Archibald Sayce

An engraving of Archibald Sayce

Archibald Henry Sayce FRAS (25 September 1845 – 4 February 1933) was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919. He was able to write in at least twenty ancient and modern languages, and was known for his emphasis on the importance of archaeological and monumental evidence in linguistic research. He was a contributor to articles in the 9th, 10th and 11th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Quotes

• The nearer a language is to its primary centre, the less alteration we are likely to find in it. Now of all the Aryan dialects, Sanskrit and Zend may, on the whole, be considered to have changed the least.
  • (Sayce 1880, 122). Introduction to the science of language
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

• During the last half-century a new world has been opened out before us by the excavators and decipherers of the ancient monuments of the East, the great civilisations of the past have risen up, as it were, from their grave, and we find ourselves face to face with the contemporaries of Ezekiel and Hezekiah, of Moses and of Abraham. Pages of history have been restored to us which had seemed lost for ever, and we are beginning to learn that the old empires of the Orient were in many respects as cultured and literary as is the world of to-day. The Old Testament has hitherto stood alone; the literature which existed by the side of it in the oriental world seemed to have perished, and if we would test and verify, illustrate or explain its statements, we had nothing to fall back upon except a few scattered fragments of doubtful value, which had come to us through Jewish and Christian apologists, or the misleading myths and fables of Greek writers. The books of the Old Testament Scriptures could be explained and interpreted only through themselves; they were what the logicians would call “a single instance”; there was nothing similar with which they could be compared, no contemporaneous record which could throw light on the facts they contained.
  • The "Higher Criticism" and the Verdict of the Monuments (8th, revised ed.). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 1915. pp. 6–7.  (1st edition, 1894)

• ... In the literary age of Greece and Rome the ancient religions of Babylonia and Egypt had passed into their dotage, and the conceptions on which they were founded had been transformed or forgotten. What was left of them was little more than an empty and unintelligible husk, or even a mere caricature. The gods, in whose name the kings of Assyria had gone forth to conquer, and in whose honour Nebuchadrezzar had reared the temples and palaces of Babylon, had degenerated into the patrons of a system of magic; the priests, who had once made and unmade the lords of the East, had become “Chaldæan” fortune-tellers, and the religion and science of Babylonia were remembered only for their connection with astrology. The old tradition had survived in Egypt with less apparent alteration, but even there the continuity of religious belief and teaching was more apparent than real, external rather than internal; and though the ... Ptolemies and early Roman emperors rebuilt the temples on the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted in the dress of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods whose very names they could not have pronounced, it was all felt to be but a sham, a dressing up, as it were, in the clothes of a religion out of which all the spirit and life had fled.
  • The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia. The Gifford Lectures on the Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian Conception of the Divine, Delivered in Aberdeen (1st ed.). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1903. pp. 2–3.  text at archive.org; 1st printing December 1902; 2nd printing March 1903)

• In the early spring of 1859 I saw London for the first time. My father introduced me to all the chief sights of the metropolis, including, of course, the Colosseum with its diving-bell, as well as the Vauxhall Gardens, which were closed shortly afterwards. I spent hours in the British Museum, more especially in the Egyptian and Assyrian rooms; the spell of the East became more potent than ever, and I still have a small note-book in which I endeavoured to copy the strange characters on one of the cuneiform tablets in the glass cases.
  • Reminiscences. London: Macmillan. 1923. p. 14. 

The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire

• ... The Hittites were a very real power. Not very many centuries before the age of Elisha they had contested the empire of Western Asia with the Egyptians, and though their power had waned in the days of Jehoram they were still formidable enemies and useful allies. They were still worthy of comparison with the divided kingdom of Egypt, and infinitely more powerful than that of Judah.
  But we hear no more about them in the subsequent records of the Old Testament. The age of Hittite supremacy belongs to an earlier date than the rise of the monarchy in Israel; earlier, we may even say, than the Israelitish conquest of Canaan.
  • The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire. By-paths of Bible Knowledge. volume XII (4th, revised ed.). London: Religious Tract Society. 1925. p. 12.  (1st edition 1888)

• The Hittites were a people with yellow skins and ‘mongoloid’ features whose receding foreheads, oblique eyes, and protruding upper jaws, are represented as faithfully on their own monuments as they are on those of Egypt, so that we cannot accuse the Egyptian artists of caricaturing their enemies...
  We have seen that the Hittites were a northern race. Their primitive home probably lay on the northern side of the Taurus. What they were like we can learn both from their own sculptures and from the Egyptian monuments, which agree most remarkably in the delineation of their features. The extraordinary resemblance between the Hittite faces drawn by the Egyptian artists and those depicted by themselves in their bas-reliefs and their hieroglyphs, is a convincing proof of the faithfulness of the Egyptian representations, as well as of the identity of the Hittites of the Egyptian inscriptions with the Hittites of Carchemish and Kappadokia.
  It must be confessed that they were not a handsome people. They were short and thick of limb, and the front part of their faces was pushed forward in a curious and somewhat repulsive way. The forehead retreated, the cheek-bones were high, the nostrils were large, the upper lip protrusive. They had, in fact, according to the craniologists, the characteristics of a Mongoloid race. Like the Mongols, moreover, their skins were yellow and their eyes and hair were black. They arranged the hair in the form of a 'pig-tail,' which characterizes them on their own and the Egyptian monuments quite as much as their snow-shoes with upturned toes.
  In Syria they doubtless mixed with the Semitic race, and the further south they advanced the more likely they were to become absorbed into the native population.
  • SAYCE 1890: “The Hittites, The Story of a forgotten Empire”, the Religious Tract Society, Piccadilly, 1890. pp. 15, 101