He was hardly thirty when, in 1362 B.C., he died, broken with the realization of his failure as a ruler, and the unworthiness of his race.
V. DECLINE AND FALL
Tutenkhamon—The labors of Rameses II—The wealth of the clergy—The poverty of the people—The conquest of Egypt—Summary of Egyptian contributions to civilization
Two years after his death his son-in-law, Tutenkhamon, a favorite of the priests, ascended the throne. He changed the name Tutenkhaton which his father-in-law had given him, returned the capital to Thebes, made his peace with the powers of the Church, and announced to a rejoicing people the restoration of the ancient gods. The words Aton and Ikhnaton were effaced from all the monuments, the priests forbade the name of the heretic king to pass any man’s lips, and the people referred to him as “The Great Criminal.” The names that Ikhnaton had removed were recarved upon the monuments, and the feast-days that he had abolished were renewed. Everything was as before.
For the rest Tutenkhamon reigned without distinction; the world would hardly have heard of him had not unprecedented treasures been found in his grave. After him a doughty general, Harmhab, marched his armies up and down the coast, restoring Egypt’s external power and internal peace. Seti I wisely reaped the fruits of renewed order and wealth, built the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak,272 began to cut a mighty temple into the cliffs at Abu Simbel, commemorated his grandeur in magnificent reliefs, and had the pleasure of lying for thousands of years in one of the most ornate of Egypt’s tombs.
At this point the romantic Rameses II, last of the great Pharaohs, mounted the throne. Seldom has history known so picturesque a monarch. Handsome and brave, he added to his charms by his boyish consciousness of them; and his exploits in war, which he never tired of recording, were equaled only by his achievements in love. After brushing aside a brother who had inopportune rights to the throne, he sent an expedition to Nubia to tap the gold mines there and replenish the treasury of Egypt; and with the resultant funds he undertook the reconquest of the Asiatic provinces, which had again rebelled. Three years he gave to recovering Palestine; then he pushed on, met a great army of the Asiatic allies at Kadesh (1288 B.C.), and turned defeat into victory by his courage and leadership. It may have been as a result of these campaigns that a considerable number of Jews were brought into Egypt, as slaves or as immigrants; and Rameses II is believed by some to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus.273 He had his victories commemorated, without undue impartiality, on half a hundred walls, commissioned a poet to celebrate him in epic verse, and rewarded himself with several hundred wives. When he died he left one hundred sons and fifty daughters to testify to his quality by their number and their proportion. He married several of his daughters, so that they too might have splendid children. His offspring were so numerous that they constituted for four hundred years a special class in Egypt, from which, for over a century, her rulers were chosen.
He deserved these consolations, for he seems to have ruled Egypt well. He built so lavishly that half the surviving edifices of Egypt are ascribed to his reign. He completed the main hall at Karnak, added to the temple of Luxor, raised his own vast shrine, the Ramesseum, west of the river, finished the great mountain-sanctuary at Abu Simbel, and scattered colossi of himself throughout the land. Commerce flourished under him, both across the Isthmus of Suez and on the Mediterranean. He built another canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, but the shifting sands filled it up soon after his death. He yielded up his life in 1225 B.C., aged ninety, after one of the most remarkable reigns of history.
Only one human power in Egypt had excelled his, and that was the clergy: here, as everywhere in history, ran the endless struggle between church and state. Throughout his reign and those of his immediate successors, the spoils of every war, and the lion’s share of taxes from the conquered provinces, went to the temples and the priests. These reached the zenith of their wealth under Rameses III. They possessed at that time 107,000 slaves—one-thirtieth of the population of Egypt; they held 750,000 acres—one-seventh of all the arable land; they owned 500,000 head of cattle; they received the revenues from 169 towns in Egypt and Syria; and all this property was exempt from taxation.274 The generous or timorous Rameses III showered unparalleled gifts upon the priests of Amon, including 32,000 kilograms of gold and a million kilograms of silver;275 every year he gave them 185,000 sacks of corn. When the time came to pay the workmen employed by the state he found his treasury empty.276 More and more the people starved in order that the gods might eat.
Under such a policy it was only a matter of time before the kings would become the servants of the priests. In the reign of the last Ramessid king the High Priest of Amon usurped the throne and ruled as openly supreme; the Empire became a stagnant theocracy in which architecture and superstition flourished, and every other element in the national life decayed. Omens were manipulated to give a divine sanction to every decision of the clergy. The most vital forces of Egypt were sucked dry by the thirst of the gods at the very time when foreign invaders were preparing to sweep down upon all this concentrated wealth.
For meanwhile on every frontier trouble brewed. The prosperity of the country had come in part from its strategic place on the main line of Mediterranean trade; its metals and wealth had given it mastery over Libya on the west, and over Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine on the north and east. But now at the other end of this trade route—in Assyria, Babylon and Persia—new nations were growing to maturity and power, were strengthening themselves with invention and enterprise, and were daring to compete in commerce and industry with the self-satisfied and pious Egyptians. The Phoenicians were perfecting the trireme galley, and with it were gradually wresting from Egypt the control of the sea. The Dorians and Achaeans had conquered Crete and the Ægean (ca. 1400 B.C.), and were establishing a commercial empire of their own; trade moved less and less in slow caravans over the difficult and robber-infested mountains and deserts of the Near East; it moved more and more, at less expense and with less loss, in ships that passed through the Black Sea and the Ægean to Troy, Crete and Greece, at last to Carthage, Italy and Spain. The nations along the northern shores of the Mediterranean ripened and blossomed, the nations on the southern shores faded and rotted away. Egypt lost her trade, her gold, her power, her art, at last even her pride; one by one her rivals crept down upon her soil, harassed and conquered her, and laid her waste.
In 954 B.C. the Libyans came in from the western hills, and laid about them with fury; in 722 the Ethiopians entered from the south, and avenged their ancient slavery; in 674 the Assyrians swept down from the north and subjected priest-ridden Egypt to tribute. For a time Psamtik, Prince of Saïs, repelled the invaders, and brought Egypt together again under his leadership. During his long reign, and those of his successors, came the “Saïte Revival” of Egyptian art: the architects and sculptors, poets and scientists of Egypt gathered up the technical and esthetic traditions of their schools, and prepared to lay them at the feet of the Greeks. But in 525 B.C. the Persians under Cambyses crossed Suez, and again put an end to Egyptian independence. In 332 B.C. Alexander sallied out of Asia, and made Egypt a province of Macedon.* In 48 B.C. Caesar arrived to capture Egypt’s new capital, Alexandria, and to give to Cleopatra the son and heir whom they vainly hoped to crown as the unifying monarch of the greatest empires of antiquity.277 In 30 B.C. Egypt became a province of Rome, and disappeared from history.
For a time it flourished again when saints peopled the desert, and Cyril dragged Hypatia to her death in the streets (415 A.D.); and again when the Moslems conquered it (ca. A.D. 650), built Cairo with the ruins of Memphis, and filled it with bright-domed mosques and citadels. But these were alien cultures not really Egypt’s own, and they too passed away. Today there is a place called Egypt, but the Egyptian people are not masters there; long since they have been broken by conquest, and merged in language and marriage with their Arab conquerors; their cities know only the authority of Moslems and Englishmen, and the feet of weary pilgrims who travel thousands of miles to find that the Pyramids are merely heaps of stones. Perhaps greatness could grow there again if Asia should once more become rich, and make Egypt the half-way house of the planet’s trade. But of the morrow, as Lorenzo sang, there is no certainty; and today the only certainty is decay. On all sides gigantic ruins, monuments and tombs, memorials of a savage and titanic energy; on all sides poverty and desolation, and the exhaustion of an ancient blood. And on all sides the hostile, engulfing sands, blown about forever by hot winds, and grimly resolved to cover everything in the end.
Nevertheless the sands have destroyed only the body of ancient Egypt; its spirit survives in the lore and memory of our race. The improvement of agriculture, metallurgy, industry and engineering; the apparent invention of glass and linen, of paper and ink, of the calendar and the clock, of geometry and the alphabet; the refinement of dress and ornament, of furniture and dwellings, of society and life; the remarkable development of orderly and peaceful government, of census and post, of primary and secondary education, even of technical training for office and administration; the advancement of writing and literature, of science and medicine; the first clear formulation known to us of individual and public conscience, the first cry for social justice, the first widespread monogamy, the first monotheism, the first essays in moral philosophy; the elevation of architecture, sculpture and the minor arts to a degree of excellence and power never (so far as we know) reached before, and seldom equaled since: these contributions were not lost, even when their finest exemplars were buried under the desert, or overthrown by some convulsion of the globe.* Through the Phoenicians, the Syrians and the Jews, through the Cretans, the Greeks and the Romans, the civilization of Egypt passed down to become part of the cultural heritage of mankind. The effect or remembrance of what Egypt accomplished at the very dawn of history has influence in every nation and every age. “It is even possible,” as Faure has said, “that Egypt, through the solidarity, the unity, and the disciplined variety of its artistic products, through the enormous duration and the sustained power of its effort, offers the spectacle of the greatest civilization that has yet appeared on the earth.”278 We shall do well to equal it.
CHAPTER IX
Babylonia
I. FROM HAMMURABI TO NEBUCHADREZZAR
Babylonian contributions to modern civilization—The Land between the Rivers—Hammurabi—His capital—The Kassite Domination—The Amarna letters—The Assyrian Conquest—Nebuchadrezzar—Babylon in the days of its glory
CIVILIZATION, like life, is a perpetual struggle with death. And as life maintains itself only by abandoning old, and recasting itself in younger and fresher, forms, so civilization achieves a precarious survival by changing its habitat or its blood. It moved from Ur to Babylon and Judea, from Babylon to Nineveh, from these to Persepolis, Sardis and Miletus, and from these, Egypt and Crete to Greece and Rome.
No one looking at the site of ancient Babylon today would suspect that these hot and dreary wastes along the Euphrates were once the rich and powerful capital of a civilization that almost created astronomy, added richly to the progress of medicine, established the science of language, prepared the first great codes of law, taught the Greeks the rudiments of mathematics, physics and philosophy,1 gave the Jews the mythology which they gave to the world, and passed on to the Arabs part of that scientific and architectural lore with which they aroused the dormant soul of medieval Europe. Standing before the silent Tigris and Euphrates one finds it hard to believe that they are the same rivers that watered Sumeria and Akkad, and nourished the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
In some ways they are not the same rivers: not only because “one never steps twice into the same stream,” but because these old rivers have long since remade their beds along new courses,2 and “mow with their scythes of whiteness”3 other shores. As in Egypt the Nile, so here the Tigris and the Euphrates provided, for thousands of miles, an avenue of commerce and—in their southern reaches—springtime inundations that helped the peasant to fertilize his soil. For rain comes to Babylonia only in the winter months; from May to November it comes not at all; and the earth, but for the overflow of the rivers, would be as arid as northern Mesopotamia was then and is today. Through the abundance of the rivers and the toil of many generations of men, Babylonia became the Eden of Semitic legend, the garden and granary of western Asia.*
Historically and ethnically Babylonia was a product of the union of the Akkadians and the Sumerians. Their mating generated the Babylonian type, in which the Akkadian Semitic strain proved dominant; their warfare ended in the triumph of Akkad, and the establishment of Babylon as the capital of all lower Mesopotamia. At the outset of this history stands the powerful figure of Hammurabi (2123-2081 B.C.) conqueror and lawgiver through a reign of forty-three years. Primeval seals and inscriptions transmit him to us partially—a youth full of fire and genius, a very whirlwind in battle, who crushes all rebels, cuts his enemies into pieces, marches over inaccessible mountains, and never loses an engagement. Under him the petty warring states of the lower valley were forced into unity and peace, and disciplined into order and security by an historic code of laws.
The Code of Hammurabi was unearthed at Susa in 1902, beautifully engraved upon a diorite cylinder that had been carried from Babylon to Elam (ca. 1100 B.C.) as a trophy of war.† Like that of Moses, this legislation was a gift from Heaven, for one side of the cylinder shows the King receiving the laws from Shamash, the Sun-god himself. The Prologue is almost in Heaven:
When the lofty Anu, King of the Anunaki and Bel, Lord of Heaven and Earth, he who determines the destiny of the land, committed the rule of all mankind to Marduk; . . . when they pronounced the lofty name of Babylon; when they made it famous among the quarters of the world and in its midst established an everlasting kingdom whose foundations were firm as heaven and earth—at that time Anu and Bel called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, the worshiper of the gods, to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, . . . to enlighten the land and to further the welfare of the people. Hammurabi, the governor named by Bel, am I, who brought about plenty and abundance; who made everything for Nippur and Durilu complete; . . . who gave life to the city of Uruk; who supplied water in abundance to its inhabitants; . . . who made the city of Borsippa beautiful; . . . who stored up grain for the mighty Urash; . . . who helped his people in time of need; who establishes in security their property in Babylon; the governor of the people, the servant, whose deeds are pleasing to Anunit.4
The words here arbitrarily underlined have a modern ring; one would not readily attribute them to an Oriental “despot” 2100 B.C., or suspect that the laws that they introduce were based upon Sumerian prototypes now six thousand years old. This ancient origin combined with Babylonian circumstance to give the Code a composite and heterogeneous character. It begins with compliments to the gods, but takes no further notice of them in its astonishingly secular legislation. It mingles the most enlightened laws with the most barbarous punishments, and sets the primitive lex talionis and trial by ordeal alongside elaborate judicial procedures and a discriminating attempt to limit marital tyranny.5 All in all, these 285 laws, arranged almost scientifically under the headings of Personal Property, Real Estate, Trade and Business, the Family, Injuries, and Labor, form a code more advanced and civilized than that of Assyria a thousand and more years later, and in many respects “as good as that of a modern European state.”6* There are few words finer in the history of law than those with which the great Babylonian brings his legislation to a close:
The righteous laws which Hammurabi, the wise king, established, and (by which) he gave the land stable support and pure government. . . . I am the guardian governor. . . . In my bosom I carried the people of the land of Sumer and Akkad; . . . in my wisdom I restrained them, that the strong might not oppress the weak, and that they should give justice to the orphan and the widow. . . . Let any oppressed man, who has a cause, come before my image as king of righteousness! Let him read the inscription on my monument! Let him give heed to my weighty words! And may my monument enlighten him as to his cause, and may he understand his case! May he set his heart at ease, (exclaiming:) “Hammurabi indeed is a ruler who is like a real father to his people; . . . he has established prosperity for his people for all time, and given a pure government to the land.” . . .
In the days that are yet to come, for all future time, may the king who is in the land observe the words of righteousness which I have written upon my monument!8
This unifying legislation was but one of Hammurabi’s accomplishments. At his command a great canal was dug between Kish and the Persian Gulf, thereby irrigating a large area of land, and protecting the cities of the south from the destructive floods which the Tigris had been wont to visit upon them. In another inscription which has found its devious way from his time to ours he tells us proudly how he gave water (that noble and unappreciated commonplace, which was once a luxury), security and government to many tribes. Even through the boasting (an honest mannerism of the Orient) we hear the voice of statesmanship.
When Anu and Enlil (the gods of Uruk and Nippur) gave me the lands of Sumer and Akkad to rule, and they entrusted this sceptre to me, I dug the canal Hammurabi-nukhush-nishi (Hammurabi-the-Abundance-of-the-People), which bringeth copious water to the land of Sumer and Akkad. Its banks on both sides I turned into cultivated ground; I heaped up piles of grain, I provided unfailing water for the lands. . . . The scattered people I gathered; with pasturage and water I provided them; I pastured them with abundance, and settled them in peaceful dwellings.9
Despite the secular quality of his laws Hammurabi was clever enough to gild his authority with the approval of the gods. He built temples as well as forts, and coddled the clergy by constructing at Babylon a gigantic sanctuary for Marduk and his wife (the national deities), and a massive granary to store up wheat for gods and priests. These and similar gifts were an astute investment, from which he expected steady returns in the awed obedience of the people. From their taxes he financed the forces of law and order, and had enough left over to beautify his capital. Palaces and temples rose on every hand; a bridge spanned the Euphrates to let the city spread itself along both banks; ships manned with ninety men plied up and down the river. Two thousand years before Christ Babylon was already one of the richest cities that history had yet known.*
The people were of Semitic appearance, dark in hair and features, masculinely bearded for the most part, and occasionally bewigged. Both sexes wore the hair long; sometimes even the men dangled curls; frequently the men, as well as the women, disguised themselves with perfumes. The common dress for both sexes was a white linen tunic reaching to the feet; in the women it left one shoulder bare, in the men it was augmented with mantle and robe. As wealth grew, the people developed a taste for color, and dyed for themselves garments of blue on red, or red on blue, in stripes, circles, checks or dots. The bare feet of the Sumerian period gave way to shapely sandals, and the male head, in Hammurabi’s time, was swathed in turbans. The women wore necklaces, bracelets and amulets, and strings of beads in their carefully coiffured hair; the men flourished walking-sticks with carved heads, and carried on their girdles the prettily designed seals with which they attested their letters and documents. The priests wore tall conical caps to conceal their humanity.10
It is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay. For wealth produces ease as well as art; it softens a people to the ways of luxury and peace, and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths. On the eastern boundary of the new state a hardy tribe of mountaineers, the Kassites, looked with envy upon the riches of Babylon. Eight years after Hammurabi’s death they inundated the land, plundered it, retreated, raided it again and again, and finally settled down in it as conquerors and rulers; this is the normal origin of aristocracies. They were of non-Semitic stock, perhaps descendants of European immigrants from neolithic days; their victory over Semitic Babylon represented one more swing of the racial pendulum in western Asia. For several centuries Babylonia lived in an ethnic and political chaos that put a stop to the development of science and art.11 We have a kaleidoscope of this stifling disorder in the “Amarna” letters, in which the kinglets of Babylonia and Syria, having sent modest tribute to imperial Egypt after the victories of Thutmose III, beg for aid against rebels and invaders, and quarrel about the value of the gifts that they exchange with the disdainful Amenhotep III and the absorbed and negligent Ikhnaton.*
The Kassites were expelled after almost six centuries of rule as disruptive as the similar sway of the Hyksos in Egypt. The disorder continued for four hundred years more under obscure Babylonian rulers, whose polysyllabic roster might serve as an obbligato to Gray’s Elegy,† until the rising power of Assyria in the north stretched down its hand and brought Babylonia under the kings of Nineveh. When Babylon rebelled, Sennacherib destroyed it almost completely; but the genial despotism of Esarhaddon restored it to prosperity and culture. The rise of the Medes weakened Assyria, and with their help Nabopolassar liberated Babylonia, set up an independent dynasty, and dying, bequeathed this second Babylonian kingdom to his son Nebuchadrezzar II, villain of the vengeful and legendary Book of Daniel.13 Nebuchadrezzar’s inaugural address to Marduk, god-in-chief of Babylon, reveals a glimpse of an Oriental monarch’s aims and character:
As my precious life do I love thy sublime appearance! Outside of my city Babylon, I have not selected among all settlements any dwelling. . . . At thy command, O merciful Marduk, may the house that I have built endure forever, may I be satiated with its splendor, attain old age therein, with abundant offspring, and receive therein tribute of the kings of all regions, from all mankind.14
He lived almost up to his hopes, for though illiterate and not unquestionably sane, he became the most powerful ruler of his time in the Near East, and the greatest warrior, statesman and builder in all the succession of Babylonian kings after Hammurabi himself. When Egypt conspired with Assyria to reduce Babylonia to vassalage again, Nebuchadrezzar met the Egyptian hosts at Carchemish (on the upper reaches of the Euphrates), and almost annihilated them. Palestine and Syria then fell easily under his sway, and Babylonian merchants controlled all the trade that flowed across western Asia from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.
