nd it was consequently the general
belief, before any Assyrian inscriptions had been disinterred, that the
Assyrian language was of this type, either a sister tongue to the three
above mentioned, or else identical with some one of them. The only
difficulty in the way of this theory was the supposed Medo-Persic or
Arian character of a certain number of Assyrian royal names; but this
difficulty was thought to be sufficiently met by a suggestion that the
ruling tribe might have been of Median descent, and have maintained its
own national appellatives, while the mass of the population belonged to
a different race. Recent discoveries have shown that this last
suggestion was needless, as the difficulty which it was intended to meet
does not exist. The Assyrian names which either _history_ or the
monuments have handed down to us are Semitic, and not Arian. It is only
among the fabulous accounts of the Assyrian Empire put forth by Ctesias
that Arian names, such as Xerxes, Arius, Armamithres, Mithraus, etc.,
are to be found.

Together with the true names of the Assyrian kings, the mounds of
Mesopotamia have yielded up a mass of documents in the Assyrian
language, from which it is possible that we may one day acquire as full
a knowledge of its structure and vocabulary as we possess at present of
Greek or Latin. These documents have confirmed the previous belief that
the tongue is Semitic. They consist, in the first place, of long
inscriptions upon the slabs of stone with which the walls of palaces
were panelled, sometimes occupying the stone to the exclusion of any
sculpture, sometimes carried across the dress of figures, always
carefully cut, and generally in good preservation. Next in importance to
these memorials are the hollow cylinders, or, more strictly speaking,
hexagonal or octagonal prisms, made in extremely fine and thin terra
cotta, which the Assyrian kings used to deposit at the corners of
temples, inscribed with an account of their chief acts and with
numerous religious invocations. [PLATE XXXIX., Fig. 1.] These cylinders
vary from a foot and a half to three feet in height, and are covered
closely with a small writing, which it often requires a good magnifying
glass to decipher. A cylinder of Tiglath-Pileser I. (about B.C. 1180)
contains thirty lines in a space of six inches, or five lines to an
inch, which is nearly as close as the type of the present volume. This
degree of closeness is exceeded on a cylinder of Ass