Ancient Assyrian Knowledge
By Christian at Work
The pyramids—and notably Cheops—have shown us that the Egyptians knew a thing or two about astronomy, and the further investigation is pursued the more evident it becomes that if knowledge lingered, yet the ancients had the inquiring mind peculiar to human nature to-day, and indeed in nothing are the ravages of time more clearly set forth than in the scant information which meets us as we attempt to learn how far the ancients were advanced in knowledge. Thus, to Galileo is given the credit of the discovery of the telescope, but it is by no means certain that he was the first discoverer, and the contrary is pretty clearly set forth by the discoveries of the cuneiform inscriptions at Nineveh, which reveal the fact that the ancient Assyrians were acquainted with the existence of spots on the sun, which they could only have known by the aid of telescopes. These it is supposed they possessed. Mr. Layard found a crystalline lens in the ruins of Nineveh. The Assyrian Cyclopædia, printed on bricks, was an exhaustive work. The inscriptions on the bricks disclosed the facts that houses and lands were sold, leased, and mortgaged, that money was loaned at interest, and that the market gardeners, to use an American phrase, “worked on shares;” that the farmer, when plowing with his oxen, beguiled his labor with short and homely songs, two of which have been found; and connecting this very remote civilization of 2000 B. C. with the usages of to-day, dispose the reader to fall back upon the exclamation of Solomon, that “there is nothing new under the sun.”—Christian at Work.