NINEVEH AND ITS REMAINS.
(From the " Quarterly Review") Surely it is a lasting glory for England, that a native of this small and once despised island/should have broken the iron slumbers of thirty centuries, and revealed to the world a scene wliich shows what art and human life were in the morning and the grey dawn of the world. The Arab Sheikh, Abd-ur-rahman, expressed to Mr. Layard the wonderful facts occasioned in his mind, in these striking words:— "In the name of the Most High, tell me, O Bey, what you are going to do with these stones? So many thousands of purses spent on such things ? Can it be, as you say, that your people learn wisdom from them ? Or is it, as his reverence the Cadi declares, that they are to go to the palace of your. Queen, who, with the rest of the unbelievers, worship these idols ? As for wisdom, these figures will not teach you to make better knives, scissors or chintzes; and it is in the making of them the English show their wisdom. But God is great! God is great! Here are stones which have been buried ever since the time of the Holy Noah peace be with him! Perhaps they were under ground before the Deluge. I have lived on these lands for years. My father and the father of my father, pitched their tents here before me; but they never heard of these figures. For twelve hundred years have the true believers (and, praise be to God! all true wisdom is with them alone) been settled in this country, and none of them ever heard of a palace under ground. Neither $d they who
went before them. But lo ! here cornea Frank from many days' journey off, and he walks up to the very place, and h 0 takes a stick and makes a line here an) a line there. Hero, says he, is the palace • there, says he, is the gate ; and he shows us what has been all our lives beneatl our feet without our having ever known anything about it. Wonderful! wonder ful! Is it by books, is it by magic is it by your prophets, that you have learnt these things ? Speak, O Bey; tell ma the secret of wisdom."
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Bibliographic details
Wellington Independent, Volume VI, Issue 560, 22 February 1851, Page 4
Word Count
382NINEVEH AND ITS REMAINS. Wellington Independent, Volume VI, Issue 560, 22 February 1851, Page 4
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