But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite necromantic enough without conjuring for them a necromantic future. The story of their restoration is like a brilliant romance of history. Prior to the middle of this century the inquiring student could learn in an hour or so all that was known in fact and in fable of the renowned city of Nineveh. He had but to read a few chapters of the Bible and a few pages of Diodorus to exhaust the important literature on the subject. If he turned also to the pages of Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and Aelian, these served chiefly to confirm the suspicion that the Greeks themselves knew almost nothing more of the history of their famed Oriental forerunners. The current fables told of a first King Ninus and his wonderful queen Semiramis; of Sennacherib the conqueror; of the effeminate Sardanapalus, who neglected the warlike ways of his ancestors but perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh itself, in a self-imposed holocaust. And that was all. How much of this was history, how much myth, no man could say; and for all any one suspected to the contrary, no man could ever know. And to-day the contemporary records of the city are before us in such profusion as no other nation of antiquity, save Egypt alone, can at all rival. Whole libraries of Assyrian books are at hand that were written in the seventh century before our era. These, be it understood, are the original books themselves, not copies. The author of that remote time appeals to us directly, hand to eye, without intermediary transcriber. And there is not a line of any Hebrew or Greek manuscript of a like age that has been preserved to us; there is little enough that can match these ancient books by a thousand years. When one reads Moses or Isaiah, Homer, Hesiod, or Herodotus, he is but following the transcription--often unquestionably faulty and probably never in all parts perfect--of successive copyists of later generations. The oldest known copy of the Bible, for example, dates probably from the fourth century A.D., a thousand years or more after the last Assyrian records were made and read and buried and forgotten.