ISSN: 1522-5658

Biblical Assyria and Other Anxieties in the British Empire

Steven W. Holloway
American Theological Library Association
Saint Xavier University, Chicago

Introduction

[1] British imperialism in Western Asia exercised a staggering impact on biblical studies through, among other exploits, the excavation of Assyrian palaces and the unveiling of the results before the insular public via exhibits in the British Museum and published illustrations of the antiquities themselves. In terms of heritage, the Assyrian monuments attested to the veracity of the biblical tradition that was being challenged on several fronts. In terms of prestige, the ingathering of antiquities from the palaces of the very Assyrian kings railed against by the biblical prophets into the British Museum constituted a victory over the French, who had failed to procure these artifacts for their own glorification, and the despised Ottoman Empire, whose myopic disdain for its pre-Islamic past prompted it to discard its own cultural heritage. This study seeks to illuminate a fascinating moment in early Victorian social history through the exploration of British rapport with the world of ancient Assyria. As the Assyrian kings of the Old Testament appeared in the cuneiform records like scheduled stops along the railway line, they were hailed as epical testimonies to the integrity of the received biblical history. When one biblical king failed to board the train, however, both scholarly panic and denial were given free rein until the absentee monarch was recovered and rehabilitated. This is a story about the British race to conquer the biblical world by annexing both the physical remains of the Assyrian imperial past and its hermeneutical keys, the impact that appropriation had on English society, and the avid quest for missing King Pul that illustrates the essential fragility of the entire enterprise.

[2] It bears repeating that the vogue for biblical confirmation through ancient monuments was a seasoned pastime in the British Isles many decades before the first western spade was sunk in Mesopotamia. For example, William Stukeley, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying - rather accurately - Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible (see Piggot; Force: 248-53). He states in the preface to his work on Stonehenge:

Figure 1. Frontispiece from Description de l'Égypte, 1809

Figure 2. Great Assyrian Hall at the Louvre, ca. 1863, in Le Tour de Monde (1863). Used by permission of the Louvre, Paris

Figure 3. (Botta and Flandin: Frontispiece)

Figure 4. Illustrated London News (August 28, 1847: 144)

My intent is (besides preserving the memory of these extraordinary monuments, so much to the honour of our country, now in great danger of ruin) to promote, as much as I am able, the knowledge and practice of ancient and true Religion; to revive in the minds of the learned the spirit of Christianity.

Antiquarianism, nationalistic pride, sheer joy in the spectacle of the past, and the Bible efficaciously served up to the present through the monuments: save for the florid syntax, the sentence might have been penned at any time in the nineteenth century and carried complete conviction.

[3] Napoleon's brilliantly conceived invasion of Egypt in 1798, with its startling propaganda blitz of Islamic and Jewish toleration, and the triumphant reclamation of ancient Egypt that would spark more than a century of European Egyptomania, was dust and ashes to British sensibilities (Figure 1). Having neatly evicted Napoleon from the eastern Levant and stolen as many of his display-worthy portable antiquities as possible, a new dynamic would evolve in the playing out of the Great Game in the Middle East. France and Great Britain would wage conventional warfare and messy diplomatic effrontery not only over Ottoman territory, but over the very proprietorship of the past. The past was ancient Greece and Rome of course, but above all, the past was the biblical narrative, the Land of Goshen in Pharaonic Egypt, the puny but god-ridden Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Judea of Jesus, and the Mesopotamia ruled by the merciless kings of Assyria and Babylonia. The general whereabouts of historical Assyria had never been forgotten; what was unknown was whether there were any Assyrian antiquities worth digging for. Pragmatic hindrances included the prospect of infidels digging up Muslim tells and the persistent problems of financing the operations. Again, the French government stole a march on the British in 1843 by subventing the excavation of spectacular reliefs and architectural remains from the eccentric palace of Sargon II in Khorsabad (Figure 2). The first antiquities went on display in the Louvre in 1847; the final publication of the expedition in 1849-1850, published in three elephant folios at a cost equivalent to $810 in 1988 (Figure 3),<1> was intended for the libraries and salons of the truly well-to-do. This elitist perspective on the first presentation of Assyria in France accounts for its muted national reception.

