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 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

General Editors
   . 
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece
and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to
authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has
been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal
of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest
scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and
abuse, of the classical past.
Topologies of the
Classical World
in Children’s Fiction
Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals

Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey

1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey 2019
© Excerpts from Bull by David Elliott. Copyright © 2017 by David Elliott.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved.
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941460
ISBN 978–0–19–884603–1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the assistance and helpful counsel of many
people over many years. Amanda Covington was a wonderful research
assistant. For advice on work now forming parts of chapters, we are
grateful to Karen Coats, Owen Hodkinson, Helen Lovatt, Sheila (Bridget)
Murnaghan, Judith Plotz, and Deborah Roberts. The section on Rick
Riordan in Chapter 5 comes from our longer article “ ‘A God Buys Us
Cheeseburgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Cul-
ture Wars,” which first appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn 39.3
(September 2015), and we thank the L&U editorial staff for their help
in strengthening this publication. Mara Bernstein at Indiana University
Libraries kindly sourced two illustrations, and multiple staff members at
Texas A&M University’s Evans Library supplied technological assistance
and research texts through TAMU’s Get It for Me service. Financial help
from the TAMU Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts, and
the Claudius M. Easley, Jr., Faculty Fellowship facilitated travel to con-
ferences where we could try out early versions of many of the textual
readings contained in this study and learn from the expertise of fellow
conferees too many to name. The “Asterisks and Obelisks: Greece and
Rome in Children’s Literature” conference held in Lampeter, Wales, in
2009 was particularly helpful as a forum for exchanging ideas about
classically inflected works for young readers.
It has been a pleasure to work with editors Charlotte Loveridge and
Georgina Leighton at OUP, and we are deeply grateful for the feedback
received from Lorna Hardwick and James I. Porter, the editors of the
Classical Presences series, and from our superb outside readers.
Copyright Acknowledgments

Excerpts from “Interview with Susan Cooper” by Raymond

H. Thompson. Copyright © 1989 by Raymond H. Thompson. Repro-
duced by permission.
Excerpt from one of the illustrated appendices to Julius Zebra: Bundle
with the Britons! by Gary Northfield. Copyright © 2016 Gary Northfield.
Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ,
<www.walker.co.uk>.
Excerpts from “Dedicated to the Demigods: Our Lit Camps” by
Topher Bradfield. Copyright © 2013 by the Los Angeles Review of
Books. Reproduced by permission.
Section 5.5 comes from our longer article “ ‘A God Buys Us Cheese-
burgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Culture
Wars.” Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This
article first appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 39, Issue 3,
September 2015, pages 235–53.
Excerpts from “John Christopher” by John R. Pfeiffer, from British
Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, 1918–1960, ed. Darren Harris-Fain.
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Copyright © 2002 Gale, a part of Cengage,
Inc. Reproduced by permission. <www.cengage.com/permissions>
Excerpts from “Megan Whalen Turner: Testing the Conventional” by
Jennifer M. Brown. Copyright © 2010 ShelfAwareness. Reproduced by
permission.
List of Illustrations

2.1 Claude Allin Shepperson, illustration for The Strand’s

serialization of Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill,
June 1906 26
3.1 Mary Whitson Haring, frontispiece to Caroline Dale
Snedeker’s Theras and His Town, 1924 69
4.1 H. R. Millar, illustration for The Strand’s serialization of
E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, November 1905 103
4.2 Detail from Egbert L. Viele’s Topographical Map of
the City of New York: Showing Original Water Courses
and Made Land, 1865 137
5.1 First page of “Roman Numerals,” an appendix to Gary
Northfield’s Julius Zebra: Bundle with the Britons!, 2016 162
6.1 “Prosobranchia,” from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen
der Natur, 1904 188
 1
Einführung

Most researchers working at the intersection of cognitive theory and

literary studies accept as a fundamental premise that literature is not
just a product but also a cause of human cognition. They contend that
literature helps to shape readers’ thought not only by providing infor-
mation, ideas, and insight but also by influencing the ways in which
readers process input from the nonliterary world; as Ellen Spolsky puts it,
“Narratives seem to colonize human brains” (37). Groundbreaking work
by scholars including George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We
Live By, 1980, and Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999), Mark Turner (The
Literary Mind, 1996), Peter Stockwell (Cognitive Poetics, 2002), Zoltán
Kövecses (Language, Mind, and Culture, 2006), and others has directed
attention toward literature’s power to provide conceptual metaphors that
shape readers’ understanding of the world, cognitive frames or schemas
for organizing experience, and scripts or internalized models for how to
behave in particular situations. While the cognitive study of literature has
many mansions,¹ it is this inquiry into metaphor and its offshoots that
concerns us here. Not surprisingly, children’s literature, directed primarily
toward an audience that has not yet reached intellectual or emotional
maturity and thus is still working to identify the principles by which
later decisions may be governed, has proven an especially rich field for
cognitively based inquiry, and scholars such as Maria Nikolajeva, Marek
Oziewicz, John Stephens, and Roberta Seelinger Trites (to name only a
few) have produced important recent work in this area.

¹ Consider, for instance, cognitive rhetoric, which takes a linguistic and behavioral
approach to the neuroscience of communication; cognitive narratology, which examines
how we process story in both producing and consuming it; and cognitive aesthetics of
reception, which considers the visual dimension that we create when we hear a story. Our
concern is primarily with cognitive poetics, which Margaret Freeman defines as a “tool
for . . . illuminating the structure and content of literary texts” (“Poetry” 254).

Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals.
Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Claudia Nelson and
Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001
     

In the book that follows, we seek to add to this dynamic conversation

by examining a particular subset of youth literature, namely some of the
many books written for older children and adolescents since the dawn of
the twentieth century that draw upon the classical world by making use
of ancient Greek and Roman settings, figures, and/or narratives. This
branch of children’s literature is a sufficiently widespread and important
phenomenon to have engendered its own dynamic conversation among
critics who do not take a cognitive approach, as valuable recent collec-
tions edited by Lisa Maurice (The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome
in Children’s Literature, 2015), Katarzyna Marciniak (Our Mythical
Childhood . . . , 2016), Markus Janka and Michael Stierstorfer (Verjüngte
Antike: Griechisch-römische Mythologie und Historie in zeitgenössischen
Kinder- und Jugendmedien, 2017), and Owen Hodkinson and Helen
Lovatt (Classical Reception and Children’s Literature: Greece, Rome and
Childhood Transformation, 2018), as well as Sheila Murnaghan and
Deborah H. Roberts’s monograph Childhood and the Classics: Britain
and America, 1850–1965 (2018) demonstrate.²
Yet to write about the past, or to incorporate intertextual references to
the past in a work set in the present or future, is to participate in what
geographer Barney Warf refers to as the fashioning of “time and space
[as] socially created, plastic, mutable institutions that profoundly shape,
just as they are shaped by, individual perceptions and social relations”
(2). As Warf notes, language (and by extension, literature) “is central to
how human beings construct and experience” space and time alike (3).
Authors who incorporate the classical world or any other past into their
work are not engaging in a neutral act, but modeling—and thus taking
part in shaping for readers—a particular understanding of time. Among
other things, by asserting the relevance of the distant past to the

² Marciniak’s volume is one outcome of the large and exciting international project by
the same name that she leads, which is funded by the European Research Council and
involves scholars on continents from Africa to Australia. The project focuses on children’s
literature as a significant vector for the transmission of classical tropes. Classicists use the
term “classical reception studies” to refer to such investigations, which have taken on
increasing importance over the past decades. Feeling the need for an adjectival form, in
this study we will sometimes refer to our primary texts as “neoclassical,” a term that we use
not to refer to works that attempt to reinstate genuine classical values in a postclassical age
(the definition that might come most naturally to a classicist) but rather in the more general
sense of the word, to refer to a postclassical adaptation of or riff upon an inspiration from
antiquity.
  

experience of the contemporary reader, they are endeavoring to lessen

what that reader might otherwise be inclined to regard as the classical
world’s remoteness: in the perception of the receptive reader, time and
space alike are abridged.
Even so, just as not all readers will read a given text in the same way
(we focus throughout this study on the invitations that we see particular
texts proffering, which may always be rejected by individual readers),
authors do not perform these abridgments in identical ways or to identi-
cal effect. In their survey of myth retellings and neoclassical historical
novels produced between 1850 and 1965, for instance, Murnaghan
and Roberts offer valuable insights into differences between British and
American and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to
the classical world, while noting that the texts that they discuss were all
intended to “draw the reader into another period” by lessening the
distance between past and present (Childhood 139). They add that
even near-contemporaries with similar projects—their examples here
are Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley—may reveal sharply
“contrasting visions of the relationship between children and the ancient
times” (42). For this reason, we propose that uniting neoclassical works
for children with the cognitive study of that literature is a productive way
of illuminating both the shifting ways in which children’s authors
seek to train their readers to think about the past and the ways in
which the classical heritage has been packaged for the young over the
last century.
In making our preliminary exploration of this intersection, we are
perforce omitting much. Influenced by space constraints, by the vast
amount of potentially relevant material, and in some cases by lack of
adequate expertise, we are not considering the enticing possibilities
offered by heavily illustrated texts (picture books such as the retold
myths included in Rosemary Wells’s Max and Ruby series, graphic
novels such as Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze sequence about the Trojan
War, comic books such as the Asterix titles) or by media other than print
(classical mythology and classical militarism have been particularly rich
sources of inspiration for computer and video games, from the 1984 title
Hercules to the ongoing God of War series). We are not looking at works
for the very young, aware that “a young brain is different from an adult
brain” (Nikolajeva, Reading 15), that “children’s ability to understand
different kinds of metaphors” increases significantly between ages six
     

and fourteen (Coats, “Form” 149), and that it is easier to generalize

about the cognitive processes invited by a group of texts if all these
texts address readers who have achieved a certain level of competence
and sophistication. We are also reluctantly ignoring works written out-
side Britain or the United States and those produced before the twentieth
century, although the lively classical tradition in continental Europe and
Australasia has resulted from the nineteenth century forward in the
publication of many historical novels with classical settings and many
repurposings of ancient myths. And finally, we are less interested in
relatively straightforward retellings of classical narratives (despite the
success and influence achieved by texts such as Ingri and Edgar Parin
d’Aulaire’s 1962 Book of Greek Myths and Padraic Colum’s The Golden
Fleece: And the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, designated a Newbery
Honor book in 1922) than we are in works that play with the classical
world in more radical ways.
Using a relatively constrained set of texts, then, we are asking the
following: how do British and American writers for middle-grade and
high-school readers encourage their audience to think about the classical
past and their own relationship to it, and how might this experience
potentially influence readers’ outlook more generally? (Here we would
emphasize the “might” in the previous sentence; as nonscientists, we see
our role in the collaboration between humanities scholars and cognitive
scientists as what Gregory Currie describes as “developing theories of
how we might learn from fiction, especially given that psychological work
in this area sometimes suffers from an impoverished view of the explana-
tory options” [653, orig. emphasis].) We contend that the metaphor with
which L. P. Hartley famously begins his 1953 novel The Go-Between,
“The past is a foreign country,” suggests a vision that is widespread in
youth literature, namely that time is most readily comprehended as an
aspect of place. In itself, this point is not surprising; Lakoff and Johnson
comment that “Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms
of one or more spatialization metaphors” (17). Indeed, that literary works
model particular ways of understanding space is an ancient phenomenon,
recently explored by such scholars as Alex C. Purves (Space and Time in
Ancient Greek Narrative, 2010) and William G. Thalmann (Apollonius of
Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism, 2011). Yet the precise nature of the
metaphors that a given author may draw upon in conceptualizing space
and time is contingent, not fixed, and popular metaphors—including the
  

clusters of related terms that we here organize under three collective

headings—can arise in response to, and in turn operate as a mechanism
for reinforcing, particular social developments.
For example, the possibility of “traveling” in time, an image that
equates time with a physical landscape, was popularized for Anglophone
readers as late as 1895, with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine,³ and
reached children’s literature only in the twentieth century via Rudyard
Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, both
of which were published in 1906 and, as the earliest texts in our study, are
considered at some length in later chapters. The formulation “time
travel,” which carries with it implications of the rapid or even instantan-
eous bridging of gaps via a folding or truncating of significant temporal
distance—not only spatiality, that is, but specifically the conquering of
spatiality—required a particular social context in order to take hold.
Geographers who think about how space is conceptualized have observed
the relevance of such developments as telegraphy, photography, radio,
and film, which, together with improvements in transportation networks,
promoted a general sense that increasingly, there would be no such thing
as distance either spatially or temporally. And arguably, one manifest-
ation of the “new ways of thinking about space and time” that Warf
identifies as emerging in the nineteenth century and gathering speed in
the twentieth (165) was the nineteenth-century invention of the chil-
dren’s historical novel, a form that depends upon the abrogation of time
inasmuch as it resituates the modern reader in a bygone world.
Inheriting the Victorian tendency to think of time and space as linked
and bridgeable, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that we
study here conceive of the past as understandable in terms of concrete
form, which in turn may affect readers’ approach to both past and
present. Accordingly, we are interested in how these texts implicitly or
explicitly draw upon a limited and powerful collection of spatial meta-
phors in order to organize the past. We do not insist that a contemporary
author who invokes the classical tradition rather than, say, the medieval

³ Wells was not, of course, the first or best known author to employ the conceit of a
character occupying a time not his or her own; his predecessors here include Mark Twain.
But Twain’s Connecticut Yankee finds himself in King Arthur’s court not, as he sees it,
through travel but as a result of a “transposition of epochs and bodies” after a blow on the
head (7).
     

will approach the past through different metaphors than those used by
his or her medievalist colleague, although sometimes that may be the
case. (As one of the reviewers of our manuscript pointed out, a
classicist—and some of our authors were classically trained—could con-
vincingly argue that early versions of the metaphors we examine appear
in Greek and Roman epic, a circumstance that increases the likelihood
that the metaphors would be picked up and recycled along with other
antique content.) Since our own background is in more recent texts, our
decision to focus on classical reception in children’s literature is
prompted primarily by the desire to examine a body of literature that
is at once varied and unified. Nor do we contend that the small set of
metaphors on which we focus most of our attention either is directly
employed in our texts, as our central metaphors are images that we have
developed to describe and organize the phenomena on display in the
fiction rather than terms universally used by the authors themselves, or
constitutes the entire set available to authors. Indeed, later in this intro-
duction we will offer three representative examples of texts that take
nonstandard approaches. Nevertheless, in collecting texts for our study,
we were struck by how frequently novelists have drawn upon one
(or more than one) of three central conceptual models in representing
or mining the past for young readers, and by the extent to which the
dominant model on display in a particular text correlates with genre and
overall tone.

