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Title: The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions
Author: Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Language: English
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CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS ***
[Illustration: REVERSE OF A TABLET IN THE HITTITE LANGUAGE FROM
BOGHAZ KEUI.
_Frontispiece._ [_See Preface, p._ vi.]
The Archæology of the
Cuneiform Inscriptions
BY THE
REV. A. H. SAYCE
PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY, OXFORD
PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE GENERAL
LITERATURE COMMITTEE
_SECOND EDITION--REVISED_
LONDON
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C.; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C.
BRIGHTON: 129, NORTH STREET
NEW YORK: E. S. GORHAM
1908
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE v
I. THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 7
II. THE ARCHÆOLOGICAL MATERIALS; THE EXCAVATIONS AT SUSA
AND THE ORIGIN OF BRONZE 36
III. THE SUMERIANS 67
IV. THE RELATION OF BABYLONIAN TO EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 101
V. BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 135
VI. ASIA MINOR 160
VII. CANAAN IN THE CENTURY BEFORE THE EXODUS 187
INDEX 215
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Facing page_
REVERSE OF A TABLET IN THE HITTITE LANGUAGE FROM
BOGHAZ KEUI (_Frontispiece_)
MAP--THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C. 7
THE TOMB OF DARIUS 16
BLACK OBELISK OF SHAL-MANESER II 21
CHALDÆAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN TERRA-COTTA 21
THE TELL OF JERABIS (PROBABLY THE ANCIENT CARCHEMISH) 40
THE TUMULUS OF SUSA, AS IT APPEARED TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF
LAST CENTURY 46
HEAD OF ONE OF THE STATUES FROM TELLO 58
VASE OF SILVER, DEDICATED TO NINGIRSU BY ENTENA PATESI OF
LAGAS 58
THE TELL OF BORSIPPA, THE PRESENT BIRS-NIMRUD 78
THE SEAL OF SHARGANI-SHAR-ALI (SARGON OF AKKAD): GILGAMES
WATERS THE CELESTIAL OX 88
BAS-RELIEF OF NARAM-SIN 88
SITTING STATUE OF GUDEA 122
MAP--THE FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE 135
VIEW OF THE TEMPLE OF UR IN ITS PRESENT STATE, ACCORDING
TO LOFTUS 141
THE GARDENS AND HILL OF DHUSPAS OR VAN 163
THE RUINS OF A PALACE OF URARTU AT TOPRAK-KALEH 166
THE RUINS AT BOGHAZ KEUI 174
ONE OF THE PROCESSIONS IN THE RAVINE OF BOGHAZ 176
PREFACE
The first six chapters which follow, embody the Rhind Lectures in
Archæology which I delivered at Edinburgh in October 1906. The seventh
chapter appeared as an article in the _Contemporary Review_ for
August 1905, and is here reprinted by the courtesy of the Editor to
whom I render my thanks. The book is the first attempt to deal with
what I would call the archæology of cuneiform decipherment, and like
all pioneering work consequently claims the indulgence of the reader.
For the sake of clearness I have been forced to repeat myself in a
few instances, more especially in the sixth chapter, but what has
thereby been lost in literary finish will, I hope, be compensated by an
increase of clearness in the argument.
If what I have written serves no other purpose, I shall be content
if it draws attention to the miserably defective state of our
archæological knowledge of Babylonia and Assyria, and to the necessity
of scientific excavations being carried on there similar to those
inaugurated by Mr. Rhind in Egypt. We have abundance of epigraphic
material; it is the more purely archæological material that is still
wanting.
The need of it is every year becoming more urgent with the ever-growing
revelation of the important and far-reaching part played by Babylonian
culture in the ancient East. Excavation is just commencing in Asia
Minor, and there are many indications that it has startling discoveries
and surprises in store for us. Even while my manuscript was in the
printer’s hands, Professor Winckler has been examining the cuneiform
tablets found by him last spring at Boghaz Keui, on the site of the
old Hittite capital in Cappadocia, and reading in them the records of
the Hittite kings, Khattu-sil, Sapaluliuma, Mur-sila and Muttallu.
Most of the tablets, though written in cuneiform characters, are in
the native language of the country, but among them is a version in
the Babylonian language of the treaty between the “great king of the
Hittites” and Riya-masesa Mai or Ramses II., the Egyptian copy of which
has long been known to us. The two Arzawan letters in the Tel el-Amarna
collection no longer stand alone; the Boghaz Keui tablets show that
an active correspondence was carried on between Egypt and Cappadocia.
We must revise our old ideas about an absence of intercourse between
different parts of the ancient Oriental world: there was quite as much
intercommunication as there is to-day. Elam and Babylonia, Assyria
and Asia Minor, Palestine and Egypt, all were linked together by the
ties of a common culture; there were no exclusive religions to raise
barriers between nation and nation, and the pottery of the Hittites
was not only carried to the south of Canaan, but the civilization of
Babylonia made its way through Hittite lands to the shores and islands
of Greece. On the south, the Ægean became a highway from Asia Minor to
Europe, while northward the Troad formed a bridge which carried the
culture of Cappadocia to the Balkans and the Danube.
A. H. SAYCE.
_November_ 1906.
[Illustration: THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C.]
THE ARCHÆOLOGY OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS
CHAPTER I
THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS
The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was the archæological
romance of the nineteenth century. There was no Rosetta stone to
offer a clue to their meaning; the very names of the Assyrian kings
and of the gods they worshipped had been lost and forgotten; and the
characters themselves were but conventional groups of wedges, not
pictures of objects and ideas like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The
decipherment started with the guess of a classical scholar who knew no
Oriental languages and had never travelled in the East. And yet it is
upon this guess that the vast superstructure of cuneiform decipherment
has been slowly reared, with its ever-increasing mass of literature
in numerous languages, the very existence of some of which had been
previously unknown, and with its revelation of a civilized world that
had faded out of sight before Greek history began. The ancient East
has risen, as it were, from the dead, with its politics and its wars,
its law and its trade, its art, its industries and its science. And
this revelation of a new world, this resurrection of a dead past,
has started from a successful guess. But the guess had been made in
accordance with scientific method and had scientific reasons behind it,
and it has proved to be the fruitful seed of an overspreading tree.
Seventy years ago a single small case was sufficient to hold all the
Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities possessed by the British Museum.
They had been collected by Rich, to whom we owe the first accurate
plans of the sites of Babylon and Nineveh. But the cuneiform characters
found on the seals and clay cylinders of Babylonia were not the only
characters of the kind that were known. Similar characters had been
noticed by travellers on the walls of the ruined palaces of Persepolis
in Persia. As far back as 1621 the Italian traveller Pietro della
Valle had copied two or three of these, which he reproduced in the
account of his travels some thirty years later. One of the first acts
of the newly-founded Royal Society of Great Britain was to ask in their
_Philosophical Transactions_ (p. 420) whether some draughtsman
could not be found to copy the bas-reliefs and inscriptions which
had thus been observed at Persepolis, though the only result of the
inquiry was that a few years afterwards (in June 1693) two lines of
cuneiform were published in the _Transactions_ from the papers of
a Mr. Samuel Flower, who had been the agent of the East India Company
in Persia. The editor of the _Transactions_ correctly concluded
that the inscriptions were to be read from left to right. The cuneiform
characters which were printed in the _Transactions_ were, however,
not the first specimens of cuneiform script that had been published in
England. Thomas Herbert, in the fourth edition of his Travels, which
appeared in 1677, had already given three lines of characters taken
indifferently from the three classes of inscriptions engraved on the
Persian monuments; these were afterwards annexed by an Italian named
Careri, who published them as his own. But the earliest inscription to
be reproduced in full was a short one inscribed by Darius I. over the
windows of his palace, which had been copied by Sir John Chardin during
one of his two visits to Persepolis (in 1665 and 1673). Chardin was
the son of a Huguenot jeweller in Paris, and after returning from his
travels settled in London, where he became a great favourite of Charles
II., and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. The inscription he had
copied, however, was not printed in the earlier edition of his Travels,
and had to wait until 1735 before it saw the light.[1]
The existence of the cuneiform script thus became known in Europe,
and that was all. It was not until Carsten Niebuhr, the father of the
better-known historian, had been sent by the Danish Government on
an exploring mission to the East that fairly complete and accurate
copies of the inscriptions of Persepolis were at last put into the
hands of European scholars. Niebuhr, who sacrificed his sight to the
work, returned to Denmark in 1767, and seven years later the first
of the three volumes in which the scientific results of his travels
were embodied was published at Copenhagen. With the publication of the
second volume, which contained his description of the Persepolitan
monuments, the attempt to decipher the cuneiform characters began. He
himself had noticed that in the first of the three classes or systems
of cuneiform writing of which every inscription consisted, only
forty-two characters were employed, and he therefore concluded that the
system was alphabetic. Another Dane, Bishop Münter, discovered that the
words in it were divided from one another by an oblique wedge,[2] and
further showed that the monuments must belong to the age of Cyrus and
his successors.[3] One word, which occurs without any variation towards
the beginning of each inscription, he correctly inferred to signify
“king”; but beyond this he was unable to advance.
Meanwhile, Anquetil-Duperron, with self-sacrificing enthusiasm, had
rediscovered the Zend of the later Zoroastrian faith, and de Sacy, with
the help of it, had deciphered the Pehlevi inscriptions of the Sassanid
kings. It was only the older Persian of the Achæmenian cuneiform
inscriptions that still awaited interpretation; and a bridge had been
built between it and modern Persian by means of the Zendic texts. In
1802 the guess was made which opened the way to the decipherment of the
mysterious wedge-shaped signs. The inspired genius was Grotefend, an
accomplished Latinist and a school-master at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
He knew no Oriental languages, but his mother-wit and common-sense
more than made up for the deficiency. It was clear to him that the
three systems of cuneiform represented three different languages,
the Persian kings being like a Turkish pasha of to-day, who, when he
wishes an edict to be understood, writes it in Turkish and Arabic. It
was also clear to him that the first system must be the script of the
Persian kings themselves, of which the other two were translations. The
preparatory work for reading this had already been done by Münter; what
Grotefend now had to do was to identify and read the names to which the
word for “king” was attached.
On comparing the inscriptions together he found that while the word
for “king” remained unchanged, the word which accompanied it at the
beginning of an inscription varied on different monuments. There were,
in fact, two wholly different words, one of which was peculiar to one
set of monuments, the other to another set. But he also found that the
first of these words followed the other on the second set of monuments,
though with a different termination from that which belonged to it when
it took the place of the first word. Hence he conjectured that the two
words represented the names of two Persian kings, one of whom was the
son of the other, the termination of the second name when it followed
the first being that of the genitive. It was now necessary to discover
who the kings were whose names had thus been found. Fortunately the
Achæmenian dynasty was not a long one, and the number of royal names
in it was not large. And of these names, Cyrus was too short and
Artaxerxes too long for either of the two names which Grotefend had
detected. There only remained Darius and Xerxes, and as Xerxes was the
son of Darius, the name which characterized the first set of monuments
must be Darius.
Grotefend’s next task was to ascertain the old Persian pronunciation of
the name of Darius. This had been given by Strabo, while the Persian
pronunciation of Xerxes was indicated in the Old Testament. With this
assistance Grotefend was able to assign alphabetic values to the
cuneiform characters which composed the two names, and a corner of the
veil which had so long covered the cuneiform records was lifted at
last. A comparison of the names which he had thus read gave the needful
verification of the correctness of his method. In the names of Darius
and Xerxes the same letters occur, but in different places; _a_ and _r_
in _Darius_ occupy the second and third places, in _Xerxes_ the fourth
and fifth, while _sh_, which is the last letter in _Darius_, would
be the second and sixth in _Xerxes_. And such was actually the case.
Grotefend was therefore justified in concluding that his guesses were
correct, and that the right values had been assigned to the cuneiform
characters. A beginning had been made in cuneiform decipherment, and in
this instance the beginning was half the whole.
Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy on September
4, 1802. By a curious accident it was at the same meeting that Heyne
described the first attempts that had been made towards deciphering
the Egyptian hieroglyphs. But the learned world looked askance at the
discoveries of the young Latinist. The science of archæology was still
unborn, and Oriental philologists were unable even to understand the
inductive method of the decipherer. The Academy of Göttingen refused to
print his communications, and it was not until 1815 that they appeared
in the first volume of the History of his friend Heeren, who, being
untrammelled by the prejudices of Oriental learning, had been one of
the earliest to accept his conclusions.[4] For a whole generation the
work of decipherment was allowed to sleep.
It is unfortunately true that after his initial success Grotefend’s
ignorance of Oriental languages really did stand in his way. He
assumed that the language of the inscriptions and that of the
_Zend-Avesta_ were one and the same, and accordingly went to the
newly-found Zend dictionary for the readings of the cuneiform names
and words. Vishtaspa, the name of the father of Darius, was thus
read Goshtasp, the word for “king” became _khsheh_ instead of
_khshayathiya_, and that which Grotefend had correctly divined
to signify “great,” _eghre_ instead of _vazraka_. It is not
wonderful, therefore, that he was never able to follow up the beginning
he had made.
To do this was reserved for the Zendic scholars of a later generation.
Rask the Dane in 1826 determined the true form of the genitive plural,
and thereby identified the character for _m_ which gave him the
names of the supreme god Auramazda and of Achæmenes the forefather of
Cyrus.[5] But the great step forward was made by the eminent French
scholar, Emile Burnouf, in 1836.[6] The first of the inscriptions
published by Niebuhr he discovered to contain a list of the satrapies
of Darius. With this clue in his hand the reading of the names and the
subsequent identification of the letters which composed them could
be a question only of patience and time. For this Burnouf was well
equipped by his philological knowledge and training, and the result
was an alphabet of thirty letters, the greater part of which had been
correctly deciphered.
Burnouf’s Memoir on the subject was published in June 1836. In the
preceding month his friend and pupil, Professor Lassen of Bonn, had
also published a work on “The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of
Persepolis.”[7] He and Burnouf had been in frequent correspondence, and
his claim to have independently detected the names of the satrapies,
and thereby to have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was
in consequence fiercely attacked. To the attacks made upon him,
however, Lassen never vouchsafed a reply. Whatever his obligations to
Burnouf may have been, his own contributions to the decipherment of
the inscriptions were numerous and important. He succeeded in fixing
the true values of nearly all the letters in the Persian alphabet, in
translating the texts, and in proving that the language of them was not
Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the relation of a sister.
Meanwhile another scholar, armed with fresh and important material,
had entered the field. A young English officer in the East India
Company’s service, Major Rawlinson by name, was attached to the
British Mission in Persia. A happy inspiration led him to attempt the
decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions. It was in 1835, when he
was twenty-five years old, that he first began his work. All that he
knew was that Grotefend had discovered in the texts of Persepolis the
names of Darius, of Xerxes and of Hystaspes, but cut off as he was in
his official position at Kirmanshah on the western frontier of Persia
from European libraries, he was unable to procure either the Memoir of
the German scholar or the articles to which it had given rise. Like
Burnouf, he set himself to decipher the two inscriptions of Hamadan,
which he had himself copied with great care. He soon recognized in them
the names that had been read by Grotefend, and thus obtained a working
alphabet. But his position in Persia soon gave him an advantage which
was denied to his fellow-workers in Europe. It was not long before he
found an opportunity of copying the great inscription on the sacred
rock of Behistun, which had never been copied before. It was by far
the longest cuneiform inscription yet discovered, and was filled with
proper names, including those of the Persian satrapies. The copying of
it, however, cost much time and labour, and was accomplished at actual
risk of life, as Major Rawlinson, better known by his later title of
Sir Henry Rawlinson, had to be lowered in a basket from the top of the
cliff in order to ascertain the exact forms of certain characters.
[Illustration: THE TOMB OF DARIUS.]
In the following year (1836) Rawlinson moved to Teheran, and there
received from Edwin Norris, the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society,
the Memoirs of Grotefend and Saint-Martin. In 1837 he finished his copy
of the Behistun inscription, and sent a translation of its opening
paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. Before, however, his Paper
could be published, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him,
necessitating a revision of his Paper and the postponement of its
publication. Then came other causes of delay. He was called away to
Afghanistan to perform the onerous and responsible duties of British
Agent at Kandahar, and it was not until 1843 that he was once more
free to resume his cuneiform studies. A year later he was visited by
the Danish Professor, Westergaard, who placed at his disposal the
copies he had just made of the inscription on the tomb of Darius at
Naksh-i-Rustam and of some shorter inscriptions from Persepolis,
and Rawlinson’s Memoir was accordingly finished at last and sent
to England. Here Norris subjected it to a careful revision, and at
his suggestion Rawlinson once more visited Behistun, where he took
squeezes and re-examined doubtful characters. In 1847 the first part
of the Memoir was published, though the second part, containing the
analysis and commentary on the text, did not appear till 1849.[8]
The work, however, was well worthy of the time and care that had been
bestowed upon it. The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform texts
was virtually accomplished, and the guesses of Grotefend had developed
into the discovery of a new alphabet and a new language. The capstone
was put to the work by the discovery of Hincks, an Irish clergyman,
that the alphabet was not a true one in the modern sense of the word, a
vowel-sound being attached in pronunciation to each of the consonants
represented in it.
The mystery of the Persian cuneiform texts was thus solved after nearly
fifty years of endeavour. A harder task still remained. The Persian
texts were accompanied by two other cuneiform transcripts, which, as
Grotefend had perceived, must have represented the other two principal
languages that were spoken in the Persian Empire. That the third
transcript was Babylonian seemed evident from the resemblance of the
characters contained in it to those on the bricks and seal-cylinders of
Babylonia. Grotefend had already written upon the subject, and had even
divined the name of Nebuchadrezzar on certain Babylonian bricks.
But this third species of writing, which we must henceforth term
Babylonian or Assyrian, presented extraordinary difficulties. Instead
of an alphabet of forty-two letters, the decipherer was confronted by
an enormous number of different characters, while no indication was
given of the separation of one word from another. Moreover the forms
of the characters as found on the Persepolitan monuments differed
considerably from those found on the Babylonian monuments, which
again differed greatly from each other. On the seal-cylinders, more
especially, they assumed the most complicated shapes, between which and
the Persepolitan forms it was often impossible to trace any likeness
whatever.
Suddenly a discovery was made which furnished an abundance of new
material and incited the decipherer to fresh efforts. In 1842 Botta
was sent to Mossul as French Consul, and at Mohl’s instigation began
to excavate on the site of Nineveh. His first essays there not proving
very successful, he transferred his workmen further north, to the mound
of Khorsabad, and there laid bare the ruins of a large and splendid
palace which subsequently turned out to be that of Sargon. In the
autumn of 1845 the excavations of Botta were succeeded by those of
Layard, first at Nimrûd (the ancient Calah), and then at Kûyunjik or
Nineveh, the result being to fill the British Museum with bas-reliefs
covered with cuneiform writing and with other relics of Assyrian
civilization.
The inscriptions brought to light by Botta were copied and published by
him in 1846–50.[9] The sumptuous work which was dedicated to them was
followed by a smaller and cheaper edition, and the author gave further
help to the student by classifying the characters, which amounted to
as many as 642.[10] His work proved conclusively the identity of the
script used at Nineveh with that of the third transcripts on the
Persian monuments, as well as the substantial agreement of the groups
of characters occurring in each.
The Irish scholar Dr. Hincks--one of the most remarkable and acute
decipherers that have ever lived--was already at work on the
newly-found texts. In 1847 he published a long article on “The Three
Kinds of Persepolitan Writing,”[11] and, two years later, another “On
the Khorsabad Inscriptions.”[12] In 1850 he read a Paper before the
British Association,[13] summing up his conclusions and announcing the
important discovery that the Assyrian characters were syllabic and not
alphabetic, as had hitherto been supposed. With this discovery the
scientific decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions actually begins.
The proper names contained in the Persian texts furnished the clue to
the reading of the Babylonian transcripts. The values thus obtained
for the Babylonian characters made it possible to read many of the
words, the meaning of which was fixed by a comparison with the Persian
original. It then became clear that Assyrian was a Semitic language,
standing in much the same relation to Hebrew that the Old Persian stood
to Zend.
Its Semitic origin was proved to demonstration by the French scholar
de Saulcy in 1849. Another French scholar, de Longpérier, had already
discovered the name of Sargon in the Khorsabad inscriptions[14]--the
first royal Assyrian name that had yet been read. De Saulcy himself
subjected the Babylonian transcript of the trilingual inscription of
Elwend to a minute analysis, and so carefully was the work performed,
and so secure were the foundations upon which it rested, that the
translation needs but little revision even to-day.[15] The old belief
in the alphabetic nature of the characters, however, still possessed
the mind of the decipherer, although in one passage he goes so far as
to say, “I am tempted to believe” that the signs are syllabic. But he
did not go beyond the temptation to believe, and the discovery was
reserved for Hincks.
Rawlinson was now at Bagdad. De Saulcy sent him his Memoirs, and the
British scholar had the immense advantage of having in his hands the
Babylonian version of the great Behistun inscription, of knowing the
country in which the monuments were found, and of possessing copies of
inscriptions which had not yet made their way to Europe.
Nevertheless, it is amazing with what rapidity and perspicacity he
forced his way through the thick jungle of cuneiform script. In his
Memoir on the Persian texts, published in 1847, he already maps out
with marvellous fulness and exactitude the different varieties of
cuneiform writing. It is his second Memoir, however, which excites in
the Assyriologist of to-day the profoundest feelings of surprise and
admiration. This consists of notes on the inscriptions of Assyria and
Babylonia, and was communicated to the Royal Asiatic Society at the
beginning of the year 1850.[16]
[Illustration: BLACK OBELISK OF SHAL-MANESER II.
[_See p. 21._]
[Illustration: CHALDÆAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN TERRA-COTTA.
[_See p. 52._]
One of the inscriptions he has translated in full--the annals of
Shalmaneser II., on an obelisk of black marble discovered at Nimrûd
and now in the British Museum. The text is a long one, and for the
first time the European reader had placed before him a contemporaneous
account of the campaigns of an Assyrian monarch in the ninth century
before our era. The translation is substantially correct; it is only
in the proper names that Rawlinson has gone much astray. The values
of many of the characters were still uncertain or unknown, and he was
under the domination of the belief that they represented alphabetic
letters.
He was, moreover, mistaken as to the age of the monument itself, which
he assigned to too early an epoch. It was Dr. Hincks who again settled
the question, by reading upon it the names of Hazael of Damascus and
Jehu of Israel.[17] This was one of the first-fruits of his discovery
of the syllabic character of the Assyrian signs. Another was the
discovery of the name of Sennacherib,[18] as well as those of Hezekiah
and Jerusalem.[19]
Shortly before this Hincks had made another discovery of importance. He
had deciphered the names of Nebuchadrezzar and his father on the bricks
of Babylon,[20] and had further shown that a cylinder of Nebuchadrezzar
brought from Babylon by Sir Robert Ker-Porter, and written in the
cuneiform characters met with on the Persian monuments, contained
the same text as another cylinder obtained by Sir Harford Jones, and
inscribed with characters of the most complex kind. A comparison of the
two texts gave him the values of the latter characters, which we now
know to represent the archaic Babylonian forms of the cuneiform signs.
But the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian script was not yet
complete. In 1851 Rawlinson’s long-promised Memoir on the Babylonian
version of the inscription of Behistun was given to the world,[21]
and consisted of the cuneiform text, with translation, grammar and
commentary, besides a list of 242 characters. It announced, moreover,
two facts about these characters, one of which had already been
recognized, while the second was received by the Orientalists with
shouts of incredulity. The first fact was that the characters, besides
having phonetic values, could also be used ideographically to denote
objects and ideas. The second fact was that they were polyphonous, each
character possessing more than one phonetic value.
For once the sceptics seemed to have common-sense upon their side.
How, it was asked, could a system of writing be read the symbols of
which might be pronounced sometimes in one way, sometimes in another?
Anything could be made out of anything upon such principles, and a
method of interpretation which ended in such a result was pronounced
to be self-condemned. Hincks, however, once more entered the field and
demonstrated that Rawlinson was right.[22] Hincks was an Egyptologist,
and consequently the polyphony of the cuneiform characters was not
to him a new and startling phenomenon. It merely showed that they
must once have been pictorial--as, indeed, their ideographic use also
indicated--and in a picture-writing each picture could necessarily
be represented by more than one word, and therefore by more than one
phonetic value, when the pronunciation of the word came to be employed
phonetically. The picture of a foot, for instance, would denote not
only a “foot,” but also such ideas as “go,” “run,” “walk,” each of
which would become one of its phonetic values with the development of
the picture into a conventional syllabic sign.
Excavation was still proceeding on the site of Nineveh. Mr. Hormuzd
Rassam, himself a native of Mossul and the active assistant of Layard,
was sent in 1852 by the British Museum to complete the work from
which Layard had now been called away by diplomatic duties.[23] In
1853 he made a discovery which proved to be of momentous importance
for Assyrian decipherment, and without which, in fact, it could never
have advanced very far. He discovered the library of Nineveh with its
multitudes of closely-written clay tablets, many of them containing
long lists of characters, dictionaries and grammars, which have served
at once to verify and to extend the knowledge of the script and
language that the early decipherers had obtained. Meanwhile a careful
survey of the whole country was made at the expense of the East India
Company,[24] and the French Government sent out an exploring and
excavating expedition to Babylonia under a young and brilliant scholar,
Jules Oppert. The results of the mission, which lasted from 1851 to
1854, were embodied in two learned volumes, the first of which appeared
in 1863.[25] In these Oppert showed, what Hincks and Rawlinson had
already pointed out, that the peculiarities of the Assyrian syllabary
were due not only to its pictorial origin but also to the fact that it
had been invented by a non-Semitic people. This primitive population of
Babylonia, called Akkadian by Hincks, Sumerian by Oppert, had spoken
an agglutinative language similar to that of the Turks or Finns, and
had been the founders of Babylonian civilization. For these views
Oppert found support in the tablets of the library of Nineveh, a large
part of which consists of translations from the older language into
Semitic Assyrian, as well as of comparative grammars, vocabularies and
reading-books in the two languages.
Once more the Semitic scholars protested. There was no end to the
extravagant fantasies of the Assyriologists! The learned world was
comfortably convinced that none but a Semitic or Aryan people could
have been the originators of civilization, and to assert that the
Semites had borrowed their culture from a race which seemed to have
affinities with Mongols or Tatars was an outrage upon established
prejudices. The Semitic philologist was more certain than ever that
Assyrian decipherment was the folly of a few “untrained” amateurs, and
could safely be disregarded.
But the little band of Assyriologists pursued their labours
undisturbed. In 1855–6 Hincks published a most remarkable series of
articles in the _Journal of Sacred Literature_, in which the
various forms of the Assyrian verb were analyzed and given once for
all. The work has never had to be repeated, and the foundations of
Assyrian grammar were solidly laid. A few years later (in 1860) a
complete grammar of the language was published by Oppert. The initial
stage of Assyrian decipherment was thus at an end.
We must now turn back to the second transcript of the Persian
inscriptions, which, thanks to its greater simplicity, had been
deciphered before the Assyro-Babylonian. The way was opened in 1844 by
the Danish scholar Westergaard.[26] With the help of the proper names
he fixed the values of many of the characters and made a tentative
endeavour to read the texts. But the language he brought to light was
of so strange a nature as to throw doubt on the correctness of his
method. Turkish, Arabic, Indian and even Keltic elements seemed alike
to be mingled in it. It was not, therefore, till his readings had been
subjected to revision by Hincks in 1846[27] and de Saulcy in 1850[28]
that any confidence was reposed in it, and the results made available
for the decipherment of the Babylonian transcripts, the characters of
which frequently had the same forms. It must be remembered, however,
that Westergaard worked from defective materials. Rawlinson had not yet
published his copy of the Behistun inscription, which he eventually
placed in the hands of Edwin Norris, who, in 1853, edited the text
along with a syllabary, grammar and vocabulary, as well as translations
and commentary.[29] This edition was a splendid piece of work, and
with it the decipherment of the second transcript of the Persian
inscriptions may be said to have been accomplished. Oppert’s _Peuple
et Langage des Médes_, which appeared in 1870, did but revise,
supplement and systematize the work of Norris.
The new language which had thus been brought to light was
agglutinative. Westergaard had seen in it the language of the Medes,
and, like Rawlinson, had connected it with a hypothetical “Scythian”
family of speech. The term “Scythian” was retained by Norris, who,
however, attempted to show that it was really related to the Finnish
dialects. But the excavations made at Susa by Loftus in 1851 put
another face on the matter. In 1874, and again more fully in 1883,[30]
I pointed out that the inscriptions found at Susa and other ancient
Elamite sites were in an older form of the same language as that
of the second Achæmenian transcripts, and furthermore that certain
inscriptions discovered by Layard in the plain of Mal-Amîr eastward
of Susa were in practically the same script and dialect. At the same
time I fixed the values of the characters in the Mal-Amîr texts
and gave provisional translations of them, with a vocabulary and
commentary. Oppert and myself had already been working at the reading
of the older Susian inscriptions, a task in which we were followed by
Weissbach with a greater measure of success. But the same cause which
had retarded the decipherment of the second transcript of the Persian
inscriptions--a want of materials--militated against any great advance
being made in the decipherment of the older Susian, and it is only
since 1897, when the excavations of M. de Morgan at Susa were begun,
that the student has been at last provided with the necessary means.
Thanks to the brilliant penetration of the French Assyriologist, Dr.
Scheil, the outlines of the language of the ancient kingdom of Elam can
now be sketched with a fair amount of completeness and accuracy.[31]
The name of Neo-Susian has by common consent been conferred upon the
language of the second Achæmenian transcripts; perhaps Neo-Elamite
would be better. At all events it represents the language of the second
capital of the Persian Empire as it was spoken in the age of Darius and
his successors, and is a lineal descendant of the old agglutinative
language of Elam.
The three systems of cuneiform script, which a hundred years ago seemed
so impenetrable in their mystery, have thus, one by one, been forced
to yield their secrets. But as each in turn has been deciphered,
fresh forms of cuneiform writing and new languages expressed in
cuneiform characters have come to light. The first to emerge was that
agglutinative language of primitive Chaldæa which so scandalized
the philological world and excited such strong distrust of the
Assyriologists. The question of the name by which it should be called
has been set at rest by the discovery of tablets in which its native
designation is made known to us. Some years ago Bezold published a
bilingual text in which it is termed “the language of Sumer,”[32] and
more recently Messerschmidt has edited a bilingual inscription of the
Babylonian king Samsu-ditana in which the Semitic “translation” is
described as “Akkadian.”[33] Oppert is thus shown to have been right in
the name which he proposed to give to the language of the inventors of
the cuneiform script.
The first analysis of Sumerian grammar was made by myself in 1870, when
the general outlines of the language were fixed and the verbal forms
read and explained.[34] Three years later Lenormant threw the materials
I had collected into a connected and systematic form, one result of
which was a controversy started by the Orientalist, Joseph Halévy, who
maintained that Sumerian was not a language at all, but a cryptograph
or secret writing. The answers made by the Assyriologists to this
curious theory obliged its author constantly to shift his ground,
but at the same time it also obliged them to examine their materials
more carefully and to revise conclusions which had been arrived at on
insufficient evidence. An important discovery was now made by Haupt,
who had already given the first scientific translation of a Sumerian
text;[35] he demonstrated the existence of two dialects, one of
which is marked by all the phenomena of phonetic decay.[36] This was
naturally supposed to indicate a difference of age in the two dialects,
the one being the older and the other the later form of the language.
Subsequent research, however, has gone to show that the two dialects
were really used contemporaneously, the decayed state of that which was
called “the woman’s language” by the Babylonians being due to the fact
that it was spoken in Akkad or Northern Babylonia, where the Semitic
element became predominant at a much earlier period than in Sumer or
Southern Babylonia.
Up to this time the study of Sumerian had been almost entirely confined
to the bilingual texts, of which a very large number existed in the
library of Nineveh, and in which a Semitic translation was attached to
the Sumerian original. Now, however, the French excavations at Tello in
Southern Babylonia began to furnish European scholars with monuments
of the pre-Semitic period, and to these the decipherers, among whom
Amiaud and Thureau Dangin hold the first place, accordingly turned
their attention. Texts composed in days when Sumerian princes still
governed the country, and written by scribes who were unacquainted with
a Semitic language, were successfully attacked with the assistance of
the bilingual tablets of Nineveh. But it was soon found that between
these genuine examples of Sumerian composition and the Sumerian which
was written and explained by Semitic scribes there was a good deal of
difference. The Semites had derived their culture from their Sumerian
predecessors, and a considerable part of the religious and legal
literature that had been handed on to them was in the older language.
