volume 1, page 137.

ASSIZE OF CLARENDON, The.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1162-1170.

ASSIZE OF JERUSALEM, The.

"No sooner had Godfrey of Bouillon [elected King of Jerusalem, after the taking of the Holy City by the Crusaders, A. D. 1099] accepted the office of supreme magistrate than he solicited the public and private advice of the Latin pilgrims who were the best skilled in the statutes and customs of Europe. From these materials, with the counsel and approbation of the Patriarch and barons, of the clergy and laity, Godfrey composed the Assise of Jerusalem, a precious monument of feudal jurisprudence. The new code, attested by the seals of the King, the Patriarch, and the Viscount of Jerusalem, was deposited in the holy sepulchre, enriched with the improvements of succeeding times, and respectfully consulted as often as any doubtful question arose in the tribunals of Palestine. With the kingdom and city all was lost; the fragments of the written law were preserved by jealous tradition and variable practice till the middle of the thirteenth century. The code was restored by the pen of John d'Ibelin, Count of Jaffa, one of the principal feudatories; and the final revision was accomplished in the year thirteen hundred and sixty-nine, for the use of the Latin kingdom of Cyprus."

_E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 58. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25717_

ASSIZES.

"The formal edicts known under the name of Assizes, the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton, the Assize of Arms, the Assize of the Forest, and the Assizes of Measures, are the only relics of the legislative work of the period [reign of Henry II. in England]. These edicts are chiefly composed of new regulations for the enforcement of royal justice, ... In this respect they strongly resemble the capitularies of the Frank Kings, or, to go farther back, the edicts of the Roman prætors. ... The term Assize, which comes into use in this meaning about the middle of the twelfth century, both on the continent and in England, appears to be the proper Norman name for such edicts. ... In the 'Assize of Jerusalem' it simply means a law; and the same in Henry's legislation. Secondarily, it means a form of trial established by the particular law, as the Great Assize, the Assize of Mort d' Ancester; and thirdly the court held to hold such trials, in which sense it is commonly used at the present day."

_William Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 13._

ASSUR.

See ASSYRIA.

ASSYRIA.

For matter relating to Assyrian history, the reader is referred to the caption SEMITES, under which it will be given. The subject is deferred to that part of this work which will go later into print, for the reason that every month is adding to the knowledge of the students of ancient oriental history and clearing away disputed questions. It is quite possible that the time between the publication of our first volume and our fourth or fifth may make important additions to the scanty literature of the subject in English. Modern excavation on the sites of the ancient cities in the East, bringing to light large library collections of inscribed clay tablets,--sacred and historical writings, official records, business contracts and many varieties of inscriptions,--have almost revolutionized the study of ancient history and the views of antiquity derived from it. {143} "M. Botta, who was appointed French consul at Mosul in 1842, was the first to commence excavations on the sites of the buried cities of Assyria, and to him is due the honour of the first discovery of her long lost palaces. M. Botta commenced his labours at Kouyunjik, the large mound opposite Mosul, but he found here very little to compensate for his labours. New at the time to excavations, he does not appear to have worked in the best manner; M. Botta at Kouyunjik contented himself with sinking pits in the mound, and on these proving unproductive abandoning them. While M. Botta was excavating at Kouyunjik, his attention was called to the mounds of Khorsabad by a native of the village on that site; and he sent a party of workmen to the spot to commence excavation. In a few days his perseverance was rewarded by the discovery of some sculptures, after which, abandoning the work at Kouyunjik, he transferred his establishment to Khorsabad and thoroughly explored that site. ... The palace which M. Botta had discovered ... is one of the most perfect Assyrian buildings yet explored, and forms an excellent example of Assyrian architecture. Beside the palace on the mound of Khorsabad, M. Botta also opened the remains of a temple, and a grand porch decorated by six winged bulls. ... The operations of M. Botta were brought to a close in 1845, and a splendid collection of sculptures and other antiquities, the fruits of his labours, arrived in Paris in 1846 and was deposited in the Louvre. Afterwards the French Government appointed M. Place consul at Mosul, and he continued some of the excavations of his predecessor. ... Mr. Layard, whose attention was early turned in this direction, visited the country in 1840, and afterwards took a great interest in the excavations of M. Botta. At length, in 1845, Layard was enabled through the assistance of Sir Stratford Canning to commence excavations in Assyria himself. On the 8th of November he started from Mosul, and descended the Tigris to Nimroud. ... Mr. Layard has described in his works with great minuteness his successive excavations, and the remarkable and interesting discoveries he made. ... After making these discoveries in Assyria, Mr. Layard visited Babylonia, and opened trenches in several of the mounds there. On the return of Mr. Layard to England, excavations were continued in the Euphrates valley under the superintendence of Colonel (now Sir Henry) Rawlinson. Under his directions, Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, Mr. Loftus, and Mr. Taylor excavated various sites and made numerous discoveries, the British Museum receiving the best of the monuments. The materials collected in the national museums of France and England, and the numerous inscriptions published, attracted the attention of the learned, and very soon considerable light was thrown on the history, language, manners, and customs of ancient Assyria and Babylonia."

