Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/29

 descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers. Ker-Porter, Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and comprehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed stones of Persia and Media, Eugène Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes.

Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts and classified the monumental fragments which had travelled so far from the scene of their creation, we owe our power to describe, upon a sound basis and from authentic materials, the great civilisation which was developed in Western Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf. There were still many details which escaped us, but, through the shadows which every day helped to dissipate, the essential outlines and the leading masses began to be clearly distinguished, and the local distinctions which, in such a vast extent of country and so long a succession of empires, were caused by differences of race, of time, and of physical conditions, began to be appreciated. But, in spite of all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and Persepolis, presented so many points of striking similarity as to prove that the various peoples represented by those famous capitals all sprang from the same original stock. The elements of writing and of the arts are in each case identical. The alphabets were all formed upon the same cuneiform principle, notwithstanding the variety in the languages which they served. In the plastic arts, although the plans of their buildings vary in obedience to the requirements of different materials, their sculpture always betrays the same way of looking at living forms, the same conventions and the same motives. Every work fashioned by the hand of man which has been discovered within the boundaries given above, displays community of style and unity of origin and tradition.

The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that this ancient civilisation had sprung from two original sources, the one in the valley of the Nile, the other in