A history of art in Chaldæa & Assyria, Vol. 1 (of 2)
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Title: A history of art in Chaldæa & Assyria, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Author: Georges Perrot
Charles Chipiez
Translator: Sir Walter Armstrong
Release date: February 14, 2009 [eBook #28072]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALDÆA & ASSYRIA, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***
Produced by Paul Dring, Adrian Mastronardi and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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A HISTORY
OF
ART IN CHALDAEA & ASSYRIA
FROM THE FRENCH
OF
GEORGES PERROT,
PROFESSOR IN THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE,
AND
CHARLES CHIPIEZ.
ILLUSTRATED WITH FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY-TWO ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT
AND FIFTEEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES.
_IN TWO VOLUMES.--VOL. I._
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
WALTER ARMSTRONG, B.A., Oxon.,
AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS," ETC.
[Illustration]
London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Limited.
New York: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON.
1884.
London:
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL.
PREFACE.
In face of the cordial reception given to the first two volumes of MM.
Perrot and Chipiez's History of Ancient Art, any words of introduction from
me to this second instalment would be presumptuous. On my own part,
however, I may be allowed to express my gratitude for the approval
vouchsafed to my humble share in the introduction of the History of Art in
Ancient Egypt to a new public, and to hope that nothing may be found in the
following pages to change that approval into blame.
W. A.
_October 10, 1883._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHALDAEO-ASSYRIAN CIVILIZATION.
PAGE
Sec. 1. Situation and Boundaries of Chaldaea and Assyria 1-8
Sec. 2. Nature in the Basin of the Euphrates and Tigris 8-13
Sec. 3. The Primitive Elements of the Population 13-21
Sec. 4. The Wedges 21-33
Sec. 5. The History of Chaldaea and Assyria 33-55
Sec. 6. The Chaldaean Religion 55-89
Sec. 7. The People and Government 89-113
CHAPTER II.
THE PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHALDAEO-ASSYRIAN
ARCHITECTURE.
Sec. 1. Materials 114-126
Sec. 2. The General Principles of Form 126-146
Sec. 3. Construction 146-200
Sec. 4. The Column 200-221
Sec. 5. The Arch 221-236
Sec. 6. Secondary Forms 236-260
Sec. 7. Decoration 260-311
Sec. 8. On the Orientation of Buildings and Foundation
Ceremonies 311-322
Sec. 9. Mechanical Resources 322-326
Sec. 10. On the Graphic Processes Employed in the Representations
of Buildings 327-334
CHAPTER III.
FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE.
Sec. 1. Chaldaean and Assyrian Notions as to a Future Life 335-355
Sec. 2. The Chaldaean Tomb 355-363
CHAPTER IV.
RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE.
Sec. 1. Attempts to Restore the Principal Types 364-382
Sec. 2. Ruins of Staged Towers 382-391
Sec. 3. Subordinate Types of the Temple 391-398
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PLATES.
I. Babil _To face page_ 154
II. Rectangular Chaldaean temple 370
III. Square double-ramped Chaldaean temple 378
IV. Square Assyrian temple 380
FIG. PAGE
1. Brick from Erech 24
2. Fragment of an inscription engraved upon the back of a statue
from Tello 25
3. Seal of Ourkam 38
4. Genius in the attitude of adoration 42
5. Assurbanipal at the chase 45
6. Demons 61
7. Demons 62
8. Eagle-headed divinity 63
9. Anou or Dagon 64
10. Stone of Merodach-Baladan I 73
11. Assyrian cylinder 74
12. Assyrian cylinder 74
13. Gods carried in procession 75
14. Gods carried in procession 76
15. Statue of Nebo 81
16. Terra-cotta statuette 83
17. A Chaldaean cylinder 84
18. The winged globe 87
19. The winged globe with human figure 87
20. Chaldaean cylinder 95
21. Chaldaean cylinder 95
22. The King Sargon and his Grand Vizier 97
23. The suite of Sargon 99
24. The suite of Sargon 101
25. Fragment of a bas-relief in alabaster 105
26. Bas-relief of Tiglath Pileser II 106
27. Feast of Assurbanipal 107
28. Feast of Assurbanipal 108
29. Offerings to a god 109
30. Convoy of prisoners 111
31. Convoy of prisoners 112
32. Babylonian brick 118
33. Brick from Khorsabad 119
34. Temple 128
35. Tell-Ede, in Lower Chaldaea 129
36. Haman, in Lower Chaldaea 131
37. Babil, at Babylon 135
38. A fortress 138
39. View of a town and its palaces 140
40. House in Kurdistan 141
41. Temple on the bank of a river, Khorsabad 142
42. Temple in a royal park, Kouyundjik 143
43. View of a group of buildings, Kouyundjik 145
44. Plan of angle, Khorsabad 147
45. Section of wall through AB in Fig. 44 147
46. Elevation of wall, Khorsabad 148
47. Section in perspective through the south-western part of
Sargon's palace at Khorsabad 149
48. Temple at Mugheir 154
49. Upper part of the drainage arrangements of a mound 159
50. Present state of one of the city gates, Khorsabad 161
51. Fortress; from the Balawat gates, in the British Museum 164
52. The palace at Firouz-Abad 170
53. The palace at Sarbistan 170
54. Section through the palace at Sarbistan 171
55. Restoration of a hall in the harem at Khorsabad 174
56. Royal tent, Kouyundjik 175
57. Tent, Kouyundjik 175
58. Interior of a Yezidi house 178
59. Fortress 180
60. Crude brick construction 181
61. Armenian "lantern" 183
62-65. Terra-cotta cylinders in elevation, section and plan 184
66. Outside staircases in the ruins of Abou-Sharein 191
67. Interior of the royal tent 193
68. Tabernacle; from the Balawat gates 194
69. The seal of Sennacherib 196
70. Type of open architecture in Assyria 197
71. Homage to _Samas_ or _Shamas_ 203
72. Sheath of a cedar-wood mast, bronze 205
73. Interior of a house supported by wooden pillars; from the
gates of Balawat 206
74. Assyrian capital, in perspective 207
75. Capital; from a small temple 209
76. View of a palace 210
77. Capital; from a small temple 212
78. Capital 212
79. Chaldaean tabernacle 212
80. Ivory plaque found at Nimroud 212
81. The _Tree of Life_ 213
82. Ornamental base, in limestone 214
83. Model of a base, side view 215
84. The same, seen from in front 215
85. Winged Sphinx carrying the base of a column 216
86. Facade of an Assyrian building 216
87, 88. Bases of columns 217
89. Tomb-chamber at Mugheir 222
90. Interior of a chamber in the harem of Sargon's palace at
Khorsabad 225
91. Return round the angle of an archivolt in one of the gates
of Dour-Saryoukin 227
92. Drain at Khorsabad, with pointed arch 229
93. Sewer at Khorsabad, with semicircular vault 232
94. Sewer at Khorsabad, with elliptical vault 233
95. Decorated lintel 238
96. Sill of a door, from Khorsabad 240
97. Bronze foot, from the Balawat gates, and its socket 243
98, 99. Assyrian mouldings. Section and elevation 245
100. Facade of a ruined building at Warka 246
101. Decoration of one of the harem gates, at Khorsabad 247
102. View of an angle of the _Observatory_ at Khorsabad 249
103. Lateral facade of the palace at Firouz-Abad 251
104. Battlements from an Assyrian palace 251
105. Battlements from the Khorsabad _Observatory_ 252
106. Battlements of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad 255
107. Altar 255
108. Altar in the Louvre 256
109. Altar in the British Museum 257
110. Stele from Khorsabad 258
111. The obelisk of Shalmaneser II. in the British Museum 258
112. Rock-cut stele from Kouyundjik 259
113. Fragment from Babylon 263
114. Human-headed lion 267
115. Bas-relief with several registers 269
116. Ornament painted upon plaster 275
117. Ornament painted upon plaster 275
118. Ornament painted upon plaster 276
119. Plan and elevation of part of a facade at Warka 278
120. Cone with coloured base 279
121, 122. Rosettes in glazed pottery 290
123. Detail of enamelled archivolt 291
124. Detail of enamelled archivolt 292
125. Enamelled brick in the British Museum 293
126. Ornament upon enamelled brick 294
127. Fragment of a glazed brick 295
128. Fragment of a glazed brick 297
129. Ivory tablet in the British Museum 301
130. Fragment of an ivory tablet 301
131. Threshold from Kouyundjik 303
132. Rosette 304
133. Bouquet of flowers and buds 305
134. Painted border 306
135. Fragment of a threshold 306
136. Door ornament 307
137. Palmette 308
138. Goats and palmette 308
139. Winged bulls and palmette 309
140. Stag upon a palmette 310
141. Winged bull upon a rosette 311
142. Stag, palmette, and rosette 311
143. Plan of a temple at Mugheir 312
144. Plan of the town and palace of Sargon at Khorsabad 313
145. General plan of the remains at Nimroud 314
146. Bronze statuette 316
147. Bronze statuette 317
148. Bronze statuette 318
149. Terra-cotta cone 319
150. Terra-cotta cylinder 320
151. The transport of a bull 324
152. Putting a bull in place 326
153. Chaldaean plan 327
154. Assyrian plan; from the Balawat gates in the British
Museum 329
155. Plan and section of a fortress 329
156. Plan, section, and elevation of a fortified city 330
157. Plan and elevation of a fortified city 331
158. Fortress with its defenders 333
159, 160. Vases 342
161. Plaque of chiselled bronze. Obverse 350
162. Plaque of chiselled bronze. Reverse 351
163. Tomb at Mugheir 357
164. Tomb at Mugheir 358
165. Tomb at Mugheir 358
166. Tomb, or coffin, at Mugheir 359
167. Map of the ruins of Mugheir 362
168. View of the Birs-Nimroud 367
169-171. Longitudinal section, plan, and horizontal section of
the rectangular type of Chaldaean temple 370
172. Map of Warka, with its ruins 371
173. Type of square, single-ramped Chaldaean temple 375
174-176. Transverse section, plan, and horizontal section of a
square, single-ramped, Chaldaean temple 377
177-179. Transverse section, plan, and horizontal section of a
square, double-ramped Chaldaean temple 378
180-182. Square Assyrian temple. Longitudinal section, horizontal
section, and plan 380
183. Map of the ruins of Babylon 383
184. Actual condition of the so-called _Observatory_, at
Khorsabad 387
185. The _Observatory_, restored. Elevation 388
186. The _Observatory_, restored. Plan 389
187. The _Observatory_. Transverse section through A B 390
188. Plan of a small temple at Nimroud 393
189. Plan of a small temple at Nimroud 393
190. Temple with triangular pediment 394
TAIL-PIECES, &c.
Lion's head, gold (French National Library) _Title-page_
Lion's head, glazed earthenware (Louvre) 113
Two rabbits' heads, ivory (Louvre) 334
Cow's head, ivory (British Museum) 363
Eagle, from a bas-relief (British Museum) 398
A HISTORY OF ART
IN
CHALDAEA AND ASSYRIA
CHAPTER I.
THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHALDAEO-ASSYRIAN CIVILIZATION.
Sec. 1.--_Situation and Boundaries of Chaldaea and Assyria._
The primitive civilization of Chaldaea, like that of Egypt, was cradled in
the lower districts of a great alluvial basin, in which the soil was stolen
from the sea by long continued deposits of river mud. In the valley of the
Tigris and Euphrates, as in that of the Nile, it was in the great plains
near the ocean that the inhabitants first emerged from barbarism and
organized a civil life. As the ages passed away, this culture slowly
mounted the streams, and, as Memphis was older by many centuries than
Thebes, in dignity if not in actual existence, so Ur and Larsam were older
than Babylon, and Babylon than Nineveh. The manners and beliefs, the arts
and the written characters of Egypt were carried into the farthest recesses
of Ethiopia, partly by commerce but still more by military invasion; so too
Chaldaic civilization made itself felt at vast distances from its
birthplace, even in the cold valleys and snowy plateaux of Armenia, in
districts which are separated by ten degrees of latitude from the burning
shores where the fish god Oannes showed himself to the rude fathers of the
race, and taught them "such things as contribute to the softening of
life."[1] In Egypt progressive development took place from north to south,
while in Chaldaea its direction was reversed. The apparent contrast is,
however, but a resemblance the more. The orientation, if such a term may be
used, of the two basins, is in opposite directions, but in each the spread
of religion with its rites and symbols, of written characters with their
adaptation to different languages, and of all those arts and processes
which, when taken together, make up what we call civilization, advanced
from the seaboard to the river springs.
In these two countries the conscience of man seems to have been first
awakened to his innate power of bettering his own condition by well
directed observation, by the elaboration of laws, and by forethought for
the future. Between Egypt on the one hand, and Chaldaea with that Assyria
which was no more than its offshoot and prolongation, on the other, there
are strong analogies, as will be clearly seen in the course of our study,
but there are also differences that are not less appreciable. Professor
Rawlinson shows this very clearly in a page of descriptive geography which
he will allow us to quote as it stands. It will not be the last of our
borrowings from his excellent work, _The Five Great Monarchies of the
Ancient Eastern World_, a book that has done so much to popularize the
discoveries of modern scholars.[2]
"The broad belt of desert which traverses the eastern hemisphere, in a
general direction from west to east (or, speaking more exactly, of W.S.W.
to N.E.E.) reaching from the Atlantic on the one hand nearly to the Yellow
Sea on the other, is interrupted about its centre by a strip of rich
vegetation, which at once breaks the continuity of the arid region, and
serves also to mark the point where the desert changes its character from
that of a plain at a low level to that of an elevated plateau or
table-land. West of the favoured district, the Arabian and African wastes
are seas of land seldom raised much above, often sinking below the level of
the ocean; while east of the same, in Persia, Kerman, Seistan, Chinese
Tartary, and Mongolia, the desert consists of a series of plateaux, having
from 3,000 to nearly 10,000 feet of elevation. The green and fertile region
which is thus interposed between the 'highland' and 'lowland' deserts,[3]
participates, curiously enough, in both characters. Where the belt of sand
is intersected by the valley of the Nile, no marked change of elevation
occurs; and the continuous low desert is merely interrupted by a few miles
of green and cultivable surface, the whole of which is just as smooth and
as flat as the waste on either side of it. But it is otherwise at the more
eastern interruption. Then the verdant and productive country divides
itself into two tracts, running parallel to each other, of which the
western presents features, not unlike those that characterize the Nile
valley, but on a far larger scale; while the eastern is a lofty mountain
region, consisting for the most part of five or six parallel ranges, and
mounting in many places far above the level of perpetual snow.
"It is with the western or plain tract that we are here concerned. Between
the outer limits of the Syro-Arabian desert and the foot of the great
mountain range of Kurdistan and Luristan intervenes a territory long famous
in the world's history, and the chief site of three out of the five empires
of whose history, geography, and antiquities, it is proposed to treat in
the present volumes. Known to the Jews as Aram-Naharaim, or 'Syria of the
two rivers'; to the Greeks and Romans as Mesopotamia, or 'the between-river
country'; to the Arabs as Al-Jezireh, or 'the island,' this district has
always taken its name from the streams which constitute its most striking
feature, and to which, in fact, it owes its existence. If it were not for
the two great rivers--the Tigris and Euphrates--with their tributaries, the
more northern part of the Mesopotamian lowland would in no respect differ
from the Syro-Arabian desert on which it adjoins, and which, in latitude,
elevation, and general geological character, it exactly resembles. Towards
the south the importance of the rivers is still greater; for of Lower
Mesopotamia it may be said, with more truth than of Egypt,[4] that it is
'an acquired land,' the actual 'gift' of the two streams which wash it on
either side; being as it is, entirely a recent formation--a deposit which
the streams have made in the shallow waters of a gulf into which they have
flowed for many ages.[5]
"The division, which has here forced itself upon our notice, between the
Upper and the Lower Mesopotamian country, is one very necessary to engage
our attention in connection with ancient Chaldaea. There is no reason to
think that the term Chaldaea had at any time the extensive signification of
Mesopotamia, much less that it applied to the entire flat country between
the desert and the mountains. Chaldaea was not the whole, but a part, of the
great Mesopotamian plain; which was ample enough to contain within it three
or four considerable monarchies. According to the combined testimony of
geographers and historians,[6] Chaldaea lay towards the south, for it
bordered upon the Persian Gulf, and towards the west, for it adjoined
Arabia. If we are called upon to fix more accurately its boundaries, which,
like those of most countries without strong natural frontiers, suffered
many fluctuations, we are perhaps entitled to say that the Persian Gulf on
the south, the Tigris on the east, the Arabian desert on the west, and the
limit between Upper and Lower Mesopotamia on the north, formed the natural
bounds, which were never greatly exceeded, and never much infringed upon.
These boundaries are for the most part tolerably clear, though the northern
only is invariable. Natural causes, hereafter to be mentioned more
particularly, are perpetually varying the course of the Tigris, the shore
of the Persian Gulf and the line of demarcation between the sands of Arabia
and the verdure of the Euphrates valley. But nature has set a permanent
mark, half way down the Mesopotamian lowland, by a difference of a
geological structure, which is very conspicuous. Near Hit on the Euphrates,
and a little below Samarah on the Tigris,[7] the traveller who descends the
streams, bids adieu to a somewhat waving and slightly elevated plain of
secondary formation, and enters on the dead flat and low level of the new
alluvium. The line thus formed is marked and invariable; it constitutes the
only natural division between the upper and lower portions of the valley;
and both probability and history point to it as the actual boundary between
Chaldaea and her northern neighbour."[8]
Whether the two States had independent and separate life, or whether, as in
after years, one of the two had, by its political and military superiority
reduced the other to the condition of a vassal, the line of demarcation was
constant, a line traced in the first instance by nature and rendered more
rigid and ineffaceable by historical developments. Even when Chaldaea became
nominally a mere province of Assyria, the two nationalities remained
distinct. Chaldaea was older than Assyria. The centres of her civil life
were the cities built upon the alluvial lands between the thirty-first and
thirty-third degree of latitude. The most famous of these cities was
Babylon. Those whom we call Assyrians, a people who rose to power and glory
at a much more recent date, drew the seeds of their civilization from their
more precocious neighbour.
These expressions, Assyria and Chaldaea, are now employed in a sense far
more precise than they ever had in antiquity. For Herodotus Babylonia was a
mere district of Assyria;[9] in his time both States were comprised in the
Persian Empire, and had no distinct existence of their own. Pliny calls the
whole of Mesopotamia Assyria.[10] Strabo carries the western frontier of
Assyria as far as Syria.[11] To us these variations are of small
importance. The geographical and historical nomenclature of the ancients
was never clearly defined. It was always more or less of a floating
quantity, especially for those countries which to Herodotus or Diodorus, to
Pliny or to Tacitus, were dimly perceptible on the extreme limits of their
horizon.
It would, however, be easy to show that in assigning a more definite value
to the terms in question--a proceeding in which we have the countenance of
nearly every modern historian--we do not detach them from their original
acceptation; at most we give them more constancy and precision than the
colloquial language of the Greeks and Romans demanded.[12] The expressions
_Khasdim_ and _Chaldaei_ were used in the Bible and by classic authors
mainly to denote the inhabitants of Babylon and its neighbourhood; and we
find Strabo attaching with precision the name _Aturia_, which is nothing
but a variant upon Assyria, to that district watered and bounded by the
Tigris in which Nineveh was situated.[13] Our only aim is to adopt, once
for all, such terms as may be easily understood by our readers, and may
render all confusion impossible between the two kingdoms, between the
people of the north and those of the south.
