Our factual knowledge of Mesopotamian civilisation is mostly due to the labours of the present century. Professor Grotefend of Bonn, in 1801–1803, discovered the clue to the Persian cuneiform,[659] cuneatic or arrow-headed character. This great step in advance opened the labyrinth to a host of minor explorers—Heeren (1815), Burnouf (1836), Lassen (1836–44), Hincks, who attacked the Assyrian cuneiform, and, to mention no more, Rawlinson, whose ‘Reading made Easy’ popularised the study in England. Actual exploration of the Mesopotamian ruins was begun by the learned Consul Botta (Dec. 1842) who, after failing at Koyunjik opposite Mosul, worked successfully at Khorsabad, some ten miles to the north-east: four years afterwards (Dec. 1846) the first collection of Assyrian antiquities reached the Louvre. He was followed (Nov. 8, 1845) by Mr. (now Sir) H. A. Layard, who unfortunately was not an Orientalist: his various discoveries of a stamped-clay literature, and his popular publications, introduced to the public Koyunjik and Kal’at Ninawi (Nineveh), Hillah (Babylon), Warká, Sippara (Abu Nabbah) sixteen miles south-west of Baghdad, and a variety of Biblical sites.
This ‘recovery’ of antiquities buried twenty centuries ago, and a whole literature of bas-reliefs, enables us to compare the Nile Valley, the cradle and mother-country of science and art, with its rival-successor on the Tigris-Euphrates. The original workmanship of Assyria, like that of Egypt, is still unknown; and, though she borrowed from Nile-land, her art is rather a decadence than a rise. The difference, indeed, is between the porphyries, the granites, and the syenites of Egypt, and the mud-bricks, the coarse black marbles, the rough basalts, and the undurable alabasters (a calcareous carbonate) of Interamnian Assyria. But the industrious valley-men made the best of their poor material. The ruins show the true Egyptian arch; the so-called Ionic capital, the original volutes being goats’ horns;[660] the Caryatides and Atlantes, or human figures acting columns; the cornice, corbel, and bracket; with a host of architectural embellishments to fill up plain fields. Apparently all migrated from Nile-land. Such were the winged circle, the lotus,[661] the fir-cone, and the rosette: the latter, also found by Dr. Schliemann at ‘Troy’ (p. 160), became the _rosa mystica_ of Byzantine art, and was used by Christians to denote their origin. Again, we have the key-pattern, which is Trojan and Chinese as well as Greek; the honeysuckle, a symbol of the Homa or Assyrian ‘Tree of Life’;[662] the guilloche-scroll or wave-pattern; and the meander, also miscalled the Tuscan border: the latter is common in Egypt and Cyprus, and possibly derives from the Hittite Svasti, erroneously called Svastika.[663] Assyria equally excelled in literature,[664] in painting, in sculpture, in the minor arts, and in metallurgy. She made transparent glass: a crystal lens[665] found at Nineveh accounts for the diminutive size of some inscriptions. Her sons worked enamel, and thus adorned the humble brick: like their Egyptian teachers, they were skilful in ivory-carving, in cutting cylinders of jasper and _pietra dura_, and in gem-engraving on carnelian, onyx, sardonyx, amethyst, agate, chalcedony, and lapis lazuli.