Victorian Assyria

[4] A growing stream of English periodical articles beginning in February of 1846 would keep the British public abreast of young Austen Henry Layard's archaeological exploits in Mesopotamia, niggardly funded by British Museum Trustees, dubious of the aesthetic worth of "the Assyrian marbles" (Figure 4; see "Fine Arts"). Although the intrinsic ethnological fascination of artifacts from a major civilization of the ancient world was never entirely lost sight of, two themes consistently mesmerized the public's attention: nationalism and biblical proof. The success of the French excavations at Khorsabad and the triumphant display of the spoils at the Louvre constituted an affront to British imperial supremacy. For the honor of King and Country, it was imperative that sober Englishmen should hoist the British Jack over ancient Assyria by procuring the finest monuments for the British Museum and blaze the way in deciphering the inscriptions written in the baffling wedge-shaped signs.<2>

[5] Early Victorian England, reeling from challenges to traditional religious authority brought about by the accelerating social ills of the industrial revolution, disturbing revelations of natural science, and German "higher-criticism," vigorously sought for past certainty in the literal proof of the Bible. Why did Christian England unselfconsciously promote the exploration of the Bible-kingdom of ancient Assyria? This was a country in which a religious census on a randomly-chosen Sunday would reveal over 60% of the population in church,<3> in which most households owned Bibles (Bowen; Knight: 36-41; Hyam: 90), and whose grass-roots constituency identified Britain's moral mission to colonize Asia and Africa with the spread of Christian civilization (Hyam: 91-97).<4> The world of Homer may be fabulous, but the nations that assailed ancient Israel were certainly not. The biblical texts are awash with images of the remorselessly aggressive Assyrian Empire and its evil monarchs, from the skewed historiography of 2 Kings and Isaiah to the rhapsodic images of their liquidation in Nahum, to the category-blasting parable of a repentant Nineveh in Jonah. Biblical Assyria was part of the living imagination of any reasonably schooled nineteenth century westerner.

Figure 5. Watercolor of Babylon, by J. M. W. Turner, ca. 1834. Used by permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

[6] The typological injection of the Bible into literature, the arts, and even politics, such an unconsciously systemic facet of Victorian civilization (Landow), had scooped up ancient Assyria in its project.<5> Prior to the excavations, evangelical writers harped on the theme of the utter desolation of the sites of ancient Nineveh and Babylon (Figure 5) and the degeneracy of the present inhabitants as visible, palpable proofs of biblical prophecy fulfilled. For example, in his exceedingly popular work, Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion, Alexander Keith takes the cities prophesied against in the Bible, reproduces the prophecies themselves in italics, and links them in a narrative compounded of travelers' tales and his own sonorous moralizing in a "demonstration" of the prophecy's fulfillment.<6> One writer for the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, entranced by the practical benefits of the monuments in the ongoing crusade against unbelief, boasted that

The historical basis of the Old Testament scriptures has been confirmed in a manner and to a degree which may bid defiance to all of the present or future advocates of infidelity or skepticism . . . On a sudden the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt have rolled off their hieroglyph-encrusted swathes, and the Assyrian monarchs have reappeared in serenely majestic sternness, attesting by their visible presence, and the indelible records of their times, the terrible reality of the events recorded in Scripture, and proclaiming from their long-silent tombs that Moses and Isaiah had spoken nothing but the truth (quoted by Bohrer: 272).

Figure 6. Jonah preaching to Nineveh (Peltz: 285)

Figure 7. (Layard 1849: 1:Frontispiece)

Figure 8. (Layard 1849: 2:Frontispiece)

Figure 9. Illustrated London News (October 26, 1850: 392)

Figure 10. English bracelet, ca. 1867, imitating Assyrian palace motifs. Used by permission of the Louvre, Paris

Figure 11. Illustrated London News (June 18, 1853: 493)

Figure 12. Syndenham Crystal Palace (Wyatt: after 20)

From this time forward, distinctive line-drawings and engravings of authentic Assyrian ruins and artworks will replace the fanciful drawings of Greco-Roman or Islamic subjects that formerly illustrated "antiquities of the Bible" handbooks (Nevin: 220-32; Cox: 125; Barrows: 312-13; Bissell), weekly devotional literature (Kitto: 3:59-98), and a wealth of light-from-the-biblical-monuments literature (Harper; Walther; Kellner; Figure 6).