Nebuchadrezzar spent the tolls of this trade, the tributes of these subjects, and the taxes of his people, in beautifying his capital and assuaging the hunger of the priests. “Is not this the great Babylon that I built?”15 He resisted the temptation to be merely a conqueror; he sallied forth occasionally to teach his subjects the virtues of submission, but for the most part he stayed at home, making Babylon the unrivaled capital of the Near East, the largest and most magnificent metropolis of the ancient world.16 Nabopolassar had laid plans for the reconstruction of the city; Nebuchadrezzar used his long reign of forty-three years to carry them to completion. Herodotus, who saw Babylon a century and a half later, described it as “standing in a spacious plain,” and surrounded by a wall fifty-six miles in length,17 so broad that a four-horse chariot could be driven along the top, and enclosing an area of some two hundred square miles.18* Through the center of the town ran the palm-fringed Euphrates, busy with commerce and spanned by a handsome bridge.19† Practically all the better buildings were of brick, for stone was rare in Mesopotamia; but the bricks were often faced with enameled tiles of brilliant blue, yellow or white, adorned with animal and other figures in glazed relief, which remain to this day supreme in their kind. Nearly all the bricks so far recovered from the site of Babylon bear the proud inscription: “I am Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon.”21
Approaching the city the traveler saw first—at the crown of a very mountain of masonry—an immense and lofty ziggurat, rising in seven stages of gleaming enamel to a height of 650 feet, crowned with a shrine containing a massive table of solid gold, and an ornate bed on which, each night, some woman slept to await the pleasure of the god.22 This structure, taller than the pyramids of Egypt, and surpassing in height all but the latest of modern buildings, was probably the “Tower of Babel” of Hebraic myth, the many-storied audacity of a people who did not know Yahveh, and whom the God of Hosts was supposed to have confounded with a multiplicity of tongues.* South of the ziggurat stood the gigantic Temple of Marduk, tutelary deity of Babylon. Around and below this temple the city spread itself out in a few wide and brilliant avenues, crossed by crowded canals and narrow winding streets alive, no doubt, with traffic and bazaars, and Orientally odorous with garbage and humanity. Connecting the temples was a spacious “Sacred Way,” paved with asphalt-covered bricks overlaid with flags of limestone and red breccia; over this the gods might pass without muddying their feet. This broad avenue was flanked with walls of colored tile, on which stood out, in low relief, one hundred and twenty brightly enameled lions, snarling to keep the impious away. At one end of the Sacred Way rose the magnificent Ishtar Gate, a massive double portal of resplendent tiles, adorned with enameled flowers and animals of admirable color, vitality, and line.†
Six hundred yards north of the “Tower of Babel” rose a mound called Kasr, on which Nebuchadrezzar built the most imposing of his palaces. At its center stood his principal dwelling-place, the walls of finely made yellow brick, the floors of white and mottled sandstone; reliefs of vivid blue glaze adorned the surfaces, and gigantic basalt lions guarded the entrance. Nearby, supported on a succession of superimposed circular colonnades, were the famous Hanging Gardens, which the Greeks included among the Seven Wonders of the World. The gallant Nebuchadrezzar had built them for one of his wives, the daughter of Cyaxares, King of the Medes; this princess, unaccustomed to the hot sun and dust of Babylon, pined for the verdure of her native hills. The topmost terrace was covered with rich soil to the depth of many feet, providing space and nourishment not merely for varied flowers and plants, but for the largest and most deep-rooted trees. Hydraulic engines concealed in the columns and manned by shifts of slaves carried water from the Euphrates to the highest tier of the gardens.24 Here, seventy-five feet above the ground, in the cool shade of tall trees, and surrounded by exotic shrubs and fragrant flowers, the ladies of the royal harem walked unveiled, secure from the common eye; while, in the plains and streets below, the common man and woman ploughed, wove, built, carried burdens, and reproduced their kind.
II. THE TOILERS
Hunting—Tillage—Food—Industry—Transport—The perils of commerce—Money-lenders—Slaves
Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in the thick grass, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods, posed placidly for artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men. Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle.
Most of the soil was tilled by tenants or by slaves; some of it by peasant proprietors.25 In the earlier centuries the ground was broken up with stone hoes, as in neolithic tillage; a seal dating some 1400 B.C. is our earliest representation of the plough in Babylonia. Probaby this ancient and honorable tool had already a long history behind it in the Land between the Rivers; and yet it was modern enough, for though it was drawn by oxen in the manner of our fathers, it had, attached to the plough, as in Sumeria, a tube through which the seed was sown in the manner of our children.26 The waters of the rising rivers were not allowed to flood the land as in Egypt; on the contrary, every farm was protected from the inundation by ridges of earth, some of which can still be seen today. The overflow was guided into a complex network of canals, or stored into reservoirs, from which it was sluiced into the fields as needed, or raised over the ridges by shadufs—buckets lifted and lowered on a pivoted and revolving pole. Nebuchadrezzar distinguished his reign by building many canals, and gathering the surplus waters of the overflow into a reservoir, one hundred and forty miles in circumference, which nourished by its outlets vast areas of land.27 Ruins of these canals can be seen in Mesopotamia today, and—as if further to bind the quick and the dead—the primitive shaduf is still in use in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Loire.28
So watered, the land produced a variety of cereals and pulses, great orchards of fruits and nuts, and above all, the date; from this beneficent concoction of sun and soil the Babylonians made bread, honey, cake and other delicacies; they mixed it with meal to make one of their most sustaining foods; and to encourage its reproduction they shook the flowers of the male palm over those of the female.29 From Mesopotamia the grape and the olive were introduced into Greece and Rome and thence into western Europe; from nearby Persia came the peach; and from the shores of the Black Sea Lucullus brought the cherry-tree to Rome. Milk, so rare in the distant Orient, now became one of the staple foods of the Near East. Meat was rare and costly, but fish from the great streams found their way into the poorest mouths. And in the evening, when the peasant might have been disturbed by thoughts on life and death, he quieted memory and anticipation with wine pressed from the date, or beer brewed from the corn.
Meanwhile others pried into the earth, struck oil, and mined copper, lead, iron, silver and gold. Strabo tells how what he calls “naphtha or liquid asphalt” was taken from the soil of Mesopotamia then as now, and how Alexander, hearing that this was a kind of water that burned, tested the report incredulously by covering a boy with the strange fluid and igniting him with a torch.30 Tools, which had still been of stone in the days of Hammurabi, began, at the turn of the last millennium before Christ, to be made of bronze, then of iron; and the art of casting metal appeared. Textiles were woven of cotton and wool; stuffs were dyed and embroidered with such skill that these tissues became one of the most valued exports of Babylonia, praised to the skies by the writers of Greece and Rome.31 As far back as we can go in Mesopotamian history we find the weaver’s loom and the potter’s wheel; these were almost the only machines. Buildings were mostly of adobe—clay mixed with straw; or bricks still soft and moist were placed one upon the other and allowed to dry into a solid wall cemented by the sun. It was observed that the bricks in the fireplace became harder and more durable than those that the sun had baked; the process of hardening them in kilns was then a natural development, and thenceforth there was no end to the making of bricks in Babylon. Trades multiplied and became diversified and skilled, and as early as Hammurabi industry was organized into guilds (called “tribes”) of masters and apprentices.32
Local transport used wheeled carts drawn by patient asses.33 The horse is first mentioned in Babylonian records about 2100 B.C., as “the ass from the East”; apparently it came from the table-lands of Central Asia, conquered Babylonia with the Kassites, and reached Egypt with the Hyksos.34 With this new means of locomotion and carriage, trade expanded from local to foreign commerce; Babylon grew wealthy as the commercial hub of the Near East, and the nations of the ancient Mediterranean world were drawn into closer contact for good and ill. Nebuchadrezzar facilitated trade by improving the highways; “I have turned inaccessible tracks,” he reminds the historian, “into serviceable roads.”35 Countless caravans brought to the bazaars and shops of Babylon the products of half the world. From India they came via Kabul, Herat and Ecbatana; from Egypt via Pelusium and Palestine; from Asia Minor through Tyre, Sidon and Sardis to Carchemish, and then down the Euphrates. As a result of all this trade Babylon became, under Nebuchadrezzar, a thriving and noisy market-place, from which the wealthy sought refuge in residential suburbs. Note the contemporary ring of a rich suburbanite’s letter to King Cyrus of Persia (ca. 539 B.C.): “Our estate seemed to me the finest in the world, for it was so near to Babylon that we enjoyed all the advantages of a great city, and yet could come back home and be rid of all its rush and worry.”36
Government in Mesopotamia never succeeded in establishing such economic order as that which the Pharaohs achieved in Egypt. Commerce was harassed with a multiplicity of dangers and tolls; the merchant did not know which to fear the more—the robbers that might beset him on the way, or the towns and baronies that exacted heavy fees from him for the privilege of using their roads. It was safer, where possible, to take the great national highway, the Euphrates, which Nebuchadrezzar had made navigable from the Persian Gulf to Thapsacus.37 His campaigns in Arabia and his subjugation of Tyre opened up to Babylonian commerce the Indian and Mediterranean Seas, but these opportunities were only partially explored. For on the open sea, as in the mountain passes and the desert wastes, perils beset the merchant at every hour. Vessels were large, but reefs were many and treacherous; navigation was not yet a science; and at any moment pirates, or the ambitious dwellers on the shore, might board the ships, appropriate the merchandise, and enslave or kill the crew.38 The merchants reimbursed themselves for such losses by restricting their honesty to the necessities of each situation.
These difficult transactions were made easier by a well-developed system of finance. The Babylonians had no coinage, but even before Hammurabi they used—besides barley and corn—ingots of gold and silver as standards of value and mediums of exchange. The metal was unstamped, and was weighed at each transaction. The smallest unit of currency was the shekel—a half-ounce of silver worth from $2.50 to $5.00 of our contemporary currency; sixty such shekels made a mina, and sixty mina, made a talent—from $10,000 to $20,000.38a Loans were made in goods or currency, but at a high rate of interest, fixed by the state at 20% per annum for loans of money, and 33% for loans in kind; even these rates were exceeded by lenders who could hire clever scribes to circumvent the law.39 There were no banks, but certain powerful families carried on from generation to generation the business of lending money; they dealt also in real estate, and financed industrial enterprises;40 and persons who had funds on deposit with such men could pay their obligations by written drafts.41 The priests also made loans, particularly to finance the sowing and reaping of the crops. The law occasionally took the side of the debtor: e.g., if a peasant mortgaged his farm, and through storm or drought or other “act of God” had no harvest from his toil, then no interest could be exacted from him in that year.42 But for the most part the law was written with an eye to protecting property and preventing losses; it was a principle of Babylonian law that no man had a right to borrow money unless he wished to be held completely responsible for its repayment; hence the creditor could seize the debtor’s slave or son as hostage for an unpaid debt, and could hold him for not more than three years. A plague of usury was the price that Babylonian industry, like our own, paid for the fertilizing activity of a complex credit system.43
It was essentially a commercial civilization. Most of the documents that have come down from it are of a business character—sales, loans, contracts, partnerships, commissions, exchanges, bequests, agreements, promissory notes, and the like. We find in these tablets abundant evidence of wealth, and a certain materialistic spirit that managed, like some later civilizations, to reconcile piety with greed. We see in the literature many signs of a busy and prosperous life, but we find also, at every turn, reminders of the slavery that underlies all cultures. The most interesting contracts of sale from the age of Nebuchadrezzar are those that have to do with slaves.44 They were recruited from captives taken in battle, from slave-raids carried out upon foreign states by marauding Bedouins, and from the reproductive enthusiasm of the slaves themselves. Their value ranged from $20 to $65 for a woman, and from $50 to $100 for a man.45 Most of the physical work in the towns was done by them, including nearly all of the personal service. Female slaves were completely at the mercy of their purchaser, and were expected to provide him with bed as well as board; it was understood that he would breed through them a copious supply of children, and those slaves who were not so treated felt themselves neglected and dishonored.46 The slave and all his belongings were his master’s property: he might be sold or pledged for debt; he might be put to death if his master thought him less lucrative alive than dead; if he ran away no one could legally harbor him, and a reward was fixed for his capture. Like the free peasant he was subject to conscription for both the army and the corvée—i.e., for forced labor in such public works as cutting roads and digging canals. On the other hand the slave’s master paid his doctor’s fees, and kept him moderately alive through illness, slack employment and old age. He might marry a free woman, and his children by her would be free; half his property, in such a case, went on his death to his family. He might be set up in business by his master, and retain part of the profits—with which he might then buy his freedom; or his master might liberate him for exceptional or long and faithful service. But only a few slaves achieved such freedom. The rest consoled themselves with a high birth-rate, until they became more numerous than the free. A great slave-class moved like a swelling subterranean river underneath the Babylonian state.
III. THE LAW
The Code of Hammurabi—The powers of the king—Trial by ordeal—“Lex Talionis”—Forms of punishment—Codes of wages and prices—State restoration of stolen goods
Such a society, of course, never dreamed of democracy; its economic character necessitated a monarchy supported by commercial wealth or feudal privilege, and protected by the judicious distribution of legal violence. A landed aristocracy, gradually displaced by a commercial plutocracy, helped to maintain social control, and served as intermediary between people and king. The latter passed his throne down to any son of his choosing, with the result that every son considered himself heir apparent, formed a clique of supporters, and, as like as not, raised a war of succession if his hopes were unfulfilled.47 Within the limits of this arbitrary rule the government was carried on by central and local lords or administrators appointed by the king. These were advised and checked by provincial or municipal assemblies of elders or notables, who managed to maintain, even under Assyrian domination, a proud measure of local self-government.48
Every administrator, and usually the king himself, acknowledged the guidance and authority of that great body of law which had been given form under Hammurabi, and had maintained its substance, despite every change of circumstance and detail, through fifteen centuries. The legal development was from supernatural to secular sanctions, from severity to lenience, and from physical to financial penalties. In the earlier days an appeal to the gods was taken through trial by ordeal. A man accused of sorcery, or a woman charged with adultery, was invited to leap into the Euphrates; and the gods were on the side of the best swimmers. If the woman emerged alive, she was innocent; if the “sorcerer” was drowned, his accuser received his property; if he was not, he received the property of his accuser.49 The first judges were priests, and to the end of Babylonian history the courts were for the most part located in the temples;50 but already in the days of Hammurabi secular courts responsible only to the government were replacing the judgment-seats presided over by the clergy.
Penology began with the lex talionis, or law of equivalent retaliation. If a man knocked out an eye or a tooth, or broke a limb, of a patrician, precisely the same was to be done to him.51 If a house collapsed and killed the purchaser, the architect or builder must die; if the accident killed the buyer’s son, the son of the architect or builder must die; if a man struck a girl and killed her not he but his daughter must suffer the penalty of death.52 Gradually these punishments in kind were replaced by awards of damages; a payment of money was permitted as an alternative to the physical retaliation,53 and later the fine became the sole punishment. So the eye of a commoner might be knocked out for sixty shekels of silver, and the eye of a slave might be knocked out for thirty.54 For the penalty varied not merely with the gravity of the offense, but with the rank of the offender and the victim. A member of the aristocracy was subject to severer penalties for the same crime than a man of the people, but an offense against such an aristocrat was a costly extravagance. A plebeian striking a plebeian was fined ten shekels, or fifty dollars; to strike a person of title or property cost six times more.55 From such dissuasions the law passed to barbarous punishments by amputation or death. A man who struck his father had his hands cut off;56 a physician whose patient died, or lost an eye, as the result of an operation, had his fingers cut off;57 a nurse who knowingly substituted one child for another had to sacrifice her breasts.58 Death was decreed for a variety of crimes: rape, kidnaping, brigandage, burglary, incest, procurement of a husband’s death by his wife in order to marry another man, the opening or entering of a wine-shop by a priestess, the harboring of a fugitive slave, cowardice in the face of the enemy, malfeasance in office, careless or uneconomical housewifery,59 or malpractice in the selling of beer.60 In such rough ways, through thousands of years, those traditions and habits of order and self-restraint were established which became part of the unconscious basis of civilization.
Within certain limits the state regulated prices, wages and fees. What the surgeon might charge was established by law; and wages were fixed by the Code of Hammurabi for builders, brickmakers, tailors, stonemasons, carpenters, boatmen, herdsmen, and laborers.61 The law of inheritance made the man’s children, rather than his wife, his natural and direct heirs; the widow received her dowry and her wedding-gift, and remained head of the household as long as she lived. There was no right of primogeniture; the sons inherited equally, and in this way the largest estates were soon redivided, and the concentration of wealth was in some measure checked.62 Private property in land and goods was taken for granted by the Code.
We find no evidence of lawyers in Babylonia, except for priests who might serve as notaries, and the scribe who would write for pay anything from a will to a madrigal. The plaintiff preferred his own plea, without the luxury of terminology. Litigation was discouraged; the very first law of the Code reads, with almost illegal simplicity: “If a man bring an accusation against a man, and charge him with a (capital) crime, but cannot prove it, the accuser shall be put to death.”63 There are signs of bribery, and of tampering with witnesses.64 A court of appeals, staffed by “the King’s Judges,” sat at Babylon, and a final appeal might be carried to the king himself. There was nothing in the Code about the rights of the individual against the state; that was to be a European innovation. But articles 22-24 provided, if not political, at least economic, protection. “If a man practise brigandage and be captured, that man shall be put to death. If the brigand be not captured, the man who has been robbed shall, in the presence of the god, make an itemized statement of his loss, and the city and governor within whose province and jurisdiction the robbery was committed shall compensate him for whatever was lost. If it be a life (that was lost), the city and governor shall pay one mina ($300) to the heirs.” What modern city is so well governed that it would dare to offer such reimbursements to the victims of its negligence? Has the law progressed since Hammurabi, or only increased and multiplied?
IV. THE GODS OF BABYLON
Religion and the state—The junctions and powers of the clergy—The lesser gods—Marduk—Ishtar—The Babylonian stories of the Creation and the Flood—The love of Ishtar and Tammuz—The descent of Ishtar into Hell—The death and resurrection of Tammuz—Ritual and prayer—Penitential psalms—Sin—Magic—Superstition
The power of the king was limited not only by the law and the aristocracy, but by the clergy. Technically the king was merely the agent of the city god. Taxation was in the name of the god, and found its way directly or deviously into the temple treasuries. The king was not really king in the eyes of the people until he was invested with royal authority by the priests, “took the hands of Bel,” and conducted the image of Marduk in solemn procession through the streets. In these ceremonies the monarch was dressed as a priest, symbolizing the union of church and state, and perhaps the priestly origin of the kingship. All the glamor of the supernatural hedged about the throne, and made rebellion a colossal impiety which risked not only the neck but the soul. Even the mighty Hammurabi received his laws from the god. From the patesis or priest-governors of Sumeria to the religious coronation of Nebuchadrezzar, Babylonia remained in effect a theocratic state, always “under the thumb of the priests.”65
The wealth of the temples grew from generation to generation, as the uneasy rich shared their dividends with the gods. The kings, feeling an especial need of divine forgiveness, built the temples, equipped them with furniture, food and slaves, deeded to them great areas of land, and assigned to them an annual income from the state. When the army won a battle, the first share of the captives and the spoils went to the temples; when any special good fortune befell the king, extraordinary gifts were dedicated to the gods. Certain lands were required to pay to the temples a yearly tribute of dates, corn, or fruit; if they failed, the temples could foreclose on them; and in this way the lands usually came into possession by the priests. Poor as well as rich turned over to the temples as much as they thought profitable of their earthly gains. Gold, silver, copper, lapis lazuli, gems and precious woods accumulated in the sacred treasury.
