Assyrian literature in their original form, unglossed, unaltered, and
ungarbled, and in this respect Chaldean records are actually superior to
those of the Greeks, the Hebrews, or the Romans.

The literature of the Chaldeans is very varied in its forms. The hymns to
the gods form an important department, and were doubtless employed in
public worship. They are by no means lacking in sublimity of expression,
and while quite unmetrical they are proportioned and emphasized, like
Hebrew poetry, by means of parallelism. In other respects they resemble
the productions of Jewish psalmists, and yet they date as far back as the
third millennium before Christ. They seem to have been transcribed in the
shape in which we at present have them in the reign of Assurbanipal, who
was a great patron of letters, and in whose reign libraries were formed in
the principal cities. The Assyrian renaissance of the seventeenth century
B.C. witnessed great activity among scribes and book collectors: modern
scholars are deeply indebted to this golden age of letters in Babylonia
for many precious and imperishable monuments. It is, however, only within
recent years that these works of hoar antiquity have passed from the
secluded cell of the specialist and have come within reach of the general
reader, or even of the student of literature. For many centuries the
cuneiform writing was literally a dead letter to the learned world. The
clue to the understanding of this alphabet was originally discovered in
1850 by Colonel Rawlinson, and described by him in a paper read before the
Royal Society. Hence the knowledge of Assyrian literature is, so far as
Europe is concerned, scarcely more than half a century old.

Among the most valuable of historic records to be found among the
monuments of any nation are inscriptions, set up on public buildings, in
palaces, and in temples. The Greek and Latin inscriptions discovered at
various points on the shores of the Mediterranean have been of priceless