This older language long continued to be that of both religion and
law, the two conservative forces in society, Sumerian becoming to the
Semitic Babylonians what Latin was to mediæval Europe. The inevitable
result followed: Semitic idioms and modes of thought were clothed
in a Sumerian dress, and the ignorance of the scribe produced not
infrequently the equivalent of the dog-Latin of a modern school-boy.
The gradual changes that took place in the cuneiform system of writing,
and the adaptation of it to the requirements of Semitic speech,
contributed to the creation of an artificial and quite unclassical
Sumerian, and the lexical tablets became filled with uses and
combinations of characters which were professedly Sumerian but really
Semitic in origin. All this renders the decipherment of a Sumerian text
even now a difficult affair, and many years must elapse before we can
say that the stage of decipherment is definitely passed and that the
scholar may content himself with a purely philological treatment of the
language.
But Sumerian was not the only new language outside the circle
recognized by the Persian monarchs which the decipherment of the
cuneiform characters has revealed to us. Even before the discovery
of Sumerian, cuneiform inscriptions had been copied on the rocks and
quarried stones of Armenia, which, when the characters composing
them came to be read, proved to belong to a language as novel and as
apparently unrelated to any other as Sumerian itself. As far back
as 1826 a young scholar of the name of Schulz had been sent by the
French Government to Van in Armenia, where, according to Armenian
writers, Semiramis, the fabled queen of Assyria, had once left her
monuments. Here Schulz actually found that the cliff on which the
ancient fortress of the city stood was covered with lines of cuneiform
characters, and similar inscriptions soon came to light in other parts
of the country. Before Schulz, however, could return to Europe he was
murdered (in 1829) by a Kurdish chief, whose guest he had been. But his
papers were recovered, and the copies of the inscriptions he had made
were published in 1840 in the _Journal Asiatique_. The first to
attempt to read them was Dr. Hincks, whom no problem in decipherment
ever seemed to baffle.[37] The characters, he showed, were practically
identical with those found in the Assyrian texts, the values of many of
which had now been ascertained; but Hincks, with his usual acuteness,
went on to use the Armenian or Vannic inscriptions for settling
the values of other Assyrian characters which had not as yet been
determined. In 1848 he was already able to read the names of the Vannic
kings and fix their succession, to make out the sense of several
passages in the texts, and to indicate the nominative and accusative
suffixes of the noun.
Here Vannic decipherment rested for many years. There was no difficulty
in reading the inscriptions phonetically, for they were written in a
very simplified form of the Assyrian syllabary; but the language which
was thus revealed stood isolated and alone, without linguistic kindred
either ancient or modern. The various attempts made to decipher it were
all failures.
So things remained until 1882–3, when I published my Memoir on “The
Decipherment of the Vannic Inscriptions” in the _Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society_. Here for the first time translations were given of
the inscriptions, together with a commentary, grammar and vocabulary.
At the same time I settled the chronological place of the Vannic kings,
which had hitherto been uncertain, as well as the geography of the
country over which they ruled, and analyzed the ancient religion of
the people as made known to us by the decipherment of the texts. In
revising and supplementing Schulz’s copies of the inscriptions I had
obtained the help of squeezes taken by Layard and Rassam. The task
of decipherment was, after all, not so hard a matter as the absence
of a bilingual text might make it appear. The want of a bilingual
was compensated by the numerous ideographs and “determinatives”
scattered through the inscriptions, which indicated their general
meaning, pointed out to the decipherer the names of countries,
cities, individuals and the like, and gave him the signification of
the phonetically-written words which in parallel passages often
replaced them. Moreover, the French Assyriologist, Stanislas Guyard,
and myself had independently made the discovery that a clause which
frequently comes at the end of a Vannic inscription corresponds with
the imprecatory formula of the Assyrians, while the decipherment of
the inscriptions led to the further discovery that not only had the
characters employed in them been borrowed from the Assyrians in the
time of the Assyrian conqueror, Assur-natsir-pal, but that many of the
phrases used in Assur-natsir-pal’s texts had been borrowed at the same
time.
Other scholars soon appeared to pursue and extend my work, more
especially Drs. Belck and Lehmann, whose expedition to Armenia in 1898
has placed at our disposal a large store of fresh material. Amongst
this fresh material are two long bilingual inscriptions, in Vannic and
Assyrian, one of which had been discovered by de Morgan in 1890. These
have verified my system of decipherment, have increased our knowledge
of the Vannic vocabulary, have corrected a few errors, and, I am bound
to add, have in one or two cases justified renderings of mine to which
exception had been taken. A historical Vannic text can now be read with
almost as much certainty as an Assyrian one.
With the discovery of the language spoken in Armenia before the arrival
of the modern Armenians the list of lost languages and dialects
brought to light by the decipherment of the cuneiform script is by no
means exhausted. Among the tablets found in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna in
Upper Egypt was a long letter from the king of Mitanni or Northern
Mesopotamia in the native language of his country, which has been
partially deciphered by Messerschmidt, Jensen and myself.[38] The
language turns out to be distantly related to the Vannic, but is of
a much more complicated description. Two of the other letters in the
same collection were in yet another previously unknown language, which
the contents of one of them showed to be that of a kingdom in Asia
Minor called Arzawa. Since then tablets have been found at Boghaz Keui
in Cappadocia, on the site of the ancient capital of the Hittites,
which are in the same dialect and form of cuneiform writing, and prove
that in them we have discovered at last actual relics of the Hittite
tongue. Thanks to the light thrown upon them by a tablet from the same
locality, which I obtained last year, it is now possible to raise the
veil which has hitherto concealed the Hittite language, and in a Paper
which will shortly be printed I have succeeded in partially translating
the texts and sketching the outlines of their grammar. But any detailed
account of these discoveries must be reserved for a future chapter; at
present I can do no more than refer briefly to these latest problems in
cuneiform decipherment.
That other problems still await us cannot be doubted. The number of
different languages which the decipherment of the cuneiform script
has thus far revealed to us is an assurance that, as excavation and
research proceed, fresh languages will come to light which have
employed the cuneiform syllabary as a means of expression. Indeed, we
already know that it was used by the Kossæans, wild mountaineers who
skirted the eastern frontiers of Babylonia, and a list of whose words
has been preserved in a cuneiform tablet,[39] and also that there was
a time, before the introduction of the Phœnician alphabet, when “the
language of Canaan”--better known as Hebrew--was written in cuneiform
characters. Canaanite glosses are found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets,
and two Sidonian seals exist in which the cuneiform syllabary is
employed to represent the sounds of Canaanitish speech.[40]
And the key to all this varied literature, this medley of languages,
the very names of which had perished, was a simple guess! But it was a
scientific guess, made in accordance with scientific method, and based
upon sound scientific reasoning. It is true that it needed the slow
and patient work of generations of scholars before the guess could
ripen into maturity; the discovery of the value of a single letter
in the Old Persian alphabet was sometimes the labour of a lifetime;
but, like the seed of the mustard tree, the guess contained within
itself all the promise of its future growth. On the day when Grotefend
identified the names of Darius and Xerxes, the decipherment of the
cuneiform inscriptions, and therewith of the history, the theology
and the civilization of the ancient Oriental world, was potentially
accomplished.
CHAPTER II
THE ARCHÆOLOGICAL MATERIALS; THE EXCAVATIONS
AT SUSA AND THE ORIGIN OF BRONZE
The modern science of archæology has been derisively called “the study
of pots.” As a matter of fact, the study of ancient pottery occupies a
prominent place in it, and we cannot turn over the pages of a standard
archæological work without constantly coming across photographs and
illustrations of the ceramic art or reading descriptions of vases
and bowls, of coloured ware and fragmentary sherds. Questions of
date and origin are made to turn on the presence or absence of some
particular form of pottery on a given site, and fierce controversies
have arisen over a single fragment of a vessel of clay. A knowledge of
ancient pottery is a primary requisite in the scientific excavator and
archæologist of to-day.
The reason of this is obvious. Archæology is an inductive science;
its conclusions, therefore, are drawn from the comparison and
co-ordination of objects which can be seen and handled, as well as
tested by all competent observers. It is built upon what our German
friends would call objective facts, and the method it employs is that
carefully-disciplined and experimentally-guarded application of the
ordinary logic of life which can alone give us scientific results.
The method is one which the purely literary mind seems often curiously
incapable of comprehending; the literary student is accustomed to deal
so exclusively with matters of merely individual taste and theory
that he is as little able to understand what is meant by scientific
evidence and probability as the scholar who is not a mathematician is
able to follow the reasoning of Lord Kelvin. This is a fact which has
to be borne in mind more especially in archæological science, for the
questions with which archæology is concerned so frequently invade the
domain of literature or appear so closely connected with questions that
are more or less literary, that the purely literary scholar is apt to
think himself just as well qualified to discuss them as “the man in the
street” is apt to think himself qualified to discuss the etymology of a
word. To all such the archæologist would say, “Go and study your pots.”
For pottery is practically indestructible. Like the fossils on which
the geologist has built up the past history of life upon the earth, it
is an enduring evidence, when rightly interpreted, of the past history
of man. Like the fossils, moreover, it exhibits a multitudinous variety
of types and forms. But in all these types and forms there is an
underlying unity. The primitive needs of man are everywhere the same,
and the powers of mind called in to supply them are the same also.
The dish and bowl, the vase and its handles, meet us again and again
wherever we go; and the same materials for making them meet us also.
The hands of man, guided by the brain of man, found clay wherewith to
manufacture the vessels that he needed, and to harden it afterwards in
the sun or fire. Where or how the first pottery was made we do not
know, we probably shall never know. When palæolithic man first makes
his appearance in Europe he seems not yet to have been acquainted with
it; but it is difficult to prove a negative in archæology as in other
sciences, and the absence of palæolithic pottery may be due only to
the imperfection of the record. At any rate, as we descend the ladder
of chronology the existence of man is marked more and more by the
fragments of pottery he has left behind him; at Rome a whole mountain
of it grew up in the space of a few centuries, and the huge mounds that
encircled Cairo a hundred years ago were mainly formed of mediæval
sherds. When excavating on an Egyptian site I have sometimes been
tempted to think that the people who once lived there must have spent
their whole time in breaking their household ware.
Now not only are the primitive needs of man much the same throughout
the world and at all periods of time, the nature of man is much
the same also; and a distinguishing feature in his nature is love
of variety. The same variety which we see in the forms of life and
in the outward appearance and mental aptitudes of man himself is
reflected in the products of his skill. Yet along with this love of
variety goes a strong conservative or imitative instinct--an instinct
which finds, too, its counterpart in nature, “so careful of the
type.” On the one hand, fashions change; on the other, a fashion once
introduced spreads rapidly and maintains itself to the exclusion of
all others for a determinate period of time throughout a determinate
area. And to nothing does this apply with more truth than to pottery.
Observation has shown that not only are different tribes or countries
distinguished by a difference in their pottery, but that in each tribe
or country similar differences distinguish successive periods of time.
When to this is added the practical indestructibility of the potsherd,
it will easily be seen what a criterion is afforded by it for fixing
the age and character of ancient remains, and their relation to other
monuments of the past. It is not surprising that a study of pottery
has become the sheet-anchor of archæological chronology, and that the
first object of the scientific excavator is to determine the relative
succession of the ceramic remains he discovers and their connection
with similar remains found elsewhere. Scientific excavation means,
before all things else, careful observation and record of every piece
of pottery, however apparently worthless, which the excavator disinters.
But now, unfortunately, I have to make an admission. We have, as yet,
no ceramic record in either Babylonia or Assyria. Until very recently
there has been no attempt in either country at scientific excavation.
The pioneers, Layard and Botta and Loftus, lived and worked before it
was known or thought of, and we cannot, therefore, be too thankful to
Layard for having nevertheless given us so full and accurate an account
of what he found, and the conditions under which he found it. The
excavations controlled by the British Museum have, I am sorry to say,
been for the most part destructive rather than scientific; such objects
as were wanted by the Museum were alone sought after; little or no
record has been kept of their discovery, and they have been mixed with
objects bought from natives, of whose origin nothing was known. At one
spot, Carchemish, the old Hittite capital, which, though not strictly
in Assyria, formed part of the Assyrian Empire, and was the seat of an
Assyrian governor, the so-called excavations conducted by the Museum in
1880 were simply a scandal, which Dr. Hayes Ward, who visited the spot
shortly afterwards, has characterized as “wicked.” The archæological
evidence there, which would have thrown so much light on the Hittite
problem, has been irretrievably lost.
Matters are better now, and if I may judge from the work done by Mr.
H. R. Hall at Dêr el-Bâharî in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund,
his colleague, Mr. L. W. King, who has recently been excavating for
the British Museum in Assyria, will have done something to retrieve
the archæological good name of our British excavators in the East.
M. de Sarzec’s excavations at Tello in Southern Babylonia were also
conducted with some consideration for archæological method, at all
events on the architectural side, and in the capable hands of M.
Heuzey the works of art found there have been made to yield valuable
results. Moreover, the history of Tello may be said to be comprised
in a single epoch of archaic Babylonia, and all objects discovered
on the site may consequently be regarded as belonging to one age
and phase of Babylonian civilization. Of the American excavations
at Niffer it is difficult to speak at present. The work there has
been careful and patient, and has extended over a long series of
years. The architectural facts have been accurately recorded, at
all events in the case of the great temple of Bel, and about the
sequence of the inscribed monuments there is little room for
doubt. But accusations of carelessness have lately been brought by
the excavators one against the other, and when we find the sharpest
critic among them unable to substantiate his own account of the
discovery of a library and implicitly endorsing the assignment of a
Parthian palace to the “Mykenæan” age, it is impossible to put much
faith in their descriptions of archæological details. Some years ago
the Germans explored a cemetery at El-Hibba with considerable care
and thoroughness, and thus revealed to us pretty much all we know at
present about Babylonian funereal customs; yet here again too little
attention was paid to the pottery, and the actual date of the cemetery
is still uncertain. It may belong to the Babylonian period, but it may
also not be older than the Persian or even Parthian age.
[Illustration:
THE TELL OF JERABIS (PROBABLY THE ANCIENT CARCHEMISH).]
The Germans are once more working in the lands of the Euphrates and
Tigris, but in Babylonia their labours have been mainly confined
to the Babylon of Nebuchadrezzar, where comparatively little has
been discovered. Since 1904, however, the chief strength of the
expedition has been directed upon Qal’at Shirqât, where Assur, the
primitive capital of Assyria, formerly stood, and here we may expect
that archæological results of first-class importance will at last be
obtained. But the work there has not yet advanced far enough for more
to be done than the mapping out of the old city, the ascertainment of
certain architectural facts, and the recovery of inscriptions of great
historical value.
It will be seen, therefore, that the reproach brought against
excavations in Egypt by Mr. Rhind in 1862 still holds good of
excavations in Babylonia and Assyria. The first stage in their
history is only just passing away. The idea that excavation is a trade
which any one can take up without previous training, and that all the
excavator need think about is the discovery of objects for a museum,
is only beginning to disappear. In 1862 Rhind could write of Egyptian
tombs: “I am not aware that there can be found the contents of a
single sepulchre duly authenticated with satisfactory precision as to
what objects were present, and as to the relative positions all these
occupied when deposited by contemporary hands. Indeed, for many of the
Egyptian sepulchral antiquities scattered over Europe there exists
no record to determine even the part of the country where they were
exhumed.... There have thus been swept away unrecorded into the past
illustrative facts of very great interest, which cannot now, according
to any reasonable probability, be replaced, at all events in the degree
which there are grounds to believe were then possible.”[41] Happily,
Mr. Rhind’s words are no longer true of Egypt, where he himself set the
first example of showing how scientific exploration ought to be carried
on, and the result is that the ancient civilization and culture of
Egypt are now known to us even better than those of classical Greece or
Rome.
But what was true in 1862 of Egypt is still very largely true of
Assyria and Babylonia. We are beginning to know something about the
history of Assyro-Babylonian architecture; we know a little about the
early work of the Babylonians in metal and stone; but the history of
Assyro-Babylonian pottery is still, speaking broadly, a blank. For
most of his knowledge of the ancient Euphratean civilizations the
archæologist has to turn to the inscriptions and written literature of
which such vast quantities have survived, and hence, besides being an
archæologist in the strict sense, he must be also a decipherer and a
philologist. He is still precluded from appealing to the evidence which
can be handled and felt.
From the point of view of the archæologist written evidence is usually
unsatisfactory because it admits of more than one interpretation. A
translation which seems certain to one scholar may be questioned by
another; an inference drawn from the words of a text by one student
may be denied by another. The statements in the texts themselves may
be contradictory, or their imperfection may lead to wrong conclusions.
Above all, the evidence may come to the archæologist from a philologist
whose bent of mind is literary rather than scientific, and who will
therefore be unable either to appreciate or to understand scientific
testimony. Nothing is more common than to come across literary critics
who cannot be made to understand the nature of inductive proof.
On the other hand, the decipherer of a lost language must necessarily
be an archæologist as well. The clues he follows will be largely
archæological, and he has to appeal to archæology at every step.
The method he must pursue is the method of archæology and of other
inductive sciences, and the materials he uses are in part the materials
of archæology also. The philologist who knows nothing of history and
geography, who is unable to follow a scientific argument and appreciate
scientific reasoning, can never decipher; he may take the materials
given him by the decipherer and work them into philological shape,
but that is all. We must listen to him on questions of grammar and
vocabulary; on questions of archæology his opinions are worth no more
than those of the ordinary man.
I have insisted on this point because it is a very important one in
a study like Assyriology. The public naturally thinks that in all
Assyriological matters the opinion of one Assyriologist is as good as
that of another. We might just as well suppose that in all matters
which come under the head of astronomy the opinions of every class
of astronomer are equally authoritative. But in astronomy there are
questions which are purely mathematical, and there are other questions
which are more or less chemical, and the astronomer who has devoted
his attention to the spectrum analysis is contented to leave to his
mathematical colleague abstruse calculations in advanced mathematics.
The Assyriologist who is a grammarian pure and simple is just as little
an authority on the archæological side of his study as any one else who
is ignorant of archæology, and the materials he provides must be dealt
with by the archæologist like the literary materials provided for him
by the classical philologist; the materials in both cases stand on the
same footing.
At the same time, there is a difference between them. In the first
place, the literary materials with which the Assyriologist deals are
in a very large number of instances autographs. They are the actual
documents of the writers whose names they bear or to whose age they
belong. And there is all the difference in the world between the
letters of a Plato or a Cicero which have come down to us through
numerous copyists and the letters of Khammu-rabi of Babylon, the
originals of which are now in our hands. The inscriptions in which
Nebuchadrezzar describes his building operations or the contemporaneous
annals of the Assyrian kings are, from the historical point of view,
of far more value than the books written about them at a later date,
however admirable the latter may be as works of literature; in other
words, they are first-hand sources, and, as such, objective facts of
much the same character as ancient pottery or stone implements. Then,
in the second place, the documents have to be deciphered before they
can be treated philologically; and, as I have already said, the task
of decipherment is in itself an archæological pursuit. If carried
out on correct lines it is itself an instance of the application of
the inductive method, and it is, moreover, constantly compelled to
call archæology or history to its aid. Assyriology is thus primarily
an archæological study, using the methods of archæological science
and demanding the help of the archæologist, even though there are
Assyriologists who are not archæologists themselves.
But for the present our archæological facts have to be taken
mainly from the results of the decipherment of the inscriptions.
They are for the most part epigraphical; the excavator has not yet
supplemented them, as in Egypt or prehistoric Greece, on what I would
term the ceramic side. This, at least, is the case in Babylonia and
Assyria. It is no longer the case, however, throughout the ancient
Assyro-Babylonian world. There is one exception to the charge brought
by modern archæology against the excavators in the lands of the Tigris
and Euphrates. M. de Morgan has been working for the last ten years
on the site of Susa, the capital of Elam, and he has brought to his
labours the knowledge and experience of an excavator who has been
trained in modern methods and is fully awake to the requirements of
modern science. At last, at Susa, we have an archæological record of
the history of culture, based not only on written monuments, but also
on the more tangible evidence of scientifically-observed strata of
human remains. It is true that Elam is not Babylonia; but one of the
surprises of M. de Morgan’s discoveries is that in the early days of
Babylonian history Elam was a Babylonian province, and Susa the seat of
a Babylonian governor. The same culture extended from Sippara on the
Euphrates to Susa in Elam, and this culture was Babylonian. Hence, in
default of materials from Babylonia itself, we may see in the history
of cultural development at Susa a counterpart of that in Babylonia, at
any rate during the period when Elam and Babylonia were alike under
Semitic rule.[42]
[Illustration: THE TUMULUS OF SUSA, AS IT APPEARED TOWARDS THE MIDDLE
OF LAST CENTURY.]
At Susa the line of division between the prehistoric or neolithic
age and the historical epoch is very clearly marked. The prehistoric
stratum lies twenty-five metres below the surface of the mounds, and
is divided by M. de Morgan and his fellow-workers into two periods.
The first is distinguished by a fine thin pottery, with yellow paste,
which is already made upon a wheel. It does not exceed from two to
seven millimetres in thickness; it is polished, and decorated with
black bands and various patterns in a brown colour produced by oxide
of iron. The designs are not only geometric, but also represent animal
and vegetable forms. Among them are rows of ostriches identical with
those found on the painted prehistoric pottery of Egypt. Indeed, the
explorers were especially struck by the resemblance of the pottery as a
whole to that of Egypt in the prehistoric age, though it is difficult
to see what connection there can have been between the two countries at
so remote a date, and the curious similarity between the rows of birds
depicted on the vases must remain for the present an archæological
puzzle. There is also a certain amount of resemblance between the
geometric pottery and that disinterred by M. Chantre at the early
Assyrian colony at Kara Eyuk in Cappadocia, which will be discussed
more fully in a later chapter.[43] Among the geometrical patterns of
the Susian ware spherical forms are common; the herring-bone pattern is
also met with, as well as a pattern like the Greek _sigma_. The
under-part of the vases is often decorated, so also is the inside. A
form of vase frequently found is the water-jar with a rounded foot; the
goblet is another common shape. Sometimes the vases are supplied with
four handles for suspension.
This fine yellow pottery occurs not only at Susa, but also throughout
Elam, but practically none of it has hitherto been discovered in
Babylonia.[44] One cause of this is doubtless that in the alluvial
plain of Babylonia a purely neolithic stratum, if it existed at all,
would lie below the water-level. Maritime shells are met with as far
north as the site of Babylon, showing that the Persian Gulf once
extended thus far, and the water of the Euphrates still infiltrates
through the soil.
The period of the fine thin pottery in Elam comes suddenly to an
end, and the people of the second prehistoric period seem to have
been intruders who were less civilized than their predecessors and
unacquainted with the art of making the older ware. Their pottery is
coarse and porous, and the geometric designs upon it are traced with
the pen, not freely painted as in the case of the earlier ceramic. The
animal and vegetable designs of the older ware have disappeared, and
the zones, triangles and other geometric figures which take their place
are traced in black or maroon-red upon a yellow clay. The resemblance
between this pottery and that of Kara Eyuk is even greater than in the
case of the pottery of the first period. Thick cylindrical vases are
common, as well as bowls with a flat bottom and broad sides. Some of
the vases resemble the bulbous vases of the Egyptian Twelfth dynasty;
there are others with flat bottoms and angular sides which are also
like Egyptian water-jars of the same Twelfth-dynasty period. Along with
these more characteristic forms of pottery many small, unpainted cups
have been found, as well as a few finer wheel-made vases of ovoid shape
and yellow or reddish colour. It should be added that coarse, red,
hand-made pottery abounds in both the prehistoric periods, as indeed it
does also in the later historic epoch.
As the second prehistoric epoch drew to a close at Susa, many
indications of an advance in culture began to show themselves. Vases
and flat-bottomed cups of soft stone were introduced, among them
being a few of alabaster; the bricks began to be burnt in a kiln, and
even seals with a species of writing upon them made their appearance.
Nevertheless, the neolithic age does not pass into the age of metal
through any transitional stages.
The earliest stratum which marks the historic age yields for the first
time clay tablets with inscriptions, the characters of which are
already developing out of pictures into the cursive cuneiform. The
inscribed cylinder-seals of Babylonia naturally appear along with them;
alabaster vases, cups and bowls become common, and some of them are cut
into the forms of animals. Comparatively little pottery has been found
in this stratum; but this is probably an accident.
The next stratum brings us to the period of Babylonian supremacy,
when the viceroys of the Babylonian king ruled at Susa, and Semitic
influence was already predominant in the Babylonian plain. It is
the age of Sargon of Akkad, and its commencement may approximately
be placed about B.C. 4000. The pottery still consists of
a yellow paste, though there are also many specimens of a coarse
black clay decorated with incrustations in white. The yellow ware is
occasionally ornamented with mouldings of trees and other natural
objects. A typical vase of the period is one of globular shape and
small rim, and with a moulded or incised rope-pattern running round
the centre and lower part of the rim. Another type is one which looks
like an inverted vase, with a series of rope-patterns encircling it,
while another seems to have been copied from the pile of cylindrical
vases into which, as into a drain, the body of the dead Babylonian
was inserted. These types of vase appear to have lasted, with
little variation, down to the end of the Persian period, though,
unfortunately, the disturbance of the ground and the consequent mixture
of objects under the temple of In-Susinak, where the excavations
were carried on, makes certainty on the point unattainable. Immense
quantities of bronze votive offerings, of all kinds and sorts,
were, however, found here, along with fragments of glass, and, as
inscriptions show that they must all have been buried on the spot
before the tenth century B.C., we have a time-limit for dating
the forms of the bronze weapons and tools.
The archæological evidence obtained at Susa has been supplemented by
excavations made some ninety miles to the west of it, at a place called
Mussian, on the eastern bank of the river Tib. Here there are graves,
as well as the remains of a temple and houses with vaults, columns and
walls of burnt brick. Where the strata have allowed a section to be
cut down to the virgin soil the results are found to agree with those
revealed by the excavations at Susa. The earliest layer belongs to the
neolithic age, flint and obsidian, as at Susa, being the materials
employed for tools and weapons. The pottery is thick and hand-made,
the paste being either yellow or red in colour, and the surface is
often polished, while many of the vases are furnished with holes for
suspension. This layer seems older than anything discovered at Susa. It
is followed by a second layer, in which the pottery is wheel-made, and
is decorated with animal and vegetable figures in black or red, like
the first prehistoric ware of the Susa mounds. Among the animal figures
are those of men, and one fragment of yellow ware is ornamented with
the so-called swastika. In the upper part of the layer a few fragments
of copper have been met with, indicating that the neolithic age was
beginning to pass into that of copper.
Above this layer is a third, characterized by a fine ware, usually
yellow but sometimes greenish in colour, and decorated with designs
in lustrous black. In the fine specimens the decoration has been laid
on before firing, in other cases after firing. The pottery as a whole
has a general resemblance to that of prehistoric Egypt. The culture
represented by this layer was still neolithic, but objects of copper
were making their appearance, and the flint instruments of the past
were beginning to be superseded by metal, a knowledge of which appears
to have come from abroad. With the introduction of copper the Elamite
or historical epoch may be said to have begun. It was now that the
temple was first built of crude bricks, reeds taking the place of
wood, and so pointing to the influence of Babylonia, where reeds were
plentiful and wood was scarce.
Another proof of Babylonian influence must be seen not only in ware
of Babylonian origin, but also in the figures of a nude goddess with
the hands placed upon the breasts, which originally represented the
divinity called Istar by the Semitic Babylonians. Indeed, from the
fact that the goddess was represented in human form we may infer
that the figures, though first met with in the Sumerian age, were
of Semitic derivation, and show that Sumerian culture was already
being affected by the influence of Semitic religious ideas.[45] The
pottery found along with the figures is of a very varied description,
including coarse red and fine yellow ware. Among the fine yellow ware
are goblets with a tall cup supported on a foot. A typical form of
the yellow ware is the vase with angular sides; this, together with
vases of more bulbous shape and terra-cotta stands, is remarkably like
some of the Egyptian Twelfth-dynasty pottery in form. The stands, more
especially, remind us of Twelfth-dynasty Egypt. There is also a black
ware decorated with incised lines which are filled in with white.
This black ware is also found in Egypt, where Professor Petrie is now
inclined to associate it with the Hyksos. At all events it is absent
there during the interval that elapsed between the prehistoric period
and the epoch of the Twelfth dynasty, and it characterizes the Hyksos
sites of the Delta, while its foreign and non-Egyptian character has
been recognized from the first. A few fragments of the same class of
pottery have been brought to light at Tello in Babylonia, where they
would appear to belong to the age of Gudea (B.C. 2700). One of
these formed part of a cylindrical vase or pyxis, identical in shape
with the black incised pyxides found at Susa at a depth of from five to
ten metres below the surface. On another fragment are spirited drawings
of a water-bird, a fish seized by a gull, a four-footed animal, and
a boat with reeds growing behind it, each in a separate panel.[46]
Similar ware has been discovered in Southern Palestine, on the eastern
coast of Cyprus, in Spain and in the Greek islands. At Syros, for
instance, where it goes back to the neolithic age, it is associated
with alabaster vases, just as it is at Mussian. Here the bowls and
vases of alabaster are strikingly Egyptian in form.
The clay figures of the Babylonian goddess testify to the same
extension of culture in the copper age of Western Asia as do the black
incised vases with their white fillings. M. Chantre has found them
at Kara Eyuk in Cappadocia, on the borders of the Hittite region,
though in these the arms are no longer folded across the breast.
Further west I have lately shown[47] that the so-called figure of
Niobê on Mount Sipylus in Lydia is a Hittite modification of them,
and Dr. Schliemann discovered one of them, of lead, in the ruins of
the Second (prehistoric) city at Troy.[48] At Troy, however, the type
was more usually modified in the Hittite direction, as it was also
in the islands of the Ægean, where marble figures of the goddess are
plentiful.[49] In Egypt clay figures closely resembling those of
Babylonia and Elam, but with the arms outstretched, have been met with
from time to time at Karnak, and supposed to be dolls of the Roman
period; but since the discovery by M. Legrain of remains which prove
that the history of Karnak reaches back to the prehistoric or early
dynastic period, there is no longer any reason for not connecting them
with their analogues elsewhere. And the discoveries recently made by
Professor Pumpelly in the tumuli near Askabad, west of Khiva and Herat,
go far towards supporting the identification. Here the explorers have
brought to light two periods of neolithic culture, in the earlier of
which no animals were as yet domesticated, and the pottery was of the
rudest description. During the second period the domesticated animals
were introduced, including the horse and camel. Then came an age of
copper, accompanied by figurines representing the Babylonian goddess,
sometimes with the arms outstretched, sometimes with them lying against
the sides, as in Cappadocia. The figurines are evidence that the art
of working copper was derived from Babylonia, a conclusion which is
confirmed by M. Henri de Morgan’s excavations in the tumuli of Talîsh
in Gîlân, on the south-western shore of the Caspian.[50]
As far back as our knowledge of Babylonian history extends the
inhabitants of the country were acquainted with copper, and its use
lasted century after century into quite recent times. Of a stone age,
as I have already said, there is no clear trace. It is true that
Captain Cros has sunk shafts at Tello, and reached the virgin soil at
a depth of seventeen metres, finding there mace-heads of alabaster and
hard stone similar to those of primitive Egypt, as well as other stone
objects; but no flint flakes were met with, and the pottery was similar
to that of the higher strata.[51] On the other hand, objects of copper,
great and small, including helmets and a colossal spear dedicated by a
king of Kis, have been disinterred, though nothing of bronze has been
discovered among the earlier remains, It was the same at Muqayyar, the
ancient Ur, as well as on the site of Eridu, where Taylor found only
copper bowls and the like in the graves, even in those of so late a
date as to contain objects of iron and an Egyptian scarab.[52] At
Niffer, moreover, the ancient Nippur, American excavation has the
same tale to tell. According to Dr. Peters,[53] though iron knives,
hatchets, spear-heads and arrow-heads have been exhumed, the date of
which is said to be between 2000 and 1000 B.C., there is no
trace of bronze, the multitudinous objects, which further west would
have been of bronze, being here of copper. As at Ur, the copper age
lasts down to the very end of the Babylonian kingdom. Hilprecht, on the
authority of Haynes, does indeed say[54] that in the very lowest strata
of the temple mound, far below the pavements of Sargon and Naram-Sin
(B.C. 3750), “fragments of copper, bronze and terra-cotta
vessels” were disinterred. But no attempt seems to have been made to
analyze the so-called “bronze,” which may have been a natural alloy
of copper with a small percentage of lead or antimony, and the age
ascribed to the fragments is rendered doubtful by the accompanying
statement, that “fragments of red and black lacquered pottery” were
discovered in the same place which were indistinguishable from the red
and black pottery of classical Greece. As yet, therefore, excavation in
Babylonian lands has failed to tell us when the art of mixing tin with
the copper was discovered and copper was superseded by bronze.