1.1 The Models

We begin our investigation with works that, by invoking images such as
carpets, wells, archaeological digs, and so on, present history primarily as
a palimpsest. In these works, past and present exist in a many-layered
series of deposits. If the work is set in the past, the narrator nods to the
perceptions and knowledge of contemporary readers, for example by
commenting on the ways in which the classical landscape resembles and/
or differs from its modern counterpart. If the work is set in the author’s
present, the past is shown to have a continuing existence as something
discernible by the right kind of modern individual, who proves capable
of interacting with the past through an informed historical imagination
or, as happens in Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle (1907), through magic.
Such texts may be framed as fantasies (often time-slip fantasies) or as
  

works of realism, but in either case both the classical and the contemporary
layer are often only two strata among many.
Much as the original excavators of Troy found not “the” Troy but
multiple Troys superimposed upon the same geographical location, or as
Book 8 of the Aeneid focuses both upon the prehistory of the place that
will become Rome and upon images of the future glory of the Roman
empire, palimpsest texts frequently establish a single location—in our
study, which focuses on British and American texts, this location is
characteristically found in Britain—as the site of a chronological core
sample. As happens in works such as Kipling’s Puck stories (1906–10),
Philip Turner’s Darnley Mills sequence (1964–77), and Joan Aiken’s The
Shadow Guests (1980), the reach of this core sample may extend from the
prehistoric to the Roman era, the Middle Ages and/or the Tudor period,
the eighteenth century, and the twentieth century. By positioning char-
acter and reader as occupying one among many equally important
temporal strata, palimpsest texts emphasize the physical or social land-
scape’s continuity but the individual’s impermanence, modeling a
modest vision of one’s place in time. The first of our two palimpsest
chapters presents Puck of Pook’s Hill as the foundation of a textual
palimpsest added to by writers for adults and children alike, while the
second explores landscape and trauma in works less overtly influenced
by Kipling. In the texts discussed in these two chapters, the metaphors
contributing to the palimpsest schema, with its inherent urging of
humility and cooperation, are also used to convey messages about
citizenship, empire, family, and coping with pain.
The second of the popular models that we examine is the map text. In
these works, which typically feature maps as important plot elements
and/or as illustrations or endpapers, protagonists’ journeys toward
knowledge, maturity, and self-discovery—and the reader’s journey
toward an improved understanding of the classical world—are presented
as physical movement. Like palimpsest texts, map texts may be set in
either past or present and span more than one genre. Although we have
found it prudent (given the large number of classically inflected map
texts found within children’s literature, ranging from the Pan chapter in
The Wind in the Willows to retellings of the Odyssey to the latest myth-
inspired fantasy) to narrow our scope somewhat by investigating under-
world stories in our first map chapter and narratives of the grotesque in
our second, our discussion nevertheless includes a wide variety of textual
     

types. We classify as map texts works as diverse as K. M. Peyton’s Roman

Pony trilogy (2007–9), Roger Lancelyn Green’s and Caroline Lawrence’s
mysteries set respectively in Mycenae and in the Roman world (1959 and
2001–9), C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (1953), and comic sagas including
Paul Shipton’s Gryllus the Pig duology (2004–6) and Rick Riordan’s
Percy Jackson series (2005–9). All these texts feature quests or other
acts of mobile problem-solving, all of which have successful outcomes.
Writing of children’s works that include maps as frontispieces or end-
papers, Anthony Pavlik argues that the invitation to interact with these
maps casts the reader in an “active, participatory role” (35). Similarly, the
classically inspired map texts that we examine here highlight—and not
just in their endpapers—freedom of action, decision making, and arrival
at one’s planned destination. They model an assertive, confident outlook
and tend to present the protagonist (with whom the reader is encouraged
to identify) as exceptional, a figure upon whom friends’ lives or even the
fate of the cosmos may depend.
The third and final model that we find in multiple texts in our study,
albeit in considerably fewer texts than is the case for either palimpsest
texts or map texts, is what we are terming the fractal text. Here, small
parts of the narrative are structured in a way that mirrors the structure of
the overarching whole, and the problems of the individual are identical
to the problems of the larger society. Consider how Suzanne Collins’s
Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10)—based, as Kathryn Strong Hansen has
shown, not only on the Theseus myth but also on those of Artemis and
Philomela—contains a recurring pattern of betrayal that operates on both
micro and macro levels. For instance, a narrative aside in Volume 1,
Katniss’s betrayal of the lynx who has trusted her, is a miniature version
of the state’s betrayal of its citizens, the ongoing problem that drives
the entire trilogy; the lynx also has multiple feline counterparts in other
episodes of the trilogy, from Katniss’s sister’s tomcat to human “cats”
such as Tigris the Capitol shopkeeper and Katniss/“Catnip” herself,
and all these cats similarly raise questions of trust and betrayal.⁴ Fractal
texts work by analogy, denying difference between past, present,
and future and inviting optimistic readers to conclude that even small
social change affects the whole world, while pessimistic readers may

⁴ We discuss this issue in more detail in Chapter 6 of this study.

  

discover that meaningful change is impossible. To borrow an insight

from David Quint’s Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from
Virgil to Milton (1993), Freud’s repetition compulsion, in which “The
victim of an earlier trauma may neurotically reenact his victimization
over and over again” (51), helps to explain “the obsessive circular
return to a traumatic past” that characterizes the (fractal) opening
books of the Aeneid (50);⁵ whereas Virgil’s epic changes course as
the Trojans turn themselves from “losers” into “winners,” however,
contemporary fractal fiction for the young often takes a less optimistic
form.
For at least where classically inspired adolescent fiction is concerned,
the fractal model is closely associated with dystopian narratives. This
association is logical inasmuch as the didactic purpose of dystopian
fiction is conventionally to prompt readers to see connections between
the dystopian world and their own reality; this purpose is furthered when
narratives encourage readers to look for similarities in apparently unre-
lated narrative moments. Thus John Christopher’s Fireball trilogy
(1981–6), to invoke another example, begins as what briefly appears to
be a conventional domestic novel about a boy resentful about his lack of
power within the family setting, as his parents have refused to send him
on a school trip to Greece and are instead requiring him to entertain a
previously unknown cousin. Almost immediately, the narrative shifts
into being what first appears to be a time-slip novel involving Roman
Britain and is later revealed to be an alternate-history saga, but neither
the hostile dynamic between the cousins nor the feeling of dissatisfaction
with the status quo ever reaches a permanent resolution. In other words,
readers are instantly provided in miniature with the pattern that will
animate both plot and character dynamics across all three installments.
But even recognizing this pattern as soon as possible will not protect
them from the feelings of disorientation from which the protagonist
perennially suffers in this trilogy; rather, the repetition merely under-
scores the inevitability of this response.

⁵ We thank one of our anonymous manuscript readers for this suggestion and for
pointing out the palimpsestic qualities of The Roman Mysteries, an insight that we pursue
on the next page. The same reader adds that “the Iliad is arguably fractal, in that Patroclus
foreshadows Hector, Hector foreshadows Achilles, and all foreshadow the fall of Troy,
which is viewed as inevitable.”
     

Yet combinations of the three models are also possible, and that we
have sorted works into chapters according to the class of metaphor that
we see as dominant in a given text does not preclude the possibility that a
secondary metaphor is also present. For instance, because Lawrence’s
Roman Mysteries series is centrally concerned with journeys, we see it
primarily as a map text, yet in its emphasis on individual and family
pasts, the enduring effects of trauma, and the eruption of Vesuvius, it is
simultaneously palimpsestic, if ultimately to a more limited extent—and
the contemplative sensibility that is characteristic of the palimpsest text
tempers the confidence that is characteristic of the map text. Similarly,
Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series (1996–) is a rare example
of a fractal text that is optimistic because the fractal here is combined
with the map to form a symmetrical labyrinth. The series’s plot mech-
anism works by a constant feedback loop of mutual theft and misprision.
The fractal nature of the text is visible in the endless repetition of and
connections among acts of stealing and failures to judge correctly what
others (usually the series protagonist, Eugenides) may be capable of. But
because Eugenides is intensely aware of others’ tendency to remain
mired in particular patterns, he is able to manipulate this tendency to
the advantage of the three kingdoms with which the series is concerned,
consistently enabling the weaker element to triumph over apparently
stronger forces. Eugenides thus has considerably more agency than is
typical for the protagonists of fractal works, so that the thefts and con
games—in which readers as well as the characters are implicated—work
to bind rather than to separate, and instead of being trapped in the
labyrinth, we emerge from it having gained new understanding.
As the foregoing point implies, we propose that each of the conceptual
metaphors (HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST, HISTORY IS A MAP, HIS-
TORY IS A FRACTAL⁶) upon which we primarily focus in this study
urges readers to adopt a particular approach to life. Although, as Jukka
Mikkonen points out, authorities disagree over how to interpret the
results of experiments designed to test “the cognitive and emotive effects

⁶ Sarah Mohler explains, “When cognitive theorists reference conceptual metaphors,

they do so using all capital letters to signify that they are not referencing a single denotive
understanding of a word, but the web of cultural references and personal associations linked
to that particular word that are activated in the mind of the individual who encounters the
metaphor” (442).
  

of literary narratives” (276), cognitive research nevertheless suggests that

textual prompts can have real effects, however difficult to measure these
effects may be, upon how their consumers learn to approach the world.
Spolsky, for example, cites neurological findings to argue for a biological
basis for story’s appeal, writing that “narratives indeed teach us by man-
aging our neuronal/brain/body responses in all kinds of situations. . . .
An achieved narrative can be thought of as a representation or schema
that satisfies because it enables prediction” (40). This contention helps to
explain not only why the dystopian approach to the fractal model is an
innovation of the apocalyptically inclined postmodern era but also why it is
so popular with post-9/11 readers: it normalizes, and thus brings under a
measure of control, the idea that real progress may not happen.
If texts indeed “colonize” readers, potentially affecting not only short-
term phenomena such as mood but also longer-term matters such as
children’s understanding of their place in the world and in time, our
project may seem to have particular significance in an era when instruc-
tion in history is declining. Since for many children leisure reading is the
principal mechanism for gaining an acquaintance with the past, the
authors of that leisure reading have become, de facto, such children’s
principal history teachers. Examining how fiction for children and ado-
lescents organizes the spaces of the past thus has important pedagogical
implications: teachers who are aware of the metaphors that students may
already use to understand time are equipped to decide whether they want
to take advantage of these existing structures in presenting new material
or to offer alternative ways of thinking. More generally, if we accept the
proposition that the metaphors that authors choose condition the
reader’s sense of the world’s coherence and the individual’s agency,
examining these metaphors becomes crucial because they have powerful
implications for citizenship.