_G. Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, chapter 1._

"One of the most important results of Sir A. H. Layard's explorations at Nineveh was the discovery of the ruined library of the ancient city, now buried under the mounds of Kouyunjik. The broken clay tablets belonging to this library not only furnished the student with an immense mass of literary matter, but also with direct aids towards a knowledge of the Assyrian syllabary and language. Among the literature represented in the library of Kouyunjik were lists of characters, with their various phonetic and ideographic meanings, tables of synonymes, and catalogues of the names of plants and animals. This, however, was not all. The inventors of the cuneiform system of writing had been a people who preceded the Semites in the occupation of Babylonia, and who spoke an agglutinative language utterly different from that of their Semitic successors. These Accadians, as they are usually termed, left behind them a considerable amount of literature, which was highly prized by the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians. A large portion of the Ninevite tablets, accordingly, consists of interlinear or parallel translations from Accadian into Assyrian, as well as of reading books, dictionaries, and grammars, in which the Accadian original is placed by the side of its Assyrian equivalent. ... The bilingual texts have not only enabled scholars to recover the long-forgotten Accadian language; they have also been of the greatest possible assistance to them in their reconstruction of the Assyrian dictionary itself. The three expeditions conducted by Mr. George Smith [1873-1876], as well as the later ones of Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, have added largely to the stock of tablets from Kouyunjik originally acquired for the British Museum by Sir A. H. Layard, and have also brought to light a few other tablets from the libraries of Babylonia."

_A. H. Sayce, Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, chapter 1._

ALSO IN: _G. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies: The Second Monarchy, chapter 9._

_Mr. Duncker, History of Antiquity, books 3-4._

_George Smith, Ancient History from the Monuments: Assyria._

See, also, BABYLONIA and SEMITES.

ASSYRIA, Eponym Canon of.

"Just as there were archons at Athens and consuls at Rome who were elected annually, so among the Assyrians there was a custom of electing one man to be over the year, whom they called 'limu,' or 'eponym.' ... Babylonian and Assyrian documents were more generally dated by the names of these eponyms than by that of the reigning King. ... In 1862 Sir Henry Rawlinson discovered the fragment of the eponym canon of Assyria. It was one of the grandest and most important discoveries ever made, for it has decided definitely a great many points which otherwise could never have been cleared up. Fragments of seven copies of this canon were found, and from these the chronology of Assyria has been definitely settled from B. C. 1330 to about B. C. 620."

_E. A. W. Budge, Babylonian Life and History, chapter 3._

ASTOLF, King of the Lombards, A. D. 749-759.

ASTRAKHAN: The Khanate.

See MONGOLS: A. D. 1238-1391.

ASTRAKHAN: A. D. 1569. Russian repulse of the Turks.

See RUSSIA: A. D. 1569-1571.

ASTURIANS, The.

See CANTABRIANS.

ASTURIAS: Resistance to the Moorish Conquest.

See SPAIN: A. D. 713-737.