In order to define Assyria exactly we should have to determine its
frontiers, and that we can only do approximately. As the nation grew its
territory extended in certain directions. To the east, however, where the
formidable rampart of the Zagros forbade all progress, no such extension
took place. Those lofty and precipitous chains which we now call the
mountains of Kurdistan, were only to be crossed in two or three places, and
by passes which during their few months of freedom from snow and floods
gave access to the high-lying plains of Media. These narrow defiles might
well be traversed by an army in a summer campaign, but neither dwellings
nor cultivated lands could invade such a district with success; at most
they could take possession of the few spots of fertile soil which lay at
the mouth of the lateral valleys; such, for example, was the plain of
Arbeles which was watered by the great Zab before its junction with the
Tigris. Towards the south there was no natural barrier, but in that
direction all development was hindered by the density of the Chaldee
population which was thickly spread over the country above Babylon and
about the numerous towns and villages which looked towards that city as
their capital. To the north, on the other hand, the wide terraces which
mounted like steps from the plains of Mesopotamia to the mountains of
Armenia offered an ample field for expansion. To the west there was still
more room. Little by little rural and urban life overflowed the valley of
the Tigris into that of the Chaboras or Khabour, the principal affluent of
the Euphrates, until at last it reached the banks of the great western
river itself. In all Northern Mesopotamia, between the hills of the Sinjar
and the last slopes of Mount Masius, the Assyrians encountered only nomad
tribes whom they could drive when they chose into the Syrian desert. Over
all that region the remains of artificial mounds have been found which must
at one time have been the sites of palaces and cities. In some cases the
gullies cut in their flanks by the rain discover broken walls and fragments
of sculpture whose style is that of the Ninevitish monuments.[14]
In the course of their victorious career the Assyrians annexed several
other states, such as Syria and Chaldaea, Cappadocia and Armenia, but those
countries were never more than external dependencies, than conquered
provinces. Taking Assyria proper at its greatest development, we may say
that it comprised Northern Mesopotamia and the territories which faced it
from the other bank of the Tigris and lay between the stream and the lower
slopes of the mountains. The heart of the country was the district lying
along both sides of the river between the thirty-fifth and thirty-seventh
degree of latitude, and the forty-first and forty-second degree of
longitude, east. The three or four cities which rose successively to be
capitals of Assyria were all in that region, and are now represented by the
ruins of Khorsabad, of Kouyundjik with Nebbi-Younas, of Nimroud, and of
Kaleh-Shergat. One of these places corresponds to _Ninos_, as the Greeks
call it, or Nineveh, the famous city which classic writers as well as
Jewish prophets looked upon as the centre of Assyrian history.
To give some idea of the relative dimensions of these two states Rawlinson
compares the surface of Assyria to that of Great Britain, while that of
Chaldaea must, he says, have been equal in extent to the kingdom of
Denmark.[15] This latter comparison seems below the mark, when, compass in
hand, we attempt to verify it upon a modern map. The discrepancy is caused
by the continual encroachments upon the sea made by the alluvial deposits
from the two great rivers. Careful observations and calculations have shown
that the coast line must have been from forty to forty-five leagues farther
north than it is at present when the ancestors of the Chaldees first
appeared upon the scene.[16] Instead of flowing together as they do now to
form what is called the _Shat-el-Arab_, the Tigris and Euphrates then fell
into the sea at points some twenty leagues apart in a gulf which extended
eastwards as far as the last spurs thrown out by the mountains of Iran, and
westwards to the foot of the sandy heights which terminate the plateau of
Arabia. "The whole lower part of the valley has thus been made, since the
commencement of the present geological period, by deposits from the Tigris,
the Euphrates, and such minor streams as the Adhem, the Gyndes, the
Choaspes, streams which, after having long enjoyed an independent existence
and having contributed to drive back the waters into which they fell, have
ended by becoming mere feeders of the Tigris."[17] We see, therefore, that
when Chaldaea received its first inhabitants it was sensibly smaller than it
is to-day, as the district of which Bassorah is now the capital and the
whole delta of the Shat-el-Arab were not yet in existence.
NOTES:
[1] BEROSUS, fragment No. 1, in the _Essai de Commentaire sur les Fragments
cosmogoniques de Berose d'apres les Textes cuneiformes et les Monuments de
l'Art Asiatique_ of FRANCOIS LENORMANT (Maisonneuve, 1871, 8vo.).
[2] _The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World; or, The
History, Geography, and Antiquities of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylon, Media,
and Persia. Collected and Illustrated from Ancient and Modern Sources_, by
GEORGE RAWLINSON. Fourth edition, 3 vols., 8vo., with Maps and
Illustrations (Murray, 1879).
[3] HUMBOLDT, _Aspects of Nature_, vol. i. pp. 77, 78.--R.
[4] HERODOTUS, ii. 5.
[5] LOFTUS'S _Chaldaea and Susiana_, p. 282.--R.
[6] See STRABO, xvi. 1, Sec. 6; PLINY, H.N. vi. 28; PTOLEMY, v. 20; BEROSUS,
pp. 28, 29.--R.
[7] Ross came to the end of the alluvium and the commencement of the
secondary formation in lat. 34 deg., long. 44 deg. (_Journal of Geographical
Society_, vol. ix. p. 446). Similarly, Captain Lynch found the bed of the
Tigris change from pebbles to mere alluvium near Khan Iholigch, a little
above its confluence with the Aahun (_Ib._ p. 472). For the point where the
Euphrates enters on the alluvium, see Fraser's _Assyria and Mesopotamia_,
p. 27.--R.
[8] RAWLINSON. _The Five Great Monarchies_, &c., vol. i., pp. 1-4. As to
the name and boundaries of Chaldaea, see also GUIGNAUT, _La Chaldee et les
Chaldeens_, in the _Encyclopedie Moderne_, vol. viii.
[9] HERODOTUS, i. 106, 192; iii. 92.
[10] PLINY, _Nat. Hist._ vi. 26.
[11] STRABO, xvi. i. Sec. 1.
[12] _Genesis_ xi. 28 and 31; _Isaiah_ xlvii. 1; xiii. 19, &c.; DIODORUS
ii. 17; PLINY, _Nat. Hist._ vi. 26; the Greek translators of the Bible
rendered the Hebrew term Khasdim by Chaldaioi; both forms seem to be
derived from the same primitive word.
[13] STRABO, xvi. i. 1, 2, 3.
[14] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. i. pp. 312, 315;
_Discoveries_, p. 245.
[15] RAWLINSON, _Five Great Monarchies_, vol. i. pp. 4, 5.
[16] LOFTUS, in the _Journal of the Geographical Society_, vol. xxvi. p.
142; _Ib._, Sir HENRY RAWLINSON, vol. xxvii. p. 186.
[17] MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, p. 137.
Sec. 2.--_Nature in the Basin of the Euphrates and Tigris._
The inundation of the Nile gives renewed life every year to those plains of
Egypt which it has slowly formed, and so it is with the Tigris and
Euphrates. Lower Mesopotamia is entirely their creation, and if the time
were to come when their vivifying streams were no longer to irrigate its
surface, it would very soon be changed into a monotonous and melancholy
desert. It hardly ever rains in Chaldaea.[18] There are a few showers at the
changes of the season, and, in winter, a few days of heavy rain. During the
summer, for long months together, the sky remains inexorably blue while the
temperature is hot and parching. In winter, clouds are almost as rare; but
winds often play violently over the great tracts of unbroken country. When
these blow from the south they soon lose their warmth and humidity at the
contact of a soil which, but a short while ago, was at the bottom of the
sea, and is, therefore, in many places still strongly impregnated with salt
which acts as a refrigerant.[19] Again, when the north wind comes down from
the snowy summits of Armenia or Kurdistan, it is already cold enough, so
that, during the months of December and January, it often happens that the
mercury falls below freezing point, even in Babylonia. At daybreak the
waters of the marshes are sometimes covered with a thin layer of ice, and
the wind increases the effect of the low temperature. Loftus tells us that
he has seen the Arabs of his escort fall benumbed from their saddles in the
early morning.[20]
It is, then, upon the streams, and upon them alone, that the soil has to
depend for its fertility; all those lands to which they never reach are
doomed to barrenness and death. It is fortunate for the prosperity of the
country through which they flow, that the Tigris and Euphrates swell and
rise annually from their beds, not indeed like the Nile, almost on a stated
day, but ever in the same season, about the commencement of spring. Without
these periodical floods many parts of the plain of Mesopotamia would be
beyond the reach of irrigation, but their regular occurrence allows water
to be stored in sufficient quantities for use during the months of drought.
To obtain the full advantage of this precious capital, the inhabitants
must, however, take more care and expend more labour than is necessary in
Egypt. The rise of the Euphrates and of the Tigris is neither so slow nor
so regular as that of the Nile. The waters do not spread so gently over the
soil, neither do they stay upon it so long;[21] since they have been
abandoned to themselves as they are at present, a great part of them are
lost, and, far from rendering a service to agriculture, they turn vast
regions into dangerous hot-beds of infection.
It was to the west of the double basin that the untoward effects of the
territorial conformation were chiefly felt. The valley of the Euphrates is
not like that of the Nile, a canal hollowed out between two clearly marked
banks. From the northern boundary of the alluvial plain to the southern,
the slope is very slight, while from east to west, from the plains of
Mesopotamia to the foot of the Arabian plateau, there is also an
inclination. When the river is in flood the right bank no longer exists.
Where it is not raised and defended by dykes, the waters flow over it at
more than one point. They spread through large breaches into a sort of
hollow where they form wide marshes, such as those which stretch in these
days from the country west of the ruins of Babylon almost to the Persian
Gulf. In the parching heat of the summer months the mud blackens, cracks,
and exhales miasmic vapours, so that a long acclimatization, like that of
the Arabs, is necessary before one can live in the region. Some of these
Arabs live in forests of reeds like those represented in the Assyrian
bas-reliefs.[22]
Their huts of mud and rushes rise upon a low island in the marshes; and all
communication with neighbouring tribes and with the town in which they sell
the product of their rice-fields, is carried on by boats. The brakes are
more impenetrable than the thickest underwood, but the natives have cut
alleys through them, along which they impel their large flat-bottomed
_teradas_ with poles.[23] Sometimes a sudden rise of the river will raise
the level of these generally stagnant waters by a yard or two, and during
the night the huts and their inhabitants, men and animals together, will be
sent adrift. Two or three villages have been destroyed in this fashion amid
the complete indifference of the authorities. The tithe-farmer may be
trusted to see that the survivors pay the taxes due from their less
fortunate neighbours.
The masters of the country could, if they chose, do much to render the
country more healthy, more fertile, more capable of supporting a numerous
population. They might direct the course of the annual floods, and save
their excess. When the land was managed by a proprietory possessing
intelligence, energy, and foresight, it had, especially in minor details, a
grace and picturesque beauty of its own. When every foot of land was
carefully cultivated, when the two great streams were thoroughly kept in
hand, their banks and those of the numerous canals intersecting the plains
were overhung with palms. The eye fell with pleasure upon the tall trunks
with their waving plumes, upon the bouquets of broad leaves with their
centre of yellow dates; upon the cereals and other useful and ornamental
plants growing under their gentle shade, and forming a carpet for the rich
and sumptuous vegetation above. Around the villages perched upon their
mounds the orchards spread far and wide, carrying the scent of their orange
trees into the surrounding country, and presenting, with their masses of
sombre foliage studded with golden fruit, a picture of which the eye could
never grow weary.
No long series of military disasters was required to destroy all this
charm; fifty years, or, at most, a century, of bad administration was
enough.[24] Set a score of Turkish pachas to work, one after the other, men
such as those whom contemporary travellers have encountered at Mossoul and
Bagdad; with the help of their underlings they will soon have done more
harm than the marches and conflicts of armies. There is no force more
surely and completely destructive than a government which is at once idle,
ignorant, and corrupt.
With the exception of the narrow districts around a few towns and villages,
where small groups of population have retained something of their former
energy and diligence, Mesopotamia is now, during the greater part of the
year, given over to sterility and desolation. As it is almost entirely
covered with a deep layer of vegetable earth, the spring clothes even its
most abandoned solitudes with a luxuriant growth of herbs and flowers.
Horses and cattle sink to their bellies in the perfumed leafage,[25] but
after the month of May the herbage withers and becomes discoloured; the
dried stems split and crack under foot, and all verdure disappears except
from the river-banks and marshes. Upon these wave the feathery fronds of
the tamarisk, and in the stagnant or slowly moving water which fills all
the depressions of the soil, aquatic plants, water-lilies, rushes, papyrus,
and gigantic reeds spring up in dense masses, and make the low-lying
country look like a vast prairie, whose native freshness even the sun at
its zenith has no power to destroy. Everywhere else nature is as dreary in
its monotony as the vast sandy deserts which border the country on the
west. In one place the yellow soil is covered with a dried, almost
calcined, stubble; in another, with a grey dust which rises in clouds
before the slightest breeze; in the neighbourhood of the ancient townships
it has received a reddish hue from the quantity of broken and pulverized
brick with which it is mixed. These colours vary in different places, but
from Mount Masius to the shores of the Persian Gulf, from the Euphrates to
the Tigris, the traveller is met almost constantly by the one melancholy
sight--of a country spreading out before him to the horizon, in which
neglect has gone on until the region which the biblical tradition
represents as the cradle of the human race has been rendered incapable of
supporting human life.[26]
The physiognomy of Mesopotamia has then been profoundly modified since the
fall of the ancient civilization. By the indolence of man it has lost its
adornments, or rather its vesture, in the ample drapery of waving palms and
standing corn that excited the admiration of Herodotus.[27] But the general
characteristics and leading contours of the landscape remain what they
were. Restore in thought one of those Babylonian structures whose lofty
ruins now serve as observatories for the explorer or passing traveller.
Suppose yourself, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, seated upon the summit of
the temple of Bel, some hundred or hundred and twenty yards above the level
of the plain. At such a height the smiling and picturesque details which
were formerly so plentiful and are now so rare, would not be appreciated.
The domed surfaces of the woods would seem flat, the varied cultivation,
the changing colours of the fields and pastures would hardly be
distinguished. You would be struck then, as you are struck to-day, by the
extent and uniformity of the vast plain which stretches away to all the
points of the compass.
In Assyria, except towards the south where the two rivers begin to draw in
towards each other, the plains are varied by gentle undulations. As the
traveller approaches the northern and eastern frontiers, chains of hills,
and even snowy peaks, loom before him. In Chaldaea there is nothing of the
kind. The only accidents of the ground are those due to human industry; the
dead level stretches away as far as the eye can follow it, and, like the
sea, melts into the sky at the horizon.
NOTES:
[18] HERODOTUS, i. 193: He de ge ton Assurion huetai men oligoi.
[19] LOFTUS, _Susiana and Chaldaea_, i. vol. 8vo. 1857, London, p. 73.
[20] LOFTUS, _Susiana and Chaldaea_, p. 73; LAYARD, _Discoveries in the
Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 146 (i. vol. 8vo. 1853).
[21] HERODOTUS, exaggerates this difference, but it is a real one. "The
plant," he says, "is nourished and the ears formed by means of irrigation
from the river. For this river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the
cornlands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the hand or by the
help of engines," i. 193. [Our quotations are from Prof. Rawlinson's
_Herodotus_ (4 vols. 8vo. 1875; Murray); Ed.] The inundations of the Tigris
and Euphrates do not play so important a _role_ in the lives of the
inhabitants of Mesopotamia, as that of the Nile in those of the Egyptians.
[22] LAYARD, _A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh_, plate 27
(London, oblong folio, 1853).
[23] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 551-556; LOFTUS, _Chaldaea and Susiana_,
chap. x.
[24] LAYARD (_Discoveries_, pp. 467, 468 and 475) tells us what the Turks
"have made of two of the finest rivers in the world, one of which is
navigable for 850 miles from its mouth, and the other for 600 miles."
[25] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. i. p. 78 (1849). "Flowers of
every hue enamelled the meadows; not thinly scattered over the grass as in
northern climes, but in such thick and gathering clusters that the whole
plain seemed a patch-work of many colours. The dogs as they returned from
hunting, issued from the long grass dyed red, yellow, or blue, according to
the flowers through which they had last forced their way."
[26] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. ii. pp. 68-75.
[27] HERODOTUS, i. 193. "Of all the countries that we know, there is none
which is so fruitful in grain. It makes no pretension indeed, of growing
the fig, the olive, the vine, or any other trees of the kind; but in grain
it is so fruitful as to yield commonly two hundredfold, and when the
production is greatest, even three hundredfold. The blade of the wheat
plant and barley is often four fingers in breadth. As for millet and the
sesame, I shall not say to what height they grow, though within my own
knowledge; for I am not ignorant that what I have already written
concerning the fruitfulness of Babylonia, must seem incredible to those who
have never visited the country.... Palm trees grow in great numbers over
the whole of the flat country, mostly of the kind that bears fruit, and
this fruit supplies them with bread, wine, and honey."
Sec. 3.--_The Primitive Elements of the Population._
The two great factors of all life and of all vegetable production are water
and warmth, so that of the two great divisions of the country we have just
described, the more southern must have been the first inhabited, or at
least, the first to invite and aid its inhabitants to make trial of
civilization.
In the north the two great rivers are far apart. The vast spaces which
separate them include many districts which have always been, and must ever
be, very difficult of irrigation, and consequently of cultivation. In the
south, on the other hand, below the thirty-fourth degree of latitude, the
Tigris and Euphrates approach each other until a day's march will carry the
traveller from one to the other; and for a distance of some eighty leagues,
ending but little short of the point of junction, their beds are almost
parallel. In spite of the heat, which is, of course, greater than in
northern Mesopotamia, nothing is easier than to carry the blessings of
irrigation over the whole of such a region. When the water in the rivers
and canals is low, it can be raised by the aid of simple machines, similar
in principle to those we described in speaking of Egypt.[28]
It is here, therefore, that we must look for the scene of the first
attempts in Asia to pass from the anxious and uncertain life of the
fisherman, the hunter, or the nomad shepherd, to that of the sedentary
husbandman, rooted to the soil by the pains he has taken to improve its
capabilities, and by the homestead he has reared at the border of his
fields. In the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis we have an echo of
the earliest traditions preserved by the Semitic race of their distant
origin. "And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they
found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there."[29] The _land_
of SHINAR is the Hebrew name of what we call Chaldaea. There is no room for
mistake. When the sacred writer wishes to tell us the origin of human
society, he transports us into Lower Mesopotamia. It is there that he
causes the posterity of Noah to build the first great city, Babel, the
prototype of the Babylon of history; it is there that he tells us the
confusion of tongues was accomplished, and that the common centre existed
from which men spread themselves over the whole surface of the earth, to
become different nations. The oldest cities known to the collector of these
traditions were those of Chaldaea, of the region bordering on the Persian
Gulf.
"And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
"He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, '_Even as
Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord_.'
"And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and
Calneh, in the land of Shinar.
"Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city
Rehoboth, and Calah,
"And Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city."[30]
These statements have been confirmed by the architectural and other remains
found in Mesopotamia. Inscriptions from which fresh secrets are wrested day
by day; ruins of buildings whose dates are to be approximately divined from
their plans, their structure, and their decorations; statues, statuettes,
bas-reliefs, and all the various _debris_ of a great civilization, when
studied with the industrious ardour which distinguishes modern science,
enable the critic to realize the vast antiquity of those Chaldaean cities,
in which legend and history are so curiously mingled.
Even before they could decipher their meaning Assyriologists had compared,
from the palaeographic point of view, the different varieties of the written
character known as _cuneiform_--a character which lent itself for some two
thousand years, to the notation of the five or six successive languages,
at least, in which the inhabitants of Western Asia expressed their
thoughts. These wedge-shaped characters are found in their most primitive
and undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts of
Mesopotamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which are
especially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plastic
figuration of Assyria.