[7] Layard's reward for his harrowing exploits in Mesopotamia led, more or less directly, to a knighthood, a career in the Foreign Office, and a seat in Parliament. The immense success of Layard's publications traded upon the image of the resourceful English sahib abroad and the biblical proofs of the monuments, augmented by the competent marketing strategy of his publisher, the respected John Murray.<7> For Layard's first volume, Nineveh and Its Remains, Murray spent approximately £7 for editing Layard's lucid and engaging prose travelogue, but over £300 to have master engravers, working from Layard's site sketches, prepare hundreds of eye-catching illustrations of local tribesmen excavating the looming tells (Figure 7), scenes from the palace reliefs themselves, palace floorplans and maps, and romantic vignettes of Arabs and native Christians in their picturesque costumes (Figure 8; Bohrer: 139). One barometer of the success of Layard's book was attendance at the British Museum. Samuel Birch, a British Museum officer and first president of the Society for Biblical Archaeology, wrote Layard in 1849 that "All the world is mad to see the monuments - and the cry is ‘the bulls - the bulls'" (quoted in Saggs: 314; Figure 9). By following the redoubtable Layard in his perilous quest for buried treasure with volume in hand, the humblest British subject could in pilgrim-fashion retrace the path of the monuments from the British Museum located in the capital of the British Empire across oceans of time and space to the very capital of the Assyrian Empire thundered against by the prophets of Israel. It was all quite thrilling, and became a profitable best-seller for Murray (Bohrer: 212-15).

[8] The marketing of Assyria in mid-century England was a multi-media affair. It soon became possible to purchase, for fine gentlemen, gold lapel studs with embossed winged Assyrian bulls and, for the ladies, bracelets and necklaces sporting royal and mythological motifs from the palace sculptures (Figure 10; Bohrer: 338-44). As early as 1853, Charles Kean staged an ambitious London production based on Lord Byron's tragedy Sardanapalus, King of Assyria, that literally translated whole pages of fine lithographs illustrating Layard's works into theatrical stage sets (Figure 11; Bohrer: 345-56).<8> Dreamy backdrops of monumental buildings fronting the Tigris framed actors with square-cut beards moving in halls flanked by the ubiquitous giant winged bulls, familiar to visitors of the British Museum. At this time, British stage censorship forbade theatrical performances based on the Bible, but it was perfectly in order, and profitable box-office revenue, to stage the downfall of Assyrian kings, particularly if they are confused in the public's mind with the Ottoman Sultan and other Oriental despots.

[9] In 1854, seven years after the arrival of the first Assyrian antiquities from Layard's excavations, the Sydenham Crystal Palace opened. Arguably the world's first commercial amusement theme park, the Crystal Palace housed a Fine Arts Court, a series of galleries with three-dimensional walk-through architectural tableaus of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Moorish Spain, Byzantium, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, and the Italian Baroque. Squeezed incongruously between Moorish Spain, "Aboo Simbel Tomb & Colossal Figures," and Byzantium was a Nineveh Court, a mongrel structure compounded of polychrome Assyrian-style reliefs and an upper storey anachronistically based on the Hall of Columns at Persepolis (Figure 12). Up until 1867, when the Nineveh Court burned, it was possible, for the price of admission, for a Victorian family to stroll through the throne room of a mock Assyrian palace and pretend they were back in ancient Assyria (Bohrer: 422-43).<9>

Figure 13. Jules Oppert (Budge: 206)

Figure 14. Edward Hincks (Budge: 92)

Figure 15. H. C. Rawlinson (G. Rawlinson 1898)

Figure 16. Eberhard Schrader (Budge: 224)

Figure 17. George Smith. Illustrated London News (April 10, 1875: 338)