ASTY, OR ASTU, The.

The ancient city of Athens proper, as distinguished from its connected harbors, was called the Asty, or Astu.

_J. A. St. John, The Hellenes, book 1, chapter 4._

ALSO IN: _W. M. Leake, Topography of Athens, section 10._

See also, ATHENS: AREA, &c.

A Logical Outline of Athenian and Greek History

[Red ] Physical or material. [Blue ] Ethnological. [Green] Social and political. [Brown] Intellectual, moral and religious. [Black] Foreign.

In which the dominant conditions and influences are distinguished by colors.

The Land

The most capable people of early times, placed in the most favorable environment that the world in those times could offer them, worked out a civilization--perfect in all refinements except the moral--which has been the admiration and the marvel of later days.

Under modern conditions, the country of the Greeks gives no marked advantage to its inhabitants; but in the age of fiercer struggles, when war among men was tribal, universal, and hand to hand, and when the larger possibilities of pacific intercourse were bounded by one small sea, its intersecting mountains, its separated valleys and plains, its penetrating gulfs and bays, its clustered peninsulas in peninsulas, were helpful beyond measure to their social and political advance. In no other region of Europe could the independent city-states of ancient Hellas have grown up in shelter so safe, under skies so kindly, amid influences from the outer world so urgent and so strong.

It is reasonable to say that these happy conditions had much to do with the shaping of the character and career of the Greek people as a whole. But they differed very greatly from one another in their various political groups, and by differences that cannot be traced to varied surroundings of earth, or air, or sea, or human neighborhood. When every circumstance which distinguishes Athens in situation from Sparta, or from Corinth, or from Argos, has been weighed and reckoned, the Athenian is still parted from the Spartan, from the Corinthian and from the Argive, by a distinction which we name and do not explain by calling it family or race.

Ionians and Dorians.

At some time in the unknown past, there had been a parting of kindred among the ancestors of the Greeks, and the current of descent ran, for many centuries, perhaps, in two clearly divided streams, which acquired (in what manner, who can guess?) very different characteristics and qualities in their course. Then, in time, the great migrations, which are at the beginning of the traditions of the Greeks, brought these two branches of the race (the Doric and the Ionic, as they are named), into contact again, and associated them in a common career. In the inherited nature of the Ionian Greeks there was something which made them more sensitive to the finer delights of the mind, and prepared them to be more easily moved by every impulse toward philosophy and art, from the civilizations that were older than their own. In the Dorians there was less of this. They shared in equal measure, perhaps, the keen, clear Greek intellect, but they narrowed it to commoner aims.

Achaians.--Mycenæ.

It is possible that all which the Athenians came to be, their elder kindred, the Achaians, might have been. Their peninsula of Argolis is the peninsula of Attica in duplicate,--washed by the same waves, and reaching out to the same eastern world. They were first to touch hands with Phœnicia and with Egypt, and first to borrow arts and ideas from Memphis and Tyre. But their civilization, which they had raised to the height which Homer portrays, was overwhelmed by the Doric conquest; and the fact that these invaders, succeeding to the same vantage ground, remained as poor in culture as the Argives and their final masters, the Spartans, appear to have been, gives evidence of the strange difference that was rooted in the constitution of the two branches of the race.

Sparta.-Athens.

By force of this difference, the Spartans formed their state upon the grim lines of a military camp, and took leadership among the Greeks in practical affairs; the Athenians adorned a free city with great and beautiful works, made it hospitable to all genius and all the knowledge of the time, and created a capital for the civilization of the ancient world.

In all the Greek communities there was a primitive stage in which kings ruled over therm in a patriarchal way. In most of them the kingship surrendered to an oligarchy,--the oligarchy in time, was overthrown by some bold adventurer, who led a rising of the people and snatched power in the turmoil to make himself a "tyrant,"--and the tyrant in his turn fell after no long reign. In Athens that course of revolution was run; but it did not end as with the rest. The Athenian tyranny gave way to the purest democracy that has ever had trial in the world.

Æthel democracy.

