The Royal Library at Nineveh 1

Abstract

OUR readers who are in the position of being able to recall the “discovery” of Nineveh, which was announced between the years 1845 and 1854, will have no difficulty in remembering that the exhuming of colossal bulls and bas-reliefs from the site of the palace of the great kings of Nineveh was almost contemporaneous with the discovery of the means whereby the wedge-shaped characters, which were found cut upon them in long, symmetrical lines, could be read and understood. It was a coincidence of the most remarkable kind that the excavations at Nineveh yielded at that time such a large mass of new material for Rawlinson, Norris and Hincks to work upon, and it may be safely said that the correct information concerning Bible history which they succeeded in producing from it convinced the general public of the trustworthiness of Rawlinson's system of decipherment more effectually than his epoch-making translation of the inscription of Darius the Great, which was cut on the face of the now famous rock of Behistun, would ever have done. The bulls and colossal figures and bas-reliefs, which Sir Henry Layard drew out of their hiding places, appealed strongly to the popular imagination, which already at that time saw in them the prototypes of the mysterious figures that the prophets of the Hebrew god Yahwe saw in their visions, but for the scientific seeker after the knowledge of the long-lost cuneiform language they did little. It was soon recognised that the texts engraved upon them contained many duplicates, and also that they did little more than set forth, in stereotyped and vaunting phrases, the names and titles which the kings of the Second Assyrian Empire arrogated to themselves. But further examination of the smaller objects which were found in the ruins of the Assyrian palace at Nineveh resulted in the discovery of a large collection of “tiles,” as they were first called, made of baked clay, which were inscribed with texts written in cuneiform with minute characters, and this “find” is, for cuneiform decipherment, probably the greatest which has ever been made. An investigation of these minutely written texts showed that they consisted of lists of cuneiform signs arranged on a definite plan, of lists of words and phrases, and of connected narratives, which might well come under the general description of “literature”; in fact, the thousands of tablets and fragments of tablets which had been sent home, without the least idea of their value having entered into the heads of those who found them, turned out to be neither more nor less than the fundamental matter upon which the whole of the great superstructure of Assyriology has been built. We now know of a certainty that, at the close of the eighth century before Christ, Sargon, king of Assyria, possessed a few tablets, the contents of which concerned the business of his kingdom, and that he kept these in a chamber in his palace. It seems also that his two successors, Sennacherib (B.C. 705-B.C. 681) and Esarhaddon (B.C. 681-B.C. 668), added other tablets to Sargon's, and that we may also regard the united collections of these great kings as the nucleus of the Royal Library at Nineveh.