The Assyrians and the Babylonians repeatedly put the Israelites to the sword; yet that conquered people maintained its integrity long after these persecutors had ceased to have national existence. In one sense, this time of decline had greater importance than any other period that preceded it, because its vicissitudes gave rise to that impassioned poetry of denunciation which remained, and will always remain, the chief glory of Hebrew history. Thanks largely to this poetry, the Hebrews first began to have a truly world-historical importance some centuries after the Romans effected their final dispersion. All through their life as an autonomist nation they vainly strove to vie with their neighbours in royal power, looking out upon other peoples jealously, and accepting their own insignificance with angry protest. Yet by a strange irony of fortune the despised Hebrew was to be chiefly responsible for preserving the memory of his more glorious contemporaries. For two thousand years the swords of the Assyrians and Babylonians were remembered chiefly because the stylus of the Hebrew scribe had told of their prowess. OUR SOURCES A little over half a century ago James Ferguson, the historian of architecture, commented on the lack of Hebrew records as follows: “It is one of the peculiarities of the Jewish history, and certainly not one of the least singular, that all we know of them is derived from their written books. Not one monument, not one sculptured stone, not one letter of an inscription, not even a potsherd, remains to witness by a material fact the existence of the Jewish kingdom. No museum ever possessed a Jewish antiquity, while Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and all the surrounding countries teem with material evidence of former greatness, and of the people that once inhabited them.”