1.2 Sample Exception #1: Mirroring

in Echo Echo
As noted above, most of this book explores the three spatial models that
we see operating across multiple works of youth literature containing
classical content. We do not, however, wish to imply that all such works
can be classified according to one or more of these models, and to
     

underscore this point, we offer here readings of three representative

exceptions: a collection of poetry, a verse novel, and a historical novel.
In our first example, Marilyn Singer’s Echo Echo: Reverso Poems about
Greek Myths (2016), the reader’s attention is directed forcefully toward
form. As the book’s subtitle indicates, all fourteen poems in this collec-
tion are what Singer calls “reverso poems,” a genre that she originated. In
a prose comment included in the book, she explains that this form
involves the publisher in printing two versions side by side; the second
is identical to the first in wording, but the order of the lines is inverted.
From the standpoint of form, the genre’s purpose is to highlight the
radical change in meaning that results from the destabilization of
perspective as we move from one speaker (or outlook) to another, a
change signaled by the flipping of the order in which the reader encoun-
ters the lines (n.pag.). In other words, here the conceptual metaphor
governing form is DIFFERENCE IN VIEWPOINT IS A MIRROR,
with the idea of the mirror emphasizing both what is identical in the
mirror image and what is opposite.⁷
Karen Coats argues that in cognitive terms, the function of children’s
poetry is to create “a holding environment in language to help children
manage their sensory environments, map and regulate their neurological
functions, and contain their existential anxieties” (“Meaning” 140).
Using as her examples several poems for adults by Emily Dickinson,
cognitive literary theorist Margaret Freeman foregrounds “the general
mapping skills that constitute the cognitive ability to create and interpret
metaphor” (“Poetry” 254). In Singer’s work, this connection between
reading poetry and cognitive mapping receives an unusually specific
orientation, up to down and down to up, even while the poems simul-
taneously suggest that what we identify as “up” or “down” may be
arbitrary. Singer has used the reverso form for poems on a wide range
of subjects, from cats to fairy tales to Richard Nixon. Yet because Greek
myths are associated with a particular long-ago culture in a way that fairy

⁷ Nancy Hadaway and Terrell Young cite as an example one of Singer’s earliest and
briefest efforts in this style, which consists in its entirety of six words read first from the top
down and subsequently from the bottom up (qtd. 52; see also http://www.librarything.com/
topic/108882). For additional examples from Echo Echo, excerpted or (in one case) reprinted
entire, see Maria Russo’s review of the collection, which appeared in the New York Times on
24 February 2016; Nicole Lamy’s Boston Globe review of 23 February 2016 quotes similarly
illustrative lines from “Echo and Narcissus” and “Orpheus and Eurydice.”
  

tales, say, are not (we can date and place Charles Perrault’s version of
“Cinderella,” but its source text is much harder to pin down), the reader
of Echo Echo is encouraged to understand not only that the characters in
myths have different points of view but also that reading down into the
past is different from reading up out of the past. Indeed, the volume’s
emphasis on simultaneity implies that “past” and “present” may be
misnomers; the characters have their points of view, the narrator and
readers theirs, but all exist in the same volume and at least potentially
resist prioritization.
Thus, for instance, “Demeter and Persephone” contrasts the bereaved
mother’s anger with Persephone’s expression of acceptance and opti-
mism; while the goddess of agriculture, harvests, and the seasons implies
that regeneration may never come again, her daughter focuses on spring
(n.pag.). Mother and daughter’s opposing attitudes toward Persephone’s
abductor should pose no particular conceptual challenge for the third- to
sixth-grade reader posited by Deborah Stevenson in her review of the
collection.⁸ Yet a more sophisticated point being made here arises from
the fact that Demeter, Persephone, and the other characters who popu-
late the myths that Singer invokes exist on a different time plane from
that of the contemporary reader, as is apparent in the two poems that
bookend the collection. Both “An Age of Marvelous Myths”—which is
reproduced in its entirety on the author’s website, marilynsinger.net—
and “Gods and Mortals” step outside the seemingly timeless world of
myth to make time-specific reference to the distant Greek past (in the
opening poem) and to readers of today (in the concluding poem, whose
illustration shows children in modern dress walking on the same path as
a winged horse and interacting with a king, while above them a temple
roof turns into the opened pages of a book). That is, in Nikolajeva’s
terms, Singer invokes both “eternal, mythic time” and “measurable,
linear time” (Mythic 5).
This juxtaposition means that the volume as a whole offers a larger
version of the contrast in viewpoint apparent in each individual poem.
Yet because of the “reverso” effect, the spatial model on display is not
that of the fractal, in which order makes no difference to the ultimate

⁸ As is often the case with assessments of children’s books, reviewers’ ideas of the age of
the target audience vary, with some positing a significantly younger reader than others. We
cite Stevenson because our opinion coincides with hers.
     

meaning. Rather, attention is drawn to the importance of organization,

with the opening poem’s emphasis on a combination of disruption and
balance turning into the final poem’s emphasis on how myths allow
people to find meaning in what they see around them. The job of
interpreting implies a commitment to linear time, in which events first
occur and are then parsed in memory and whose association with the
progress toward maturity Nikolajeva points out throughout From Mythic
to Linear. Moreover, because of the passage of time, the conflicts between
the outlooks of individual characters, unresolved in the poems them-
selves, come to closure, since the reader knows how these stories end.
Simultaneously, however, that the twelve poems set within the world
of myth capture moments before the stories have ended insists upon the
myths’ timelessness: for the purposes of this volume, they are not over,
however “ancient” they may be. Nikolajeva’s examination of mythic and
linear time in children’s fiction addresses “how the narrative structure of
children’s novels changes in accordance with the grade of the ‘displace-
ment’ of myth” (Mythic 8); in this collection of poems, Singer creates a
system in which neither mythic nor linear time is displaced. Rather, the
two exist in productive tension, since on the one hand linear time is
granted the privilege of having the first and last word, but on the other
hand the myth poems significantly outnumber the historical-time poems
that frame them. Like the poems, then, time works in two directions,
carrying different meanings depending on which direction is (or hap-
pens to be) uppermost. If Coats is correct in contending that children’s
poetry helps children to “map . . . their neurological functions,” the
implication of the central insight that Singer offers in this collection is
that quite a complex network of synapses is being created.

1.3 Sample Exception #2: Insides and

Outsides in Bull
A second work that both defies and affirms some of the assertions that
we are making about complexity and spatial organization is David
Elliott’s verse novel Bull (2017). Elliott retells the story of the Minotaur
as that of a particularly dysfunctional family victimized through the
conflict between two selfish patriarchs, Poseidon and Minos. Each
narrator—members of the household, plus Poseidon and Theseus—
  

speaks in order to meditate on the wrongs done to him or her, or to

justify the wrongs done to others. The center of the work is the psyche of
the Minotaur, Asterion, for as long as he remains articulate. Asterion is
presented as an outcast adolescent (son to Minos and Pasiphae, half-
brother to Ariadne, victim of Poseidon and Theseus, and so on), the
product of his mother’s shameful lust for the perfect white bull sent by
Poseidon to Minos. By the end of the narrative, Asterion has been
rejected by Minos, neglected by his withdrawn and mentally disturbed
mother, and betrayed by his initially loving sister Ariadne, who gives up
the secret of the Labyrinth to Theseus.
The major principle of spatial organization on display here is the
contrast between inside and outside. For example, Asterion’s reality
exists within what is effectively an exhibition space curated by Poseidon,
which in turn exists within but separated from the reader’s own reality,
which is buffered by author-supplied but extradiagetic material in the
form of a list of characters at the start and afterwords on the myth and on
poetic form. The powerless are swallowed up by more powerful mortals
such as Minos, while Minos is in turn constrained by a straitjacket
imposed by divine power and even Poseidon, according to Elliott, is
product rather than master of the verse form associated with him, since
“In a very real way, those forms wrote the book” (184). Meanwhile, the
dysfunctional family is defined through the figures that it shouldn’t
contain but does (a partially nonhuman son, a vengeful deity) and also
through the figures that it should contain but does not (responsible and
loving parents, children who share parental regard and care). The inside/
outside design is found formally in complex ways, particularly those that
suggest sexual irregularity for the poem’s adolescent readers. Pasiphae
must conceal herself inside an artificial cow in order to mate with the
bull; she then carries her nonhuman progeny inside her until Asterion’s
birth. Asterion’s progress toward the wholly discarded, the wholly non-
human, is charted through his enforced removal from his mother by
stages: he first moves from the center of the palace to a more remote
space, then to a barn away from the palace, and finally to the Labyrinth.
This inside/outside dichotomy is continued in Ariadne’s fleeting concern
for her half-brother. She blackmails Daedalus into creating a hole in the
Labyrinth in order that she might speak to Asterion, and she receives the
secret to escaping from the Labyrinth that will allow Theseus to enter and
exit the space completely associated with the Minotaur.
     

On the level of characterization, the ultimate inside/outside dichotomy

is the presence of the sentient, articulate human being inside the bull boy
and adolescent. There is a human being inside Asterion, but either the
rejection he suffers or his maturation (or both) gradually work to reduce
what is human in him to pure rage until his inside and outside appear
congruent. Yet the relationship between inside and outside is apparent on
other levels as well. As Coats observes, the formal qualities on display in
the volume (the book’s “outside,” in the sense that the reader may expect it
to exist separate from the narrative layer) comment upon content here,
since “the novel makes clever use of typography and book design. . . . The
shapes and lineation of Asterion’s ottava rimas and Pasiphae’s random-
ized syllables chart their descents into meandering instability, while the
background color of the pages of Asterion’s poems after entering the
labyrinth darken[s] gradually along with his environment and his
thoughts” (Review 255–6). As Coats elsewhere explains, nonstandard
“ways of arranging line breaks, space, font, and color on the page are
examples of visual and sonic allegories of embodied states and processes
that facilitate the reader’s understanding of characters and settings in a
verse novel”; that is, book design in Bull as in many of its fellows is
intended to encourage a particular kind of cognition, directing the reader
toward certain insights through its use of space and shape (“Form” 148–9).
Somewhat similarly, the multivocality of Bull’s poetic structure is designed
to highlight the contest between social insiders and social outsiders by
revealing Minos’ self-delusion, Pasiphae’s despair and dissolution as a
personality, and Asterion’s reduction to the purely animal. It also reveals
Poseidon as vain, self-regarding, and strategically vulgar (his initial greet-
ing to readers is “Whaddup, bitches?” [3]), again allowing the reader
access to a psyche that is typically off limits in the context of more
conventional versions of Greek myths. Because each major character has
his or her own distinct poetic form and speaks in the first person, readers
are effectively inside the dysfunctional family and the wounded wife, son,
or daughter instead of being held at arm’s length by the remoteness of
mythic time.
Conversely, the performative masks or personae adopted by such
characters as Poseidon and Theseus complicate that empathic effort. In
particular, Poseidon’s aggressively modern language functions at first to
highlight his likeness to the contemporary reader, but by the end of the
text the reader may understand him as the most alien of all the novel’s
  

characters because his speech suggests an affect devoid of human feeling,

the expression of a power that is wholly disengaged emotionally. In
Coats’s reading, “Poseidon is positioned outside of time and place”
through his combination of up-to-the-minute diction and ancient
godly attributes. The pairing “works like a canted angle in film; it projects
a world that is off-balance and unsettled, and replicates the prolifera-
tion of sometimes contradictory roles experienced by the adolescent,” a
device that furthers what Coats sees as Elliott’s project of turning “poetic
form and material presentation [into] physical-psychological metaphors
for the developing self” (“Form” 156). Meanwhile, although Ariadne’s
voice seems at first to bear a strong resemblance to Poseidon’s in its
profane disrespect for others (“Everything’s a fucking mess. / My family
is clueless. / . . . Phaedra? She’s a complete whack / job. And a nympho-
maniac” [61]), later poems are couched in more formal language and
convey considerably greater emotional depth. “Ariadne means ‘holy /
one.’ But how could that be me / unless prevarication is sacred?” she asks
(116), a question that both directs us to look for the core truth that her
defiant demeanor has been concealing and suggests a deep sadness.
Ultimately, in strong contrast with Poseidon’s mode of expression,
Ariadne’s language is laden with affect and concern for her half-brother.
The contest between inside and outside, and the language designed to
grant the reader privileged access to individual thoughts and feelings that
would otherwise be unavailable, produce the final set of dialogic relations
in Bull, that between the biological and the mechanical. Daedalus assists
with the creation of Asterion by inventing the device of the false cow in
which Pasiphae enfolds herself, but Asterion is a true organic fusion of
human and animal. Later, Daedalus approaches the combining of human
and animal mechanically, through the production of wings for his
doomed flight with Icarus. While the reader might find the affect of
gods or animals alien, it is notable that the narrative chronicles repeated
human efforts to use machines to achieve union with the divine or the
animal. This gesture toward the mechanical makes the rejection of the
human within Asterion more painful. It also parallels Poseidon’s detach-
ment from human feeling: the god is distanced from the disasters that
ensue from his plans for revenge on Minos, which is structured in such a
way as to fall endlessly on his wife and children. The god’s pique thus has
its own mechanical working out, emphasized through his detached
language.
     

Ultimately, a major implicit contrast of the novel is that between the

imperfect and disastrous attempts to achieve fusion with alien beings
using mechanical aids and the seamless entry into alien psyches that is
enabled by telling and reading their stories. Through poetry and empathy,
Elliott suggests, we can achieve what the flawed characters in this text
cannot—especially since, as Coats argues, works such as Bull approach
structure and metaphor in a way calculated “to not only reflect preadoles-
cent and adolescent experiences of embodiment and affective-cognitive
development, but also to scaffold and support those developments”
(“Form” 159; orig. emphasis). The emphasis on getting to the heart of
the labyrinth constituted by the tormented family and its tragic son cuts
across time and space; outsiders by virtue of era, nationality, and status as
fully human, the readers are made insiders by language. If the controlling
metaphor here is implicitly HISTORY IS A SECRET, one is nonetheless to
understand that the way to breach secrets is to articulate them.

