Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/20

 A History oi< Art in Ciialiu :a and Assyria. objects excited a kind of hopeless curiosity. They were some- times pointed out to the attention of scholars, as by Millin in his paper on the Cat //ou Michaux > a sort of Babylonian landmark that has belonged to the Cabinet des Antiques 1 in Paris ever since 1801. But no attempt was made to define the style of the school of art by which such things were produced, and not the faintest suspicion was felt of the influence exercised by Chaldaean pro- ductions over distant races whose genius for the plastic arts was universally acknowledged. A single writer, the historian Niebuhr, seems by a kind of intuition to have divined the dis- coveries at which a new generation was to assist, and to have anticipated their consequences. As early as the year 1829 he wrote, " When at Rome I heard from a Chaldaean priest who lives near the ruins of Nineveh, that colossi are there found buried under huge masses of building rubbish. When he was a child one of these statues was discovered by a mere acci- dent, but the Turks at once broke it up. Nineveh is destined to be a Pompeii for Western Asia. It will be an inexhaustible mine for those that come after us, perhaps even for our own children. The Assyrian language will also have its Cham- pollions. You who can do so should prepare the way by the study of Zend for the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions." 2 Here Niebuhr showed himself a true prophet, but he was denied the joy of seeing his prophecy fulfilled. He died in 1 83 1, and it was not till the 20th March, 1843, that the French consul at Mossoul sent his first batch of labourers to Khorsa- bad. The date better deserves to be remembered than that of many a battle or royal accession. His first reports to the Académie des Inscriptions were scientific events. 3 Funds were placed at his disposal, and a clever draughtsman, M. Flandin, 1 Millin, Monuments inédits, vol. i. plates 8 and 9. 2 Rheinisches Museum, 1829, p. 41. This passage will be found in a note appended by the illustrious historian to a paper by Ottfried Mûller, entitled Sandon und Sardanapal. 3 Traces of the excitement caused by these discoveries may be found in an article written by M. de Longperier in 1845, in which, before having seen the monuments, he points out the interest and importance of the discoveries with rare sagacity. The paper in question is entitled Ninive et Khorsabad. It has lately been reprinted in