Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

DURING 19tii CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 87
monument allowed Place and others gradually to restore it.
The Assyrian architecture, previously completely unknown,
appeared suddenly before us in all the details of a sumptuous
building, adorned with sculptures and paintings which
lead us back into the midst of Assyrian life during the
eighth pre-Christian century. We get acquainted with the
occupations of the king and his subjects, their customs, their
pleasures, their mode of living, their religion, their art,
and
part of their literature. With great astonishment, artists
and scholars began to realize how high a standard this people
in the East had reached at a time when Europe as a whole
was still in a state of barbarism. With extraordinary enthusiasm,
students of philology and history welcomed the
enormous mass of authentic material, which, in the hands of
Rawlinson, Hincks, and Oppert, was soon to shed a flood
of new light upon the person and reign and language of that
great warrior, Sargon, so far known only by name from a
statement in Isaiah (20 : i ), and upon the whole history and
geography of Western Asia shrouded in darkness, and which,
by its
constant references to names and events mentioned in
the Bible, was eagerly called upon as an unexpected witness
to test the truthfulness of the Holy Scriptures. There have
been made other and even greater discoveries in Assyrian
and Babylonian ruins since Botta's far-reaching exploration
of the mounds of Khorsabad, but there never has been
aroused again such a deep and general interest in the excavation
of distant Oriental sites as towards the middle of
the last century, when Sargon's palace rose suddenly out
of the ground, and furnished the first faithful picture of a
great epoch of art which had vanished completely from
human sight.