The Assyriologists

[10] All of the first generation of Assyriologists were, without exception, biblically engaged, and sought to harmonize the emerging contours of the Neo-Assyrian Empire with the Assyria enshrined in the Old Testament. Jules Oppert (Figure 13), appointed Professor of Assyrian philology and archaeology at the Collège de France in 1869, published numerous articles on biblical regnal chronology as well as commentaries on the books of Esther and Judith (on the life of Oppert, see Muss-Arnolt; Bezold; Lehmann-Haupt). The brilliantly gifted linguist Edward Hincks (Figure 14) served as Rector of Killyleagh, County Down, Ireland, for 55 years; he was the first scholar correctly to identify "Jehu son of Omri" in the Black Obelisk inscription, and also made lively contributions to the biblical chronology debate (on the life of Hincks, see Davidson; Lane-Poole 1921-22a; Cathcart).

[11] Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (Figure 15), a British career soldier and diplomat, published dozens of articles in the Athenaeum and the imperial drum-beating Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society that dealt with "biblical Assyria" in light of Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions (on the life of Rawlinson, see Flemming; Lane-Poole 1921-22b; Larsen: passim). In the early days of decipherment, Rawlinson confidently harmonized biblical, classical and historical Assyria into a richly woven tapestry of scriptural confirmation, constantly evolving as it incorporated the latest revelation from the "monuments." Texts and images alike will verify the Bible:

[W]hen I shall have accurately learnt the locality of the different bas-reliefs that have been brought from Koyunjik (an acropolis of Nineveh), I do not doubt but that I shall be able to point out the bands of Jewish maidens who were delivered to Sennacherib, and perhaps to distinguish the portraiture of the humbled Hezekiah.

Thus, for example, when Rawlinson was baffled by his failure to read correctly the royal Assyrian name of Shalmaneser in the cuneiform inscriptions, and influenced by 2 Kings 17:3-6's apparent attribution of the destruction of Israel to that king, he could harmonize the royal inscriptions of Sargon - which spoke of the conquest of Samaria and the deportation of the Israelites - with the exploits of Shalmaneser recounted in Josephus and the Old Testament. In other words, he resorted to the traditional scholarly expedient of assuming that Sargon was an alias for Shalmaneser (1851).

[12] Eberhard Schrader (Figure 16), Professor of Old Testament at Zürich, Giessen, Jena, and Professor of Oriental Languages at Berlin, the justly called father of Assyriology in Germany, published in 1872 what was arguably the single most accessible source of nineteenth century assyriological research for Old Testament specialists, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament. Arranged as a commentary by canonical order of biblical books, chapters, and verses, Schrader walked the reader through the Old Testament, stopping at each verse where comparative philology, mythology, geography, or historical examples could shed light (on the life of Schrader, see Meyer; Renger: 151-57).

[13] The 1872 London lecture of the "intellectual picklock" George Smith (Figure 17) on the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, featured in the 1873 issue of the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology as "The Chaldean Account of the Deluge" (2: 213-34) captured the public's thirst for biblical confirmation of Genesis. Sensing profits from afar, The Daily Telegraph footed the bill for Smith to dig in the Mesopotamian ruins until he found the missing portions of the cuneiform tablet, which, against all rational odds, he did. He published the text in Transactions the following year (on the life of Smith, see Sayce 1876; Hoberman; Evers; on the story of his sensational finds, see Moorey: 11-12; Rogers: 278-84).

[14] All of these men began their assyriological investigations confident in the literal historical accuracy of the biblical narratives. The Ussherite dates printed in most Protestant Bibles were perceived as useful benchmarks, but, since the numbers were clearly based on fallible human reason, not divine revelation, they were subject to correction when challenged by pertinent extra-biblical sources, like the Assyrian eponym canon. Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions of an historical nature for the most part were dealt with as if their facticity was above reproach, except in those rare instances when the tenets of "biblical Assyria" were jeopardized. A hermeneutic of suspicion regarding the historiographic shaping of the Assyrian royal inscriptions themselves would not, with isolated exceptions, be exercised until the twentieth century.

