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

22 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
Assyrian and Babylonian exploration had come to an end.
Merchants and adventurers, missionaries and scholars had
equally contributed their share to awakening Western Europe
from its long lethargy by again vividly directing the
attention of the learned and religious classes to the two great
centres of civilization in the ancient East. The ruins of
Nineveh, on the upper course of the Tigris, had been less
frequently visited and less accurately described than those
of Babylon on the lower Euphrates. The reason is very
evident. The glory of the great Assyrian metropolis vanished
more quickly and completely from human sight, and
its ruins lay further from the great caravan road on which
the early travellers proceeded to Baghdad, the famous city of
Harun-ar-Rashid, then a principal centre for the exchange
of the products of Asia and Europe. But the ascertained
results of the observations and efforts of many, and in particular
the better equipped missionaries and scholars of the
eighteenth century, were the rediscovery and almost definite
fixing of the actual sites of Nineveh and Babylon, which,
forgotten by Europe, had seemed to lie under a doom of
eternal silence, — the Divine response to the curses of the
oppressed nations and of the Old Testament prophets.
II
EXPLORING AND SURVEYING IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
The close of the eighteenth and the dawn of the nineteenth
centuries witnessed a feverish activity in the workshops
of a small but steadily growing number of European
scholars. The continuous reports by different travellers
of the imposing ruins of Persepolis, the occasional reproduction
of sculptures and inscriptions from the walls and
pillars of its palaces, the careful sifting and critical editing