As the priests could not directly use or consume this wealth, they turned it into productive or investment capital, and became the greatest agriculturists, manufacturers and financiers of the nation. Not only did they hold vast tracts of land; they owned a great number of slaves, or controlled hundreds of laborers, who were hired out to other employers, or worked for the temples in their divers trades from the playing of music to the brewing of beer.66 The priests were also the greatest merchants and financiers of Babylonia; they sold the varied products of the temple shops, and handled a large proportion of the country’s trade; they had a reputation for wise investment, and many persons entrusted their savings to them, confident of a modest but reliable return. They made loans on more lenient terms than the private money-lenders; sometimes they lent to the sick or the poor without interest, merely asking a return of the principal when Marduk should smile upon the borrower again.67 Finally, they performed many legal functions: they served as notaries, attesting and signing contracts, and making wills; they heard and decided suits and trials, kept official records, and recorded commercial transactions.
Occasionally the king commandeered some of the temple accumulations to meet an expensive emergency. But this was rare and dangerous, for the priests had laid terrible curses upon all who should touch, unpermitted, the smallest jot of ecclesiastical property. Besides, their influence with the people was ultimately greater than that of the king, and they might in most cases depose him if they set their combined wits and powers to this end. They had also the advantage of permanence; the king died, but the god lived on; the council of priests, free from the fortunes of elections, illnesses, assassinations and wars, had a corporate perpetuity that made possible long-term and patient policies, such as characterize great religious organizations to this day. The supremacy of the priests under these conditions was inevitable. It was fated that the merchants should make Babylon, and that the priests should enjoy it.
Who were the gods that formed the invisible constabulary of the state? They were numerous, for the imagination of the people was limitless, and there was hardly any end to the needs that deities might serve. An official census of the gods, undertaken in the ninth century before Christ, counted them as some 65,000.68 Every town had its tutelary divinity; and as, in our own time and faith, localities and villages, after making formal acknowledgment of the Supreme Being, worship specific minor gods with a special devotion, so Larsa lavished its temples on Shamash, Uruk on Ishtar, Ur on Nannar—for the Sumerian pantheon had survived the Sumerian state. The gods were not aloof from men; most of them lived on earth in the temples, ate with a hearty appetite, and through nocturnal visits to pious women gave unexpected children to the busy citizens of Babylon.69
Oldest of all were the astronomic gods: Anu, the immovable firmament, Shamash, the sun, Nannar, the moon, and Bel or Baal, the earth into whose bosom all Babylonians returned after death.70 Every family had household gods, to whom prayers were said and libations poured each morning and night; every individual had a protective divinity (or, as we should say, a guardian angel) to keep him from harm and joy; and genii of fertility hovered beneficently over the fields. It was probably out of this multitude of spirits that the Jews moulded their cherubim.
We do not find among the Babylonians such signs of monotheism as appear in Ikhnaton and the Second Isaiah. Two forces, however, brought them near to it: the enlargement of the state by conquest and growth brought local deities under the supremacy of a single god; and several of the cities patriotically conferred omnipotence upon their favored divinities. “Trust in Nebo,” says Nebo, “trust in no other god”;71 this is not unlike the first of the commandments given to the Jews. Gradually the number of the gods was lessened by interpreting the minor ones as forms or attributes of the major deities. In these ways the god of Babylon, Marduk, originally a sun god, became sovereign of all Babylonian divinities.72 Hence his title, Bel-Marduk—that is, Marduk the god. To him and to Ishtar the Babylonians sent up the most eloquent of their prayers.
Ishtar (Astarte to the Greeks, Ashtoreth to the Jews) interests us not only as analogue of the Egyptian Isis and prototype of the Grecian Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, but as the formal beneficiary of one of the strangest of Babylonian customs. She was Demeter as well as Aphrodite—no mere goddess of physical beauty and love, but the gracious divinity of bounteous motherhood, the secret inspiration of the growing soil, and the creative principle everywhere. It is impossible to find much harmony, from a modern point of view, in the attributes and functions of Ishtar: she was the goddess of war as well as of love, of prostitutes as well as of mothers; she called herself “a compassionate courtesan”;73 she was represented sometimes as a bearded bisexual deity, sometimes as a nude female offering her breasts to suck;74 and though her worshipers repeatedly addressed her as “The Virgin,” “The Holy Virgin,” and “The Virgin Mother,” this merely meant that her amours were free from all taint of wedlock. Gilgamesh rejected her advances on the ground that she could not be trusted; had she not once loved, seduced, and then slain, a lion?75 It is clear that we must put our own moral code to one side if we are to understand her. Note with what fervor the Babylonians could lift up to her throne litanies of laudation only less splendid than those which a tender piety once raised to the Mother of God:
I beseech thee, Lady of Ladies, Goddess of Goddesses, Ishtar, Queen of all cities, leader of all men.
Thou art the light of the world, thou art the light of heaven, mighty daughter of Sin (the moon-god). . . .
Supreme is thy might, O Lady, exalted art thou above all gods.
Thou renderest judgment, and thy decision is righteous.
Unto thee are subject the laws of the earth and the laws of heaven, the laws of the temples and the shrines, the laws of the private apartment and the secret chamber.
Where is the place where thy name is not, and where is the spot where thy commandments are not known?
At thy name the earth and the heavens shake, and the gods they tremble. . . .
Thou lookest upon the oppressed, and to the down-trodden thou bringest justice every day.
How long, Queen of Heaven and Earth, how long,
How long, Shepherdess of pale-faced men, wilt thou tarry?
How long, O Queen whose feet are not weary, and whose knees make haste?
How long, Lady of Hosts, Lady of Battles?
Glorious one whom all the spirits of heaven fear, who subduest all angry gods; mighty above all rulers; who holdest the reins of kings.
Opener of the womb of all women, great is thy light.
Shining light of heaven, light of the world, enlightener of all the places where men dwell, who gatherest together the hosts of the nations.
Goddess of men, Divinity of women, thy counsel passeth understanding.
Where thou glancest, the dead come to life, and the sick rise and walk; the mind of the diseased is healed when it looks upon thy face.
How long, O Lady, shall mine enemy triumph over me?
Command, and at thy command the angry god will turn back.
Ishtar is great! Ishtar is Queen! My Lady is exalted, my Lady is Queen, Innini, the mighty daughter of Sin.
There is none like unto her.76
With these gods as dramatis personæ the Babylonians constructed myths which have in large measure come down to us, through the Jews, as part of our own religious lore. There was first of all the myth of the creation. In the beginning was Chaos. “In the time when nothing which was called heaven existed above, and when nothing below had yet received the name of earth, Apsu, the Ocean, who first was their father, and Tiamat, Chaos, who gave birth to them all, mingled their waters in one.” Things slowly began to grow and take form; but suddenly the monster-goddess Tiamat set out to destroy all the other gods, and to make herself—Chaos—supreme. A mighty revolution ensued in which all order was destroyed. Then another god, Marduk, slew Tiamat with her own medicine by casting a hurricane of wind into her mouth as she opened it to swallow him; then he thrust his lance into Tiamat’s wind-swollen paunch, and the goddess of Chaos blew up. Marduk, “recovering his calm,” says the legend, split the dead Tiamat into two longitudinal halves, as one does a fish for drying; “then he hung up one of the halves on high, which became the heavens; the other half he spread out under his feet to form the earth.”77 This is as much as we yet know about creation. Perhaps the ancient poet meant to suggest that the only creation of which we can know anything is the replacement of chaos with order, for in the end this is the essence of art and civilization. We should remember, however, that the defeat of Chaos is only a myth.*
Having moved heaven and earth into place, Marduk undertook to knead earth with his blood and thereby make men for the service of the gods. Mesopotamian legends differed on the precise way in which this was done; they agreed in general that man was fashioned by the deity from a lump of clay. Usually they represented him as living at first not in a paradise but in bestial simplicity and ignorance, until a strange monster called Oannes, half fish and half philosopher, taught him the arts and sciences, the rules for founding cities, and the principles of law; after which Oannes plunged into the sea, and wrote a book on the history of civilization.79 Presently, however, the gods became dissatisfied with the men whom they had created, and sent a great flood to destroy them and all their works. The god of wisdom, Ea, took pity on mankind, and resolved to save one man at least—Shamash-napishtim—and his wife. The flood raged; men “encumbered the sea like fishes’ spawn.” Then suddenly the gods wept and gnashed their teeth at their own folly, asking themselves, “Who will make the accustomed offerings now?” But Shamash-napishtim had built an ark, had survived the flood, had perched on the mountain of Nisir, and had sent out a reconnoitering dove; now he decided to sacrifice to the gods, who accepted his gifts with surprise and gratitude. “The gods snuffed up the odor, the gods snuffed up the excellent odor, the gods gathered like flies above the offering.”80
Lovelier than this vague memory of some catastrophic inundation is the vegetation myth of Ishtar and Tammuz. In the Sumerian form of the tale Tammuz is Ishtar’s young brother; in the Babylonian form he is sometimes her lover, sometimes her son; both forms seem to have entered into the myths of Venus and Adonis, Demeter and Persephone, and a hundred scattered legends of death and resurrection. Tammuz, son of the great god Ea, is a shepherd pasturing his flock under the great tree Erida (which covers the whole earth with its shade) when Ishtar, always insatiable, falls in love with him, and chooses him to be the spouse of her youth. But Tammuz, like Adonis, is gored to death by a wild boar, and descends, like all the dead, into that dark subterranean Hades which the Babylonians called Aralu, and over which they set as ruler Ishtar’s jealous sister, Ereshkigal. Ishtar, mourning inconsolably, resolves to go down to Aralu and restore Tammuz to life by bathing his wounds in the waters of a healing spring. Soon she appears at the gates of Hades in all her imperious beauty, and demands entrance. The tablets tell the story vigorously:
When Ereshkigal heard this,
As when one hews down a tamarisk (she trembled?).
As when one cuts a reed (she shook?).
“What has moved her heart, what has (stirred) her liver?
Ho, there, (does) this one (wish to dwell) with me?
To eat clay as food, to drink (dust?) as wine?
I weep for the men who have left their wives;
I weep for the wives torn from the embrace of their husbands;
For the little ones (cut off) before their time.
Go, gate-keeper, open thy gate for her,
Deal with her according to the ancient decree.”
The ancient decree is that none but the nude shall enter Aralu. Therefore at each of the successive gates through which Ishtar must pass, the keeper divests her of some garment or ornament: first her crown, then her ear-rings, then her necklace, then the ornaments from her bosom, then her many-jeweled girdle, then the spangles from her hands and feet, and lastly her loin-cloth; and Ishtar, protesting gracefully, yields.
Now when Ishtar had gone down into the land of no return,
Ereshkigal saw her and was angered at her presence.
Ishtar without reflection threw herself at her.
Ereshkigal opened her mouth and spoke
To Namtar, her messenger. . . .
“Go, Namtar, (imprison her?) in my palace.
Send against her sixty diseases,
Eye disease against her eyes,
Disease of the side against her side,
Foot-disease against her foot,
Heart-disease against her heart,
Head-disease against her head,
Against her whole being.”
While Ishtar is detained in Hades by these sisterly attentions, the earth, missing the inspiration of her presence, forgets incredibly all the arts and ways of love: plant no longer fertilizes plant, vegetation languishes, animals experience no heat, men cease to yearn.
After the lady Ishtar had gone down into the land of no return,
The bull did not mount the cow, the ass approached not the she-ass;
To the maid in the street no man drew near;
The man slept in his apartment,
The maid slept by herself.
Population begins to diminish, and the gods note with alarm a sharp decline in the number of offerings from the earth. In panic they command Ereshkigal to release Ishtar. It is done, but Ishtar refuses to return to the surface of the earth unless she is allowed to take Tammuz with her. She wins her point, passes triumphantly through the seven gates, receives her loin-cloth, her spangles, her girdle, her pectorals, her necklace, her ear-rings and her crown. As she appears plants grow and bloom again, the land swells with food, and every animal resumes the business of reproducing his kind.81 Love, stronger than death, is restored to its rightful place as master of gods and men. To the modern scholar it is only an admirable legend, symbolizing delightfully the yearly death and rebirth of the soil, and that omnipotence of Venus which Lucretius was to celebrate in his own strong verse; to the Babylonians it was sacred history, faithfully believed and annually commemorated in a day of mourning and wailing for the dead Tammuz, followed by riotous rejoicing over his resurrection.82
Nevertheless the Babylonian derived’ no satisfaction from the idea of personal immortality. His religion was terrestrially practical; when he prayed he asked not for celestial rewards but for earthly goods;83 he could not trust his gods beyond the grave. It is true that one text speaks of Marduk as he “who gives back life to the dead,”84 and the story of the flood represents its two survivors as living forever. But for the most part the Babylonian conception of another life was like that of the Greeks: dead men—saints and villains, geniuses and idiots, alike—went to a dark and shadowy realm within the bowels of the earth, and none of them saw the light again. There was a heaven, but only for the gods; the Aralu to which all men descended was a place frequently of punishment, never of joy; there the dead lay bound hand and foot forever, shivering with cold, and subject to hunger and thirst unless their children placed food periodically in their graves.85 Those who had been especially wicked on earth were subjected to horrible tortures; leprosy consumed them, or some other of the diseases which Nergal and Allat, male and female lords of Aralu, had arranged for their rectification.
Most bodies were buried in vaults; a few were cremated, and their remains were preserved in urns.86 The dead body was not embalmed, but professional mourners washed and perfumed it, clad it presentably, painted its cheeks, darkened its eyelids, put rings upon its fingers, and provided it with a change of linen. If the corpse was that of a woman it was equipped with scentbottles, combs, cosmetic pencils, and eye-paint to preserve its fragrance and complexion in the nether world.87 If not properly buried the dead would torment the living; if not buried at all, the soul would prowl about sewers and gutters for food, and might afflict an entire city with pestilence.88 It was a medley of ideas not as consistent as Euclid, but sufficing to prod the simple Babylonian to keep his gods and priests well fed.
The usual offering was food and drink, for these had the advantage that if they were not entirely consumed by the gods the surplus need not go to waste. A frequent sacrifice on Babylonian altars was the lamb; and an old Babylonian incantation strangely anticipates the symbolism of Judaism and Christianity: “The lamb as a substitute for a man, the lamb he gives for his life.”89 Sacrifice was a complex ritual, requiring the expert services of a priest; every act and word of the ceremony was settled by sacred tradition, and any amateur deviation from these forms might mean that the gods would eat without listening. In general, to the Babylonian, religion meant correct ritual rather than the good life. To do one’s duty to the gods one had to offer proper sacrifice to the temples, and recite the appropriate prayers;90 for the rest he might cut out the eyes of his fallen enemy, cut off the hands and feet of captives, and roast their remainders alive in a furnace,91 without much offense to heaven. To participate in—or reverently to attend—long and solemn processions like those in which the priests carried from sanctuary to sanctuary the image of Marduk, and performed the sacred drama of his death and resurrection; to anoint the idols with sweet-scented oils,* to burn incense before them, clothe them with rich vestments, or adorn them with jewelry; to offer up the virginity of their daughters in the great festival of Ishtar; to put food and drink before the gods, and to be generous to the priests—these were the essential works of the devout Babylonian soul.93
Perhaps we misjudge him, as doubtless the future will misjudge us from the fragments that accident will rescue from our decay. Some of the finest literary relics of the Babylonians are prayers that breathe a profound and sincere piety. Hear the proud Nebuchadrezzar humbly addressing Marduk:
Without thee, Lord, what could there be
For the king thou lovest, and dost call his name?
Thou shalt bless his title as thou wilt,
And unto him vouchsafe a path direct.
I, the prince obeying thee,
Am what thy hands have made.
’Tis thou who art my creator,
Entrusting me with the rule of hosts of men.
According to thy mercy, Lord, . . .
Turn into loving-kindness thy dread power,
And make to spring up in my heart
A reverence for thy divinity.
Give as thou thinkest best.94
The surviving literature abounds in hymns full of that passionate self abasement with which the Semite tries to control and conceal his pride. Many of them take the character of “penitential psalms,” and prepare us for the magnificent feeling and imagery of “David”; who knows but they served as models for that many-headed Muse?
I, thy servant, full of sighs cry unto thee.
Thou acceptest the fervent prayer of him who is burdened with sin.
Thou lookest upon a man, and that man lives. . . .
Look with true favor upon me, and accept my supplication. . . .
And then, as if uncertain of the sex of the god—
How long, my god,
How long, my goddess, until thy face be turned to me?
How long, known and unknown god, until the anger of thy heart shall be appeased?
How long, known and unknown goddess, until thy unfriendly heart be appeased?
Mankind is perverted, and has no judgment;
Of all men who are alive, who knows anything?
They do not know whether they do good or evil.
O Lord, do not cast aside thy servant;
He is cast into the mire; take his hand!
The sin which I have sinned, turn to mercy!
The iniquity which I have committed, let the wind carry away!
My many transgressions tear off like a garment!
My god, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins!
My goddess, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins! . . .
Forgive my sins, and I will humble myself before thee.
