
A Revelation from prehistory. When the ancient royal library at Nineveh--in modern-day Kouyunjik, northern Iraq--was being excavated by Austen Henry Layard in 1846, thousands of broken clay tablets carrying Akkadian inscriptions were unearthed. Dismissed as nothing more than 'decorated potshards' the countless artefacts were casually piled up and shipped over to Britain for later inspections. By the end of the 19th century Iraq was infested by European archaeologists who were busy digging up six different sites. With World War I looming, German troops joined the archaeological contest, claiming locations further south, among them the site of ancient Babylon where the sacred precinct, the Esagil temple-ziggurat, was discovered. Up north, Layard's seemingly insignificant find of decorated broken clay soon proved to be of immense archaeological importance. The Hebrew language, the only surviving from biblical antiquity, is derived from Akkadian, the Semitic mother tongue. Suspecting that the decorations on the discovered clay were some form of ancient texts, Assyriologist George Smith from the British Museum began the almost impossible process of matching the tens of thousands of broken pieces. The deciphered script signs on the fragmented clay described Nineveh library as being 'very old' and credited its collection to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal who lived circa 2,670 years ago. In his dedication tablet, Ashurbanipal boasts that he could read several old languages, including prehistoric texts from pre-Diluvian Earth! But before one draws any comparisons to the biblical stories in Genesis, one must hear the rest of what was found. King Ashurbanipal had assembled and translated literature from his own antiquity. The question is: How far back in time was 'very old' to a king who lived 2,670 years ago? The experts that started to decipher the texts on the clay were stunned. What Layard had discovered in Iraq were tablets recording the oldest known human language, conta
Page Count:
676
Publication Date:
2016-10-25
Publisher:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10:
1500661716
ISBN-13:
9781500661717
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!