work in silver and gold, and how slight their knowledge of letters.

Dr. Schliemann has now a multitude of imitators.

France and Germany and England and the United States each maintain a school of archaeology in Athens, and each conducts careful explorations.

Our American School lost to the French, for lack of money at the right time, the chance to explore Delphi, but it has carried on careful explorations at Corinth and other places.

How wonderful was the discovery, not long ago, of a shipload of bronze and marble statues wrecked while being transported as spoil of war from Corinth to Rome!

But the most surprising discoveries in the realm of old Greek history and art are those that have been made in these last two or three years in Crete.

Crete was a famous centre of ancient Greek legend.

Jupiter was born and reared on Mount Ida.

From another mountain summit in Crete the gods watched the battle on the plains of Troy.

There ruled Minos, who first gave laws to men, and who at his death was sent by the gods to judge the shades as they entered the lower world.

There was the famous Labyrinth, and there the Minotaur devoured his annual tale of maidens until he was slain by Theseus.

Was there such a real palace of Minos as the Greek poets sung?

The magnificent palace of the Cretan kings at Cnossus has been found, by Mr. Evans, with its friezes, its spiral ornaments, its flounce-petticoated women, its treasuries, and its tablets written in a script so old that it cannot yet be read, but which will be read as surely as scholarship leaves none of its riddles unsolved.

The childhood of Greece, its mighty infancy, out of which it grew to be the creator and the example of all the world's culture, is even now being exposed to our view, safely kept to be recovered by the scholars of our generation.

Of interest rather to the student of the curiosities of history are the mounds and pyramids and temples built by the aborigines of America; for these tribes have had absolutely no part in creating our dominant civilization or developing its art.

China and Japan are, at this late day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility; but the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers, the Mayas and Toltecs and Incas, have given absolutely nothing which the world cared to accept.

But this does not argue that it is not worth while to learn what we can of the rude civilization of the races whom we have displaced.

Their arrowheads and hatchets are in every little museum.

Their mounds, sometimes shaped like serpents or tortoises or lizards, are scattered over all the central States, and many of them have been carefully explored with scanty results.

The cliff-dwellers have left somewhat richer remains, more baskets and parched corn, yet nothing of artistic value.

We have to go to Mexico and Yucatan and further south to Peru, to find the majestic capitals of the Mayas and Incas, who had really reached a fair degree of such civilization as stone and copper, without iron, and the beginnings of picture symbols, without letters, could provide.

Humboldt and Stephens, and Lord Kingsborough, and Squier, and Tchudi, and Charnay have made explorations and found vast and wonderful cities, some of them deserted and overgrown before Cortez and Pizarro took possession of the lands for Spain and enslaved the people.

Where the city of Mexico now stands was a famous capital, from whose ruins were taken the great Calendar stone and the double statue of the god of war and the god of death.

In Palenque and Uxmal, capitals of Yucatan, were immense palaces and temples, with the weird ornamentation of Mayan imagination; and equal wonders exist in the high uplands where the Incas ruled Peru.

Even their barbaric art and their unrecorded history must be recovered, to satisfy the curiosity of the more fortunate races whose boasted Christianity visited on them nothing better than cruel slaughter.

At least we can give them museums and publish magnificent pictures of their ruins.

So we may bless the ashes and sand that seemed to destroy and bury the monuments of the mighty empires of the ancient world, but which have kindly covered and preserved them, just as we put our treasures away in some safety-vault while absent on a long journey.

The fire burned the upper wooden walls of the city, and it fell in ruins, but under those ruins, covered by that ashes, were preserved for two thousand, three thousand, five thousand years uninjured, the choicest sculpture and the most precious records of ancient nations,--retained beyond the reach of vandal hands, until scholarship had grown wise enough to ask questions of forgotten history, and had sent Layard and Schliemann and De Sarzec and Evans and a hundred other men to dig with their competitive spades.

But in all the long list of enthusiasts not one deserves a higher honor or has reaped a richer harvest than Sir Henry Layard.

AUTHORITIES.

Layard: "Early Adventures;" "Nineveh and its Remains;" "Nineveh and Babylon;" "Monuments of Nineveh."

Botta: "Monument de Ninive."

Loftus: "Chaldea and Susiana."

Y.

Place: "Ninive et Assyrie."

Hilprecht: "Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania;" "Recent Research in Bible Lands."

Perrot and Chipiez: "History of Art in Antiquity."

J.

P.

Peters: "Nippur."

R.

W.

Rogers: "History of Babylonia and Assyria."

F.

Lenormant: "Students' Manual of the Ancient History of the East;" "The Beginnings of History."

Maspero: "Dawn of Civilization;"

"Struggle of the Nations;" "Passing of the Empires;" "Egyptian Archaeology;" "Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria."

C. J.

Ball: "Light from the East."

Egypt Exploration Fund's Publications.

F.

J.

Bliss: "Exploration in Jerusalem;" "A Mound of Many Cities."

Schliemann: "Troy and its Remains;" "Ilios;" "Mycenae;" "Tiryns;" "Troja."

A.

J.

Evans: "Cnossus;" "Cretan Pictographs."

Tsountas and Manatt: "The Mycenaean Age."

MICHAEL FARADAY.