May thy heart, as the heart of a mother who hath borne children, be glad;
As a mother who hath borne children, as a father who hath begotten, may it be glad!95
Such psalms and hymns were sung sometimes by the priests, sometimes by the congregation, sometimes by both in strophe and antistrophe. Perhaps the strangest circumstance about them is that—like all the religious literature of Babylon—they were written in the ancient Sumerian language, which served the Babylonian and Assyrian churches precisely as Latin serves the Roman Catholic Church today. And just as a Catholic hymnal may juxtapose the Latin text to a vernacular translation, so some of the hymns that have come down to us from Mesopotamia have a Babylonian or Assyrian translation written between the lines of the “classic” Sumerian original, in the fashion of a contemporary schoolboy’s “interlinear.” And as the form of these hymns and rituals led to the Psalms of the Jews and the liturgy of the Roman Church, so their content presaged the pessimistic and sin-struck plaints of the Jews, the early Christians, and the modern Puritans. The sense of sin, though it did not interfere victoriously in Babylonian life, filled the Babylonian chants, and rang a note that survives in all Semitic liturgies and their anti-Semitic derivatives. “Lord,” cries one hymn, “my sins are many, great are my misdeeds! . . . I sink under affliction, I can no longer raise my head; I turn to my merciful God to call upon him, and I groan! . . . Lord, reject not thy servant!”96
These groanings were rendered more sincere by the Babylonian conception of sin. Sin was no mere theoretical state of the soul; like sickness it was the possession of the body by a demon that might destroy it. Prayer was in the nature of an incantation against a demon that had come down upon the individual out of the ocean of magic forces in which the ancient Orient lived and moved. Everywhere, in the Babylonian view, these hostile demons lurked: they hid in strange crannies, slipped through doors or even through bolts and sockets, and pounced upon their victims in the form of illness or madness whenever some sin had withdrawn for a moment the beneficent guardianship of the gods. Giants, dwarfs, cripples, above all, women, had sometimes the power, even with a glance of the “evil eye,” to infuse such a destructive spirit into the bodies of those toward whom they were ill-disposed. Partial protection against these demons was provided by the use of magic amulets, talismans and kindred charms; images of the gods, carried on the body, would usually suffice to frighten the devils away. Little stones strung on a thread or a chain and hung about the neck were especially effective, but care had to be taken that the stones were such as tradition associated with good luck, and the thread had to be of black, white or red according to the purpose in view. Thread spun from virgin kids was particularly powerful.97 But in addition to such means it was wise also to exorcise the demon by fervent incantation and magic ritual—for example, by sprinkling the body with water taken from the sacred streams—the Tigris or the Euphrates. Or an image of the demon could be made, placed on a boat, and sent over the water with a proper formula; if the boat could be made to capsize, so much the better. The demon might be persuaded, by the appropriate incantation, to leave its human victim and enter an animal—a bird, a pig, most frequently a lamb.98
Magic formulas for the elimination of demons, the avoidance of evil and the prevision of the future constitute the largest category in the Babylonian writings found in the library of Ashurbanipal. Some of the tablets are manuals of astrology; others are lists of omens celestial and terrestrial, with expert advice for reading them; others are treatises on the interpretation of dreams, rivaling in their ingenious incredibility the most advanced products of modern psychology; still others offer instruction in divining the future by examining the entrails of animals, or by observing the form and position of a drop of oil let fall into a jar of water.99 Hepatoscopy—observation of the liver of animals—was a favorite method of divination among the Babylonian priests, and passed from them into the classical world; for the liver was believed to be the seat of the mind in both animals and men. No king would undertake a campaign or advance to a battle, no Babylonian would risk a crucial decision or begin an enterprise of great moment, without employing a priest or a soothsayer to read the omens for him in one or another of these recondite ways.
Never was a civilization richer in superstitions. Every turn of chance from the anomalies of birth to the varieties of death received a popular, sometimes an official and sacerdotal, interpretation in magical or supernatural terms. Every movement of the rivers, every aspect of the stars, every dream, every unusual performance of man or beast, revealed the future to the properly instructed Babylonian. The fate of a king could be forecast by observing the movements of a dog,100 just as we foretell the length of the winter by spying upon the groundhog. The superstitions of Babylonia seem ridiculous to us, because they differ superficially from our own. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
V. THE MORALS OF BABYLON
Religion divorced from morals—Sacred prostitution—Free love—Marriage—Adultery—Divorce—The position of woman—The relaxation of morals
This religion, with all its failings, probably helped to prod the common Babylonian into some measure of decency and civic docility, else we should be hard put to explain the generosity of the kings to the priests. Apparently, however, it had no influence upon the morals of the upper classes in the later centuries, for (in the eyes and words of her prejudiced enemies) the “whore of Babylon” was a “sink of iniquity,” and a scandalous example of luxurious laxity to all the ancient world. Even Alexander, who was not above dying of drinking, was shocked by the morals of Babylon.101
The most striking feature of Babylonian life, to an alien observer, was the custom known to us chiefly from a famous page in Herodotus:
Every native woman is obliged, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Venus, and have intercourse with some stranger. And many disdaining to mix with the rest, being proud on account of their wealth, come in covered carriages, and take up their station at the temple with a numerous train of servants attending them. But the far greater part do thus: many sit down in the temple of Venus, wearing a crown of cord round their heads; some are continually coming in, and others are going out. Passages marked oat in a straight line lead in every direction through the women, along which strangers pass and make their choice. When a woman has once seated herself she must not return home till some stranger has thrown a piece of silver into her lap, and lain with her outside the temple. He who throws the silver must say thus: “I beseech the goddess Mylitta to favor thee”; for the Assyrians call Venus Mylitta.* The silver may be ever so small, for she will not reject it, inasmuch as it is not lawful for her to do so, for such silver is accounted sacred. The woman follows the first man that throws, and refuses no one. But when she has had intercourse and has absolved herself from her obligation to the goddess, she returns home; and after that time, however great a sum you may give her you will not gain possession of her. Those that are endowed with beauty and symmetry of shape are soon set free; but the deformed are detained a long time, from inability to satisfy the law, for some wait for a space of three or four years.102
What was the origin of this strange rite? Was it a relic of ancient sexual communism, a concession, by the future bridegroom, of the jus primæ noctis, or right of the first night, to the community as represented by any casual and anonymous citizen?103 Was it due to the bridegroom’s fear of harm from the violation of the tabu against shedding blood?104 Was it a physical preparation for marriage, such as is still practised among some Australian tribes?105 Or was it simply a sacrifice to the goddess—an offering of first fruits?106 We do not know.
Such women, of course, were not prostitutes. But various classes of prostitutes lived within the temple precincts, plied their trade there, and amassed, some of them, great fortunes. Such temple prostitutes were common in western Asia: we find them in Israel,107 Phrygia, Phoenicia, Syria, etc.; in Lydia and Cyprus the girls earned their marriage dowries in this way.108 “Sacred prostitution” continued in Babylonia until abolished by Constantine (ca. 325 A.D.).109 Alongside it, in the wine-shops kept by women, secular prostitution flourished.110
In general the Babylonians were allowed considerable premarital experience. It was considered permissible for men and women to form unlicensed unions, “trial marriages,” terminable at the will of either party; but the woman in such cases was obliged to wear an olive—in stone or terra cotta—as a sign that she was a concubine.111 Some tablets indicate that the Babylonians wrote poems, and sang songs, of love; but all that remains of these is an occasional first line, like “My love is a light,” or “My heart is full of merriment and song.”112 One letter, dating from 2100 B.C., is in the tone of Napoleon’s early messages to Josephine: “To Bibiya: . . . May Shamash and Marduk give thee health forever. . . . I have sent (to ask) after thy health; let me know how thou art. I have arrived in Babylon, and see thee not; I am very sad.”113
Legal marriage was arranged by the parents, and was sanctioned by an exchange of gifts obviously descended from marriage by purchase. The suitor presented to the father of the bride a substantial present, but the father was expected to give her a dowry greater in value than the gift,114 so that it was difficult to say who was purchasd, the woman or the man. Sometimes, however, the arrangement was unabashed purchase; Shamashnazir, for example, received ten shekels ($50) as the price of his daughter.115 If we are to believe the Father of History,
those who had marriageable daughters used to bring them once a year to a place where a great number of men gathered round them. A public crier made them stand up and sold them all, one after another. He began with the most beautiful, and having got a large sum for her he put up the second fairest. But he only sold them on condition that the buyers married them. . . . This very wise custom no longer exists.116
Despite these strange practices, Babylonian marriage seems to have been as monogamous and faithful as marriage in Christendom is today. Premarital freedom was followed by the rigid enforcement of marital fidelity. The adulterous wife and her paramour, according to the Code, were drowned, unless the husband, in his mercy, preferred to let his wife off by turning her almost naked into the streets.117 Hammurabi out-Cæsared Cæsar: “If the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man because of another man, and she have not been taken in lying with another man, for her husband’s sake she shall throw herself into the river”118—perhaps the law was intended as a discouragement to gossip. The man could divorce his wife simply by restoring her dowry to her and saying, “Thou art not my wife”; but if she said to him, “Thou art not my husband,” she was to be drowned.119 Childlessness, adultery, incompatibility, or careless management of the household might satisfy the law as ground for granting the man a divorce;120 indeed “if she have not been a careful mistress, have gadded about, have neglected her house, and have belittled her children, they shall throw that woman into the water.”121 As against this incredible severity of the Code, we find that in practice the woman, though she might not divorce her husband, was free to leave him, if she could show cruelty on his part and fidelity on her own; in such cases she could return to her parents, and take her marriage portion with her, along with what other property she might have acquired.122 (The women of England did not enjoy these rights till the end of the nineteenth century.) If a woman’s husband was kept from her, through business or war, for any length of time, and had left no means for her maintenance, she might cohabit with another man without legal prejudice to her reunion with her husband on the latter’s return.123
In general the position of woman in Babylonia was lower than in Egypt or Rome, and yet not worse than in classic Greece or medieval Europe. To carry out her many functions—begetting and rearing children, fetching water from the river or the public well, grinding corn cooking, spinning, weaving, cleaning—she had to be free to go about in public very much like the man.124 She could own property, enjoy its income, sell and buy, inherit and bequeath.125 Some women kept shops, and carried on commerce; some even became scribes, indicating that girls as well as boys might receive an education.126 But the Semitic practice of giving almost limitless power to the oldest male of the family won out against any matriarchal tendencies that may have existed in prehistoric Mesopotamia. Among the upper classes—by a custom that led to the purdah of Islam and India—the women were confined to certain quarters of the house; and when they went out they were chaperoned by eunuchs and pages.127 Among the lower classes they were maternity machines, and if they had no dowry they were little more than slaves.128 The worship of Ishtar suggests a certain reverence for woman and motherhood, like the worship of Mary in the Middle Ages; but we get no glimpse of chivalry in Herodotus’ report that the Babylonians, when besieged, “had strangled their wives, to prevent the consumption of their provisions.”129
With some excuse, then, the Egyptians looked down upon the Babylonians as not quite civilized. We miss here the refinement of character and feeling indicated by Egyptian literature and art. When refinement came to Babylon it was in the guise of an effeminate degeneracy: young men dyed and curled their hair, perfumed their flesh, rouged their cheeks, and adorned themselves with necklaces, bangles, ear-rings and pendants. After the Persian Conquest the death of self-respect brought an end of self-restraint; the manners of the courtesan crept into every class; women of good family came to consider it mere courtesy to reveal their charms indiscriminately for the greatest happiness of the greatest number;130 and “every man of the people in his poverty,” if we may credit Herodotus, “prostituted his daughters for money.”131 “There is nothing more extraordinary than the manners of this city,” wrote Quintus Curtius (42 A.D.), “and nowhere are things better arranged with a view to voluptuous pleasures.”132 Morals grew lax when the temples grew rich; and the citizens of Babylon, wedded to delight, bore with equanimity the subjection of their city by the Kassites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks.
VI. LETTERS AND LITERATURE
Cuneiform—Its decipherment—Language—Literature—The epic of Gilgamesh
Did this life of venery, piety and trade receive any ennobling enshrinement in literary or artistic form? It is possible; we cannot judge a civilization from such fragments as the ocean of time has thrown up from the wreckage of Babylon. These fragments are chiefly liturgical, magical and commercial. Whether through accident or through cultural poverty, Babylonia, like Assyria and Persia, has left us a very middling heritage of literature as compared with Egypt and Palestine; its gifts were in commerce and law.
Nevertheless, scribes were as numerous in cosmopolitan Babylon as in Memphis or Thebes. The art of writing was still young enough to give its master a high rank in society; it was the open sesame to governmental and sacerdotal office; its possessor never failed to mention the distinction in narrating his deeds, and usually he engraved a notice of it on his cylinder seal,133 precisely as Christian scholars and gentlemen once listed their academic degrees on their cards. The Babylonians wrote in cuneiform upon tablets of damp clay, with a stylus or pencil cut at the end into a triangular prism or wedge; when the tablets were filled they dried and baked them into strange but durable manuscripts of brick. If the thing written was a letter it was dusted with powder and then wrapped in a clay envelope stamped with the sender’s cylinder seal. Tablets in jars classified and arranged on shelves filled numerous libraries in the temples and palaces of Babylonia. These Babylonian libraries are lost; but one of the greatest of them, that of Borsippa, was copied and preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal, whose 30,000 tablets are the main source of our knowledge of Babylonian life.
The decipherment of Babylonian baffled students for centuries; their final success is an honorable chapter in the history of scholarship. In 1802 Georg Grotefend, professor of Greek at the University of Göttingen, told the Göttingen Academy how for years he had puzzled over certain cuneiform inscriptions from ancient Persia; how at last he had identified eight of the forty-two characters used, and had made out the names of three kings in the inscriptions. There, for the most part, the matter rested until 1835, when Henry Rawlinson, a British diplomatic officer stationed in Persia, quite unaware of Grotefend’s work, likewise worked out the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes in an inscription couched in Old Persian, a cuneiform derivative of Babylonian script; and through these names he finally deciphered the entire document. This, however, was not Babylonian; Rawlinson had still to find, like Champollion, a Rosetta Stone—in this case some inscription bearing the same text in old Persian and Babylonian. He found it three hundred feet high on an almost inaccessible rock at Behistun, in the mountains of Media, where Darius I had caused his carvers to engrave a record of his wars and victories in three languages—old Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. Day after day Rawlinson risked himself on these rocks, often suspending himself by a rope, copying every character carefully, even making plastic impressions of all the engraved surfaces. After twelve years of work he succeeded in translating both the Babylonian and the Assyrian texts (1847). To test these and similar findings, the Royal Asiatic Society sent an unpublished cuneiform document to four Assyriologists, and asked them—working without contact or communication with one another—to make independent translations. The four reports were found to be in almost complete agreement. Through these unheralded campaigns of scholarship the perspective of history was enriched with a new civilization.134
The Babylonian language was a Semitic development of the old tongues of Sumeria and Akkad. It was written in characters originally Sumerian, but the vocabulary diverged in time (like French from Latin) into a language so different from Sumerian that the Babylonians had to compose dictionaries and grammars to transmit the old “classic” and sacerdotal tongue of Sumeria to young scholars and priests. Almost a fourth of the tablets found in the royal library at Nineveh is devoted to dictionaries and grammars of the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian languages. According to tradition, such dictionaries had been made as far back as Sargon of Akkad—so old is scholarship. In Babylonian, as in Sumerian, the characters represented not letters but syllables; Babylon never achieved an alphabet of its own, but remained content with a “syllabary” of some three hundred signs. The memorizing of these syllabic symbols formed, with mathematics and religious instruction, the curriculum of the temple schools in which the priests imparted to the young as much as it was expedient for them to know. One excavation unearthed an ancient classroom in which the clay tablets of boys and girls who had copied virtuous maxims upon them some two thousand years before Christ still lay on the floor, as if some almost welcome disaster had suddenly interrupted the lesson.135
The Babylonians, like the Phoenicians, looked upon letters as a device for facilitating business; they did not spend much of their clay upon literature. We find animal fables in verse—one generation of an endless dynasty; hymns in strict meter, sharply divided lines and elaborate stanzas;136 very little surviving secular verse; religious rituals presaging, but never becoming, drama; and tons of historiography. Official chroniclers recorded the piety and conquests of the kings, the vicissitudes of each temple, and the important events in the career of each city. Berosus, the most famous of Babylonian historians (ca. 280 B.C.) narrated with confidence full details concerning the creation of the world and the early history of man: the first king of Babylonia had been chosen by a god, and had reigned 36,000 years; from the beginning of the world to the great Flood, said Berosus, with praiseworthy exactitude and comparative moderation, there had elapsed 691,200 years.137
Twelve broken tablets found in Ashurbanipal’s library, and now in the British Museum, form the most fascinating relic of Mesopotamian literature—the Epic of Gilgamesh. Like the Iliad it is an accretion of loosely connected stories, some of which go back to Sumeria 3000 B.C.; part of it is the Babylonian account of the Flood. Gilgamesh was a legendary ruler of Uruk or Erech, a descendant of the Shamash-napishtim who had survived the Deluge, and had never died. Gilgamesh enters upon the scene as a sort of Adonis-Samson—tall, massive, heroically powerful and troublesomely handsome.
Two thirds of him is god, One third of him is man,
There’s none can match the form of his body. . . .
All things he saw, even to the ends of the earth,
He underwent all, learned to know all;
He peered through all secrets,
Through wisdom’s mantle that veileth all.
What was hidden he saw,
What was covered he undid;
Of times before the stormflood he brought report.
He went on a long far way,
Giving himself toil and distress;
Wrote then on a stone tablet the whole of his labor.138
Fathers complain to Ishtar that he leads their sons out to exhausting toil “building the walls through the day, through the night”; and husbands complain that “he leaves not a wife to her master, not a single virgin to her mother.” Ishtar begs Gilgamesh’s godmother, Aruru, to create another son equal to Gilgamesh and able to keep him busy in conflict, so that the husbands of Uruk may have peace. Aruru kneads a bit of clay, spits upon it, and moulds from it the satyr Engidu, a man with the strength of a boar, the mane of a lion, and the speed of a bird. Engidu does not care for the society of men, but turns and lives with the animals; “he browses with the gazelles, he sports with the creatures of the water, he quenches his thirst with the beasts of the field.” A hunter tries to capture him with nets and traps, but fails; and going to Gilgamesh, the hunter begs for the loan of a priestess who may snare Engidu with love. “Go, my hunter,” says Gilgamesh, “take a priestess; when the beasts come to the watering-place let her display her beauty; he will see her, and his beasts that troop around him will be scattered.”
The hunter and the priestess go forth, and find Engidu.
“There he is, woman!
Loosen thy buckle,
Unveil thy delight,
That he may take his fill of thee!
Hang not back, take up his lust!
When he sees thee, he will draw near.
Open thy robe that he rest upon thee!
Arouse in him rapture, the work of woman.
Then will he become a stranger to his wild beasts,
Who on his own steppes grew up with him.
His bosom will press against thee.”
Then the priestess loosened her buckle,
Unveiled her delight,
For him to take his fill of her.
She hung not back, she took up his lust,
She opened her robe that he rest upon her.
She aroused in him rapture, the work of woman.
His bosom pressed against her.
Engidu forgot where he was born.139
For six days but seven nights Engidu remains with the sacred woman. When he tires of pleasure he awakes to find his friends the animals gone, whereupon he swoons with sorrow. But the priestess chides him: “Thou who art superb as a god, why dost thou live among the beasts of the field? Come, I will conduct thee to Uruk, where is Gilgamesh, whose might is supreme.” Ensnared by the vanity of praise and the conceit of his strength, Engidu follows the priestess to Uruk, saying, “Lead me to the place where is Gilgamesh. I will fight with him and manifest to him my power”; whereat the gods and husbands are well pleased. But Gilgamesh overcomes him, first with strength, then with kindness; they become devoted friends; they march forth together to protect Uruk from Elam; they return glorious with exploits and victory. Gilgamesh “put aside his war-harness, he put on his white garments, he adorned himself with the royal insignia, and bound on the diadem.” Thereupon Ishtar the insatiate falls in love with him, raises her great eyes to him, and says:
“Come, Gilgamesh, be my husband, thou! Thy love, give it to me as a gift; thou shalt be my spouse, and I shall be thy wife. I shall place thee in a chariot of lapis and gold, with golden wheels and mountings of onyx; thou shalt be drawn in it by great lions, and thou shalt enter our house with the odorous incense of cedar-wood. . . . All the country by the sea shall embrace thy feet, kings shall bow down before thee, the gifts of the mountains and the plains they will bring before thee as tribute.”
Gilgamesh rejects her, and reminds her of the hard fate she has inflicted upon her varied lovers, including Tammuz, a hawk, a stallion, a gardener and a lion. “Thou lovest me now,” he tells her; “afterwards thou wilt strike me as thou didst these.” The angry Ishtar asks of the great god Anu that he create a wild urus to kill Gilgamesh. Anu refuses, and rebukes her: “Canst thou not remain quiet now that Gilgamesh has enumerated to thee thy unfaithfulness and ignominies?” She threatens that unless he grants her request she will suspend throughout the universe all the impulses of desire and love, and so destroy every living thing. Anu yields, and creates the ferocious urus; but Gilgamesh, helped by Engidu, overcomes the beast; and when Ishtar curses the hero, Engidu throws a limb of the urus into her face. Gilgamesh rejoices and is proud, but Ishtar strikes him down in the midst of his glory by afflicting Engidu with a mortal illness.