There is another particular in which the monumental records and the
biblical tradition are in accord. During those obscure centuries that saw
the work sketched out from which the civilization of the Tigris and
Euphrates basin was, in time, to be developed, the Chaldaean population was
not homogeneous; the country was inhabited by tribes who had neither a
common origin nor a common language. This we are told in Genesis. The
earliest chiefs to build cities in Shinar are there personified in the
person of Nimrod, who is the son of Cush, and the grandson of Ham. He and
his people must be placed, therefore, in the same family as the Ethiopians,
the Egyptians, and the Libyans, the Canaanites and the Phoenicians.[31]
A little lower down in the same genealogical table we find attached to the
posterity of Shem that Asshur who, as we are told in the verses quoted
above, left the plains of Shinar in order to found Nineveh in the upper
country.[32] So, too, it was from Ur of the Chaldees that Terah, another
descendant of Shem, and, through Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish
people, came up into Canaan.[33]
The world has, unhappily, lost the work of Berosus, the Babylonish priest,
who, under the Seleucidae, did for Chaldaea what Manetho was doing almost at
the same moment for Egypt.[34] Berosus compiled the history of Chaldaea
from the national chronicles and traditions. The loss of his work is still
more to be lamented than that of Manetho. The wedges may never, perhaps, be
read with as much certainty as the hieroglyphs; the remains of
Chaldaeo-Assyrian antiquity are much less copious and well preserved than
those of the Egyptian civilization, while the gap in the existing documents
are more frequent and of a different character. And yet much precious
information, especially in these latter days, has been drawn from those
fragments of his work which have come down to us. In one of these we find
the following evidence as to the mixture of races: "At first there were at
Babylon a great number of men belonging to the different nationalities that
colonized Chaldaea."[35]
How far did that diversity go? The terms used by Berosus are vague enough,
while the Hebraic tradition seems to have preserved the memory of only two
races who lived one after the other in Chaldaea, namely, the Kushites and
the Shemites. And may not these groups, though distinct, have been more
closely connected than the Jews were willing to admit? We know how bitterly
the Jews hated those Canaanitish races against whom they waged their long
and destructive wars; and it is possible that, in order to mark the
separation between themselves and their abhorred enemies, they may have
shut their eyes to the exaggeration of the distance between the two
peoples. More than one historian is inclined to believe that the Kushites
and Shemites were less distantly related than the Hebrew writers pretend.
Almost every day criticism discovers new points of resemblance between the
Jews before the captivity and certain of their neighbours, such as the
Phoenicians. Almost the same language was spoken by each; each had the same
arts and the same symbols, while many rites and customs were common to
both. Baal and Moloch were adored in Judah and Israel as well as in Tyre
and Sidon. This is not the proper place to discuss such a question, but,
whatever view we may take of it, it seems that the researches of
Assyriologists have led to the following conclusion: That primitive Chaldaea
received and retained various ethnic elements upon its fertile soil; that
those elements in time became fused together, and that, even in the
beginning, the diversities that distinguished them one from another were
less marked than a literal acceptance of the tenth chapter of Genesis might
lead us to believe.
We cannot here undertake to explain all the conjectures to which this point
has given rise. We are without some, at least, of the qualifications
necessary for the due appreciation of the proofs, or rather of the
probabilities, which are relied on by the exponents of this or that
hypothesis. We must refer curious readers to the works of contemporary
Assyriologists; or they may, if they will, find all the chief facts brought
together in the writings of MM. Maspero and Francois Lenormant, whom we
shall often have occasion to quote.[36] We shall be content with giving, in
as few words as possible, the theory which appears at present to be
generally admitted.
There is no doubt as to the presence in Chaldaea of the Kushite tribes. It
is the Kushites, as represented by Nimrod, who are mentioned in Genesis
before any of the others; a piece of evidence which is indirectly confirmed
by the nomenclature of the Greek writers. They often employed the terms
Kissaioi and Kissioi to denote the peoples who belonged to this very part
of Asia,[37] terms under which it is easy to recognize imperfect
transliterations of a name that began its last syllable in the Semitic
tongues with the sound we render by _sh_. As the Greeks had no letters
corresponding to our _h_ and _j_, they had to do the best they could with
breathings. Their descendants had to make the same shifts when they became
subject to the Turks, and had to express every word of their conqueror's
language without possessing any signs for those sounds of _sh_ and _j_ in
which it abounded.
The same vocable is preserved to our day in the name borne by one of the
provinces of Persia, Khouzistan. The objection that the Kissaioi or Kissioi
of the classic writers and poets were placed in Susiana rather than in
Chaldaea will no longer be made. Susiana borders upon Chaldaea and belongs,
like it, to the basin of the Tigris. There is no natural frontier between
the two countries, which were closely connected both in peace and war. On
the other hand, the name of Ethiopians, often applied by the same authors
to the dwellers upon the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, recalls the
relationship which attached the Kushites of Asia to those of Africa in the
Hebrew genealogies.
We have still stronger reasons of the same kind for affirming that the
Shemites or Semites occupied an important place in Chaldaea from the very
beginning. Linguistic knowledge here comes to the aid of the biblical
narrative and confirms its ethnographical data. The language in which most
of our cuneiform inscriptions are written, the language, that is, that we
call Assyrian, is closely allied to the Hebrew. Towards the period of the
second Chaldee Empire, another dialect of the same family, the Aramaic,
seems to have been in common use from one end of Mesopotamia to the other.
A comparative study of the rites and religious beliefs of the Semitic races
would lead us to the same result. Finally, there is something very
significant in the facility with which classic writers confuse such terms
as Chaldaeans, Assyrians, and Syrians; it would seem that they recognized
but one people between the Isthmus of Suez on the south and the Taurus on
the north, between the seaboard of Phoenicia on the west and the table
lands of Iran in the east. In our day the dominant language over the whole
of the vast extent of territory which is inclosed by those boundaries is
Arabic, as it was Syriac during the early centuries of our era, and Aramaic
under the Persians and the successors of Alexander. From the commencement
of historic times the Semitic element has never ceased to play the chief
_role_ from one end of that region to the other. For Syria proper, its
pre-eminence is attested by a number of facts which leave no room for
doubt. Travellers and historians classed the inhabitants of Mesopotamia
with those of Phoenicia and Palestine, because, to their unaccustomed ears,
the differences between their languages were hardly perceptible, while
their personal characteristics were practically identical. Such affinities
and resemblances are only to be explained by a common origin, though the
point of junction may have been distant.
It has also been asserted that an Aryan element helped to compose the
population of primitive Chaldaea, that sister tribes to those of India and
Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor furnished their contingents to the mixed
population of Shinar. Some have even declared that a time came when those
tribes obtained the chief power. It may have been so, but the evidence upon
which the hypothesis rests is very slight. Granting that the Aryans did
settle in Chaldaea, they were certainly far less numerous than the other
colonists, and were so rapidly absorbed into the ranks of the majority that
neither history nor language has preserved any sensible trace of their
existence. We may therefore leave them out of the argument until fresh
evidence is forthcoming.
But the students of the inscriptions had another, and, if we accept the
theories of MM. Oppert and Francois Lenormant, a better-founded, surprise
in store for us. It seemed improbable that science would ever succeed in
mounting beyond those remote tribes, the immediate descendants of Kush and
Shem, who occupied Chaldaea at the dawn of history; they formed, to all
appearance, the most distant background, the deepest stratum, to which the
historian could hope to penetrate; and yet, when the most ancient
epigraphic texts began to yield up their secrets, the interpreters were
confronted, as they assure us, with this startling fact: the earliest
language spoken, or, at least, written, in that country, belonged neither
to the Aryan nor to the Semitic family, nor even to those African languages
among which the ancient idiom of Egypt has sometimes been placed; it was,
in an extreme degree, what we now call an _agglutinative language_. By its
grammatical system and by some elements of its vocabulary it suggests a
comparison with Finnish, Turkish, and kindred tongues.
Other indications, such as the social and religious conditions revealed by
the texts, have combined with these characteristics to convince our
Assyriologists that the first dwellers in Chaldaea--the first, that is, who
made any attempt at civilization--were Turanians, were part of that great
family of peoples who still inhabit the north of Europe and Asia, from the
marshes of the Baltic to the banks of the Amoor and the shores of the
Pacific Ocean.[38] The languages of all those peoples, though various
enough, had certain features in common. No one of them reached the delicate
and complex mechanism of internal and terminal inflexion; they were
guiltless of the subtle processes by which Aryans and Semites expressed the
finest shades of thought, and, by declining the substantive and conjugating
the verb, subordinated the secondary to the principal idea; they did not
understand how to unite, in an intimate and organic fashion, the root to
its qualifications and determinatives, to the adjectives and phrases which
give colour to a word, and indicate the precise _role_ it has to play in
the sentence in which it is used. These languages resemble each other
chiefly in their lacunae. Compare them in the dictionaries and they seem
very different, especially if we take two, such as Finnish and Chinese,
that are separated by the whole width of a continent.
It is the same with their physical types. Certain tribes whom we place in
the Turanian group have all the distinctive characteristics of the white
races. Others are hardly to be distinguished from the yellow nations.
Between these two extremes there are numerous varieties which carry us,
without any abrupt transition, from the most perfect European to the most
complete Chinese type.[39] In the Aryan family the ties of blood are
perceptible even between the most divergent branches. By a comparative
study of their languages, traditions, and religious conceptions, it has
been proved that the Hindoos upon the Ganges, the Germans on the Rhine, and
the Celts upon the Loire, are all offshoots of a single stem. Among the
Turanians the connections between one race and another are only perceptible
in the case of tribes living in close neighbourhood to one another, who
have had mutual relations over a long course of years. In such a case the
natural affinities are easily seen, and a family of peoples can be
established with certainty. The classification is less definitely marked
and clearly divided than that of the Aryan and Semitic families; but,
nevertheless, it has a real value for the historian.[40]
According to the doctrine which now seems most widely accepted, it was from
the crowded ranks of the immense army which peopled the north that the
tribes who first attempted a civilized life in the plains of Shinar and the
fertile slopes between the mountains and the left bank of the Tigris, were
thrown off. It is thought that these tribes already possessed a national
constitution, a religion, and a system of legislation, the art of writing
and the most essential industries, when they first took possession of the
lands in question.[41] A tradition still current among the eastern Turks
puts the cradle of the race in the valleys of the Altai, north of the
plateau of Pamir.[42] Whether the emigrants into Chaldaea brought the
rudiments of their civilization with them, or whether their inventive
faculties were only stirred to action after their settlement in that
fertile land, is of slight importance. In any case we may say that they
were the first to put the soil into cultivation, and to found industrious
and stationary communities along the banks of its two great rivers. Once
settled in Chaldaea, they called themselves, according to M. Oppert, the
people of SUMER, a title which is continually associated with that of "the
people of ACCAD" in the inscriptions.[43]
NOTES:
[28] _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. i. p. 15 (London, 1883,
Chapman and Hall). Upon the Chaldaean _chadoufs_ see LAYARD, _Discoveries_,
pp. 109, 110.
[29] _Genesis_ xi. 2.
[30] _Genesis_ x. 8-12.
[31] _Genesis_ x. 6-20.
[32] _Genesis_ x. 22: "The children of Shem."
[33] _Genesis_ xi. 27-32.
[34] In his paper upon the _Date des Ecrits qui portent les Noms de Berose
et de Manethou_ (Hachette, 8vo. 1873), M. ERNEST HAVET has attempted to
show that neither of those writers, at least as they are presented in the
fragments which have come down to us, deserve the credence which is
generally accorded to them. The paper is the production of a vigorous and
independent intellect, and there are many observations which should be
carefully weighed, but we do not believe that, as a whole, its
hypercritical conclusions have any chance of being adopted. All recent
progress in Egyptology and Assyriology goes to prove that the fragments in
question contain much authentic and precious information, in spite of the
carelessness with which they were transcribed, often at second and third
hand, by abbreviators of the _basse epoque_.
[35] See Sec. 2 of Fragment 1. of BEROSUS, in the _Fragmenta Historicorum
Graecorum_ of CH. MUeLLER (_Bibliotheque Grecque-Latine_ of Didot), vol. ii.
p. 496; En de te Babuloni polu plethos anthropon genesthai alloethnon
katoikesanton ten Chaldaian.
[36] Gaston MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, liv. ii.
ch. iv. _La Chaldee_. Francois LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne de
l'Orient_, liv. iv. ch. i. (3rd edition).
[37] The principal texts in which these terms are to be met with are
brought together in the _Woerterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen_ of PAPE
(3rd edition), under the words Kissia, Kissioi, Kossaioi.
[38] A single voice, that of M. Halevy, is now raised to combat this
opinion. He denies that there is need to search for any language but a
Semitic one in the oldest of the Chaldaean inscriptions. According to him,
the writing under which a Turanian idiom is said to lurk, is no more than a
variation upon the Assyrian fashion of noting words, than an early form of
writing which owed its preservation to the quasi-sacred character imparted
by its extreme antiquity. We have no intention of discussing his thesis in
these pages; we must refer those who are interested in the problem to M.
HALEVY'S dissertation in the _Journal Asiatique_ for June 1874:
_Observations critiques sur les pretendus Touraniens de la Babylonie_. M.
Stanislas Guyard shares the ideas of M. Halevy, to whom his accurate
knowledge and fine critical powers afford no little support.
[39] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 134. Upon the etymology of
_Turanians_ see MAX MUeLLER'S _Science of Language_, 2nd edition, p. 300,
_et seq._ Upon the constituent characteristics of the Turanian group of
races and languages other pages of the same work may be consulted.... The
distinction between Turan and Iran is to be found in the literature of
ancient Persia, but its importance became greater in the Middle Ages, as
may be seen by reference to the great epic of Firdusi, the _Shah-Nameh_.
The kings of Iran and Turan are there represented as implacable enemies. It
was from the Persian tradition that Professor Mueller borrowed the term
which is now generally used to denote those northern races of Asia that are
neither Aryans nor Semites.
[40] This family is sometimes called _Ural-Altaic_, a term formed in
similar fashion to that of _Indo-Germanic_, which has now been deposed by
the term Aryan. It is made up of the names of two mountain chains which
seem to mark out the space over which its tribes were spread. Like the word
_Indo-Germanic_, it made pretensions to exactitude which were only
partially justified.
[41] This is the opinion of M. OPPERT. He was led to the conclusion that
their writing was invented in a more northern climate than that of Chaldaea,
by a close study of its characters. There is one sign representing a bear,
an animal which does not exist in Chaldaea, while the lions which were to be
found there in such numbers had to be denoted by paraphrase, they were
called _great dogs_. The palm tree had no sign of its own. See in the
_Journal Asiatique_ for 1875, p. 466, a note to an answer to M. Halevy
entitled _Summerien ou rien_.
[42] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 135.
[43] These much disputed terms, Sumer and Accad, are, according to MM.
Halevy and Guyard, nothing but the geographical titles of two districts of
Lower Chaldaea.
Sec. 4.--_The Wedges._
The writing of Chaldaea, like that of Egypt, was, in the beginning, no more
than the abridged and conventionalized representation of familiar objects.
The principle was identical with that of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and of
the oldest Chinese characters. There are no texts extant in which images
are exclusively used,[44] but we can point to a few where the ideograms
have preserved their primitive forms sufficiently to enable us to recognize
their origin with certainty. Among those Assyrian syllabaries which have
been so helpful in the decipherment of the wedges, there is one tablet
where the primitive form of each symbol is placed opposite the group of
strokes which had the same value in after ages.[45]
This tablet is, however, quite exceptional, and, as a rule, the cuneiform
characters cannot thus be traced to their primitive form. But
well-ascertained and independent facts allow us to come to certain
conclusions which even this scanty evidence is enough to confirm.
In inventing the process of writing and bringing it to perfection, the
human intellect worked on the same lines among the Turanians of Chaldaea as
it did everywhere else. The point of departure and the early stages have
been the same for all peoples, although some have stopped half-way and
others when three-fourths of the journey were complete. The supreme
discovery which should crown the effort is the attribution of a special
sign to each of the elementary articulations of the human voice. This final
object, an object towards which the most gifted nations of antiquity were
working for so many centuries, was just missed by the Egyptians. They were,
we may say, wrecked in port, and the glory of creating the alphabet that
men will use as long as they think and write was reserved for the
Phoenicians.
Even when their civilization was at its height the Babylonians never came
so near to alphabetism as the Egyptians. This is not the place for an
inquiry into the reasons of their failure, nor even for an explanation how
signs with a phonetic value forced themselves in among the ideograms, and
became gradually more and more important. Our interest in the two kinds of
writing is of a different nature; we have to learn and explain their
influence upon the plastic arts in the countries where they were used.
In our attempt to define the style of Egyptian sculpture and to give
reasons for its peculiar characteristics, we felt obliged to attribute
great importance to the habits of eye and hand suggested and confirmed by
the cutting and painting of the hieroglyphs. In their monumental
inscriptions, if nowhere else, the symbols of the Egyptian system retained
their concrete imagery to the end; and the images, though abridged and
simplified, never lost their resemblance;[46] and if it is necessary to
know something more than the particular animal or thing which they
represent before we can get at their meaning, that is only because in most
cases they had a metaphorical or even a purely phonetic signification as
well as their ideographic one. For the most part, however, it is easy to
recognize their origin, and in this they differ greatly from the symbols of
the first Chaldaean alphabet. In the very oldest documents there are certain
ideograms that, when we are warned, remind us of the natural objects from
which their forms have been taken, but the connection is slight and
difficult of apprehension. Even in the case of those characters whose forms
most clearly suggest their true figurative origin, it would have been
impossible to assign its prototype to each without the help of later texts,
where, with more or less modification, they formed parts of sentences whose
general significance was known. Finally, the Assyrian syllabaries have
preserved the meaning of signs, that, so far as we can judge, would
otherwise have been stumbling-blocks even to the wise men of Nineveh when
they were confronted with such ancient inscriptions as those whose
fragments are still found among the ruins of Lower Chaldaea.
Even in the remote days that saw the most venerable of these inscriptions
cut, the images upon which their forms were based had been rendered almost
unrecognizable by a curious habit, or caprice, which is unique in history.
Writing had not yet become entirely _cuneiform_, it had not yet adopted
those triangular strokes which are called sometimes nails, sometimes
arrow-heads, and sometimes wedges, as the exclusive constituents of its
character. If we examine the tablets recovered by Mr. Loftus from the ruins
of Warka, the ancient Erech (Fig. 1), or the inscriptions upon the diorite
statues found at Tello by M. de Sarzec (Fig. 2), we shall find that in the
distant period from which those writings date, most of the characters had
what we may call an unbroken trace.[47] This trace, like that of the
hieroglyphs, would have been well fitted for the succinct imitation of
natural objects but for a rigid exclusion of those curves of which nature
is so fond. This exclusion is complete, all the lines are straight, and cut
one another at various angles. The horror of a curve is pushed so far that
even the sun, which is represented by a circle in Egyptian and other
ideographic systems, is here a lozenge.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Brick from Erech.]
It is very unlikely that even the oldest of these texts show us Chaldaean
writing in its earliest stage. Analogy would lead us to think that these
figures must at one time have been more directly imitative. However that
may have been, the image must have been very imperfect from the day that
the rectilinear trace came into general use. Figures must then have rapidly
degenerated into conventional signs. Those who used them could no longer
pretend to actually represent the objects they wished to denote. They must
have been content to suggest their ideas by means of a character whose
value had been determined by usage. This transformation would be
accelerated by certain habits which forced themselves upon the people as
soon as they were finally established in the land of Shinar.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Fragment of an inscription engraved upon the back
of a statue from Tello. Louvre. (Length 10-1/4 inches.)]
