Free PDF

Author : Bristowe Sydney
Title : Sargon the magnificent
Year : 1927

Link download : Bristowe_Sydney_-_Sargon_the_magnificent.zip

About thirty years ago in a series of lectures a certain German professor, himself a higher critic, announced his belief in the Divine inspiration of the first chapters of Genesis; his regret at the attacks being made upon their authenticity by other professors; and his conviction that if a certain discovery could be made it would largely help to counteract those attacks. He apparently did not expect that such a discovery would be made; but I hope to show that when the cuneiform inscriptions found in Babylonia and now available for anyone's inspection are studied from a new point of view, that discovery is ours. In support of this new point of view, extracts from works leading Assyriologists are quoted in the following pages, and their translations of the inscriptions are given. It can scarcely be thought presumptuous on my part if I suggest a new application of those inscriptions considering that the deductions already drawn from them are indeterminate and unconvincing. While taking advantage of them I make bold to suggest that their decipherers, like others before them, may sometimes have "failed to see the woods for the trees." That the writers, from whose works I quote, hold different views from my own naturally makes any of their evidence that supports my views the more convincing because it is involuntary. Since the history which they have deduced from Babylonian inscriptions is admittedly conjectural, and rests upon a certain hypothesis described by one of them as almost incredible, it is well that some other hypothesis should be tested, and I claim that my new version of Babylonian history rests upon a much more reasonable one. That a new interpretation should be welcome is suggested by Professor Sayce's words: "Both in Egypt and Babylonia, therefore, we are thrown back upon the monumental texts which the excavator has recovered from the soil, and the decipherer has pieced together with infinite labour and patience.... The conclusions we form must to a large extent be theoretical and provisional, liable to be revised and modified with the acquisition of fresh material or a more skilful combination of what is already known." (The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonian, p.3) And also by Professor T. Eric Peet, who writes: "Archaeology can in no sense be termed an exact science, that is to say, its conclusions rarely follow with mathematical certainty from its premises, and indeed but too frequently they do not rise above the level of mere nebulous possibilities or probabilities. This state of things is partly to be accounted for by the very nature of its subject matter, but also, in the opinion of the writer, by the fact that archaeologists have hitherto made no attempt to come to any kind of agreement as to the conditions which must be satisfied by a train of archaeological reasoning in order that it may acquire cogency. We are doubtless all to blame in this, and in our defense it can only be urged that the constant accumulation of fresh material has tended to distract our attention from a really critical use of the evidence already available." (Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1922 No.8.) Neither fresh material nor a skilful combination is offered in this little work, but a new combination of the facts already known about ancient Babylonia taken in conjunction with the Bible Records which I claim to be the Master key to the problem of the ancient civilization of that country. I have been asked to say that the Council of the B. I. W. F. does not associate itself with my views about the pre-Adamites and the Deluge. ...