Archibald Sayce Quotes

In the early spring of 1859 I saw London for the first time. My father introduced me to all the chief sights of the metropolis, including, of course, the with its diving-bell, as well as the , which were closed shortly afterwards. I spent hours in the , more especially in the Egyptian and Assyrian rooms; the spell of the East became more potent than ever, and I still have a small note-book in which I endeavoured to copy the strange characters on one of the tablets in the glass cases.

During the last half-century a new world has been opened out before us by the excavators and decipherers of the ancient monuments of the East, the great civilisations of the past have risen up, as it were, from their grave, and we find ourselves face to face with the contemporaries of and , of Moses and of Abraham. Pages of history have been restored to us which had seemed lost for ever, and we are beginning to learn that the old empires of the Orient were in many respects as cultured and literary as is the world of to-day. The Old Testament has hitherto stood alone; the literature which existed by the side of it in the oriental world seemed to have perished, and if we would test and verify, illustrate or explain its statements, we had nothing to fall back upon except a few scattered fragments of doubtful value, which had come to us through Jewish and Christian apologists, or the misleading myths and fables of Greek writers. The books of the Old Testament Scriptures could be explained and interpreted only through themselves; they were what the logicians would call “a single instance”; there was nothing similar with which they could be compared, no contemporaneous record which could throw light on the facts they contained.

... In the literary age of Greece and Rome the ancient religions of Babylonia and Egypt had passed into their dotage, and the conceptions on which they were founded had been transformed or forgotten. What was left of them was little more than an empty and unintelligible husk, or even a mere caricature. The gods, in whose name the kings of had gone forth to conquer, and in whose honour had reared the temples and palaces of Babylon, had degenerated into the patrons of a system of magic; the priests, who had once made and unmade the lords of the East, had become “Chaldæan” fortune-tellers, and the religion and science of Babylonia were remembered only for their connection with astrology. The old tradition had survived in Egypt with less apparent alteration, but even there the continuity of religious belief and teaching was more apparent than real, external rather than internal; and though the ... and early s rebuilt the temples on the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted in the dress of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods whose very names they could not have pronounced, it was all felt to be but a sham, a dressing up, as it were, in the clothes of a religion out of which all the spirit and life had fled.

The nearer a language is to its primary centre, the less alteration we are likely to find in it. Now of all the Aryan dialects, Sanskrit and Zend may, on the whole, be considered to have changed the least.

... The Hittites were a very real power. Not very many centuries before the age of they had contested the empire of Western Asia with the Egyptians, and though their power had waned in the days of they were still formidable enemies and useful allies. They were still worthy of comparison with the divided kingdom of Egypt, and infinitely more powerful than that of .
But we hear no more about them in the subsequent records of the Old Testament. The age of Hittite supremacy belongs to an earlier date than the rise of the monarchy in Israel; earlier, we may even say, than the Israelitish conquest of .