This, however, had taken place before the commencement of the Assyrian
age. The bronze scimitar of Hadad-nirari I. (B.C. 1330)[55]
finds an exact copy in a scimitar discovered by Mr. Macalister at Gezer
in Palestine,[56] and the tools and weapons exhumed at Nineveh are of
bronze and not copper. Analysis shows that the bronze usually consisted
of about one part of tin to ten of copper, though for special objects
like bells the amount of tin was considerably increased.[57] When was
it that the tin was first imported and intentionally mixed with the
copper in order to harden the metal?
In default of archæological evidence, the only possibility there is
of discovering an answer to this question lies in an examination
of the primitive pictures out of which the cuneiform characters
eventually developed. Here we are at once struck by a curious fact. The
“determinative” attached to ideographs signifying “knife,” “weapon”
and the like is not an ideograph which expresses the name of a metal;
nor is it an ideograph denoting “stone,” but one which means “wood.”
That is to say, the material of which cutting instruments were made at
the time when the picture-writing of Babylonia came into existence was
neither metal nor stone, but wood. That it should not have been stone
is explained by the geology of the Babylonian plain, which consists of
alluvial soil devoid of stones. That it should not have been of metal
can only mean that the inventors of the pictorial script were not yet
acquainted with the use of copper, bronze or iron. In default of metal
and stone they had to content themselves with hard wood.
On the other hand, copper, as well as gold and silver, had become
known to them when the primitive pictographs were still in process of
formation, and long before they had passed into cursive cuneiform.
Copper was represented by the picture of an ingot or square plate of
the metal with a handle attached to it, showing that it was already
in a fused and worked state when it was imported into Babylonia. Gold
seems to have originally been denoted by the picture of a collar or
necklace, which signified “shining,” and was afterwards employed
before the names of the precious metals. I have, however, never found
this collar actually used to signify “gold”; in the earliest texts
yet discovered the phonetic syllable _gi_ is attached to it when
“gold” is denoted, the Sumerian word for “gold” being _azag-gi_.
“Silver” was “the white precious metal,” the symbol for “white” being
attached to the picture of the collar, and so forming a compound
ideograph. This implies that silver became known to the inventors
of the hieroglyphs at a later period than gold, though still before
what I will call the cuneiform age. Even iron was known to them at
the same early epoch, and was expressed by ideographs which literally
mean “stone of heaven,”[58] an indication that meteoric iron must be
referred to.
[Illustration: HEAD OF ONE OF THE STATUES FROM TELLO.
[_See p. 73._]
[Illustration:
VASE OF SILVER, DEDICATED TO NINGIRSU, BY ENTENA PATESI OF LAGAS.
[_See p. 58._]
But now comes a fact which is difficult to explain, so contrary is
it to the archæological evidence. As we have seen, no traces of
bronze have been found in the Assyro-Babylonian region before the
beginning of the Assyrian age--let us say about B.C. 2000.
Nevertheless, by the side of the simple ideograph which denotes the
Sumerian _urudu_, “copper”--_erû_ in Semitic Babylonian--we
find a compound ideograph signifying “bronze,” called _zabar_ in
Sumerian, from which the Semites borrowed their _’siparru_. It is
true that it is a compound ideograph, but it occurs in the cuneiform
texts, not only in the era of Gudea (B.C. 2700), but even
before the age of Sargon of Akkad (B.C. 3800). And an analysis
of its earliest form seems to indicate that it really must have meant
bronze from the first, and that consequently there was no transference
of signification in later days. Literally it means “white copper,” the
word for “copper” being phonetically-written _ka-mas_, with which
the Semitic Babylonian _kemassu_ is closely connected. Lead cannot
be intended, as that was denoted by a different word and different
ideographs, and I do not see what else “white copper” can be in
contradistinction to red copper except bronze. Polished copper could
be termed “bright,” but hardly “white.”[59]
The possibility remains that tin might have been the metal originally
denoted by the compound ideograph. If so, both the ideograph and
the words expressed by it had lost all reference to tin before the
beginning of the Assyrian period, and neither the Assyrian word for
“tin” nor the Sumerian word, if any existed, is now known. Tin,
moreover, was archæologically late in making its appearance. The
earliest examples of pure tin of which I know are of the time of the
Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. On the other hand, bronze first appears in
Egypt in the age of the Twelfth dynasty,[60] though it does not become
common until the Hyksos predecessors of the Eighteenth dynasty had made
themselves masters of the valley of the Nile. From about B.C.
1600 onwards, enormous quantities of it were employed in the eastern
basin of the Mediterranean and the adjoining lands, necessitating an
equally large supply of tin. What the source of this tin may have been
it is not my present purpose to inquire. But the persistence of the
copper age in Babylonia, as well as in the tumuli of Askabad, east
of the Caspian, indicates that the manufacture of bronze must have
migrated from the north-west to the Babylonian plain. We find it first
in Assyria, not in Babylonia, and it may well be that the Assyrians
derived it from Armenia and the population of Cappadocia, where, as I
shall show in a subsequent chapter, they had established colonies at an
early period. At all events, the earliest examples of bronze yet met
with were discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the Second prehistoric city
at Troy.
It was to this region that classical tradition referred the origin of
working in iron. An analysis of the gold of the first six Egyptian
dynasties submitted to Dr. Gladstone by Professor Petrie proved that
it was mixed with silver, and hence must have been derived from Asia
Minor.[61] Egyptian legend made “the followers of Horus,” who founded
dynastic Egypt, metallurgists and smiths whose metal weapons enabled
them to subdue the older neolithic population. The story as it has come
down to us declares the smiths to have been workers in iron; iron,
however, must be the substitute of the later version of the story for
some other metal, since, though Vyse claims to have discovered an iron
clamp in the great pyramid of Giza,[62] and Petrie has found a mass of
iron in a Sixth-dynasty deposit in the temple of Osiris at Abydos,[63]
ironsmiths can hardly have existed in the pre-dynastic age. It is
probable, therefore, that copper was the metal which the dynastic
Egyptians introduced into their new home, and which was already in use
in Babylonia. But the intercourse with Asia Minor, which the gold of
the First dynasty indicates must even then have been going on, makes it
possible that it was from this quarter of the world that the earliest
knowledge of the manufacture of bronze was brought to the valley of
the Nile. Even in the time of the Twelfth dynasty, however, the tools
found by Professor Petrie in the workmen’s huts at Kahûn are of copper
rather than of bronze.[64] The colossal statue of King Pepi of the
Sixth dynasty, discovered at Hierakonpolis, is of hammered copper, and
we have to wait for the advent of the Eighteenth dynasty before bronze
becomes the predominant metal.
That such was the case points to the Hyksos period as that in which
bronze succeeded in superseding the older copper. It may be that the
Hyksos brought the extended use of it with them from Syria. In Southern
Palestine, Mr. Macalister’s excavations at Gezer have shown that bronze
rather than copper was largely employed throughout the so-called
Amorite period, which went back to an earlier age than that of the
Twelfth dynasty, and it is just here that in the time of the Eighteenth
dynasty bronze itself began to make way for iron. Mr. J. L. Myres
has recently traced the polychrome pottery of Southern Canaan to the
Hittite lands of Cappadocia,[65] where the red ochre was found by which
it was characterized, and a knowledge of bronze may have travelled
along the same road.
But these are speculations which may or may not be verified by future
research. For the present we must be content with the fact that, in
spite of the philological evidence to the contrary, copper, and not
bronze, was the metal which preceded the use of iron in Babylonia,
whereas in the northern kingdom of Assyria bronze was already known at
a comparatively early date. So far as the existing evidence can carry
us, it seems to indicate that Babylonia was the primitive home of the
copper industry, while bronze, on the other hand, made its way eastward
from Asia Minor and the north of Syria. Where bronze was first invented
is still unknown to us; all that seems certain is that it must have
been in a land where copper and tin are found together.
NOTE
According to the mineralogists, in the western part of the northern
hemisphere tin is found only in Britain, Spain and the neighbourhood
of Askabad, the scanty surface-tin of Saxony, France and Tuscany being
too poor and insignificant to have attracted attention in antiquity
(see de Morgan, _Mission Scientifique au Caucase_, ii. pp. 16–28).
The American excavations at Askabad under Professor Pumpelly appear to
have made it clear that bronze was not invented in that part of the
world, or indeed used in early days, and we are thus thrown back on
Britain and Spain. It is quite certain, however, that bronze made its
way to the west of Europe from the east, and the Hon. John Abercromby
has proved (_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. pp.
375–94, and _Proceedings of Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_,
1903–4, pp. 323–410) that the bronze culture came to this country from
the valley of the central Rhine where it cuts the river at Mayence. On
the other hand, the bronze-age civilization of the Danube valley, the
Balkan peninsula and Italy forms a whole with that of the south-eastern
basin of the Mediterranean, which again is closely connected with
the bronze-age culture of the Ægean, Asia Minor and Egypt, while the
civilization of the Danube valley leads on to that of Central Europe
and, to a less extent, of Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Montelius
(_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, 1900, pp. 89
_sqq._) has pointed out that the early bronze culture of Northern
Italy was carried to Scandinavia along the route of the amber trade as
far back as the close of the neolithic age in Sweden, and the numerous
objects of Irish gold found in Scandinavia--though, it is true, of
somewhat later date--show that commercial relations must have existed
between the British Islands and the Scandinavian peninsula. Tin might
have followed the gold route until it met the amber route, by which it
would have been carried southward to Central Europe and the Adriatic.
In Western Europe the sword, like the socketed celt, is first met
with in the third and last period into which the bronze age has been
divided. The earliest examples of the sword, in fact, are those
discovered at Mykenæ, which belong to the age of the Eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty. Schliemann found only the dirk at Troy, and, so far
as our present evidence goes, the dirk alone was used by the Hittites
and Proto-Armenians down to the seventh century B.C. The
scimitar, however, was known in Assyria and at Gezer at least as early
as the fourteenth century B.C. (see p. 57 above), and in
Cyprus the sword makes its appearance along with the knife and fibula
in the later bronze age after the close of the age of copper. Similarly
in Krete it was only in tombs of the Late Mykenæan (or Late Minoan)
period that the cemetery of Knossos yielded swords of bronze (_Annual
of the British School at Athens_, x. p. 4). The dirk of the copper
age was stanged as at Troy and in the Danube valley, the Cyprian and
Hungarian forms being practically identical. From the Danube valley the
stanged spear-head passed to Western Europe during the second period
of the bronze age. The fibula is not found at Troy, where the early
bronze age will have corresponded with the copper age of Cyprus.
All this goes to show (1) that the scimitar--the _harpê_ of
the Perseus myth--was a Semitic invention, while the long sword was
of European origin; (2) that at Troy, and possibly also in Southern
Palestine, to which Hittite polychrome pottery was carried at an early
date, bronze was known at a time when only copper was used in Cyprus
and Egypt; and (3) that the characteristic weapon of this primitive
bronze age was the dirk, which continued to characterize Asia Minor
long after the sword and scimitar had been invented elsewhere. Taken
in connection with the fact that the pottery and decorative designs
of Asia Minor can be linked with those of the Balkan peninsula and
the valley of the Danube, we may provisionally conclude that Northern
Asia Minor was the home of the invention of bronze. Against this is
the fact that no tin has hitherto been found there, and we should
accordingly have to explain the origin of bronze by the theory that
after the discovery of various processes for hardening copper, further
experiments were made with imported tin. Unfortunately, neither the
south of Cornwall nor Asia Minor, with the exception of the Troad, has
as yet been scientifically explored from an archæological point of
view. But it deserves mention that the curious needles with a double
head of twisted wire, which are met with among the remains of the
bronze age in Britain, are characteristic of the copper age in Cyprus
and of the early bronze age at Troy.
CHAPTER III
THE SUMERIANS
Among the first results of the decipherment of the Assyrian cuneiform
inscriptions was one which was so unexpected and revolutionary, that
it was received with incredulity and employed to pour discredit on
the fact of the decipherment itself. European scholars had long been
nursing the comfortable belief that the white race primarily, and
the natives of Europe secondarily, were _ipso facto_ superior
to the rest of mankind, and that to them belonged of right the
origin and development of civilization. The discovery of the common
parentage of the Indo-European languages had come to strengthen the
belief; the notion grew up that in Sanskrit we had found, if not the
primeval language, at all events a language that was very near to it,
and idyllic pictures were painted of the primitive Aryan community
living in its Asiatic home and already possessed of the elements of
its later culture. Outside and beyond it were the barbarians, races
yellow and brown and black, with oblique eyes and narrow foreheads,
whose intelligence was not much above that of the brute beasts. Such
culture as some of them may have had was derived from the white race,
and perhaps spoilt in the borrowing. The idea of the rise of a
civilization outside the limits of the white race was regarded as a
paradox.
It was just this paradox to which the first decipherers of Assyrian
cuneiform found themselves forced. And another paradox was added to it.
Not only had the civilization of the Euphrates and Tigris originated
amongst a race that spoke an agglutinative language, and therefore was
neither Aryan nor Semitic, the civilization of the Semitic Babylonians
and Assyrians was borrowed from this older civilization along with the
cuneiform system of writing. It seemed impossible that so revolutionary
a doctrine could be true, and Semitic philologists naturally denounced
it. For centuries Hebrew had been supposed to have been the language
of Paradise, and the old belief which made the Semitic Adam the first
civilized man still unconsciously affected the Semitic scholars of the
nineteenth century. It was hard to part with the prejudices of early
education, especially when they were called upon to do so by a small
group of men whose method of decipherment was an enigma to the ordinary
grammarian, and who were introducing new and dangerous principles into
the study of the extinct Semitic tongues.
The method of decipherment was nevertheless a sound one, and the
result, which seemed so incredible and impossible when first announced,
is now one of the assured facts of science. The first civilized
occupants of the alluvial plain of Babylonia were neither Semites nor
Aryans, but the speakers of an agglutinative language, and to them
were due all the elements of the Babylonian culture of later days. It
was they who first drained the marshes, and regulated the course of
the rivers by canals, thereby transforming what had been a pestiferous
swamp into the most fertile of lands; it was they who founded the
great cities of the country, and invented the pictorial characters,
the cursive forms of which became what we term cuneiform. The theology
and law of later Babylonia went back to them, and long after Semitic
Babylonian had become the language of the country, legal judgments were
still written in the old language and the theological literature was
still studied in it. The Church and the Law were as loth to give up the
dead language of Sumer as they were in modern Europe to give up the use
of Latin.
This dead agglutinative language has been called sometimes Akkadian,
sometimes Sumerian, but Sumerian is the name which has been finally
selected. In fact, this was the name applied to it by the Semitic
Babylonians themselves, who included in the term the two dialects--or
rather the two forms of the language at different periods of its
development--which have been preserved to us in the cuneiform tablets.
Strictly speaking, the dialect which had been most affected by contact
with the Semites, and had in consequence suffered most from phonetic
decay, was known as the language of Akkad, but this was because Akkad
represented Northern Babylonia, which had become Semitic at an earlier
date than the south and had been the seat of the first great Semitic
Empire.[66] Both names, Akkadian and Sumerian, are correct as applied
to the primitive language of Chaldæa, but of the two Sumerian is
preferable, not only because it was used by the Babylonian scribes
themselves, but also because it denoted the oldest and purest form of
the language before it had passed under foreign influence.
This, then, was the great archæological fact which resulted from the
decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. The earliest civilized
inhabitants of Babylonia did not speak a Semitic language, and
therefore presumably they were not Semites. It is perfectly true that
language and race are not synonymous terms, and that we are seldom
justified in arguing from the one to the other. But the Sumerian
language is one of the exceptions which proves the rule. Those who
spoke it were the first civilizers of Western Asia, the inventors and
perfecters of a system of writing which was destined to be one of
the chief humanizing agents of the ancient world, the authors of the
irrigation engineering of the Babylonian plain, and the builders of
its many cities. The language they spoke, accordingly, could not have
been forced upon them by conquerors who have otherwise left no trace
behind them, and they certainly would not have exchanged it of their
own accord for their native tongue. The Semitic languages have always
been conspicuous for the tenacity with which they have held their own,
and the conservatism with which they have resisted change. We may still
hear in the Egyptian Arabic of to-day the very words which were written
by Semitic Babylonian scribes upon their tablets some four or five
thousand years ago. A Semitic people would have been the last to borrow
the language of its less-civilized neighbours without any assignable
reason. The fact, consequently, that the pioneers of Babylonian culture
spoke an agglutinative language fully justifies us in concluding that
they belonged to a race that was not Semitic.
Sumerian, however, was not the only language in the neighbourhood of
the Babylonian plain which was agglutinative. Further to the east,
in the highlands of Elam, other agglutinative languages were spoken,
monuments of one or more of which have been preserved to us. Whether or
not the agglutinative languages of Elam were related to the Sumerian
of Babylonia, I cannot tell; so far as our materials go at present
they do not warrant us in saying more than that, like Sumerian, they
were of the agglutinative type. It is only rarely that the scientific
philologist is able to separate some of the multitudinous languages of
the globe into genealogically related groups; for the most part they
stand isolated and apart from one another, and, however much we may
wish to group them together, it is seldom that we find such proofs of
a common descent as will satisfy the requirements of science. Families
of speech--or at all events such as can be scientifically proved to be
so--are the exception and not the rule.
Eastward of Sumer the type of language was thus agglutinative, as it
was in Sumer itself. And in the days when civilization first grew up
there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional.
The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in
Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the
old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since
been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist,[67]
and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must
be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent; the
tide of Semitic speech which eventually overflowed Babylonia, surged
northward and eastward into Assyria and Elam, but never succeeded in
passing Susiana, and was finally driven again from the ground it had
once gained there. The home of the Semite lay to the west and not to
the east of the Babylonian plain. Babylonian culture owed its origin to
a race whose type of language was that of the Finn, of the Magyar or
the Japanese.
The physical characteristics of this race cannot as yet be fully
determined. The oldest sculptures yielded by Babylonian excavation
belong to a time when the Semite was already in the land. It might
be supposed that the early monuments of Tello, which were erected by
Sumerian princes and go back to Sumerian times, would give us the
necessary materials; but not only are they too rude and infantile
to be of scientific use, they also indicate the existence of two
ethnological types, one heavily bearded, the other beardless, with
oblique eyes and negrito-like face. It is not until we come to the
age of Semitic domination that sculpture is sufficiently realistic
for exact anthropological purposes. At the same time, there was to
the last a marked contrast of both form and feature in the artistic
representation of the Babylonian and his more purely Semitic Assyrian
neighbour. The squat, thick figure, the full, well-shaven cheeks, the
large, almond-shaped eyes and round head of King Merodach-nadin-akhi in
the twelfth century B.C. still reproduce the characteristic
form and features of the statues found in the palace of Gudea, the
Sumerian high-priest of Lagas, who lived more than a thousand years
before. The aquiline or hooked nose, the thick lips and muscular limbs
which distinguished the Assyrian are generally wanting in Babylonia.
And, on the other hand, there is a likeness between the Babylonian
as he is portrayed on the monuments and the Elamite adversaries of
Assur-bani-pal, some of whom, it is noticeable, are depicted with
beards, though the excavations of Dieulafoy and de Morgan at Susa
have shown (according to Quatrefages and Hamy) that a beardless and
short-nosed negrito type with round heads was aboriginal in Elam. The
same type is reproduced in one of the heads found at Tello, and M.
de Morgan has pointed out that similar brachycephalic and beardless
negritos are represented on the monuments of Naram-Sin as serving in
the army of Akkad.[68] We may conclude, therefore, that they still
formed a part of the population of Northern Babylonia even in the age
when it had passed completely under Semitic rule. Indeed, Dr. Pinches
has shown that the pure Semitic type is not depicted in Babylonian art,
outside the kingdom of Akkad, “before the time of the First dynasty of
Babylon, which began to reign about B.C. 2300.”
It has often been maintained that the Sumerians themselves were an
immigrant people, who had descended from the mountains of Elam. There
is nothing unreasonable in the supposition; it was always difficult
to prevent the mountaineers of Elam from making raids in Babylonia,
and one of their tribes succeeded in settling in the country and
establishing at Babylon one of the longest-lived of its dynasties. But
the supposition mainly rests upon two facts. The pictorial hieroglyphs
out of which the cuneiform characters have developed had no special
sign for “river,” while the same character represented both “mountain”
and “country.” It would seem, therefore, that the land in which the
cuneiform system of writing was first invented was just the converse of
the Babylonian plain, being at once mountainous and riverless. That the
same character means both “mountain” and “country” is no doubt a strong
argument in favour of the Elamite origin of Babylonian civilization.
That the use of the primitive hieroglyphs should have survived in Elam
while it was lost in Babylonia, as M. de Morgan’s discoveries have
shown to be the case, is also another fact which may perhaps be claimed
on the same side; at any rate it indicates that they were known to the
Elamites before the cursive cuneiform had developed out of them. But
the want of a special character for “river” is not so decisive as it
appears at first sight to be. The word “river” is represented by two
ideographic signs which literally signify “the watery deep,” and so
point to the fact that those who originally invented them lived not in
the highlands of the East, but on the shores of that Persian Gulf which
the Babylonians of the historic period still called “the deep.” As it
was also known as “the salt river,” it is not difficult to understand
how, to those whose experience of navigable water had been confined
to the Persian Gulf, the Tigris and Euphrates would have seemed but
repetitions of the Gulf on a smaller scale.[69]
The rise of Sumerian culture on the shores of the Persian Gulf is in
accordance with Babylonian tradition. Babylonian myths told how Oannes
or Ea, the god of culture, had risen each morning out of his palace
in “the deep,” bringing with him the elements of civilization which
he communicated to mankind. Letters, science and art had all been
his gifts. He had instructed the wild tribes of the coast to build
houses and erect temples; he had compiled for them the first law-book,
and had instructed them in the mysteries of agriculture. Babylonian
civilization was sea-born. The system of cosmology which finally won
its way to acceptance with the priesthood and philosophers of Babylonia
was one which had been first conceived at Eridu, the site of which is
now more than a hundred miles distant from the sea, but in the early
days of Babylonian history, before the silting up of the shore, had
been its seaport. Here the first man Adam[70] was supposed to have
lived, and to have spent his time fishing in the waters of the Gulf.
The whole earth was believed to have grown out of a primeval deep like
the mud-flats which the inhabitants of Eridu saw slowly emerging from
the retreating sea. Philosophy and cosmology, with the theology with
which they were associated, looked back upon Eridu and the Babylonian
coast as their primeval home.[71]
In fact the physical conditions of the Babylonian plain rendered it
impossible for the first culture of the country to have sprung up in
it. Before it was reclaimed by engineering skill and labour the larger
part of it had been a pestiferous marsh. The science needed for making
it habitable, at least by civilized man, must have arisen outside its
boundaries. Only when he was already armed with a civilization which
enabled him to dig canals, to mould bricks, and pile his houses and
temples on artificial foundations could the Sumerian have settled in
the Babylonian plain and there developed it still further. The cities
of the plain grew up each round its sanctuary, which became a centre of
civilization and progress, of agriculture and trade. But the builders
of the sanctuaries must have brought their culture with them from
elsewhere.
Of these sanctuaries the most venerable was that of Bel the Elder at
Nippur. It has been systematically excavated by the Americans down to
its foundations, and the successive strata of its history laid bare.
Inscribed objects have been found in all the strata, carrying the
history of the cuneiform system of writing back to the days when the
temple was originally built. But it is still the cuneiform system of
writing as far back as we can go, that is to say the characters are the
cursive forms of earlier hieroglyphic pictures, the features of which
are in most cases scarcely traceable. Here and there, it is true, the
primitive pictorial form has been preserved, but this is the exception
and not the rule. As a rule the earliest writing found at Nippur, and
coeval with the foundation of its temple, is already the degenerated
and cursive hand which we call cuneiform.
The fact is very noteworthy. The cuneiform characters have assumed the
shapes which give them their name owing to their having been inscribed
on clay by a stylus of wood or metal, which obliged the writer to
substitute a series of wedge-like indentations for curves and straight
lines. As time went on, the number of the wedges was reduced, the forms
of the characters were simplified, and the resemblance to the pictures
they were once intended to represent became more and more indistinct.
The cuneiform script is, in short, a running hand, like the hieratic
of Egypt. But whereas in Egypt the hieratic running hand does not
come into common use until long after the beginning of the monumental
period, while the pictorial hieroglyphs continued to be employed to
the last, in Babylonia the cuneiform running hand has superseded the
primeval pictures as far back as our records carry us. When the temple
of Nippur was built--and it was probably one of the first, if not the
first, to be built in the Babylonian plain--the clay tablet was already
in use for writing purposes, and the cursive cuneiform had taken the
place of the older hieroglyphs.
The Babylonian plain was called by its Sumerian inhabitants the Edin,
or “Plain,” a name which was borrowed by the Semites and has been made
familiar to us by the book of Genesis. Originally it had meant all
the uncultivated flats on either side of the Euphrates, but it soon
acquired the sense of the country as opposed to the city, and so of the
cultivated plain itself. Most of the important Babylonian cities were
built in it between the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris on the
east. A few only lay beyond it on the western bank of the Euphrates.
One of these was Eridu, another was Ur, a third was Borsippa.
[Illustration:
THE TELL OF BORSIPPA, THE PRESENT BIRS-NIMRUD.]
Of Eridu I have already spoken. Some six or eight thousand years
ago it was the seaport of primitive Babylonia.[72] Ur, which stood
close to it, seems to have been a colony of Nippur, and therefore of
comparatively late origin.[73] Borsippa was a small and unimportant
town, which eventually became a suburb of Babylon, and Babylon, on
the eastern bank of the Euphrates, was itself a colony of Eridu.[74]
Hence of the cities which stood outside the Edin of Babylonia, and may
therefore belong to an age when Babylonian civilization was still in
its infancy, Eridu alone is of account. And the priority even of Eridu
was contested. Traditionally Sippara, which is expressly stated to have
been in “the Edin,” claimed to be the oldest of Babylonian cities; one
quarter of it bore the name of “Sippara that is from everlasting,” and
like Eridu, it believed itself to have been the abode of the first
man.[75] Thus far, however, the monuments have given us nothing to
substantiate the claim; the culture-god of Babylonia was Ea of Eridu,
not the Sun-god of Sippara, and for the present, therefore, we must
look to the shore of the Persian Gulf, rather than to the “land of
Eden” for the cradle of Babylonian civilization.
At any rate, both Sippara and Eridu were of Sumerian foundation, as
indeed were nearly all the great cities of Babylonia. Eridu was a later
form of the older Eri-dugga, “the good city,” a name which seems to
have been the starting-point of more than one legend. The growth of the
coast to the south of it gives us some idea as to the age to which its
foundation must reach back.
It was, as I have said, the primitive seaport of Babylonia, and its
legend of the first man Adamu made him a fisherman in the Persian Gulf.
Its site is now rather more than a hundred miles distant from the
present line of coast. The progress of alluvial deposit brought down by
the Euphrates and Tigris can be estimated by the fact that forty-seven
miles of it have been formed since Spasinus Charax, the modern
Mohammerah, was built in the age of Alexander the Great, and was for a
time the port of Chaldæa. During the last 2000 years, accordingly, the
rate of deposit would seem to have been about 115 feet a year. This,
however, does not agree with the observations of Loftus, who made the
rate not more than a mile in every seventy years,[76] while on the
other hand Sir Henry Rawlinson adduced reasons for believing it to have
been more rapid in the past than it is to-day, and that consequently
the rate must once have been as much as a mile in thirty years.[77] It
is desirable that some competent geologist should study the question
on the spot. Taking, however, as a basis of calculation, the one known
fact of the rate of growth since the foundation of Spasinus Charax, and
bearing in mind that before the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates
the rate of advance must have been comparatively slow, we should have
to go back to about B.C. 5000 as the latest date at which
Eridu could still have been the seaport of the country.
Was it here that the system of writing which was so closely entwined
with the origin of Babylonian civilization was first invented?
Babylonian tradition in later days certainly believed that such was the
case, and the fact that Ea of Eridu was the culture-god of Babylonia
is strongly in its favour. But there are difficulties in the way.
Eridu was the home of the “white witchcraft” of early Chaldæa; it was
here that the charms and incantations were composed which gave the
priesthood of Eridu its influence, and made the god they worshipped
the impersonation of wisdom. The belief that he was the originator of
Babylonian culture may have had its source in the system of magic which
was associated with his name. Eridu was built on the Semitic side of
the Euphrates, and the Semitic tribes who received their letters and
their civilization from the Sumerians of Eridu would naturally have
looked upon the city of their teachers as the primeval home of Sumerian
culture. The traditions that made Eridu the starting-point of Sumerian
civilization could thus be explained away, and we should be left free
to settle the question of its origin upon purely archæological evidence.
Unfortunately the site of Eridu has not yet been systematically
excavated. Once again the archæological materials for settling an
archæological question are not at hand, and we are thrown back upon an
examination of the picture-writing from which the cuneiform characters
are derived. Here the evidence on the whole may be said to be in
favour of tradition. It is true that there is no special ideograph for
“river,” but there is one for “the deep,” and “the spirit of the deep”
must have been a chief object of worship at the time when the primitive
hieroglyphs were first formed. The “ship,” too, played a prominent
part in the life of their inventors, and the picture of it represented
it as moved not by oars but by a sail.[78] The flowering reed was
equally prominent, and was even used to symbolize what stood firm and
established.[79] Houses, fortresses, temples, and cities were built of
brick, and vases were moulded out of clay.[80] The tablet, rectangular
or square, was already employed for the purpose of writing, but as it
was provided with a handle or a couple of rings at the top, I think
it was more probably of wood than of clay. The sheep, goat and ox were
domesticated,[81] and so also probably was the ass,[82] and corn was
cultivated in the fields. The symbol of the “earth” appears to have
been the picture of an island of circular or elliptical form. Among
trees the cedar was well known.
All this points to the sea-coast of Babylonia as the district in which
its civilization first arose. But on the other hand, there is the fact
that “country” and “mountain” are alike represented by the picture of
a mountainous land. There is also the fact that the land in which the
inventors of the hieroglyphs lived was one in which copper, gold and
silver were procurable--perhaps also meteoric iron; and the further
fact that hard wood was sufficiently plentiful for tools or weapons to
have been made of it before the employment of metal. That they should
have been made of wood, however, and not of stone, is a strong argument
in favour of the Babylonian coast.
It is on wood, moreover, that the first hieroglyphs must have been
painted or cut. Many of them represented round objects or were
formed of curved lines, which were transformed into a series of
wedge-like indentations when imprinted by a stylus upon clay. We
know, therefore, that clay was not the original writing material;
its use as such, in fact, is coeval with the rise of that cursive
script which, in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, is called
hieratic, but in Assyro-Babylonian is known as cuneiform. It was the
attempt to reproduce the old pictures upon clay that created the
cuneiform characters. As metal is not likely to have been employed
by the primitive scribes of Chaldæa, and there is no trace of stone
having been used--even the stone cylinder of later days being called
a _dup-sar_ or “written tablet”--we are left to choose between
wood and papyrus. In favour of papyrus is the fact that the circular
forms of so many of the pictures suggest that they were originally
painted rather than engraved; on the other hand, it is doubtful whether
the papyrus grows in the Babylonian rivers, or at any rate did so
in the prehistoric age. And the pictograph of a “written document”
is not a strip or roll of papyrus, as in Egypt, but a tablet with a
handle or loop. It is true that the primeval picture which denoted
“copper” has much the same form, but as even cutting instruments had
the determinative of “wood” attached to them in the early picture
writing, it is clear that the original tablet could not have been of
metal, whatever might have been the case with its later successors.
The picture, moreover, of the “tablet” is distinguished from that of
a “plate of bronze” by the addition of a string which is tied to the
handle.
On the whole, therefore, the only archæological evidence available at
present is on the side of the tradition which made Babylonian culture
move northward from the coast. The only fact against it of which I know
is that, as I have already stated, the word for land was symbolized by
the picture of a triple mountain. But this fact is not insuperable.
Before the silting up of the shore, the old coast-line of Babylonia
would have stretched away north-eastward of Eridu towards the mountains
of Elam. Whether the mountains that fringed what would then have been
the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf are visible from the site of
Eridu, I do not know; if the clear light of Upper Egypt exists there
they would be so. Nor do I know whether on the western side there
are mountain ranges visible in Arabia; these are points which can be
cleared up only when the country has been thoroughly explored.