1.4 Sample Exception #3: Curves vs. Straight

Lines in The Mark of the Horse Lord
For our final example of an approach to structuring time that does not
readily fall into one of our three principal metaphorical modes, we turn
to Rosemary Sutcliff. As a major chronicler of Roman Britain in chil-
dren’s literature, Sutcliff was an avowed admirer and disciple of Kipling,
her predecessor in this endeavor. She identified him as particularly
important to her early reading: “of all the writers of my childhood, he
made the strongest impact on me, an impact which I have never forgot-
ten” (qtd. Wright 90). Hilary Wright notes, however, that when Sutcliff
borrows from Kipling “the kernel of a story or a point of detail . . . she
has always developed it in her own way” (98). For Roberts, this “own
way” is typically simpler and less interesting than Kipling’s, whose works
she judges “both thematically and narratologically more complex than
Sutcliff ’s” (“Pasts” 108). While we will return in Chapter 2 to the question
of Kipling’s influence, at this point we turn to a discussion of Sutcliff ’s
1965 novel The Mark of the Horse Lord in an effort to ally ourselves
with the critics who see her as a writer whose work has its own narrato-
logical complexities to offer. Throughout the novel, Sutcliff juxtaposes two
recurring spatial images, one linear and the other circular/mythic, to
  

suggest the contrast between Roman and ancient British ways of thinking.
In the process, she also dramatizes a conflict between linear and mythic
time, hinting that the mode of thought that one adopts determines, for
good or ill, one’s destiny.
The novel’s plot follows Phaedrus, a half-Greek, half-British inhabitant
of Britain toward the end of the second century . Originally a slave in his
father’s household, Phaedrus is sold as a gladiator upon his father’s death,
gains his freedom in the arena, and shortly thereafter finds himself in jail
after a night of drunken revelry turns violent. At this juncture, he gains a
new identity and leaves the Roman orbit: he has been discovered by
members of the Dalriad tribe who see that he bears a striking resemblance
to Midir, who should have been their king but was secretly blinded and
exiled by his father’s half-sister, Liadhan, in an effort to establish the
ascendancy of the Mother-worshiping Epidii over the patriarchal Dalriads.
Tutored by Midir (whose mutilation has rendered him ineligible to return
to his people and take up the kingship), Phaedrus successfully imperson-
ates his double, ascends to the ruling position of Horse Lord, marries
Liadhan’s daughter Murna, and leads the Dalriads to victory in battle
over the more numerous Caledones, cultural allies of the Epidii. Liadhan
escapes and gains sanctuary with the Romans, who capture Phaedrus and
Midir when the latter attempt to infiltrate the Roman garrison and kill her.
Midir manages to avenge himself upon the queen-goddess, although doing
so costs him his own life; Phaedrus, facing the Roman demand that he buy
his freedom by sending a thousand young Dalriads to become Roman
auxiliaries, kills himself for the sake of his adopted subjects.
As Barbara Talcroft points out, “the sacrificial kingship,” a concept
derived from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, is central to this novel
(7); that is, Phaedrus is not only his birth self, an adventurer with a linear
history beginning in slavery and ending in kingship, but also one incar-
nation of a mythic figure who transcends time. In her commentary on
The Mark of the Horse Lord, Talcroft details the many mythic elements
in the work, noting that Sutcliff ’s
use of myth was not allegorical, but very nearly literal. She was not so much
attempting to present myth as metaphor as to present myth as reality, and to
imagine what effect a pervasive belief in that reality would have had on the
actions and destinies of those who believed. . . . Sutcliff ’s use of the kingship
themes reflects the intensity of her perception of history as the eternal death and
resurrection of the people and the land. (57)
     

But while we agree with Talcroft’s point about the centrality of myth to
this narrative, we want to emphasize here the importance of the simul-
taneity of the mythic and the linear. Sutcliff produces here two stories at
once, one an account of the coming of age and identity quest of a
protagonist whose original affiliation is with Rome, the other an account
of how ancient Celtic myths are to be seen working themselves out over
one cycle of a seemingly endless recurring pattern. To ignore either
dimension is to overlook the device that generates much of the novel’s
complexity—a complexity of character and mood that takes concrete
form in Sutcliff ’s repeated contrasting of straight and curved lines.
This contrast sometimes occurs in the foreground of the narrative,
sometimes in the background. Significantly, the reader may first become
aware of it during the scene in which Phaedrus is being recruited to
impersonate Midir, when Gault, one of the Dalriad leaders, dips his
finger in a puddle of wine “and as though not conscious of what he
was doing, [began] to draw patterns on the table-top as he talked. It was a
trick that Phaedrus was to come to know well as time went by” (251). The
narrator’s vision returns to the doodle throughout the conversation,
tracing their progress from a collection of “curved and crosswise lines”
(251) to the addition of “a carefully judged flourish” (252) and finally to a
smeared “red blur on the table-top” (253); although the doodle serves no
plot function and the reader never sees Phaedrus react to it, the narra-
tor’s tracking of it at four separate moments hints at thematic import-
ance for this movement between curved and straight, order and disorder.
Readers will next see Gault creating a pattern in Chapter 4, when for the
tattooist’s use he draws on Phaedrus’ forehead “the lost pattern . . . those
potent, interlocking lines and spirals and double curves of Sun Cross and
Stallion Symbol that formed between them a device not unlike a four-
petalled flower”—the titular “Mark of the Horse Lord” that will identify
him as the Dalriads’ missing king (260–1). Looking back from this
moment at the earlier pattern drawn in wine on the table, one may
interpret Gault’s first effort as a rehearsal for Phaedrus’ transformation
into Midir’s committed double. But it is also a clue that the “curved and
crosswise,” the “interlocking lines and spirals” of the two (or one?)
double not just one another but also the novel’s overall plot, in which
curves and straight lines are ultimately inseparable.
Similarly foregrounded is a remark made to Phaedrus at the end of
Chapter 5 by one of Gault’s companions, Sinnoch the trader. Speaking
  

of the man who will later command the local Roman garrison and set the
ransom that impels Phaedrus’ final sacrifice, Sinnoch commends him as
“a bright enough lad . . . good at his job,” but also notes a crucial con-
ceptual weakness: “like most of his kind, his mind works in straight lines.
Maybe that is what has made Rome the ruler of the world, but there’s no
denying that when it comes to buying or selling a horse, the man who can
think in curves has the advantage” (280–1). The metaphorical nature of
this comment prompts readers to be alert to instances of “thinking in
curves” or in straight lines and to notice when one or the other wins out.
For instance, Phaedrus is unexpectedly straightforward when Conory, a
cousin and close childhood friend of Midir, challenges him as a coun-
terfeit; Phaedrus promptly admits to the imposture and to his own low
status as a non-Dalriad and a former Roman slave, and the truth having
been established, Conory becomes his closest ally in the task of keeping
the secret as closely held as possible. Here “straight line” thinking serves
Phaedrus well, but he is later able to bring about his own death (and thus
preserve the autonomy and existence of the tribe) by a final example of
“curve” thinking when he stabs himself with the brooch that holds his
cloak. It has not occurred to his captors, who have of course disarmed
him, to think of this enameled ornament as a weapon, yet “the deadly
pin . . . was almost as long as a small dagger” (476)—and as part of the
mythic pattern of sacrificial kingship, Phaedrus’ decision to die is itself
“as familiar as the folds of an old cloak” (469).
Much as Gault’s patterns are composed of both straight lines and
curves, then, both forms of thought are presented as potentially advan-
tageous. Over and over, the narration employs the words “pattern,”
“curved” (or variants such as “curving”), “straight,” “line,” and “circle,”
with other geometric terms such as “angle” and “spiral” entering into the
mix as well. In general, these words are employed neutrally, without
attached value judgments. And although Sinnoch suggests that curves
are Celtic and straight lines Roman (a classification supported to some
extent by the contrast between the straight Roman Wall and roads and
the meandering paths and watery ways associated with the Dalriads and
Caledones), circular spaces such as arenas may be Roman and straight
lines have their place in the Dalriad patterns. It seems telling, then, that
immediately before killing himself as the Horse Lord, Phaedrus thinks
multiple times of his days as a gladiator; his two identities merge and
inform each other. Finally, the novel hints that far from being opposites,
     

curves and straight lines are complementary; the real advantage goes to
the individual capable of thinking in both modalities, and to the approach
to Britain that appreciates Celtic and Roman contributions alike.

1.5 Conclusion
These three examples, but also our focus on the topologies of palimpsest,
map, and fractal, reveal how frequently writers about the antique deploy
simple means for substantial expressivity. The schemas associated with
the metaphors that we identify in this study are flexible, even palindromic,
in their potential operation. The works that we explore variously insist
that the antique world is alien or familiar, or that the contemporary world
is alien or familiar based on its resemblance or maintenance of connec-
tions to the antique world. The topological metaphors implicitly or expli-
citly adopted by authors can indicate that the antique world was a “then”
or a “there,” or can collapse those efforts to hold at bay the potential
strangeness of the mores of the past. In either event, these devices suggest
to the child reader that he or she is disposed in time and place potentially
arbitrarily but not without agency. To realize these two apparently contra-
dictory features of our relationship to potential community is to begin to
appreciate how classically inflected fiction for children rehearses and
refines the burdens and responsibilities of adulthood.
 2
HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST 1
The Layers of Ancient Rome in Puck
of Pook’s Hill and Its Successors

As critic Sarah Wintle has noted (9–10), Rudyard Kipling’s 1906 volume
Puck of Pook’s Hill, in which two Edwardian children are “made free” of
British history as figures from the past emerge to bring it to life for them,
is in part a meditation on belonging, and specifically on Britishness. That
the time travelers—a Roman centurion, a Norman knight, and a Seph-
ardic Jew—are Britons by adoption rather than by blood enables the
author, a product of the Raj and the father of children who were half
American, to explore what it means to become naturalized, and indeed to
comment on how “natural” a process naturalization is. The Puck stories
thus present British history as a many-layered saga of invasion and
adaptation, told from the viewpoint of the foreigner but stressing the
power of the land to change these aliens into Britons. To live in England,
Kipling contends, is to be shaped by it, so that the country’s history
becomes a palimpsest revealing multiple versions of the same message
about citizenship and nation. The palimpsestic nature of the British
landscape is established from the outset by the poem that introduces
the narrative, which contains the following representative stanzas:
And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion’s camping place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul!
And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns!

Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals.
Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Claudia Nelson and
Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001
     

Just as the prefatory poem is built from images that draw the reader’s
attention to half-erased marks that past events have left upon the face of
the land, the child protagonists, Dan and Una, are serially introduced to
historical events and personages who are then magically eradicated from
their waking memory—but who nonetheless function on some deeper
level of consciousness to make the children true citizens of England.
Although Kipling never uses the word “palimpsest,” that both land and
mind are to be understood in these terms is clear throughout.
If the implied metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST functions on a
structural level to guide the overarching pattern of the narrative as one
episode gives way to another focused on a different era, absorbing this
structure and its teachings may also do something to shape the reader.
Mary-Anne Shonoda notes that while critical attention has been directed
toward “the connotative way techniques such as metaphor work to situate
readers,” “narrative techniques” beyond metaphor have received less
attention, even though these techniques also “prompt negotiative read-
ing strategies and engage readers in a kind of interpretive play” (81). The
palimpsest metaphor demands that the reader accept a notion of the
individual’s occupation of time and space as temporary; while traces of
the past may remain, its human inhabitants do not. Thus the affect
associated with this form often tends toward nostalgia and melancholy,
a recognition of losses sustained, or alternatively toward a rejection of
memory as a force too potent and potentially destructive for life in the
here and now.
That is, as Andrew McInnes argues of Arthur Ransome’s use of the
(non-Roman) past in the Swallows and Amazons novels, the child
protagonists—and, we would add, child readers—“are explorers who
are quickly confronted by their secondariness, discovering that [others]
already occupy the spaces they attempt to conquer. By meditating on the
mechanisms through which his child protagonists learn to cope with
coming second, [the author] reconceptualizes the power relationship
between adults and children from one of subjugation to one that balances
pain, pleasure, and playfulness” (282). While McInnes refers here to
Ransome, a similar argument could be made of Puck, and another way
to put this point is to suggest that accepting that others have preceded us
and still others will follow is to accept a kind of enforced modesty; we are
not the conquerors of time but merely a tiny fraction of the casualties
that it is constantly in the process of inflicting. Offsetting this pain,
however, is the awareness of membership in an enormous community.
      

We belong in time, and in the narratives of Kipling and his heirs, we

belong in Britain as well, by adoption if not by birth.
The idea of the palimpsest has influenced the structure of our inves-
tigation in this chapter. Although Kipling grounds Puck and its 1910
sequel, Rewards and Fairies, in British prehistory and thus presents
Roman Britain as an early layer in British history but not its foundation,
the Roman stories (which Peter Hinchcliffe sees as the “core” of the first
volume [158]) nonetheless served as the substratum for an extensive
Kipling-indebted literature aimed at adults as well as children and
making use of the classical. We thus focus this chapter not only on
Puck¹ but also on later texts that resemble it in highlighting the connec-
tion between Britain’s Roman past and its present and in focusing on the
interplay between invasion and naturalization, an interplay that is inher-
ent in the idea of the palimpsest as a unity composed of multiple layers.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note that rich metaphors generate
lengthy strings of “entailments” or associated concepts (Metaphors 9), and
in our use of the metaphor of the palimpsest, we wish to draw particular
attention to the dualities that it contains. As physical objects, palimpsests
work by oppositions—spatially between the contents of the top layer and
those of the bottom, chronologically between the late and the early, and
often theologically between the pagan and the Christian. Above all, we
have the opposition created by the conflict of wills on the part of warring
authors, one of whom has laid down a text that the other then scrapes
away and replaces, even while the old text remains at least potentially
recoverable. The image of the palimpsest thus speaks to the relationship
between a text and its literary sources, but also to those who, like Kipling
and his children, are transplants shaped by multiple countries, and to
those who, like many characters in the texts that we are examining in this
project, must contemplate being invaded by an alien empire.

2.1 Foundations: Puck of Pook’s Hill

Hinchcliffe contends that Puck’s overarching message is a warning, “[R]
econcile your internal differences so that you may guard yourself from
invasion” (160); we suggest that the matter of invasion here is more

¹ Because Rewards and Fairies contains no Roman episodes, we omit it from consider
ation here, although we are cognizant of strong cases (see, e.g., McCutchan) for the
inseparability of the two volumes.
     

complicated than that statement might imply, in part because in Kipling’s

text it is never entirely certain who is invading whom and by what means.
In one sense, Dan and Una, stand-ins for Kipling’s half-American, half-
Anglo-Indian offspring, are the latest in the wave of foreign colonizers
who have shaped this part of England. But in another sense, the time
travelers are invading Dan and Una’s time and changing it and them for
the better by giving the children a sense of the history of their adopted
place. Although Puck repeatedly erases the siblings’ ability to remember
each visitation unless they are in his presence, thus bringing the potential
dangers of nostalgia under control by ensuring that they will not hanker
after relationships with the dead, the reader presumes that the experiences
nonetheless have lasting didactic value for the children, whose under-
standing of England will now be palimpsestically grounded in a rich
foundation of pastness, so that like the Roman soldiers appearing in the
illustration shown in Figure 2.1, they will become rooted in the landscape.