The Curious Case of Missing King Pul

Figure 18 (Layard 1853: 619)

[15] The Assyrian king Pul, who received tribute from Menahem of Israel in 2 Kings 15:19-20, posed no special difficulty prior to the decipherment of the royal Assyrian annals. Among biblical commentators and historians of the ancient world writing prior to 1850, Pul was universally recognized as the first Assyrian conqueror to trouble Israel, followed immediately by Tiglath-Pileser (see Schroeer: 144, 468-69; Winer: 2:259-60, 2:611-12; Kenrick: 374-75; Milman: 302-5). In 1852 Hincks read "Menahem of Samaria" as tributary to the king whose sculptures had been reused in the Southwest Palace of Nimrud.<10> This decipherment permitted Layard a year later to publish an engraving of an Assyrian king on his chariot with the caption "Bas-relief, representing Pul, or Tiglath-Pileser" (Figure 18; 1853: 619).<11> The identification, made before the cuneiform name of the king could actually be read, proved to be correct. While the events enumerated in the translations of the badly mutilated inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III seemed to corroborate the military history of "biblical Assyria", "King Pul" proved too entrenched in the scholarly imagination for the first Assyriologists not to find him in the "monuments." For example, through a false reading of the royal Assyrian name Adad-nirari III as "Phal-lukha," and by equating this with biblical Pul, Rawlinson linked the name Semiramis of Greek legend with Israelite history, a charmingly absurd example of "biblical" and "classical" Assyria stealing a march on "historical Assyria" (1854a).<12>

[16] The industrious Rawlinson, beginning in 1862 in a series of articles devoted to Assyrian and Babylonian chronology,<13> believed himself capable of providing the means for solving the vexatious puzzle of the lengths of the reigns of the Assyrian kings (see especially, 1862b, 1863, 1867a, 1867). During the Neo-Assyrian era, calendar years were named after a fixed rota of officials, comparable to the use of the names of Greek archons and Roman consuls for the same purpose. These eponyms were systematically recorded in lists, or canons, sometimes with parenthetical notices of events of military or political importance. Rawlinson had access to four overlapping canon lists; combined, they covered what we now know to have been the late tenth century through the beginning of Assurbanipal's reign in the seventh century (for the modern edition, see Millard, and the discussion by Finkel and Reade). The Assyrian eponym canon not only made it possible to illuminate the sequence of kings from the heretofore obscure ninth century monarchs to the resplendent Assurbanipal of the lion-hunt sculptures, but it also enabled students of history to state how many years, say, Tiglath-Pileser III and Shalmaneser III occupied the throne. In 1872 the German academic Schrader published an accurate synoptic transliteration of the canons complete with bc dating as an appendix to his Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament. The indefatigable George Smith would canvass the brief but contentious history of interpretation in his 1875 monograph, The Assyrian Canon.<14>

Figure 19. Name of Tiglath-Pileser in cuneiform characters

[17] In cuneiform script, Tiglath-Pileser's name usually required five or more different characters for its representation (Figure 19; for the options, see Brinkman: 240 n. 1544). The Assyrian name for Tiglath-Pileser does not correspond to Pul, as even the most enthusiastic assyriological tyros were forced to admit. Publication of the Assyrian eponym canon, begun in 1862, failed to break the suspense. Pul could not be found in the Assyrian records. Numerous explanations were put forward to King Pul:

The Assyrian eponym canon is flawed - Pul was skipped in a forty-odd year hiatus (Oppert continued to campaign for this well into the 1880s);<15>

"The compiler of the [Assyrian eponym] canon was a blunderer" (Hincks, quoted in Bosanquet 1874: 2);

Pul was a Chaldean suzerain whose reign was skipped by the Assyro-phile canon authors (Bosanquet 1865: 152-53);<16>

Pul is to be identified with an eighth century monarch preceding Tiglath-Pileser whose name appears in the Assyrian eponym canon (Smith 1869: 9-10);<17>

