Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin

Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin

Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin (1835 – 1924) was a Russian-American author, journalist, traveller, and translator. Born in Russia, she emigrated to the United States in 1874.

Quotes

• In or about the year before Christ 606, Nineveh, the great city, was destroyed. For many hundred years had she stood in arrogant splendor, her palaces towering above the Tigris and mirrored in its swift waters; army after army had gone forth from her gates and returned laden with the spoils of conquered countries; her monarchs had ridden to the high place of sacrifice in chariots drawn by captive kings. But her time came at last. The nations assembled and encompassed her around. Popular tradition tells how over two years lasted the siege; how the very river rose and battered her walls; till one day a vast flame rose up to heaven; how the last of a mighty line of kings, too proud to surrender, thus saved himself, his treasures and his capital from the shame of bondage. Never was city to rise again where Nineveh had been.
  • Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria : (treated as a General Introduction to the Study of Ancient History). Volume 11 of The Story of the Nations (5th ed.). T. Fisher Unwin. 1886. p. 1. 

• That the nation of Asshur, which the biblical table of nations (Gen. x. 22) places second among Shem’s own children, was of purely Semitic race, has never been doubted. The striking likeness of the Assyrian to the Hebrew type of face would almost alone have sufficed to establish the relationship, even were not the two languages so very nearly akin. But the kinship goes deeper than that, and asserts itself in certain spiritual tendencies, which find their expression in the national religion, or, more correctly, in the one essential modificationintroduced by the Assyrians into the Babylonian religion, which they otherwise adopted wholesale, just as they brought it from their Southern home. Like their Hebrew brethren, they arrived at the perception of the Divine Unity; but while the wise men of the Hebrews took their stand uncompromisingly on monotheism and imposed it on their reluctant followers with a fervor and energy that no resistance or backsliding could abate, the Assyrian priests thought to reconcile the truth, which they but imperfectly grasped, with the old traditions and the established religious system. They retained the entire Babylonian pantheon, with all its theory of successive emanations, its two great triads, its five planetary deities, and the host of inferior divinities, but, at the head of them all, and above them all, they placed the one God and Master whom they recognized as supreme. They did not leave him wrapped in uncertainty and lost in misty remoteness, but gave him a very distinct individuality and a personal name: they called him Asshur ...
  • Assyria: From the Rise of the Empire to the Fall of Nineveh. Volume 13 of The Story of the Nations (2nd ed.). T. Fisher Unwin. 1887. pp. 4–5. 

• It was in the year 641 A.D. that the Arab invaders, in the heyday of their fervor for the faith of which their prophet Mohammed had taught them to consider themselves the heaven-sent bearers, won the battle, (on the field of Nehavend, fifty miles from ancient Ecbatana), which changed the destinies of Erân, and turned its people, dreaded and victorious for four centuries under their last national kings, the Sassanian dynasty, into a conquered, enslaved, and for a long time ruthlessly oppressed and ill-treated population. Yezdegerd III., the last Sassanian king, was murdered on his flight, for plunder, and no effort was made to retrieve the lost fortunes of that terrible day, with which closed an heroic struggle of over eight years; the country’s energies were broken.
  • The Story of Media, Babylon and Persia: Including a Study of the Zend-Avesta Or Religion of Zoroaster; from the Fall of Nineveh to the Persian War, (continued from "The Story of Assyria"). Volume 19 of The Story of the Nations (3rd ed.). G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1888. pp. 2–3. 

• The serpent tribe is perhaps more numerous in India than in any other country, and the most poisonous varieties seem to have congregated there. The openness of the dwellings imperatively demanded by the climate, and the vast numbers of people sleeping in the open air, in groves, forests, gardens, etc. give them chances of which they make but too good use, swarming in the gardens and seeking shelter in the houses during the rainy season. As a consequence, death from snake-bite almost equals an epidemic. In ... 1877, 16,777 human victims perished by this means, although £811 reward were paid for the destruction of 127,295 snakes, while in 1882, 19,519 person were reported to have been killed by snakes as compared with 2606 by tigers, leopards, wolves, and all other wild beasts together. That year £1487 were paid in rewards for the destruction of 322,421 venomous reptiles.
  • The Story of Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda. Volume 41 of The Story of the Nations. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1895. pp. 40–42. 

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin on Wikipedia
• wikisource:The New International Encyclopædia/Ragozin, Zénaïde Alexeïevna