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JUNE, 1922]
NEW LIGHT FROM WESTERN ASIA
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education ; a self-educated man, what did he know about the classics, much less about their interpretation? The Trojan War had been proved to be a solar myth; how then could be have discovered the city of Priam and established the historical credibility of the Iliad ?
It was worse when his enthusiasm led him to excavate Mykenae and find there the tombs of the royal heroes for whom he was looking, filled as they were with gold and other treasures which displayed the features of a hitherto unknown art. Some scholars maintained that they were Byzantine ; there were others who were equally assured that they were Gothic loot. That they could not be what their discoverer maintained they were, was agreed on all sides; Homer had been shown to be a medley of late date, and Agamemnon and his colleagues were creatures of myth.
I was one of the first advocates of Schliemann's beliefs, and an article of mine in The Academy brought me his acquaintance and friendship. It was not long before discoveries similar to those at Mykenae and Tiryns were announced from other parts of the old Greek world : little by little the opposition to the conclusions to be drawn from them died away. and it came to be admitted on all sides that the spade had disproved the confident convictions of scholarship, had revealed to us the prehistoric past of Greece, and had shown that the old traditions were founded on historic truth. It was the first blow delivered against the historical scepticism of the middle of the nineteenth century.
As an excavator Schliemann had to seek his evidence in the material objects which he diginterred. How to interpret this evidence had already been made clear by the prehistoric students of northern and western Europe. Among the material objects, the most important part was played by the pottery. Pottery is indestructible except by the hand of man; it is the most common of objects wherever civilised or semi-civilised man has existed, and the potter is almost as much subject to the dictates of fashion as the milliner. Successive periods of history can thus be traced through varying styles of pottery, as well as the relations of various forms of culture one to another.
Now a new excavator appeared upon the scene in the person of Mr. Flinders Petrie, and the scene of his work was no longer the ancient Greek world, but Egypt. Under him the study and classification of pottery became an elaborate branch of science, and brought with it the scientific study and arrangement of other objects of social life. Upper Egypt is a land where nothing perishes except by the hand of man; where the relics of early civilisation seem hardly to grow old, and where accordingly it is easier than elsewhere to unravel their history and arrange them in chronological order. The archaeological science of to-day is largely the creation of Petrie and his followers in the lands of the Nile..
Meanwhile Assyriology had overcome opposition and suspicion, and had forced the older Semitic scholars to accept its statements and conclusions. Even Germany had at last yielded; the enthusiasm of the Swiss scholar Schrader silenced all opposition, and a Chair of Assyriology was established for him at Berlin. But Assyriology itself had widened its domain. It was no longer only the Semitic language of Assyria and Babylonia and the Iranian language of ancient Persia, which the cuneiform scholar was called upon to decipher; the cuneiform soript had once extended over the greater part of Western Asia and had been used by the various languages that were spoken there. It was discovered that AssyroBabylonian had been the pupil and heir of an earlier culture and an earlier language which was agglutinative, but unlike any other known form of speech. The earlier Assyriologists called it Akkadian ; we now know that its name was Sumerian, the language of Sumer,