Mourning over the corpse of his friend, whom he has loved more than any woman, Gilgamesh wonders over the mystery of death. Is there no escape from that dull fatality? One man eluded it—Shamash-napishtim; he would know the secret of deathlessness. Gilgamesh resolves to seek Shamash-napishtim, even if he must cross the world to find him. The way leads through a mountain guarded by a pair of giants whose heads touch the sky and whose breasts reach down to Hades. But they let him pass, and he picks his way for twelve miles through a dark tunnel. He emerges upon the shore of a great ocean, and sees, far over the waters, the throne of Sabitu, virgin-goddess of the seas. He calls out to her to help him cross the water; “if it cannot be done, I will lay me down on the land and die.” Sabitu takes pity upon him, and allows him to cross through forty days of tempest to the Happy Island where lives Shamashnapishtim, possessor of immortal life. Gilgamesh begs of him the secret of deathlessness. Shamash-napishtim answers by telling at length the story of the Flood, and how the gods, relenting of their mad destructiveness, had made him and his wife immortal because they had preserved the human species. He offers Gilgamesh a plant whose fruit will confer renewed youth upon him who eats it; and Gilgamesh, happy, starts back on his long journey home. But on the way he stops to bathe, and while he bathes a serpent crawls by and steals the plant.*
Desolate, Gilgamesh reaches Uruk. He prays in temple after temple that Engidu may be allowed to return to life, if only to speak to him for a moment. Engidu appears, and Gilgamesh inquires of him the state of the dead. Engidu answers, “I cannot tell it thee; if I were to open the earth before thee, if I were to tell thee that which I have seen, terror would overthrow thee, thou wouldst faint away.” Gilgamesh, symbol of that brave stupidity, philosophy, persists in his quest for truth: “Terror will overthrow me, I shall faint away, but tell it to me.” Engidu describes the miseries of Hades, and on this gloomy note the fragmentary epic ends.140
VII. ARTISTS
The lesser arts—Music—Fainting—Sculpture—Bas-reliefs Architecture
The story of Gilgamesh is almost the only example by which we may judge the literary art of Babylon. That a keen esthetic sense, if not a profound creative spirit, survived to some degree the Babylonian absorption in commercial life, epicurean recreation and compensatory piety, may be seen in the chance relics of the minor arts. Patiently glazed tiles, glittering stones, finely wrought bronze, iron, silver and gold, delicate embroideries, soft rugs and richly dyed robes, luxurious tapestries, pedestaled tables, beds and chairs141—these lent grace, if not dignity or final worth, to Babylonian civilization. Jewelry abounded in quantity, but missed the subtle artistry of Egypt; it went in for a display of yellow metal, and thought it artistic to make entire statues of gold.142 There were many musical instruments—flutes, psalteries, harps, bagpipes, lyres, drums, horns, reed-pipes, trumpets, cymbals and tambourines. Orchestras played and singers sang, individually and chorally, in temples and palaces, and at the feasts of the well-to-do.143
Painting was purely subsidiary; it decorated walls and statuary, but made no attempt to become an independent art.144 We do not find among Babylonian ruins the distemper paintings that glorified the Egyptian tombs, or such frescoes as adorned the palaces of Crete. Babylonian sculpture remained similarly undeveloped, and was apparently stiffened into an early death by conventions derived from Sumeria and enforced by the priests: all the faces portrayed are one face, all the kings have the same thick and muscular frame, all the captives are cast in one mould. Very little Babylonian statuary survives, and that without excuse. The bas-reliefs are better, but they too are stereotyped and crude; a great gulf separates them from the mobile vigor of the reliefs that the Egyptians had carved a thousand years before; they reach sublimity only when they depict animals possessed of the silent dignity of nature, or enraged by the cruelty of men.145
Babylonian architecture is safe from judgment now, for hardly any of its remains rise to more than a few feet above the sands; and there are no carved or painted representations among the relics to show us clearly the form and structure of palaces and temples. Houses were built of dried mud, or, among the rich, of brick; they seldom knew windows, and their doors opened not upon the narrow street but upon an interior court shaded from the sun. Tradition describes the better dwellings as rising to three or four stories in height.146 The temple was raised upon foundations level with the roofs of the houses whose life it was to dominate; usually it was an enormous square of tiled masonry, built, like the houses, around a court; in this court most of the religious ceremonies were performed. Near the temple, in most cases, rose a ziggurat (literally “a high place”)—a tower of superimposed and diminishing cubical stories surrounded by external stairs. Its uses were partly religious, as a lofty shrine for the god, partly astronomic, as an observatory from which the priests could watch the all-revealing stars. The great ziggurat at Borsippa was called “The Stages of the Seven Spheres”; each story was dedicated to one of the seven planets known to Babylonia, and bore a symbolic color. The lowest was black, as the color of Saturn; the next above;← was white, as the color of Venus; the next was purple, for Jupiter; the fourth blue, for Mercury; the fifth scarlet, for Mars; the sixth silver, for the moon; the seventh gold, for the sun. These spheres and stars, beginning at the top, designated the days of the week.147
There was not much art in this architecture, so far as we can vision it now; it was a mass of straight lines seeking the glory of size. Here and there among the ruins are vaults and arches—forms derived from Sumeria, negligently used, and unconscious of their destiny. Decoration, interior and exterior, was almost confined to enameling some of the brick surfaces with bright glazes of yellow, blue, white and red, with occasional tiled figures of animals or plants. The use of vitrified glaze, not merely to beautify, but to protect the masonry from sun and rain, was at least as old as Naram-sin, and was to continue in Mesopotamia down to Moslem days. In this way ceramics, though seldom producing rememberable pottery, became the most characteristic art of the ancient Near East. Despite such aid, Babylonian architecture remained a heavy and prosaic thing, condemned to mediocrity by the material it used. The temples rose rapidly out of the earth which slave labor turned so readily into brick and cementing pitch; they did not require centuries for their erection, like the monumental structures of Egypt or medieval Europe. But they decayed almost as quickly as they rose; fifty years of neglect reduced them to the dust from which they had been made.148 The very cheapness of brick corrupted Babylonian design; with such materials it was easy to achieve size, difficult to compass beauty. Brick does not lend itself to sublimity, and sublimity is the soul of architecture.
VIII. BABYLONIAN SCIENCE
Mathematics—Astronomy—The calendar—Geography—Medicine
Being merchants, the Babylonians were more likely to achieve successes in science than in art. Commerce created mathematics, and united with religion to beget astronomy. In their varied functions as judges, administrators, agricultural and industrial magnates, and soothsayers skilled in examining entrails and stars, the priests of Mesopotamia unconsciously laid the foundations of those sciences which, in the profane hands of the Greeks, were for a time to depose religion from its leadership of the world.
Babylonian mathematics rested on a division of the circle into 360 degrees, and of the year into 360 days; on this basis it developed a sexagesimal system of calculation by sixties, which became the parent of later duodecimal systems of reckoning by twelves. The numeration used only three figures: a sign for 1, repeated up to 9; a sign for 10, repeated up to 90; and a sign for 100. Computation was made easier by tables which showed not only multiplication and division, but the halves, quarters, thirds, squares and cubes of the basic numbers. Geometry advanced to the measurement of complex and irregular areas. The Babylonian figure for π (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle) was 3—a very crude approximation for a nation of astronomers.
Astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians, for which they were famous throughout the ancient world. Here again magic was the mother of science: the Babylonians studied the stars not so much to chart the courses of caravans and ships, as to divine the future fates of men; they were astrologers first and astronomers afterward. Every planet was a god, interested and vital in the affairs of men: Jupiter was Marduk, Mercury was Nabu, Mars was Nergal, the sun was Shamash, the moon was Sin, Saturn was Ninib, Venus was Ishtar. Every movement of every star determined, or forecast, some terrestrial event: if, for example, the moon was low, a distant nation would submit to the king; if the moon was in crescent the king would overcome the enemy. Such efforts to wring the future out of the stars became a passion with the Babylonians; priests skilled in astrology reaped rich rewards from both people and king. Some of them were sincere students, poring zealously over astrologic tomes which, according to their traditions, had been composed in the days of Sargon of Akkad; they complained of the quacks who, without such study, went about reading horoscopes for a fee, or predicting the weather a year ahead, in the fashion of our modern almanacs.149
Astronomy developed slowly out of this astrologic observation and charting of the stars. As far back as 2000 B.C. the Babylonians had made accurate records of the heliacal rising and setting of the planet Venus; they had fixed the position of various stars, and were slowly mapping the sky.150 The Kassite conquest interrupted this development for a thousand years. Then, under Nebuchadrezzar, astronomic progress was resumed; the priest-scientists plotted the orbits of sun and moon, noted their conjunctions and eclipses, calculated the courses of the planets, and made the first clear distinction between a planet and a star;*151 they determined the dates of winter and summer solstices, of vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and, following the lead of the Sumerians, divided the ecliptic (i.e., the path of the earth around the sun) into the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Having divided the circle into 360 degrees, they divided the degree into sixty minutes, and the minute into sixty seconds.152 They measured time by a clepsydra or water-clock, and a sun-dial, and these seem to have been not merely developed but invented by them.153
They divided the year into twelve lunar months, six having thirty days, six twenty-nine; and as this made but 354 days in all, they added a thirteenth month occasionally to harmonize the calendar with the seasons. The month was divided into four weeks according to the four phases of; the moon. An attempt was made to establish a more convenient calendar by dividing the month into six weeks of five days; but the phases of the moon proved more effective than the conveniences of men. The day was reckoned not from midnight to midnight but from one rising of the moon to the next;154 it was divided into twelve hours, and each of these hours was divided into thirty minutes, so that the Babylonian minute had the feminine quality of being four times as long as its name might suggest. The division of our month into four weeks, of our clock into twelve hours (instead of twenty-four), of our hour into sixty minutes, and of our minute into sixty seconds, are unsuspected Babylonian vestiges in our contemporary world.*
The dependence of Babylonian science upon religion had a more stagnant effect in medicine than in astronomy. It was not so much the obscurantism of the priests that held the science back, as the superstition of the people. Already by the time of Hammurabi the art of healing had separated itself in some measure from the domain and domination of the clergy; a regular profession of physician had been established, with fees and penalties fixed by law. A patient who called in a doctor could know in advance just how much he would have to pay for such treatment or operation; and if he belonged to the poorer classes the fee was lowered accordingly.157 If the doctor bungled badly he had to pay damages to the patient; in extreme cases, as we have seen, his fingers were cut off so that he might not readily experiment again.158
But this almost secularized science found itself helpless before the demand of the people for supernatural diagnosis and magical cures. Sorcerers and necromancers were more popular than physicians, and enforced, by their influence with the populace, irrational methods of treatment. Disease was possession, and was due to sin; therefore it had to be treated mainly by incantations, magic and prayer; when drugs were used they were aimed not to cleanse the patient but to terrify and exorcise the demon. The favorite drug was a mixture deliberately compounded of disgusting elements, apparently on the theory that the sick man had a stronger stomach than the demon that possessed him; the usual ingredients were raw meat, snake-flesh and wood-shavings mixed with wine and oil; or rotten food, crushed bones, fat and dirt, mingled with animal or human urine or excrement.159 Occasionally this Dreckapothek was replaced by an effort to appease the demon with milk, honey, cream, and sweet-smelling herbs.160 If all treatment failed, the patient was in some cases carried into the market-place, so that his neighbors might indulge their ancient propensity for prescribing infallible cures.161
Perhaps the eight hundred medical tablets that survive to inform us of Babylonian medicine do it injustice. Reconstruction of the whole from a part is hazardous in history, and the writing of history is the reconstruction of the whole from a part. Quite possibly these magical cures were merely subtle uses of the power of suggestion; perhaps those evil concoctions were intended as emetics; and the Babylonian may have meant nothing more irrational by his theory of illness as due to invading demons and the patient’s sins than we do by interpreting it as due to invading bacteria invited by culpable negligence, uncleanliness, or greed. We must not be too sure of the ignorance of our ancestors.
IX. PHILOSOPHERS
Religion and Philosophy—The Babylonian Job—The Babylonian Koheleth—An anti-clerical
A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes.
Since we know the thought of Babylon mostly from the later reigns, it is natural that we should find it shot through with the weary wisdom of tired philosophers who took their pleasures like Englishmen. On one tablet Balta-atrua complains that though he has obeyed the commands of the gods more strictly than any one else, he has been laid low with a variety of misfortunes; he has lost his parents and his property, and even the little that remained to him has been stolen on the highway. His friends, like Job’s, reply that his disaster must be in punishment of some secret sin—perhaps that hybris, or insolent pride of prosperity, which particularly arouses the jealous anger of the gods. They assure him that evil is merely good in disguise, some part of the divine plan seen too narrowly by frail minds unconscious of the whole. Let Balta-atrua keep faith and courage, and he will be rewarded in the end; better still, his enemies will be punished. Balta-atrua calls out to the gods for help—and the fragment suddenly ends.162
Another poem, found among the ruins of Ashurbanipal’s collection of Babylonian literature, presents the same problem more definitely in the person of Tabi-utul-Enlil, who appears to have been a ruler in Nippur. He describes his difficulties:*
(My eyeballs he obscured, bolting them as with) a lock;
(My ears he bolted), like those of a deaf person.
A king, I have been changed into a slave;
As a madman (my) companions maltreat me.
Send me help from the pit dug (for me)! . . .
By day deep sighs, at night weeping;
The month—cries; the year—distress. . . .
He goes on to tell what a pious fellow he has always been, the very last man in the world who should have met with so cruel a fate:
As though I had not always set aside the portion for the god,
And had not invoked the goddess at the meal,
Had not bowed my face and brought my tribute;
As though I were one in whose mouth supplication and prayer were not constant! . . .
I taught my country to guard the name of the god;
To honor the name of the goddess I accustomed my people. . . .
I thought that such things were pleasing to a god.
Stricken with disease despite all this formal piety, he muses on the impossibility of understanding the gods, and on the uncertainty of human affairs.
Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
The plan of a god full of mystery—who can understand it? . . .
He who was alive yesterday is dead today;
In an instant he is cast into grief; of a sudden he is crushed.
For a moment he sings and plays;
In a twinkling he wails like a mourner. . . .
Like a net trouble has covered me.
My eyes look but see not;
My ears are open but they hear not. . . .
Pollution has fallen upon my genitals,
And it has assailed the glands in my bowels. . . .
With death grows dark my whole body. . . .
All day the pursuer pursues me;
During the night he gives me no breath for a moment. . . .
My limbs are dismembered, they march out of unison.
In my dung I pass the night like an ox;
Like a sheep I mix in my excrements. . . .
Like Job, he makes another act of faith:
But I know the day of the cessation of my tears,
A day of the grace of the protecting spirits; then divinity will be merciful.163
In the end everything turns out happily. A spirit appears, and cures all of Tabi’s ailments; a mighty storm drives all the demons of disease out of his frame. He praises Marduk, offers rich sacrifice, and calls upon every one never to despair of the gods.*
As there is but a step from this to the Book of Job, so we find in late Babylonian literature unmistakable premonitions of Ecclesiastes. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the goddess Sabitu advises the hero to give up his longing for a life after death, and to eat, drink and be merry on the earth.
O Gilgamesh, why dost thou run in all directions?
The life that thou seekest thou wilt not find.
When the gods created mankind they determined death for mankind;
Life they kept in their own hands.
Thou, O Gilgamesh, fill thy belly;
Day and night be thou merry; . . .
Day and night be joyous and content!
Let thy garments be pure,
Thy head be washed; wash thyself with water!
Regard the little one who takes hold of thy hand;
Enjoy the wife in thy bosom.165*
In another tablet we hear a bitterer note, culminating in atheism and blasphemy. Gubarru, a Babylonian Alcibiades, interrogates an elder sceptically:
O very wise one, O possessor of intelligence, let thy heart groan!
The heart of God is as far as the inner parts of the heavens.
Wisdom is hard, and men do not understand it.
To which the old man answers with a forboding of Amos and Isaiah:
Give attention, my friend, and understand my thought.
Men exalt the work of the great man who is skilled in murder.
They disparage the poor man who has done no sin.
They justify the wicked man, whose fault is grave.
They drive away the just man who seeks the will of God.
They let the strong take the food of the poor;
They strengthen the mighty;
They destroy the weak man, the rich man drives him away.
He advises Gubarru to do the will of the gods none the less. But Gubarru will have nothing to do with gods or priests who are always on the side of the biggest fortunes:
They have offered lies and untruth without ceasing.
They say in noble words what is in favor of the rich man.
Is his wealth diminished? They come to his help.
They ill-treat the weak man like a thief,
They destroy him in a tremor, they extinguish him like a flame.166
We must not exaggerate the prevalence of such moods in Babylon; doubtless the people listened lovingly to their priests, and crowded the temples to seek favors of the gods. The marvel is that they were so long loyal to a religion that offered them so little consolation. Nothing could be known, said the priests, except by divine revelation; and this revelation came only through the priests. The last chapter of that revelation told how the dead soul, whether good or bad, descended into Aralu, or Hades, to spend there an eternity in darkness and suffering. Is it any wonder that Babylon gave itself to revelry, while Nebuchadrezzar, having all, understanding nothing, fearing everything, went mad?
X. EPITAPH
Tradition and the Book of Daniel, unverified by any document known to us, tell how Nebuchadrezzar, after a long reign of uninterrupted victory and prosperity, after beautifying his city with roads and palaces, and erecting fifty-four temples to the gods, fell into a strange insanity, thought himself a beast, walked on all fours, and ate grass.167 For four years his name disappears from the history and governmental records of Babylonia;168 it reappears for a moment, and then, in 562 B.C., he passes away.
Within thirty years after his death his empire crumbled to pieces. Nabonidus, who held the throne for seventeen years, preferred archeology to government, and devoted himself to excavating the antiquities of Sumeria while his own realm was going to ruin.169 The army fell into disorder; business men forgot love of country in the sublime internationalism of finance; the people, busy with trade and pleasure, unlearned the arts of war. The priests usurped more and more of the royal power, and fattened their treasuries with wealth that tempted invasion and conquest. When Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates, the anticlericals of Babylon connived to open the city to him, and welcomed his enlightened domination.170 For two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as part of the greatest empire that history had yet known. Then the exuberant Alexander came, captured the unresisting capital, conquered all the Near East, and drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar.171
The civilization of Babylonia was not as fruitful for humanity as Egypt’s, not as varied and profound as India’s, not as subtle and mature as China’s. And yet it was from Babylonia that those fascinating legends came which, through the literary artistry of the Jews, became an inseparable portion of Europe’s religious lore; it was from Babylonia, rather than from Egypt, that the roving Greeks brought to their city-states and thence to Rome and ourselves, the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, grammar, lexicography, archeology, history, and philosophy. The Greek names for the metals and the constellations, for weights and measures, for musical instruments and many drugs, are translations, sometimes mere transliterations, of Babylonian names.172 While Greek architecture derived its forms and inspiration from Egypt and Crete, Babylonian architecture, through the ziggurat, led to the towers of Moslem mosques, the steeples and campaniles of medieval art, and the “setback” style of contemporary architecture in America. The laws of Hammurabi became for all ancient societies a legacy comparable to Rome’s gift of order and government to the modern world. Through Assyria’s conquest of Babylon, her appropriation of the ancient city’s culture, and her dissemination of that culture throughout her wide empire; through the long Captivity of the Jews, and the great influence upon them of Babylonian life and thought; through the Persian and Greek conquests, which opened with unprecedented fulness and freedom all the roads of communication and trade between Babylon and the rising cities of Ionia, Asia Minor and Greece—through these and many other ways the civilization of the Land between the Rivers passed down into the cultural endowment of our race. In the end nothing is lost; for good or evil every event has effects forever.
