Indian Antiquary Vol 51

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 128

120
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(JONE, 1922
with the Ancient History of our immediate forefathers so far as Asia and Europe were concerned. Behind the classical age of Greece and Rome there was either thick darkness, or assertions and guesses which we now know to have been wide of the truth. Apart from what co#ld be gleaned from the pages of the Old Testament, (not unfrequently misinterpreted or misunderstood), nothing practically was known of the earlier history of Europe and Western Asia.
When I went to school light was beginning to dawn. Champollion had lifted the curtain which so long covered the script and records of Egypt, and the catlines of early Egyptian history were beginning to be sketched, while the ancient life of the Egyptians, their crafts and arts and theology, were being recovered from the painted walls of tombs and temples. The Persian cuneiform inscriptions had just been deciphered, and through them the inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia were at last revealing their secrets. Among my first recollections are the discoveries that were being made in Assyria and Babylonia, the bulls that Layard was sending from the ruins of Nineveh, the names of Sennacherib and Sargon that the decipherers were finding in the inscriptions, the new world of art and history that was being opened up on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. The story of it all had penetrated into the remotest country places, the daily papers were filled with accounts of what had been found, and the theological public, which was a large one in those days, was intensely interested in discoveries which explained or supplemented the familiar stories of the Bible.
Then came the reaction. The canons of a sceptical criticism were introduced from Germany and eagerly assimilated by our classical scholars. The Homeric Poems were dissected into small morsels, assigned to a late age, and denied all historical credence, while Niebuhr's rejection of early Roman history became a fashion. Sir George Cornewail Lewis proved to his own satisfaction and that of his readers that Roman history so-called, before the capture of the city by the Gauls, was entirely devoid of truth; Grote made it clear to an acquiescent world that Greek tradition was valueless and that we might as well look for history in the rainbow as in Greek myth and legend; and finally, the philological theory of mythology became the vogue, which derived a myth from a misunderstood word or phrase and resolved most of the figures of early legend into forms of the Sun-god. Except perhaps in Palestine and Egypt, it was assumed that writing for literary purposes was unknown to the ancient world until a few centuries before the Christian era, and that consequently, as there were no contemporaneous records, there could be no reliable history. Archæology still meant discussions about the age and authority of Greek statuary and the like ; scientific excavation, and examination of the materials found in the course of it, were left to the stu. dents of the prehistoric ages, more especially in Scandinavia. The application of the methods and results of the Scandinavian scholars to the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean was not dreamed of, or if dreamed of, dismissed as a dream. The old sites of the East were explored for the sake of the great monuments and smaller antiquities which they yielded and which were coveted by the Museums, as well as for the inscriptions which were to be discovered in them. That the history of the pre-Hellenic past could be recovered, except through the help of written records, had not as yet dawned upon the world of students. As for Assyriology, the Semitic scholars of Germany still regarded it as unworthy of their attention.
It was an outsider, Dr. Schliemann, who was the revolutionist, and it is needless to say that the first announcements of his work and discoveries were received with violent opposition, unbelief and contempt. He was not a Professor ; he had not even received a University