Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/27

xvi Semitic Empires, events on which our cuneiform records have thrown new and important light. Considering that the existence of the old Babylonian. Empire was previously entirely unknown; that our knowledge of the Assyrian Empire hitherto depended altogether on a few passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, and some absurd legends collected by Herodotus and Ctesias; that the very existence of a second Babylonian Empire seems to have entirely escaped the knowledge of the Greeks, we are in a position to estimate the gain to the range of our historical information. The inscriptions have also shown the origin of many myths popular in ancient times; and of legends that even still enter into current theology. They have exhibited the Semitic people in the new light of a polytheistic race, and they have illustrated the important position filled by the Turanians at the dawn of civilisation.

It was only natural that the accuracy of many of these results should have been somewhat strenuously contested. M. Renan, for example, could not be induced to believe in the polytheism of the Semitic race, though the images of their gods began to crowd the Louvre in bewildering numbers. M. Halévy disputed the very existence of the Sumerian race and language, and the controversy he excited has not even yet wholly died away. Others cannot reconcile themselves to the subordinate position of the Semite to the Turanian in laying the foundations of all modern culture, and they still endeavour to show that the two races were at least contemporary workers from the earliest times, and contributed equally to the great result. All this is perhaps