Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/53

 THE HISTORY OF CHALD.EA AND ASSYRIA. 33 We have, yet to visit more than one famous country. In our voyage across the plains where antique civilization was sketched out and started on its long- journey to maturity, we shall, whenever we cross the frontiers of a new people, begin by turning our attention for a space to their inscriptions ; and wherever we are met by those characters which are found in their oldest shapes in the texts from Lower Chaldsea, there we shall surely find plastic forms and motives whose primitive types are to be traced in the remains of Chaldsean art. A man's writing will often tell us where o his early days were passed and under what masters his youthful intellect received the bent that only death can take away. 5. 77/f History of Chaldcea and Assyria. WE cannot here attempt even to epitomize the history of those great empires that succeeded one another in Mesopotamia down to the period of the Persian conquest. Until quite lately their history was hardly more than a tissue of tales and legends behind which it was difficult to catch a glimpse of the few seriously attested facts, of the few people who were more than shadows, and of the dynasties whose sequence could be established. The foreground was taken up by fabulous creatures like Minus and Semiramis, compounded by the lively imagination of the Greeks of features taken from several of the building and conquering sovereigns of Babylon and Nineveh. So, in the case of Egypt, was forged the image of that great Sesostris who looms so large in o o o o the pages of the Greek historians and combines many Pharaohs of the chief Theban dynasties in his own person. The romantic tales of Ctesias were united by Rollin and his emulators with other statements of perhaps still more doubtful value. The book of Daniel was freely drawn upon, and yet it is certain that it was not written until the year which saw the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. The book of Daniel is polemical, not historical ; the Babylon in which its scene is laid is a Babylon of the hypothesis has been lately started, and an attempt made to affiliate the Cypriot syllabary to the as yet little understood hieroglyphic system of the Hittites. See a paper by Professor A. H. SAYCE, A Forgotten Empire in Asia Minor, in No. 608 of Eraser's Magazine. F