Here is a book published in 1925. Just reading the first lines on the forward page invites a curiousity to turn the pages.
"Here will be seen how, by patient excavation and by laborious decipherment, this remote past has been conjured up gradually- conjured up with all the gaps of a shadow."
"L. Delaporte gives in abridged form the results of the latest works on the kings, the dynasties, the perpetual wars, the sacks of toons, the deportations of the conquered, the monotonous destructions of the products of collective labour."
"The period prior ot Hammurabi has neveryet been treated as it deserves in any French work. [ ...] this book leaves the same impression as certain ancient tapestries frayed by time the fragmentary scenes and mutilated figures alone are visible, that is just what the author intended."
"Continuous knowledge in the case of these past ages is neither possible, nor, happily, essential"
This sentence in itself is worth exploring. What is being said here?
The above image says-
Across the successive volumes of this work what is to ensure their unity is the general plan, the continual preoccupation with the problems of history and the anxiety to verify some great explicative hypotheses.
It is also solid knowledge, the indispensable basis for any historical construction. But the method of exposition in history cannot be completely independent of the author's personality. Does not that play some part even in the explanation of the natural sciences and of the truths of mathematies themselves without infecting the foundation of Science On the same basis of profound erudition one historian proceeds by generalizations and extensive scenes, another by fine shades, by an accumulation of details and typical quotations. Properly handled the two procedures end by calling forth a similar image.
We believe that the reader of this book, replete as it is with facts, while he views the general outline of the past in Mesopotamia, will at the same time arrive unconsciously, but inevitably, at the heart of that reanimated civilization.