Eridu lay five miles southward of Ur,[83] that “Ur of the Chaldees”
from which Hebrew history affirmed the ancestor of the nation had
come. Ur was never a maritime port like Eridu; it stood on the Arabian
plateau and looked towards the west. Its face was turned to the Semitic
rather than to the Sumerian world. From the first, therefore, it must
have been in touch with Semitic tribes. And a curious reminiscence
of the fact survived in the western Semitic languages, Ur or Uru
signifies “the city”; it was a Sumerian word, another form of which was
_eri_. The word was borrowed by the Semites, and in the Hebrew
of the Old Testament, accordingly, the idea of “city” is expressed by
_’îr_. The Assyrians of the north, whose vocabulary was otherwise
so full of Sumerian loan-words, preferred the native _âlu_, “a
tent,” to which the meaning of “city” was assigned when Sumerian
culture had been passed on to the Semitic race and the tent had been
exchanged for the city. The history of the word is a history of early
culture as well.
But I am far from saying that it was through Ur that the civilization
of Sumer came to be handed on to its Semitic neighbours. On the
contrary, such facts as there are point in a different direction.
Western Semites, whom linguistically we may call Arabs or Aramæans, or
Canaanites or Hebrews, doubtless mingled with the Sumerian population
of Ur, and adopted more or less of its manners and civilization, but it
was further north, in the Babylonian Eden itself, that the Semite first
came under the influence of the higher culture, and soon outstripped
his masters in the arts of life.
The entrance of the Semitic element into Babylonia is at present one of
the most obscure of problems. All we can be sure of are certain main
facts. First of all, as we have seen, the early culture of Babylonia,
including so integral a part of it as the script, was of Sumerian
origin. So, too, were the great cities and sanctuaries of the country,
as well as the system of irrigation engineering which first made it
habitable. Sumerian long continued to be the language of theology and
law; indeed a large part of the Babylonian pantheon of later days
was frankly non-Semitic. As was inevitable under such conditions,
the Assyrian language contained an immense number of words--many of
them compound--which were borrowed from the older language, and its
idioms and grammar equally showed signs of Sumerian influence. I have
sometimes been tempted, from a scientific point of view, to speak of
Semitic Babylonian as a mixed language.
On the other hand, if the elements of Babylonian civilization were
Sumerian, the superstructure was Semitic. When the Semites entered into
the heritage of Sumerian culture, the cuneiform script must have still
been in a very inchoate and immature state. Its pictorial ancestry must
still have been clear, and no scruples were felt about altering or
adding to the characters. The phonetic application of the characters,
which was still in its initial stage in the Sumerian period, was
developed and carried to perfection by the Semitic scribes, and a very
considerable proportion of their values and ideographic meanings is of
Semitic derivation. The theological system was transformed, and a new
literature and a new art came into existence. As Sumerian words had
been borrowed by the Semites, so, too, Semitic words were borrowed by
the Sumerians, and it is possible that examples of them may occur in
some of the oldest Sumerian texts known to us.[84] The Babylonians of
history, in short, were a mixed people; and their culture and language
were mixed like our own.
This, then, is one main fact. A second is that the Semitic element
first comes to the front in the northern part of Babylonia. It is in
Akkad, and not in Sumer, that the first Semitic Empire--that of Sargon
the Elder, B.C. 3800--had its seat, and old as that empire
is, it presupposes a long preceding period of Semitic settlement and
advance in power and civilization. The cuneiform system of writing
is already complete and has ceased to be Sumerian, archive-chambers
of Semitic literature are founded, and Semitic authority is firmly
established from Susa in the east to the Mediterranean in the west.
Art is no longer Sumerian, and in the hands of the Semitic subjects of
Sargon and his son Naram-Sin has reached a perfection which in certain
directions was never afterwards surpassed. The engraved seal-cylinders
of the period are the finest that we possess. Naturally the Semitic
language has superseded the Sumerian in official documents, and the
physical type as represented on the monuments is also distinctly
Semitic. At the beginning of the fourth millennium before our era, the
civilization and culture of Northern Babylonia have thus ceased to be
Sumerian, and the sceptre has fallen into the hands of a Semitic race.
But there is a third fact. The displacement of the Sumerian by the
Semite was the case only in Northern Babylonia. In the south, in the
land of Sumer, the older population continued to be dominant. Sumerian
dynasties continued to rule there from time to time, and the old
agglutinative language continued to be spoken. When a West-Semitic
dynasty governed the country about B.C. 2200, state proclamations
and similar official documents had still to be drawn up in the two
languages, Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian. Sumerian did not become
extinct till a later day. Indeed, after the fall of the empire of
Sargon of Akkad there seems to have been a Sumerian reaction. While
Susa was lost to the Semites and became the capital of a non-Semitic
people who spoke an agglutinative language, the power of the Sumerian
princes in Southern Babylonia appears to have revived. At all events
even the dynasty which followed that of the West-Semites bore
Sumerian names.[85] It was only under the foreign domination of the
Kassites, apparently, who governed Babylonia for nearly 600 years,
that the Sumerian element finally became merged in the Semitic and the
Babylonian of later history was born.
[Illustration: THE SEAL OF SHARGANI-SHAR-ALI (SARGON OF AKKAD):
GILGAMES WATERS THE CELESTIAL OX.]
[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF OF NARAM-SIN.]
The last fact is that while what we call Assyrian is Semitic Babylonian
with a few dialectal variations, it stands apart from the other Semitic
languages. A scientific comparison of its grammar with those of the
sister-tongues leads us to believe that it represents one of the two
primeval dialects of the Semitic family of speech, the other dialect
being that which subsequently split up into the varying dialects of
Canaanite or Hebrew, Arabic, South-Arabic and Aramæan--or, adopting
the genealogical form of linguistic relationship, Assyro-Babylonian
would have been one daughter of the primitive parent-speech, while the
other daughter comprised the remaining Semitic languages.[86] There
are two conclusions to be drawn from this; one is that the Babylonian
Semites must have separated from their kinsfolk and come under Sumerian
influence at a very early period, the other that they moved northward,
along the banks of the Tigris into Assyria.
With these two inferences we have to be content. Upon the first home
of the Semitic race or its affinities with other branches of the white
race, Babylonia can naturally throw no light. The earliest glimpses
we catch of the Semites of Babylonia are those of a people who have
already come under the influences of Sumerian civilization, who are
mingling with their teachers and helping with them to build up the
stately edifice of historical Babylonia. There were ruder Semitic
tribes, it is true, who continued to live their own nomad life on the
western bank of the Euphrates or in the marshes that bordered the
Persian Gulf. But like the Bedâwîn of to-day on the outskirts of Egypt
they were little, if at all, affected by the civilization at their
sides. They remained the same wild savages of the desert as their
descendants who encamp in the swamps of modern Babylonia; they neither
traded nor tilled the ground, and the language they spoke was not the
same as that of their Babylonian kindred. They served, however, as the
herdsmen and shepherds of their Babylonian neighbours, and the vast
flocks whose wool was so important an article of Babylonian trade, were
entrusted to their care. But Bedâwîn they were born, and Bedâwîn they
continued to be.
Even the Aramæan tribes of the coast-land kept apart from the
Babylonians, whether Sumerian or Semitic, until the day when one of
their tribes, the Kaldâ or Chaldæans, made themselves masters of
Babylon under their prince Merodach-baladan, and from henceforward
became an integral factor in the Babylonian population. They must
have settled on the borders of Babylonia at a comparatively late
date, when Semitic Babylonian had definitely marked itself off from
its sister-tongues and the Babylonian Semite had acquired distinctive
characteristics of his own. The West-Semitic elements in the
population of Babylonia could have entered the country only long after
the mixture of Sumerian and Semite had produced the Babylonian of
history.
The Babylonian of history came to forget that he had ever had another
fatherland than the Babylonian plain, the Eden of the Old Testament,
the land whose southern border was formed by “the salt river” or
Persian Gulf of early Sumerian geography, with its four branches
which were themselves “heads.” Here the first man Adamu[87] had been
created in Eridu, “the good city,” and here therefore the Babylonian
Semite placed the home of the first ancestor of his race. But it was a
borrowed belief, borrowed along with the other elements of Babylonian
culture, and no argument can be drawn from it as to the actual cradle
of the Semitic race. Like the story of the deluge, it was part of the
Sumerian heritage into which the Semite had entered.
The Semitic tradition which made the first man a tiller of the ground
may also have been borrowed from the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia.
At all events it is significant that the garden in which he was
placed was in the land of Eden, and that the picture of a garden or
plantation is one of the primitive hieroglyphs of Sumer. The beginnings
of Babylonian civilization were bound up with the cultivation of the
Babylonian soil; the reclamation of the great alluvial plain was at
once the effect and the cause of Sumerian culture. Sumerian culture, in
fact, was at the outset essentially that of an agricultural people.
Trade would have come later, when Eridu had become a seaport, and
ships ventured on the waters of the Persian Gulf. It grew up under the
shelter of the great sanctuaries. Supported at first by the labour
of their serfs, the priests in time came to exchange their surplus
revenues--the wool of their sheep, the wheat and sesame of their
fields, or the wine yielded by their palms--for other commodities, and
the temples themselves formed safe and capacious store-houses in which
such goods could be kept. In the historical period Babylonia is already
a great trading community, and as the centuries passed trade absorbed
more and more the energies of its population, agriculture fell into the
background, and the Babylonia conquered by Cyrus could be described
with truth as “a nation of shopkeepers.” Even the crown prince was a
merchant who dealt in wool.[88]
The increasing preponderance of trade goes along with the increasing
preponderance of the Semitic element in the country, and it is
tempting to suppose that there was a connection between the two. At
present, however, there is no positive evidence that such was the case.
Nor is there any positive evidence that the Semites who settled in
Babylonia were not already agriculturists. The circumstances in which
a people lives are mainly responsible for its being agricultural or
pastoral, and the fact that the Bedâwîn neighbours of the Babylonians
on the western side of the Euphrates remained a pastoral race does
not exclude the possibility that there were other branches of the
Semitic family who had already passed out of the pastoral into the
agricultural stage before coming into contact with the Sumerians. On
the other hand, it is at least noticeable that in Semitic Babylonian
the usual word for “city” continued to be one which properly meant a
“tent”--the home of the pastoral nomad--and that no Semitic traditions
have come down to us of the beginnings of agricultural life outside the
limits of the Babylonian “Plain.” The title of “Shepherd,” moreover,
was at times given to the Babylonian kings in days subsequent to the
Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to
judge, city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive Semitic
nomad.[89]
To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown in my Lectures on
Babylonian religion,[90] we must ascribe an important theological
conception. In historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in
the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods
themselves were men. But the conception cannot be traced back further
than the age when the Sumerians and Semites came into contact with one
another. In pre-Semitic Sumer there are no anthropomorphic gods. We
hear, instead, of the _zi_ or “spirit,” a word properly signifying
“life” which manifested itself in the power of motion. All things
that moved were possessed of life, and there was accordingly a “life”
or “spirit” of the water as well as of man or beast. In place of the
divine “lord of heaven” whom the Semites adored there was “a spirit of
heaven”; in place of Ea, the later Babylonian god of the deep, there
was “a spirit of the abyss.” Sumerian theology, in fact, was still on
the level of animism, and the inventors of the script represented the
idea of “god” by the picture of a star. Vestiges of the old animism can
still be detected even in the later cult: by the side of the human gods
an Assyrian prayer invokes the mountains, the rivers and the winds,
and from time to time we come across a worship of deified towns. It
was the town itself that was divine, not the deity to whom its chief
temple was dedicated. So, again, the god or goddess continued to be
symbolized by some sacred animal or object whose figure appears upon
seals and boundary-stones, and in some cases we learn that the Sumerian
prototypes of the later Babylonian divinities bore such names as “the
gazelle,” “the antelope” or “the bull.”
With the advent of the Semite all is changed. The gods have become men
and women with intensified powers and the gift of immortality, but in
all other respects they live and act like the men and women of this
nether world. Like them, too, they are born and married, and the court
of the early prince finds its counterpart in the divine court of the
supreme Bel, or “Lord.” The Semitic god of Babylon was “lord of gods”
and men, of heaven and earth; Assur of Assyria was “king of the gods”
and lord of “the heavenly hosts.”
It was natural that, corresponding with this lord of the heavenly
hosts, there should be a lord of the hosts of earth, and that as the
divine king was clothed in the attributes of man, the human king should
take upon him the divine nature. Like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the
emperors of Rome, the early kings of Semitic Babylonia were deified.
And the deification took place during their lifetime,--in fact, so far
as we can judge, upon their accession to the throne. In the eyes of
their subjects they were incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions
they give themselves the title of god. One of them is even called “the
god” of Akkad, his capital.[91]
Here, then, in the conception of the divine, we have a clear dividing
line between the Semite and his non-Semitic predecessor. So far back as
the cuneiform monuments allow us to carry his history, the Semite is
anthropomorphic. As a consequence, the gods he worships conform to the
social conditions under which he lives. In the desert the sacred stone
becomes “the temple of the god”; in the organized monarchy of Babylonia
each deity takes his appointed place in an imperial court. Under the
one supreme ruler there are princes and sub-princes, vice-regents and
generals, while angel-messengers carry the commands of Bel to his
subjects on earth, like the messengers who carried the letters of the
Babylonian king along the high-roads of the empire. On the other hand,
the earthly king receives his power and attributes from the god whose
adopted son and representative he claims to be. Nowhere has “the divine
right of kings” been more fully insisted on than in ancient Babylonia.
The laws of the monarch had to be obeyed, foreign nations had to become
his vassals, because he was a god on earth as the supreme Bel was god
in heaven.
But the reflection of the divine upon the human brought with it not
only the exaltation of sovereignty, but also the rise of a priesthood.
There were priests of a sort in Sumer of whom many different classes
are enumerated. But when we examine the signification of the names
attached to them we find that they were not priests in the true sense
of the word. They were rather magicians, sorcerers, wizards, masters
of charms. They do not develop into priests until after the Semite has
entered upon the scene. The god and the priest make their appearance
together.
I do not think, however, that we are justified in concluding that the
elaborate hierarchy of Babylonia was of purely Semitic origin. On the
contrary, like the theological system with which it was associated,
it was a composite product. Behind the gods and goddesses of Semitic
Babylonia lay the primitive “spirits” and fetishes of Sumer; its
mythology and cosmological theories rested on Sumerian foundations;
and in the same way the priestly hierarchy was the result of a racial
amalgamation in which the Semitic element had adopted and adapted the
ideas and institutions of the older people. We do not find the theology
and priesthood of Babylonia among other Semitic populations, except
where they had been borrowed from the Babylonians (as in Assyria); in
the form in which we know them they were peculiarly and distinctively
Babylonian. Like the language of Semitic Babylonia, which is permeated
with Sumerian elements, or the script, which is a Semitic adaptation of
the Sumerian system of writing, they presuppose a mixture of race.
The priesthood eventually proved irreconcilable with “the divine
right” of the monarch, though both alike had the same origin. The
priests prevailed over the king, and as in England the doctrine of
divine right was unable to survive the accession of a German line
of princes, so in Babylonia the accession of a foreign, non-Semitic
dynasty (that of the Kassites) dealt a death-blow to the belief in a
deified king. The king became merely the representative and deputy
of the divine “Lord” of heaven, deriving his right to rule from his
adoption by the god as a son; Bel-Merodach came to be regarded as the
true ruler of Babylonia, lord of the earth as well as of the heavens,
and a theocratic state affords but little room for a secular king.
The priests of Bel decided whom their god should recognize or not,
and little by little the controlling power of the state passed into
their hands It was in a sense a triumph for the non-Semitic element
in the population. While the deification of the sovereign may be said
to have been purely Semitic in its origin, the necessary corollary of
an anthropomorphic conception of the deity, the supernatural powers
supposed to be inherent in the priesthood went back to Sumerian times.
It was because he had once been a master of spells that the priest of
the anthropomorphic god could influence the spiritual world. The final
triumph of the theocratic principle in Babylonia, where the Semite
had been so long dominant, showed that the old racial element was
still strong, and ready to reassert itself when the favourable moment
arrived. Such, indeed, is generally the history of a mixed people: the
conquering or immigrant race may seem to have suppressed or absorbed
the earlier population of the country, but as generations pass the
foreign element becomes weaker, and the nation in greater or less
degree reverts to the older type.
NOTE
So far as the primitive culture of Sumer may be recovered from such
of the primitive pictographs as can be at present identified, it may
be described as follows. The inventors of them lived on the sea-coast
within sight of mountains, but in a marshy district where reeds
abounded. Trees also grew there, and the cedar was known. Stone was
scarce, but was already cut into blocks and seals. Tablets were used
for writing purposes, and copper, gold and silver were worked by the
smith. Daggers with metal blades and wooden handles were worn, and
copper was hammered into plates, while necklaces or collars were made
of gold. Brick was the ordinary building material, and with it cities,
forts, temples and houses were constructed. The city was provided with
towers and stood on an artificial platform; the house also had a
tower-like appearance. It was provided with a door which turned on a
hinge, and could be opened with a sort of key; the city gate was on a
larger scale, and seems to have been double. By the side of the house
was an enclosed garden planted with trees and other plants; wheat and
probably other cereals were sown in the fields, and the shaddûf was
already employed for the purpose of irrigation. Plants were also grown
in pots or vases. That floods took place is evident from the existence
of a pictograph denoting “inundation,” and representing a fish left
stranded above the foliage of a tree. Canals or aqueducts had already
been dug. The sheep, goat, ox and probably ass had been domesticated,
the ox being used for draught, and woollen clothing as well as
rugs were made from the wool or hair of the two first. A feathered
head-dress was worn on the head. Beds, stools and chairs were used,
with carved legs resembling those of an ox. There were fire-places and
fire-altars, and apparently chimneys also. Pottery was very plentiful,
and the forms of the vases, bowls and dishes were manifold; there were
special jars for honey, butter, oil and wine, which was probably made
from dates, and one form of vase had a spout protruding from its side.
Some of the vases had pointed feet, and stood on stands with crossed
legs; others were flat-bottomed, and were set on square or rectangular
frames of wood. The oil-jars--and probably others also--were sealed
with clay, precisely as in early Egypt. Vases and dishes of stone were
made in imitation of those of clay, and baskets were woven of reeds or
formed of leather. Knives, drills, wedges and an instrument which looks
like a saw were all known, while bows, arrows and daggers (but not
swords nor, probably, spears) were employed in war. Time was reckoned
in lunar months. Sacred cakes were offered to the gods, whose images
were symbolized sometimes by a bearded human head with a feather crown,
sometimes by a two-legged table of offerings on which stand two vases
(of incense?). Demons were feared who had wings like a bird, and the
foundation stones--or rather bricks--of a house were consecrated by
certain objects that were deposited under them. A “year” was denoted by
the branch of a tree, as in Egypt, and a “name” by a bird placed over
the sacred table of offerings. The country was full of snakes and other
creeping things, and wild beasts lurked in the jungle. The pictographs
were read from left to right, and various expedients were devised for
making them express ideas. Thus _mud_, “to beget,” was denoted by the
picture of a bird dropping an egg. At other times the pictograph was
used to express an idea, the pronunciation of which was the same as
that of the object which it represented. The bent knee, for example,
was used to express _dug_ or _tuk_, “to have,” since it represented a
“knee,” which was called _dug_ in Sumerian.
CHAPTER IV
THE RELATION OF BABYLONIAN TO EGYPTIAN
CIVILIZATION
In dealing with the question of origins, science is constantly
confronted with the problem of unity or polygeneity. Has language one
origin or many; are the various races of mankind traceable to one
ancestor or to several? Do the older civilizations presuppose the same
primeval starting-point, or were there independent centres of culture
which grew up unknown to one another in different parts of the world?
Under the influences of theology the belief long prevailed that they
were all sprung from the same source; of late the tendency has been in
an opposite direction. While the biologist has inclined to a belief in
the unity of species, the anthropologist has seen reason to maintain
the diversity of origin in culture.
The two earliest civilizations with which we are acquainted were those
of Babylonia and Egypt. To a certain extent the conditions under
which they both arose were similar. They grew up alike on the banks
of great rivers and in a warm, though not tropical, climate. They
rested, moreover, on organized systems of agriculture, which again had
been made possible by irrigation engineering. In Babylonia the first
settlers had found a plain which was little more than a swamp, over
which the swollen streams of the Euphrates and Tigris wandered at will
during the annual period of inundation, and which needed engineering
works on a large scale before it could be made habitable. The rivers
had to be confined within their channels by means of embankments, and
canals had to be cut in order to draw off the surplus supply of water
and regulate its distribution to the land. While the swamp was thus
being made possible for habitation, the population must have lived
on the edge of the desert plateau which bordered it, and have there
developed a civilization which not only produced the engineers and
their science, but also the concentrated authority which enabled the
science to be utilized.
In Egypt it was the banks and delta of the Nile which took the place
of the Babylonian plain. Recent discoveries have shown that in the
prehistoric age, when the natives still lived in the desert and led a
pastoral life, all this was a morass, the haunt of beasts of prey and
venomous reptiles. But here again the swamp was rendered habitable by
engineering works similar to those of primeval Babylonia. The swamp
was transformed into fertile fields, the annual flood of the river was
regulated, and an elaborate network of canals and embankments spread
over the country. The pastoral nomads of the neolithic age became
agriculturists, or were employed in constructing and repairing the
works of irrigation, or in erecting monumental buildings for their
rulers. There is evidence of the same centralized government, the
same directing brain and organizing force that there is in primitive
Babylonia.
Is it possible that two systems of engineering science, so similar
in their objects, their methods and their results, should have been
invented independently in two different countries? There are scholars
who answer in the negative. But the possibility cannot be denied,
since an even more elaborate system of irrigation was invented in
China without any suggestion, as far as we know, from outside. The
geographical conditions of Babylonia and Egypt, moreover, resemble
one another, and the question of draining the swamps and regulating
the overflow of the rivers once raised, the answer to it seems fairly
obvious. By itself, therefore, the fact that the cultures of ancient
Babylonia and Egypt alike rested on a similar system of irrigation
engineering would be no proof of their common origin.
In some respects the problem which the Babylonian engineers were
called upon to solve was more difficult than that which faced the
Egyptians. The Nile is fed by the rains and melting snows of Abyssinia
and Central Africa, and its annual inundation takes place in the later
summer months. The Euphrates and Tigris flow from the north, from
the highlands of Armenia, and are at their fullest in the spring.
Their overflow accordingly comes just before the summer heats, when
agriculture is difficult or impossible, whereas in Egypt the period
of inundation ushers in the most favourable time of the year for the
growth of the crops. What the Babylonian engineers had to do was not
only to drain off the overflow, but also to store it for use at least
six months later. With them it was a question of storage as well as of
regulation.
Those then, who believe that the engineering sciences of the
Babylonians and Egyptians were no independent inventions are bound to
see in Babylonia their original home. It would have been here that the
great problems were solved, the practical application of which to the
needs of Egypt would have been a comparatively simple matter. On the
chronological side there would be no difficulties in such a view. Old
as was the civilization of Egypt, the excavations in Babylonia have
made it clear that the civilization of Babylonia was at least equally
old. At Nippur the American excavators claim to have found inscribed
remains which reach back for nearly ten thousand years, and though
the data upon which this calculation is based may be disputable, it
is certain that the earliest monuments met with are of immense age.
And it must be remembered that they belong to a time when the early
pictorial writing had already passed into a cursive script, and the
plain of Babylonia had been a land of cultivated fields for unnumbered
generations.
But by itself, I repeat, the practical identity of engineering science
in primeval Babylonia and Egypt is no proof that it had been learnt by
the one from the other. If we are to fall back on the old belief which
brought the civilized population of Egypt from the plain of Shinar,
it must be for reasons which are supported by archæological facts. If
such archæological facts exist, the parallel systems of irrigation
engineering will be additional evidence; alone, they prove nothing.
At the outset we are met by a fact which personally I find it hard to
explain away. The hieroglyphic script of Egypt has little in common
with the primitive pictorial characters of Babylonia. Objects and
ideas like “the sun,” “man,” “number one,” will be represented by the
same pictures or symbols all the world over, and consequently the fact
that in both Babylonian and Egyptian writing the sun is denoted by a
circle and the moon by a crescent is of no significance whatsoever.
But when we turn to less obvious symbols there is comparatively little
similarity between the two forms of script. The ideograph of “god,” for
example, is a star in Babylonia, a stone axe and its shaft in Egypt;
“life” is represented by a flowering reed in the one case, by a knotted
girdle in the other. It is true that Professor Hommel and others have
pointed to a few coincidences like those between the Egyptian symbol
for “foreign land” and the Babylonian ideograph of “country,” or
between the Egyptian and Babylonian signs for “city,” “place,” but
such coincidences are rare.[92] As a rule, as soon as we leave the
more obvious conventions of pictorial writing little or no connection
can be traced between the pictorial characters of Egypt and those of
Babylonia. As a whole the two graphic systems stand apart.
Nevertheless I am bound to add that it is only as a whole that they
do so. With all the general unlikeness there is a curious similarity
in a few--a very few--instances which it is difficult to interpret as
merely the result of accident. The round circle with lines inside it
which denotes “a city” in Egyptian might be explained from the circular
villages which still characterize Central Africa; but then how is it
that the ideograph for “place” in the pictorial script of Babylonia had
precisely the same form? That the word for “country” should be denoted
in the Babylonian script by the picture of three mountain peaks may
be due to the fact that to the Babylonian “country” and “mountain”
were the same; but such an explanation fails us in the case of the
Egyptian hieroglyph of “foreign land,” where the three peaks appear
again, since the hieroglyph for “mountain” in Egyptian has but two.
The picture of a seat, and a seat, too, of peculiar shape, represents
“place” in Egyptian; in Babylonian the same picture represents “city,”
thus inverting the ideographic signification of the picture which in
Egyptian and Babylonian has respectively the meanings of “city” and
“place.” Between the primitive Babylonian picture of a “ship” and
the boats depicted in the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, again, the
resemblance is very exact, and Professor Hommel has pointed out to me a
curious likeness between the original form of the Babylonian ideograph
for “a personal name” and the _ka_-sign with the Horus-hawk above
it within which the names of the earliest Pharaohs are inscribed.[93]
Indeed the learned and ingenious Munich Professor has made out a list
of even more striking coincidences, where the characters agree not only
in sense but also in the phonetic values attached to them.[94]
Here, however, we trench on another question, the philological position
of the Egyptian language. Egyptian scholars to-day are practically
unanimous in believing it to belong, more or less remotely, to the
Semitic family of speech. The Berlin school of Egyptologists, who under
the guidance of Professor Erman have made Egyptian grammar a special
subject of investigation, are largely responsible for the dominance
of this belief. I ought to be the last person in the world to protest
against it, seeing that I maintained it years ago when the patronage
of the Berlin Egyptologists had not yet made it fashionable. At the
same time I confess that I cannot follow the Berlin philologists to
the extent to which they would have us go. For them the old Egyptian
language is not related to the Semitic family of speech “more or less
remotely,” but very closely indeed. Indeed in their hands it becomes
itself a Semitic language, and as a logical consequence the Egyptian
script is metamorphosed into one of purely Semitic invention. But
while admitting that Egyptian grammar is Semitic in the sense in which
English grammar is Teutonic, the comparative philologist is bound
to add that it contains much which cannot be reduced to a Semitic
pattern. The structure, moreover, is not on the whole Semitic, neither
is a large part of its vocabulary. And among the words in the lexicon
which have Semitic affinities there are a good many which are better
explained as the result of borrowing than as belonging to the original
stratum of the language. In some cases they are demonstrably words
which have been introduced into the Egyptian language at a late date;
in other cases it seems possible to regard them as loan-words from
Semitic Babylonian which entered the language at a “pre-dynastic”
epoch. Thus, _qemḳu_, “the wheaten loaf” which was used for
offerings, is the Hebrew _qemakh_, the Babylonian _qêmu_,
and may have been brought into Egypt along with the wheat which was
first cultivated in Babylonia and still grows wild on the banks of the
Euphrates. To what an early period the importation of the cereal must
be referred is shown by its occurrence in the prehistoric graves of
Upper Egypt.[95]
When all allowances are made, however, the fact remains that the
Egyptian language as we know it was related to the Semitic family of
speech. It stood to the latter as an elder sister, or rather as the
sister of the parent-language which the existing Semitic dialects
presuppose. It was not like the so-called Hamitic dialects of Eastern
Africa, which are African languages Semitized, but it was itself
of the same stock as Hebrew or Semitic Babylonian. It represents,
however, a form of language at an earlier stage of development than
are any of those which we call Semitic, and it has, moreover, been
largely influenced and modified by foreign languages, which we may
term African. So extensive has this influence been that the Semitic
element has been even more disguised in it than the Teutonic element is
disguised in modern English. In leaving the soil of Asia the language
of Egypt took upon it an African dress.
Now though language can prove but little as regards race, it can
prove a great deal as regards history. A mixed language means a mixed
history, and indicates an intimate contact between the populations who
spoke the languages which are represented in it. Egyptian grammar would
not have been Semitic if those who imposed it upon the natives of the
Nile had not been of Semitic descent, or at all events had not come
from a region where the language was Semitic. Nor would this grammar
have been modified by foreign admixture if a part of those who learned
to use it had not previously been accustomed to some other form of
speech. And since we know of no Semitic languages in Africa which were
not brought from Asia, we are justified in concluding that the Semitic
element in the Egyptian language was of Asiatic origin.
But we can go yet a step further. Where two languages are brought
into close contact, the general rule is that that of the stronger
race prevails. The conqueror is less likely to learn the language
of the conquered than the conquered are to learn the language of
their masters. On the other hand, the negro slave in America became
English-speaking, whereas the English emigrant wherever he goes
preserves the language of his fathers. It is only where a conquering
caste brings no women with it that it is likely to lose its language.
When, therefore, we find that Old Egyptian is an Africanized Semitic
language, we have every right to infer that it is because invaders
brought it with them from Asia who were Semites either by race or by
language. In other words, Egypt must have been occupied in prehistoric
days by a people who came from the Semitic area in Asia.
The days were prehistoric, but of the invasion itself history preserved
a tradition. On the walls of the temple of Edfu it is recounted how
the followers of Horus, the totem guide and patron deity of the first
kings of Upper Egypt, made their way across the eastern desert to the
banks of the Nile, and there, with the help of their weapons of metal,
subjugated the older inhabitants of the valley. Battle after battle
was fought as the invaders slowly pushed their way down the Nile to
the Delta, establishing a forge and a sanctuary of Horus on every
spot where a victory had been gained.[96] The story has come down
to us under a disguise of euhemeristic mythology, but the tradition
it embodies has been strikingly confirmed by modern discovery. The
“dynastic” Egyptians, the Egyptians, that is to say, who founded the
Egyptian monarchy and to whom we owe the great monuments of Egypt, were
immigrants from the east.
The culture of these “dynastic” Egyptians was built up on two solid
foundations, the engineering skill which made Egypt a land of
agriculture, and a system of writing which made the organization of
the government possible. The culture was at once agricultural and
literary, and this alone marked it off from the culture of neolithic
(or “prehistoric”) Egypt, which belonged to the desert rather than to
the banks and delta of the river, and which knew nothing of writing.
Now we have seen that there was one other country in the world in which
a similar form of culture had come into existence. In Babylonia too
we have a civilization which has as its basis the training of rivers
for the purpose of irrigation and the use of a pictorial script. The
civilization of Babylonia was, it is true, Sumerian at its outset, but
in time it became Semitic, and expressed itself in a Semitic tongue.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Semitic-speaking
people who brought the science of irrigation and the art of writing to
the banks of the Nile came, like the wheat they cultivated, from the
Babylonian plain.
There are two archæological facts connected with the early culture of
“dynastic” Egypt which seem to me to prove at any rate some kind of
intercourse with Babylonia. No building-stone exists in the Babylonian
plain; it was therefore the natural home of the art of building in
brick, and since every pebble was of value it was also the natural
birthplace of the gem-cutter. Nowhere else could the use of clay as a
writing material have suggested itself, or that of the inscribed stone
cylinder which left its impression behind it when rolled over the clay.
Wherever we have the clay tablet and the seal-cylinder we have evidence
of Babylonian influence.
Now recent discoveries have shown that the culture of the early
dynastic period of Egypt is distinguished from that of later times by
the employment of clay and the stone seal-cylinder. Neither the one nor
the other could have originated in the country itself, for Upper Egypt
(where all authenticated discoveries of early seal-cylinders have been
made) is a land of stone, and the river-silt, which is mixed with sand,
is altogether unsuited for the purpose of writing. When the Egyptians
of the Eighteenth dynasty corresponded in Babylonian cuneiform with
their subjects and allies in Asia, the clay upon which they wrote was
brought from a distance. Moreover, the stone seal-cylinder of the
early dynasties is an exact reproduction of the early seal-cylinder
of Babylonia. Substitute cuneiform characters for the hieroglyphs and
there is practically no difference between them in many cases. It is
difficult to believe that such an identity of form is the result of
accident, more especially when we find that, as Egyptian civilization
advanced, the seal-cylinder became less and less like its Babylonian
original, and finally disappeared from use altogether. That is to
say, as the culture of the people was further removed from its first
starting-point, and therefore more national, an object which never
had any natural basis in the physical conditions of the country grew
more and more of an anomaly, and was eventually superseded, first by
the “button-seal” and then by the scarab. I see no other explanation
of this than that it was originally introduced from Babylonia, and
maintained itself so long in an alien atmosphere only because it was
bound up with a culture which had come from the same region of the
world. The seal-cylinder of the early Egyptian dynasties seems to me,
apart from everything else, to prove the existence of some kind of
“prehistoric” intercourse between the civilizations of the Euphrates
and the Nile. And in this intercourse the influences came from
Babylonia to Egypt, not from Egypt to Babylonia.