We are told that there are certain expressions in the Assyrian language
which lead to the belief that the earliest writing was on the bark of
trees, that it offered the first surface to the scribe in those distant
northern regions from which the early inhabitants of Chaldaea were
emigrants. It is certain that the dwellers in that vast alluvial plain were
compelled by the very nature of the soil to use clay for many purposes to
which no other civilization has put it. In Mesopotamia, as in the valley of
the Nile, the inhabitants had but to stoop to pick up an excellent
modelling clay, fine in texture and close grained--a clay which had been
detached from the mountain sides by the two great rivers, and deposited in
inexhaustible quantities over the whole width of the double valley. We
shall see hereafter what an important part bricks, crude, fired, and
enamelled, played in the construction and decoration of Chaldaean buildings.
It was the same material that received most of their writing.
Clay offered a combination of facility with durability which no other
material could equal. While soft and wet it readily took the shape of any
figure impressed upon it. The deftly-handled tool could engrave characters
upon its yielding surface almost as fast as the reed could trace them upon
papyrus, and much more rapidly than the chisel could cut them in wood.
Again, in its final condition as solid terra-cotta, it offered a chance of
duration far beyond that of either wood or papyrus. Once safely through the
kiln it had nothing to fear short of deliberate destruction. The message
intrusted to a terra-cotta slab or cylinder could only be finally lost by
the reduction of the latter to powder. At _Hillah_, the town which now
occupies a corner of the vast space once covered by the streets of Babylon,
bricks are found built into the walls to this day, upon which the Assyrian
scholar may read as he runs the royal style and titles of
Nebuchadnezzar.[48]
As civilization progressed, the dwellers upon the Persian Gulf felt an
ever-increasing attraction towards the art of writing. It afforded a
medium of communication with distant points, and a bond of connection
between one generation and another; by its means the son could profit by
the accumulated experience of the father. The slab of terra-cotta was the
most obvious material for its reception. It cost almost nothing, while such
an elaborate substance as the papyrus of Egypt can never have been very
cheap. It lent itself kindly to the service demanded of it, and the writer
who had confided his thoughts to its surface had only to fire it for an
hour or two to secure them a kind of eternity. This latter precaution did
not require any very lengthy journey; brick kilns must have blazed day and
night from one end of Chaldaea to another.
If we consider for a moment the properties of the material, and examine the
remains which have come down to us, we shall understand at once what
writing was certain to become under the triple impulse of a desire to write
much, to write fast, and to use clay as we moderns use paper. Suppose
oneself compelled to trace upon clay figures whose lines necessitated
continual changes of direction; at each angle or curve it would be
necessary to turn the hand, and with it the tool, because the clay surface,
however tender it might be, would still afford a certain amount of
resistance. Such resistance would hardly be an obstacle, but it would in
some degree diminish the speed with which the tool could be driven. Now, as
soon as writing comes into common use, most of those who employ it in the
ordinary matters of life have no time to waste. It is important that all
hindrances to rapid work should be avoided. The designs of the old writing
with their strokes sometimes broken, sometimes continuous, sometimes thick,
and sometimes thin, wearied the writer and took much time, and at last it
came about that the clay was attacked in a number of short, clear-cut
triangular strokes each similar in form to its fellow. As these little
depressions had all the same depth and the same shape, and as the hand had
neither to change its pressure nor to shift its position, it arrived with
practice at an extreme rapidity of execution.
Some have asserted that the instrument with which these marks were made has
been found among the Mesopotamian ruins. It is, we are told, a small style
in bone or ivory with a bevelled triangular point.[49] And yet when we look
with attention at these terra-cotta inscriptions, we fall to doubting
whether the hollow marks of which they are composed could have been made by
such a point. There is no sign of those scratches which we should expect to
find left by a sharp instrument in its process of cutting out and removing
part of the clay. The general appearance of the surface leads us rather to
think that the strokes were made by thrusting some instrument with a sharp
ridge like the corner of a flat rule, into the clay, and that nothing was
taken away as in the case of wood or marble, but an impression made by
driving back the earth into itself.[50] However this may be, the first
element of the cuneiform writing was a hollow incision made by a single
movement of the hand, and of a form which may be compared to a greatly
elongated triangle. These triangles were sometimes horizontal, sometimes
vertical, sometimes oblique, and when arranged in more or less complex
groups, could easily furnish all the necessary symbols. In early ages, the
elements of some of these ideographic or phonetic signs--signs which
afterwards became mere complex groups of wedges--were so arranged as to
suggest the primitive forms--that is, the more or less roughly blocked out
images--from which they had originally sprung. The _fish_ may easily be
recognized in the following group [Illustration]: while the character that
stands for the _sun_, [Illustration], reminds us of the lozenge which was
the primitive sign for that luminary. In the two symbols [Illustration] and
[Illustration], we may, with a little good will, recognize a _shovel_ with
its handle, and an _ear_. But even in the oldest texts the instances in
which the primitive types are still recognizable are very few; the wedge
has in nearly every case completely transfigured, and, so to speak,
decomposed, their original features.
This is the case even in what is called the Sumerian system itself, and
when its signs and processes were borrowed by other nations, the tendency
to abandon figuration was of course still more marked. It has now been
clearly proved that the wedges have served the turn of at least four
languages beside that of the people who devised them, and that in passing
from one people to another their groups never lost the phonetic value
assigned to them by their first inventors.[51]
In the absence of this extended employment all attempts to decipher the
wedges would have been condemned to almost certain failure from the first,
but as soon as its existence had been placed beyond doubt, there was every
reason to count upon success. It allowed the words of a text to be
transliterated into phonetic characters, and that being done, to discover
their meaning was but an affair of time, patience, and method.
* * * * *
We see then, that the system of signs invented by the first inhabitants of
Chaldaea had a vogue similar to that which attended the alphabet of the
Phoenicians in the Mediterranean basin. For all the peoples of Western Asia
it was a powerful agent of progress and civilization. We can understand,
therefore, how it was that the wedge, the essential element of all those
groups which make up cuneiform writing, became for the Assyrian one of the
holy symbols of the divine intelligence. Upon the stone called the _Caillou
Michaud_, from the name of its discoverer, it is shown standing upon an
altar and receiving the prayers and homage of a priest.[52] It deserved all
the respect it received; thanks to it the Babylonian genius was able to
rough out and hand down to posterity the science from which Greece was to
profit so largely.
And yet, in spite of all the services it had rendered, this form of writing
fell into disuse towards the commencement of our era; it was supplanted
even in the country of its origin by alphabets derived from that of the
Phoenicians.[53] It had one grave defect: its phonetic signs always
represented syllables. No one of the wedge-using communities made that
decisive step in advance of which the honour belongs to the Phoenicians
alone. No one of them carried the analysis of language so far as to reduce
the syllable to its elements, and to distinguish the consonant, mute by
itself, from the vowel upon which it depends, if we may say so, for an
active life.
All those races who have not borrowed their alphabet _en bloc_ from their
neighbours or predecessors but have invented it for themselves, began with
the imitation of objects. At first we have a mere outline, made to gratify
some special want.[54] The more these figures were repeated, the more they
tended towards a single stereotyped form, and that an epitomized and
conventional one. They were only signs, so that it was not in the least
necessary to painfully reproduce every feature of the original model, as if
the latter were copied for its plastic beauty. As time passed on, writing
and drawing won separate existences; but at first they were not to be
distinguished one from the other, the latter was but a use of the former,
and, in a sense, we may even say that writing was the first and simplest of
the plastic arts.
In Egypt this art remained more faithful to its origin than elsewhere. Even
when it had attained the highest development it ever reached in that
country, and was on the point of crowning its achievements by the invention
of a true alphabet, it continued to reproduce the general shapes and
contours of objects. The hieroglyphs were truly a system of writing by
which all the sounds of the language could be noted and almost reduced to
their final elements; but they were also, up to their last day, a system of
design in which the characteristic features of genera and species, if not
of individuals, were carefully distinguished.
Was it the same in Chaldaea? Had the methods, and what we may call the style
of the national writing, any appreciable influence upon the plastic arts,
upon the fashion in which living nature was understood and reproduced? We
do not think it had, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek.
The very oldest of the ideographic signs of Chaldaea are much farther
removed from the objects upon which they were based than the Egyptian
hieroglyphs; and when the wedge became the primary element of all the
characters, the scribe ceased to give even the most distant hint of the
real forms of the things signified. Throughout the period which saw those
powerful empires flourishing in Mesopotamia whose creations were admired
and copied by all the peoples of Western Asia, the more or less complex
groups and arrangements of the cuneiform writing, to whatever language
applied, had no aim but to represent sometimes whole words, sometimes the
syllables of which those words were composed. Under such conditions it
seems unlikely that the forms of the written characters can have
contributed much to form the style of artists who dealt with the figures of
men and animals. We may say that the sculptors and painters of Chaldaea were
not, like those of Egypt, the scholars of the scribes.
And yet there is a certain analogy between the handling of the inscriptions
and that of the bas-reliefs. It is doubtless in the nature of the materials
employed that we must look for the final explanation of this similarity,
but it is none the less true that writing was a much earlier and a much
more general art than sculpture. The Chaldaean artist must have carried out
his modelling with a play of hand and tool learnt in cutting texts upon
clay, and still more, upon stone. The same chisel-stroke is found in both;
very sure, very deep, and a little harsh.
However this may be, we cannot embark upon the history of Art in Chaldaea
without saying a word upon her graphic system. If there be one proof more
important than another of the great part played by the Chaldaeans in the
ancient world, it is the success of their writing, and its diffusion as far
as the shores of the Euxine and the eastern islands of the Mediterranean.
Some cuneiform texts have lately been discovered in Cappadocia, the
language of which is that of the country,[55] and the most recent
discoveries point to the conclusion that the Cypriots borrowed from
Babylonia the symbols by which the words of the Greek dialect spoken in
their island were noted.[56]
We have yet to visit more than one famous country. In our voyage across
the plains where antique civilization was sketched out and started on its
long journey to maturity, we shall, whenever we cross the frontiers of a
new people, begin by turning our attention for a space to their
inscriptions; and wherever we are met by those characters which are found
in their oldest shapes in the texts from Lower Chaldaea, there we shall
surely find plastic forms and motives whose primitive types are to be
traced in the remains of Chaldaean art. A man's writing will often tell us
where his early days were passed and under what masters his youthful
intellect received the bent that only death can take away.
NOTES:
[44] We are told that there is an inscription at Susa of this character. It
has been examined but not as yet reproduced. We can, therefore, make no use
of it. See Francois LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne_, vol. ii. p.
156.
[45] M. LENORMANT reproduces this tablet in his _Histoire ancienne de
l'Orient_ (9th edition, vol. i. p. 420). The whole of the last chapter in
this volume should be carefully studied. It is well illustrated, and
written with admirable clearness. The same theories and discoveries are
explained at greater length in the introduction to M. LENORMANT'S great
work entitled _Essai sur la Propagation de l'Alphabet phenicien_, of which
but one volume has as yet appeared (Maisonneuve, 8vo., 1872). At the very
commencement of his investigations M. OPPERT had called attention to the
curious forms presented by certain characters in the oldest inscriptions.
See _Expedition scientifique de Mesopotamie_, vol. ii. pp. 62, 3, notably
the paragraph entitled _Origine Hieroglyphique de l'Ecriture anarienne_.
The texts upon which the remarks of MM. Oppert and Lenormant were mainly
founded were published under the title of _Early Inscriptions from Chaldaea_
in the invaluable work of Sir Henry RAWLINSON (_A Selection from the
Historical Inscriptions of Chaldaea, Assyria, and Babylonia_, prepared for
publication by Major-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, assisted by Edwin Norris,
British Museum, folio, 1861).
[46] See the _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. ii. pp. 350-3 (?).
[47] This peculiarity is still more conspicuous in the engraved limestone
pavement which was discovered in the same place, but the fragments are so
mutilated as to be unfit for reproduction here.
[48] LAYARD, _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 506.
[49] OPPERT, _Expedition scientifique de Mesopotamie_, vol. ii. pp. 62, 3.
[50] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. ii. p. 180.
[51] A list of these languages, and a condensed but lucid explanation of
the researches which have led to the more or less complete decipherment of
the different groups of texts will be found in the _Manuel de l'Histoire
ancienne de l'Orient_ of LENORMANT, 3rd edition, vol. ii. pp. 153,
&c.--"Several languages--we know of five up to the present moment--have
given the same phonetic value to these symbols. It is clear, however, that
a single nation must have invented the system," OPPERT, _Journal
Asiatique_, 1875, p. 474. M. Oppert has given an interesting account of the
mode of decipherment in the _Introduction_ and in _Chapter 1._ of the first
volume of his _Expedition scientifique de Mesopotamie_.
[52] A reproduction of this stone will be found farther on. The detail in
question is engraved in LAYARD'S _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. ii. p.
181.
[53] The latest cuneiform inscription we possess dates from the time of
Domitian. It has been published by M. OPPERT, _Melanges d'Archeologie
egyptienne et assyrienne_, vol. i. p. 23 (Vieweg, 1873, 4to.). Some very
long ones, from the time of the Seleucidae and the early Arsacidae, have been
discovered.
[54] Hence the name _pictography_ which some scholars apply to this
primitive form of writing. The term is clear enough, but unluckily it is
ill composed: it is a hybrid of Greek and Latin, which is sufficient to
prevent its acceptance by us.
[55] See the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, twelfth
session, 1881-2.
[56] See MICHEL BREAL, _Le Dechiffrement des Inscriptions cypriotes_
(_Journal des Savants_, August and September, 1877). In the last page of
his article, M. Breal, while fully admitting the objections, asserts that
it is "difficult to avoid recognizing the general resemblance (difficile de
meconnaitre la ressemblance generale)." He refers us to the paper of Herr
DEECKE, entitled _Der Ursprung der Kyprischen Sylbenschrift, eine
palaeographische Untersuchung_, Strasbourg, 1877. Another hypothesis has
been lately started, and an attempt made to affiliate the Cypriot syllabary
to the as yet little understood hieroglyphic system of the Hittites. See a
paper by Professor A. H. SAYCE, _A Forgotten Empire in Asia Minor_, in No.
608 of _Fraser's Magazine_.
Sec. 5.--_The History of Chaldaea and Assyria._
We cannot here attempt even to epitomize the history of those great empires
that succeeded one another in Mesopotamia down to the period of the Persian
conquest. Until quite lately their history was hardly more than a tissue of
tales and legends behind which it was difficult to catch a glimpse of the
few seriously attested facts, of the few people who were more than shadows,
and of the dynasties whose sequence could be established. The foreground
was taken up by fabulous creatures like Ninus and Semiramis, compounded by
the lively imagination of the Greeks of features taken from several of the
building and conquering sovereigns of Babylon and Nineveh. So, in the case
of Egypt, was forged the image of that great Sesostris who looms so large
in the pages of the Greek historians and combines many Pharaohs of the
chief Theban dynasties in his own person. The romantic tales of Ctesias
were united by Rollin and his emulators with other statements of perhaps
still more doubtful value. The book of Daniel was freely drawn upon, and
yet it is certain that it was not written until the year which saw the
death of Antiochus Epiphanes. The book of Daniel is polemical, not
historical; the Babylon in which its scene is laid is a Babylon of the
imagination; the writer chose it as the best framework for his lessons to
the Israelites, and for the menaces he wished to pour out upon their
enemies.[57] Better materials are to be found in other parts of the Bible,
in _Kings_, in the _Chronicles_, and in the older prophets. But it would be
an ungrateful task for the critic to attempt to work out an harmonious
result from evidence so various both in origin and value. The most skilful
would fail in the endeavour. With such materials it would be impossible to
arrive at any coherent result that would be, we do not say true, but
probable.
The discovery of Nineveh, the exploration of the ruins in Chaldaea, and the
decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, have changed all this, although
much of the detail has yet to be filled in, especially so far as the
earlier periods are concerned. We are now able to trace the leading lines,
to mark the principal divisions, in a word, to put together the skeleton of
a future history. We are no longer ignorant of the origin of Babylonish
civilization nor of the directions in which it spread; we can grasp both
the strong differences and the close bonds of connection between Assyria
and Chaldaea, and understand the swing of the pendulum that in the course of
two thousand years shifted the political centre of the country backwards
and forwards from Babylon to Nineveh, while from the mountains of Armenia
to the Persian Gulf, beliefs, manners, arts, spoken dialects, and written
characters, preserved so many striking resemblances as to put their common
origin beyond a doubt.
Not a year passes but the discovery of fresh documents and the process of
translation allows us to retouch and complete the story. MM. Maspero and
Lenormant have placed it before us as shaped by their most recent studies,
and we shall take them for our guide in a rapid indication of the ruling
character and approximate duration of each of those periods into which the
twenty centuries of development may be divided. We shall then have some
fixed points by which to guide our steps in the vast region whose monuments
we are about to explore. So that if we say that a certain fragment belongs
to the _first_ or _second Chaldaean Empire_, our readers will know, not
perhaps its exact date, but at least its relative age, and all risk of
confusing the time of Ourkam or Hammourabi with that of Nebuchadnezzar
will be avoided.
* * * * *
When we attempt to mount the stream of history and to pierce the mists
which become ever thicker as we near its source, what is it that we see? We
see the lower part of the basin through which the twin rivers make their
way, entirely occupied by tribes of various origin and blood whose ethnic
characteristics we have endeavoured to point out. These mixed populations
are divided by the Tigris into two distinct groups. These groups often came
into violent collision, and in spite of mutual relations kept up through a
long series of years, the line of demarcation between them ever remained
distinct.
Towards the east, in the plain which borders the river, and upon the
terraces which rise one above the other up to the plateau of Iran, we have
the country called by the Greeks Susiana, and by the Hebrews the kingdom of
Elam. West of the Tigris, in Mesopotamia, the first Chaldaean Empire is
slowly taking shape.
The eastern state, that of which Susa was the capital, was, at intermittent
periods, a great military power, and more than once poured its hosts, not
only over Babylonia, but over the Syrian provinces to the west of the
Euphrates. But in these momentary successes, nevertheless, the part played
by this state was, on the whole, a subordinate one. It spent itself in
bloody conflicts with the Mesopotamian empires, to which it became subject
in the end, while at no time does it appear to have done anything to
advance civilization either by isolated inventions or by general
perseverance in the ways of progress. We know very little of its internal
history, and nothing to speak of about its religion and government, its
manners and laws; but the few monuments which have been discovered suffice
to prove that its art had no independent existence, that it was never
anything better than a secondary form of Chaldaean art, a branch broken off
from the parent stem.
We are better, or, rather, less ill, informed, in the case of the first
Chaldee Empire. The fragments of Berosus give us some knowledge of its
beginnings, so far, at least, as the story was preserved in the national
traditions, and the remains by which tradition can be tested and corrected
are more numerous than in the case of Susiana.
The chronicles on which Berosus based his work began with a divine
dynasty, which was succeeded by a human dynasty of fabulous duration. These
legendary sovereigns, like the patriarchs of the Bible, each lived for many
centuries, and to them, as well as to the gods who preceded them, certain
myths were attached of which we find traces in the surviving monuments.
