Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations

by Henry, Sayce Archibald

• ISBN13: 9781438505053
• ISBN10: 1438505051
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-30
• Publisher: Standard Pubns Inc

Summary

Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce (1846 - 1933), was a pioneer Assyriologist linguist, and Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919. In 1879 Sayce linked the reliefs near Magnesia on the Maeander in western Anatolia to those in the Turkish plateau. He was instrumental in deciphering hieroglyphics, especially one inscribed on stones at Hamath. Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations begins ¿One of the first facts which strike the traveller in Palestine is the smallness of a country which has nevertheless occupied so large a space in the history of civilised mankind. It is scarcely larger than an English county, and a considerable portion of it is occupied by rocky mountains and barren defiles where cultivation is impossible. Its population could never have been great, and though cities and villages were crowded together on the plains and in the valleys, and perched at times on almost inaccessible crags, the difficulty of finding sustenance for their inhabitants prevented them from rivalling in size the European or American towns of to-day. Like the country in which they dwelt, the people of Palestine were necessarily but a small population when compared with the nations of our modern age.¿