The use of brick in early Egypt points in the same direction. While
Babylonia was a land of clay, Upper Egypt was a land of stone, and
it was as unnatural to invent the art of brick-making in the latter
country as it was natural to do so in the former. To this day the
Nubians build their cottages of stone; so too do the Bedâwîn squatters
on the east bank of the Nile; it is only where the population is
Egyptian and the influence of the old Egyptian civilization is still
dominant that brick is employed. Under the Old Empire the Egyptian
Pharaohs built even the temples of the gods of brick; it was but
gradually that the brick was superseded by stone. It was the same also
in Assyria; here too, in a land of stone, brick was at first the sole
building material, and even the great brick platforms which the marshy
soil of Babylonia had necessitated continued to be laid. But Assyrian
culture was confessedly Babylonian in origin, and the brick edifice
was therefore a characteristic of it. It was only by degrees that
Assyrian architecture emancipated itself from its early traditions,
and at first timidly, then more boldly, superseded the brick by stone.
The example of Assyria throws light on that of Egypt, and as the
Assyrian employment of brick was due to the Babylonian origin of its
civilization, it is permissible to infer that the Egyptian employment
of brick was also due to the same cause. Once more we may repeat that
there was early intercourse between Egypt and Babylonia--the land of
the brick-maker--and that in this intercourse the prevailing influences
came from the east.
Such, then, is the conclusion to which the most recent research leads
us. The “dynastic” Egyptians, the Egyptians of history, spoke a
language which is related to those of the Semitic family; their first
kingdoms, so far as we know, were in Upper Egypt, and tradition brought
them across the eastern desert to the banks of the Nile. The culture
which they possessed was characterized by Babylonian features, and was
therefore due either wholly or in part to intercourse with Babylonia.
The fact that the use of the seal-cylinder--which, by the way, bore the
Semitic name of _khetem_--should have lingered in the valley of
the Nile to the very beginnings of the Middle Empire, is an indication
that the period of its introduction could not have been very remote.
The earliest historical monuments which have been revealed to us by
modern excavation may not, after all, be many centuries later than the
time when the culture of Babylonia found its way to the Nile.
Indeed, there is a fact which indicates that this is the case, and that
the literary culture of Babylonia had been imported into the valley of
the Nile at a time when Egypt was divided into independent kingdoms.
At an early epoch an ingenious system of official chronology had been
invented in Babylonia. The years were named there after the chief
events that had occurred in each of them, among these the accession
or death of a king being naturally prominent. At the death of a king
a list was drawn up of his regnal years, with their characteristic
events, and such lists were from time to time combined into longer
chronicles. The Babylonians were preeminently a commercial people, and
for purposes of trade it was necessary that contracts and other legal
documents should be dated accurately, and that in case of a dispute the
date should be easily ascertained. Now an exactly similar system of
dating had been adopted in Egypt before the age of the First historical
dynasty. A pre-Menic monument dated in this way has been discovered at
Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, and the same method of reckoning time
is found on ivory tablets that have been disinterred at Abydos. The
method lasted down to the age of the Fifth dynasty, since the Museum
of Palermo contains the fragment of a stone from Heliopolis, on which
the chronology of the Egyptian kings is given from Menes onward, each
year being named after the event or events from which it had received
its official title. The successive reigns are divided from one another
as in the Babylonian lists, and the height of the Nile in each year
is further added--a note which naturally is of Egyptian origin. It
is, therefore, interesting to observe that it is added as a note,
independent of the event which gave its name to the year. Nothing
could prove more clearly the foreign origin of the whole system of
chronology, since, had it been of native invention, the height of the
Nile, on which the prosperity of the country depended, would have been
the first event to be recorded. After the fall of the Old Empire this
ancient Babylonian method of dating seems to have passed out of use
like the Babylonian seal-cylinder; at all events we find no further
traces of it. It was, in short, an exotic which never took kindly to
Egyptian soil.
Did the “dynastic” Egyptians bring this method of dating with them,
or did they borrow it after their settlement in Egypt? The second
supposition is very difficult to entertain, for intimate trade
relations between Babylonia and Upper (or Lower)[97] Egypt in the
pre-Menic age appear to be out of the question, and are unsupported by
any known facts. And literary correspondence, such as was carried on in
the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, seems equally out of the question.
How, then, did the Egyptians come to learn the peculiar Babylonian
system of chronology unless the founders of the culture of which it
formed a portion had originally brought it with them from the east?
The same question is raised by the existence in early Egypt of an
artistic _motif_ which had its origin in Babylonia. This is what
is usually known as the heraldic position of the figures of men and
animals. An example of it is found on the famous “palette” of Nar-Buzau
discovered by Mr. Quibell at Hierakonpolis,[98] where the hybrid
monsters whose necks form the centre of the slate are heraldically
arranged. In this case the design is known to be Babylonian, since
M. Heuzey has pointed out a Babylonian seal-cylinder on which the
two monsters recur. Nar-Buzau is made the immediate predecessor of
Menes by Professor Petrie on grounds to which every archæologist must
assent; but an even better example of the heraldic design is met with
on a great isolated rock of sandstone near El-Kab which was quarried
in the time of the Old Empire. Here the ownership and opening of the
quarry are denoted by an elaborate sculpture of the Pharaoh, who is
duplicated, his two forms being figured as seated back to back, with
a column between them, while the winged solar disk of Edfu, with the
royal uræi on either side of the orb, spreads its wings above them.
Each of the royal forms holds a sceptre, but that on the left has
no head-dress, whereas that on the right wears a skull-cap, above
which is the solar orb with the uræus serpent issuing from it.[99]
In front of the latter is an altar consisting of a bowl on a stand,
loaves of bread and a cup and jar of wine (with the customary handles
for suspension) being engraved above the bowl along with a series
of perpendicular lines which in this instance cannot (as has been
suggested) represent the fringes of a mat. In front of the figure on
the left is another altar, of different shape, the place of the bowl
being taken by a flat top, above which are six upright lines and a
flat cake. Precisely the same altar with the same objects above it are
engraved on a broken seal-cylinder of ivory found by Dr. Reisner at
Naga’ ed-Dêr, which I understand from the discoverer to be of the age
of the First dynasty. When, therefore, was it that the heraldic design
in art was introduced into Egypt from its Babylonian birthplace? In any
case it would seem to have been before the foundation of the united
monarchy.
In Babylonia itself, as we have seen, tradition looked seaward, towards
the Persian Gulf, for the elements of its civilization. At any rate
the seaport of Eridu was the gateway through which the culture of
Babylonia was believed to have passed. Here on the shores of the sea
the culture-god of Sumer had his home; here trade sprang up, and the
sailors and merchants of Eridu came into contact with men of other
lands and other habits. Is it possible to discover a connection between
Eridu and primeval Egypt?
I believe that it is, though in making the attempt we are of
course treading upon precarious ground. There are certain curious
coincidences, one of which, since it goes to the heart of Sumerian and
Egyptian religion, is necessarily of considerable weight. But they are
all, it must be remembered, more in the nature of indications and
possibilities than of ascertained facts.
Eridu meant in Sumerian “the good city.” Memphis (Men-nofer), “the good
place,” the name of the first capital of united Egypt, had the same
signification. In the case of Eridu the name had something to do with
the fact that the city was the seat of Ea, the god of beneficent spells
and incantations, who had given the arts and sciences to man, and was
ever ready to heal those that were sick. The son and vice-gerent of
Ea, who carried his commands to earth and spent his time in curing
diseases and raising “the dead to life,” was Asari, “the prince,” who
was usually entitled Mulu-dugga, “the good” or “beneficent one.” The
character and attributes of Asari are thus the same as those of the
Egyptian Osiris, who was also known as Ati, “the prince,” and was
commonly addressed as Un-nofer, “the good being.” Unlike most of the
Egyptian deities, Osiris had the same human form as Asari of Eridu,
and the resemblance between the names of Asari and Osiris--Asar in
Egyptian--is rendered more striking by the remarkable fact that they
are both represented by two ideographs or hieroglyphs of precisely
the same shape and signification.[100] It does not appear possible to
ascribe such a threefold identity to mere coincidence. And the theory
of coincidence becomes still more improbable when we remember that
while the story of Osiris centres in his death and resurrection, one
of the chief offices of the Sumerian Asari was to “raise the dead
to life.” Nowhere else in Babylonian literature, whether Sumerian
or Semitic, do we find any reference to a resurrection; the Semitic
Babylonians, indeed, did not look forward to a future life at all, or
if they did, it was to a shadowy existence in a subterranean land of
darkness “where all things are forgotten.” It is only in connection
with Asari that we hear of a possibility that the dead may live again.
Other resemblances between the theologies of Eridu and primitive Egypt
have been pointed out. Professor Hommel believes that in the Egyptian
deity Nun, the heavenly ocean, we must see a Sumerian god Nun, who also
represented the celestial abyss. However this may be, an old formula,
torn from its context, which has been introduced into the Pyramid texts
of the Pharaoh Pepi I., takes us back not only to the cosmology of
Eridu but to the literary form in which it had been expressed. Pepi, it
is said, “was born of his father Tum. At that time the heaven was not,
the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods were not born, there was
no death.” The words are almost a repetition of those with which the
Babylonian epic of the creation begins: “At that time the heaven above
was not known by name, the earth beneath was not named ... at that
time the gods had not appeared, any one of them”; and they are also a
distant echo of the commencement of the cosmological legend of Sumerian
Eridu: “At that time no holy house, no house of the gods in a holy
place had been built, no reed had grown, no tree had been planted.”[101]
The testimony of philological archæology, if I may use such a term, is
supplemented by that of archæological discovery. Sumerian Babylonia and
early dynastic Egypt are alike characterized by vases of hard stone,
many of which have the same forms. Examples of some of them will be
found in de Morgan’s _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_,
ii. p. 257, where Jéquier observes that analogues to the Egyptian vases
have been disinterred by de Sarzec at Tello in Southern Babylonia,
“the shape and execution of which are exactly like” those discovered
in Egypt, “the only difference being that the one are ornamented with
hieroglyphics, and the others with a cuneiform inscription; apart
from this they are identical in make.” The most remarkable instance
of identity, however, is the design on the palette of the pre-Menic
Pharaoh Nar-Buzau to which attention was first called by Professor
Heuzey.[102] On this we have a representation of two lions set face
to face in the Babylonian fashion, and with long serpentine necks
which are interlaced so as to enclose a circle. Precisely the same
representation is met with on an early Babylonian seal-cylinder from
Tello.
Years ago I noticed the general likeness presented by the seated
statues of Tello to those of the Third Egyptian dynasty,[103] and
suggested that both belonged to the same school of sculpture. A little
earlier Professor Flinders Petrie had demonstrated that the standard
of measurement marked upon the plan of the city which one of the Tello
figures holds in his lap is the same as the standard of measurement of
the Egyptian pyramid-builders, the cubit, namely, of 20·63, which is
quite different from the later Assyro-Babylonian cubit of 21·6.[104]
Still more convincing, perhaps, is the Babylonian division of the year
into twelve months of thirty days each, which was already known in
Egypt in the age of the early dynasties. The Babylonian week of five
and ten days reappears in the Egyptian week of ten days, while the
division of the day into twelve “double hours,” six belonging to the
day and six to the night, has its counterpart in the Egyptian day of
twenty-four hours, twelve of which were reckoned to the day and the
other twelve to the night. Since a list of the thirty-six decans or
zodiacal stars has recently been found on a coffin of the time of the
Twelfth Dynasty[105] it is possible that this distinctively Babylonian
invention may also go back to the age of the first Egyptian dynasties.
At all events one of the chief stars in the Pyramid texts is “the Bull
of heaven,” a translation of the Sumerian Gudi-bir, or “Bull of Light,”
the name given to the planet Jupiter in its relation to the ecliptic.
In primitive Babylonian astronomy the zodiacal sign of the Bull ushered
in the year.
[Illustration: SITTING STATUE OF GUDEA.]
It may be that some of these evidences of Babylonian influence are
referable to contact between Babylonia and Egypt in the age that
immediately preceded the foundation of the united Egyptian monarchy
rather than to that still earlier age when the “dynastic” settlers
first settled in the valley of the Nile. But at present we do not
know how such a contact could have taken place. Upper Egypt and not
the Delta was the seat of the first Pharaohs with their Horus-hawk
totem, and at the remote period when the future civilization of the
country was being developed under their fostering care it is difficult
to believe that Babylonian soldiers or traders had made their way
to the shores of the Mediterranean, much less to the deserts of the
Sayyîd. For the present, at all events, where we have clear proof of
the dependence of early Egyptian culture upon that of the Babylonians
we have no alternative but to ascribe it to the Semitic emigrants or
invaders to whom the historical civilization of Egypt was primarily
due.[106]
This civilization, like that of Babylonia, implied a knowledge of
metal. It was a civilization of the copper age, and thus stood in sharp
contrast to the neolithic culture, such as it was, of “prehistoric”
Egypt. Egyptian tradition, it is true, believed that the metal weapons
with which the followers of Horus had overcome the stone-defended
natives of the country were of iron, but this was because the compilers
of the story in its existing form projected the knowledge and usages
of their own time back into the past. There is incontrovertible proof
that in Egypt, as in Europe, the ages of copper and bronze preceded
that of iron. But the tradition was doubtless right in laying stress
upon the fact that the invaders were forgers and blacksmiths. It
would have been by reason of the superiority of their arms that
they succeeded in subduing the valley of the Nile and reducing its
inhabitants to serfdom. They were, too, “the followers of Horus,”
under the leadership of a single prince who was himself a Horus, that
is to say, an incarnate god. Here, again, we find ourselves in the
presence of a conception and doctrine of Semitic Babylonia. There, too,
as we have seen, the kings were incarnate gods, not only the sons of
a divinity, but themselves divine. In Egypt, apart from the Osirian
circle, the gods were not men, but animals, and so deeply rooted was
this beast-worship in the hearts of the indigenous population that
even the “dynastic” civilization, with all its unifying and absorbing
power, never succeeded in doing more than in uniting the head of the
beast with the body of the man. Even the human Pharaoh was forced to
picture himself as a hawk. In Semitic Babylonia on the other hand, as
we have seen, the deification of the king flowed naturally from the
anthropomorphic conception of the deity; where man was made in the
image of God, it was easy to see in him a god on earth. Like the use
of copper, therefore, the deification of the king which characterized
dynastic Egypt points back to Babylonia.
It must not be supposed, however, that because certain elements and
leading characteristics in the civilization of historical Egypt
indicate that the Semitic-speaking race to whom it was mainly due
came originally from Babylonia, there are no elements in it which can
be derived from elsewhere. On the contrary, there is much that is
native to Egypt itself. Even the script shows but comparatively few
traces of a Babylonian origin. If the “dynastic” Egyptians came from
Babylonia, they must have very considerably modified and developed
the seeds of culture which they brought with them. And in Egypt they
found a neolithic culture which had already made considerable progress.
The indigenous population possessed the same artistic sense as the
palæolithic European of the Solutrian and Magdalenian epochs, with whom
perhaps it was contemporaneous, and under the direction of its dynastic
conquerors this sense was trained and educated until the Egyptians of
history became one of the most artistic peoples of the old world.
But it is noticeable that throughout the historical period whenever the
civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia came into contact, it was Egypt
that was influenced rather than Asia. The tradition of the earliest
ages was thus carried on; the stream of influence flowed from the east,
and Herodotus was justified in assigning Egypt to Asia rather than
to Africa. It was, in fact, Asia with an African colouring. In the
days of the Eighteenth dynasty, when Egypt for the first and last time
possessed an Asiatic empire, the eastern influence is very marked. The
script itself became Babylonian, the correspondence of the Government
with its own officials in Canaan was conducted in the Babylonian
language and the Babylonian syllabary, and there are indications that
even the official memoranda of the campaigns of Thothmes III. were
drawn up in cuneiform characters. The clay tablets of Babylonia were
imitated in Upper Egypt, where hieroglyphic and hieratic characters
were somewhat awkwardly impressed upon them, and the language was
filled with Semitic loan-words. The fashionable author of the age of
the Nineteenth dynasty interlarded his style not only with Semitic
words, but even with Semitic phrases. It is true that the Semitic words
and phrases are Canaanite; but Canaan had long been a province of
Babylonia, and it was because it was permeated with Babylonian culture
and used the Babylonian script, that the foreign words and phrases were
introduced into the literary language of Egypt.
On the other hand, so far as, we can judge, there was no reflex action
of Egypt upon Babylonia. The seal-cylinder was never superseded there
by the scarab; indeed the only scarabs yet found in the Mesopotamian
region are memorials of the Egyptian conquests of the Eighteenth
dynasty. Neither the hieroglyphs nor the hieratic of Egypt made their
way eastward into Asia, a fact which is somewhat remarkable when we
remember over how wide an area the more complicated cuneiform spread.
It was Europe that was affected by Egypt rather than Asia. Before
Egypt laid claim to Palestine, Babylonian culture had already taken
too firm a hold of Western Asia to be dislodged, and in Babylonia
itself Egyptian influences are hard to find. In the age of Khammu-rabi,
we meet with a few proper names which may contain the name of the
Sun-god Ra, as well as with the name of Anupum or Anubis on a stone
cylinder, and the hieroglyphic character _nefer_, “good,” is
affixed to a legal document.[107] But this merely proves that in a
period when the Babylonian Empire reached to the confines of Egypt,
there were Egyptians settled in Babylon for the purpose of trade. A
more curious example of possible Egyptian influence is one to which
I have drawn attention in my lectures on the _Religions of Ancient
Egypt and Babylonia_.[108] Thoth, the Egyptian god of literature,
was accompanied by four apes, who sang hymns to the rising and setting
sun. Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of troops of
apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and the origin
of these companions of Thoth has been cleared up by an inscription in
a tomb at Assuan. Here we learn that in the age of the Old Empire,
expeditions were sent by the Pharaohs into the Sudan--the home of the
apes of Thoth--in order to bring back from “the land of the gods”
Danga dwarfs who could “dance the dances of the gods.” In the eyes of
the Egyptians, it would seem, there was little difference between the
ape and the Danga dwarf; the one was a dwarf-like ape, the other an
ape-like man. But they alone could perform correctly the dances that
were held in honour of certain gods, and which are already depicted
on the prehistoric vases of Egypt.[109] Closely allied to the Danga
dwarfs and the apes of Thoth are the Khnumu or Patæki of Memphis, the
followers of Ptah, who were also dwarfs with bowed legs. Now dwarfs of
precisely the same form are found on early Babylonian seal-cylinders
where they are associated sometimes with the goddess Istar, sometimes
with an ape and the god Sin.[110] The Babylonian name of the dwarf was
the Sumerian Nu-gidda, an indication that his association with the
deity went back to Sumerian times. We may conclude that, like the Danga
dwarf of Egypt, he, too, performed dances in honour of the gods.
The extraordinary resemblance of form between the Egyptian and
Babylonian sacred dwarfs, as represented in art, raises the question
whether the Babylonian dwarf was not an importation from Egypt, since
the ape with which he was confounded was a native of the Sudan. This
was the view to which I was long inclined, but there are certain
considerations which make it difficult to be accepted. The Khnumu of
Memphis were not the only dwarfs who were represented by the Egyptian
artists. Still better known was Bes, who became a special favourite
in the Roman period, when he was made a sort of patron of childbirth.
But Bes, it was remembered, had come to Egypt from the southern lands
of Somali and Arabia, like the goddess Hathor or the god Horus. Hathor
is, I believe, the Babylonian Istar, who has passed to Egypt through
her South Arabian name of Athtar; however this may be, Ptah of Memphis,
whose followers were the Khnumu dwarfs, bears a Semitic name, and must
therefore be of Semitic derivation. He belongs, that is to say, to the
Egyptians of the dynastic stock, and is accordingly one of the few
Egyptian divinities who is depicted in human form. On the other hand,
the Sumerian dwarf Nu-gidda is the companion of Istar.
On the Egyptian side, therefore, the dwarfs of Ptah are associated
with a god who has come from Asia, while the dwarf Bes was confessedly
of foreign extraction. On the Babylonian side the dwarf Nu-gidda was
the associate of Istar, the counterpart of Hathor, and of Sin, the
Moon-god, who was adopted by the people of Southern Arabia, and whose
name was carried as far as Mount Sinai on the borders of Egypt. All
this suggests that the sacred dwarf came to the valley of the Nile from
Babylonia and Arabia like the name of Ptah, the creator of the world.
In this case it would have come with the dynastic Egyptians before the
age of history begins.
But, on the other hand, there is the ape, and the ape is figured
along with the dwarf on the Babylonian seals, It is true that the ape
is equally foreign to Egypt and Babylonia, but the Sudan is nearer
Egypt than Southern Arabia is to Babylonia. The actual date and path
of migration, therefore, of the sacred dwarf must be left undecided.
Whether he was brought to Egypt at the dawn of history, or whether he
travelled to Babylonia in the historical age remains doubtful. All we
can be sure of is that the sacred dwarfs of Babylonia and Egypt were
originally one and the same, and that they testify to an intercourse
between the two countries of which all literary record has been
lost.[111]
The same verdict must be given in the case of another point, not only
of resemblance, but of identity, between ancient Egypt and Babylonia.
This is the shadûf or contrivance for drawing water from a falling
river for the sake of irrigation. The shadûf, which is still used
in Upper Egypt, can be traced back pictorially to the time of the
Eighteenth dynasty, but the basin system of irrigation with which it
was connected was already of immemorial antiquity. It is a simple yet
most effective invention, and on that account perhaps the less likely
to have been independently invented, for it is always the obvious
which remains longest unnoticed. In the modern shadûf a long pole is
laid across a beam which is supported at either end upon other poles
or on pillars of brick or mud; it is kept in place by thongs and is
heavily weighted at one end, while at the other end a bucket or skin
is attached to it by means of a rope. The shadûf of the Eighteenth
dynasty was supported sometimes, as to-day, on a cross-beam, sometimes
on a column of mud, and the bucket was of triangular form with two
handles to which the rope was tied. Representations of it from Theban
tombs will be found in Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilization_, p. 764,
and Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s _Ancient Egyptians_, plates 38 and
356. Precisely the same machine is represented on a bas-relief found by
Layard in the palace of Kûyunjik at Nineveh,[112] the only difference
being that the shadûf-worker stands upon a platform of brick instead
of on the bank itself, and that the pillar upon which the pole is
supported seems to be built of bricks rather than of mud. The machine,
however, is identical in both its Egyptian and its Assyrian form. That
the bas-relief should have been found in Assyria and not in Babylonia
is a mere accident. Like almost everything else in Assyrian culture,
the invention was of Babylonian origin, and, in fact, formed part of
the system of irrigation which made the plain of Babylonia habitable.
Herodotus, who calls the machine a κηλωνεῖον, describes it as being
used as in Egypt, and for the same reason, since the river did not
rise to the actual level of the cultivated ground, which, like that of
Egypt, was divided into a number of basins.[113]
The palace of Kûyunjik belongs to the last age of Assyrian history.
But the shadûf in Babylonia went back to the Sumerian period, as we
know from the references to it in the lexical tablets. It was called
_dulâtum_ in Semitic Babylonian, the pole or poles being _kakritum_,
and the bucket _zirqu_ or _zirqatum_ (Sumerian _sû_),[114] and
an old Sumerian collection of agricultural precepts describes how
the irrigator “fixes up the shadûf, hangs up the bucket and draws
water.”[115] The “irrigator” was naturally an important personage in
early Babylonia, and legend averred that the famous Sargon of Akkad,
the founder of the first Semitic Empire, had been rescued as a child
from a watery grave, and brought up by one. In both Babylonia and Egypt
the shadûf was closely associated with a system of irrigation which
went back to the dawn of their several histories.
What explanation must we give of its identity in the two countries?
There are three possibilities. In the first place, it may have been
invented independently on the banks of both the Euphrates and the
Nile. Similar conditions tend to produce similar results. But against
this is the fact that the shadûf was not the only kind of irrigating
machine that was suggested by the nature of the two rivers and
the lands through which they flowed. In modern Egypt, besides the
shadûf there are the _saqia_, or water-wheel, and an irrigating
contrivance which is in use in the Delta. The water-wheel, we know, was
a Babylonian invention which was imported into Egypt in comparatively
recent times; the irrigating contrivance of the Delta, which consists
of a bucket suspended on a rope swung by two men who stand facing
each other, is a primitive instrument which might have been invented
anywhere. Its survival is due to the fact that in the flat marshes of
the Delta, the shadûf, though saving labour, is not necessary, and it
therefore continued to be employed there after the shadûf was known.
But this implies that the shadûf was not the oldest instrument for
raising the water of the Nile.
Then there is the second possibility that the shadûf was borrowed by
Egypt from Babylonia or by Babylonia from Egypt in historical times.
In Babylonia, however, we can trace its history back to the Sumerian
epoch, and in both countries it was intimately connected with a system
of irrigation the origin of which must be sought in the prehistoric
age, and which was probably carried from the valley of the Euphrates to
that of the Nile. There remains the third possibility that it came to
Egypt along with the system of irrigation itself.
It is always easier to ask questions than to answer them, in archæology
as in other things. There are many details connected with the early
relationship between the civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt which
must be left to future research to discover. But of that relationship
there can now be little question in the minds of those who are
accustomed to deal with inductive evidence. There was intercourse in
the prehistoric age between the two countries, and the civilizing
influences, like the wheat and the language, came from the lands which
bordered on the Euphrates. Civilized man made his way from the east,
and dwelt in primeval days “in the land of Shinar.”[116]
[Illustration: THE 1^{ST}. ASSYRIAN EMPIRE]
CHAPTER V
BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE
A very few years ago Palestine was still archæologically an unknown
land. Its history subsequent to the Israelitish conquest could be
gathered from the Old Testament, and Egyptian papyri of the age of
the Nineteenth dynasty had told us something about its condition
immediately prior to that event. Thanks to the Palestine Exploration
Fund, the country had been carefully surveyed, and the monuments
still existing on its surface had been noted and registered. But the
earlier history of the people, their races and origin, their social
and religious life, and their relation to the rest of the world, were
still a blank. Of the Canaan invaded by the children of Israel we knew
nothing from an archæological point of view, and very little even of
the Palestine that was governed by Israelitish judges and Jewish kings.
The veil has at last been lifted which so long lay over the face of
Palestine. Cuneiform texts have come to clear up its civil history,
while the spade of the excavator has supplemented their evidence on
the more purely archæological side. The history of Palestine can
now be followed back not only into the neolithic, but even into
the palæolithic age, and the source and character of Canaanite
civilization have been in large measure revealed to us.
First and foremost among the materials which have made this possible
are the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, which
were discovered in 1887. Tel el-Amarna, about midway between Minia
and Assiut, is the site of a city which sprang, like a meteor, into
a brief but glorious existence under the so-called “heretic king”
Amon-hotep IV. about B.C. 1400. Amon-hotep, under the guidance
of his mother, had endeavoured to suppress the old state religion of
Egypt, and to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism. In spite
of persecution, however, the adherents of the old faith proved too
strong for the king; he was forced to leave Thebes, the capital of his
fathers, and to build a new capital further north, where he changed
his name to that of Khu-n-Aten, and called artists from the islands
of the Mediterranean to adorn his palace. When moving from Thebes he
naturally transferred to the new seat of government both the Foreign
Office and its records in so far as they covered the reign of his
father Amon-hotep III. and his own. For reasons unknown to us they do
not extend further back.
They were all in the cuneiform script, and for the most part in the
Babylonian language. The fact came upon the historian with a shock
of surprise, and had far-reaching consequences, historical as well
as archæological. In the first place, they proved what had already
been suspected, that under the Eighteenth dynasty Egypt possessed an
Asiatic empire which stretched to the banks of the Euphrates. Then,
secondly, they showed that Western Asia was at the time intersected by
high-roads along which merchants and couriers were constantly passing,
and an active literary correspondence was carried on. Thirdly--and
this was the greatest surprise of all--they made it clear that this
correspondence was in the script and language of Babylonia, and that it
was shared in by writers of various nationalities and languages, of all
classes of society and of both sexes. The Hittite and Cappadocian kings
wrote to the Pharaoh in cuneiform characters, just as did the kings
of Babylonia and Assyria. Arab shêkhs and Hittite condottieri joined
in the correspondence, and politically-minded ladies did the same.
Even the Egyptian Government was compelled to suppress all feelings of
national vanity, and to conduct the whole of its correspondence with
its own governors and vassals in Palestine or Syria in the foreign
language and syllabary. There is no trace anywhere of the use of either
the Egyptian language or the Egyptian mode of writing.
From these facts other facts follow. The age of the Eighteenth Egyptian
dynasty must have been quite as literary as the age of our own
eighteenth century, and international correspondence must have been
quite as easy, if not easier. Education, moreover, must have been very
widely spread; all the civilized world was writing and reading; and the
system of writing was a most complicated one, demanding years of study
and memory. In spite of this it was known not only to a professional
class of scribes and the officials of the Government, but also to the
shêkhs of petty Canaanitish towns and even to Bedâwîn chiefs. And along
with the system of writing went a knowledge of the foreign language
of Babylonia--the French of Western Asia--including some slight
acquaintance with the extinct language of the Sumerians. All this
presupposes libraries and archive-chambers where books and dispatches
could be stored, as well as schools where the Babylonian script and
language could be taught and learned.
Such libraries and schools had existed in Babylonia from a very
early age. Every great city had its library, every great temple
its muniment-room. Here the clay books were numbered and arranged
on shelves, catalogues being provided which gave their titles. The
system under which the longer literary or semi-scientific works were
arranged and catalogued was at once ingenious and complete. By the
side of the library was naturally the school. Here every effort was
made to facilitate the progress of the scholars, more especially in
the study of the Sumerian language and texts. The characters of the
syllabary were classified and named; comparative grammars, dictionaries
and reading-books of Sumerian and Semitic Babylonian were compiled,
lists of Semitic synonyms were drawn up, explanatory commentaries were
written on older works, and interlinear translations provided for the
Sumerian texts. But with all this the cuneiform system of writing
must have been hard even for the native Babylonian to learn, and in
the case of the foreigner its difficulties were multiplied. It may be
doubted whether the average boy of to-day, who finds the spelling of
his own English almost too much for him, would have had the memory and
patience to learn the cuneiform characters. Even in Sumerian times the
difficulty of the task was realized, for there is a Sumerian proverb
that “he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with
the dawn.”[117] It says much for the educational zeal of the Oriental
world in the century before the Exodus that it was just this difficult
and complicated script which it chose as its medium for correspondence.
The fact, however, points unmistakably to its cause. The reason why the
Babylonian language and syllabary were thus in use throughout Western
Asia, and why even the Egyptian Government was obliged to employ them
in its communications with its Asiatic subjects, can only have been
because Babylonian culture was too deeply rooted there to be superseded
by any other. Before Egypt appeared upon the scene under the conquerors
of the Eighteenth dynasty, Western Asia, as far as the Mediterranean,
must have been for centuries under the direct influence and domination
of Babylonia. I say domination as well as influence, for in the ancient
East military conquest was needed to enforce an alien language and
literature, theology and system of law upon another people. And even
military conquest was not always sufficient, as witness the Assyrian
and Persian conquests of Egypt, or the Roman conquest of Syria.
We now have monumental testimony that such domination there actually
was. As far back as B.C. 3800, Sargon of Akkad had founded a
Semitic empire which had its centre in Babylon, and which stretched
across Asia to the shores of the Mediterranean. We learn from his
annals that three campaigns were needed to subdue “the land of the
Amorites,” as Syria and Palestine were called, and that at last, after
three years of warfare, all the coast-lands of “the sea of the setting
sun” acknowledged his sway. He set up an image of himself on the Syrian
coast in commemoration of his victories, and moulded his conquests
“into one” great empire. His son and successor, Naram-Sin, extended his
conquests into the Sinaitic peninsula, and a seal-cylinder, on which he
is adored as a god, has been found in Cyprus. But Sargon was a patron
of literature as well as a conqueror; his court was filled with learned
men, and one of the standard works of Babylonian literature is said
to have been compiled during his reign. The extension of Babylonian
rule, therefore, to Western Asia meant the extension of Babylonian
civilization, an integral part of which was its script.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE TEMPLE OF UR IN ITS PRESENT STATE,
ACCORDING TO LOFTUS.]
