History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) eBook

Gaston Maspero
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 410 pages of information about History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12).

History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) eBook

Gaston Maspero
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 410 pages of information about History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12).
was maintained in activity.  Other tablets contain authentic copies of works which were looked upon as classics in the sanctuaries of the Euphrates.  Probably, when Babylon was sacked, Sennacherib had ordered the books which lay piled up in E-Sagilla and the other buildings of the city to be collected and carried away to Nineveh along with the statues and property of the gods.  They had been placed in the treasury, and there they remained until Esarhaddon re-established the kingdom of Karduniash, and Assur-bani-pal was forced to deliver up the statue of Marduk and restore to the sanctuaries, now rebuilt, all the wealth of which his grandfather had robbed them:  but before sending back the tablets, he ordered copies to be made of them, and his secretaries set to work to transcribe for his use such of these works as they considered worthy of reproduction.  The majority of them were treatises compiled by the most celebrated adepts in the sciences for which Chaldaea had been famous from time immemorial; they included collections of omens, celestial and terrestrial, in which the mystical meaning of each phenomenon and its influence on the destinies of the world was explained by examples borrowed from the Annals of world-renowned conquerors, such as Naramsin and Sargon of Agade; then there were formulae for exorcising evil spirits from the bodies of the possessed, and against phantoms, vampires, and ghosts, the recognised causes of all disease; prayers and psalms, which had to be repeated before the gods in order to obtain pardon for sin; and histories of divinities and kings from the time of the creation down to the latest date.  Among these latter were several versions of the epic of Grilgames, the story of Etana, of Adapa, and many others; and we may hope to possess all that the Assyrians knew of the old Chaldaean literature in the seventh century B.C., as soon as the excavators have unearthed from the mound at Kouyunjik all the tablets, complete or fragmentary, which still lie hidden there.  Even from the shreds of information which they have already yielded to us, we are able to piece together so varied a picture that we can readily imagine Assur-bani-pal to have been a learned and studious monarch, a patron of literature and antiquarian knowledge.  Very possibly he either read himself, or had read to him, many of the authors whose works found a place in his library:  the kings of Nineveh, like the Pharaohs, desired now and then to be amused by tales of the marvellous, and they were doubtless keenly alive to the delightful rhythm and beautiful language employed by the poets of the past in singing the praises of their divine or heroic ancestors.  But the mere fact that his palace contained the most important literary collection which the ancient East has so far bequeathed to us, in no way proves that Assur-bani-pal displayed a more pronounced taste for literature than his predecessors; it indicates merely the zeal and activity of his librarians, their intelligence,
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History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.