Figure 2.1 Claude Allin Shepperson’s illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s “On the
Great Wall” (an installment of Puck of Pook’s Hill published in The Strand vol. 31
issue 186, June 1906, p. 704) depicts the Roman soldiers as a feature of the
landscape visually analogous to the hills beyond them.
Image courtesy of Indiana University Libraries.
      

As Jack Voller observes, “What Puck gives the children is not land,
but . . . a complex sense of belonging in what we might call ‘placetime,’
in which the value and meaning of place, and therefore belonging,
depend as much on history as geography” (83). What happens to Dan
and Una in this regard is itself a metaphor—and consequently a tool—
for how young readers may be colonized by the texts they read, just as
Puck’s author was himself indebted to an earlier text, Edwin Lester
Arnold’s The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (Briggs,
“Amulet” 221).
Strikingly, Kipling arranges neither his invasions nor his time travelers
in chronological order. He situates the three linked Roman stories,
“A Centurion of the Thirtieth,” “On the Great Wall,” and “The Winged
Hats,” between two sets of medieval stories, at the heart of Puck of Pook’s
Hill. By resisting what Lakoff and Johnson identify as the dominant
metaphors involving time, which posit that “time goes past us from
front to back” (Metaphors 44), Puck implicitly places emphasis on the
Roman stories as chronological rule-breakers. We might, indeed, see
such rule-breaking as inherent in the genre of historical fiction. As Lakoff
and Johnson note, “[I]n English certain orders of words are more normal
than others”; they point out, as one instance of this fact, that the phrase
“now and then” is more usual than the phrase “then and now” (132–3).
Yet the historical novel as a form may be said to function as a normal-
ization of “then and now,” as it prioritizes the “then” experience of the
characters over the “now” experience of the reader. Puck of Pook’s Hill
dramatizes this point by giving center stage to the time travelers from the
past, while Dan and Una, like the reader, are cast as onlookers.
In a letter to an adult fan, Member of Parliament George Wyndham,
Kipling wrote, “I swear I didn’t mean to write parables—much—but
when situations are so ludicrously, or terribly parallel what can one do?”
(qtd. Wintle 24).² The parallel in question was that between Rome’s
imperial venture in Britain and Britain’s modern imperial experience.
As in his 1897 poem “Recessional,” which likens Britain to vanished

² In contrast, Kipling forthrightly acknowledges of Rewards and Fairies, “I loaded the

book up with allegories and allusions” (Something 111). In a chapter on “Kipling and
History,” Sue Walsh nonetheless “argue[s] against reading Kipling’s texts as allegorical.”
She suggests that the critical tendency to do so arises from Kipling’s focus on “the nature of
language as intrinsically arbitrary,” which she sees as having important “implications . . . for
notions of ‘history’ through the ‘Puck’ books” (155).
     

powers elsewhen in history, the tone of Puck’s Roman stories, set in the
fourth century AD on the eve of Rome’s abandonment of its British
possessions, is elegiac. “A Centurion of the Thirtieth” describes the
childhood and youth of its Romano-British protagonist, Parnesius,
establishing his naïveté through a dismissive comment that he makes
about his father: “to listen to him you would have thought Eternal Rome
herself was on the edge of destruction, just because a few people had
become a little large-minded” (125). The two subsequent stories trace the
growth of Parnesius’ awareness, shaped by his experiences as a centurion
stationed on Hadrian’s Wall, that the destruction foreseen by his father is
inevitable and that it is nonetheless his job to join in staving it off as long
as possible, despite his sense of being “a man with a rotten stick standing
before a broken fence to turn bulls” (156).
The “rotten stick” image mocks the “polished stick” that is the
centurion’s badge of office (126), just as the reference to the “broken
fence” mocks Hadrian’s Wall; as many critics have observed,³ the history
being offered to Dan and Una is a tale not of imperial might and Roman
pride but of an impending disaster that the courage and honor of
Parnesius and his friend Pertinax are powerless to avert. Yet that it is
Parnesius rather than his ambitious general, Maximus, who steps out of
time to speak to the children establishes that his virtues, and not the
erstwhile glories of Roman conquest, are the best residue of Roman
Britain, the foundation upon which the modern children are expected
to build. Parable, Mark Turner observes, involves “the projection of
story” onto “a much larger abstract narrative, one that applies to our
own specific lives, however far our lives are removed from the detail of
the story” (7), and in Puck’s Roman stories Kipling invites readers to
contemplate and learn from the inevitable waning of imperial power, the
gallant hopelessness of the struggle to preserve civilization against the
barbarian, and the limited vision of political and military leaders past
and, by implication, present.
The narratives in Puck explore a complex process of introducing
into and removing from England an assortment of goods and people,
with only Puck himself remaining unchanged as the one permanent

³ For instance, David J. Bradshaw notes that the tales question the usefulness of betting
on the success of the army and suggest that the empire’s confidence in the inevitability of its
success is misplaced (1).
      

indigene.⁴ So, for example, gold imported to England from Africa

with the help of Vikings in early Norman times is removed by Kadmiel
the Sephardic Jew during the reign of King John in order to assist the
widening of English rights. Roman culture is imported to England in
the time of Agricola, so effectively that English-born Roman subjects are
more Roman than those, such as Libyans, who have lived in greater
proximity to Rome’s might for far longer. England’s Romans are more
“Roman” because they have imbibed Rome’s precepts of duty, loyalty,
self-control, and self-sacrifice; thus abstract principles are metaphoric-
ally identified as among the “goods” that we see imported and exported
in the various narratives. Indeed, it appears to be precisely because they
are metaphors rather than objects that they have the potential for longer
legibility on the Anglo-Roman palimpsest. When in “The Winged Hats”
Maximus takes the best legions from the wall to France in his unsuc-
cessful bid to become emperor, Parnesius and Pertinax know that it will
only be a matter of time before England is overrun by the barbarians,
but they defend it bravely and intelligently nonetheless. Roman culture
has been successfully seeded in Albion, even if the Romans themselves
do not remain.
As A. Michael Matin points out in his well-informed consideration of
the Puck tales (which he pairs with Kim and Kipling’s collaborative effort
of 1911, A School History of England), these works are shaped by the
genre of the invasion scare story. Highly popular from the 1870s through
the beginning of the First World War and existing in both fiction and
nonfiction form, this largely adult genre depicted Britain’s subjugation
by a technologically superior power, often Germany but sometimes
France, Russia, or even—as in H. G. Wells’s 1897 novella The War of
the Worlds—Mars. Yet in Kipling’s hands the metaphor HISTORY IS
INVASION, which for him and some of his successors is entailed by the
metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST, seems colored by his experi-
ence as a native of British India, as well as by his more academic interest
in Britain’s ventures in Africa.

⁴ Corinne McCutchan considers that “the smuggler group” in Puck consists of only three
stories, “Hal o’ the Draft,” “Dymchurch Flit,” and “The Treasure and the Law”; this is
because she defines smuggling as requiring something to be removed from rather than
imported into England (80). We take a broader view.
     

In examining the representation of Indian, African, and Chinese

colonial subjects in British children’s textbooks and magazines at the
turn of the twentieth century, Kathryn Castle notes that precolonial India
was depicted as chaotically multiracial and multilingual, “ravaged by the
constant warfare of constituent states,” afflicted by a disorder so extreme
that British rule must be seen as a blessing (13). Textbooks played up
the “order and peace” brought by the Raj and “emphasised the stability
and strength of the imperial ethos” (15, 24). Puck’s Roman stories thus
translate certain common perceptions of India into England’s past: the
tribal diversity, the chaos and color, and the colonizers’ uphill struggle to
impose and maintain an “order[ly] and peace[ful] civilization” are all
present, even while the Englishness of the colonial subjects here allows
readers to see empire as temporary. But if these stories are clearly about
the waning of empire, they simultaneously present an implicit vision of
the modern British Empire as a long-delayed tribute to its Roman model,
so that in a sense Rome still endures. Here colonialism thus becomes at
once necessary and melancholy, temporary and permanent, impossible
and successful—a concept involving and evoking dueling emotions, just
as the nation that shaped Kipling’s understanding of colonialism
involved dueling ethnic sensibilities. The capaciousness of the historical
palimpsest, which must accommodate both many layers of time and
many contradictory emotions, models for the reader an approach to
ambivalence that does not see reaching a resolution as the inevitable
outcome.

2.2 Layers for Adults: Three Fantasies

From the beginning, Puck of Pook’s Hill was presented as suitable fare for
adults and children alike. Inspired by Kipling’s children John and Elsie,
the tales first appeared in magazines whose primary audience was adult:
in Britain the Strand (which, in addition to middlebrow adult fare,
frequently serialized children’s stories expected to appeal to a wide age
range), in the United States Ladies’ Home Journal and McClure’s.⁵ Once
collected in book form, they were packaged for younger audiences in
handsome volumes illustrated by H. R. Millar in Britain and by Arthur

⁵ For a discussion of how these magazines framed the stories for their separate audi
ences, see Tomlinson 275 80.
Another random document with
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 supervision of the Secretary of State of the United States,
and was to continue in existence for a period of ten years,
and, if found profitable to the nations participating in its
advantages, it was to be maintained for successive periods of
ten years indefinitely. At the first session of the
Fifty-first Congress of the United States, that body, in an
'Act making appropriations for the support of the Diplomatic
and Consular Service, etc.,' approved July 14, 1890, gave the
President authority to carry into effect the recommendations
of the Conference so far as he should deem them expedient, and
appropriated $36,000 for the organization and establishment of
the Bureau, which amount it had been stipulated by the
delegates in the Conference assembled should not be exceeded,
and should be annually advanced by the United States and
shared by the several Republics in proportion to their
population. … The Conference had defined the purpose of the
Bureau to be the preparation and publication of bulletins
concerning the commerce and resources of the American
Republics, and to furnish information of interest to
manufacturers, merchants, and shippers, which should be at all
times available to persons desirous of obtaining particulars
regarding their customs tariffs and regulations, as well as
commerce and navigation."

Bulletin of the Bureau of American Republics,

June, 1898.

A plan of government for the International Union, by an

executive committee composed of representatives of the
American nations constituting the Union, was adopted in 1896,
but modified at a conference held in Washington, March 18,
1899. As then adopted, the plan of government is as follows:

"The Bureau of the American Republics will be governed under

the supervision of the Secretary of State of the United
States, with the cooperation and advice of four
representatives of the other Republics composing the
International Union, the five persons indicated to constitute
an Executive Committee, of which the Secretary of State is to
be ex-officio Chairman, or, in his absence, the Acting
Secretary of State. The other four members of the Executive
Committee shall be called to serve in turn, in the
alphabetical order of the official names of their nations in
one of the four languages of the Union, previously selected by
lot at a meeting of the representatives of the Union. At the
end of each year the first of these four members shall retire,
giving place to another representative of the Union, in the
same alphabetical order already explained, and so on until the
next period of succession."

{11}

"The interest taken by the various States forming the

International Union of American Republics in the work of its
organic bureau is evidenced by the fact that for the first
time since its creation in 1890 all the republics of South and
 Central America are now [1899] represented in it. The unanimous
recommendation of the International American Conference,
providing for the International Union of American Republics,
stated that it should continue in force during a term of ten
years from the date of its organization, and no country
becoming a member of the union should cease to be a member
until the end of said period of ten years, and unless twelve
months before the expiration of said period a majority of the
members of the union had given to the Secretary of State of
the United States official notice of their wish to terminate
the union at the end of its first period, that the union
should continue to be maintained for another period of ten
years, and thereafter, under the same conditions, for
successive periods of ten years each. The period for
notification expired on July 14, 1899, without any of the
members having given the necessary notice of withdrawal. Its
maintenance is therefore assured for the next ten years."

Message of the President of the United States.

December 5, 1899.

AMERICANISM:
Pope Leo XIII. on opinions so called.

See (in this volume)

PAPACY: A. D. 1899 (JANUARY).

AMNESTY BILL, The French.

See (in this volume)

FRANCE: A. D. 1900 (DECEMBER).

ANARCHIST CRIMES:
Assassination of Canovas del Castillo.

See (in this volume)

SPAIN: A. D. 1897 (AUGUST-OCTOBER).

Assassination of the Empress of Austria.

See (in this volume)

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1898 (SEPTEMBER).

Assassination of King Humbert.

See (in this volume)

ITALY: A. D. 1899-1900;
and 1900 (JULY-SEPTEMBER).

ANATOLIAN RAILWAY, The.

See (in this volume)

TURKEY: A. D. 1899 (NOVEMBER).

ANCON, The Treaty of.

 See (in this volume)
CHILE: A. D. 1894-1900.

ANDERSON, General Thomas M.:

Correspondence with Aguinaldo.

See (in this volume)

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1898 (JULY-AUGUST: PHILIPPINES).

ANDRÉE, Salamon August:

Arctic balloon voyage.

See (in this volume)

POLAR EXPLORATION, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900-.

ANGLO-AMERICAN POPULATION.