Here, then, is an explanation of the archæological fact that the graves
of the copper and early bronze age in Cyprus, which mark the beginning
of civilization in the country, contain numerous seal-cylinders made in
imitation of those of Babylonia.[118] Examples of the seal-cylinders
from which they were copied have also been discovered there. Among
them is the cylinder on which Naram-Sin is adored as a god, another is
an extremely fine specimen of the style that was current in the age
of Sargon of Akkad.[119] Along with the seal-cylinder it is probable
that the clay tablet was also introduced to the people of the
West. Though the clay tablets found by Dr. Evans and others in Krete
may not go back to so remote a date, the linear Kretan characters
belong to the same system of writing as the Cypriote syllabary, and an
inscription in the letters of this syllabary on a seal-cylinder from
the early copper-age cemetery of Paraskevi near Nikosia has recently
been published by myself.[120] We may infer that the prototypes of the
tablets of Knossos or Phæstos once existed in Cyprus and Syria, though
in the damp climate of the Mediterranean the unbaked clay of which they
were made has long since returned to its original dust.
A few centuries after the age of Sargon of Akkad we find Gudea, a
Sumerian prince in Southern Babylonia, bringing limestone from “the
land of the Amorites,” blocks of alabaster from the Lebanon, and beams
of cedar from Mount Amanus, for his buildings in the city of Lagas.
Gold-dust and acacia wood were at the same time imported from the
“salt” desert which lay between Palestine and Egypt, and stones from
the mountains of the Taurus, to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch,
were floated down the Euphrates on rafts.[121] At a later date we hear
of the kings of the Babylonian dynasty which had its capital at Ur,
conducting military expeditions to the district of the Lebanon.
About B.C. 2100 Northern Babylonia was occupied by a dynasty
of kings, whose names show that they belonged to the Western division
of the Semitic family. The language of Canaan--better known to us as
Hebrew--and that of Southern and North-eastern Arabia, were at the time
substantially one and the same, and as the same deities were worshipped
and the same ancestors were claimed throughout this portion of the
Semitic world, Assyriologists are not agreed as to whether the dynasty
in question should be regarded as coming from Canaan or from Southern
Arabia. The Babylonians themselves called the names Amorite, so it is
possible that they would have pronounced the kings to have been Amorite
also. The point, however, is of little moment; the fact remains that
Northern Babylonia passed under the rule of sovereigns who belonged to
the Western and not to the Babylonian branch of the Semitic race, and
who made Babylon their capital. The contract tablets and other legal
documents of this period show that Babylonia was at the time full of
Amorite, that is Canaanite, settlers, most of whom had come there for
the sake of trade. At Sippara there was a district called “the field
of the Amorites,” over which, therefore, they must have had full legal
rights. Indeed, it would seem that in the eyes of the law the Amorite
settlers were on a complete footing of equality with the natives of the
country.
This fact, so little in harmony with our ordinary idea of the
exclusiveness of the ancient East, is largely explained by the further
fact that Canaan and Syria were now acknowledged portions of the
Babylonian Empire. When Babylonia was conquered by the Elamites,
and the West Semitic king of Babylon allowed to retain his crown as
an Elamite vassal, his claim to rule over “the land of the Amorites”
passed naturally to his suzerain. Accordingly we find Chedor-laomer
of Elam in the Book of Genesis marching to Canaan to put down a local
rebellion there, while Eri-Aku, or Arioch, of Larsa, at the same date
describes an Elamite prince as “governor of the land of the Amorites.”
When Khammu-rabi, or Amraphel, the king of Babylon, at last succeeded
in shaking off the Elamite yoke and making himself monarch of a
free and united Babylonia, “the land of the Amorites” followed the
fortunes of Babylonia as a matter of course. On a monument discovered
at Diarbekir, in Northern Mesopotamia, the only title taken by the
Babylonian sovereign is that of “king of the land of the Amorites.”
And the same title is borne by one at least of his successors in the
dynasty.
For more than two thousand years, therefore, Western Asia was more or
less closely attached to Babylonia. At times it was as much a part
of the dominions of the Babylonian king as the cities of Babylonia
itself, and it is consequently not surprising that it should have
become thoroughly interpenetrated with Babylonian culture. There was
an excellent postal service connecting Canaan with Babylonia which
went back to the days of Naram-Sin, and some of the clay _bullæ_
which served as stamps for the official correspondence at that period
are now in the Museum of the Louvre.[122] On the other hand, a clay
docket has been found in the Lebanon, dated in the reign of the son of
Khammu-rabi, which contains one of the notices sent by the Babylonian
Government to its officials at the beginning of each year, in order
that they might know what was its official title and date.[123]
When this close connection between Babylonia and its Syrian provinces
was broken off we do not as yet know. Perhaps it did not take
place until the conquest of Babylonia by a horde of half-civilized
mountaineers from Elam about B.C. 1800. At any rate, from this
time forward, though the influence of Babylonian culture continued,
Babylonian rule in the West was at an end. From the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence we learn that the Babylonian Government was still
inclined to intrigue in Palestine; the memories of its ancient empire
were not altogether obliterated, and just as the English sovereigns
called themselves kings of France long after they had ceased to possess
an inch of French ground, so the Babylonian kings doubtless persuaded
themselves that they were still by right the rulers of Canaan.
The wild mountaineers from the Kossæan highlands who had conquered
Babylon soon passed under the spell of Babylonian culture, and became
themselves Babylonian in habits, if not in name. They founded a dynasty
which lasted for five hundred and seventy-six years and nine months. It
is a curious coincidence that Egypt also was governed about the same
time by foreign conquerors, whose primitive wildness had been tamed
by the influences of Egyptian civilization, which they had adopted as
the Kossæan mountaineers adopted that of Babylonia, and whose rule
also lasted for more than five hundred years. The Hyksos who conquered
Egypt have been convincingly shown by recent discoveries to have been
Semites, speaking a language of the West Semitic type.[124] They came
from Canaan, and their conquest of Egypt made of it a dependency
of Canaan. Hence they fixed their head-quarters in the northern
part of their Egyptian territories, where they could easily keep up
communication with Asia.
The excavations undertaken by the Palestine Exploration Fund at
Lachish, Gezer and other sites in Southern Canaan have made it clear
that throughout the Hyksos period Egypt and that part of Palestine
were closely connected with one another. How much further eastward
the government or influence of the Hyksos may have extended we do not
know; the figure of a lion inscribed with the name of a Hyksos Pharaoh
has been discovered in Babylonia, but this may have been brought from
elsewhere. At any rate, so far as Palestine is concerned, we may say
that the Hyksos period in Egypt coincides with the disappearance of
Babylonian rule in Canaan. From that time onward Canaan looks towards
Egypt, and not towards Babylonia.
But even before the beginning of the Hyksos period Canaan--or at all
events Southern Canaan--is Egyptian rather than Babylonian. That has
been abundantly proved by Mr. Macalister’s excavations at Gezer.
Objects of the age of the Twelfth dynasty have been disinterred there,
and of such a character as to make it evident that the country was
already subject to Egyptian influence long before the appearance of the
Hyksos. An Egyptian of that age was buried within the precincts of the
consecrated “high place,” and a stela commemorating him erected on the
spot.
Both at Gezer and at Lachish it has been possible to trace the
archæological chronology of the sites by the successive cities which
arose upon them. Gezer was the older settlement of the two; its history
goes back to the neolithic age, when it was inhabited by a race of
short stature who lived in caves and burned their dead, and whose
pottery was of the roughest description. Some of it was ornamented with
streaks of red or black on a yellow or red wash, like coarse pottery of
the age of the Third Egyptian dynasty which I have found in so-called
“prehistoric” graves at El-Kab. Two settlements of the neolithic
population can be made out, one resting upon the other; in the second
there was a distinct advance in civilization, and the place became a
town surrounded by a wall. The neolithic race was succeeded by a taller
race with Semitic characteristics, to whom the name of Amorite has
been given; they buried the dead in a contracted position, and were
acquainted with the use of copper and later of bronze. The city was
now defended by a solid wall of stone, intersected with brick towers;
as Mr. Macalister observes, in a country where stone is the natural
building material the employment of brick must be due to foreign
influence. He thinks the influence was Egyptian; this is very possible;
but considering that building with brick was a salient feature in
Babylonian civilization, the influence may have come rather from the
side of Babylonia.
The first “Amorite” city at Gezer was coeval with the earliest city
at Lachish--the modern Tel el-Hesy, where the Amorite settlers had no
neolithic predecessors. At Gezer their sanctuary has been discovered.
It was a “high place” formed of nine great monoliths running from north
to south, and surrounded by a platform of large stones. The second
monolith, polished with the kisses of the worshippers, was possibly the
central object of veneration, the _bœtylos_ or _beth-el_,
as it was termed.[125] This _beth-el_, or “house of God,” takes
us back to Semitic Babylonia. The veneration of isolated stones was
common to all branches of the Semitic race; it may have come down
to them from the days when their ancestors wandered over the desert
plains of Arabia, where the solitary rocks assumed fantastic shapes
that appealed to their imagination and excited feelings of awe, while
their shadows offered a welcome retreat in the heat of noon-day. In the
historical age, however, it was not the rock itself that was adored,
but the divinity whose home it had become by consecration with oil.
The brick-built temple was called by the Babylonians a _bit-ili_,
_beth-el_, or “house of God,” and the name was easily transferred
to the consecrated stones, the worship of which was coeval with the
beginnings of Semitic history. But though the worship of stones
was primitive, the belief that the stone was not a fetish, but the
shrine of divinity, belonged to an age of reflection and points to a
Babylonian source.
The first Amorite city at Gezer was succeeded by a second, in which the
high place underwent enlargement and was provided with a temenos. Under
its pavement have been found memorials of the grim rites performed
in honour of its Baal--the bones of children and even adults who
had been sacrificed and sometimes burnt and then deposited in jars.
Similar sacrifices, it would seem, were offered when a new building was
erected, since children’s bones have been disinterred from under the
foundations of houses, both at Gezer and at Taanach and Megiddo. The
bones were placed in jars along with lamps and bowls, which, it has
been suggested, were intended to receive the blood of the victim. The
old sacred cave of the neolithic race was now brought into connection
with the high place of the “Amorite” settlers, and the skeleton of a
child has been found in it resting on a flat stone.
This fourth city at Gezer--the second since the Semites first settled
there--has yielded objects which enable us to assign to it an
approximate date. These objects are Egyptian, and belong to the age
of the Twelfth dynasty. Many of them are scarabs, but there is also
the tombstone of the Egyptian who was buried under the shadow of the
Amorite sanctuary. Fragments of diorite and alabaster vases also occur,
telling of trade with Egypt, and in the upper and later part of the
stratum painted pottery makes its appearance similar to that met with
in the corresponding stratum at Lachish. I shall have more to say about
this painted pottery in the next chapter; here it is sufficient to
state that it is related to the early painted pottery of the Ægean,
but is itself of Hittite origin, and can be traced back to the Hittite
centre in Cappadocia.
The fourth city had a long existence. It lasted from the period of the
Twelfth Egyptian dynasty to the middle of the Eighteenth. Then it was
ruined by an enemy and its old wall partially destroyed--doubtless by
Thothmes III. when he conquered Palestine (about B.C. 1480).
Upon its ruins rose another Amorite town. A new city wall was built of
larger circumference and greater strength; it measured fourteen feet in
thickness, and the stones of which it was composed were large and well
shaped. The houses erected on the _débris_ of the brick towers
belonging to the old wall were filled with scarabs, beads, fragments
of pottery and other objects contemporary with the reign of Amon-hotep
III. (B.C. 1400). At Lachish the ruins of the third city
were full of similar objects, and among them was a cuneiform tablet
in which reference is made to the governor of Lachish mentioned in
the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. At Taanach the Austrian excavators
discovered an archive-chamber, the contents of which were of the same
age. Taanach was merely a third-rate or fourth-rate town, but its
shêkh possessed a fortified residence, in a subterranean chamber of
which his official records and private correspondence were kept in a
coffer of terra-cotta. They were all in the Babylonian language and
script. Among them is a list of the number of men each landowner (?)
was required to furnish for the local militia, and there are also the
letters which passed between the shêkh and his friends about their
private affairs. How little of an official character is to be found in
these letters may be gathered from the following translation of one of
them: “To Istar-yisur (writes) Guli-Hadad.--Live happily! May the gods
grant health to yourself, your house and your sons! You have written
to me about the money ... and behold I will give fifty pieces of
silver, since this has not (yet) been done.--Again: Why have you sent
your salutation here afresh? All you have heard there I have (already)
learned through Bel-ram.--Again: If the finger of the goddess Asherat
appears, let them announce (the omen) and observe (it), and you shall
describe to me both the sign and the fact. As to your daughter, we know
the one, Salmisa, who is in the city of Rabbah, and if she grows up,
you must give her to the prince; she is in truth fit for a lord.”[126]
These Taanach letters are a final proof, if any were needed, of the
completely Babylonian nature of Canaanitish civilization in the
century before the Exodus. When we find the petty shêkhs of obscure
Canaanite towns corresponding with one another on the trivial matters
of every-day life in the foreign language and syllabary of Babylonia,
it is evident that Babylonian influence was still as strong in
Palestine as it had been in the days when “the land of the Amorites”
was a Babylonian province. It is also evident that there must have been
plenty of schools in which the foreign language and syllabary could be
taught and studied, and that the clay literature of Babylonia had been
carried to the West. Indeed the Tel el-Amarna collection contains proof
of this latter fact. Along with the letters are fragments of Babylonian
literary works, one of which has been interpunctuated in order to
facilitate its reading by the Egyptian scholar.
On the other hand, apart from the cuneiform tablets the more strictly
archæological evidence of Babylonian influence upon Canaan is
extraordinarily scanty. Naturally we should discover no traces of
“the goodly Babylonish garments” which, as we learn from the Book of
Joshua, were imported into the country, the climate of Palestine not
being favourable to their preservation; but it is certainly strange
that so few seal-cylinders or similar objects have been disinterred,
either at Gezer and Lachish in the south, or at Taanach and Megiddo
in the north. What makes it the stranger is that Mr. Macalister has
opened a long series of graves, beginning with the neolithic race and
coming down to Græco-Roman times, and that while the influence of Egypt
is sufficiently visible in them, that of Babylonia is almost entirely
absent. It is true that a few seal-cylinders have been met with in
the excavations on the city sites, but with the exception of one found
at Taanach[127] I do not know of any that can be said to be of purely
Babylonian manufacture; most of them are of Syrian make, and represent
a Syrian modification of the Babylonian type. And yet there are
seal-cylinders from the Lebanon, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford,
which are purely Babylonian in origin, and belong to the period of
Khammu-rabi.[128]--There are also two seal-cylinders of later pattern
in M. de Clercq’s collection, on which are representations of the
Egyptian gods Set and Horus--similar to those found on scarabs from the
Delta of the time of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties--as well
as of the Canaanite god Reshef, accompanied by cuneiform inscriptions
which on palæographic grounds must be assigned to the age of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets. As the inscriptions record the names of Hadad-sum
and his son Anniy, “citizens of Sidon, the crown of the gods,” we
know that they have come from the Phœnician coast.[129] Like the
cuneiform tablets, they bear witness to the long-continued influence of
Babylonian culture in Canaan on its literary side.
When we turn to theology and law, the same influence is recognizable.
The deities of Canaan were to a large extent Babylonian, with
Babylonian names. The Babylonian gods Ana, Nebo, Rimmon (Rammân), Hadad
and Dagon meet us in the names of places and persons, and Ashtoreth,
who shared with Baal the devotion of the inhabitants of Palestine,
is the Babylonian Istar with the suffix of the feminine attached to
her name. Even Asherah, in whom Semitic scholars were long inclined
to see a genuinely Canaanitish goddess, turns out to have been of
Babylonian origin, and to be the feminine counterpart of Asir, or
Asur, the national god of Assyria. The recently-discovered legal code
of Khammu-rabi has shown that such glimpses as we have in the Book of
Genesis of the laws and legal customs of Canaan in the patriarchal age
all presuppose Babylonian law. From time to time usages are referred
to and laws implied which have no parallel in the Mosaic code, and are
therefore presumably pre-Israelite. But though they have no parallel
in the Mosaic code, we have now learnt that they were all provided for
in the code of Khammu-rabi. Thus Abram’s adoption of his slave and
house-steward Eliezer is in strict accordance with the provisions of
the old Babylonian law. Adoption, indeed, which was practically unknown
among the Israelites, was a leading feature in Babylonian life, and
the childless man was empowered to adopt an heir, even from among his
slaves, to whom he left his name and his property. So, again, Sarai’s
conduct in regard to Hagar, or Rachel’s conduct in regard to Bilhah, is
explained by the Babylonian enactment which allowed the wife to present
her husband with a concubine; while we can now understand why Hagar was
not sold after her quarrel with Sarai, for the Babylonian law laid down
that “if a man has married a wife, and she has given a concubine to her
husband by whom he has had a child, should the concubine afterwards
have a dispute with her mistress because she has borne children, her
mistress cannot sell her; she can only lay a task upon her and make her
live with the other slaves.”
In the account of Isaac’s marriage with Rebekah it is again a provision
of the old Babylonian code with which we meet. There we hear of the
bride receiving a dowry from the father of the bridegroom, and of other
presents being made to her mother in conformity with Babylonian usage.
So, too, the infliction of death by burning with which Judah threatened
his daughter-in-law Tamar, on the supposition that she was a widow,
has its explanation in the legislation of Khammu-rabi, where the same
punishment is enacted against a nun who has been unfaithful to her
vows of virginity or widowhood. The story of the purchase of the cave
of Machpelah, moreover, has long been recognized by Assyriologists as
pre-supposing an acquaintance with the legal forms of a Babylonian sale
of land in the Khammu-rabi age.
With all this heritage of Babylonian culture, therefore, it is curious
that the excavators in Palestine have come across so few material
evidences of intercourse with Babylonia. Mr. Macalister is inclined
to believe that it must belong to a period anterior to the Twelfth
Egyptian dynasty. But this raises a chronological question of some
difficulty. We have seen that the earlier and inner city wall of
Gezer served as the defence of three successive settlements, and
that it was partially destroyed along with the city it protected
about B.C. 1480. Now the outer and more massive wall which
superseded it also served to protect three cities, the latest of which
was deserted during the Maccabean period, about B.C. 100.
Hence, Mr. Macalister argues, “if we may assume the rate of growth to
have been fairly uniform, we are led back to B.C. 2900 as the
(latest) date” for the foundation of the first wall. During this long
period of time twenty-eight feet of _débris_ accumulated; below
this are as much as twelve feet of neolithic accumulation.[130]
The conquests of Sargon of Akkad would accordingly have fallen within
the neolithic epoch. But in this case it is strange that the use
of copper, with which Babylonia had long been acquainted, was not
communicated to its Western province, and that it should have needed a
new race and the lapse of nearly a thousand years for its introduction.
Moreover, specific evidences of Babylonian civilization are quite as
much wanting in the remains of the first Amorite city as they are
in those of the second. And unless we adopt a date for the Twelfth
Egyptian dynasty, which on other grounds seems out of the question, it
is hard to see how the Khammu-rabi dynasty can be placed before it.
What little evidence we possess at present goes to indicate that the
Khammu-rabi dynasty was contemporaneous with the earlier Hyksos kings
or their immediate predecessors. And yet not only do we know that
the Khammu-rabi dynasty ruled in Palestine, but the adoption of the
cuneiform script, which was at least as old as the age of that dynasty,
as well as the testimony of theology and law, proves that its rule
must have exercised a profound and permanent influence upon the people
of Canaan. How is it, then, that while the excavations have brought to
light so many evidences of Egyptian domination, there is so little in
the way of material objects to show that Palestine was once and for
several centuries a Babylonian province?[131]
Perhaps the excavations which are still proceeding at Megiddo may
throw some light upon the problem. Meanwhile, we may remember that
thus far the greater part of the objects that have been found belong
to the less wealthy and educated part of the population. The annals
of Thothmes III. prove that, so far as the upper classes were
concerned, the picture of Canaanitish luxury presented in the Old
Testament had a foundation of fact. Among the spoils taken from the
princes of Canaan we hear of tables, chairs and staves of cedar and
ebony inlaid or gilded with gold, of a golden plough and sceptre, of
richly-embroidered stuffs similar to those depicted on the walls of the
Egyptian monuments, of chariots chased with silver, of iron tent-poles
studded with precious stones, and of “bowls with goats’ heads on them,
and one with a lion’s head, the workmanship of the land of the Zahi,”
that is to say, of the Canaanitish coast. These latter were doubtless
imitations of the gold and silver cups with double handles and animals’
heads imported from Krete, which were also received as tribute from
the Canaanitish princes by the Egyptian king. Other gifts comprised
chariots plated with gold, iron armour with gold inlay, a helmet of
gold inlaid with lapis-lazuli, the tusks of elephants, rings of gold
and silver that were used as money, copper and lead, as well as jars
of wine, oil and balsam. Of all these articles, the copper and lead
excepted, it is needless to say next to nothing has been discovered by
the excavators. The most valuable work of art yet met with is a bronze
sword of precisely the same shape as one found in Assyria, which bears
upon it the name of Hadad-nirari I. (B.C. 1330).[132]
On the palæographical side the forms of the cuneiform characters used
in Canaan go back to the script of the age of Khammu-rabi and his
predecessors. From a purely Assyriological point of view, no regard
being had to other considerations, I should date their introduction
into Palestine about B.C. 2300. The chronology that would
best harmonize the historical facts would thus be one which made the
dominance of Egypt in Palestine under the Twelfth dynasty precede the
Babylonian rule of the Khammu-rabi period. Against it is the negative
evidence of archæological discovery, so few traces of this rule having
been discovered in the course of the excavations. But neither in
archæology nor in anything else is negative evidence of much value.
At any rate, thanks to the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions,
the main facts are clear. Canaan was once a province of the Babylonian
Empire, and during the long period of time that this was the case
it became permeated with the literary culture of Babylonia. The
civilization which was partially destroyed by the Israelitish invasion
had its roots in the valley of the Euphrates.
Gezer, it is true, was one of the cities in which no visible break with
the past was made by the irruption of the desert tribes. It escaped
capture by the invaders, and it was only in the reign of Solomon,
when the Israelites had already entered into the heritage of the old
Canaanitish culture, that it was handed over by the king of Egypt to
his Jewish son-in-law. But at Lachish the marks of the destruction of
the town by Joshua are still visible. Above the ruins of the Amorite
cities is a bed of ashes left by the charcoal-burners who squatted
on the site before it was again rebuilt. Above the stratum of ashes
all must be Israelitish, and the objects found in the remains of the
cities that stand upon it testify accordingly to a complete change.
No more cuneiform tablets are met with, and but few Egyptian scarabs;
the pottery is different, and the “high place” has disappeared.
The bowl and lamp, indeed, are still buried under the walls of the
newly-built house, but the bones of sacrificed children which they once
contained are replaced by sand. As the Israelitish power increased
the old Babylonian influence necessarily lessened. When the cuneiform
syllabary finally made way for the so-called Phœnician alphabet is
still uncertain, but it was at all events before the days of Solomon.
Already in the Amorite period the characters of the Kretan linear
script discovered by Dr. Evans are found scratched on fragments of
pottery, indicating that besides the cuneiform another form of writing
was known; it may be that the Israelitish conquest, by destroying the
centres of Canaanitish civilization and the schools of the scribes,
gave a first blow to the tradition of Babylonian learning, and that the
work of destruction was subsequently completed by the Philistine wars.
CHAPTER VI
ASIA MINOR
If it has been a surprise to learn that Palestine was once within
the circle of Babylonian culture, it has been equally a surprise to
learn that Asia Minor was so too. It is true that Herodotus traced the
Herakleid dynasty of Lydian kings to the gods of Nineveh and Babylon,
that Strabo knew of a “mound of Semiramis” in Cappadocia, and that in
the Book of Genesis Lud is called the son of Shem. But historians had
long agreed that all such beliefs were creations of a later day, and
rested on no substratum of fact. The northern limits of Babylonian
or Assyrian influence, it was held, were fixed by the Taurus and the
mountains of Kurdistan.
The discovery of cuneiform inscriptions on the stones and rocks of
Armenia made the first breach in this conclusion. Their existence was
known even before Botta and Layard had opened up Nineveh. In 1826
Schulz had been sent by the French Government at the instance of M.
Mohl to copy the mysterious characters which had already excited the
attention of Oriental writers. Schulz was unexpectedly successful in
his quest. The number of inscriptions he discovered was far larger
than had been imagined, and his copies of them, as we now know, were
remarkably accurate. But the explorer himself never lived to return
to Europe. He was murdered by a Kurdish chief, Nurallah Bey, in 1829,
while engaged in the work of exploration; his papers, however, were
eventually recovered, and the inscriptions he had copied were published
in 1840 in the Journal of the Société Asiatique. One of them was a
trilingual inscription of Xerxes, the Persian transcript of which was
just beginning to be deciphered; the rest were still a closed book.
Then came the discovery of Nineveh and the first essays at the
interpretation of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. Layard himself made
an expedition to Armenia, and besides recopying Schulz’s texts and
correcting certain inaccuracies in them, added considerably to the
collection. Dr. Hincks, with his usual genius for decipherment,
perceived that the syllabary in which they were written was the same as
that used at Nineveh, and utilized them for determining the values of
some of the Assyrian characters. He succeeded in reading most of the
proper names, in assigning the inscriptions to a group of kings whose
order he was able to fix, and in pointing out that many of them contain
an account of military campaigns and of the amount of booty which had
been carried off. But it was also clear that the inscriptions were not
in a Semitic language, and as the nominative and accusative of the noun
seemed to terminate in _-s_ and _-n_, while the patronymic
was expressed by the suffix _-khinis_, the decipherer assumed
that the language was Indo-European. The most important texts had been
found in or near Van, which had apparently been the capital of the
kings by whose orders they had been engraved, and the name of Vannic,
accordingly, was given to both texts and language.
It was soon recognized that Dr. Hincks had been in error in suggesting
that the Vannic language was Indo-European. It was, it is true,
inflectional, but with this any resemblance to the languages of the
Indo-European family ceased. Nor was there any other language or group
of languages to which it appeared to be related, and all attempts
failed to advance the decipherment much beyond the point at which
it had been left by Hincks. Thanks to the “determinatives,” which
indicate proper names and the like, and the ideographs, which are
fairly plentiful, the general sense of many of the inscriptions could
be made out; but beyond that it seemed impossible to go. Lenormant,
indeed, following Hincks, showed that the suffix _-bi_ denoted the
first person singular of the verb, and indicated Georgian as possibly a
related language; but in the hands of other would-be decipherers, like
Robert and Mordtmann, there was retrogression instead of advance.
[Illustration:
THE GARDENS AND HILL OF DHUSPAS OR VAN.]
So matters remained until 1882, when Stanislas Guyard pointed out the
parallelism between a formula which occurs at the end of many Vannic
inscriptions and the imprecatory formula of the Assyrian texts. I had
already been struck by the same fact, and was at the time preparing a
Memoir on the decipherment and translation of the inscriptions, which
shortly afterwards appeared in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society_. In this I had made use of Layard’s copies, which had never
been published; other copies also, including photographs, squeezes
and casts, had been placed at my disposal, and in 1882 I was able to
lay before cuneiform scholars a grammar and vocabulary of the Vannic
language, together with translations and analyses of all the known
texts.[133] These have been subsequently corrected and extended by
other Assyriologists--Guyard, D. H. Müller, Nikolsky, Scheil, Belck
and Lehmann, as well as by myself. An ordinary Vannic text can now
be translated with nearly as much completeness and certainty as an
Assyrian text, and the number of them known to us has been greatly
enlarged by the archæological explorations of Belck and Lehmann.
In the decipherment of the Vannic inscriptions the ideographs and
determinatives which are scattered through them took the place for me
of a bilingual text. The determinatives told me what was the nature of
the words which followed or preceded them, and so explained the general
sense of the passages in which they occurred, while from time to time a
phonetically-written word would be replaced in a parallel passage by an
ideograph the signification of which was known. I soon found, moreover,
that the cuneiform syllabary must have been brought from Nineveh to Van
in the age of Assur-natsir-pal II. (B.C. 884–859), and that
the actual phrases met with in the inscriptions of that monarch are
sometimes reproduced in a Vannic dress. The Vannic language, however,
still remains isolated, though the majority of those who have studied
it incline to Lenormant’s view that its nearest living representative
is Georgian. Not being a Georgian scholar myself, this is a point upon
which I can express no opinion.
Instead of “Vannic,” it has been proposed to call the language
“Khaldian.” The chief god of the people who spoke the language was
Khaldis, and in the inscriptions we find the people themselves
described as “the children of Khaldis.” Derivatives from the name are
found employed in a geographical sense northward of the region to which
the inscriptions belong. Thus the Khaldi “in the neighbourhood of
Colchis” are said to have been also called Khaldæi;[134] “Khaldees” are
frequently referred to by Armenian writers as living between Trapezont
and Batûm, and a Turkish inscription at Sumela shows that as late as
the beginning of the fifteenth century Lazistân was still known as
Khaldia. That the name was ever applied, however, to the kingdom which
had its chief seat at Van is not proved, and it is therefore best to
adhere to the term “Vannic,” which commits those who use it to no
theory.[135]
The decipherment of the Vannic texts has not only led to the discovery
of a new language, it has also thrown a flood of light on the early
history, geography and religion of the Armenian plateau. The military
campaigns of the Assyrian kings had brought it into contact with
Assyrian civilization, and in the ninth century before our era a
dynasty arose which adopted the literary culture and art of Assyria,
and founded a powerful kingdom which extended its sway from Urumia on
the east to Malatia on the west, and from the slopes of Ararat and the
shores of Lake Erivan to the northern frontiers of Assyria.
The main fact which has thus been disclosed is that the Armenians of
history--the Aryan tribes, that is to say, who spoke an Indo-European
language--did not enter the country and establish themselves in the
place of its older rulers before the end of the seventh century before
our era. The fall of the Vannic monarchy seems to have coincided with
the fall of the Assyrian Empire, with which it had once contended on
almost equal terms, and in each case the invasion of the so-called
Scythian hordes from the plains of Eastern Europe had much to do with
the result. The founders of Armenian civilization and of the cities of
the Armenian plateau had no connection with the Indo-European family.
Their type of language corresponded with that which distinguishes most
of the actual languages of the Caucasus, though no genetic relationship
is traceable between them. The break with the past, however, occasioned
by the irruption of the Indo-European invaders, was so great that not
only did the older language become extinct and forgotten, but even the
tradition of the older civilization was also lost. Like the recovery of
the Sumerian language and the culture it represented, the recovery of
the Vannic language and culture is the revelation of a new world.
At the head of the pantheon was a trinity consisting of Khaldis, the
supreme god of the race; Teisbas, the god of the air; and the Sun-god
Ardinis. Temples were erected in their honour, and shields and spears
dedicated to their service. The vine, which grows wild in Armenia,
was the sacred tree of the people, and there are inscriptions which
commemorate its planting and consecration, and describe the endowments
that were set apart for its maintenance. Wine was naturally offered
to the gods along with the domestic animals and prisoners of war. Dr.
Belck has discovered burial-places which go back to the neolithic age,
but the majority of the monuments scattered over the Vannic area belong
to the bronze age, and testify to a native adaptation of Assyrian art
and culture. Iron also makes its appearance, but scantily. The pottery
of the age of the inscriptions is related on the one side to the
Assyrian pottery of the same period, and on the other to the pottery
of Asia Minor. The polished red ware more especially points to the
west.[136]
[Illustration:
THE RUINS OF A PALACE OF URARTU AT TOPRAK-KALEH.]
The existence of a language of the Caucasian type in Armenia, and its
association with a powerful kingdom and an advanced culture, is not
the only revelation of the kind that we owe to cuneiform decipherment.
We have learned that at a much earlier epoch Northern Mesopotamia was
occupied by a people who spoke a language of similar type but of far
more complicated form; and that here, too, the language in question was
accompanied by a high civilization, a powerful monarchy, and the
use of the cuneiform syllabary. The monarchy was that of Mitanni, and
its culture and script had been borrowed from Babylonia in the age of
Khammu-rabi, instead of from Assyria in the age of Assur-natsir-pal.
