But the letters themselves were carefully preserved in manuscript, in the libraries of Geneva, Zurich, Gotha, and Paris. From these sources Dr. Bretschneider of Gotha, Dr. Henry of Berlin, in his valuable biography of the Reformers, and Mr. Ruchat of Geneva, have published in the present century many important documents.

But a complete collection of all the letters of the great Reformer was left to Dr. Jules Bonnet, who promises thus to do the same labor of love for Calvin, which the late Dr. De Wette has so faithfully performed for Luther. Charged by the French government under Louis Philippe with a scientific mission of a more general nature, and sustained by distinguished scholars and admirers of the Reformer, Mr. Bonnet has devoted five years of study and research to this object, and succeeded in completing a collection which throws much light not only upon the life of Calvin, but also upon the whole history of the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century. Of the original Latin and French edition, the first two volumes have already appeared in Paris, containing the French letters of Calvin. Of the English edition, we have seen thus far only the first volume, which is to be followed by three others, and will embrace in the end at least six hundred letters. The translation has been ably and faithfully executed by Mr. Constable, under the superintendence of the excellent Dr. Cunningham, principal of the New college, of the Free church at Edinburgh. We need not add that such an important work is worthy of the hearty support of all friends of evangelical Protestantism.

ARTICLE VI.

TESTIMONY OF ASSYRIAN INSCRIPTIONS TO THE TRUTH OF SCRIPTURE.

By Rev. Thomas Laurie, formerly Missionary of the A. B. C. F. M. at Mosul.

STANDING On the highest part of Mosul, and looking across the Tigris, the eye rests on a long range of ancient mounds. At the southern end is the irregular platform on which stands the village of Nebby Yoonas, with its spacious mosque and populous cemetery. Towards the northern extremity rises the huge plateau of Kouyunjik, large enough to hold four such villages and still have room to spare. Its sides are too steep for direct ascent, but by following the narrow paths that wind obliquely upward, one can ride to the very top, where he will find a broad surface, cultivated from time immemorial, and rewarding the toil of the Fellah as richly as the plain below.

But this mound, though noted as containing the palace of ancient Nineveh, is only one of many. There are others at Khorsabad, twelve miles to the north; at Nimroud, twenty miles in the opposite direction, and at Kala Shergat, thirty miles further down on the opposite bank of the Tigris. The traveller finds them at Babylon and Borsippa, Senkereh and Niffer. Along the Khabor and Euphrates, and on the plains of Babylonia and Chaldea as well as Mesopotamia and Assyria.

Many of these have been recently explored, and wonderful things have been brought to light; for, deep down in their interior have lain buried, for thousands of years, palaces of monarchs who reigned from the time when Abraham dwelt in tents down to the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, or from a period about six hundred years before the founding of Troy, down almost to the expulsion of Tarquin and the commencement of the Roman Republic.

It is not the object of this Article to repeat the account of

the discovery of these antiquities, which has been so well done both by Mons. Botta the pioneer, and Mr. Layard his worthy successor in the work. The magnificent success of the latter has somewhat eclipsed the achievements of the other; but, with the generosity of the true scholar, he tells us that "To Mons. Botta belongs the honor of having discovered the first Assyrian monuments." That was a success that crowned months of persevering effort, made wholly at his own expense and in the face of just such opposition as Layard has described so graphically.

Nor does the writer intend to enter on any description of these antiquities as works of art. That is a subject which demands a separate discussion by one more familiar with such themes.

The present Article proposes merely to give a brief notice of the inscriptions, their interpretation, and a few of the historical facts learned from them by those who have studied them most thoroughly, especially the identification of Scripture names and the corroboration they furnish of the sacred record.

Most of the large mounds already explored contain, buried up at various depths, extensive remains of ancient palaces. The walls of these are very thick, built of sunburnt brick and coated to the height of ten feet or more with thick slabs of a dark-colored marble (sulphate of lime). These are covered with sculptures and cuneiform inscriptions, which depict many a scene and narrate many an event of that olden time. The visitor treads halls trodden by men who died more than three thousand years ago. He sees "men por

trayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed with vermilion, girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea" (Ezek. 23:14,15), such as idolatrous Jerusalem saw when she "doted upon the Assyrians her neighbors, captains and rulers, clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable young men" (ver. 12).

It is as if, instead of reading the account, the visitor

looked on "the king of kings coming from the north with horses, and with chariots, and with horsemen, and companies and much people; he slays with the sword the villages in the fields; he makes a fort against the city; he casts a mount against it; he lifts up the buckler against it; he sets. engines of war against the walls, and with his axes he breaks down the towers. The walls shake at the noise of the horsemen, and of the wheels, and of the chariots; when he enters into the gates or through the breach with the hoofs. of his horses, he treads down every street, he slays the inhabitants by the sword, and strong garrisons go down to the ground. His soldiers make a spoil of wealth and merchandise. They break down the walls, and destroy pleasant houses." "A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth. The land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing escapes them" (Ezek. 26: 7-12. Joel 2: 3).

Besides these warlike scenes, the king is often seen seated at the feast, with his servants and cup-bearers in attendance; or we are transported suddenly into the excitement of a royal hunt, and see lions and other beasts of prey fall before the king. Then again we behold him in the house of his gods, offering sacrifices and pouring out libations; or he is receiving the tribute of conquered provinces, borne by a long line of men, whose dress as well as the gifts they present, mark them as belonging to different and distant nations.

Some of the sculptures show manuscripts unrolled as they are read, telling us that the Assyrians were acquainted with writings on parchment or papyrus. Clay seals also, which seem to have been attached to such documents, burned up or long since decayed, and scribes writing down the list of the slain or the number of captives, corroborate this testimony.

Printing was known to those early ages, as is testified by their bricks, millions of which were evidently stamped with the name of the king before they were burned. In Babylonia the stamp was all in one piece; but in Assyria the letters seem to have been made by separate impressions.

The letters on the marble walls, as also the intaglios on seals and cylinders, were engraved with a sharp instrument; and where the inscription was on the floor of a palace, the letters were often filled up with some soft metal, illustrating that passage of Job (19: 23, 24): "O that my words were now written, that they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever."

"In

But the great question has been how to decipher these ancient records. Fragments of cuneiform inscription were for a long time in the possession of the learned before they could give any clue to their meaning. Grotefend labored on them as far back as 1802, and Burnouf, Lassen, and others entered into his labors, with but partial success. what language are they written? Are the characters letters, like ours, or syllables, like the Chinese? Do they read from right to left like the Shemitish, or from left to right like the languages of modern Europe? were inquiries which baffled investigation, till Col. Rawlinson deciphered the Persian portion of the trilingual inscription at Behistun, or as it is in some maps, Bisûtûn near Kermanshah. This celebrated monument of antiquity consisted of sculptures in bass-relief and four hundred lines of cuneiform characters engraved on the perpendicular face of a precipice more than three hundred feet above the base, and dates from the year 511 B. C. The reading of the Persian portion of this, accomplished for the more difficult and complicated Assyrian versions, what the Greek of the Rosetta stone did for the hieroglyphics of Egypt: it furnished a key to unlock at least the outer door; and when, by a long and patient use of this, scholars were prepared for a further advance, ten thousand inscribed tablets of clay, from the palace of Asshur bani pal, son of Esarhaddon, who began to reign 660 B. c., came to introduce them into the inner chambers of these repositories of ancient lore. This "library" of the palace at Kouyunjik (see p. 147), as it has been called, contained, besides other records of Assyrian science, a number of grammars, alphabets, and vocabularies explaining the differences between the more ancient Babylonian and the then Assyrian language of the