See (in this volume)

NINETEENTH CENTURY: EXPANSION.

ANGONI-ZULUS, The.

See (in this volume)

BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA PROTECTORATE.

ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION.

See (in this volume)

POLAR EXPLORATION.

ANTEMNÆ, Excavations at.

See (in this volume)

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: ITALY.

ANTIGUA: Industrial condition.

See (in this volume)

WEST INDIES, THE BRITISH: A. D. 1897.

ANTITOXINE, Discovery of.

See (in this volume)

SCIENCE, RECENT: MEDICAL AND SURGICAL.

ANTI-IMPERIALISTS, The League of American.

See (in this volume)

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1900 (MAY-NOVEMBER).

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY BILL, The German.

See (in this volume)

GERMANY: A. D. 1894-1895.
ANTI-SEMITIC AGITATIONS.

See (in this volume)

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1895-1896, and after;
and FRANCE: A. D. 1897-1899, and after.

ANTI-SEMITIC LEAGUE, Treasonable conspiracy of the.

See (in this volume)

FRANCE: A. D. 1899-1900 (AUGUST-JANUARY).

APPORTIONMENT ACT.

See (in this volume)

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1901 (JANUARY).

ARBITRATION, Industrial:
In New Zealand.

See (in this volume)

NEW ZEALAND: A. D. 1891-1900.

ARBITRATION, Industrial:
In the United States between employees and employers
engaged in inter-state commerce.

See (in this volume)

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1898 (JUNE).

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1896-1900.

Boundary dispute between Colombia and Costa Rica.

See (in this volume)

COLOMBIA: A. D. 1893-1900.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1897.

Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

See (in this volume)

CENTRAL AMERICA (NICARAGUA-COSTA RICA): A. D. 1897.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1897-1899.

Venezuela and Great Britain.
Guiana boundary.

See (in this volume)

VENEZUELA: A. D. 1896-1899.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1898.

Argentine Republic and Chile.

See (in this volume)

ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: A. D. 1898.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1898.

 Treaty between Italy and the Argentine Republic.

See (in this volume)

ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: A. D. 1898.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1899.

The Treaty for the Pacific Settlement of International
Disputes concluded at the Peace Conference at the Hague (Text).
The Permanent Court created.

See (in this volume)

PEACE CONFERENCE.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1900.

Brazil and French Guiana boundary dispute.

See (in this volume)

BRAZIL: A. D. 1900.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1900.

Compulsory arbitration voted for at Spanish-American Congress.

See (in this volume)

SPAIN: A. D. 1900 (NOVEMBER).

ARBITRATION TREATY, Great Britain and the United States.

Its defeat.

See (in this volume)

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1897 (JANUARY-MAY).

----------ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Start--------

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH:
The Oriental Field.
Recent achievements and future prospects.

"Three successive years have just added to the realm of

Egyptian archaeology, not only the period of the first two
dynasties, hitherto absolutely unrecognized from contemporary
remains, but also a long prehistoric period. Assyriology
likewise has lately been pushed back into antiquity with
almost equal rapidity. Though the subjects will probably
always have their limitations, yet the insight of scholars and
explorers is opening up new vistas on all sides. … Our
prospect for the future is bright. Egypt itself seems
inexhaustible. Few of the cities of Babylonia and Assyria have
yet been excavated, and each of them had its library and
record office of clay-tablets as well as monuments in stone
and bronze. In Northern Mesopotamia are countless sites still
untouched; in Elam and in Armenia monuments are only less
plentiful.
{12}
In Arabia inscriptions are now being read which may perhaps
date from 1000 B. C. The so-called Hittite hieroglyphs still
 baffle the decipherer; but as more of the documents become
known these will in all likelihood prove a fruitful source for
the history of North Syria, of Cappadocia, and of Asia Minor
throughout. Occasionally, too, though it is but rarely, an
inscription in the Phaenician type of alphabet yields up
important historical facts. When all is done, there is but
scant hope that we shall be able to construct a consecutive
history of persons and events in the ancient world. All that
we can be confident of securing, at any rate in Egypt, is the
broad outline of development and change, chronologically
graduated and varied by occasional pictures of extraordinary
minuteness and brilliancy."

F. LL. Griffith,
Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane,
part 2, pages. 218-219
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: In Bible Lands:

General results as affecting our knowledge
of the ancient Hebrews.

"The general result of the archaeological and anthropological

researches of the past half-century has been to take the
Hebrews out of the isolated position which, as a nation, they
seemed previously to hold, and to demonstrate their affinities
with, and often their dependence upon, the civilizations by
which they were surrounded. Tribes more or less closely akin
to themselves in both language and race were their neighbours
alike on the north, on the east, and on the south; in addition
to this, on each side there towered above them an ancient and
imposing civilization,—that of Babylonia, from the earliest
times active, enterprising, and full of life, and that of
Egypt, hardly, if at all, less remarkable than that of
Babylonia, though more self-contained and less expansive. The
civilization which, in spite of the long residence of the
Israelites in Egypt, left its mark, however, most distinctly
upon the culture and literature of the Hebrews was that of
Babylonia. It was in the East that the Hebrew traditions
placed both the cradle of humanity and the more immediate home
of their own ancestors; and it was Babylonia which, as we now
know, exerted during many centuries an influence, once
unsuspected, over Palestine itself.

"It is true, the facts thus disclosed, do not in any degree

detract from that religious pre-eminence which has always been
deemed the inalienable characteristic of the Hebrew race: the
spiritual intuitions and experiences of its great teachers
retain still their uniqueness; but the secular institutions of
the nation, and even the material elements upon which the
religious system of the Israelites was itself constructed, are
seen now to have been in many cases common to them with their
neighbours. Thus their beliefs about the origin and early
history of the world, their social usages, their code of civil
and criminal law, their religious institutions, can no longer
be viewed, as was once possible, as differing in kind from
 those of other nations, and determined in every feature by a
direct revelation from Heaven; all, it is now known, have
substantial analogies among other peoples, the distinctive
character which they exhibit among the Hebrews consisting in
the spirit with which they are infused and the higher
principles of which they are made the exponent. …

"What is called the 'witness of the monuments' is often

strangely misunderstood. The monuments witness to nothing
which any reasonable critic has ever doubted. No one, for
instance, has ever doubted that there were kings of Israel (or
Judah) named Ahab and Jehu and Pekah and Ahaz and Hezekiah, or
that Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib led expeditions into
Palestine; the mention of these (and such like) persons and
events in the Assyrian annals has brought to light many
additional facts about them which it is an extreme
satisfaction to know: but it has only 'confirmed' what no
critic had questioned. On the other hand, the Assyrian annals
have shewn that the chronology of the Books of Kings is, in
certain places, incorrect: they have thus confirmed the
conclusion which critics had reached independently upon
internal evidence, that the parts of these books to which the
chronology belongs are of much later origin than the more
strictly historical parts, and consequently do not possess
equal value.

"The inscriptions, especially those of Babylonia, Assyria, and

Egypt, have revealed to us an immense amount of information
respecting the antiquities and history of these nations, and
also, in some cases, respecting the peoples with whom, whether
by commerce or war, they came into contact: but (with the
exception of the statement on the stele of Merenptah that
'Israel is desolated') the first event connected with Israel
or its ancestors which they mention or attest is Shishak's
invasion of Judah in the reign of Rehoboam; the first
Israelites whom they specify by name are Omri and his son
Ahab. There is also indirect illustration of statements in the
Old Testament relating to the period earlier than this; but
the monuments supply no 'confirmation' of any single fact
recorded in it, prior to Shishak's invasion."

S. R. Driver,
Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane,
part 1, pages 150-151
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:

Earlier explorations in.

For some account of the earlier archæological explorations in

Babylonia and their results,

See (in volume 1) BABYLONIA, PRIMITIVE;

and (in volume 4) SEMITES.

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:

 American exploration of the ruins of ancient Nippur.

[Footnote: Quotations in this account from Professor

Hilprecht's copyrighted reports in the "Sunday School Times"
are used with permission from the publishers of that journal.]

"In the summer of 1888, the University of Pennsylvania fully

equipped and sent out the first American expedition to the
northern half of the plains of Babylonia to effect a thorough
exploration of the ruins of Nippur—the modern Niffer, or, more
correctly, Nuffar—on the border of the unwholesome swamps of
the Affej, and to undertake extensive excavations. A few
intelligent citizens of Philadelphia had met in the house of
Ex-Provost Dr. William Pepper, and formed 'The Babylonian
Exploration Fund,' a short time before this with the purpose
of effecting a systematic exploration of ancient Babylonia.
What science owes to this unselfish undertaking can be
adequately estimated only by posterity. … Two professors,
Peters and Hilprecht, were entrusted with the management of
the expedition, Dr. Peters as director, and Dr. Hilprecht as
Assyriologist."

H. V. Hilprecht, editor,
Recent Research in Bible Lands,
page 47.

{13}

Professor Hilprecht, who conducts for the "Sunday School

Times" a most interesting and important department, in which
the proceedings and principal results of archæological
exploration in Bible Lands have been currently chronicled
during several years past, gave, in that journal of December
I, 1900, the following description of the scene and the
historical importance of the ruins in which the excavations
above mentioned have been carried on: "Nuffar is the modern
Arabic name of an old Babylonian ruin situated about half-way
between the Euphrates and Tigris, at the northeastern boundary
of the great Affej swamps, which are formed by the regular
annual inundations of the Euphrates. In a straight line, it is
nearly eighty miles to the southeast from Baghdad. A large
canal, now dry, and often for miles entirely filled with
rubbish and sand, divides the ruins into two almost equal
parts. On an average about fifty or sixty feet high, these
ruins are torn up by frequent gulleys and furrows into a
number of spurs and ridges, from the distance not unlike a
rugged mountain range on the bank of the upper Tigris. In the
Babylonian language, the city buried here was called Nippur.
According to Jewish tradition, strongly supported by arguments
drawn from cuneiform texts and archaeological objects found at
the ruins themselves, Nippur was identical with the Biblical
Calneh, mentioned in Genesis 10: 10, as one of the four great
cities of the kingdom of Nimrod. It was therefore natural that
the public in general should take a warm interest in our
excavations at Nuffar. This interest grew considerably in
religious circles when, a few years ago, I announced my
discovery of the name of the 'river Chebar' in two cuneiform
texts from the archives of Nippur. It became then evident that
this 'river Chebar,' which hitherto could not be located, was
one of the four or five large canals once bringing life and
fertility to the fields of Nippur; that, furthermore, a large
number of the Jewish captives carried away by Nebuchadrezzar
after the destruction of Jerusalem were settled in the plains
around this city; and that even Ezekiel himself, while
admonishing and comforting his people, and holding out to them
Jehovah's mercy and never-failing promise of a brighter
future, stood in the very shadow of Babylonia's ancient
national sanctuary, the crumbling walls of the great temple of
Bêl at Nippur. The beginning and end of Old Testament history
thus point to Nippur as the background and theater for the
first and final acts in the great drama of divine selection
and human rejection in which Israel played the leading role."

In the same article, Professor Hilprecht indicated in a few

words what was done at Nuffar by the first three of the four
expeditions sent out from Philadelphia since 1888. "It was
comparatively easy," he said, "to get a clear idea of the
extent of the city and the life in its streets during the last
six centuries preceding our era. Each of the four expeditions
to Nuffar contributed its peculiar share to a better knowledge
of this latest period of Babylonian history, particularly,
however, the third and the present campaigns. But it was of
greater importance to follow up the traces of a very early
civilization, which, accidentally, we had met during our first
brief campaign in 1889. By means of a few deep trenches, the
second expedition, in the following year, had brought to light
new evidence that a considerable number of ancient monuments
still existed in the lower strata of the temple mound. The
third expedition showed that the monuments, while numerous,
are mostly very fragmentary, thereby offering considerable
difficulties to the decipherer and historian. But it also
showed that a number of platforms running through the temple
mound, and made of baked bricks, frequently bearing
inscriptions, enable us to fix the age of the different strata
of this mound with great accuracy. The two lowest of these
platforms found were the work of kings and patesis
(priest-kings) of 4000-3800 B. C., but, to our great
astonishment, they did not represent the earliest trace of
human life at Nippur. There were not less than about thirty
feet of rubbish below them, revealing an even earlier
civilization, the beginning and development of which lie
considerably before the times of Sargon the Great (3800 B. C.)
and Narâm-Sin, who had been generally regarded as
half-mythical persons of the first chapter of Babylonian
history."