But it is interesting to observe that in borrowing the script the
people of Mitanni had adapted and simplified it in precisely the same
way as did the people of Van in after days. Superfluous characters were
discarded, a single phonetic value only assigned to each character,
and large use made of those which expressed vowels. In fact, in
both Mitannian and Vannic the system of writing begins to approach
the alphabetic. Whether this similarity in adaptation was due to a
similarity of phonetic structure in the two languages or to conscious
imitation on the part of the Vannic scribes it is difficult to say; it
is a point, however, which cannot be passed over.
The name of Mitanni meets us on the Egyptian monuments of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties. The kingdom played a considerable
part at that period of time in the politics of Western Asia, and the
daughters of its kings were married to the Egyptian Pharaohs. The
boundaries of the Egyptian Empire were coterminous with those of
Mitanni, and we gather from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence that the
Mitannian forces had more than once made their way into Palestine,
perhaps as far south as Jerusalem, and that Mitannian intrigue
was active in that portion of the Pharaoh’s dominions. Among the
Canaanitish governors are some who bear Mitannian names, and testify to
the continuance of a Mitannian element in that common meeting-place of
nationalities.
Several letters from the Mitannian king have been found among the
Tel el-Amarna tablets. Most of them are written in the Babylonian
language, but one--and fortunately an exceptionally long one--though
in cuneiform characters, is in the native language of the country.
A comparison of it with its companion letters, assisted by the
determinatives and ideographs which are employed in it from time to
time, has enabled Jensen, Leopold Messerschmidt and myself to decipher
a very considerable part of the letter, and so to compile a grammar and
vocabulary of the Mitannian language. That it is distantly related to
Vannic seems to admit of little doubt, but it comes before us in a much
more developed form; indeed, its system of suffixes is so elaborate and
ponderous as to remind us of the polysynthetic languages of America.
A legal document found in Babylonia and dated in the epoch of
Khammu-rabi contains a number of proper names which are of Mitannian
or allied origin, and show that persons of that race were already
settled in Babylonia.[137] As the Mitannian form of cuneiform script
must have been borrowed about the same time, we may infer that the
advanced guard of the northern race had already made its way as far
south as Mesopotamia, and there established its power in the midst of
a Semitic population. From that time forward a constant struggle went
on between the two races, the Semitic race striving to push back the
northern intruders and planting its own colonies in the very heart of
the northern area, while the northerners pressed ever more and more to
the southward, and at one time even seemed likely to possess themselves
of the heritage of the Babylonian Empire in Western Asia. Like Armenia,
Northern Mesopotamia was occupied by a people of Caucasian and Asianic
affinities, whose armies had crossed the Euphrates and won territory in
Syria and Palestine.
On the west, however, the Mitannians found themselves confronted by
another northern population, the Hittites, whose first home was in
Cappadocia. The Hittites also had passed under the spell of Babylonian
culture, and the cuneiform script had been carried to them at an early
date. Thanks to recent discoveries, we can now trace in some measure
the earlier fortunes of a race who made a profound impression, not only
on the future history of Asia Minor and its relations with Greece, but
also on the history of Palestine.
As far back as about B.C. 2000, Babylonian or Assyrian troops
had already made their way along the northern banks of the Tigris
and Euphrates to the borders of Cappadocia and the neighbourhood
of the Halys. I say Babylonian or Assyrian, for Assyria was at the
time a province of Babylonia, though as the colonies which settled
in the track of the invaders were distinctively Assyrian in their
municipal customs and the names of their inhabitants, the troops were
probably drafted from Assyria.[138] The mineral wealth of Cappadocia
was doubtless the attraction which led them to such distant and
semibarbarous lands; Dr. Gladstone’s analysis of the gold of the Sixth
Egyptian dynasty, with its admixture of silver, has shown that it was
imported from the north of Asia Minor,[139] and the silver itself was
probably already worked. Further south, in the Taurus, were mines of
copper.
However this may be, the remains of one of these early
Assyro-Babylonian colonies has been partially excavated a few miles
(twenty-three kilometres) to the north-east of Kaisariyeh.[140] The
site is now known as Kara Eyuk, “the Black Mound,” and numerous
cuneiform tablets have come from it. It has obtained its present name
from the marks of fire which are everywhere visible upon it, and bear
eloquent testimony to its final fate. Established as an outpost of
the Assyrian Empire in the distant west, a time came when, deserted
by the Government at home, its strong walls were battered down by the
besieging foe and the Assyrian settlers massacred among the ruins
of their burning town. According to M. Chantre, its excavator (who,
however, believes that it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption), the
whole mound is a mass of charred and burnt remains.
The construction of the walls, as well as the pottery found within
them, marks it off with great distinctness from the ruins of the
Hittite or native Cappadocian cities in its neighbourhood. While in
their case the city wall is made of unmortared blocks of stone, the
walls of Kara Eyuk are built of brick, and where stones are used
they are of small size and cemented with mortar. The pottery differs
considerably from that of the Hittite capital at Boghaz Keui. Some
of it is of black ware, especially characterized by the vases with
long spouts, which are also found in Phrygia and the Troad. Some of
it, again, is of the dark-red lustrous ware which has been met with
at Toprak Kaleh, near Van, and Boz Eyuk in Phrygia, while the yellow
ware with geometrical patterns in black and maroon-red which has been
discovered in Phrygia occurs in large quantities. This latter ware is
of the class known as “Mykenæan.”[141]
The cuneiform tablets which have come from the site are known as
“Cappadocian,” and were first noticed by Dr. Pinches. The forms of the
characters resemble those of the early Babylonian script, which was
still used in Assyria in the age of Khammu-rabi. Many of the proper
names, moreover, seem to be distinctive of that period. On the other
hand, a large proportion of them contain the name of Asur--often in its
primitive form of Asir--or are otherwise characteristic of Assyria.
The tablets are further dated by the archons who gave their names to
the years, a system of chronology which was peculiar to Assyria and
unknown in Babylonia, while the month was divided into “weeks” of five
days each. The language of the tablets also, which is full of dialectic
mispronunciations and strange words, points to Assyria rather than to
the southern kingdom, and we may therefore conclude that the colonists
were Assyrians, even though the colony may have been founded when
Assyria was still a Babylonian province.
There are indications in the Assyrian inscriptions themselves that
the road to Cappadocia was known to the Assyrian princes at an early
epoch. The earliest Assyrian kings whose annals have come down to us
are Hadad-nirari I. and his son Shalmaneser I. (B.C. 1300).
Hadad-nirari tells us that his greatgrandfather, Assur-yuballidh, whose
letters form part of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, had subdued
“the wide-spread” province of Subari, which lay near the sources of
the Euphrates, and in which Kara Eyuk was perhaps included, while he
himself restored the cities of the same province which had fallen into
ruin. Later, Shalmaneser I. conducted campaign after campaign towards
the same region. In his second year he overthrew the king of Malatia,
and the combined forces of the other “Hittite” states, who had come to
his assistance: “all were conquered,” from the borders of Cappadocia
to the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish. A military colony was settled
at the head waters of the Tigris which secured the high-road to Asia
Minor.
Two centuries later we learn from Tiglath-pileser I. that Moschians and
Hittites had overrun part of this Assyrian territory, and occupied some
of the Assyrian settlements. Once more, therefore, the Assyrian troops
marched to the north-west; the provinces which lay in the valley of the
Murad-chai were recovered, and the old province of Subari cleared of
intruders. Soon afterwards Tiglath-pileser forced his way into Southern
Cappadocia and the valley of the Sarus, making Comana tributary, razing
to the ground the fortresses that had resisted him, and erecting
on their site chambers of brick, with bronze tablets on which his
conquests were recorded. Eastern Cilicia was known at the time to the
Assyrians as Muzri, or “the Marchland,” a clear proof that it had long
formed a borderland and debatable territory between the Assyrian Empire
and the nations of Asia Minor.
It is thus evident that even before the rise of the Assyrian monarchy,
the road that led to the mining districts of Cappadocia, along the
valleys of the Upper Tigris, Euphrates and Tokhma Su, was not only
known to the Assyro-Babylonians, but had actually constituted Assyrian
territory, which was colonized by Assyrian garrisons and paid tribute
to Nineveh whenever Assyria was strong enough to enforce its authority.
At the eastern extremity of the road stood the city of unknown name,
now represented by “the Burnt Mound” of Kara Eyuk, whose existence as
an Assyro-Babylonian city probably dates back to the age of Khammu-rabi.
It was the outpost of Babylonian culture in Asia Minor. Babylonian
art, and, above all, the Babylonian system of writing, were brought by
it into the heart of the Hittite region, and the archæological objects
found there consequently become important for chronological dating. Not
far off, on the other side of the Halys, rose the Hittite capital, now
known as Boghaz Keui, the centre from which, as Professor Ramsay has
shown,[142] the early roads of Asia Minor radiated in all directions.
Boghaz Keui is being excavated at the present moment. Hundreds of
clay tablets have already been found there, inscribed with cuneiform
characters, the majority of which are in the native Hittite language,
though many are in Semitic Babylonian, including a copy of the famous
treaty between Ramses II. and the Hittite king. So far as the tablets
have been examined, they show that the Hittite empire extended from the
west of Asia Minor to the Egyptian frontier, and that the cuneiform
characters were used in ordinary life.
[Illustration:
THE RUINS AT BOGHAZ KEUI.]
By one of those coincidences which sometimes happen in archæological
research, the discovery fits with another fact which had long been
in the possession of the Assyriologist, though the full meaning of
it was unknown to him. Among the Tel el-Amarna letters are two in a
language unlike any with which we are acquainted. One of them is from a
Hittite leader of condottieri,[143] who has left us two other letters
which are in the Assyrian language, and who came from a town in the
neighbourhood of Cilicia. The second letter was written to the king of
Arzawa by one of the foreign secretaries of the Egyptian Government.
But the situation of Arzawa was wholly uncertain; as the king bore the
Hittite name of Tarkhundaraba, I suggested that it lay in the Hittite
territory, and that consequently in the language of the letter we had
a fragment of the Hittite language. For many years, however, this
remained a mere conjecture, without any definite proofs.
When the fragmentary tablets from Boghaz Keui came to be copied, it
was at once perceived that they were in a language which resembled
that of the Arzawa letters, but it was not until the new tablet
from Constantinople had been cleaned and copied by Dr. Pinches and
myself that the actual facts became clear. The Arzawa and Boghaz Keui
texts agree in the forms given to the characters, in grammar and in
vocabulary. Arzawa, therefore, must have been the Hittite kingdom which
had its centre at Boghaz Keui, and already in the age of the Eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty it was employing a form of the cuneiform script which
implied a long preceding period of use and adaptation. A new realm has
thus to be added to the domain of the cuneiform system of writing; in
Syria the Hittite king of Kadesh wrote to the Pharaoh in Babylonian,
but in his old home in the north, though the Babylonian syllabary
had been adopted, the language it served to express was that of the
Hittites themselves.
A certain amount of this Hittite language of Arzawa can be deciphered,
thanks to those same determinatives and ideographs which have assisted
so materially towards the decipherment of the Vannic texts, and more
especially to the recurrence in the two Tel el-Amarna letters of
phrases that are common to the whole correspondence. The new tablet,
however, is more than usually helpful, since it contains Assyrian words
and grammatical forms which in parallel passages of the same text are
replaced by native equivalents. In this way a sketch of Arzawan grammar
can now be made, as well as a list of Arzawan words. The language which
is thus disclosed is of an Asianic type, with features that remind us
of Lycian on the one side, and of Mitannian and Vannic on the other.
But in what may be termed the fundamentals of grammar it agrees with
Mitannian and Vannic.
At the same time, certain of these same fundamentals have a curious but
superficial resemblance to what we have hitherto been accustomed to
regard as characteristics of Indo-European grammar. The nominative and
accusative of the noun, for example, are distinguished by the suffixes
_-s_ and _-n_, the plural nominative and accusative often terminate
in _-s_, and the possessive pronouns of Arzawan are _mi-s_, “mine”;
_ti-s_, “thine”; and _sa(s)_, “his”; while _si_ is “(to) her.” The
third person of the present tense ends in _-t_; _es-tu_, is “may it
be”; _es-mi_, “may I be.” Yet with all these remarkable coincidences, I
can assure the comparative philologist that Arzawan is certainly not an
Indo-European language, and I must leave him to explain them as best
he may.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE PROCESSIONS IN THE RAVINE OF BOGHAZ.
(_See p. 174._)]
We have, however, learnt a good deal more about the Hittite populations
of Asia Minor from the Tel el-Amarna tablets than the nature of the
language which they spoke. In the closing days of the Eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty we find them on the southern side of the Taurus,
sending forth bands of adventurers, who hired their services to the
king of Egypt and to the rival governors and princes of Palestine,
and from time to time carved out principalities of their own with the
sword. We are even able to follow the fortunes of some of the leaders
of the condottieri, who had no scruple in transferring their allegiance
from one vassal prince to another when tempted by the prospect of
better pay, or in murdering their employer when the opportunity
arose, and plundering or occupying his city. They had, it is true, a
wholesome awe of Egyptian power and of the Egyptian army, and some of
the letters they wrote to the Egyptian court are amusing examples of
the excuses they offered for their misdeeds. But they never hesitated
about seizing the Pharaoh’s property when they thought they could do
so with impunity, while they were all the time professing to be his
devoted slaves. A considerable number of the vassal princes of Canaan
kept these mercenaries in their pay, and in many cases the Egyptian
Foreign Office thought it wisest to confirm one of their leaders in the
government of a district, however doubtful might have been the means by
which it had come into his hands. So long as the tribute was paid, and
the imperial authority acknowledged, no further questions were asked.
The mercenaries were useful at times to the imperial forces, and the
mutual jealousies and quarrels of the local governors were perhaps not
altogether displeasing to the home Government.[144]
In this way bands of Hittite mercenaries came to be settled in
various parts of Palestine, even in the extreme south. The sons of
Arzawaya, “the Arzawan,” established themselves in the neighbourhood
of Jerusalem, whose king, by the way, seems to bear a Mitannian name.
The statement in the Book of Genesis that Heth was the son of Canaan
receives a new signification from the Tel el-Amarna tablets.
But Hittite influence in Southern Palestine goes back to an earlier
epoch than the age of the tablets. The painted pottery found in the
“Amorite” strata of Lachish and Gezer shows remarkable affinities
to the pottery discovered by Chantre at Boghaz Keui, and Mr. J. L.
Myres has succeeded in tracing it in a fairly continuous line to the
region north of the Halys.[145] Here was found the red ochre--or
_sandarakê_, as it was called--which was used in the decoration
of the pottery, and after the introduction of two other colours still
remained the principal feature in the system of ornamentation. This
Hittite or Cappadocian pottery was carried westward along the road
which led from Boghaz Keui towards the Troad, and south-eastwards
across the Taurus into Syria. It was probably the ultimate origin of
the painted Minoan or “Kamâres” pottery of Krete.
The introduction of Hittite pottery into Canaan where it tended to
supersede the native ware, was doubtless the result of trade. But in
ancient Asia the trader and the soldier were very apt to march side by
side. The soldier opened the way for the trader and kept it for him,
quite as much as the trader opened it for the soldier. Hence it is
not surprising that the Assyrian monuments should furnish incidental
evidence of the Hittite occupation of Palestine at an early date. In
the inscriptions of Babylonia, as we have seen, Palestine and Syria
are “the land of the Amorites”; the name went back to an immemorial
antiquity, and indicates that at the time it was first given the
Amorites were the ruling population in the West. But in the Assyrian
inscriptions the place of the Amorites is taken by the Hittites. For
the Assyrians, Syria is “the land of the Hittites,” and in the later
historical texts even the Israelites and Philistines are classed as
“Hittite.”[146]
Canaan, however, was already well known to the Assyrians in the age of
the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, when the ambassadors of the Assyrian
king carried letters and presents through it to the Pharaoh. It must,
therefore, have been at a still earlier period that they first became
acquainted with it, and at this period Hittite influence must have
been so predominant as to cause them to discard the name of Amorite,
consecrated though it was by the long-continued usage of Babylonian
literature, and to employ instead of it the name of Hittite.
But it was in the direction of the Greek seas that Hittite influence
was most powerful. Through Asia Minor Babylonian culture penetrated to
the West. A native imitation of the Babylonian seal-cylinder was found
by Dr. Schliemann in the ruins of Hissarlik,[147] and the so-called
“heraldic” position of the lions at Mykenæ can be traced back through
Asia Minor to the designs of the Babylonian gem-cutters. The winged
horse, Pegasus, is found on Hittite seals, and, like the double-headed
eagle of Eyuk and other composite figures, is derived from Babylonian
prototypes.[148] They represented the first attempts of the creative
power, as conceived of by Babylonian cosmology, and an old Babylonian
legend of the creation accordingly describes the monsters suckled
by Tiamât as “warriors with the bodies of birds, men with the faces
of ravens.”[149] The fantastic monsters of “Minoan” art, which have
been brought to light by the excavations in Krete, claim an intimate
connection with the similar composite beings which are a characteristic
of Hittite art.[150]
The early Hittite art of Asia Minor, as I pointed out many years ago,
is dependent on that of Babylonia, and has little in common with the
art of Assyria.[151] It is not until we come to the later Hittite
monuments of Cilicia and Syria that the influence of Assyrian art makes
itself visible. Hence was derived the partiality of the Hittite artist
for the composite animals that adorn the seal-cylinders of Babylonia,
and which consequently became known wherever the seal-cylinder and
the literary culture it accompanied had made their way. As I have
already stated, though Subari was an Assyrian province and Kara Eyuk
an Assyrian colony, the form of the cuneiform script that was used in
Cappadocia was of Babylonian origin.
The writing material of “Minoan” Krete, we now know, consisted of clay
tablets. The fact is a proof that the influence of Babylonian culture
had extended thus far. But it was an indirect influence only. Though
the clay tablet was employed, the characters impressed upon it were
the native Kretan. This in itself, however, demonstrates how strong
the influence must have been, for the Kretan characters, whether
hieroglyphic or linear, were less easy to inscribe on clay than the
cuneiform. Krete, moreover, is a land of rock and stone rather than of
clay. We may infer, therefore, from the use of the Babylonian material
that the first impulse to write was inspired by the civilization of
Babylonia.
How it was brought to Krete we do not know. It may have passed over
from the shores of Canaan; it may have come from Cyprus or Asia Minor.
A seal-cylinder, which I have lately published, and which was found in
the early copper-age cemetery of Agia Paraskevi in Cyprus, shows that
the so-called Cypriote syllabary was already in use in the island at
a remote date,[152] and this syllabary is closely connected with the
linear characters of Krete. Inscriptions in the same form of script
have been found on the site of Troy, and the pre-Israelitish pottery of
Southern Palestine is marked with signs which seem to be derived from
it. So, too, is certain Egyptian pottery of the age of the Eighteenth
dynasty, and even of the age of the Twelfth.[153]
It is possible that Krete was the birthplace of the picture writing
which developed into the linear script of Knossos and the Cypriote
syllabary; it is possible that it was rather Cyprus. I do not think,
as I once did, that it comes from Asia Minor, for Asia Minor had its
own pictographic system, which we see represented in the Hittite
inscriptions, and an increased knowledge of this system tends to
dissociate it from the pictographs and syllabaries of Krete and Cyprus.
Wherever it arose, however, it was associated with the Babylonian
writing material and the Babylonian seal-cylinder. So far as our
present knowledge goes, Cyprus is more likely than any other part of
the world to have been the meeting-point of Babylonian culture and the
nascent civilization of the West. The numerous seal-cylinders which
characterize the early copper age of the island are native imitations
of Babylonian seal-cylinders of the epoch of Sargon of Akkad, when the
boundaries of the Babylonian Empire were pushed to the coasts of the
Mediterranean, if not into Cyprus itself, and the great eastern plain
of Cyprus was better fitted to provide clay for the tablet than any
other Mediterranean district with which I am acquainted.
That no written tablets have been found by the excavators in Cyprus
is not surprising. In an island climate where heavy rains occur the
unbaked tablet soon becomes hardly distinguishable from the earth in
which it is embedded. It was almost by accident that even the practised
eye of Dr. A. J. Evans was first led to notice the clay tablets of
Knossos.
The Greek term δέλτος, which was borrowed from the language of Canaan,
is evidence that the tablet was once known to the Greeks. For the
letters of the Phœnician and Greek alphabet rolls of papyrus or
leather were needed; the fact that the writing material was a tablet
and not a roll refers us back to Babylonia. With the introduction
of the Phœnician letters the word δέλτος necessarily changed its
meaning, and became synonymous with a wooden board. But it is possible
that a reminiscence of its original signification is preserved in a
famous passage of the _Iliad_ (vi. 169), where the later “board”
has been substituted for the earlier “tablet.” Here we are told how
Bellerophon carried with him to Lycia “baleful signs”--which may have
been the pictographs of Krete or the Hittites, or even cuneiform
characters--written upon “a folded board.” The expression would have
most naturally originated in the folded clay tablet of early Babylonia,
the inner tablet being enclosed in an envelope on which the address or
a description of the contents of the document is written.
On the literary side, however, this is the utmost contribution that
we can claim for Babylonia to have made to historical Greece. In the
sphere of religion it is possible that the anthropomorphism of Greece
was influenced by the anthropomorphism of Babylonia through Asia
Minor, where the rock sculptures of Boghaz Keui show how the primitive
Hittite fetishes had become human deities like those of Chaldæa; in
the sphere of philosophy Thales and Anaximander clothed in a Greek
dress the cosmological theories of the Babylonians; and in the domain
of art the heraldry and composite monsters of Babylonia made their
way to Europe, while the Ionic artists of Ephesus carved ivories into
forms so Oriental in character that similar figures found in the palace
of Sargon have been pronounced to be the work of Phœnicians. But the
literary culture of historical Greece did not begin until the tide of
Babylonian influence had already rolled back from Western Asia, when
the Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the cuneiform syllabary
in Syria, and the Hittite populations of Asia Minor had returned to
their clumsy hieroglyphs.
It is, however, remarkable how very nearly the cuneiform script became
what the Phœnician alphabet has been called, “the mother of the
alphabets of the world.” At one time it covered nearly the whole area
of the civilized globe. A seal-cylinder with a cuneiform inscription in
an unknown language has been discovered on the hills near Herat;[154]
in the west its use extended as far as Cappadocia, perhaps further.
Northward it made its home in Armenia; southward it obliged even the
Egyptian Foreign Office to employ it for correspondence, while military
scribes wrote in it their memoranda of the Pharaoh’s campaigns. In
both Mitanni and Van the syllabary was on the high-road to becoming an
alphabet; in Persia it actually became one.
But this final evolution came too late. A simpler script had already
entered the field, and won its way in lands where clay was scarce
and other writing materials more easily procurable. Indeed, it is
probable that the presence or absence of clay suitable for writing
purposes had quite as much to do with the spread of the cuneiform
script as the political events which transformed the map of Western
Asia. Canaan still continued to write in cuneiform characters after the
empire of Babylonia had been exchanged for that of Egypt, while the
use of the script never penetrated far into the limestone regions of
the Mediterranean. It was probably the geological formation of Europe
more than anything else which saved us to-day from having to learn the
latest modification of the cursive writing of the Babylonian plain.
But it had been a potent instrument of civilization in its day, perhaps
more potent even than the Phœnician alphabet, for its sway lasted
for thousands of years. It was at once the symbol and the inspiring
spirit of a culture whose roots go back to the very beginnings of
human civilization, and to which we still owe part of our own heritage
of civilized life. Babylonia was the mother-land of astronomy and
irrigation; from thence a knowledge of copper seems to have spread
through Western Asia; it was there that the laws and regulations of
trade were first formulated, and the earliest legal code, so far as
we know, was compiled. Babylonian theology and cosmology left their
impress upon beliefs and views of the world which have passed through
Judæa to Europe, and the astrology and magic which played so active
a part in the mental history of the Middle Ages were Babylonian
creations. It is not a little remarkable that an Etruscan model of the
liver in bronze (discovered at Piacenza), divided and inscribed for
the purposes of haruspicy, finds its counterpart and probably also its
prototype in the clay copy of a liver, similarly divided and inscribed,
which was found in Babylonia.[155] We are children of our fathers, and
amongst our spiritual fathers must be reckoned the Babylonians.
CHAPTER VII
CANAAN IN THE CENTURY BEFORE THE EXODUS
It is now nearly twenty years ago since the archæological world was
startled, not to say revolutionized, by the discovery of the cuneiform
tablets of Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt. Nor was it the archæological
world only which the discovery affected. The historian and the
theologian have equally had to modify and forsake their old ideas
and assumptions, and the criticism of the Old Testament writings has
entered upon a new and altogether unexpected stage. The archæologist,
the historian and the Biblical critic alike can never again return to
the point of view which was dominant before 1887, or regard the ancient
world of the East with the unbelieving eyes of a Grote or a Cornewall
Lewis. A single archæological discovery has upset mountains of learned
discussion, of ingenious theory and sceptical demonstration.
At the risk of repeating a well-worn tale, I will describe briefly
the nature of the discovery. In the ruins of a city and palace which,
like the palace of Aladdin, rose out of the desert sands into gorgeous
magnificence for a short thirty years and then perished utterly, some
300 clay tablets were found, inscribed, not with the hieroglyphics
of Egypt, but with the cuneiform characters of Babylonia. They were,
in fact, the contents of the Foreign Office of Amon-hotep IV., the
“Heretic King” of Egyptian history, who endeavoured to reform the old
religion of Egypt and to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism.
This was about 1400 years before the birth of Christ, and a full
century before the Israelitish Exodus. The attempt failed in spite of
the fanatical efforts of its royal patron to force it upon his people,
and of his introduction of religious persecution for the first time
into the world. The Eighteenth dynasty, to which he belonged, and which
had conquered Western Asia, went down in civil and religious war; the
Asiatic Empire of Egypt was lost, and a new dynasty sat on the throne
of Thebes.
The archives in the Foreign Office included not only the foreign
correspondence of Amon-hotep’s own reign, but the foreign
correspondence also of his father, which he had carried with him from
Thebes when he founded his new capital at Tel el-Amarna. And the scope
and character of it are astounding. There are letters from the kings
of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and the Hittites, of Cilicia
and Cappadocia, besides letters and communications of all sorts from
the Egyptian governors and vassal princes in Canaan and Syria. Most of
the correspondence is in the language of Babylonia; it is only in a few
rare instances that the cuneiform characters embody the actual language
of the people from whom the letters were sent. It is difficult to
imagine anything more subversive of the ideas about the ancient history
of the East, which were current twenty years ago, than the conclusions
to be drawn from this correspondence. It proved that, so far as
literary culture is concerned, the civilized Oriental world in the
Mosaic age was quite as civilized as our own. There were schools and
libraries all over it, in which a foreign language and a complicated
foreign system of writing formed an essential part of education. It
proved that this education was widely spread: there are letters from
Bedâwîn shêkhs as well as from a lady who was much interested in
politics. It showed that this correspondence was active and regular,
that those who took part in it wrote to each other on the trivial
topics of the day, and that the high-roads and postal service were
alike well organized. We learned that the nations of the Orient were no
isolated units cut off from one another except when one of them made
war with the other, but that, on the contrary, their mutual relations
were as close and intimate as those of modern Europe. The Babylonian
king in his distant capital on the Euphrates sent to condole with the
Egyptian Pharaoh on his father’s death like a modern potentate, and was
every whit as anxious to protect and encourage the trade of his country
as Mr. Chamberlain. Indeed, the privileges of the merchant and the
sacredness of his person had long been a matter of international law.
In one respect the advocates of international harmony and arbitration
were better off in the Mosaic age than they are in the Europe of
to-day. There was no difficulty about diversities of language and the
danger of being misunderstood. The language of diplomacy, of education
and trade was everywhere the same, and was understood, read and written
by all educated persons. Even the Egyptian lord of Western Asia had to
swallow his pride and write in the language and script of Babylonia
when he corresponded with his own subjects in Canaan. Indeed, like
English officials in Egypt, who are supposed to write to one another on
official business in French, his own Egyptian envoys and commissioners
sent their official communications in the foreign tongue. The Oriental
world in the century before the Exodus thus anticipated the Roman
Empire.
Canaan was the centre and focus of the correspondence. It was the
battle-ground and meeting-place of the great powers of the Eastern
world. It had long been a province of Babylonia, and, like the rest
of the Babylonian Empire, subject to Babylonian law and permeated
by Babylonian literary culture. It was during these centuries of
Babylonian government that it had come to adopt as its own the script
and language of its rulers; the deities of Babylonia were worshipped
on the high places of Palestine, and Babylonian legends and traditions
were taught in its schools.
Out of Canaan had marched the Hyksos who conquered Egypt. The names
of their kings found on the monuments that have survived to us are
distinctively Canaanite of the patriarchal period; among them is
Jacob-el, or Jacob, whom the Alexandrine Jews seem to have identified
with their own ancestor. While the Hyksos Pharaohs reigned, Egypt
was but a dependency of Canaan; the source of Hyksos power lay in
Canaan, and their Egyptian capital was accordingly placed close to the
Canaanitish frontier.
When, after five generations of warfare, the native princes of Thebes
succeeded at last in expelling the Hyksos conquerors from the valley
of the Nile and in founding the Eighteenth dynasty, they perceived
that their best hope of preventing a second Asiatic conquest lay in
possessing themselves of the land which was, as it were, the key to
their own. The Hyksos conquest, in fact, had shown that Canaan was at
once a link between Asia and Africa, and the open gate which let the
invader into the fertile fields of Egypt. The war, therefore, that had
ended by driving the Asiatic out of Egypt was now carried into his own
home. Campaign after campaign finally crushed Canaanitish resistance,
and the Egyptian standards were planted on the banks of the Euphrates.
Palestine and Syria were transformed into Egyptian provinces; in the
language of the tenth chapter of Genesis, they became the brothers of
Mizraim.
The Tel el-Amarna letters tell us how the new provinces were organized.
The most important cities were placed under Egyptian governors, many
of whom, however, were natives. But they were carefully watched by
Egyptian commissioners, to whom the control of the military forces was
entrusted, as well as by special high-commissioners sent from time
to time by the imperial Government. Local jealousies and rivalries,
moreover, among the governors prevented union among them against the
central power, and up to a certain point were not discouraged by the
Egyptian Foreign Office. The Tel el-Amarna letters offer us a curious
picture of the extent to which their mutual animosities were carried in
the days when the Egyptian Empire was growing feeble. All the governors
protest their devotion to the court, and all like are accused by their
rivals of intriguing and even fighting against it.
Besides the states which were thus directly under Egyptian rule, there
were also protected states. Here the representative of the old line
of kings was allowed to retain a titular authority, though in reality
his power was not greater than that of the governors in other states.
But, whether governor or protected prince his duty to the imperial
Government was clearly marked out for him. He had to levy the taxes and
send a fixed amount of tribute to the Egyptian Treasury, to provide a
certain number of militia, and to send official reports to the king. He
had further to see that the troops of the army of occupation were duly
provided with pay and maintenance.
The army of occupation in the reign of Amon-hotep IV. does not seem to
have been large. The imperial forces were needed at home to enforce
the new faith upon the Egyptian people, and to put down the discontent
that was growing there. We hear, however, of “the household troops,”
who belonged to the standing army of Egypt and formed the nucleus of
the permanent garrison. How many of them were native Egyptians it is
impossible to say; as we hear of Kushites or Ethiopians among them,
it is probable that the Sudanese were at least as largely employed on
foreign service as the Egyptians themselves. The Egyptian has never
been fond of military service, whereas, we all now know, the Sudanese
is essentially a fighting animal.
Both sides of the Jordan were included in the Egyptian administration.
One of the Tel el-Amarna letters, for example, is from a governor of
“the field of Bashan.” It is characteristic of the whole series, and
shows what the relations were between the army of occupation and the
native levies. I cannot do better than quote it in full: “To the king,
my lord, thus says Artamanya, the governor of the Field of Bashan, thy
servant: at the feet of the king, my lord, seven times seven do I fall.
Behold, thou hast written to me to join the household troops, and how
could I be a dog (of the king) and not go? Behold, I and my soldiers
and my chariots will join the household troops in whatever place the
king my lord orders.”
The name of Artamanya is not Semitic; neither is it Egyptian. The fact
brings us to one of the most interesting and unexpected results of the
decipherment of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. And this is that the
ruling caste in the Palestine of the Mosaic age was largely of Hittite
origin, or had come from those countries of the north whose population
was related in blood and language to the Hittites of Asia Minor.