Pul and Tiglath-Pileser are identical (H. C. Rawlinson and Schrader).<18>

[18] Schrader's identification in the 1870s of the scriptural and Ptolemaic canon entity Pul with the scriptural and cuneiform entity Tiglath-Pileser III (generally known as Tiglath-Pileser II at the time) wins almost universal acceptance. In truth, this identification was anticipated a decade earlier by H. C. Rawlinson (a point of nationalistic honor defensively raised by Smith 1875: 13, who was well aware of Schrader's position). Unlike Schrader, however, Rawlinson never expressed his opinion about the positive correlation as an unqualified statement, waffling over the possibility that biblical Pul was a "general" of Tiglath-Pileser (1863: 245).<19> Schrader's lucid prose exposition, on the contrary, left no room for equivocation. The interregnum of Pul "hat in Wirklichkeit nie existiert" (Hommel: 19).<20> Since Pul corresponds to Tiglath-Pileser, the historical integrity of the Bible is perceived as intact, and the Assyrian eponym canon will be used henceforth by biblical pundits fearlessly, and recklessly, to date biblical and related historical events.

[19] The scholarly consensus from 1875 to the present, that Pul was another name by which the contemporaries of Tiglath-Pileser knew him,<21> may well be "correct", i.e. biblical Assyria more or less equals historical Assyria. On the other hand, one must pause to wonder what the exegetes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might have done with Sargon, mentioned only once in Isaiah 20:1, had his name stubbornly refused to be read in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria (see Holloway). The failure of Assyriology to confirm the independent reality of King Pul touched a raw nerve in a Bible-fearing Europe,<22> sparking a twenty year fox-and-hound hunt through textual and archaeological sources for the missing king.<23> Schrader's elegant solution, essentially the harmonization of biblical higher criticism and assyriological spadework later canonized by William Foxwell Albright and his disciples as the American School "backgrounds method," was symptomatic of an overweening Victorian desire to retain a static biblical exegesis for battling the menace of Nineveh and its remains, and modernity.

[20] The concept of prestige appears to synthesize the disparate threads of British imperialism, biblical confirmation vis-à-vis Mesopotamian archaeology, and the anxieties that encompassed them both. All empires, whether Neo-Assyrian or British, are based in part on the fiction of comprehensive and legitimate domination of foreign territories and their nationals, as if any human hand were capacious enough to grasp the globe of imperial will-to-power. In 1867 in a speech delivered to Parliament, the decipherer Rawlinson spells out his estimation of political prestige as a tool of empire:

I look on "prestige" in politics very much as I look on credit in finance. It is a power which enables us to achieve very great results with very small means at our immediate disposal. "Prestige" may not be of paramount importance in Europe, but in the East, sir, our whole position depends upon it. It is a perfect fallacy to suppose that we hold India by the sword. The foundation of our tenure, the talisman - so to speak - which enables 100,000 Englishmen to hold 150,000,000 natives in subjection, is the belief in our unassailable power, in our inexhaustible resources; and in any circumstance, therefore, which impairs that belief, which leads the nations of the East to mistrust our superiority, and to regard us as more nearly on an equality with themselves, inflicts a grievous shock on our political position (G. Rawlinson 1898: 252).<24>

[21] Like the British colonial system, any tradition of biblical exegesis carries its own cachet of prestige, based in part on the collective fiction that its hallowed interpretation of history and theology lies beyond the logician's realm of mere falsification and verification. To threaten the empire of traditional hermeneutics, whether through modern geological theories or the failure to locate King Pul in Assyrian royal inscriptions, rocked the prestige of the entire edifice like the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.<25> The military mutiny was answered with a horrifying display of high-profile revenge retaliation, and "missing" King Pul was retrieved as an alias in the cuneiform texts and re-ensconced in the exegetes' pantheon of "forensically" demonstrated dramatis personae. But the anxieties of both empires could not, and can never, be quelled by simple strength of arms or adamantine proofs from the monuments.

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1849 Nineveh and Its Remains. 2 volumes. London: John Murray.

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1882 Phul e Tuklatpalasar II; Salmanasar V, e Sargon: questioni biblio-assire. Rome: Tipografia poliglotta della S. C. di Propaganda.

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1992 "Tiglath-pileser versus Pul - A Challenge to the Accepted View." Catastrophism and Ancient History 14, 2: 168-73.

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1908 "Schrader, Eberhard," Pp. 156-63 in Biographisches Jahrbuch und deutscher Nekrolog. Volume 13. Edited by Anton Bettelheim. Berlin: Georg Reimer.

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1859 The History of Herodotus. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

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