Such myths were the fish god, Oannes, and the Chaldaic deluge with its
Noah, Xisouthros.[58]
This double period, with its immoderate duration, corresponds to those dark
and confused ages during which the intellect of man was absorbed in the
constant and painful struggle against nature, during which he had no
leisure either to take note of time or to count the generations as they
passed. After this long succession of gods and heroes, Berosus gives what
he calls a _Medic_ dynasty, in which, it has been thought, the memory of
some period of Aryan supremacy has survived. In any case, we have serious
reasons for thinking that the third of the dynasties of Berosus, with its
eleven kings, was of Susian origin. Without speaking of other indications
which have been ingeniously grouped by modern criticism, a direct
confirmation of this hypothesis is to be found in the evidence of the
Bible. In the latter we find Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, master of the
whole basin of the Tigris and Euphrates in the time of Abraham. Among his
vassals were Amraphel, king of Shinar, and Arioch, king of Ellasar, the two
principal cities of Assyria.[59] All doubts upon this point have been
banished since the texts in which Assurbanipal, the last of the Ninevite
conquerors, vaunts his exploits, have been deciphered. In two of these
inscriptions he tells us how he took Susa 1,635 years after
Chedornakhounta, king of Elam, had conquered Babylon; he found, he says, in
that city sacred statues which had been carried off from Erech by the king
of Elam. He brought them back again to Chaldaea and re-established them in
the sanctuary from which they had been violently removed.[60]
Assurbanipal took Susa in 660. All antiquity declares that the Babylonians
and the Syrians had a taste for chronology at a very early period. This is
proved by the eponymous system of the Assyrians, a system much to be
preferred to the Egyptian habit of dating their monuments with the year of
the current reign only.[61] Moreover, have not the ancients perpetuated the
fame of the astronomical tables drawn up by the Chaldaeans and founded upon
observations dating back to a very remote epoch? Such tables could not have
been made without a strict count of time. We have, then, no reason to doubt
the figure named by Assurbanipal, and his chronicle may be taken to give
the oldest date in the history of Chaldaea, B.C. 2,295, as the year of the
Susian conquest.
The Elamite dynasty was succeeded, according to Berosus, by a native
Chaldaean dynasty. Berosus--and his dates are held in great respect--places
the appearance of this new royal family in 2,047, giving it forty-nine
sovereigns and 458 years of duration. We are thus brought down to the
conquest of Mesopotamia by the Egyptian Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty.
The names of the Chaldaean princes have been transcribed by those Byzantine
chroniclers to whom we owe the few and short fragments of Berosus that are
still extant.
On the other hand, inscriptions dug up upon the sites of the Chaldaean
cities have furnished us with fifty royal names which may, it is thought,
be ascribed to the period whose chief divisions we have just laid down.
Assyriologists have classed them as well as they could--from the more or
less archaic characters of their language and writing, from the elements of
which the proper names are composed, and from the relationships which some
of the texts show to have existed between one prince and another--but they
are still far from establishing a continuous series such as those that have
been arranged for the Pharaohs even of the Ancient Empire. Interruptions
are frequent, and their extent is beyond our power even to guess. Primitive
Chaldaea has unluckily left behind it no document like the list of Manetho
to help us in the arrangement of the royal names with which the monuments
are studded.
We do not even know how the earliest royal name upon the inscriptions
should be read; it is more to avoid speaking of him by a paraphrase than
for any other reason that the name Ourkam has been assigned to the prince
whose traces are to be found sprinkled over the ruins of most of the
southern cities. The characters of the texts stamped upon bricks recovered
from buildings erected by him, have, as all Assyriologists know, a peculiar
physiognomy of their own. Ourkam is the Menes of Chaldaea, and his date is
put long before that Susian conquest of which we have spoken above. The
seals of Ourkam (see Fig. 3) and of his son Ilgi[62] have been found. The
name of the latter occurs almost as often as that of his father among the
ruins of Southern Chaldaea.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Seal of Ourkam.]
The oldest cities of Lower Chaldaea date from this remote epoch, namely, Ur,
now _Mugheir_ or the _bituminous_, Urukh now _Warka_, Larsam (_Senkerch_),
Nipour (_Niffer_), Sippara, Borsippa, Babylon, &c. Ur, on the right bank of
the Euphrates and near its ancient mouth, seems to have been the first
capital of the country and its chief commercial centre in those early
times. The premiership of Babylon as a holy city and seat of royalty cannot
have been established until much later. The whole country between Hillah
and Bassorah is now little removed from a desert. Here and there rise a few
tents or reed huts belonging to the Montefik Arabs, a tribe of savage
nomads and the terror of travellers. Europeans have succeeded in exploring
that inhospitable country only under exceptional circumstances.[63] And yet
it was there, between two or three thousand years before our era, that the
intermingling of ideas and races took place which gave birth to the
civilization of Chaldaea.
In order to find a king to whom we can give a probable date we have to come
down as far as Ismi-Dagan, who should figure in the fourth dynasty of
Berosus. Tiglath-Pileser the First, who reigned in Assyria at the end of
the twelfth century, has left us an official document in which he recounts
how he had restored in Ellasar (now _Kaleh-Shergat_), a temple of Oannes
founded by Ismi-Dagan seven hundred years before. We are led therefore to
place the latter king about 1800.[64] We learn at the same time that
Assyria was inhabited, in the days of Ismi-Dagan, by a people who borrowed
their gods from Chaldaea, and were dependents of the sovereign of the latter
country. It was in fact upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, far enough
from Assyria, that Oannes made his first revelation, and it is at Ur in the
same region that the names of Ismi-Dagan and of his sons Goun-goun and
Samsibin are to be found stamped upon the bricks. We may, therefore, look
upon their epoch as that in which the first Chaldee Empire reached its
apogee. It then embraced all Mesopotamia, from the slopes of Mount Zagros
to the out-fall of the two great rivers.
The sovereigns of Chaldaea, like the Pharaohs of Egypt, toiled with
intelligence and unremitting perseverance to develop the resources of the
vast domain of which they found themselves masters. They set on foot great
public works whose memory survives here and there, to this day. From the
moment when the first colonists, of whatever race, appeared in the
country, they must have set about regulating the water courses; they must
have taken measures to profit by the floods to form reserves, and to
utilize the natural fall of the land, slight though it was, for the
distribution of the fertilizing liquid. The first groups of agriculturists
were established in the immediate neighbourhood of the Tigris and
Euphrates, where nothing more was required for the irrigation of the fields
than a few channels cut through the banks of the stream, but when the time
arrived for the settlement of the regions at some distance from both
rivers, more elaborate measures had to be taken; a systematic plan had to
be devised and carried out by concerted action. That the kings of Chaldaea
were quite equal to the task thus laid upon them is proved by the
inscriptions of HAMMOURABI, one of the successors of Ismi-Dagan, which have
been translated and commented upon by M. Joachim Menant.[65]
The canal to which this king boasts of having given his name, the
_Nahar-Hammourabi_, was called in later days the royal canal,
_Nahar-Malcha_. Herodotus saw and admired it, its good condition was an
object of care to the king himself, and we know that it was considerably
repaired by Nebuchadnezzar. It may be compared to a main artery; smaller
vessels flowed from it right and left, throwing off in their turn still
smaller branches, and ending in those capillaries which carried refreshment
to the roots of each thirsty palm. Even in our day the traveller in the
province of Bagdad may follow one of these ancient beds for an hour or two
without turning to the right or the left, and their banks, though greatly
broken in many places, still rise above the surrounding soil and afford a
welcome causeway for the voyager across the marshy plains.[66] All these
apparent accidents of the ground are vestiges left by the great hydraulic
works of that Chaldee Empire which began to loom through the shadows of the
past some twenty years ago, and has gradually been taking form ever since.
When civilization makes up its mind to re-enter upon that country, nothing
more will be needed for the re-awakening in it of life and reproductive
energy, than the restoration of the great works undertaken by the
contemporaries of Abraham and Jacob.
* * * * *
According to all appearance it was the Egyptian conquest about sixteen
centuries B.C., that led to the partition of Mesopotamia. Vassals of
Thothmes and Rameses, called by Berosus the "Arab kings," sat upon the
throne of Babylon. The tribes of Upper Mesopotamia were farther from Egypt,
and their chiefs found it easier to preserve their independence. At first
each city had its own prince, but in time one of these petty kingdoms
absorbed the rest, and Nineveh became the capital of an united Assyria. As
the years passed away the frontiers of the nation thus constituted were
pushed gradually southwards until all Mesopotamia was brought under one
sceptre. This consummation appears to have been complete by the end of the
fourteenth century, at which period Egypt, enfeebled and rolled back upon
herself, ceased to make her influence felt upon the Euphrates. Even then
Babylon kept her own kings, but they had sunk to be little more than
hereditary satraps receiving investiture from Nineveh. Over and over again
Babylon attempted to shake off the yoke of her neighbour; but down to the
seventh century her revolts were always suppressed, and the Assyrian
supremacy re-established after more or less desperate conflicts.
During nearly half a century, from about 1060 to 1020 B.C., Babylon seems
to have recovered the upper hand. The victories of her princes put an end
to what is called the FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. But after one or two
generations a new family mounted the northern throne, and, toiling
energetically for a century or so to establish the grandeur of the
monarchy, founded the SECOND ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. The upper country regained
its ascendency by the help of military institutions whose details now
escape us, although their results may be traced throughout the later
history of Assyria. From the tenth century onwards the effects of these
institutions become visible in expeditions made by the armies of Assyria,
now to the shores of the Persian Gulf or the Caspian, and now through the
mountains of Armenia into the plains of Cappadocia, or across the Syrian
desert to the Lebanon and the coast cities of Phoenicia. The first princes
whose figured monuments--in contradistinction to mere inscriptions--have
come down to us, belonged to those days. The oldest of all was
ASSURNAZIRPAL, whose residence was at CALACH (_Nimroud_). The bas-reliefs
with which his palace was decorated are now in the Louvre and the British
Museum, most of them in the latter.[67] They may be recognized at once by
the band of inscription which passes across the figures and reproduces one
text again and again (Fig. 4). To Assurnazirpal's son SHALMANESER III.
belongs the obelisk of basalt which also stands in the British Museum. Its
four faces are adorned with reliefs and with a running commentary engraved
with extreme care.[68]
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Genius in the attitude of adoration. From the
North-west Palace at Nimroud. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
Shalmaneser was an intrepid man of war. The inscriptions on his obelisk
recall the events of thirty-one campaigns waged against the neighbouring
peoples under the leadership of the king himself. He was always victorious,
but the nations whom he crushed never accepted defeat. As soon as his back
was well turned they flew to arms, and again drew him from his repose in
the great palace which he had built at Calach, close to that of his
father.[69]
Under the immediate successors of Shalmaneser the Assyrian _prestige_ was
maintained at a high level by dint of the same lavish bloodshed and
truculent energy; but towards the eighth century it began to decline. There
was then a period of languor and decadence, some echo of which, and of its
accompanying disasters, seems to have been embodied by the Greeks in the
romantic tale of Sardanapalus. No shadow of confirmation for the story of a
first destruction of Nineveh is to be found in the inscriptions, and, in
the middle of the same century, we again find the Assyrian arms triumphant
under the leadership of TIGLATH PILESER II., a king modelled after the
great warriors of the earlier days. This prince seems to have carried his
victorious arms as far east as the Indus, and west as the frontiers of
Egypt.
And yet it was only under his second successor, SARYOUKIN, or, to give him
his popular name, SARGON, the founder of a new dynasty, that Syria, with
the exception of Tyre, was brought into complete submission after a great
victory over the Egyptians (721-704).[70] In the intervals of his campaigns
Sargon built the town and palace which have been discovered at Khorsabad,
_Dour-Saryoukin_, or the "town of Sargon."
His son SENNACHERIB equalled him both as a soldier and as a builder. He
began by crushing the rebels of Elam and Chaldaea with unflinching severity;
in his anger he almost exterminated the inhabitants of Babylon, the
perennial seat of revolt; but, on the other hand, he repaired and restored
Nineveh. Most of his predecessors had been absentees from the capital, and
had neglected its buildings. They had preferred to place their own
habitations where they could escape from the crowd and the dangers it
implied. But Sennacherib was of another mind. He chose a site well within
the city for the magnificent palace which Mr. Layard has been the means of
restoring to the world. This building is now known as _Kouyundjik_, from
the name of the village perched upon the mound within which the buildings
of Sennacherib were hidden.[71]
Sennacherib rebuilt the walls, the towers, and the quays of Nineveh at the
same time, so that the capital, which had never ceased to be the strongest
and most populous city of the empire, again became the residence of the
king--a distinction which it was to preserve until the fast approaching
date of its final destruction.
The son of Sennacherib, ESARHADDON, and his grandson, ASSURBANIPAL, pushed
the adventures and conquests of the Assyrian arms still farther. They
subdued the whole north of Arabia, and invaded Egypt more than once. They
took and retook Memphis and Thebes, and divided the whole valley of the
Nile, from the Ethiopian frontier to the sea, into a number of vassal
principalities, whose submission was insured by the weakness and mutual
jealousies of their lords. Ever prompt in revolt, Babylon again exposed
itself to sack, and Susiana, which had helped the insurrection, was
pillaged, ravaged, and so utterly crushed that it was on the point of
disappearing for ever from the scene as an independent state. There was a
moment when the great Semitic Empire founded by the Sargonides touched even
the AEgaean, for Gyges, king of Lydia, finding himself menaced by the
Cimmerians, did homage to Assurbanipal, and sued for help against those
foes to all civilization.[72]
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Assurbanipal at the chase. Kouyundjik. British
Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
Like their ancestors, these great soldiers were also great builders. In one
of his inscriptions Esarhaddon boasts of having built ten palaces and
thirty-six temples in Assyria and Chaldaea.[73] Some traces of one of these
palaces have been found within the _enceinte_ of Nineveh, at Nebbi-Younas;
but it was chiefly upon Nimroud that Esarhaddon left marks of his
magnificence. The palace called the South-western Palace, in consequence of
its position in the mound, was commenced by him. It was never finished, but
in plan it was more grandiose than any other of the royal dwellings. Had it
been complete it would have included the largest hall ever provided by an
Assyrian architect for the pomps of the Ninevitish court.
Assurbanipal was cruel in victory and indefatigable in the chase. Judging
from his bas-reliefs he was as proud of the lions he killed by hundreds in
his hunts, as of the men massacred by thousands in his wars and military
promenades, or of the captives driven before him, like herds of helpless
cattle, from one end of Asia to the other. He appears also to have been a
patron of literature and the arts. It was under his auspices that the
collection of inscribed terra-cotta tablettes was made in the palace at
Kouyundjik,[74] of which so many fragments have now been recovered. He
ordered the transcription of several ancient texts which had been first
cut, many centuries before, at Ur of the Chaldees. In fact, he collected
that royal library whose remains, damaged by time though they be, are yet
among the most valued treasures of the British Museum. Documents of many
kinds are to be found among them: comparative vocabularies, lists of
divinities with their distinguishing epithets, chronological lists of kings
and eponymous heroes, grammars, histories, tables of astronomical
observations, scientific works of various descriptions, &c., &c. These
tablets were classified according to subject and arranged in several rooms
of the upper story, so that they suffered much in the fall of the floors
and roofs. Very few are quite uninjured but in many cases the pieces have
been successfully put together. When first discovered these broken remains
covered the floors of the buried palace to the depth of about two feet.[75]
The building was no less remarkable for the richness and beauty of its
bas-reliefs. We shall have occasion to reproduce more than one of the
hunting scenes which are there represented, and of which we give a first
illustration on the opposite page. Some remains of another palace built by
the same prince have been discovered in the mound of Nebbi-Younas.
Never had the empire seemed more strong and flourishing than now, and yet
it was close to its fall. The Sargonids understood fighting and pillage,
but they made no continuous effort to unite the various peoples whom they
successfully conquered and trampled underfoot. The Assyrians have been
compared to the Romans, and in some respects the parallel is good. They
showed a Roman energy in the conduct of their incessant struggles, and the
soldiers who brought victory so often to the standards of the Sennacheribs
and Shalmanesers must have been in their time, as the legions of the
consuls and dictators were in later years, the best troops in Asia: they
were better armed, better disciplined, and better led than those of
neighbouring states, more used to fatigue, to long marches and rapid
evolutions. The brilliance of their success and its long duration are thus
explained, for the chiefs of the empire never seem to have had the faintest
suspicion of the adroit policy which was afterwards to bind so many
conquered peoples to the Roman sceptre. The first necessity for civilized
man is security: the hope, or rather the certainty, of enjoying the fruits
of his own industry in peace. When this certainty is assured to him he
quickly pardons and forgets the injuries he has suffered. This fact has
been continually ignored by Oriental conquerors and by Assyrian conquerors
more than any others. The Egyptians and Persians appear now and then to
have succeeded in reconciling their subject races, and in softening their
mutual hatreds by paying some attention to their political wants. But the
Assyrians reckoned entirely upon terror. And yet one generation was often
enough to obliterate the memory of the most cruel disasters. Sons did not
learn from the experience of their fathers, and, although dispersed and
decimated times without number, the enemies of Assyria never acquiesced in
defeat. In the subjection imposed upon them they panted for revenge, and
while paying their tributes they counted the hours and followed with
watchful eye every movement of their master. Let him be carried into any
distant province, or engaged in lengthened hostilities, and they at once
flew to their arms. If the prince were fighting in Armenia, or on the
borders of the Caspian, Chaldaea and Susiana would rise against him: if
disputing the Nile Valley with the Ethiopians, Syria would revolt in his
rear and the insurrection would spread across the plains of Asia with the
rapidity of a prairie fire.
Thus no question received a final settlement. On the morrow of the hardest
won victory the fight had to begin anew. The strongest and bravest
exhausted themselves at such a game. Each campaign left gaps in the ranks
of the governing and fighting classes, and in time, their apparent
privilege became the most crushing of burdens. The same burden has for a
century past been slowly destroying the dominant race in modern Turkey. Its
members occupy nearly all the official posts, but they have to supply the
army as well. Since the custom of recruiting the latter with the children
of Christians, separated from their families in infancy and converted to
Islamism has been abandoned, the military population has decreased year by
year. One or two more wars like the last and the Ottoman race will be
extinct.
Losses in battle were then a chief cause of decadence in a state which
failed to discipline its subject peoples and to incorporate them in its
armies. A further explanation is to be found in the lassitude and
exhaustion which must in time overtake the most warlike princes, the
bravest generals, and the most highly tempered of conquering races. A few
years of relaxed watchfulness, an indolent and soft-hearted sovereign, are
enough to let loose all the pent up forces of insubordination and to unite
them into one formidable effort. We thus see that, in many respects,
nothing could be more precarious than the prosperity of that Assyria whose
insolent triumphs had so often astonished the world since the accession of
Sargon.
The first shock came from the north. About the year 632 all western Asia
was suddenly overrun by the barbarians whom the Greeks called the Cimmerian
Scythians. With an _elan_ that nothing could resist, they spread
themselves over the country lying between the shores of the Caspian and the
Persian Gulf; they even menaced the frontiers of Egypt. The open towns were
pillaged and destroyed, the fields and agricultural villages ruthlessly
laid waste. Thanks to the height and thickness of their defending walls
Nineveh, Babylon, and a few other cities escaped a sack, but Mesopotamia as
a whole suffered cruelly. The dwellers in its vast plains had no
inaccessible summits or hidden valleys to which they could retreat until
the wave of destruction had passed on. At the end of a few years the
loot-laden Scythians withdrew into those steppes of central Asia whence
their descendants were again, some six centuries later, to menace the
existence of civilization; and they left Assyria and Chaldaea half stripped
of their inhabitants behind them.
The work begun by the Scythians was finished by the Medes. These were Aryan
tribes, long subject to the Assyrians, who had begun to constitute
themselves a nation in the first half of the seventh century, and, under
the leadership of CYAXARES, the real founder of their power, had already
attacked Nineveh after the death of Assurbanipal. This invasion brought on
a kind of forced truce, but when the Medes had compelled the Scythians to
retreat to their deserts by the bold stroke which Herodotus admires so
much, they quickly resumed the offensive[76]. We cannot follow all the
fluctuations of the conflict; the information left by the early historians
is vague and contradictory, and we have no cuneiform inscriptions to help
us out. After the fall of Nineveh cylinders of clay and alabaster slabs
were no longer covered with wedges by the Assyrian scribes. They had
recounted their victories and conquests at length, but not one among them,
so far as we know, cared to retrace the dismal history of final defeat.
