ASSYRIAN AND BABYLONIAN LIBRARIES.
It is only the older ones among us who are able to realize the profound change which the Oriental discoveries of the last half century have effected in our conceptions of the past history of civilized man. It is not so very long ago since culture in the modern sense of the word was re garded as taking its origin in the age which saw the rise of the literature of classical Greece.
The Oriental civilizations of an earlier date were hardly recognized as civilizations at all they were rather incarnations of brute force which was concentrated in the hands of a few.
A knowledge of the art of writing was grudg ingly granted to the Egyptian and the Assyrian, but the possession of a literature was denied them, and still more a literary culture of an ex tended character. The possession of a literature had indeed to be allowed to the Hebrews, but it was looked upon as a unique and extraordinary fact, which it was necessary to minimize as much as possible. Today all is changed, the East is yielding up its dead, and we are beginning to learn that the ancient Oriental world was; after all, not so very unlike our own.
We know now that Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria possessed a culture and civilization of a high order, before the first Greek writer com mitted his thoughts to papyrus or parchment, or even before any people in Europe had risen above the level of barbarism.
We can never return to the complacent belief that Europe was the cradle of civilization, and that culture is the monopoly of the nations of the West. Such a belief was the last echoes of those medimval doctrines which placed the earth in the center of the universe, and made man the sole object for which it had been created.
Astronomy and geology have not been more fatal to these doctrines than Oriental archaeology has been to the equally unfounded and equally vainglorious theory that culture and civilization have been confined to Greece and Rome, and above all to ourselves of the modern world.
(1) The Art of Writing. The art of writing is in the East immensely old, and it was an art in Egypt and Babylonia was not restricted to a special class. On the contrary, a knowledge of reading and writing was widely spread, and when we bear in mind the complicated nature of the system of writing employed in Egypt and Babylonia, and the enormous number of separate characters used in them, it is evident that educa tion was far advanced.
In Egypt the rocks are covered with scribbles by ordinary passengers up and down the Nile, by the captains and sailors of boats, by merchants and traders, and even by quarrymen and labor ers.
The cuneiform tablets found at Tel-el-Amarna prove that in the century before the Exodus, not only was the Babylonian language, and the Baby lonian script, studied and known throughout Western Asia, but that correspondence, sometimes upon the most trivial subjects, was constantly being carried on from one extremity of the civil ized East to the other. The epoch of Moses was as much a literary age in Egypt and Western Asia as the epoch of the Renaissance was in Europe.
(2) Libraries. A literary age implies the exist ence of libraries, and libraries, indeed, there were. In Babylonia the institution of public libraries went back to a remote period, and we know of private libraries in Egypt at a period almost equally remote.
One of the most famous of the Babylonian libraries had been established by Sargon of Ac cad, the founder of the first Semitic empire, who flourished as early as 380o B. C. (See SARGON.) It was for the library of Sargon that the standard works on astronomy, astrology, and terrestrial omens had been compiled, which re tnamed a sort of text-book to the astrologers and diviners of Babylon and Assyria down to the very last.
The astronomical treatises show that the phe nomena of the heavens had been long observed and noted; eclipses of the moon, and within certain limits of the sun also, could be calculated and foretold.