Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/34

 14 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD/EA AND ASSYRIA. to improve its capabilities, and by the homestead he has reared at the border of his fields. In the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis we have an echo of the earliest traditions preserved by the Semitic race of their distant origin. " And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar ; and they dwelt there." 1 The land of SHINAR is the Hebrew name of what we call Chaldaea. There is no room for mistake. When the sacred writer wishes to tell us the origin of o human society, he transports us into Lower Mesopotamia. It is there that he causes the posterity of Noah to build the first great city, Babel, the prototype of the Babylon of history ; it is there that he tells us the confusion of tongues was accomplished, and that the common centre existed from which men spread themselves over the whole surface of the earth, to become different nations. The oldest cities known to the collector of these traditions were those of Chalckm, of the region bordering on the Persian Gulf. " And Cush begat Nimrod : he began to be a mighty one in the earth. " He was a mighty hunter before the Lord : wherefore it is said, ' Even as Nimrod, tlic mighty hunter before the Lord' " And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. " Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, "And Resen between Nineveh and Calah : the same is a great city." 2 These statements have been confirmed by the architectural and other remains found in Mesopotamia. Inscriptions from which fresh secrets are wrested clay by clay ; ruins of buildings whose dates are to be approximately divined from their plans, their structure, and their decorations ; statues, statuettes, bas-reliefs, and all the various debris ol a great civilization, when studied with the industrious ardour which distinguishes modern science, enable the critic to realise the vast antiquity of those Chaldsean cities, in which legend and history are so curiously mingled. Even before they could decipher their meaning Assyriologists had compared, from the palaeographic point of view, the different varieties of the written character known as cuneiform & character which lent itself for some two thousand years, to the notation of 1 Genesis x. 2. - Genesis x. 8-12.