All that we can guess is that the last sovereign of Nineveh fell before a
coalition in which Media and Chaldaea played the chief parts[77].
NABOPOLASSAR, the general to whom he confided the defence of Babylon,
entered into an alliance with Cyaxares. ASSUREDILANI shut himself up in his
capital, where he resisted as long as he could, and finally set fire to his
palace and allowed himself to be burned alive rather than fall living into
the hands of his enemies (625 B.C.). Nineveh, "the dwelling of the lions,"
"the bloody city," saw its last day; "Nineveh is laid waste," says the
prophet Nahum, "who will bemoan her?"[78]
The modern historian will feel more pity for Assyria than the Jewish poet,
the sincere interpreter of a national hatred which was fostered by frequent
and cruel wounds to the national pride. We can forgive Nineveh much,
because she wrote so much and built so much, because she covered so much
clay with her arrow-heads, and so many walls with her carved reliefs. We
forgive her because to the ruins of her palaces and the broken fragments of
her sculpture we owe most of our present knowledge of the great
civilization which once filled the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates. The
kings of Assyria went on building palaces up to the last moment. Each reign
added to the series of royal dwellings in which every chamber was filled
with inscriptions and living figures. Some of these structures were raised
in Nineveh itself, some in the neighbouring cities. At the south-east angle
of the mound at Nimroud, the remains of a palace begun by Assuredilani have
been excavated. Its construction had been interrupted by the Medes and
Scythians, for it was left unfinished. Its proposed area was very small.
The rooms were narrow and ill arranged, and their walls were decorated at
foot with slabs of bare limestone instead of sculptured alabaster. Above
the plinth thus formed they were covered with roughly executed paintings
upon plaster, instead of with enamelled bricks. Both plan and decoration
show evidence of haste and disquiet. The act of sovereignty had to be done,
but all certainty of the morrow had vanished. From the moment in which
Assyrian sculpture touched its highest point in the reign of Assurbanipal,
the material resources of the kingdom and the supply of skilled workmen had
slowly but constantly diminished.[79]
Nineveh destroyed, the empire of which it was the capital vanished with it.
The new Babylonian empire, the Empires of the Medes and of the Persians
followed each other with such rapidity that the Assyrian heroes and their
prowess might well have been forgotten. The feeble recollections they left
in men's minds became tinged with the colours of romance. The Greeks took
pleasure in the fable of Sardanapalus: they developed it into a moral tale
with elaborate conceits and telling contrasts, but they did not invent it
from the foundation. The first hint of it must have been given by legends
of the fall and destruction of Nineveh current in the cities of Ecbatana,
Susa, and Babylon when Ctesias was within their walls.
* * * * *
After the obliteration of Nineveh the Medes and Chaldaeans divided western
Asia between them. A family alliance was concluded between Nabopolassar and
Cyaxares at the moment of concerting the attack which was to have such a
brilliant success, and either in consequence of that alliance or for some
unknown motive, the two nations remained good friends after their common
victory. The Medes kept Assyria, and extended themselves to the north, over
the whole country between the Caspian and the Black Sea. They would have
carried their frontiers to the AEgaean but for the existence of the Lydian
monarchy, which arrested them on the left bank of the Halys. To the south
of these regions the SECOND CHALDAEAN EMPIRE took shape (625-536 B.C.). It
made no effort to expand eastwards over that plateau of Iran where the
Aryan element, as represented by the Medes and soon afterwards by the
Persians, had acquired an ever-increasing preponderance, but it pretended
to the sovereignty of Egypt and Syria. In the former country, however, the
Saite princes had rekindled the national spirit, and the frontiers were
held successfully against the invaders. It was otherwise with the Jewish
people. Sargon had taken Samaria and put an end to the Israelitish kingdom;
that of Judah was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Thanks to its insular
position, Tyre escaped the lot of Jerusalem, but the rest of Phoenicia and
all northern Syria were subdued by Babylon.
In all this region the Semitic element had long been encroaching upon those
other elements which had preceded and been associated with it at the
commencement. In all Mesopotamia only one tongue was spoken and written,
the tongue we now know as _Assyrian_, but should call _Assyro-Chaldaean_.
The differences of dialect between north and south were of little
importance, and the language in question is that of the inscriptions in
both countries.
Another change requires to be mentioned. Our readers will remember the
names of Ur, Erech, and many other cities which played a great part in the
early history of the country, and were all capitals in turn. Babylon,
however, in time acquired an unquestioned supremacy over them all. The
residence of the Assyrian viceroys during the supremacy of the northern
kingdom, it became the metropolis of the new empire after the fall of
Nineveh. Without having lost either their population or their prosperity,
the other cities sunk to the condition of provincial towns.
For some hundred years Babylon had been cruelly ill-treated by the
Assyrians, and never-ending revolts had been the consequence. Nabopolassar
began the work of restoration, and his son NEBUCHADNEZZAR, the real hero of
the Second Chaldee Empire, carried it on with ardour during the whole of
his long reign. "He restored the canals which united the Tigris to the
Euphrates above Babylon; he rebuilt the bridge which gave a means of
communication between the two halves of the city; he repaired the great
reservoirs in which the early kings had caught and stored the superfluous
waters of the Euphrates during the annual inundation. Upon these works his
prisoners of war, Syrians and Egyptians, Jews and Arabs, were employed in
vast numbers. The great wall of Babylon was set up anew; so was the temple
of Nebo at Borsippa; the reservoir at Sippara, the royal canal, and a part
at least of Lake Pallacopas, were excavated; Kouti, Sippara, Borsippa,
Babel, rose upon their own ruins. Nebuchadnezzar was to Chaldaea what
Rameses II. was to Egypt, and there is not a place in Babylon or about it
where his name and the signs of his marvellous activity cannot be
found."[80]
Nebuchadnezzar reigned forty-three years (604-561), and left Babylon the
largest and finest city of Asia. After his death the decadence was rapid. A
few years saw several kings succeed one another upon the throne, while a
revolution was being accomplished upon the plateau of Iran which was
destined to be fatal to Chaldaea. The supremacy in that region passed from
the feeble and exhausted Medes into the hands of the Persians, another
people of the same stock. The latter were a tribe of mountaineers teeming
with native energy, and their strength had been systematically organized by
a young and valiant chief, in whom they had full confidence because he had
given them confidence in themselves. CYRUS began by leading them to the
conquest of Media, Assyria, and Asia Minor, and by forcing the nations who
dwelt between the southern confines of Persia and the mountains of Upper
India to acknowledge his supremacy. Finally, he collected his forces for an
attack upon Chaldaea, and, in 536, Babylon fell before his arms.
* * * * *
And yet Babylon did not disappear from history in a day; she was not
destroyed, like Nineveh, by a single blow. Cyrus does not appear to have
injured her. She remained, under the Persian kings, one of the chief cities
of the empire. But she did not give up her habit of revolting whenever she
had a chance, and DARIUS, the son of Hystaspes, tired of besieging her,
ended by dismantling her fortifications, while XERXES went farther, and
pillaged her temples. But the chief buildings remained standing. Towards
the middle of the fifth century they excited the admiration of Herodotus,
and, fifty years later, that of Ctesias. Strabo, on the other hand, found
the place almost a desert.[81] Babylon had been ruined by the foundation of
Seleucia, on the Tigris, at a distance of rather more than thirty miles
from the ancient capital. Struck by the beauty of its monuments and the
advantages of its site, ALEXANDER projected the restoration of Babylon, and
proposed to make it his habitual residence; but he died before his
intention could be carried out, and SELEUCUS NICATOR preferred to build a
town which should be called after himself, and should at least perpetuate
his name. The new city had as many as six hundred thousand inhabitants.
Under the Parthians Ctesiphon succeeded to Seleucia, to be replaced in its
turn by Bagdad, the Arab metropolis of the caliphs. This latest comer upon
the scene would have equalled its predecessors in magnificence had the
routes of commerce not changed so greatly since the commencement of the
modern era, and, above all, had the Turks not been masters of the country.
There can be no doubt that the next generation will see the civilization of
the West repossess itself of the fertile plains in which it was born and
nursed, and a railway carried from the shores of the Mediterranean to those
of the Persian Gulf. Such a road would be the most direct route from Europe
to India, and its construction would awake Chaldaea to the feverish activity
of our modern life. Peopled, irrigated, and tilled into her remotest
corners, she would again become as prolific as of old. Her station upon the
wayside would soon change her towns into cities as populous as those of
Nebuchadnezzar, and we may even guess that her importance in the future
would reduce her past to insignificance, and would make her capital such a
Babylon as the world has not yet seen.
NOTES:
[57] TH. NOELDEKE, _Histoire litteraire de l'ancien Testament_, French
version. See chapter vii.
[58] This account of the fabulous origin of civilization in Chaldaea and
Assyria will be found in the second book of BEROSUS. See _Fragmenta
Historicorum Graecorum_ of Ch. MUeLLER, vol. i. fr. 4, 13. Book i. is
consecrated to the cosmogony, Book iii. to the Second Chaldee Empire.
[59] _Genesis_ xiv.
[60] F. LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne_, vol. ii. p. 24. SMITH
(_Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 224) puts the capture of Susa in 645, and thus
arrives at the date 2280 B.C.
[61] LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne_, vol. ii. p. 65, gives an
account of the system under which special magistrates gave their name to
each year, and of the lists which have been preserved.
[62] This was lately found at Bagdad after long being supposed to be lost.
It is now in the British Museum.
[63] It was visited under the best conditions, and has been best described
by W. KENNETH LOFTUS who was in it from 1849 to 1852. Attached as geologist
to the English mission, commanded by Colonel, afterwards General Sir
Fenwick Williams of Kars, which was charged with the delimitation of the
Turco-Persian frontier, he was accompanied by sufficient escorts and could
stay wherever he pleased. He was an ardent traveller and excellent
observer, and science experienced a real loss in his death. The only work
which he has left behind him may still be read with pleasure and profit,
namely, _Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana, with an Account of
Excavations at Warka, the "Ereich" of Nimrod, and Shush, "Shushan the
palace" of Esther_, 8vo, London: 1857. The articles contributed by J. E.
TAYLOR, English vice-consul at Bassorah, to vol. xv. of the _Journal of the
Asiatic Society_ (1855), may also be read with advantage. He passed over
the same ground, and also made excavations at certain points in Lower
Chaldaea which were passed over by Mr. Loftus. Finally, M. de Sarzec, the
French consul at Bassorah, to whom we owe the curious series of Chaldaean
objects which have lately increased the riches of the Louvre, was enabled
to explore the same region through the friendship of a powerful Arab chief.
It is much to be desired that he should give us a complete account of his
sojourn and of the searches he carried on.
[64] LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne_, vol. ii. p. 30.
[65] J. MENANT, _Inscriptions de Hammourabi, Roi de Babylone_; 1863, Paris.
These inscriptions are the oldest documents in phonetic character that have
come down to us. See OPPERT, _Expedition scientifique_, vol. i. p. 267.
[66] KER PORTER, _Travels in Georgia, Persia_, etc., 4to., vol. ii. p. 390.
LAYARD, _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 535.
"Alexander, after he had transferred the seat of his empire to the east, so
fully understood the importance of these great works that he ordered them
to be cleansed and repaired and superintended the work in person, steering
his boat with his own hands through the channels."
[67] This palace was the one called the _North-western Palace_.
[68] LAYARD, _The Monuments of Nineveh, from Drawings made on the spot,
Illustrated in one Hundred Plates_ (large folio, London: 1849), plates
53-56.
[69] It is now called the _Central Palace at Nimroud_.
[70] The chief work upon this period, the most brilliant and the best known
in Assyrian history, is the _Faites de Sargon_ of MM. OPPERT and MENANT
(Paris: 1865).
[71] The palace occupied the whole of the south-western angle of the mound.
[72] MASPERO (_Histoire ancienne_, p. 431) refers us to the authors by whom
the inscription, in which these relations between the kings of Lydia and
Assyria are recounted, was translated and explained. The chief of these is
George SMITH, who, in his _History of Assurbanipal_, has brought together
and commented upon the different texts from which we learn the facts of
this brilliant reign. The early death of this young scholar can never be
too much regretted. In spite of his comparative youth he added much to our
knowledge of Assyria, and, moreover, to him belongs the credit of having
recognized the true character of the Cypriot alphabet.
[73] RAWLINSON, _The Five Great Monarchies_, vol. ii. p. 196.
[74] The _Northern Palace_.
[75] This library has always attracted the attention of Assyriologists, and
the best preserved of its texts have been published at various times under
the supervision of Sir Henry RAWLINSON and George SMITH. These texts have
been translated into English, French, and German, and much discussed by the
scholars of all three nations. The reader may also consult the small volume
contributed by M. J. MENANT to the _Bibliotheque oriental elzevirienne_
under the title: _La Bibliotheque du Palais de Ninive_. 1 vol. 18mo., 1880
Ernest Leroux.
[76] HERODOTUS, i. 106.
[77] HERODOTUS (i. 106) alludes to this capital event only in a word or
two, in which he promises to give a more complete account of the whole
matter in another work--en heteroisi logoisi--doubtless in that _History of
Assyria_ ("Assurioi logoi" i. 184) which was either never written or soon
lost. Diodorus, who gives circumstantial details both of the coalition and
the siege, dates it a century too early, changes all the names, and mixes
up many fables with his recital (ii. 23-28). In forming a just idea of the
catastrophe and of its date we have to depend chiefly upon the lost
historians, such as Abydenus and Alexander Polyhistor, fragments of whose
works have been preserved for us by Eusebius and Georgius Syncellus. See
RAWLINSON, _The Five Great Monarchies_, etc., vol. ii. pp. 221-232.
[78] _Nahum_ ii. 11; iii. 1, 7.
[79] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. ii. pp. 38-39. _Discoveries_,
p. 655.
[80] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 506.
[81] STRABO, xvi. i. 5.
Sec. 6.--_The Chaldaean Religion._
We know much less about the religion of Chaldaea than about that of Egypt.
The religious monuments of Mesopotamia are much fewer than those of the
Nile valley, and their significance is less clear. Their series are neither
so varied nor so complete as those of the earlier civilization. Certain
orders of subjects are repeated to satiety, while others, which would be
more interesting, are completely absent.
It is in funerary inscriptions that the heart of man, touched by the
mystery of the tomb, lays bare its aspirations with the greatest frankness
and simplicity. Moved by the desire to escape annihilation on the one hand
and posthumous sufferings on the other, it is there that he addresses his
most ardent appeals to the supreme power, and allows us to arrive at a
clear understanding of his ideas as to the action, the character, and the
power of the divinity. At Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes, documents of this
kind have been found in thousands, the figures accompanying them serving as
commentaries upon their text, and helping us to clear up all doubts as to
their nature. We thus have voices speaking from the depths of every
Egyptian tomb; but the Chaldaean sepulchre is mute. It has neither
inscriptions, nor bas-reliefs, nor paintings. No Assyrian burial-place has
yet been found.
Dedications, phrases of homage to this or that divinity, the names and
distinguishing epithets of the gods, all these have been met with in
Mesopotamia; sometimes _in situ_, as artistic decorations, sometimes in
engraved fragments of unknown origin. We may say the same of the different
divine types. Sometimes we find them in monumental sculpture, more often on
those seals which we call _cylinders_. But how obscure, incomplete, and
poor such documents are in comparison with the long pages of hieroglyphs in
which the Pharaohs address their gods or make them speak for themselves!
How infinitely inferior in expression and significance to the vast pictures
which cover the walls of the Theban temples and bring all the persons of
the Egyptian pantheon before us in their turn! What hope is there that
excavations in Chaldaea and Assyria will ever provide us with such remains
as those groups of statues which fill our museums, in which the effigy of a
single god is repeated hundreds of times with every variation of type,
pose, and attribute given to it by the Egyptian theosophy? On the one hand,
what abundance, we may say what super-abundance; on the other, what
poverty, what gaping breaches in the chain of material history! Among the
gods and genii, whose names have come down to us, how few there are whose
images we can surely point to; and, again, what a small number of figures
we have upon which we can put a name without fear of error!
To write the history of these beliefs is a difficult task, not only because
the _idols_, as they would once have been called, are few, and the
Chaldaeo-Assyrian inscriptions historical and narrative rather than
religious and dogmatic, but also because the interpretation of the texts,
especially of the most ancient, is much less advanced than that of the
hieroglyphs. When documents in the old language, or at least written in the
primitive ideographic characters, are attacked, the process is one of
divination rather than of translation in the strict sense of the word.
Another difficulty has to be noticed; classic literature does little or
nothing to help us in filling up these voids and dissipating the
obscurities they cause. The Greeks were guilty of many errors when they
attempted to understand and describe foreign religions, but their relations
with the Egyptians and Phoenicians were so prolonged, and, towards the end,
so intimate, that at last they did succeed in grasping some of the doctrine
taught in the sanctuaries of Heliopolis and Thebes, of Byblos and
Hierapolis. With their lively intellects they could hardly frequent the
temples, examine the sacred images, and question the priests as to the
national rites and ceremonies without discovering at least a part of the
truth. It was not so with Chaldaea. Babylon was too far off. Until the time
of Alexander's conquests the boldest travellers did no more than glance
into its streets and monumental buildings, and by that time Nineveh had
long ceased to exist. It was only under the first of the Seleucidae, when a
Macedonian kingdom was established in the centre of Mesopotamia, that the
curiosity of the Greeks led them to make inquiries similar to those they
had pursued for some three centuries in the valley of the Nile. We cannot
doubt that this desire for information arose among the followers of those
princes themselves; many of them were very intelligent men; and when
Berosus determined to write his history in Greek, he may have wished to
answer the questions asked in his hearing by the Greek writers and
philosophers; by those Alexandrians who were not all at Alexandria.
Unfortunately, nearly the whole of his work has been lost.
At the end of a century and a half Babylon shook off Hellenism, and
Mesopotamia fell into the hands of the Parthians. These people affected, in
some degree, the poetry and arts of Greece, but at bottom they were nothing
more than Oriental barbarians. Their capital, Ctesiphon, seems never to
have attracted learned men, nor ever to have been a seat of those inquiries
into the past of the older races in which the cultured cities of the Greek
world took so great a pleasure. When Rome became the heir of Greece and the
perpetuator of her traditions, we may believe that, under Trajan, she set
about establishing herself in the country; but she soon found it necessary
to withdraw within the Euphrates, and it was her loss when the Parthians
fell from power to be succeeded in the lordship of Mesopotamia by the
Sassanids.[82]
We see, then, that, with the exception of one short period, Chaldaea was
what the Greeks called a barbarous country after the fall of its native
royalty, and that it will help us little in our endeavour to grasp the
nature and extent of its religious beliefs. The last of the Athenian
philosophers, Damascius, has certainly left us some information as to the
Babylonish deities which seems to have been taken from authentic
sources.[83] This, together with a few fragments from the work of Berosus,
is all that Hellenic tradition has handed down to us. There is nothing here
which can be even remotely compared to the treatises upon Isis and Osiris
and the Goddess of Syria preserved under the names of PLUTARCH and LUCIAN.
