value in determining certain questions of philology, as well as in
throwing new light on the events of history. Many secrets of language have
been revealed, many perplexities of history disentangled, by the words
engraven on stone or metal, which the scholar discovers amid the dust of
ruined temples, or on the _cippus_ of a tomb. The form of one Greek
letter, perhaps even its existence, would never have been guessed but for
its discovery in an inscription. If inscriptions are of the highest
critical importance and historic interest, in languages which are
represented by a voluminous and familiar literature, how much more
precious must they be when they record what happened in the remotest dawn
of history, surviving among the ruins of a vast empire whose people have
vanished from the face of the earth?

Hence the cuneiform inscriptions are of the utmost interest and value, and
present the greatest possible attractions to the curious and intelligent
reader. They record the deeds and conquests of mighty kings, the Napoleons
and Hannibals of primeval time. They throw a vivid light on the splendid
sculptures of Nineveh; they give a new interest to the pictures and
carvings that describe the building of cities, the marching to war, the
battle, by sea and land, of great monarchs whose horse and foot were as
multitudinous as the locusts that in Eastern literature are compared to
them. Lovers of the Bible will find in the Assyrian inscriptions many
confirmations of Scripture history, as well as many parallels to the
account of the primitive world in Genesis, and none can give even a
cursory glance at these famous remains without feeling his mental horizon
widened. We are carried by this writing on the walls of Assyrian towns far
beyond the little world of the recent centuries; we pass, as almost
modern, the day when Julius Cæsar struggled in the surf of Kent against
the painted savages of Britain. Nay, the birth of Romulus and Remus is a
recent event in comparison with records of incidents in Assyrian national