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Updated: June 14, 2025
This library has always attracted the attention of Assyriologists, and the best preserved of its texts have been published at various times under the supervision of Sir Henry RAWLINSON and George SMITH. These texts have been translated into English, French, and German, and much discussed by the scholars of all three nations.
Among the multitude of documents of various kinds, this narrative of Hasisadra's adventure has been found in a tolerably complete state. But Assyriologists agree that it is only a copy of a much more ancient work; and there are weighty reasons for believing that the story of Hasisadra's flood was well known in Mesopotamia before the year 2000 B.C.
It may never, perhaps, be possible to make out a complete list, or one which shall not be obnoxious to criticism on other grounds; moreover, the historian of art has no need to enter into any such discussion, or to give the details of a nomenclature as to which Assyriologists themselves have many doubts.
Even before they could decipher their meaning Assyriologists had compared, from the palæographic point of view, the different varieties of the written character known as cuneiform a character which lent itself for some two thousand years, to the notation of the five or six successive languages, at least, in which the inhabitants of Western Asia expressed their thoughts.
Far below the palace of Xerxes he has found vastly earlier remains. There is the column set up, if we can believe the Assyriologists who trust the chronology of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, and it is not incredible, three thousand eight hundred years before Christ, by Naram-Sin, a Babylonian king, to commemorate one of his raids into the land of what were perhaps his stronger enemies.
Assyriologists have classed them as well as they could from the more or less archaic characters of their language and writing, from the elements of which the proper names are composed, and from the relationships which some of the texts show to have existed between one prince and another but they are still far from establishing a continuous series such as those that have been arranged for the Pharaohs even of the Ancient Empire.
Nabonidos, the last king of the later Babylonian empire, who had a fancy for antiquarian exploration, tells us that Naram-Sin reigned 3200 years before his own time, and therefore about 3750 B.C. The date, startlingly early as it seems to be, is indirectly confirmed by other evidence, and Assyriologists consequently have come to accept it as approximately correct.
Hence it results that Assyriologists often feel no little embarrassment when they are asked to point out upon the monuments the figures even of those gods of whose names they are the least doubtful. The Assyrians and Chaldæans, like other nations of antiquity, had what we should now call their figured mythology, but we are still imperfectly acquainted with it.
This is not the proper place to discuss such a question, but, whatever view we may take of it, it seems that the researches of Assyriologists have led to the following conclusion: That primitive Chaldæa received and retained various ethnic elements upon its fertile soil; that those elements in time became fused together, and that, even in the beginning, the diversities that distinguished them one from another were less marked than a literal acceptance of the tenth chapter of Genesis might lead us to believe.
After the Egyptologists of the school of De Rouge thought they had demonstrated that the familiar symbols of the Phoenician alphabet had been copied from that modified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics known as the hieratic writing, the Assyriologists came forward to prove that certain characters of the Babylonian syllabary also show a likeness to the alphabetical characters that seemingly could not be due to chance.
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