Babylonian literature : lectures delivered at the Royal institution / by the Rev. A.H. Sayce.

  • Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry), 1845-1933.
Date:
[1877]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Babylonian literature : lectures delivered at the Royal institution / by the Rev. A.H. Sayce. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    been found to the inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar, when two very startling discoveries were made. The first was the existence of a library in ancient Nineveh, a library contained, indeed, not in books but on tablets of burnt clay; yet, nevertheless, a veritable library with works on all the various branches of learning and science that were known to the Assyrians. The other was the revelation of an ancient language, the very existence of which had been previously un- suspected, but which turns out to have been the language of the primitive Chaldeans, the builders of the great cities of Babylonia, the inventors of the cuneiform system of writing, and the originators of the art and civilisation of which the Assyrians were but the heirs and imitators. The language was agglutinative like that of the modern Finns or Turks, an earlier form, in fact, of the class of tongues to which the Susianian inscriptions belong, and it seems to have become extinct before the 17th century b.c. The monarchs who reigned during the preceding epoch call themselves kings of “ Sumir and Accad,” or of “the land of Accad,and since Sumir, the Shinar of the Bible, was the first part of the country occupied by the invading Semites, while Accad long continued to be regarded as the seat of an alien race, the language and population of primitive Chaldea have been named Accadian by the majority of Assyrian scholars. The part played by these Acca- dians in the intellectual history of mankind is highly important. They were the earliest civilisers of Western Asia, and it is to them that we have to trace the arts and sciences, the religious traditions.