This list contains titles of works in The New York Public Library on November 1, 1917. The books and articles mentioned are in the Reference Department, in the Central Building of the Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. REPRINTED JUNE 1918 BULLETIN OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY PRINTED AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY form p-109 [vi-7-18 3e] AN INTRODUCTION TO A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ASSYRIAN AND BABYLONIAN LITERATURE HE stories of three discoveries made in connection with the ancient world TH match in their uniqueness any literary inventions of the human mind; the tale of Egyptian regeneration, the record of the Babylonian and Assyrian resurrection, and the chronicle of the refinding of Crete. For many years the first of these held sway over the interests and the imagination of students and readers. It was the earliest in the field, Champollion wrote his celebrated "Lettre à Monsieur S. Dacies" in 1822; and through the politics of Napoleon, Egypt had been brought prominently within the circle of European concern. It was the first glimpse had by the thoughtful world into a past beyond that of Greece and Palestine; and the novelty of it all stung to the quick the imagination of thoughtful readers as well as of students. The strange hieroglyphics had yielded up their secrets; the picture writing on the wall, on stone and wood, and on textile had been made responsive; the halo of the Nile had cast its spell over those that had approached it, and antiquarians reveled in the wealth of old things upturned. Upon the other hand, our knowledge of Cretan civilization is so new and so fragmentary that one hardly dare speak of it in the same breath with Egyptian and Babylonian affairs; but as Mr. Evans' confrères give out more and more of its sealed wisdom, an equally astonishing vista is opened to us of an old European civilization standing at the gateway that leads to the East and which may be either the pre- or the after-lude of that eastern world. Between the older interest in Egypt and the younger in Crete stands that in Babylonia and Assyria. The interest in these two countries had been upheld continuously because of frequent references to them in the Bible. Egypt had, it is true, a similar association; but apart from the sojourn there of the Children of Israel and their Exodus, references to that country in prophet, psalmist, and historian are few in number. On the other hand, the older part of the scene upon which the tragic history of the People of the Book was enacted, lay just in the country "between the two rivers." Paradise the earthly one-was situated there; and when one thought of the country one remembered the expulsion from that scene of idyllic delights, the first attempts of man to conform himself to the needs of a non-Paradise world, the early history of the Hebrews there, the many interests that in later time dragged the Assyrian plowshare over the ground of Palestine and finally the [1] settlement in that land of sufficient numbers of Jews so as to make long-lived settlements there. What had become of that country? Strange as it may seem, nearly every vestige of its once pulsating life had been covered up and hidden. Where were the great cities of Nineveh and Babylon? Where were their palaces, their streets, their dwelling places? The very talkative Xenophon who lived within a couple of hundred years of Nineveh's downfall - passed over where the city had been. He has absolutely nothing to say about it; he did not even notice the vestiges of a city there. The truth is that after the fall of the Assyrian empire, when the Scythian hordes, with a ruthlessness equaled only in the twentieth century, destroyed the cities and ruined the temples, the sand of the desert was piled up by the wind upon these ruins and completely covered their traces. Since 606 B. C. they had lain there waiting their earthly resurrection. But the same wind that had blown the sand upon these ruins was apt, also, to blow it off again. Travellers in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought back tales of walls uncovered here, of streets disclosed there. They told of strange characters which they could not read engraven upon rocks and bricks, and of buildings, the meanings of which passed their comprehension. To the more serious minded among them there was evidence on every hand of an advanced civilization; and some pokings into these ruins gave the clue to the nomad Arabs in the region to get bricks and household vessels from the many "tells" (mounds) that covered the whole district. But, while the topical study of this ancient habitat was going apace, the scholarly world was ashamed to confess that the inscriptions and writings to be seen upon the walls and upon the most varied objects remained unreadable. It was not until the nineteenth century that the erudite Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1802) discovered the key to a later product of this group that had been found in the ruins of Persepolis, capital of the ancient kingdom of Persia; and it was hoped that, working backwards, it might be possible to unravel the mysteries of the older Assyria and Babylonia. Such a hope was well justified, nor was it belied. The Persepolis inscriptions, quite evidently, were in three different languages, represented by three different kinds of one and the same script; the first was the language used by the old Persian builders of the palaces; the third was known, from a comparison with the inscriptions found in the ruins of Babylon, to be Babylonian; while the second has been called by various names, Median, "Scythian, Susian, Amardian, Elamitic, Anzanian and Neo-Susian." But, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a young English |