CHAPTER X
Assyria
I. CHRONICLES
Beginnings—Cities—Race—The conquerors—Sennacherib and Esarhaddon—“Sardanapalus”
MEANWHILE, three hundred miles north of Babylon, another civilization had appeared. Forced to maintain a hard military life by the mountain tribes always threatening it on every side, it had in time overcome its assailants, had conquered its parent cities in Elam, Sumeria, Akkad and Babylonia, had mastered Phoenicia and Egypt, and had for two centuries dominated the Near East with brutal power. Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome: the first created a civilization, the second developed it to its height, the third inherited it, added little to it, protected it, and transmitted it as a dying gift to the encompassing and victorious barbarians. For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.
The new state grew about four cities fed by the waters or tributaries of the Tigris: Ashur, which is now Kala’at-Sherghat; Arbela, which is Irbil; Kalakh, which is Nimrud; and Nineveh, which is Kuyunjik—just across the river from oily Mosul. At Ashur prehistoric obsidian flakes and knives have been found, and black pottery with geometric patterns that suggest a central Asian origin;1 at Tepe Gawra, near the site of Nineveh, a recent expedition unearthed a town which its proud discoverers date back to 3700 B.C., despite its many temples and tombs, its well-carved cylinder seals, its combs and jewelry, and the oldest dice known to history2—a thought for reformers. The god Ashur gave his name to a city (and finally to all Assyria); there the earliest of the nation’s kings had their residence, until its exposure to the heat of the desert and the attacks of the neighboring Babylonians led Ashur’s rulers to build a secondary capital in cooler Nineveh—named also after a god, Nina, the Ishtar of Assyria. Here, in the heyday of Ashurbanipal, 300,000 people lived, and all the western Orient came to pay tribute to the Universal King.
The population was a mixture of Semites from the civilized south (Babylonia and Akkadia) with non-Semitic tribes from the west (probably of Hittite or Mitannian affinity) and Kurdish mountaineers from the Caucasus.3 They took their common language and their arts from Sumeria, but modified them later into an almost undistinguishable similarity to the language and arts of Babylonia.4 Their circumstances, however, forbade them to indulge in the effeminate ease of Babylon; from beginning to end they were a race of warriors, mighty in muscle and courage, abounding in proud hair and beard, standing straight, stern and stolid on their monuments, and bestriding with tremendous feet the east-Mediterranean world. Their history is one of kings and slaves, wars and conquests, bloody victories and sudden defeat. The early kings—once mere patesis tributary to the south—took advantage of the Kassite domination of Babylonia to establish their independence; and soon enough one of them decked himself with that title which all the monarchs of Assyria were to display: “King of Universal Reign.” Out of the dull dynasties of these forgotten potentates certain figures emerge whose deeds illuminate the development of their country.*
While Babylonia was still in the darkness of the Kassite era, Shalmaneser I brought the little city-states of the north under one rule, and made Kalakh his capital. But the first great name in Assyrian history is Tiglath-Pileser I. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: if it is wise to believe monarchs, he slew 120 lions on foot, and 800 from his chariot.5 One of his inscriptions—written by a scribe more royalist than the King—tells how he hunted nations as well as animals: “In my fierce valor I marched against the people of Qummuh, conquered their cities, carried off their booty, their goods and their property without reckoning, and burned their cities with fire—destroyed and devastated them. . . . The people of Adansh left their mountains and embraced my feet. I imposed taxes upon them.”6 In every direction he led his armies, conquering the Hittites, the Armenians, and forty other nations, capturing Babylon, and frightening Egypt into sending him anxious gifts. (He was particularly mollified by a crocodile.) With the proceeds of his conquests he built temples to the Assyrian gods and goddesses, who, like anxious débutantes, asked no questions about the source of his wealth. Then Babylon revolted, defeated his armies, pillaged his temples, and carried his gods into Babylonian captivity. Tiglath-Pileser died of shame.7
His reign was a symbol and summary of all Assyrian history: death and taxes, first for Assyria’s neighbors, then for herself. Ashurnasirpal II conquered a dozen petty states, brought much booty home from the wars, cut out with his own hand the eyes of princely captives, enjoyed his harem, and passed respectably away.8 Shalmaneser III carried these conquests as far as Damascus; fought costly battles, killing 16,000 Syrians in one engagement; built temples, levied tribute, and was deposed by his son in a violent revolution.9 Sammuramat ruled as queen-mother for three years, and provided a frail historical basis (for this is all that we know of her) for the Greek legend of Semiramis—half goddess and half queen, great general, great engineer and great statesman—so attractively detailed by Diodorus the Sicilian.10 Tiglath-Pileser III gathered new armies, reconquered Armenia, overran Syria and Babylonia, made vassal cities of Damascus, Samaria and Babylon, extended the rule of Assyria from the Caucasus to Egypt, tired of war, became an excellent administrator, built many temples and palaces, held his empire together with an iron hand, and died peacefully in bed. Sargon II, an officer in the army, made himself king by a Napoleonic coup d’état; led his troops in person, and took in every engagement the most dangerous post;11 defeated Elam and Egypt, reconquered Babylonia, and received the homage of the Jews, the Philistines, even of the Cypriote Greeks; ruled his empire well, encouraged arts and letters, handicrafts and trade, and died in a victorious battle that definitely preserved Assyria from invasion by the wild Cimmerian hordes.
His son Sennacherib put down revolts in the distant provinces adjoining the Persian Gulf, attacked Jerusalem and Egypt without success,* sacked eighty-nine cities and 820 villages, captured 7,200 horses, 11,000 asses, 80,000 oxen, 800,000 sheep, and 208,000 prisoners;13 the official historian, on his life, did not understate these figures. Then, irritated by the prejudice of Babylon in favor of freedom, he besieged it, took it, and burned it to the ground; nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, male and female, were put to death, so that mountains of corpses blocked the streets; the temples and palaces were pillaged to the last shekel, and the once omnipotent gods of Babylon were hacked to pieces or carried in bondage to Nineveh: Marduk the god became a menial to Ashur. Such Babylonians as survived did not conclude that Marduk had been overrated; they told themselves—as the captive Jews would tell themselves a century later in that same Babylon—that their god had condescended to be defeated in order to punish his people. With the spoils of his conquests and pillage Sennacherib rebuilt Nineveh, changed the courses of rivers to protect it, reclaimed waste lands with the vigor of countries suffering from an agricultural surplus, and was assassinated by his sons while piously mumbling his prayers.14
Another son, Esarhaddon, snatched the throne from his blood-stained brothers, invaded Egypt to punish her for supporting Syrian revolts, made her an Assyrian province, amazed western Asia with his long triumphal progress from Memphis to Nineveh, dragging endless booty in his train; established Assyria in unprecedented prosperity as master of the whole Near Eastern world; delighted Babylonia by freeing and honoring its captive gods, and rebuilding its shattered capital; conciliated Elam by feeding its famine-stricken people in an act of international beneficence almost without parallel in the ancient world; and died on the way to suppress a revolt in Egypt, after giving his empire the justest and kindliest rule in its half-barbarous history.
His successor, Ashurbanipal (the Sardanapalus of the Greeks), reaped the fruits of Esarhaddon’s sowing. During his long reign Assyria reached the climax of its wealth and prestige; after him his country, ruined by forty years of intermittent war, fell into exhaustion and decay, and ended its career hardly a decade after Ashurbanipal’s death. A scribe has preserved to us a yearly record of this reign;15 it is a dull and bloody mess of war after war, siege after siege, starved cities and flayed captives. The scribe represents Ashurbanipal himself as reporting his destruction of Elam:
For a distance of one month and twenty-five days’ march I devastated the districts of Elam. I spread salt and thorn-bush there (to injure the soil). Sons of the kings, sisters of the kings, members of Elam’s royal family young and old, prefects, governors, knights, artisans, as many as there were, inhabitants male and female, big and little, horses, mules, asses, flocks and herds more numerous than a swarm of locusts—I carried them off as booty to Assyria. The dust of Susa, of Madaktu, of Haltemash and of their other cities, I carried it off to Assyria. In a month of days I subdued Elam in its whole extent. The voice of man, the steps of flocks and herds, the happy shouts of mirth—I put an end to them in its fields, which I left for the asses, the gazelles, and all manner of wild beasts to people.16
The severed head of the Elamite king was brought to Ashurbanipal as he feasted with his queen in the palace garden; he had the head raised on a pole in the midst of his guests, and the royal revel went on; later the head was fixed over the gate of Nineveh, and slowly rotted away. The Elamite general, Dananu, was flayed alive, and then was bled like a lamb; his brother had his throat cut, and his body was divided into pieces, which were distributed over the country as souvenirs.17
It never occurred to Ashurbanipal that he and his men were brutal; these clean-cut penalties were surgical necessities in his attempt to remove rebellions and establish discipline among the heterogeneous and turbulent peoples, from Ethiopia to Armenia, and from Syria to Media, whom his predecessors had subjected to Assyrian rule; it was his obligation to maintain this legacy intact. He boasted of the peace that he had established in his empire, and of the good order that prevailed in its cities; and the boast was not without truth. That he was not merely a conqueror intoxicated with blood he proved by his munificence as a builder and as a patron of letters and the arts. Like some Roman ruler calling to the Greeks, he sent to all his dominions for sculptors and architects to design and adorn new temples and palaces; he commissioned innumerable scribes to secure and copy for him all the classics of Sumerian and Babylonian literature, and gathered these copies in his library at Nineveh, where modern scholarship found them almost intact after twenty-five centuries of time had flowed over them. Like another Frederick, he was as vain of his literary abilities as of his triumphs in war and the chase.18 Diodorus describes him as a dissolute and bisexual Nero,19 but in the wealth of documents that have come down to us from this period there is little corroboration for this view. From the composition of literary tablets Ashurbanipal passed with royal confidence—armed only with knife and javelin—to hand-to-hand encounters with lions; if we may credit the reports of his contemporaries he did not hesitate to lead the attack in person, and often dealt with his own hand the decisive blow.20 Little wonder that Byron was fascinated with him, and wove about him a drama half legend and half history, in which all the wealth and power of Assyria came to their height, and broke into universal ruin and royal despair.
II. ASSYRIAN GOVERNMENT
Imperialism—Assyrian war—The conscript gods—Law—Delicacies of penology—Administration—The violence of Oriental monarchies
If we should admit the imperial principle—that it is good, for the sake of spreading law, security, commerce and peace, that many states should be brought, by persuasion or force, under the authority of one government—then we should have to concede to Assyria the distinction of having established in western Asia a larger measure and area of order and prosperity than that region of the earth had ever, to our knowledge, enjoyed before. The government of Ashurbanipal—which ruled Assyria, Babylonia, Armenia, Media, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia, Sumeria, Elam and Egypt—was without doubt the most extensive administrative organization yet seen in the Mediterranean or Near Eastern world; only Hammurabi and Thutmose III had approached it, and Persia alone would equal it before the coming of Alexander. In some ways it was a liberal empire; its larger cities retained considerable local autonomy, and each nation in it was left its own religion, law and ruler, provided it paid its tribute promptly.21 In so loose an organization every weakening of the central power was bound to produce rebellions, or, at the best, a certain tributary negligence, so that the subject states had to be conquered again and again. To avoid these recurrent rebellions Tiglath-Pileser III established the characteristic Assyrian policy of deporting conquered populations to alien habitats, where, mingling with the natives, they might lose their unity and identity, and have less opportunity to rebel. Revolts came nevertheless, and Assyria had to keep herself always ready for war.
The army was therefore the most vital part of the government. Assyria recognized frankly that government is the nationalization of force, and her chief contributions to progress were in the art of war. Chariots, cavalry, infantry and sappers were organized into flexible formations, siege mechanisms were as highly developed as among the Romans, strategy and tactics were well understood.22 Tactics centered about the idea of rapid movement making possible a piecemeal attack—so old is the secret of Napoleon. Iron-working had grown to the point of encasing the warrior with armor to a degree of stiffness rivaling a medieval knight; even the archers and pikemen wore copper or iron helmets, padded loin-cloths, enormous shields, and a leather skirt covered with metal scales. The weapons were arrows, lances, cutlasses, maces, clubs, slings and battleaxes. The nobility fought from chariots in the van of the battle, and the king, in his royal chariot, usually led them in person; generals had not yet learned to die in bed. Ashurnasirpal introduced the use of cavalry as an aid to the chariots, and this innovation proved decisive in many engagements.23 The principal siege engine was a battering-ram tipped with iron; sometimes it was suspended from a scaffold by ropes, and was swung back to give it forward impetus; sometimes it was run forward on wheels. The besieged fought from the walls with missiles, torches, burning pitch, chains designed to entangle the ram, and gaseous “stink-pots” (as they were called) to befuddle the enemy;24 again the novel is not new. A captured city was usually plundered and burnt to the ground, and its site was deliberately denuded by killing its trees.25 The loyalty of the troops was secured by dividing a large part of the spoils among them; their bravery was ensured by the general rule of the Near East that all captives in war might be enslaved or slain. Soldiers were rewarded for every severed head they brought in from the field, so that the aftermath of a victory generally witnessed the wholesale decapitation of fallen foes.26 Most often the prisoners, who would have consumed much food in a long campaign, and would have constituted a danger and nuisance in the rear, were despatched after the battle; they knelt with their backs to their captors, who beat their heads in with clubs, or cut them off with cutlasses. Scribes stood by to count the number of prisoners taken and killed by each soldier, and apportioned the booty accordingly; the king, if time permitted, presided at the slaughter. The nobles among the defeated were given more special treatment: their ears, noses, hands and feet were sliced off, or they were thrown from high towers, or they and their children were beheaded, or flayed alive, or roasted over a slow fire. No compunction seems to have been felt at this waste of human life; the birth rate would soon make up for it, and meanwhile it relieved the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence.27 Probably it was in part by their reputation for mercy to prisoners of war that Alexander and Caesar undermined the morale of the enemy, and conquered the Mediterranean world.
Next to the army the chief reliance of the monarch was upon the church, and he paid lavishly for the support of the priests. The formal head of the state was by concerted fiction the god Ashur; all pronouncements were in his name, all laws were edicts of his divine will, all taxes were collected for his treasury, all campaigns were fought to furnish him (or, occasionally, another deity) with spoils and glory. The king had himself described as a god, usually an incarnation of Shamash, the sun. The religion of Assyria, like its language, its science and its arts, was imported from Sumeria and Babylonia, with occasional adaptations to the needs of a military state.
The adaptation was most visible in the case of the law, which was distinguished by a martial ruthlessness. Punishment ranged from public exhibition to forced labor, twenty to a hundred lashes, the slitting of nose and ears, castration, pulling out the tongue, gouging out the eyes, impalement, and beheading.28 The laws of Sargon II prescribe such additional delicacies as the drinking of poison, and the burning of the offender’s son or daughter alive on the altar of the god;29 but there is no evidence of these laws being carried out in the last millennium before Christ. Adultery, rape and some forms of theft were considered capital crimes.30 Trial by ordeal was occasionally employed; the accused, sometimes bound in fetters, was flung into the river, and his guilt was left to the arbitrament of the water. In general Assyrian law was less secular and more primitive than the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which apparently preceded it in time.*
Local administration, originally by feudal barons, fell in the course of time into the hands of provincial prefects or governors appointed by the king; this form of imperial government was taken over by Persia, and passed on from Persia to Rome. The prefects were expected to collect taxes, to organize the corvée for works which, like irrigation, could not be left to personal initiative; and above all to raise regiments and lead them in the royal campaigns. Meanwhile royal spies (or, as we should say, “intelligence officers”) kept watch on these prefects and their aides, and informed the king concerning the state of the nation.
All in all, the Assyrian government was primarily an instrument of war. For war was often more profitable than peace; it cemented discipline, intensified patriotism, strengthened the royal power, and brought abundant spoils and slaves for the enrichment and service of the capital. Hence Assyrian history is largely a picture of cities sacked and villages or fields laid waste. When Ashurbanipal suppressed the revolt of his brother, Shamash-shum-ukin, and captured Babylon after a long and bitter siege,
the city presented a terrible spectacle, and shocked even the Assyrians. . . . Most of the numerous victims to pestilence or famine lay about the streets or in the public squares, a prey to the dogs and swine; such of the inhabitants and the soldiery as were comparatively strong had endeavored to escape into the country, and only those remained who had not sufficient strength to drag themselves beyond the walls. Ashurbanipal pursued the fugitives, and having captured nearly all of them, vented on them the full fury of his vengeance. He caused the tongues of the soldiers to be torn out, and then had them clubbed to death. He massacred the common folk in front of the great winged bulls which had already witnessed a similar butchery half a century before under his grandfather Sennacherib. The corpses of the victims remained long unburied, a prey to all unclean beasts and birds.32
The weakness of Oriental monarchies was bound up with this addiction to violence. Not only did the subject provinces repeatedly revolt, but within the royal palace or family itself violence again and again attempted to upset what violence had established and maintained. At or near the end of almost every reign some disturbance broke out over the succession to the throne; the aging monarch saw conspiracies forming around him, and in several cases he was hastened to his end by murder. The nations of the Near East preferred violent uprisings to corrupt elections, and their form of recall was assassination. Some of these wars were doubtless inevitable: barbarians prowled about every frontier, and one reign of weakness would see the Scythians, the Cimmerians, or some other horde, sweeping down upon the wealth of the Assyrian cities. And perhaps we exaggerate the frequency of war and violence in these Oriental states, through the accident that ancient monuments and modern chroniclers have preserved the dramatic record of battles, and ignored the victories of peace. Historians have been prejudiced in favor of bloodshed; they found it, or thought their readers would find it, more interesting than the quiet achievements of the mind. We think war less frequent today because we are conscious of the lucid intervals of peace, while history seems conscious only of the fevered crises of war.