That this Athenian democracy was wise in itself may be open to doubt; but it produced wise men, and, for the century of its great career, it was wonderfully led. How far that came to it from superiority of race, and how far as the fruitage of free institutions, no man can say; but the succession of statesmen who raised Athens to her pitch of greatness, without shattering the government of the people by the people, has no parallel in the annals of so small a state.

Sparta, not Athens, was the military head of Greece; but when a great emergency came upon the whole Greek world, it was the larger intelligence and higher spirit of the Attic state which inspired and guided the defence of the land and drove the Persians back.

B.C. 498-479. The Persian War. B.C. 477. Confederacy of Delos. B.C. 445-429. Age of Pericles.

Making prompt use of the ascendancy she had won in the Persian War, Athens rose rapidly in power and wealth. Under the guise of a federation of the Ionian cities of the islands and of Asia Minor, she created an empire subject to her rule. She commanded the sea with superior fleets, and became first in commerce, as she was first in knowledge, in politics and in arts. Her coffers overran with the riches poured into them by her tribute-gatherers and her men of trade, and she employed them with a noble prodigality upon her temples and the buildings of the state. Her abounding genius yielded fruits, in learning, letters, and art, which surpass the whole experience of the world, before and since, when measured against the smallness of the numbers from which they came.

B. C. 431-404. Peloponnesian War.

But the power attained by the Athenian democracy was arrogantly and harshly used; its sovereignty was exercised without generosity or restraint. It provoked the hatred of its subjects, and the bitter jealousy of rival states. Hence war in due time was inevitable, and Athens, alone in the war, was thrown down from her high estate. The last of the great leaders of her golden age died when her need of him was greatest, and her citizens were given over to demagogues who beguiled them to the ruin of the republic.

B.C. 404-379--Sparta B.C. 379-362--Thebes

Sparta regained the supremacy in Greece, and her rude domination, imposed upon all, was harder to bear than the superiority of Athens had been. Under the lead of Epaminondas of Thebes--the most high-souled statesman who ever swayed the Hellenic race--the Spartan yoke was broken.

B.C. 338--Macedonian supremacy.

But, in breaking it, all unity in Hellas was destroyed, and all hope of resistance to any common foe. The foe who first appeared was the half-Greek Macedonian, King Philip, who subdued the whole peninsula with ease, and found none to defend it so heroically as the orator Demosthenes.

B. C. 384-328. Alexander's conquests. Hellenization of the East.

But the subjugated Greeks were not yet at the end of their career. With Philip's great son they went forth to a new and higher destiny than the building of petty states. Unwittingly he made conquest of an empire for them, and not for himself. They Hellenized it from the Euxine to the Nile. In Egypt, in Syria, and in Asia Minor, they entered and took possession of every field of activity, an put their impress on every movement of thought. Their philosophy and their literature fed all the intellectual hunger of the age; their energy was its civilizing force.

B. C. 197-146.--Roman conquest.

Then the Romans came, to conquer and be conquered by the spirit of Athenian Greece, and to do for Europe, in the West, what the Macedonians had done in the East. They effaced Greece from history, in the political sense; but they kneeled to her teaching, and became the servants of her civilization, to carry it wherever the Roman eagles went.

Christianity.

A little later, when that civilization was changed by the transforming spirit of the Gospel of Christ, it did not cease to be essentially Greek; for Hellenism and Hebraism were fused in the theology of the rising Christian Church, and Greek thought ruled mankind again in an altered phase.

A. D. 476-1458.--The Eastern Empire.

At last, when Roman imperialism was driven from the West, Greece drew it to herself, and reigned in the great name of Rome, and fought gloriously with barbarians and with infidels for a thousand added years, defending the Christian world till it grew strong and stood in peril no more.

{144}

ASTYNOMI.

Certain police officials in ancient Athens, ten in number. "They were charged with all that belongs to street supervision, e. g., the cleansing of the streets, for which purpose the coprologi, or street-sweepers, were under their orders; the securing of morality and decent behaviour in the streets."

_G. F. Schömann, Antiquity of Greece: The State,