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The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions
The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions Author:Archibald Henry Sayce General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1908 Original Publisher: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Subjects: Civilization, Assyro-Babyonian Cuneiform writing Assyria Civilization, Assyro-Babylonian Foreign Language Study / Arabic History / Ancient / General Social Science / Anthropology / Gene... more »ral Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural Social Science / Archaeology Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II THE ARCHEOLOGICAL MATERIALS ; THE EXCAVATIONS AT SUSA AND THE ORIGIN OF BRONZE THE modern science of archaeology has been derisively called " the study of pots." As a matter of fact, the study of ancient pottery occupies a prominent place in it, and we cannot turn over the pages of a standard archaeological work without constantly coming across photographs and illustrations of the ceramic art or reading descriptions of vases and bowls, of coloured ware and fragmentary sherds. Questions of date and origin are made to turn on the presence or absence of some particular form of pottery on a given site, and fierce controversies have arisen over a single fragment of a vessel of clay. A knowledge of ancient pottery is a primary requisite in the scientific excavator and archaeologist of to-day. The reason of this is obvious. Archaeology is an inductive science; its conclusions, therefore, are drawn from the comparison and co-ordination of objects which can be seen and handled, as well as tested by all competent observers. It is built upon what our German friends would call objective facts, and the method it employs is that carefully-disciplined and experimentally-guarded application of the ordinary logic of life which can alone give us scientific results. The meth...« less