Of the results of the work of those three expeditions of the

University of Pennsylvania, and of the studies for which they
furnished materials to Professor Hilprecht, Professor Sayce
wrote with much enthusiasm in the "Contemporary Review" of
January, 1897, as follows: "In my Hibbert Lectures on the
'Religion of the Ancient Babylonians' I had been led by a
 study of the religious texts of Babylonia to the conclusion
that Nippur had been a centre from which Babylonian culture
was disseminated in what we then regarded as prehistoric
times. Thanks to the American excavations, what were
prehistoric times when my Hibbert Lectures were written have
now become historic, and my conclusion has proved to be
correct. … For the first time in Babylonia they have
systematically carried their shafts through the various strata
of historical remains which occupy the site, carefully noting
the objects found in each, and wherever possible clearing each
stag away when once it had been thoroughly examined. The work
began in 1888, about two hundred Arabs being employed as
labourers. … The excavations at Nippur were carried deeply and
widely enough not only to reveal the history of the city
itself but also to open up a new vista in the forgotten
history of civilised man. The history of civilisation has been
taken back into ages which a short while since were still
undreamed of. Professor Hilprecht, the historian of the
expedition, upon whom has fallen the work of copying,
publishing, and translating the multitudinous texts discovered
in the course of it, declares that we can no longer 'hesitate
to date the founding of the temple of Bel and the first
settlements in Nippur somewhere between 6000 and 7000 B. C.,
possibly even earlier.' At any rate the oldest monuments which
have been disinterred there belong to the fifth or sixth
millennium before the Christian era. Hitherto we have been
accustomed to regard Egypt as the land which has preserved for
us the earliest written monuments of mankind, but Babylonia
now bids fair to outrival Egypt. The earliest fixed date in
Babylonian history is that of Sargon of Akkael and his son
Naram-Sin. It has been fixed for us by Nabonidos, the royal
antiquarian of Babylonia. In one of his inscriptions he
describes the excavations he made in order to discover the
memorial cylinders of Naram-Sin, who had lived '3200 years'
before his own time. In my Hibbert Lectures I gave reasons for
accepting this date as approximately correct. The recent
discoveries at Niffer, Telloh, and other places have shown
that my conclusion was justified. …

{14}

"Assyriologists have long had in their possession a cuneiform

text which contains the annals of the reign of Sargon, and of
the first three years of the reign of his son. It is a late
copy of the original text, and was made for the library of
Nineveh. Our 'critical' friends have been particularly merry
over the credulity of the Assyriologists in accepting these
annals as authentic. … So far from being unhistorical, Sargon
and Naram-Sin prove to have come at the end of a
long-preceding historical period, and the annals themselves
have been verified by contemporaneous documents. The empire of
Sargon, which extended from the Persian Gulf to the
Mediterranean, was not even the first that had arisen in
Western Asia. And the art that flourished under his rule, like
the art which flourished in Egypt in the age of the Old
Empire, was higher and more perfect than any that succeeded it
in Babylonia. … Henceforward, Sargon and Naram-Sin, instead of
belonging to 'the grey dawn of time,' must be regarded as
representatives of 'the golden age of Babylonian history.'
That they should have undertaken military expeditions to the
distant West, and annexed Palestine and the Sinaitic Peninsula
to the empire they created need no longer be a matter of
astonishment. Such campaigns had already been undertaken by
Babylonian kings long before; the way was well known which led
from one extremity of Western Asia to the other. …

"It is Mr. Haynes [Director of the explorations from 1893] who

tells us that we are henceforth to look upon Sargon of Akkad
as a representative of 'the golden age of Babylonian history,'
and his assertion is endorsed by Professor Hilprecht. In fact,
the conclusion is forced upon both the excavator and the
palæographist. Professor Hilprecht, who, thanks to the
abundant materials at his disposal, has been able to found the
science of Babylonian palæography, tracing the development of
the cuneiform characters from one stage of development to
another, and determining the age of each successive form of
writing, has made it clear to all students of Assyriology that
many of the inscriptions found at Niffer and Telloh belong to
a much older period than those of the age of Sargon. The
palæographic evidence has been supplemented by the results of
excavation. … As far back as we can penetrate, we still find
inscribed monuments and other evidences of civilisation. It is
true that the characters are rude and hardly yet lifted above
their pictorial forms. They have, however, ceased to be
pictures, and have already become that cursive script which we
call cuneiform. For the beginnings of Babylonian writing we
have still to search among the relics of centuries that lie
far behind the foundation of the temple of Nippur.

"The first king whom the excavations there have brought to

light is a certain En-sag(sak)-ana who calls himself 'lord of
Kengi' and conqueror of Kis 'the wicked.' Kengi—'the land of
canals and reeds,' as Professor Hilprecht interprets the
word—was the oldest name of Babylonia, given to it in days
when it was still wholly occupied by its Sumerian population,
and when as yet no Semitic stranger had ventured within it.
The city of Kis (now El-Hy-mar) lay outside its borders to the
north, and between Kis and Kengi there seems to have been
constant war. … Nippur was the religious centre of Kengi, and
Mul-lil, the god of Nippur, was the supreme object of Sumerian
worship. … A king of Kis made himself master of Nippur and its
sanctuary, and the old kingdom of Kengi passed away. The final
blow was dealt by the son of the Sumerian high priest of the
'Land of the Bow.' Lugal-zaggi-si was the chieftain who
descended from the north upon Babylonia and made it part of
his empire. … Lugal-zaggi-si lived centuries before Sargon of
Akkad in days which, only a year ago, we still believed to lie
far beyond the horizon of history and culture. We little
dreamed that in that hoar antiquity the great cities and
sanctuaries of Babylonia were already old, and that the
culture and script of Babylonia had already extended far
beyond the boundaries of their motherland. The inscriptions of
 Lugal-zaggi-si are in the Sumerian language, and his name,
like that of his father, is Sumerian also. … The empire of
Lugal-zaggi-si seems to have passed away with his death, and
at no long period subsequently a new dynasty arose at Ur. …
According to Professor Hilprecht, this would have been about
4000 B. C. How long the first dynasty of Ur lasted we cannot
tell. It had to keep up a perpetual warfare with the Semitic
tribes of northern Arabia, Ki-sarra, 'the land of the hordes,'
as it was termed by the Sumerians. Meanwhile a new state was
growing up on the eastern side of the Euphrates in a small
provincial city called Lagas, whose ruins are now known as
Telloh. Its proximity to Eridu, the seaport and trading depot
of early Babylonia, had doubtless much to do with its rise to
power. At all events the kings of Telloh, whose monuments have
been brought to light by M. de Sarzec, became continually
stronger, and the dynasty of Lagas took the place of the
dynasty of Ur. One of these kings, E-Anna-gin, at length
defeated the Semitic oppressors of northern Chaldæa in a
decisive battle and overthrew the 'people of the Land of the
Bow.' …

"The kings of Lagas represent the closing days of Sumerian

supremacy. With Sargon and his empire the Semitic age begins.
The culture of Chaldæa is still Sumerian, the educated classes
are for the most part of Sumerian origin, and the literature of
the country is Sumerian also. But the king and his court are
Semites, and the older culture which they borrow and adopt
becomes Semitised in the process. … For many generations
Sumerians and Semites lived side by side, each borrowing from
the other, and mutually adapting and modifying their own forms
of expression. … Sumerian continued to be the language of
religion and law—the two most conservative branches of human
study—down to the age of Abraham. … The new facts that have
been disinterred from the grave of the past furnish a striking
confirmation of Professor Hommel's theory, which connects the
culture of primitive Egypt with that of primitive Chaldæa, and
derives the language of the Egyptians, at all events in part,
from a mixed Babylonian language in which Semitic and Sumerian
elements alike claimed a share. We now know that such a mixed
language did once exist, and we also know that this language
and the written characters by which it was expressed were
brought to the shores of the Mediterranean and the frontiers
of Egypt in the earliest age of Egyptian history."

A. H. Sayce,
Recent Discoveries in Babylonia
(Contemporary Review, January, 1897).

{15}

The third of the Pennsylvania expeditions closed its work at

Nippur in February, 1896. There was then an interval of three
years before a fourth expedition resumed work at the ruins in
February, 1899. In the "Sunday School Times" of April 29 and
May 27, 1899, Professor Hilprecht (who did not go personally
to Nuffar until later in the year) gave the following account
of the friendly reception of the exploring party by the Arabs
of the district, from whom there had been formerly much
experience of trouble: "The Affej tribes, in whose territory
the large mounds are situated, had carefully guarded the
expedition's stronghold,—a mud castle half-way between the
ruins and the marshes, which had been sealed and entrusted to
their care before we quitted the field some years ago. They
now gave to the expedition a hearty welcome, accompanied by
shooting, shouting, dancing, and singing, and were evidently
greatly delighted to have the Americans once more in their
midst. In the presence of Haji Tarfa, their
commander-in-chief, who was surrounded by his minor shaykhs
and other dignitaries of the El-Hamza tribes, the former
arrangements with the two shaykhs Hamid el-Birjud and Abud
el-Hamid were ratified, and new pledges given for the security
and welfare of the little party of explorers, the question of
guards and water being especially emphasized. In accordance
with the Oriental custom, the expedition showed its
appreciation of the warm reception by preparing for their
hosts in return a great feast, at which plenty of mutton and
boiled rice were eaten by some fifty Arabs, and the old bond
of friendship was cemented anew with 'bread and salt.'" …

"Doubtless all the advantages resulting for the Affej Bed'ween

and their allies from the presence of the Americans were
carefully calculated by them in the three years (February,
1896-1899) that we had withdrawn our expedition from their
territory. They have apparently found out that the
comparatively large amount of money brought into their country
through the wages paid to many Arabs employed as workmen, and
through the purchase of milk, eggs, chicken, mutton, and all
the other material supplied by the surrounding tribes for our
camp, with its about two hundred and fifty persons, has done
much to improve their general condition. The conviction has
been growing with them that we have not come to rob them of
anything to which they attach great value themselves, nor to
establish a new military station for the Turkish government in
order to gather taxes and unpaid debts. Every Arab engaged by
the Expedition has been fairly treated, and help and
assistance have always been given cheerfully and gratis to the
many sick people who apply daily for medicine, suffering more
or less during the whole year from pulmonary diseases, typhoid
and malarial fevers, easily contracted in the midst of the
extended marshes which they inhabit."

In the "Sunday School Times" of August 5, in the same year,

Professor Hilprecht reported: "The mounds of Nippur seem to
conceal an almost inexhaustible treasure of inscribed
cuneiform tablets, by means of which we are enabled to restore
the chronology, history, religion, and the high degree of
civilization, obtained at a very early date by the ancient
inhabitants between the lower Euphrates and Tigris. More than
33,000 of these precious documents were found during the
previous campaigns. Not less than 4,776 tablets have been
rescued from February 6 to June 10 this year, averaging,
therefore, nearly 1,200 'manuscripts in clay,' as we may style
 them, per month. About the fourth part of these tablets is in
perfect condition, while a very large proportion of the
remaining ones are good-sized fragments or tablets so
fortunately broken that their general contents and many
important details can be ascertained by the patient
decipherer."

In November, 1899, Professor Hilprecht started for the field,

to superintend the explorations in person, and on the way he
wrote to the "S. S. Times" (published December 13): "The
deeper the trenches of the Babylonian Expedition of the
University of Pennsylvania descend into the lower strata of
Nippur, the probable site of the biblical Calneh, the more
important and interesting become the results obtained. The
work of clearing the northeastern wall of the high-towering
temple of Bel was continued with success during the summer
months. Particularly numerous were the inscribed vase
fragments brought to light, and almost exclusively belonging
to the pre-Sargonic period,—3800 B. C. and before. As I showed
in the second part of Volume I of our official University
publication, this fragmentary condition of the vases is due to
the wilful destruction of the temple property by the
victorious Elamitic hordes, who, towards the end of the third
pre-Christian millennium, ransacked the Babylonian cities,
extending their conquest and devastation even as far as the
shores of the Mediterranean Sea (comp. Gen. 14). From the
earliest historical period down to about 2200 B. C., when this
national calamity befell Babylonia, the large temple
storehouse, with its precious statues, votive slabs and vases,
memorial stones, bronze figures, and other gifts from powerful
monarchs and governors, had practically remained intact. What,
therefore, is left of the demolished and scattered contents of
this ancient chamber as a rule is found above the platform of
Ur-Ninib (about 2500 B. C.), in a layer several feet thick and
about twenty-five feet wide, surrounding the front and the two
side walls of the temple. The systematic clearing and
examination of this layer, and of the huge mass of ruins lying
above it, occupied the attention of the expedition
considerably in the past years, and was continued with new
energy during the past six months." At the end of January,
1900, Professor Hilprecht arrived in Babylonia, and wrote some
weeks later to the "Sunday School Times" (May 3): "As early as
eleven years ago, the present writer pointed out that the
extensive group of hills to the southwest of the temple of Bel
must be regarded as the probable site of the temple library of
ancient Nippur. About twenty-five hundred tablets were rescued
from the trenches in this hill during our first campaign.
Later excavations increased the number of tablets taken from
these mounds to about fifteen thousand. But it was only within
the last six weeks that my old theory could be established
beyond any reasonable doubt.
{16}
During this brief period a series of rooms was exposed which
furnished not less than over sixteen thousand cuneiform
documents, forming part of the temple library during the
latter half of the third millennium B. C. In long rows the
tablets were lying on ledges of unbaked clay, serving as
shelves for these imperishable Old Babylonian records. The
total number of tablets rescued from different parts of the
ruins during the present campaign amounts even now to more
than twenty-one thousand, and is rapidly increased by new
finds every day. The contents of this extraordinary library
are as varied as possible. Lists of Sumerian words and
cuneiform signs, arranged according to different principles,
and of fundamental value for our knowledge of the early
non-Semitic language of the country, figure prominently in the
new 'find.' As regards portable antiquities of every
description, and their archeological value, the American
expedition stands readily first among the three expeditions at
present engaged in the exploration of Ancient Babylonia and
the restoration of its past history."