III. ASSYRIAN LIFE
Industry and trade—Marriage and morals—Religion and science—Letters and libraries—The Assyrian ideal of a gentleman
The economic life of Assyria did not differ much from that of Babylonia, for in many ways the two countries were merely the north and south of one civilization. The southern kingdom was more commercial, the northern more agricultural; rich Babylonians were usually merchants, rich Assyrians were most often landed gentry actively supervising great estates, and looking with Roman scorn upon men who made their living by buying cheap and selling dear.33 Nevertheless the same rivers flooded and nourished the land, the same method of ridges and canals controlled the overflow, the same shadufs raised the water from ever deeper beds to fields sown with the same wheat and barley, millet and sesame.* The same industries supported the life of the towns; the same system of weights and measures governed the exchange of goods; and though Nineveh and her sister capitals were too far north to be great centers of commerce, the wealth brought to them by Assyria’s sovereigns filled them with handicrafts and trade. Metal was mined or imported in new abundance, and towards 700 B.C. iron replaced bronze as the basic metal of industry and armament.35 Metal was cast, glass was blown, textiles were dyed,† earthenware was enameled, and houses were as well equipped in Nineveh as in Europe before the Industrial Revolution.36 During the reign of Sennacherib an aqueduct was built which brought water to Nineveh from thirty miles away; a thousand feet of it, recently discovered,‡ constitute the oldest aqueduct known. Industry and trade were financed in part by private bankers, who charged 25% for loans. Lead, copper, silver and gold served as currency; and about 700 B.C. Sennacherib minted silver into half-shekel pieces—one of our earliest examples of an official coinage.37
The people fell into five classes: patricians or nobles; craftsmen or masterartisans, organized in guilds, and including the professions as well as the trades; the unskilled but free workmen and peasants of town and village; serfs bound to the soil on great estates, in the manner of medieval Europe; and slaves captured in war or attached for debt, compelled to announce their status by pierced ears and shaven head, and performing most of the menial labor everywhere. On a bas-relief of Sennacherib we see supervisee holding the whip over slaves who, in long parallel lines, are drawing a heavy piece of statuary on a wooden sledge.38
Like all military states, Assyria encouraged a high birth rate by its moral code and its laws. Abortion was a capital crime; a woman who secured miscarriage, even a woman who died of attempting it, was to be impaled on a stake.39 Though women rose to considerable power through marriage and intrigue, their position was lower than in Babylonia. Severe penalties were laid upon them for striking their husbands, wives were not allowed to go out in public unveiled, and strict fidelity was exacted of them—though their husbands might have all the concubines they could afford.40 Prostitution was accepted as inevitable, and was regulated by the state.40a The king had a varied harem, whose inmates were condemned to a secluded life of dancing, singing, quarreling, needlework and conspiracy.41 A cuckolded husband might kill his rival in flagrante delicto, and was held to be within his rights; this is a custom that has survived many codes. For the rest the law of matrimony was as in Babylonia, except that marriage was often by simple purchase, and in many cases the wife lived in her father’s house, visited occasionally by her husband.42
In all departments of Assyrian life we meet with a patriarchal sternness natural to a people that lived by conquest, and in every sense on the border of barbarism. Just as the Romans took thousands of prisoners into lifelong slavery after their victories, and dragged others to the Circus Maximus to be torn to pieces by starving animals, so the Assyrians seemed to find satisfaction—or a necessary tutelage for their sons—in torturing captives, blinding children before the eyes of their parents, flaying men alive, roasting them in kilns, chaining them in cages for the amusement of the populace, and then sending the survivors off to execution.43 Ashurnasirpal tells how “all the chiefs who had revolted I flayed, with their skins I covered the pillar, some in the midst I walled up, others on stakes I impaled, still others I arranged around the pillar on stakes. . . . As for the chieftains and royal officers who had rebelled, I cut off their members.”44 Ashurbanipal boasts that “I burned three thousand captives with fire, I left not a single one among them alive to serve as a hostage.”45 Another of his inscriptions reads: “These warriors who had sinned against Ashur and had plotted evil against me . . . from their hostile mouths have I torn their tongues, and I have compassed their destruction. As for the others who remained alive, I offered them as a funerary sacrifice; . . . their lacerated members have I given unto the dogs, the swine, the wolves. . . . By accomplishing these deeds I have rejoiced the heart of the great gods.”46 Another monarch instructs his artisans to engrave upon the bricks these claims on the admiration of posterity: “My war chariots crush men and beasts. . . . The monuments which I erect are made of human corpses from which I have cut the head and limbs. I cut off the hands of all those whom I capture alive.’”47 Reliefs at Nineveh show men being impaled or flayed, or having their tongues torn out; one shows a king gouging out the eyes of prisoners with a lance while he holds their heads conveniently in place with a cord passed through their lips.48 As we read such pages we become reconciled to our own mediocrity.
Religion apparently did nothing to mollify this tendency to brutality and violence. It had less influence with the government than in Babylonia, and took its cue from the needs and tastes of the kings. Ashur, the national deity, was a solar god, warlike and merciless to his enemies; his people believed that he took a divine satisfaction in the execution of prisoners before his shrine.49 The essential function of Assyrian religion was to train the future citizen to a patriotic docility, and to teach him the art of wheedling favors out of the gods by magic and sacrifice. The only religious texts that survive from Assyria are exorcisms and omens. Long lists of omens have come down to us in which the inevitable results of every manner of event are given, and methods of avoiding them are prescribed.50 The world was pictured as crowded with demons, who had to be warded off by charms suspended about the neck, or by long and careful incantations.
In such an atmosphere the only science that flourished was that of war. Assyrian medicine was merely Babylonian medicine; Assyrian astronomy was merely Babylonian astrology—the stars were studied chiefly with a view to divination.51 We find no evidence of philosophical speculation, no secular attempt to explain the world. Assyrian philologists made lists of plants, probably for the use of medicine, and thereby contributed moderately to establish botany; other scribes made lists of nearly all the objects they had found under the sun, and their attempts to classify these objects ministered slightly to the natural science of the Greeks. From these lists our language has taken, usually through the Greeks, such words as hangar, gypsum, camel, plinth, shekel, rose, ammonia, jasper, cane, cherry, laudanum, naphtha, sesame, hyssop and myrrh.52
The tablets recording the deeds of the kings, though they have the distinction of being at once bloody and dull, must be accorded the honor of being among the oldest extant forms of historiography. They were in the early years mere chronicles, registering royal victories, and admitting of no defeats; they became, in later days, embellished and literary accounts of the important events of the reign. The clearest title of Assyria to a place in a history of civilization was its libraries. That of Ashurbanipal contained 30,000 clay tablets, classified and catalogued, each tablet bearing an easily identifiable tag. Many of them bore the King’s bookmark: “Whoso shall carry off this tablet, . . . may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath . . . and destroy his name and posterity from the land.”53 A large number of the tablets are copies of undated older works, of which earlier forms are being constantly discovered; the avowed purpose of Ashurbanipal’s library was to preserve the literature of Babylonia from oblivion. But only a small number of the tablets would now be classed as literature; the majority of them are official records, astrological and augural observations, oracles, medical prescriptions and reports, exorcisms, hymns, prayers, and genealogies of the kings and the gods.54 Among the least dull of the tablets are two in which Ashurbanipal confesses, with quaint insistence, his scandalous delight in books and knowledge:
I, Ashurbanipal, understood the wisdom of Nabu,* I acquired an understanding of all the arts of tablet-writing. I learnt to shoot the bow, to ride horses and chariots, and to hold the reins. . . . Marduk, the wise one of the gods, presented me with information and understanding as a gift. . . . Enurt and Nergal made me virile and strong, of incomparable force. I understood the craft of the wise Adapa, the hidden secrets of all the scribal art; in heavenly and earthly buildings I read and pondered; in the meetings of clerks I was present; I watched the omens, I explained the heavens with the learned priests, recited the complicated multiplications and divisions that are not immediately apparent. The beautiful writings in Sumerian that are obscure, in Akkadian that are difficult to bear in mind, it was my joy to repeat. . . . I mounted colts, rode them with prudence so that they were not violent; I drew the bow, sped the arrow, the sign of the warrior. I flung the quivering javelins like short lances. . . . I held the reins like a charioteer. . . . I directed the weaving of reed shields and breastplates like a pioneer. I had the learning that all clerks of every kind possess when their time of maturity comes. At the same time I learnt what is proper for lordship, I went my royal ways.55
IV. ASSYRIAN ART
Minor arts—Bas-relief—Statuary—Building—A page from “Sardanapalus”
At last, in the field of art, Assyria equaled her preceptor Babylonia, and in bas-relief surpassed her. Stimulated by the influx of wealth into Ashur, Kalakh and Nineveh, artists and artisans began to produce—for nobles and their ladies, for kings and palaces, for priests and temples–jewels of every description, cast metal as skilfully designed and finely wrought as on the great gates at Balawat, and luxurious furniture of richly carved and costly woods strengthened with metal and inlaid with gold, silver, bronze, or precious stones.56 Pottery was poorly developed, and music, like so much else, was merely imported from Babylon; but tempera painting in bright colors under a thin glaze became one of the characteristic arts of Assyria, from which it passed to its perfection in Persia. Painting, as always in the ancient East, was a secondary and dependent art.
In the heyday of Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, and presumably through their lavish patronage, the art of bas-relief created new masterpieces for the British Museum. One of the best examples, however, dates from Ashurnasirpal II; it represents, in chaste alabaster, the good god Marduk overcoming the evil god of chaos, Tiamat.57 The human figures in Assyrian reliefs are stiff and coarse and all alike, as if some perfect model had insisted on being reproduced forever; all the men have the same massive heads, the same brush of whiskers, the same stout bellies, the same invisible necks; even the gods are these same Assyrians in very slight disguise. Only now and then do the human figures take on vitality, as in the alabaster relief depicting spirits in adoration before a palmetto tree,58 and the fine limestone stele of Shamsi-Adad VII found at Kalakh.59 Usually it is the animal reliefs that stir us; never before or since has carving pictured animals so successfully. The panels monotonously repeat scenes of war and the hunt; but the eye never tires of their vigor of action, their flow of motion, and their simple directness of line. It is as if the artist, forbidden to portray his masters realistically or individually, had given all his lore and skill to the animals; he represents them in a profusion of species—lions, horses, asses, goats, dogs, deer, birds, grasshoppers—and in every attitude except rest; too often he shows them in the agony of death; but even then they are the center and life of his picture and his art. The majestic horses of Sargon II on the reliefs at Khorsabad;60 the wounded lioness from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh;61 the dying lion in alabaster from the palace of Ashurbanipal;62 the lion-hunts of Ashurnasirpal II and Ashurbanipal;63 the resting lioness,64 and the lion released from a trap;65 the fragment in which a lion and his mate bask in the shade of the trees66—these are among the world’s choicest masterpieces in this form of art. The representation of natural objects in the S reliefs is stylized and crude; the forms are heavy, the outlines are hard, the muscles are exaggerated; and there is no other attempt at perspective (than the placing of the distant in the upper half of the picture, on the same scale as the foreground presented below. Gradually, however, the guild of sculptors under Sennacherib learned to offset these defects with a boldly realistic portrayal, a technical finish, and above all a vivid perception of action, which, in the field of animal sculpture, have never been surpassed. Bas-relief was to the Assyrian what sculpture was to the Greek, or painting to the Italians of the Renaissance—a favorite art uniquely expressing the national ideal of form and character.
We cannot say as much for Assyrian sculpture. The carvers of Nineveh and Kalakh seem to have preferred relief to work in the round; very little full sculpture has come down to us from the ruins, and none of it is of a high order. The animals are full of power and majesty, as if conscious of not only physical but moral superiority to man—like the bulls that guarded the gateway at Khorsabad;67 the human or divine figures are primitively coarse and heavy, adorned but undistinguished, erect but dead. An exception might be made for the massive statue of Ashurnasirpal II now in the British Museum; through all its heavy lines one sees a man every inch a king: royal sceptre firmly grasped, thick lips set with determination, eyes cruel and alert, a bull-like neck boding short shrift for enemies and falsifiers of tax-reports, and two gigantic feet full poised on the back of the world.
We must not take too seriously our judgments of this sculpture; very likely the Assyrians idolized knotted muscles and short necks, and would have looked with martial scorn upon our almost feminine slenderness, or the smooth, voluptuous grace of Praxiteles’ Hermes and the Apollo Belvedere. As for Assyrian architecture, how can we estimate its excellence when nothing remains of it but ruins almost level with the sand, and serving chiefly as a hook upon which brave archeologists may hang their imaginative “restorations”? Like Babylonian and recent American architecture, the Assyrian aimed not at beauty but at grandeur, and sought it by mass design. Following the traditions of Mesopotamian art, Assyrian architecture adopted brick as its basic material, but went its own way by facing it more lavishly with stone. It inherited the arch and the vault from the south, developed them, and made some experiments in columns which led the way to the caryatids and the voluted “Ionic” capitals of the Persians and the Greeks.68 The palaces squatted over great areas of ground, and were wisely limited to two or three stories in height;69 ordinarily they were designed as a series of halls and chambers enclosing a quiet and shaded court. The portals of the royal residences were guarded with monstrous stone animals, the entrance hall was lined with historical reliefs and statuary, the floors were paved with alabaster slabs, the walls were hung with costly tapestries, or paneled with precious woods, and bordered with elegant mouldings; the roofs were reinforced with masive beams, sometimes covered with leaf of silver or gold, and the ceilings were often painted with representations of natural scenery.70
The six mightiest warriors of Assyria were also its greatest builders. Tiglath-Pileser I rebuilt in stone the temples of Ashur, and left word about one of them that he had “made its interior brilliant like the vault of heaven, decorated its walls like the splendor of the rising stars, and made it superb with shining brightness.”71 The later emperors gave generously to the temples, but, like Solomon, they preferred their palaces. Ashurnasirpal II built at Kalakh an immense edifice of stone-faced brick, ornamented with reliefs praising piety and war. Nearby, at Balawat, Rassam found the ruins of another structure, from which he rescued two bronze gates of magnificent workmanship.72 Sargon II commemorated himself by raising a spacious palace at Dur-Sharrukin (i.e., Fort Sargon, on the site of the modern Khorsabad); its gateway was flanked by winged bulls, its walls were decorated with reliefs and shining tiles, its vast rooms were equipped with delicately carved furniture, and were adorned with imposing statuary. From every victory Sargon brought more slaves to work on this construction, and more marble, lapis lazuli, bronze, silver and gold to beautify it. Around it he set a group of temples, and in the rear he offered to the god a ziggurat of seven stories, topped with silver and gold. Sennacherib raised at Nineveh a royal mansion called “The Incomparable,” surpassing in size all other palaces of antiquity;73 its walls and floors sparkled with precious metals, woods, and stones; its tiles vied in their brilliance with the luminaries of day and night; the metal-workers cast for it gigantic lions and oxen of copper, and the sculptors carved for it winged bulls of limestone and alabaster, and lined its walls with pastoral symphonies in bas-relief. Esarhaddon continued the rebuilding and enlargement of Nineveh, and excelled all his predecessors in the grandeur of his edifices and the luxuriousness of their equipment; a dozen provinces provided him with materials and men; new ideas for columns and decorations came to him during his sojourn in Egypt; and when at last his palaces and temples were complete they were filled with the artistic booty and conceptions of the whole Near Eastern world.74
The worst commentary on Assyrian architecture lies in the fact that within sixty years after Esarhaddon had finished his palace it was crumbling into ruins.75 Ashurbanipal tells us how he rebuilt it; as we read his inscription the centuries fade, and we see dimly into the heart of the King:
At that time the harem, the resting-place of the palace . . . which Sennacherib, my grandfather, had built for his royal dwelling, had become old with joy and gladness, and its walls had fallen. I, Ashurbanipal, the Great King, the mighty King, the King of the World, the King of Assyria, . . . because I had grown up in that harem, and Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Ramman, Bel, Nabu, Ishtar, . . . Ninib, Nergal and Nusku had preserved me therein as crown prince, and had extended their good protection and shelter of prosperity over me, . . . and had constantly sent me joyful tidings therein of victory over my enemies; and because my dreams on my bed at night were pleasant, and in the morning my fancies were bright, . . . I tore down its ruins; in order to extend its area I tore it all down. I erected a building the site of whose structure was fifty tibki in extent. I raised a terrace; but I was afraid before the shrines of the great gods my lords, and did not raise that structure very high. In a good month, on a favorable day, I put in its foundations upon that terrace, and laid its brickwork. I emptied wine of sesame and wine of grapes upon its cellar, and poured them also upon its earthen wall. In order to build that harem the people of my land hauled its bricks there in wagons of Elam which I had carried away as spoil by the command of the gods. I made the kings of Arabia who had violated their treaty with me, and whom I had captured alive in battle with my own hands, carry baskets and (wear) workmen’s caps in order to build that harem. . . . They spent their days in moulding its bricks and performing forced service for it to the playing of music. With joy and rejoicing I built it from its foundations to its roof. I made more room in it than before, and made the work upon it splendid. I laid upon it long beams of cedar, which grew upon Sirara and Lebanon. I covered doors of liaru-wood, whose odor is pleasant, with a sheath of copper, and hung them in its doorways. . . . I planted around it a grove of all kinds of trees, and . . . fruits of every kind. I finished the work of its construction, offered splendid sacrifices to the gods my lords, dedicated it with joy and rejoicing, and entered therein under a splendid canopy.76
V. ASSYRIA PASSES
The last days of a king—Sources of Assyrian decay—The fall of Nineveh
Nevertheless the “Great King, the mighty King, the King of the World, the King of Assyria” complained in his old age of the misfortunes that had come to his lot. The last tablet bequeathed us by his wedge raises again the questions of Ecclesiastes and Job:
I did well unto god and man, to dead and living. Why have sickness and misery befallen me? I cannot do away with the strife in my country and the dissensions in my family; disturbing scandals oppress me always. Illness of mind and flesh bow me down; with cries of woe I bring my days to an end. On the day of the city god, the day of the festival, I am wretched; death is seizing hold upon me, and bears me down. With lamentation and mourning I wail day and night, I groan, “O God! grant even to one who is impious that he may see thy light!”77*
We do not know how Ashurbanipal died; the story dramatized by Byron—that he set fire to his own palace and perished in the flames—rests on the authority of the marvel-loving Ctesias,79 and may be merely legend. His death was in any case a symbol and an omen; soon Assyria too was to die, and from causes of which Ashurbanipal had been a part. For the economic vitality of Assyria had been derived too rashly from abroad; it depended upon profitable conquests bringing in riches and trade; at any moment it could be ended with a decisive defeat. Gradually the qualities of body and character that had helped to make the Assyrian armies invincible were weakened by the very victories that they won; in each victory it was the strongest and bravest who died, while the infirm and cautious survived to multiply their kind; it was a dysgenic process that perhaps made for civilization by weeding out the more brutal types, but undermined the biological basis upon which Assyria had risen to power. The extent of her conquests had helped to weaken her; not only had they depopulated her fields to feed insatiate Mars, but they had brought into Assyria, as captives, millions of destitute aliens who bred with the fertility of the hopeless, destroyed all national unity of character and blood, and became by their growing numbers a hostile and disintegrating force in the very midst of the conquerors. More and more the army itself was filled by these men of other lands, while semi-barbarous marauders harassed every border, and exhausted the resources of the country in an endless defense of its unnatural frontiers.
Ashurbanipal died in 626 B.C. Fourteen years later an army of Babylonians under Nabopolassar united with an army of Medes under Cyaxares and a horde of Scythians from the Caucasus, and with amazing ease and swiftness captured the citadels of the north. Nineveh was laid waste as ruthlessly and completely as her kings had once ravaged Susa and Babylon; the city was put to the torch, the population was slaughtered or enslaved, and the palace so recently built by Ashurbanipal was sacked and destroyed. At one blow Assyria disappeared from history. Nothing remained of her except certain tactics and weapons of war, certain voluted capitals of semi-“Ionic” columns, and certain methods of provincial administration that passed down to Persia, Macedon and Rome. The Near East remembered her for a while as a merciless unifier of a dozen lesser states; and the Jews recalled Nineveh vengefully as “the bloody city, full of lies and robbery.”80 In a little while all but the mightiest of the Great Kings were forgotten, and all their royal palaces were in ruins under the drifting sands. Two hundred years after its capture, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand marched over the mounds that had been Nineveh, and never suspected that these were the site of the ancient metropolis that had ruled half the world. Not a stone remained visible of all the temples with which Assyria’s pious warriors had sought to beautify their greatest capital. Even Ashur, the everlasting god, was dead.