But we cannot enter upon the discussion of Chaldaean art without making an
effort to describe the gist of the national religion and its principal
personages. In every country the highest function of art is to translate
the religious conceptions of its people into visible forms. The architect,
the sculptor, the painter, each in his own fashion, carries out this idea;
the first by the dimensions he gives to his temples, by their plan, and by
the decoration of their walls; the second and third by their choice of
feature, expression and attribute for the images in which the gods become
visible to the people. The clearness and precision with which this
embodiment of an idea is carried out will depend upon the natural aptitudes
of the race and the assistance it receives from the capabilities of the
materials at hand. Plastic creations, from their very nature, must always
be inferior to the thought they are meant to express; by no means can they
go beyond it. This truth is nowhere more striking than in the art of
Greece. Fortunately we are there able to see how a single theme is treated,
in the first place, in poetry,--the interpreter of the popular
beliefs,--and afterwards in art; we can discover how Phidias and
Praxiteles, to speak only of sculptors, treated the types created by Homer
and Hesiod. In the case of Chaldaea we have no such opportunity. She has
left us neither monuments of sacerdotal theology like those we have
inherited in such countless numbers from Egypt, nor the brilliant imagery
in which the odes and epics of the Greeks sketched the personalities of
the gods. But even in Chaldaea art was closely united with religion, and, in
spite of the difficulty of the task, the historian of art must endeavour to
pierce the shadows that obscure the question, and discover the bond of
union between the two.
Thanks to the more recently deciphered texts, we do know something of the
religious rites and beliefs of the oldest nation that inhabited Mesopotamia
and left its trace in history. Whether we call them Accads or Sumirs, or by
both names at once, we know that to them the whole universe was peopled by
a vast crowd of spirits, some dwelling in the depths of the earth, some in
the sea, while others floated on the wind and lighted in the sky the fires
of the day and night.[84]
As, among men, some are good and some bad, so among these spirits some were
beneficent and others the reverse, while a third class was helpful or
mischievous according as it was propitiated by offerings or irritated by
neglect. The great thing was to know how to command the services of the
spirits when they were required. The employment of certain gestures,
sounds, and articulate words had a mysterious but irresistible effect upon
these invisible beings. How the effect was produced no one asked, but that
it was produced no one doubted. The highest of the sciences was magic, for
it held the threads by which the denizens of the invisible world were
controlled; the master of the earth was the sorcerer who could compel them
to obey him by a nod, a form of words, or an incantation. We can form some
idea of the practical results of such a system from what we know of the
manners and social condition of those Turanian races in Asiatic Russia who
profess what is called _chamanism_, and from the condition of most of the
negro tribes and Polynesian islanders. Among all these people, who still
remain in a mental condition from which the rest of the species has long
escaped, we find the highest places occupied by priest-magicians. Now and
then popular fury makes them pay cruelly for the ill-success of their
conjurations, but as a rule their persons and the illimitable power
ascribed to them inspire nothing but abject fear.
Fear is, indeed, the ruling sentiment in all religions in which a belief in
spirits finds a place. A man can never be sure that, in spite of all his
precautions, he has not incurred the displeasure of such exacting and
capricious masters. Some condition of the bargain which is being
perpetually driven with protectors who give nothing for nothing, may have
been unwittingly omitted. "The spirits and their worshippers are equally
selfish. As a general rule, the mischievous spirits receive more homage
than the good ones; those who are believed to live close at hand are more
dreaded than those at a distance; those to whom some special _role_ is
assigned are considered more important than spirits with a wider but less
definite authority."[85]
There were, of course, moments when men turned with gratitude towards the
hidden benefactor to whom they believed themselves indebted for some
unhoped-for cure or unexpected success, when joy and confidence moved their
hearts at the thought of the efficacious protection they had secured
against future ills; but such moments were few and short. The habitual
feeling was one of disquietude, we might almost say of terror, so that when
the imagination endeavoured to give concrete forms to the beings in
question, it figured them rather as objects of fear than love. The day
arrived for art to attempt the material realization of the dreams which
until then had been dimly seen in sleep or in the still more confused
visions of the waking hours, and for this hideous and threatening features
were naturally chosen. It is thus that the numerous figures of demons found
in Chaldaea and Assyria, sometimes in the bas-reliefs, sometimes in the
shape of small bronzes and terra-cottas, are accounted for. A human body is
crowned with the head of an angry lion, with dog's ears and a horse's mane;
the hands brandish long poignards, the feet are replaced by those of a bird
of prey, the extended claws seeming to grasp the soil (Fig. 6). The
gestures vary; the right arm is sometimes stretched downwards at full
length, sometimes bent at the elbow, but the combination of forms, the
character of the figure and its intention is always the same. We shall
encounter this type again when we come to speak of Cappadocia.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Demons; from the palace of Assurbanipal at
Kouyundjik. British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
This belief in spirits is the second phase that the primitive religion,
which we studied in Egypt under the name of _fetishism_ or _animism_, has
to pass through.[86] In the beginning mere existence is confounded with
life. All things are credited with a soul like that felt by man within
himself. Such lifeless objects as stones and mountains, trees and rivers,
are worshipped; so too are both useful and noxious animals.[87] Childish as
it seems to us the worship of spirits is at least an advance upon this. It
presupposes a certain power of reflection and abstraction by which men were
led to conclude that intelligence and will are not necessarily bound up
with a body that can be seen and touched. Life has been mobilized, if we
may use such a phrase, and thus we arrive at _polydemonism_; by which we
mean the theory that partitions the government of the world among a crowd
of genii, who, though often at war among themselves, are always more
powerful than man, and may do him much harm unless he succeeds in winning
their help and good will.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Demons. Louvre.]
The worship of stars is but one form of this religious conception. The
great luminaries of night and day were of course invested with life and
power by men who felt themselves in such complete dependence upon them.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--Eagle-headed divinity, from Nimroud. Louvre.
Alabaster. Height forty inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
So far as we can judge, the primitive form of fetishism left but feeble
traces in the religion of civilized Chaldaea and Assyria. The signs are few
of that worship of sacred stones which played such an important part among
the Semites of the west, and even among the Greeks,[88] neither can we find
that either fear or gratitude ever led to the worship of animals, the
docile helpers or the redoubtable enemies of man, in the same degree as it
did in Egypt. And yet Chaldaea and Assyria followed the example of Egypt in
mixing up the forms of men with those of animals in their sacred statues.
This we know both from the texts and the figured monuments. But it was not
only in the budding art of a primitive population that such combinations
were employed, and it was not only the inferior genii that were
represented in such singular fashion. When, by the development of religion,
the capricious and unruly multitude of spirits had been placed under the
supremacy of a small number of superior beings, these, whom we may call the
sovereign gods, were often figured with the heads of lions or eagles (see
Fig. 8). Before any of these images had been found we already knew from
Berosus what the deity was like by whom the first germs of art and letters
had been sown upon the earth. "He had the whole body of a fish, but beneath
his fish's head he had another head [that of a man], while human feet
appeared below his fish's tail. He had also the voice of a man, and his
images are yet to be found."[89] More than one sculptural type has been
found answering to this description (see Fig. 9).
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Anou or Dagon. Nimroud. Layard, _Discoveries_, p.
350.]
Why did art, in creating divine types, give such prominence to features
borrowed from the lower animals? Was it impelled by mere inability to
distinguish, by varieties of feature, form and attitude, between the
different gods created by the imagination? Or must we look upon the
attribution to this or that deity, of forms borrowed from the bull, the
lion, or the eagle, as a deliberate act of symbolism, meant to suggest that
the gods in question had the qualities of the animals of which their
persons were partly made up? In order to arrive at a just conclusion we
must, of course, take account both of the resistance of the material and of
the facilities which a transparent system of allegory would give to the
artist in the working out of his thought; we must also admit perhaps that
the national intelligence had been prepared to look for and admire such
combinations. It may have been predisposed towards them by the habits of
admiration for the patient strength of the draught-ox and the destructive
vigour of the eagle and the lion contracted during a long series of years.
Both historical analogy and the examination of sculptured types lead us to
think that the tribes of Mesopotamia passed through the same religious
phases as those of the Nile valley, but it would appear that the most
primitive beliefs were less long-lived in Chaldaea than in Egypt, and that
they were engraved less deeply upon the heart of the nation.
The belief in sorcery never died out in Chaldaea; up to the very last days
of antiquity it never lost its empire at least over the lower orders of the
people. As time passed on the priests joined the practice of astrology to
that of magic. How the transition took place may readily be understood. The
magician began by seeking for incantations sufficiently powerful to compel
not only the vulgar crowd of genii to obedience, but also those who, in the
shape of stars great and small, inhabited the celestial spaces and revealed
themselves to man by the brilliance of their fires. Supposing him to be
well skilled in his art his success would be beyond doubt so far as his
clients were concerned.
Many centuries after the birth of this singular delusion even the Greeks
and Romans did not refuse to believe that magic formulae had sometimes the
powers claimed for them. "Incantation," cries an abandoned lover in Virgil,
"may bring down the very moon from the sky:"
"_Carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam._"[90]
Although simple minds allowed themselves to believe that such prodigies
were not quite impossible, skilled men could not have failed to see that in
spite of the appeals addressed to them by priests and magicians, neither
sun nor moon had ever quitted their place in the firmament or interrupted
their daily course. As the hope of influencing the action of the stars died
away, the wish to study their motions grew stronger. In the glorious nights
of Chaldaea the splendour of the sky stirred the curiosity as well as the
admiration of mankind, and the purity of the air made observation easy.
Here and there, in the more thickly inhabited and best irrigated parts of
the plain, gentle mists floated over the earth at certain periods, but they
were no real hindrance to observation. To escape them but a slight
elevation above the plain was required. Let the observer raise himself a
few feet above the tallest palm trees, and no cloud interposed to prevent
his eyes from travelling from the fires that blazed in the zenith to the
paler stars that lay clustered upon the horizon. There were no accidents of
the ground by which the astronomer could lift himself above the smoke of
cities or the mists hanging over the lakes and canals, and to make up for
their absence the massive and many-storied towers which men began to
construct as soon as they understood how to make bricks and set them, must
soon have come into use. These towers were built upon artificial mounds
which were in themselves higher than the highest house or palm. The
platforms on their summits gave therefore the most favourable conditions
possible for the interrogation of the heavens before the invention of the
telescope.[91]
Thanks to the climate and to these great observatories which rose very
early in Chaldaean history all over the plain, the skies could be read like
an open book; and the Chaldaeans were fond of such reading, because it
afforded them, as they thought, a sure means of predicting the future. They
had no great belief in the power of their most formidable conjurations to
affect the majestic regularity of the heavenly movements--a regularity
which must have impressed each generation more strongly than the last, as
it compared its own experience with the registered observations of those
that had gone before it. But they could not persuade themselves that the
powerful genii who guided those great bodies on their unending voyage could
be indifferent to the destinies of man, and that there was no bond of
union, no mysterious connection, between him and them. They pretended to
discover this hidden bond. When a child uttered its first cry, an intimate
relation, they declared, was established between the new life and some one
of the countless bodies that people space. The impassive star, they said,
governed the life and fortune of the mortal who, perhaps, ignorantly looked
upon himself as his own master and the master of some of those about him.
The future of each man was decided by the character of the star that
presided at his birth, and according to the position occupied by it in the
sky at the time of any important action of his life, that action would be
fortunate in its issue or the reverse.[92] These statements contain the
germ of all the future developments of astrology. Among all civilized
peoples this imaginary science has at last fallen from its former repute.
From the remotest antiquity down to the end of the sixteenth century, and,
in some places, to a much later date, it enjoyed a rare power and prestige.
Traces of these are yet to be found in more than one familiar expression
recalling the beliefs and ideas that took shape in the plains of
Mesopotamia long before the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh were raised upon
the banks of its two great rivers.
Astrology could not fail to smooth the way for astronomy, its successor. In
order to profit by the indications of the stars, it was necessary to
foresee the positions they would occupy in the sky on a given day or hour.
There are many undertakings which succeed only when they are carefully
matured. If some great risk is to be run, it is not of much use to receive
the advice and warnings of the stars at the last moment, when the decisive
step has, perhaps, been made, and no retreat is possible. It would then be
too late to think about the chances of success, and a sudden withdrawal
from an action already begun or an equally sudden acceptance of a task for
which no sufficient preparation had been made, would be the too frequent
result.
There was only one mode of escaping such a danger or embarrassment as this,
and that was, first, to arrive by repeated observation at an exact
knowledge of the route followed by the stars across the sky, and of the
rapidity of their march; secondly, to distinguish them one from another, to
know each by its own name, to recognize its physiognomy, character, and
habits. The first duty of the astrologer was to prepare such an inventory,
and to discover the principle of these movements; then, and then only,
would he be in a position to give a satisfactory answer to one asking where
any particular star would be at the end of any specified number of days,
weeks, or months. Thanks to such information, his client could fix upon
some happy conjunction of the heavenly bodies, or at least avoid a moment
when their influence would be on the side of disaster. In every undertaking
of any importance the most favourable hour could be selected long before by
the person chiefly concerned, the hour in which his star would be in the
best quarter of the sky and in the most propitious relations with its
neighbours.
The phenomena produced in Chaldaea by these studies have been repeated more
than once in the history of civilization; they embody one of those
surprises to which humanity owes much of its progress. The final object of
all this patient research was never reached, because the relations upon
which a belief in its feasibility was based were absolutely chimerical, but
as a compensation, the accessory and preliminary knowledge, the mere means
to a futile end, have been of incalculable value. Thus, in order to give an
imposing and apparently solid basis to their astrological doctrines, the
Chaldaeans invented such a numeration as would permit really intricate
computations to be made. By the aid of this system they sketched out all
the great theories of astronomy at a very early age. In the course of a few
centuries, they carried that science to a point never reached by the
Egyptians.[93]
The chief difficulty in the way of a complete explanation of the Chaldaean
system of arithmetic lies in the interpretation of the symbols which served
it for ciphers, which is all the greater as it would seem that they had
several different ways of writing a single number. In some cases the
notation varied according to the purpose of the calculation. A
mathematician used one system for his own studies, and another for
documents which had to be read by the public. The doubts attending the
question are gradually being resolved, however, by the combined efforts of
Assyriologists and mathematicians. At the beginning of their civilization
the Chaldaeans did as other peoples have done when they have become
dissatisfied with that mere rough opposition of unity to plurality which is
enough for savage races, and have attempted to establish the series of
numbers and to define their properties. "They also began by counting on
their fingers, by _fives_ and _tens_, or in other words by units of _five_;
later on they adopted a notation by _sixes_ and _twelves_ as an improvement
upon the primitive system, in which the chief element, the _ten_, could be
divided neither into three nor four equal parts."[94] Two regular series
were thus formed, one in units of six, the other in units of five. Their
commonest terms were, of course, those that occur in both series. We know
from the Greek writers that the Chaldaeans counted time by _sosses_ of
sixty, by _ners_ of 600, and by _sars_ of 3,600, years, and these terms
were not reserved for time, they were employed for all kinds of quantities.
The _sosse_ could be looked at either as _five twelves_ or _six tens_. So,
too, with the _ner_ (600) which represents _six hundreds_, or a _sosse_ of
_tens_, or _ten sosses_ or _fifty twelves_. The _sar_ may be analysed in a
similar fashion.
A system of numeration was thus established which may be looked at from a
double point of view; in the first place from its _sexagesimal_ base, which
certainly adapts itself to various requirements with greater ease than any
other;[95] in the second from the extreme facility with which not only
addition, but all kinds of complex calculations may be made by its use.[96]
With but two symbols, one for the units, the other for the tens, every
number could be expressed by attending to a rule of position like that
governing our written numeration; at each step to the left, a single sign,
the vertical _wedge_, increased sixty-fold in value; the tens were placed
beside it, and a blank in this or that column answered to our zero.
Founded upon a sexagesimal numeration, the metrical system of Babylon and
Nineveh was "the most scientific of all those known and practised by the
ancients: until the elaboration of the French metrical system, it was the
only one whose every part was scientifically co-ordinated, and of which the
fundamental conception was the natural development of all measures of
superficies, of capacity, or of weight, from one single unit of length, a
conception which was adopted as a starting point by the French commission
of weights and measures."
The cubit of 525 millimetres was the base of the whole system.[97] We shall
not here attempt to explain how the other measures--itinerary, agrarian, of
capacity, of weight--were derived from the cubit; to call attention to the
traces left in our nomenclature by the duodecimal or sexagesimal system of
the Babylonians, even after the complete triumph of the decimal system, is
sufficient for our purposes. It is used for instance in the division of the
circle into degrees, minutes, and seconds, in the division of the year into
months, and of the day into hours and their fractions.
This convenient, exact, and highly developed system of arithmetic and
metrology enabled the Chaldaeans to make good use of their observations, and
to extract from them a connected astronomical doctrine. They began by
registering the phenomena. They laid out a map of the heavens and
recognized the difference between fixed stars and those movable bodies the
Greeks called planets--among the latter they naturally included the sun and
the moon, the most conspicuous of them all both in size and motion, whose
courses were the first to be studied and described. The apparent march of
the sun through the crowded ranks of the celestial army was defined, and
its successive stages marked by those twelve constellations which are still
called the _Signs of the Zodiac_. In time even these observations were
excelled, and it now appears certain that the Chaldaeans recognized the
annual displacement of the equinoctial point upon the ecliptic, a discovery
that is generally attributed to the Greek astronomers. But, like
Hipparchus, they made faults of calculation in consequence of the defects
of their instruments.[98]
It was the same with the moon. They succeeded in determining its mean daily
movements, and when they had established a period of two hundred and
twenty-three lunations, they contrived to foretell its eclipses. Eclipses
of the sun presented greater difficulties, and the Chaldaeans were content
with noting their occurrence. They were acquainted with the solar year of
three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter; they used it in their
astronomical calculations; but their religious and civil year was one
composed of twelve lunar months, alternately full and short, that is, of
twenty-nine and thirty days respectively. The lunar and solar years were
brought into agreement by an intercalary cycle of eight years.[99]
The assertion of the philosopher Simplicius has been called in question for
very plausible reasons. Simplicius declares, upon the faith of Porphyrius,
that Callisthenes sent from Babylon to his uncle Aristotle, a copy of
Chaldaean observations dating back as far as 1903 years before the entry of
Alexander into Mesopotamia, that is, to more than twenty-two centuries
before our era.[100]
However this may be, all ancient writers are agreed in admitting that the
Chaldaeans had begun to observe and record astronomical phenomena long
before the Egyptians;[101] moreover the remains of those clay tablets have
been found in various parts of Chaldaea and Assyria upon which, as Pliny
tells us upon the authority of the Greek astronomer Epigenes, the Chaldaeans
had inscribed and preserved the astronomical observations of seven hundred
and eighty thousand years.[102] We need not dwell upon the enormity of this
figure; it matters little whether it is due to the mistakes of a copyist or
to the vanity of the Chaldaeans, and the too ready credulity of the Greeks;
the important point is the existence of the astronomical tablets, and
those Epigenes himself saw. The library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh included
catalogues of stellary and planetary observations, among others the times
of Venus, Jupiter and Mars, and the phases of the moon, for every day in
the month.[103] Tablets have also been recently discovered giving the
arrangement of the stars in the sky for each season and explaining the rule
to be followed in the insertion of the intercalary months. Finally, a
fragment of an Assyrian planisphere has been found in the palace of
Sennacherib.[104]
Even if classic authors had been silent on the subject, and all the
original documents had disappeared, we might have divined from the
appearance of the figured monuments alone, how greatly the Chaldaeans
honoured the stars and how much study and research they devoted to them; we
might have guessed that they lived with their eyes fixed upon the firmament
and upon the sources of light. Look at the steles that bear royal effigies,
at the representations upon contracts and other documents of that kind (see
Fig. 10), at the cylindrical or conical seals which have gravitated in
thousands into our museums (Figs. 11 and 12); you will see a personage
adoring a star, still oftener you will find the sun's disk and the crescent
moon figured upon the field, with, perhaps, one or several stars. These
images are only omitted upon reliefs that are purely narrative and
historical, like most of those in the Assyrian palaces. Everywhere else,
upon every object and in every scene having a religious and sacred
character, a place is reserved for the symbols in question, if we may call
them so. Their presence is evidence of the homage rendered by the Chaldaeans
to the stars, and of the faith they placed in their supposed revelations.
