The clay tablets and stone monuments that have been recovered
reveal the family life of the people, their commercial undertakings,
their system of legislation and land tenure, their epistolary
correspondence, and the administration under which they lived, while the
royal inscriptions and foundation-memorials throw light on the religious
and historical events of the period in which they were inscribed.
Information on all these points has been acquired as the result of
excavation, and is based on the discoveries in the ruins of early cities
which have remained buried beneath the soil for some thousands of years.
But for the history of Assyria and of the other nations in the north
there is still another source of information to which reference must now
be made.
The kings of Assyria were not content with recording their achievements
on the walls of their buildings, on stelae set up in their palaces and
temples, on their tablets of annals preserved in their archive-chambers,
and on their cylinders and foundation-memorials concealed within the
actual structure of the buildings themselves. They have also left
records graven in the living rock, and these have never been buried,
but have been exposed to wind and weather from the moment they
were engraved. Records of irrigation works and military operations
successfully undertaken by Assyrian kings remain to this day on the
face of the mountains to the north and east of Assyria.
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