Three weeks later he added: "The Temple Library, as indicated

in the writer's last report, has been definitely located at
the precise spot which, in 1889, the present writer pointed
out as its most probable site. Nearly eighteen thousand
cuneiform documents have been rescued this year from the
shelves of a series of rooms in its southeastern and
northwestern wings. The total number of tablets (mostly of a
didactic character) obtained from the library up to date is
from twenty-five thousand to twenty-six thousand tablets
(whole and broken). In view, however, of more important other
duties to be executed by this expedition before we can leave
Nippur this year, and in consideration of the enormous amount
of time and labor required for a methodical exploration of the
whole mound in which it is concealed, I have recently ordered
all the gangs of Arabic workmen to be withdrawn from this
section of ancient Nippur, and to be set at work at the
eastern fortification line of the city, close to the
temple-complex proper. According to a fair estimate based upon
actual finds, the unique history of the temple, and
topographical indications, there must be hidden at least from
a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand tablets
more in this ancient library, which was destroyed by the
invading Elamites about the time of Abraham's emigration from
Ur of the Chaldees. Only about the twentieth part of this
library (all of Dr. Haynes's previous work included) has so
far been examined and excavated."

In the same letter the Professor described the uncovering of

one façade of a large pre-Sargonic palace—"the chief
discovery," in his opinion, "of this whole campaign." "A
thorough excavation of this large palace," he wrote, "will
form one of the chief tasks of a future expedition, after its
character, age, and extent have been successfully determined
by the present one. Important art treasures of the Tello type,
and literary documents, may reasonably be expected to be
unearthed from the floor-level of its many chambers. It has
become evident, from the large number of pre-Sargonic
buildings, walls, and other antiquities discovered on both
sides of the Shatt-en-Nil, that the pre-Sargonic Nippur was of
by far greater extent than had been anticipated. This
 discovery, however, is only in strict accord with what we know
from the cuneiform documents as to the important historical
rôle which the temple of Bel ('the father of the gods'), as
the central national sanctuary of ancient Babylonia, played at
the earliest period, long before Babylon, the capital of the
later empire, achieved any prominence."

The work at Nippur was suspended for the season about the
middle of May, 1900, and Professor Hilprecht, after his return
to Philadelphia, wrote of the general fruits of the campaign,
in the "Sunday School Times" of December 1: "As the task of
the fourth and most recent expedition, just completed, I had
mapped out, long before its organization, the following work.
It was to determine the probable extent of the earliest
pre-Sargonic settlement at ancient Nippur; to discover the
precise form and character of the famous temple of Bêl at this
earliest period; to define the exact boundaries of the city
proper; if possible, to find one or more of the great city
gates frequently mentioned in the inscriptions; to locate the
great temple library and educational quarters of Nippur; to
study the different modes of burial in use in ancient
Babylonia; and to study all types and forms of pottery, with a
view to finding laws for the classification and determination
of the ages of vases, always excavated in large numbers at
Nuffar. The work set before us has been accomplished. The task
was great,—almost too great for the limited time at our
disposal. … But the number of Arab workmen, busy with pickax,
scraper, and basket in the trenches for ten to fourteen hours
every day, gradually increased to the full force of four
hundred. … In the course of time, when the nearly twenty-five
thousand cuneiform texts which form one of the most
conspicuous prizes of the present expedition have been fully
deciphered and interpreted; when the still hidden larger mass
of tablets from that great educational institution, the temple
library of Calneh-Nippur, discovered at the very spot which I
had marked for its site twelve years ago, has been brought to
light,—a great civilization will loom up from past
millenniums before our astonished eyes. For four thousand
years the documents which contain this precious information
have disappeared from sight, forgotten in the destroyed rooms
of ancient Nippur. Abraham was about leaving his ancestral
home at Ur when the great building in which so much learning
had been stored up by previous generations collapsed under the
ruthless acts of the Elamite hordes. But the light which
begins to flash forth from the new trenches in this lonely
mound in the desert of Iraq will soon illuminate the world
again. And it will be no small satisfaction to know that it
was rekindled by the hands of American explorers."

{17}

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:

German exploration of the ruins of Babylon.

An expedition to explore the ruins of Babylon was sent out by

the German Orient Society, in 1899, under the direction of Dr.
Koldewey, an eminent architect and archæologist, who had been
connected with previous works of excavation done in Babylonia
and northern Syria. In announcing the project, in the "Sunday
School Times" of January 28, 1899, Professor Hilprecht
remarked: "These extended ruins will require at least fifty
years of labor if they are to be excavated as thoroughly and
systematically as the work is done by the American expedition
at Nippur, which has employed in its trenches never less than
sixty, but frequently from two hundred to four hundred, Arabic
workmen at the same time during the last ten years. Certain
parts of the ruins of Babylon have been previously explored
and excavated by Layard, Rawlinson, and the French expedition
under Fresnel and Oppert, to which we owe the first accurate
details of the topography of this ancient city." Writing
somewhat more than a year later from Nippur, after having
visited the German party at Babylon, Professor Hilprecht said
of its work: "The chief work of the expedition during the past
year was the exploration of the great ruin heap called
El-Kasr, under which are hidden the remains of the palace of
Nebuchadrezzar, where Alexander the Great died after his
famous campaign against India. Among the few important
antiquities so far obtained from this imposing mound of
Ancient Babylon is a new Hittite inscription and a
neo-Babylonian slab with an interesting cuneiform legend. Very
recently, Dr. Koldewey, whose excellent topographical surveys
form a conspicuous part of the results of the first year, has
found the temple of the goddess Nin-Makh, so often mentioned
in the building inscriptions of the neo-Babylonian rulers, and
a little terra-cotta statue of the goddess. The systematic
examination of the enormous mass of ruins covering Ancient
Babylon will require several decenniums of continued hard
labor. To facilitate this great task, a bill has been
submitted to the German Reichstag requesting a yearly
government appropriation of over fifteen thousand dollars,
while at the same time application has been made by the German
Orient Committee to the Ottoman Government for another firman
to carry on excavations at Warka, the biblical Erech, whose
temple archive was badly pillaged by the invading Elamites at
about 2280 B. C."

Some account of results from the uncovering of the palace of

Nebuchadrezzar are quoted from "Die Illustrirte Zeitung" in
the "Scientific American Supplement," December 16, 1899, as
follows: "According to early Babylonian records,
Nebuchadnezzar completed the fortifications of the city, begun
by his father Narbolpolassar, consisting of a double inclosure
of strong walls, the inner called Imgur-Bel ('Bel is
gracious'), the outer Nemitti-Bel ('foundation of Bel'). The
circumference of the latter according to Herodotus was 480
stades (55 miles), its height 340 feet, and its thickness 85
feet. At the inner and outer peripheries, one-story houses
were built, between which was room enough for a chariot drawn
by four horses harnessed abreast. When Koldewey cut through
the eastern front of Al Kasr, he came upon a wall which was
undoubtedly that described by Herodotus. The outer eastern
shell was composed of burnt brick and asphalt, 24 feet in
 thickness; then came a filling of sand and broken stone 70½
feet in thickness, which was followed by an inner western
shell of 43 feet thickness. The total thickness was,
therefore, 137.5 feet. By dint of hard work this wall was cut
through and the entrance to Nebuchadnezzar's palace laid bare.
Koldewey and his men were enabled to verify the description
given by Diodorus of the polychromatic reliefs which graced
the walls of the royal towers and palaces. It still remains to
be seen how trustworthy are the statements of other ancient
historians. The city itself, as previous investigators have
found, was adorned with many temples, chief among them Esaglia
('the high towering house'), temple of the city, and the national
god Marduk (Merodach) and his spouse Zirpanit. Sloping toward
the river were the Hanging Gardens, one of the world's seven
wonders, located in the northern mound of the ruins of Babel.
The temple described by Herodotus is that of Nebo, in
Borsippa, not far from Babylon, which Herodotus included under
Babylon and which the cuneiform inscriptions term 'Babylon the
Second.' This temple, which in the mound of Birs Nimrûd is the
most imposing ruin of Babylon, is called the 'eternal house'
in the inscriptions; it was restored by Nebuchadnezzar with
great splendor. In form, it is a pyramid built in seven
stages, for which reason it is sometimes referred to as the
'Temple of the Seven Spheres of Heaven and Earth.' The Tower
of Babel, described in Genesis x., is perhaps the same
structure. It remains for the German expedition to continue
its excavations in Nebuchadnezzar's palace."

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:

Discovery of an inscription of Nabonidos,
the last of the Babylonian kings.

"A discovery of the greatest importance has just been made by

Father Scheil, who has for some time been exploring in
Babylonia. In the Mujelibeh mound, one of the principal heaps
of ruins in the 'enciente' of Babylon, he has discovered a
long inscription of Nabonidos, the last of the Babylonian
Kings (B. C. 555-538), which contains a mass of historical and
other data which will be of greatest value to students of this
important period of Babylonian history. The monument in
question is a small 'stela' of diorite, the upper part of
which is broken, inscribed with eleven columns of writing, and
which appears to have been erected early in the King's reign.
It resembles in some measure the celebrated India-House
inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, but is much more full of
historical matter. Its value may be estimated when it is
stated that it contains a record of the war of revenge
conducted by the Babylonians and their Mandian allies against
Assyria, for the destruction of the city by Sennacherib, in B.
C. 698; an account of the election and coronation of Nabonidos
in B. C. 555, and the wonderful dream in which Nebuchadnezzar
appeared to him; as well as an account of the restoration of
the temple of the Moon god at Kharran, accompanied by a
chronological record which enables us to fix the date of the
so-called Scythian invasion. There is also a valuable
reference to the murder of Sennacherib by his son in Tebet, B.
 C. 681."

American Journal of Archœology,

January-March, 1896.

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Persia:

French exploration of the ruins of Susa,
the capital of ancient Elam.

"In 1897 an arrangement was completed between the French

Government and the Shah of Persia by which the former obtained
the exclusive right of archeological explorations in the
latter's empire, coupled with certain privileges for the
exportation of different kinds of antiquities that might be
unearthed. Soon afterwards, M. J. de Morgan, late director of
excavations in Egypt, who had made archeological researches in
the regions east of the Tigris before, was placed at the head
of a French expedition to Susa, the ancient capital of Elam,
the upper strata of which had been successfully explored by M.
Dieulafoy.
{18}
In the Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions Elam appears as the
most terrible foe of the Babylonian empire from the earliest
time: and the name of its capital, Susa, or Shâsha, was
discovered by the present editor several years ago on a small
votive object in agate, originally manufactured and inscribed
in southern Babylonia, in the first half of the third
pre-christian millennium, several hundred years afterwards
carried away as part of their spoil by the invading Elamites,
and in the middle of the fourteenth century B. C. recaptured,
reinscribed, and presented to the temple of Nippur by King
Kurigalzu, after his conquest of Susa. It was therefore
evident that, if the same method of excavating was applied to
the ruins of Susa as had been applied so successfully by the
University of Pennsylvania's expedition in Nippur, remarkable
results would soon be obtained, and amply repay all labor and
money expended. M. de Morgan, accompanied by some engineers
and architects, set hopefully to work, cutting his trenches
more than fifty feet below the ruins of the Achæmenian
dynasty. The first campaign, 1897-98, was so successful, in
the discovery of buildings and inscribed antiquities, that in
October of last year the French government despatched the
Assyriologist Professor Scheil, in order to decipher the new
cuneiform documents, and to report on their historical
bearings.

"Among the more important finds so far made, but not yet
published, maybe mentioned over a thousand cuneiform tablets
of the earlier period, a beautifully preserved obelisk more
than five feet high, and covered with twelve hundred lines of
Old Babylonian cuneiform writing. It was inscribed and set up
by King Manishtusu, who left inscribed vases in Nippur and
other Babylonian cities. A stele of somewhat smaller size,
representing a battle in the mountains, testifies to the high
development of art at that remote period. On the one end it
bears a mutilated inscription of Narâm-Sin, son of Sargon the
 Great (3800 B. C.); on the other, the name of Shimti-Shilkhak,
a well-known Elamitic king, and grandfather of the biblical
Ariokh (Genesis 14). These two monuments were either left in
Susa by the two Babylonian kings whose names they bear, after
successful operations against Elam, or they were carried off
as booty at the time of the great Elamitic invasion, which
proved so disastrous to the treasure-houses and archives of
Babylonian cities and temples [see above: BABYLONIA]. The
latter is more probable to the present writer, who in 1896
('Old Babylonian Inscriptions,' Part II, page 33) pointed out,
in connection with his discussion of the reasons of the
lamentable condition of Babylonian temple archives, that on
the whole we shall look in vain for well-preserved large
monuments in most Babylonian ruins, because about 2280 B. C.
'that which in the eyes of the national enemies of Babylonia
appeared most valuable was carried to Susa and other places:
what did not find favor with them was smashed and scattered on
Babylonian temple courts.'"

Prof. H. V. Hilprecht,
Oriental Research
(Sunday School Times, January 28, 1809).

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Egypt:

Earlier explorations.

For some account of earlier archæological explorations in

Egypt,

See, in volume 1,
EGYPT.

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Egypt:

Results of recent exploration.
The opening up of prehistoric Egypt.
The tomb of Mena.
The funeral temple of Merenptah.
Single mention of the people of Israel.

"During all this century in which Egyptian history has been

studied at first hand, it has been accepted as a sort of axiom
that the beginnings of things were quite unknown. In the
epitome of the history which was drawn up under the Greeks to
make Egypt intelligible to the rest of the world, there were
three dynasties of kings stated before the time of the great
pyramid builders; and yet of those it has been commonly said
that no trace remained. Hence it has been usual to pass them
by with just a mention as being half fabulous, and then to
begin real history with Senefern or Khufu (Cheops), the kings
who stand at the beginning of the fourth dynasty, at about
4000 B. C. The first discovery to break up this habit of
thought was when the prehistoric colossal statues of Min, the
god of the city of Koptos, were found in my excavations in his
temple. These had carvings in relief upon them wholly
different from anything known as yet in Egypt, and the
circumstances pointed to their being earlier than any carvings