Further evidence to the same effect is given by the ancient writing, in
which the ideogram for _king_ was a star.
"The imaginations of the Egyptians were mainly impressed by the daily and
annual circlings of the sun. In that body they saw the most imposing
manifestation of the Deity and the clearest exemplification of the laws
that govern the world; to it, therefore they turned for their
personifications of the divine power."[105] The attention of the Chaldaeans,
on the other hand, was not so absorbed, and, so to speak, lost, in the
contemplation of a single star, superior though it was to all others in
its power for good or ill, and in its incomparable splendour. They watched
the sky with a curiosity too lively and too intelligent to permit of a
willing sacrifice of all the stars to one. _Samas_, the sun, and _Sin_, the
moon-god, played an important _role_ in their religion and theology, but it
does not appear that the gods of the other five planets were inferior to
them in rank. If we accept the parallels established by the Greeks and
Romans, these were _Adar_ (Saturn), _Merodach_ (Jupiter), _Nergal_ (Mars),
_Istar_ (Venus), and _Nebo_ (Mercury).
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--Stone of Merodach-Baladan I. (Smith's _Assyrian
Discoveries_).]
The chief atmospheric phenomena were also personified; of this we may give
one example. All travellers in Chaldaea agree in their descriptions of those
sudden storms which burst on the country from a clear sky, especially
towards the commencement of summer. Without a single premonitory symptom, a
huge, black water-spout advances from some point on the horizon, its flanks
shooting lightnings and thunder. In a few minutes it reaches the traveller
and wraps him in its black vapours; the sand-laden wind blinds him, the
rain pours upon him in solid sheets; but he has hardly realized his
position before the storm is past and the sun is again shining in the blue
depths above. But for torn and overthrown tents and trees uprooted or
struck by the electric fluid, a stranger to the country might almost
believe himself to have been the sport of a dream.[106]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--Assyrian Cylinder, in the National Library, Paris.
Jasper.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Assyrian Cylinder, in the National Library, Paris.
Serpentine.]
The force and suddenness of these visitations could hardly fail to impress
the imagination of a people exposed to them, and it is not surprising that
Mesopotamia had its god of storms and thunder. He, Raman, it is, perhaps,
who is figured in the bas-relief from Nimroud reproduced below (Figs. 13
and 14),[107] in which a god appears bearing an axe in his right hand, and,
in his left, a kind of faggot, whose significance might have escaped us but
for the light thrown upon it by classic sculpture. The latter no doubt
borrowed a well-known form from the east, and the object in question is
nothing less than the thunderbolt given by Greek artists to their Zeus.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.--Gods carried in procession; from Layard's
_Monuments of Nineveh_, first series, pl. 65.]
It was this adoration of the stars and planets that led by degrees to what
we call polytheism. Man partitioned those terrible powers of nature of
which he felt himself the sport, between a vast number of agents, between
crowds of genii upon whose mercies he thought himself dependent, and whom
he did his best to propitiate by gifts and to compel by magic. Little by
little, intelligence perfected that work of abstraction and simplification
by which all races but those who have stuck fast in the conceptions of
their infancy have arrived at a single conclusion. Without ceasing to
believe in the existence of genii, they invented the gods, a race of beings
far more powerful, not only than short-lived man, but even than the
confused army of demons, of those beings who enjoyed the control of not a
few of the mysterious agencies whose apparent conflict and final accord are
the causes of the life, movement, and equilibrium of the world.
[Illustration: FIG. 14.--Gods carried in procession; from Layard's
_Monuments of Nineveh_, first series, pl. 65.]
When the intellect had arrived at this doctrine, calmness and serenity fell
upon it. Each deity became a person with certain well-defined powers and
attributes, a person who could not escape the apprehension and the appeals
of mankind with the facility of the changing and fantastic crowd of demons.
His dwelling-place could be pointed out to the faithful, whether it were in
his own peculiar star, among the eternal snows upon the summits of the
distant mountains, or near at hand, in the temple built for him by his
worshippers. Such a deity could be approached like a sovereign whose honour
and interest are bound up with his word. So long as by prayer, and still
more by sacrifices, the conditions were observed on the suppliant's side,
the god, invisible though he was, would do his duty and protect those with
whom he had entered into an unwritten contract.
But in order to establish this mutual relationship between gods and men, it
was necessary that the former should be brought within reach of the
latter. With the development of the religious sentiment and of definite and
clear ideas as to the gods, the plastic faculty was called upon for greater
efforts than it had before made.
Something beside grimacing and monstrous images of genii was asked from it.
Figures were demanded which should embody something of the nobility and
majesty attributed to the eternal masters of the world. The divine effigy
was the incarnation of the deity, was one of the forms in which he
manifested himself, it was, as the Egyptians would say, one of his
_doubles_. Such an effigy was required to afford a worthy frame for the
supreme dignity of the god, and the house built by man's hands in which he
condescended to dwell had to be such that its superior magnificence should
distinguish it at a glance from the comparatively humble dwellings in which
mortals passed their short and fugitive lives.
It was thus that the temples and statues of the gods took form when the
various deities began to be clearly distinguished from one another, and, by
a process of mental condensation, to acquire a certain amount of
consistence and solidity. The Chaldaean temples, unlike those of Egypt and
Greece, have succumbed to time, and the ancient texts in which they are
described are short and obscure. Their ruins are little more than shapeless
heaps of _debris_. In endeavouring to arrive at a clear understanding of
the Chaldaean notions as to the gods, we are unable to study, as we did
elsewhere, the forms of their religious edifices, with their plans,
dimensions, and the instructive variety of decorative symbols and figures
with which the sanctuary and its dependencies were overspread.
On the other hand a sufficient number of figures of the gods have come down
to us. They abound upon small objects, such as cylinders, engraved stones,
cones, scarabaei, the bezels of rings, terra-cotta tablets and statuettes.
They are also found, though less frequently, among the _debris_ of
monumental sculpture, in the bas-reliefs of the Ninevite palaces, and even
among certain figures in the round which have been recovered from the ruins
of these latter buildings. We can therefore easily find out the particular
attributes given by the artist as the interpreter of the national beliefs
to those gods whose visible bodies it was his office to create; we can see
what choice and combination of forms he thought best fitted to solve the
problem presented to him. But as yet we are not in a position to put a
name to each even of the figures that recur most frequently. In the case of
Egypt there is no such difficulty: when we encounter the image of one of
her gods upon the walls of a temple or in the cases of a museum, we can say
without hesitation, "This is Osiris or Ptah," as the case may be, "Amen or
Horus, Isis, Sekhet, or Hathor." It is not so with Chaldaea. Figures are
there often found uninscribed, and even when an inscription is present it
not seldom offers difficulties of interpretation which have not yet been
cleared up; for the divine names are usually ideograms. Only a few have
been identified beyond all doubt, those namely of which we have Hebrew or
Greek transcriptions, preserving for us the real Chaldaean original; Ilou,
Bel, Nisroch, Beltis, Istar, are examples of this. Hence it results that
Assyriologists often feel no little embarrassment when they are asked to
point out upon the monuments the figures even of those gods of whose names
they are the least doubtful. The Assyrians and Chaldaeans, like other
nations of antiquity, had what we should now call their _figured
mythology_, but we are still imperfectly acquainted with it. Even for those
whom we may call the most exalted personages of the Chaldaean Olympus,
scholars have hardly succeeded in illustrating the texts by the monuments
and explaining the monuments by the texts; and we are yet far from being
able to institute a perpetual and standard comparison as we have done in
the case of Egypt and still more in that of Greece, between the divine
types as they appear in religious formulae and in the national poetry, and
the same types when embodied by the imagination of the artist.
A long time may elapse before a mythological gallery for Chaldaea, in which
all the important members of the Mesopotamian pantheon shall take their
places and be known by the names they bore in their own day, can be formed,
but even now the principles upon which they were represented by art may be
stated. The images of the various gods were built up in great part by the
aid of combinations similar to those made use of in realizing the minor
demons. A natural bent towards such a method of interpretation was perhaps
inherited from the days in which the _naive_ adoration of all those animals
which help or hurt mankind formed a part of the national worship; again,
certain animals were, by their shapes and constitution, better fitted than
others to personify this or that quality which, in its fulness, was
considered divine. It was natural, therefore, that the artist should, in
those early days, have indicated the powers of a deity by forms borrowed
from the strongest, the most beautiful, or the most formidable of animals.
Nothing could suggest the instantaneous swiftness of a god better than the
spreading wings of an eagle or vulture, or his destructive and irresistible
power better than their beaks and talons, the horns and dewlap of the bull,
or the mane and claws of the lion.
The sculptor had, therefore, a good reason for employing these forms and
many others offered to him by the fauna of the regions he inhabited. He
introduced them into his work with skill and decision, and obtained
composite types by their aid which we may compare to those of Egypt. But
there were some differences which deserve to be remembered. The human face
received more consideration from the Mesopotamian sculptors than from those
of Egypt. Except in the sphinxes and in two or three less important types
the Egyptians, as our readers will remember, crowned a human body with the
head of a snake, a lion, or a crocodile, an ibis or a hawk, and sometimes
of a clumsy beast like the hippopotamus,[108] and their figures are
dominated and characterized by the heads thus given to them. At Babylon and
Nineveh the case is reversed. Animals' heads are only found, as a rule,
upon the shoulders of those figures which are looked upon by common consent
as genii rather than gods. In the latter a contrary arrangement prevails.
They may have, like Dagon, a fish's tail hanging down their backs, or, like
the colossal guardians of the king's palace, the body and limbs of a lion
or bull with the wings of an eagle, but the head is that of a man and the
sculptor has given it all the beauty he could compass. To this, we believe,
there is but one exception--the eagle-headed god to whom Assyriologists
have assigned the name of Nisroch. He seems to have occupied a high place
among the Mesopotamian divinities (Fig. 8).
But the difference between the two systems does not end here. There are a
few deities, such as Ptah, Osiris, and Amen, to whom the Egyptians gave a
human form in its simple entirety; but even in such cases it was not
reproduced in its native elegance and nobility. The extremities of Ptah and
Osiris were enveloped in a kind of sheath, which made their figures look
more like mummies than beings with the power of life and motion. It was
not so in Chaldaea, as we shall see if we examine the procedure of the
Mesopotamian artist when he had to figure the greater gods, those in whom
the highest efforts of mental abstraction found concrete expression. Take,
for instance, Nebo, the god of intelligence and prophecy, and Istar, the
personification of the earth's fertility, of its power of creation and
destruction and its inexhaustible energy. Nebo stands upright, his head
covered with a horned tiara: his ample beard is gathered into three rows of
close curls: he wears a long robe falling straight to the ground (Fig. 16).
As for Istar, she is a young woman, nude, large-hipped, and pressing her
breasts with her hands (Fig. 15). The awkwardness and rudeness which to
some extent characterizes these figures is due to the inexperience of the
artist; his intentions were good, but his skill was hardly equal to giving
them full effect. His Nebo was meant to be as majestic as a king or high
priest; his Istar is the spouse, the mother, the nurse; she is the goddess
"who," as the inscriptions say,[109] "rejoices mankind," who, when
fertilized by love, assures the duration and perpetuity of the species. It
was this method of interpretation that was in later years to lead to those
great creations of Greek art whose beauty is still the wonder of mankind.
Between these Chaldaean figures and those of the Greek sculptors the
difference was one of degree. The anthropomorphism of the Chaldees was
franker than that of the Egyptians, and so far the art of Chaldaea was an
advance upon that of Egypt, although it was excelled by the latter in
executive qualities. The method to which it had committed itself, the
diligent and passionate study of the human figure, was the royal road to
all excellence in the plastic arts.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--Statue of Nebo; from Nimroud. British Museum.
Calcareous stone. Height 6 feet 5 inches.]
But our present business is to discover this people's real conceptions of
its gods and to get a clear idea of their characteristic qualities. We
shall not attempt, therefore, to show how most of them belonged to one of
those divine triads which are to be found, it is believed, in Chaldaea as
well as in Egypt: we shall not ask how these triads were subordinated,
first, one to another, and secondly, to a single supreme being, who, in
Mesopotamia as elsewhere, was in time perceived more or less clearly and
placed at the head of the divine hierarchy. These triads are nearly
always found in polytheistic religions, and that for sufficiently
obvious reasons.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.--Terra-cotta Statuette; from Heuzey's _Figurines
antiques du Musee du Louvre_.]
The most simple relationship offered by the organic world to the mind of
man is the relationship of the sexes, their contrast, and the necessity for
their union. Wherever religious conceptions spring up gods and goddesses
are created together. All the forces divined by human intelligence are
doubled into two persons, closely united, the one the complement of the
other. The one has the active, the other the passive _role_. Egypt,
Chaldaea, Greece, all had these divine couples; Apsou, or, as Damascius
calls him, Apason and Tauthe; Anou and Antou, the Anaitis of the Greek
writers; Bel and Belit, or Beltu, perhaps the Greek Mylitta; Samas, the
sun, and Allat, the queen of the dead; Merodach (or Marduk) and Zarpanit, a
goddess mother who protected unborn infants and presided at births; Nabou
and Nana; Assur and Istar; Dumouzi and Istar. Precise details as to the
status of these divinities are still wanting. Several among them seem to
have been at one time endowed with a distinct individuality, and at other
periods to have been almost indistinguishable from some other deity. They
were without the distinct features and attributes of the inhabitants of
Olympus, but we are left in no doubt as to the binary divisions of which we
have been speaking.
The attraction of desire and the union of the sexes leads to the birth of
the child; with the appearance of the latter the family is complete, and,
with it, the type upon which the triple classification of the gods was
founded. But even when we attempt to trace the composition of a single
group and to assign his proper place to each of its members, the
embarrassment is great. We find a single god sometimes filling, to all
appearance, the _role_ of husband and father, and sometimes that of the
son; or a single goddess acting at different times as the wife and daughter
of one and the same god. Some of these apparent contradictions must be
referred to the want of certainty in our interpretation of the
inscriptions, some to the floating quality of the conceptions to which they
relate. It may never, perhaps, be possible to make out a complete list, or
one which shall not be obnoxious to criticism on other grounds; moreover,
the historian of art has no need to enter into any such discussion, or to
give the details of a nomenclature as to which Assyriologists themselves
have many doubts. It suffices that he should point out the multiplicity of
couples and triads, the extreme diversity of deities, and thus indicate a
reason for the very peculiar aspect of the cylinders and engraved stones of
Chaldaea, for the complex forms of the gods, and for the multitude of varied
symbols which encumber the fields of her sculptured reliefs. Some of the
figures that crowd these narrow surfaces are so fantastic that they
astonish the eye as much as they pique the curiosity (see Fig. 17).
[Illustration: FIG. 17.--A Chaldaean Cylinder: from Menant's _La Bible et
les Cylindres Chaldeens_.]
The number of divine types and the consequent difficulties of
classification are increased, as in Egypt, by the fact that every important
town had its local deities, deities who were its own peculiar gods. In the
course of so many centuries and so many successive displacements of the
political centre of gravity, the order of precedence of the Mesopotamian
gods was often changed. The dominant city promoted its own gods over the
heads of their fellows and modified for a time which might be long or
short, the comparative importance of the Chaldaean divinities. Sin, the moon
god, headed the list during the supremacy of Ur, Samas during that of
Larsam. With the rise of Assyria its national god, Assur, doubtless a
supreme god of the heavens, acquired an uncontested pre-eminence. It was in
his name that the Assyrians subdued all Asia and shed such torrents of
blood. Their wars were the wars of Assur; they were undertaken to extend
his empire and to glorify his name. Hence the extreme rigour, the hideous
cruelty, of the punishments inflicted by the king on his rebellious
subjects; he was punishing heretics and apostates.[110]
In the religious effusions of Mesopotamia, we sometimes find an accent of
exalted piety recalling the tone of the Hebrew scriptures; but it does not
appear that the monotheistic idea towards which they were ever tending, but
without actually reaching it and becoming penetrated by its truth, had ever
acquired sufficient consistence to stimulate the Chaldaean artist to the
creation of a type superior in beauty and nobility to those of gods in the
second rank. The fact that the idea did exist is to be inferred from the
use of certain terms rather than from any mention of it in theological
forms or embodiment in the plastic arts.
At Nineveh, Assur was certainly looked upon as the greatest of the gods, if
not as the only god. Idols captured from conquered nations were sometimes
restored to their worshippers, but not before they had been engraved with
the words, "_To the glory of Assur_." Assur was always placed at the head
of the divine lists. He is thought to be descended from Anou or Sin: but he
was raised to such a height by his adoption as the national deity, that it
became impossible to trace in him the distinguishing characteristics of his
primary condition as a god of nature; he became, like the Jehovah of the
Israelites, a god superior to nature. His attributes were of a very general
kind, and were all more or less derived from his dignity as chief leader
and father, as master of legions and as president in the assemblies of the
gods. He was regarded as the supreme arbiter, as the granter of victory and
of the spoils of victory, as the god of justice, as the terror of evil
doers and the protector of the just. The great god of the Assyrians was, of
course, the god of battles, the director of armies, and in that capacity,
the spouse of Istar, who was no less warlike than himself. His name was
often used, in the plural, to signify the gods in general, as that of Istar
was used for the goddesses. No myth has come down to us in which he plays
the principal part, a fact which is to be accounted for by his
comparatively late arrival at a position of abstract supremacy.[111]
In the Babylon of the second Chaldee empire there was, it would seem, a
double embodiment of the divine superiority, in Merodach, the warrior god,
the god of royalty, and Nebo the god of science and inspiration. In Chaldaea
the power of the priests and learned men did not yield before that of the
monarch. And yet a certain latent and instinctive monotheism may be traced
in its complex religion. There were, indeed, many gods, but one was raised
above all the others, and, whether they turned to Merodach or Nebo, the
kings loved to style themselves the worshippers of the "Lord of Lords,"
_Bel Beli_.[112]
Like Assur at Nineveh, this supreme deity was sometimes called, by
abbreviation, _Ilou_, or god, a term which was employed, with slight
variants, by every nation speaking a Semitic tongue.[113]
But in spite of their aspirations and the august _role_ assigned to their
Merodach, their Nebo, and their Assur, Chaldaea and Assyria succeeded no
better than Egypt in giving a fit embodiment to the sovereign moderator of
the universe, to the king and common parent of gods and men. Their art was
without the skill and power required for the creation of an image which
should be worthy of the mental idea. Neither the temples of Nineveh nor
those of Babylon had an Olympian Jove.
Assur came nearer to the acquisition of a supreme and unique godhead than
any of his rivals, but we do not know with any certainty what features were
his in plastic representations. Some have recognized him in a group which
often occurs on the historic bas-reliefs and cylinders, here floating over
a field of battle, there introduced into some scene of adoration. You are
at once struck by the similarity of the group in question to one of the
commonest of Egyptian symbols--the winged globe on the cornice of almost
every temple in the Nile valley. Long before they had penetrated as
conquerors to Thebes and Memphis, the Assyrians may have found this motive
repeated a thousand times upon the ivories, the jewels, the various objects
of luxury which Phoenician merchants carried from the ports of the Delta to
distribute over every neighbouring country.[114]
[Illustration: FIG. 18.--The winged globe; from Layard.]
The Assyrians appropriated the emblem in question, sometimes with hardly a
modification upon its Egyptian form (Fig. 18), but more often with an
alteration of some si
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