CHAPTER XI
A Motley of Nations
I. THE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES
The ethnic scene—Mitannians—Hittites—Armenians—Scythians—Phrygians—The Divine Mother—Lydians—Crœsus—Coinage—Croesus, Solon and Cyrus
TO a distant and yet discerning eye the Near East, in the days of Nebuchadrezzar, would have seemed like an ocean in which vast swarms of human beings moved about in turmoil, forming and dissolving groups, enslaving and being enslaved, eating and being eaten, killing and getting killed, endlessly. Behind and around the great empires—Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia—flowered this medley of half nomad, half settled tribes: Cimmerians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, Bithynians, Ashkanians, Mysians, Mæonians, Carians, Lycians, Pamphylians, Pisidians, Lycaonians, Philistines, Amorites, Canaanites, Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites and a hundred other peoples each of which felt itself the center of geography and history, and would have marveled at the ignorant prejudice of an historian who would reduce them to a paragraph. Thoughout the history of the Near East such nomads were a peril to the more settled kingdoms which they almost surrounded; periodically droughts would fling them upon these richer regions, necessitating frequent wars, and perpetual readiness for war.1 Usually the nomad tribe survived the settled kingdom, and overran it in the end. The world is dotted with areas where once civilization flourished, and where nomads roam again.
In this seething ethnic sea certain minor states took shape, which, even if only as conductors, contributed their mite to the heritage of the race. The Mitannians interest us not as the early antagonists of Egypt in the Near East, but as one of the first Indo-European peoples known to us in Asia, and as the worshipers of gods—Mithra, Indra and Varuna—whose passage to Persia and India helps us to trace the movements of what was once so conveniently called the “Aryan” race.*
The Hittites were among the most powerful and civilized of the early Indo-European peoples. Apparently they had come down across the Bosphorus, the Hellespont, the Ægean or the Caucasus, and had established themselves as a ruling military caste over the indigenous agriculturists of that mountainous peninsula, south of the Black Sea, which we know as Asia Minor. Towards 1800 B.C. we find them settled near the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates; thence they spread their arms and influence into Syria, and gave mighty Egypt some indignant concern. We have seen how Rameses II was forced to make peace with them, and to acknowledge the Hittite king as his equal. At Boghaz Keui† they made their capital and centered their civilization: first on the iron which they mined in the mountains bordering on Armenia, then on a code of laws much influenced by Hammurabi’s, and finally on a crude esthetic sense which drove them to carve vast and awkward figures in the round, or upon the living rock.‡ Their language, recently deciphered by Hronzný from the ten thousand clay tablets found at Boghaz Keui by Hugo Winckler, was largely of Indo-European affinity; its declensional and conjugational forms closely resembled those of Latin and Greek, and some of its simpler words are visibly akin to English.§ The Hittites wrote a pictographic script in their own queer way—one line from left to right, the next from right to left, and so forth alternately. They learned cuneiform from the Babylonians, taught Crete the use of the clay tablet for writing, and seem to have mingled with the ancient Hebrews intimately enough to have given them their sharply aquiline nose, so that this Hebraic feature must now be considered strictly “Aryan.”4 Some of the surviving tablets are vocabularies giving Sumerian, Babylonian and Hittite equivalents; others are administrative enactments revealing a close-knit military and monarchical state; others contain two hundred fragments of a code of laws, including price-regulations for commodities.5 The Hittites disappeared from history almost as mysteriously as they entered it; one after another their capitals decayed—perhaps because their great advantage, iron, became equally accessible to their competitors. The last of these capitals, Carchemish, fell before the Assyrians in 717 B.C.
Just north of Assyria was a comparatively stable nation, known to the Assyrians as Urartu, to the Hebrews as Ararat, and to later times as Armenia. For many centuries, beginning before the dawn of recorded history and continuing till the establishment of Persian rule over all of western Asia, the Armenians maintained their independent government, their characteristic customs and arts. Under their greatest king, Argistis II (ca. 708 B.C.), they grew rich by mining iron and selling it to Asia and Greece; they achieved a high level of prosperity and comfort, of culture and manners; they built great edifices of stone, and made excellent vases and statuettes. They lost their wealth in costly wars of offense and defense against Assyria, and passed under Persian domination in the days of the all-conquering Cyrus.
Still farther north, along the shores of the Black Sea, wandered the Scythians, a horde of warriors half Mongol and half European, ferocious bearded giants who lived in wagons, kept their women in purdah seclusion,6 rode bareback on wild horses, fought to live and lived to fight, drank the blood of their enemies and used the scalps as napkins,7 weakened Assyria with repeated raids, swept through western Asia (ca. 630-610 B.C.), destroying and killing everything and everyone in their path, advanced to the very cities of the Egyptian Delta, were suddenly decimated by a mysterious disease, and were finally overcome by the Medes and driven back to their northern haunts.8* We catch from such a story another glimpse of the barbaric hinterland that hedged in every ancient state.
Towards the end of the ninth century B.C. a new power arose in Asia Minor, inheriting the remains of the Hittite civilization, and serving as a cultural bridge to Lydia and Greece. The legend by which the Phrygians tried to explain for curious historians the foundation of their kingdom was symbolical of the rise and fall of nations. Their first king, Gordios, was a simple peasant whose sole inheritance had been a pair of oxen;* their next king, his son Midas, was a spendthrift who weakened the state by that greed and extravagance which posterity represented through the legend of his plea to the gods that he might turn anything to gold by touching it. The plea was so well heard that everything Midas touched turned to gold, even the food that he put to his lips; he was on the verge of starvation when the gods allowed him to cleanse himself of the curse by bathing in the river Pactolus—which has given up grains of gold ever since.
The Phrygians made their way into Asia from Europe, built a capital at Ancyra, and for a time contended with Assyria and Egypt for mastery of the Near East. They adopted a native mother-goddess, Ma, rechristened her Cybele from the mountains (kybela) in which she dwelt, and worshiped her as the great spirit of the untilled earth, the personification of all the reproductive energies of nature. They took over from the aborigines the custom of serving the goddess through sacred prostitution, and accepted into their mythical lore the story of how Cybele had fallen in love with the young god Atys,† and had compelled him to emasculate himself in her honor; hence the priests of the Great Mother sacrificed their manhood to her upon entering the service of her temples.11 These barbarous legends fascinated the imagination of the Greeks, and entered profoundly into their mythology and their literature. The Romans officially adopted Cybele into their religion, and some of the orgiastic rites that marked the Roman carnivals were derived from the wild rituals with which the Phrygians annually celebrated the death and resurrection of the handsome Atys.12
The ascendency of Phrygia in Asia Minor was ended with the rise of the new kingdom of Lydia. King Gyges established it with its capital at Sardis; Alyattes, in a long reign of forty-nine years, raised it to prosperity and power; Croesus (570-546 B.C.) inherited and enjoyed it, expanded it by conquest to include nearly all of Asia Minor, and then surrendered it to Persia. By generous bribes to local politicians he brought one after another of the petty states that surrounded him into subjection to Lydia, and by pious and unprecedented hecatombs to local deities he placated these subject peoples and persuaded them that he was the darling of their gods. Crœsus further distinguished himself by issuing gold and silver coins of admirable design, minted and guaranteed at their face value by the state; and though these were not, as long supposed, the first official coins in history, much less the invention of coinage,* nevertheless they set an example that stimulated trade throughout the Mediterranean world. Men had for many centuries used various metals as standards of value and exchange; but these, whether copper, bronze, iron, silver or gold, had in most countries been measured by weight or other tests at each transaction. It was no small improvement that replaced such cumbersome tokens with a national currency; by accelerating the passage of goods from those that could best produce them to those that most effectively demanded them it added to the wealth of the world, and prepared for mercantile civilizations like those of Ionia and Greece, in which the proceeds of commerce were to finance the achievements of literature and art.
Of Lydian literature nothing remains; nor does any specimen survive of the preciously wrought vases of gold, iron and silver that Crœsus offered to the conquered gods. The vases found in Lydian tombs, and now housed in the Louvre, show how the artistic leadership of Egypt and Babylonia was yielding, in the Lydia of Crœsus’ day, to the growing influence of Greece; their delicacy of execution rivals their fidelity to nature. When Herodotus visited Lydia he found its customs almost indistinguishable from those of his fellow-Greeks; all that remained to separate them, he tells us, was the way in which the daughters of the common people earned their dowries—by prostitution.13
The same great gossip is our chief authority for the dramatic story of Croesus’s fall. Herodotus recounts how Crœsus displayed his riches to Solon, and then asked him whom he considered the happiest of men. Solon, after naming three individuals who were all dead, refused to call Croesus happy, on the ground that there was no telling what misfortunes the morrow would bring him. Croesus dismissed the great legislator as a fool, turned his hand to plotting against Persia, and suddenly found the hosts of Cyrus at his gates. According to the same historian the Persians won through the superior stench of their camels, which the horses of the Lydian cavalry could not bear; the horses fled, the Lydians were routed, and Sardis fell. Croesus, according to ancient tradition, prepared a great funeral pyre, took his place on it with his wives, his daughters, and the noblest young men among the surviving citizens, and ordered his eunuchs to burn himself and them to death. In his last moments he remembered the words of Solon, mourned his own blindness, and reproached the gods who had taken all his hecatombs and paid him with destruction. Cyrus, if we may follow Herodotus,14 took pity on him, ordered the flames to be extinguished, carried Crœsus with him to Persia, and made him one of his most trusted counsellors.
II. THE SEMITIC PEOPLES
The antiquity of the Arabs—Phoenicians—Their world trade—Their circumnavigation of Africa—Colonies—Tyre and Sidon—Deities—The dissemination of the alphabet—Syria—Astarte—The death and resurrection of Adoni—The sacrifice of children
If we attempt to mitigate the confusion of tongues in the Near East by distinguishing the northern peoples of the region as mostly Indo-European, and the central and southern peoples, from Assyria to Arabia, as Semitic,* we shall have to remember that reality is never so clear-cut in its differences as the rubrics under which we dismember it for neat handling. The Near East was divided by mountains and deserts into localities naturally isolated and therefore naturally diverse in language and traditions; but not only did trade tend to assimilate language, customs and arts along its main routes (as, for example, along the great rivers from Nineveh and Carchemish to the Persian Gulf), but the migrations and imperial deportations of vast communities so mingled stocks and speech that a certain homogeneity of culture accompanied the heterogeneity of blood. By “Indo-European,” then, we shall mean predominantly Indo-European; by “Semitic” we shall mean predominantly Semitic: no strain was unmixed, no culture was left uninfluenced by its neighbors or its enemies. We are to vision the vast area as a scene of ethnic diversity and flux, in which now the Indo-European, now the Semitic, stock for a time prevailed, but only to take on the general cultural character of the whole. Hammurabi and Darius I were separated by differences of blood and religion, and by almost as many centuries as those that divide us from Christ; nevertheless, when we examine the two great kings we perceive that they are essentially and profoundly akin.
The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia. Out of that arid region, where the “man-plant” grows so vigorously and hardly any other plant will grow at all, came, in a succession of migrations, wave after wave of sturdy, reckless stoics no longer supportable by desert and oases, and bound to conquer for themselves a place in the shade. Those who remained behind created the civilization of Arabia and the Bedouin: the patriarchal family, the stern morality of obedience, the fatalism of a hard environment, and the ignorant courage to kill their own daughters as offerings to the gods. Nevertheless they did not take religion very much to heart till Mohammed came, and they neglected the arts and refinements of life as effeminate devices for degenerate men. For a time they controlled the trade with the further East: their ports at Canneh and Aden were heaped with the riches of the Indies, and their patient caravans carried these goods precariously overland to Phoenicia and Babylon. In the interior of their broad peninsula they built cities, palaces and temples, but they did not encourage foreigners to come and see them. For thousands of years they have lived their own life, kept their own customs, kept their own counsel; they are the same today as in the time of Cheops and Gudea; they have seen a hundred kingdoms rise and fall about them; and their soil is still jealously theirs, guarded from profane feet and alien eyes.
Who, now, were those Phoenicians who have so often been spoken of in these pages, whose ships sailed every sea, whose merchants bargained in every port? The historian is abashed before any question of origins: he must confess that he knows next to nothing about either the early or the late history of this ubiquitous, yet elusive, people.15 We do not know whence they came, nor when; we are not certain that they were Semites;* and as to the date of their arrival on the Mediterranean coast, we cannot contradict the statement of the scholars of Tyre, who told Herodotus that their ancestors had come from the Persian Gulf, and had founded the city in what we should call the twenty-eighth century before Christ.17 Even their name is problematical: the phoinix from which the Greeks coined it may mean the red dye that Tyrian merchants sold, or a palm-tree that flourishes along the Phoenician coast. That coast, a narrow strip a hundred miles long and only ten miles wide, between Syria and the sea, was almost all of Phoenicia; the people never thought it worth while to settle in the Lebanon hills behind them, or to bring these ranges under their rule; they were content that this beneficent barrier should protect them from the more warlike nations whose goods they carried out into all the lanes of the sea.
Those mountains compelled them to live on the water. From the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty onward they were the busiest merchants of the ancient world; and when they liberated themselves from Egypt (ca. 1200 B.C.) they became masters of the Mediterranean. They themselves manufactured various forms and objects of glass and metal; they made enameled vases, weapons, ornaments and jewelry; they had a monopoly of the purple dye which they extracted from the molluscs abounding along their shores;18 and the women of Tyre were famous for the gorgeous colors with which they stained the products of their deft needlework. These, and the exportable surplus of India and the Near East—cereals, wines, textiles and precious stones—they shipped to every city of the Mediterranean far and near, bringing back, in return, lead, gold and iron from the south shores of the Black Sea, copper, cypress and corn from Cyprus,† ivory from Africa, silver from Spain, tin from Britain, and slaves from everywhere. They were shrewd traders; they persuaded the natives of Spain to give them, in exchange for a cargo of oil, so great a quantity of silver that the holds of their ships could not contain it—whereupon the subtle Semites replaced the iron or stones in their anchors with silver, and sailed prosperously away.19 Not satisfied with this, they enslaved the natives, and made them work for long hours in the mines for a subsistence wage.‡ Like all early voyagers, and some old languages, they made scant distinction between trade and treachery, commerce and robbery; they stole from the weak, cheated the stupid, and were honest with the rest. Sometimes they captured ships on the high seas, and confiscated their cargoes and their crews; sometimes they lured curious natives into visiting the Phoenician vessels, and then sailed off with them to sell them as slaves.21 They had much to do with giving the trading Semites of antiquity an evil reputation, especially with the early Greeks, who did the same things.*
Their low and narrow galleys, some seventy feet long, set a new style of design by abandoning the inward-curving bow of the Egyptian vessel, and turning it outward into a sharp point for cleaving wind or water, or the ships of the enemy. One large rectangular sail, hoisted on a mast fixed in the keel, helped the galley-slaves who provided most of the motive-power with their double bank of oars. On a deck above the rowers, soldiers stood on guard, ready for trade or war. These frail ships, having no compasses and drawing hardly five feet of water, kept cautiously near the shore, and for a long time dared not move during the night. Gradually the art of navigation developed to the point where the Phoenician pilots, guiding themselves by the North Star (or the Phoenician Star, as the Greeks called it), adventured into the oceans, and at last circumnavigated Africa, sailing down the east coast first, and “discovering” the Cape of Good Hope some two thousand years before Vasco da Gama. “When autumn came,” says Herodotus, “they went ashore, sowed the land, and waited for harvest; then, having reaped the corn, they put to sea again. When two years had thus passed, in the third, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), they arrived in Egypt.”23 What an adventure!
At strategic points along the Mediterranean they established garrisons that grew in time into populous colonies or cities: at Cadiz, Carthage and Marseilles, in Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, even in distant England. They occupied Cyprus, Melos and Rhodes.24 They took the arts and sciences of Egypt, Crete and the Near East and spread them in Greece, Africa, Italy and Spain. They bound together the East and the West in a commercial and cultural web, and began to redeem Europe from barbarism.
Nourished by this trade, and skilfully governed by mercantile aristocracies too clever in diplomacy and finance to waste their fortunes in war, the cities of Phoenicia rose to a place among the richest and most powerful in the world. Byblos thought itself the oldest of all cities; the god El had founded it at the beginning of time, and to the end of its history it remained the religious capital of Phoenicia. Because papyrus was one of the principal articles in its trade, the Greeks took the name of the city as their word for book—biblos—and from their word for books named our Bible—ta biblia.
Some fifty miles to the south, also on the coast, lay Sidon; originally a fortress, it grew rapidly into a village, a town, a prosperous city; it contributed the best ships to Xerxes’ fleet; and when later the Persians besieged and captured it, its proud leaders deliberately burned it to the ground, forty thousand inhabitants perishing in the conflagration.25 It was already rebuilt and flourishing when Alexander came, and some of its enterprising merchants followed his army to India “for trafficking.”26
Greatest of the Phoenician cities was Tyre—i.e., the rock—built upon an island several miles off the coast. It, too, began as a fortress; but its splendid harbor and its security from attack soon made it the metropolis of Phoenicia, a cosmopolitan bedlam of merchants and slaves from the whole Mediterranean world. Already in the ninth century B.C., Tyre had achieved affluence under King Hiram, friend of King Solomon; and by the time of Zechariah (ca. 520 B.C.), she had “heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets.”27 “The houses here,” said Strabo, “have many stories, even more than the houses at Rome.”28 Its wealth and courage kept it independent until Alexander came. The young god saw in it a challenge to his omnipotence, and reduced it by building a causeway that turned the island into a peninsula. The success of Alexandria completed the ruin of Tyre.
Like every nation that feels the complexity of cosmic currents and the variety of human needs, Phoenicia had many gods. Each city had its Baal (i.e., Lord) or city-god, who was conceived as ancestor of the kings, and source of the soil’s fertility; the corn, the wine, the figs and the flax were all the work of the holy Baal. The Baal of Tyre was called Melkarth; like Hercules, with whom the Greeks identified him, he was a god of strength, and accomplished feats worthy of a Munchausen. Astarte was the Greek name of the Phoenician Ishtar; she had the distinction of being worshiped in some places as the goddess of a cold Artemisian chastity, and in others as the amorous and wanton deity of physical love, in which form she was identified by the Greeks with Aphrodite. As Ishtar-Mylitta received in sacrifice the virginity of her girl-devotees at Babylon, so the women who honored Astarte at Byblos had to give up their long tresses to her, or surrender themselves to the first stranger who solicited their love in the precincts of the temple. And as Ishtar had loved Tammuz, so Astarte had loved Adoni (i.e., Lord), whose death on the tusks of a boar was annually mourned at Byblos and Paphos (in Cyprus) with wailing and beating of the breast. Luckily Adoni rose from the dead as often as he died, and ascended to heaven in the presence of his worshipers.29 Finally there was Moloch (i.e., King), the terrible god to whom the Phoenicians offered living children as burnt sacrifices; at Carthage, during a siege of the city (307 B.C.), two hundred boys of the best families were burned to death on the altar of this fiery divinity.30
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Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
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Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
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