In Northern Mesopotamia was a kingdom which ranked with those of Egypt
and Babylonia as regarded power and influence. Its native name was
Mitanni; the Hebrews, like the Egyptians, called it the kingdom of
Aram Naharaim. It stretched from Assyria to the Orontes, and contended
with the Hittites of Carchemish for the possession of the fords of
the Euphrates. Its rulers had descended upon it from the highlands of
Armenia and the Caucasus, and had reduced the native Aramæan population
to servitude. There are frequent references in the Tel el-Amarna
tablets to Mitannian intrigues in Canaan. Mitannian armies had from
time to time marched against the Canaanitish cities, and although there
was now a nominal alliance between Mitanni and Egypt, and the royal
families of the two countries were united by marriage, the Mitannian
court never lost an opportunity of sending secret support to the
disaffected princes of Canaan or of encouraging them in their revolts
from the Egyptian Government. In many parts of the country the ruling
family continued to be Mitannian, and accordingly we find more than one
governor who bears a Mitannian name. Thus one of them, as we see, was
governor of Bashan, and there was another who had his seat near the Sea
of Galilee.
Mitannian influence, however, was chiefly confined to the northern part
of Palestine. It was otherwise with the Hittites, whose marauding bands
penetrated as far south as the frontiers of Egypt. The important part
they played in the early history of Canaan and the substantial element
they must have contributed to the future population of the country has
but lately been disclosed to us by the advance that has been made in
the interpretation of the Tel el-Amarna texts. We have at last obtained
an explanation of the fact that whereas in the older Babylonian period
Canaan was known as “the land of the Amorites,” it was called by the
Assyrians “the land of the Hittites.” The Assyrian kings even speak
of Judah and Moab as “Hittite,” and the town of Ashdod is described
by Sargon as a “Hittite” state. What this must mean has indeed long
been recognized by the Assyriologists. When the Assyrians first became
acquainted with Palestine the Hittites must have been there the
dominant power. But how and when this came about we have but just begun
to learn, and it is the story of the Hittite occupation of Canaan, as a
better knowledge of the Tel el-Amarna tablets is making possible, that
I now propose to describe.
The Hittite race was of Cappadocian origin. Professor Ramsay has
pointed out that the hieroglyphic characters which they used in
their inscriptions must have been invented on the treeless plateau
of Central Asia Minor, and that their capital, whose ruins now strew
the ground at Boghaz Keui, north of the Halys, was the centre towards
which all the early high-roads of Asia Minor converge. But they
extended on both sides of the Taurus Mountains, and at an early date
had planted themselves in Northern Syria. I have lately succeeded in
deciphering their inscriptions, which have so long baffled our attempts
to read them, and one result of my decipherment is the discovery of
an unexpected fact. I find that the name of Hittite was confined to
that portion of the race which lived eastward and southward of the
Taurus. In Asia Minor itself, their first cradle and home, they called
themselves Kas or Kasians; it was the kingdom of Kas over which the
Hittite lords of Boghaz Keui claimed to rule, and it is still as kings
of Kas that they are entitled on the monuments of Carchemish, though
here they also acknowledge the name of Hittite.
The name of Kas is met with in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, where it has
hitherto been misunderstood. The kings of the Hittites, of Mitanni
and of Kas are associated together as supporting the enemies of the
Egyptian Pharaoh or attacking his cities in Syria, Hitherto we have
supposed that Kas signified Babylonia, though the supposition had but
little in its favour, and a different name is given to Babylonia in
passages where there is no doubt as to what country is meant. Now,
however, all becomes clear: in the age of the tablets there were still
four Hittite kingdoms in the north: Kas in Asia Minor, the Hittites
proper, east and south of the Taurus, Mitanni in Mesopotamia, and
Naharaim on the Orontes. Shortly afterwards they were all swallowed
up in the empire of the “great king” of the Hittites, whose southern
capital was at Kadesh. Some Kasians had found their way to Jerusalem,
where the king Ebed-Kheba--whose name is compounded with that of a
Mitannian deity--writes to the Egyptian Government to excuse his
conduct in regard to them. They had been accused of plundering the
Pharaoh’s territory and murdering his servants; he assures the court
that nothing of the sort is true. They are still in his house, where
it would seem they formed his bodyguard. But, on the other hand,
there were other Hittites in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem who were
really enemies to the king and threatened Jerusalem itself. These he
calls Khabiri, or “Confederates,” a name in which, despite history and
probability, certain writers have insisted upon seeing the Hebrews
of the Old Testament. But Dr. Knudtzon’s fresh collation of the
Tel el-Amarna texts has at last dispelled the mystery. The Khabiri
turn out to have been bands of Hittite condottieri, who sold their
military services to the highest bidder and carved out principalities
for themselves in the south of Canaan. The Egyptian Government found
them useful in escorting and protecting the trading caravans to Asia
Minor and the Taurus region, and as long as their leaders professed
themselves the devoted servants of the Pharaoh it was quite willing
to overlook such little accidents as their capture and sack of a
Canaanitish town or the murder of a Canaanitish prince.
One of these Hittite leaders, Aita-gama by name, had possessed himself
of the city of Kadesh on the Orontes, which in the following century
was to become the capital of a Hittite empire. In a letter to the
Egyptian court he has the audacity to assert that he was merely
claiming his patrimony, the whole district having belonged to his
father. If there is any truth in this it can only mean that his father
had already led a troop of Hittite raiders into this portion of the
Egyptian territory.
Along with Aita-gama two other Hittite chieftains had marched,
Teuwatti, whose name appears in the native texts under the form of
Tuates, and Arzawaya. Arzawaya means “a man of Arzawa,” the country
whose language has been revealed to us in one of the Tel el-Amarna
letters, and which proves to be the same as the Hittite dialect
found in the cuneiform tablets of Boghaz Keui. We are told that he
came from a city which was in the neighbourhood of the Karmalas, in
Southern Cappadocia. Arzawaya helped Teuwatti to conquer Damascus and
then led his followers further south. Here he acted as a free-lance,
hiring himself and his mercenaries to the rival Canaanitish princes
and professing himself to be all the while a faithful servant of the
Egyptian king. It is amusing to read one of his letters to the Egyptian
court: “To my lord the king thus writes Arzawaya, of Rukhiza. At the
feet of my lord I prostrate myself. My lord the king wrote that I
should join the household troops of the king my lord and his numerous
officers.” Here follow four words of Hittite which are accompanied by
the translation: “I am a servant of the king my lord.” Then the letter
proceeds: “I will join the household troops of the king my lord and
his officers; and I will send everything after them and march wherever
there is rebellion against the king my lord. And we will deliver
his enemies into the hand of the king our lord.” Doubtless Arzawaya
expected to be well paid for his help.
There is another letter from Arzawaya to the Pharaoh in which he calls
himself “the dust of his feet and the ground on which he treads.” But
in this letter he has to explain away the share he took in entering
the town of Gezer along with Labbawa,[156] another Hittite leader,
and there infringing the royal prerogative by summoning a levy of
the militia. In the eyes of the home Government this was a much
more serious matter than merely plundering or killing a few of its
Canaanitish subjects, as it was equivalent to usurping the functions of
the imperial power.
Labbawa also had to write and ask for forgiveness, and assure the
Pharaoh that he is his “devoted slave,” who does “not withhold his
tribute” or disobey the “requests” of the Egyptian commissioners. In
fact, he concludes his letter with declaring that “if the king should
write to me: Run a sword of bronze into your heart and die, I would
not fail to execute the king’s command.” All the same, however, he had
established himself securely on Mount Shechem, from whence, like Joshua
in after days, he was able to make raids on the surrounding Canaanitish
towns. In the north we hear of him at Shunem and Gath-Rimmon, where
he first appeared upon the scene in the train of the Egyptian army at
a time when Amon-hotep III. was suppressing an insurrection in that
part of Palestine. It is probable that he had just arrived with his
band of condottieri, attracted by the pay and the chance of plunder
that the Egyptian Pharaoh offered the free-lance. By a curious fatality
it was also in this same locality that he afterwards met his death at
the hands of the people of Gina--the Cana of Galilee, probably, of St.
John’s Gospel.
Labbawa cast envious eyes on the important city of Megiddo, and its
governor--who, by the way, is mentioned in one of the cuneiform
tablets found three years ago by the Austrian excavators on the
site of Taanach--sent piteous appeals for assistance against him to
the Egyptian Government. The beleaguered governor declared that so
closely invested was he by the Hittite free-lances that he could not
venture outside the gates of his town. The peasantry were afraid even
to bring vegetables into it, and unless help were forthcoming from
Egypt, Megiddo was doomed. After all, however, Labbawa was not only
unable to possess himself of the Canaanitish stronghold, but was taken
prisoner and confined in the very place he had hoped to capture. But
fortune befriended him. He managed to bribe the governor of Acre, and
the latter, on the pretext that he was going to send Labbawa by sea to
Egypt, took him out of prison and set him free.
Labbawa now turned his attention to the south of Palestine--the future
territory of Judah. Here he entered into alliance with the king of
Jerusalem, or, to speak more precisely, was taken into his pay, and
the two together waged war on the neighbouring states. One of the
Egyptian governors complains that they had robbed him of Keilah, and he
had to wait for Labbawa’s death before he could recover his city.
One of the two letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection which are in
the Arzawan or Hittite language was written by Labbawa, as we have
lately learned from Dr. Knudtzon’s revised copy of it. In this he calls
himself a native of the Hittite district of Uan, near Aleppo, and
refers to “the Hittite king,” though our knowledge of the language is
too imperfect to allow us to understand the meaning of the reference.
The letter is addressed simply “to my lord,” and we do not know,
therefore, whether it was intended for Hittite or Egyptian eyes. After
his settlement in Palestine, however, Labbawa adopted the official
language of the country; his letters to the Pharaoh are in Babylonian,
and his son bore the characteristically Semitic name of Mut-Baal. The
fact is an interesting example of the rapid way in which the Hittite
settlers in Palestine were Semitized. They brought no women with them,
and their wives accordingly were natives of Canaan.
Labbawa left two sons behind him, who, in spite of their Semitic
education, followed in their father’s footsteps and continued to
lead his company of Hittite mercenaries. Mut-Baal, moreover, made
himself useful to the Government by escorting the trading caravans to
Cappadocia, a fact which proves that he still maintained relations
with the country of his origin. The alliance between Ebed-Kheba of
Jerusalem and his father, however, had come to an end; Ebed-Kheba now
had the Hittites of Kas in his pay, and no longer needed the services
of the sons of Labbawa. They therefore transferred themselves to
his rivals, together with the sons of Arzawaya, who, like Labbawa,
was now dead, and Ebed-Kheba soon found himself in difficulties.
The result was letter after letter from him to the Egyptian court,
begging for help against his enemies, and declaring that if no help
came the king’s territory would be lost. These appeals seem to have
met with no response; the Egyptian Government was by no means assured
of Ebed-Kheba’s loyalty, and knew that if the territory of Jerusalem
were to pass into the hands of the Hittite chieftain it would make but
little difference to the imperial power. The tribute would still be
paid, the Egyptian commissioner would still be respected, and the new
rulers of the district would profess themselves the faithful subjects
of the Pharaoh. There would merely be a change of governors, and
nothing more. The Hittite mercenaries were formidable only in the petty
struggles which took place between the rival Canaanitish governors;
when it came to dealing with the regular army of Egypt they were
numerically too few to be of account.
Ebed-Kheba calls the followers of Labbawa and Arzawaya “Khabiri.”
I have long ago pointed out that the word is found elsewhere in
the Assyrian texts in the sense of “Confederates,” and that its
identification with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, though
phonetically possible, is historically impossible. Now that we know the
nationality of Labbawa and Arzawaya the question is finally settled,
and we can explain a hitherto puzzling passage in one of Ebed-Kheba’s
letters, in which he says that “when ships were on the sea the arm
of the mighty king seized Naharaim and Kas, but now the Khabiri have
seized the cities of the king.” Naharaim lay southward of the gulf of
Antioch, while Kas extended to the Cilician coast, and they were thus,
both of them, within reach of a maritime Power; they were, moreover,
both of them Hittite regions, Naharaim being the district afterwards
called Khattinâ, “the Hittite land,” by the Assyrians, while Kas was
the Hittite kingdom of Cappadocia. Ebed-Kheba, therefore, is drawing
a comparison between the power of “the mighty king” in the days when
an Egyptian fleet controlled the sea and the present time when Hittite
marauders are seizing without let or hindrance the king’s cities on the
very borders of Egypt. Even Lachish and Ashkelon had joined the enemy.
Perhaps the most important of the King of Jerusalem’s letters is one
which has hitherto been misunderstood, partly owing to its being broken
in half and the relation of the two halves to one another not being
recognized, partly to the imperfections of the published copy. Now
that a complete and accurate text of it lies before us, its meaning
has ceased to be a riddle, and I will therefore give here the first
translation that has been made of the completed text--
“To the king my lord thus says Ebed-Kheba thy servant: at the feet
of my lord the king seven times seven I prostrate myself. Behold,
Malchiel has not separated himself from the sons of Labbawa and the
sons of Arzawaya so as to claim the king’s land for them. A governor
who commits such an act, why has not the king questioned him (about
it)? Behold, Malchiel and Tagi have committed such an act by seizing
the city of Rabbah. And now as to Jerusalem, if this land belongs to
the king, why is it that Gaza has been appointed for the (residence of
the) king (’s commissioner)? Behold the land of Gath-Carmel is in the
power of Tagi, and the men of Gath are (his) bodyguard. He is (now) in
Beth-Sannah. But (nevertheless) we will act. Malchiel wrote to Tagi
that they should give Labbawa and Mount Shechem to the district of
the Khabiri, and he took some boys as slaves. They granted all their
demands to the people of Keilah. But we will rescue Jerusalem. The
garrison which you sent by Khaya the son of Meri-Ra has been taken
by Hadad-mikhir and stationed in his house at Gaza. [I have sent
messengers] to Egypt, [and may] the king [listen to me].... There is
no garrison of the king [here]. Verily by the life of the king Pa-ur
has gone down to Egypt; he has left me and is in Gaza. But let the king
entrust to him a garrison for the defence of the land. All the land of
the king has revolted. Send Yenkhamu and let him take charge of the
king’s land.
“(Postscript): To the secretary of the king says Ebed-Kheba your
servant: [bring] what I say clearly before the king. Kindest regards to
you! I am your servant.”
The references in this letter are explained in other letters from the
same correspondent. Malchiel was the native governor of the Hebron
district, and had married the daughter of Tagi, whose name does not
sound Semitic. The Hittite mercenaries of Labbawa from Shechem and
of Arzawaya, who does not seem to have established himself in any
special district of the country, were now in the pay of Malchiel,
while Ebed-Kheba, as we have seen, had secured the services of another
body of Hittites from Kas. He had been accused at the Egyptian court
of seeking by their means to make himself independent, and more than
one of his letters is occupied with defending himself and bringing a
counter-charge against Malchiel. Malchiel, however, secured the support
of the royal commissioner, Yenkhamu, who agreed to his employment
of the Hittite condottieri. With their assistance Keilah had been
recovered from the hands of Ebed-Kheba, who, at an earlier date,
had got Labbawa to seize it for him, but after Labbawa’s death the
tables were turned, and his sons had offered their services to the
rival party, doubtless for the sake of better pay. It was now that
Malchiel summoned the militia of Gezer, Gath-Carmel and Keilah, and
made himself master of Rabbah, a small place north-west of Keilah and
Hebron, which Ebed-Kheba asserted belonged to _his_ territory.
The tide was beginning to turn against the King of Jerusalem: his
enemies were in greater favour at court than he was himself, and they
had the support of the Hittite bands. It was in vain that he appealed
to the Egyptian Government for aid and declared that not only had his
rivals given Mount Shechem to the Hittite free-lances, but that by
their action against himself they were delivering the whole of Southern
Palestine into Hittite hands. “The king,” he writes, “no longer has
any territory, the Khabiri have wasted all the lands of the king. If
the royal troops come this year, the country will remain my lord the
king’s, but if no troops come, the territory of the king my lord is
lost.”
At this point the story breaks off abruptly. The Tel el-Amarna
correspondence comes to an end and the fate of Jerusalem and the
surrounding districts is unknown to us. Soon afterwards religious
troubles at home forced the Egyptian Government to withdraw its troops
from Canaan altogether, and for awhile the Egyptian empire in Asia
ceased to exist. It was restored, however, by Seti I. and his son,
Ramses II, at the beginning of the Nineteenth dynasty, and among the
cities whose conquest is celebrated by Ramses on the walls of the
Ramesseum at Thebes is Shalem or Jerusalem. But this second Egyptian
empire in Asia did not last long, and when the Israelitish Exodus
took place it was already passing away. When some years later the
Israelitish invaders planted themselves in Labbawa’s old stronghold
on Mount Shechem, the Egyptian occupation of Canaan belonged to the
history of the past.
Like the Saxons in England, however, the Hittite chieftains must have
founded principalities for themselves in the south of Canaan, as we
know from the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets and the Egyptian
monuments that they did in the north. Ezekiel, in fact, tells us that
the mother of Jerusalem was a Hittite, and the Jebusites, from whom
Jerusalem took its name in the age of the Israelitish conquest, were
probably the descendants of the followers of the Hittite Arzawaya.
They had, moreover, found a Hittite population already settled in
the country, descendants of older bands who had made their way from
the highlands of Asia Minor to the frontiers of Egypt in days when
as yet Abraham was unborn. At the very commencement of the Egyptian
twelfth dynasty we hear of the Pharaohs destroying “the palaces of the
Hittites” in Southern Palestine,[157] and archæology has recently shown
that the painted pottery discovered in the earlier strata of Lachish
and Gezer by English excavators had its original home in Northern
Cappadocia and is an enduring evidence of Hittite culture and trade.
The Hittites had been preceded in their occupation of Canaan by the
Amorites, as we have learnt from the Babylonian inscriptions. But in
the Tel el-Amarna age the specifically Amoritish territory was in the
north, eastward of Tyre and Gebal. Here Ebed-Asherah and his son Aziru
had their seat and from hence they led their forces northwards towards
Aleppo to resist “the king of the Hittites” on behalf of the Egyptian
Government, or attacked the Phœnician cities on their own account.
In the north, in fact, they played much the same part as the Hittite
mercenaries did in the south, with the additional advantage of being
able to secure secret assistance when it was needed from Mitanni.
Between Amorites and Hittites the Canaanites must have had a somewhat
unhappy time, like the Britons after the departure of the Roman
legions, who found themselves the alternate prey of Saxons and Scots.
But we can now understand and appreciate the ethnological notice in the
Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), which tells us that “the Hittites and the
Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the mountains, and the Canaanites
dwell by the sea and by the coast of Jordan.”
The Amorite princes, however, were more formidable to the Egyptian
Government than the Hittite chieftains, or else must have played their
cards a little too openly, for we find Aziru receiving a scolding such
as the Egyptian court seldom had the courage or energy to give. The
letter from the Egyptian Foreign Office, which is a long one, is worth
translating in full--
“To the governor of the land of the Amorites [thus] says the king your
lord. The governor of Gebal, thy brother, whom his brother has driven
from the gate (of the city) has said: ‘Take me and bring me back into
my city, [and] I will then give you money, [for] I have nothing [of
value] with me now.’ So he spoke to you.
“Behold, you write to the king your lord saying: I am your servant like
all the loyal governors who are each in his city. Yet you have acted
wrongly in taking a governor whom his brother had driven from the gate
of his city, and being in Sidon you handed him over to the governors
(there) at your own discretion, as if you did not know that they were
rebellious.
“If you are really a servant of the king why have you not seen that he
should go up to the presence of the king your lord instead of thinking,
‘This governor wrote to me saying, “Take me to thyself and restore me
to my city”’?
“But if you have acted loyally and nothing that I write is correct, the
king has devised a lie in saying that nothing which you declare is true.
“But it happens that one has heard that you have made a treaty with the
(Hittite) prince of Kadesh to deliver food and drink to one another,
and it is true. Why have you acted thus? Why have you made a treaty
with a governor with whom another governor is at enmity? For if you act
with loyalty to him and observe your and his engagements you cannot
look after (our) interests as you have undertaken to do long ago.
Whatever be your conduct in the matter you are not on the side of the
king your lord.
“Now as for these men to whom you want to turn, they are seeking to
get you into the fire and to burn (you) and all you most love. Whereas
if you submit yourself to the king your lord, what is there which the
king cannot do for you? If in anything you love to act wickedly and if
you lay up wickedness, even thoughts of rebellion, in your heart, then
you will die by the axe of the king along with all your family. Submit
therefore to the king your lord, and you shall live, for you know that
the king has no wish to be angry with all the land of Canaan.
“And since you write: ‘Let the king excuse me this year and I will go
next year to the court of the king my lord, my son not being with me,’
the king your lord accordingly will excuse you this year as you have
asked. Go yourself instead of sending your son, and you shall see the
king in the sight of whom all the world lives, and do not say: let me
be excused this year also from going to the court of the king your
lord; and do not send your son to the king your lord; he must not go in
your place.
“And now the king your lord has heard that you wrote to the king
saying, ‘Let the king my lord permit Khanni the messenger of the king
to come to me for the second time, and I will deliver the enemies of
the king into his hand.’ Now he will go to you as you have asked; do
you therefore deliver them (to him) and do not let a single one of
them escape. Now the king your lord sends you the names of the king’s
enemies in this letter by the hand of Khanni the king’s messenger; so
deliver them to the king your lord and let not a single one of them
escape, but put fetters of bronze upon their feet. Behold, the men you
are to send to the king your lord are Sarru with all his sons, Tuia,
Liya with all his sons, Yisyari with all his sons, (and) the son-in-law
of Manya with his sons and wives. The treasurer of Khanni is the
official who will read the dispatch. Dâsirtî, Pâlûwa and Nimmakhî have
gone [to collect taxes?] into the country of the Amorites.
“And know that the king, the Sun-god in heaven, is well; his soldiers
and chariots are many; from the upper country to the lower country,
from the rising of the sun [to] the setting of the sun all is peace.”
We hear again of one of the rebels mentioned in this letter in the
tablet discovered at Lachish in Palestine by Mr. Bliss. Yisyari is
there described as inciting the governor of Lachish to revolt and
promising assistance if he would call out the militia of his city
against the king. That an Amorite of the north should thus have been
able to interfere in the politics of a city in the south of Palestine
is an interesting illustration of what I may call the solidarity of
Syria and Canaan in the pre-Mosaic period. They had not yet been broken
up into a series of isolated States; like the Hittites, the Amorites
still claimed to be a power in the future territory of Judah as well as
in the neighbourhood of Sidon or Hamath.
It is possible that a well-known but somewhat mysterious personage
of the Old Testament was one of the Hittite leaders who succeeded
in carving out a principality for himself: I mean Balaam the son of
Beor. He is said to have come from the Hittite town of Pethor near
Carchemish, and besides being a seer and a prophet he was also a
soldier who fell in the ranks of the Midianites in a war against
Israel. But Balaam the son of Beor was not only a native of Pethor;
we hear of him again in the Book of Genesis, and here he appears as
the first king of Edom, his name heading the list of Edomite kings
extracted from the state annals of Edom and probably brought to
Jerusalem when David conquered the country. In the light of what
we have learnt from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna it is perhaps not
going too far to suppose that in Balaam we have one of those Hittite
chieftains who, after playing the part of prophet, made himself leader
of a band of Hittite free-lances and established a kingdom for himself
in Edom, finally falling in battle by the side of his Midianite allies.
However this may be, the important place occupied by the Hittites in
creating the Canaan which the Israelites invaded is now clear. While
the larger bands of Hittite raiders settled in the north, where they
prepared the way for the Hittite king himself with his regular army,
and where Hittite power became so firmly established that even the
great Ramses could not dislodge it, smaller companies of condottieri
made their way to the extreme south of Palestine, hiring their services
to the rival governors and princes and seizing a town or district
for themselves when the opportunity offered. So long as the tribute
was paid, and its subjects were not too troublesome, the Egyptian
Government looked on with equanimity while the states of Canaan were
practically ruled by the leaders of foreign mercenaries who transferred
their services from one paymaster to another with the most perfect
impartiality.
What is most curious is that the Imperial Government recognized the
legal position not only of the Hittite or Amorite mercenaries, but
even of organized bands of Bedâwîn and outlaws. As for the Bedâwîn,
it had companies of them in its own pay, like the Egyptian Government
in more recent times, and the governor of Gebal complains that the
Egyptian commissioner Pa-Hor had sent some of the latter to murder his
garrison of Serdani or Sardinians, who were themselves mercenaries in
the Egyptian army. That bodies of outlaws should have been subsidized
by the native princes with the permission, or at least the connivance,
of the Egyptian court may seem surprising. But after all it is only
what we find happening in later times when the king of Gath similarly
enrolled David and his band of outlaws into his bodyguard without any
remonstrance on the part of the other Philistine “lords.” Still it is
startling to find one of the Pharaoh’s governors coolly announcing that
he and his soldiers and chariots, together with his brothers, his
“cut-throats” and his Bedâwîn, are ready to join the royal troops, at
the very time when another governor is piteously begging the great king
to “save” him “out of the hands of the cut-throats and Bedâwîn.” Here
is a strange picture of Canaanitish life in the days when as yet the
Israelite was not in the land.
The fact is, the Canaanites were an unwarlike people. Inland, they
were agriculturists; on the sea-coast they were traders. And, like
other trading communities, they were disinclined to fight, preferring
to entrust the protection of themselves and their property to a
paid soldiery, while at the same time their wealth made them a
tempting prize to the assailant. It is true that they maintained a
native militia, as we have learned from one of the cuneiform tablets
discovered at Taanach, but it was upon a small scale, and apparently
so long as the person on the roll could produce the one or two men for
whom he was responsible he was not himself obliged to serve. It was
again a case of paying others to fight instead of themselves.
The fighting population of Canaan, in short, were the foreigners, and
these it was who gradually made themselves its practical masters. The
leaders of the mercenaries became the rulers of the Canaanite states,
which thus passed into the hands of a dominant military caste. When
the Israelites entered the country it was with this military upper
class that they had principally to deal; where the Canaanite had not
its protection he trusted for his defence to his iron chariots and the
strong and lofty walls of his towns. It is instructive to read the
long list of unconquered cities and districts given by the Hebrew
historian in the first chapter of the Book of Judges; among them are
the Jebusites of Jerusalem, while we are told that “the Amorites forced
the children of Dan into the mountain, for they would not suffer them
to come down to the valley.”
Canaan, it will probably be thought, was a somewhat insecure country
in which to live in the days of the Egyptian Empire. There seem to
have been constant turmoil and confusion, governor attacking governor
and bribing bands of foreign mercenaries to help him. But the turmoil
and confusion were mainly on the surface. When a town is taken from
one governor by another we do not hear of its population or their
possessions suffering materially; they soon appear upon the scene again
as prosperous as before. It is merely the governor and his immediate
surroundings who suffer; the capture of the town was probably an affair
amicably arranged between the condottieri who were attacking it and
the condottieri who were its defenders. The Egyptian commissioners go
up and down the country, hearing complaints and settling disputes,
and no one ventures even to protest against their decisions, while a
few Egyptian troops are stationed in places where the Government was
not quite sure of the fidelity of its subjects. Caravans of merchants
passed through Canaan going from Egypt to the north, and the traders
of Babylonia and Asia Minor travelled along its high-roads under the
escort of Hittite and other chieftains who were subsidized for the
purpose by the Egyptian court. Even in the days when the Egyptian
Government was breaking up, the constant fighting among the foreign
mercenaries and their employers seems to have affected the mass of the
population little, if at all.
What happened when the strong hand and controlling power of the
Egyptian Pharaoh were removed we do not yet know. We must look for
information to the systematic excavations that are at last being made
on the sites of the old Canaanitish towns. Already cuneiform tablets
have been found on them, and though these belong to the Egyptian period
we may hope that before long others may be discovered of later date.
We have still to bridge over the age which elapsed between the final
withdrawal of Egyptian domination and the conquest of the country
by Philistines and Israelites. When that age begins the script and
official language of Canaan are still Babylonian; when it closes
the cuneiform characters have been superseded by the letters of the
Phœnician alphabet, and the language of the inscriptions engraved in
them is the language no longer of Babylonia or of Hittite lands, but of
Canaan itself.
INDEX
Abercromby, the Hon. J., 64
Abram, 153
Abû Shahrein. _See_ Eridu
Achæmenian dynasty, 11;
inscriptions, 10;
transcripts (second), 26, 27
Acre, 199
Adamu, Adam, 68, 76, 78, 80, 91
Aita-gama, 197
Akkad, 69, 73, 79, 87, 95
Akkadian, 24, 28–30, 69
Amiaud, 29
Amon-hotep III., 149, 199
Amon-hotep IV., 136, 188, 192
Amorites, 139, 141, 142, 147, 179, 206, 207;
land of, 139, 141, 143, 179, 194
Amraphel (Khammu-rabi), 143
Animals, domesticated, 83, 99
Anquetil-Duperron, 10
Anupum (Anubis), 127
Ape in Babylonia, 129
Apes of Thoth, 127
Arabia, Southern, 123
Archæological _versus_ literary evidence, 43
Archæology, science of, 36, etc.
Arioch (Eri-Aku), 143
Armenia, 31, 160, etc.
Armenian and Sumerian, 59
Armenians, modern, 165
Aryan language, the, 72
Arzawa, 34, 175;
language of, 176, 200
Arzawan letters, vi., 175, 200
Arzawaya, 178, 197, 198, 202, 203, 205
Asari of Eridu, 119
Asherah, 150, 153
Ashtoreth (Istar), 153
Asia Minor, 61, 62, 160 _et seq._, 173, 174;
gold of, 62;
bronze in, 66
Askabad, excavations at, 54, 61, 83
Ass, domesticated, 83
Assur (Qal’at Shirqât), 41
Assur, the god, 95
Assur-bani-pal, 73
Assur-natsir-pal, 33, 163
Assur-yuballidh, 172
Assyria, the sword in, 65
Assyrian culture, 113;
grammar, 25;
kings, 172;
Semitic, 19;
syllabary, 19;
types, 73
Asur, 172
Babylonia (and Egypt), 101, etc.;
Canaanite dynasty in, 142;
copper age in, 55;
no neolithic age in, 45, 157;
picture-writing of, 57, 75
Babylonian anthropomorphism, 94, 125;
chronology, 114;
civilization, 75, 83;
irrigation, 101;
priesthood, 96;
script, 17, 83;
seal-cylinder, 111;
trade, 92
Babylonians a mixed people, 87
Balaam, 210
Barley, origin of, 108
Bashan, 192, 193
Behistun, 15, 16, 20, 22, 26
Bel, 95, 97
Belck, 33, 163, 166, 171, 174
Bellerophon, 183
Bes, 129
Beth-el, 147
Bezold, 28
Black Obelisk, the, 20, 21, 179
Bliss, Mr., 209
Boghaz Keui, vi., 34, 171, 174, 175, 178, 184, 195, 197
Borsippa, 78
Botta, 18
Boz Eyuk, pottery of, 171
Brick, use of, 113
British Museum, how it excavates, 39, 40
Bronze, 56, 59, 66;
scimitars, 57, 65;
earliest use in Egypt, 60;
in Krete, 60;
in the Caucasus, 60;
origin of, in Britain, 64
Bronze age in Europe, 64
Burnouf, 13, 14
Calah, 18. _See_ Nimrûd
Canaan, 126, 137, 190, 213 (_see_ Palestine);
and Egypt, 177;
before the Exodus, 187 _et seq._;
Hittite pottery in, 179;
neolithic age in, 146
Canaanite civilization, 150 _et seq._;
dynasty in Babylonia, 142;
deities, 152;
language, 35, 89, 142;
luxury, 156;
postal service, 143, 189;
pottery, 63;
sacrifice of children, 148
Cappadocia, Assyrians in, 169
Cappadocian tablets, 171
Carchemish, 40, 172, 195
Careri, 9
Chaldæa, port of, 80
Chaldæans, 90
Chantre, 47, 53, 170, 171, 174, 178
Chardin, Sir J., 9
Chedor-laomer, 143
Cilicia, 173, 175
Clay as writing material, 111
Comana, 173
Cones, terra-cotta, 134
Copper, use of, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62;
mines, 170
Copper in Sumerian, 58, 59
Cossæeans. _See_ Kossæans
Crete. _See_ Krete
Cros, Captain, 48, 55
Cubit, Babylonian, 122
Cuneiform a cursive script, 77, 84, 184;
used by Egypt, 126, 190
Cypriotic syllabary, 182
Cyprus, 65, 140, 182;
seal-cylinders in, 140
Damascus, 197
Darius I., 9, 12, 16, 35
Darius, how pronounced, 12
Deecke, 186
Deification of king, 95
Delitzsch, F., 35
Determinatives, 57, 84
Dieulafoy, 73
Dirk, 65;
in Danube valley, 65;
characterizes bronze age, 66
Domestication of animals, 83
Dwarfs, sacred, 127, 128
Ea or Oannes, 75, 79, 81, 119
Ebed-Kheba, King of Jerusalem, 196, 200, 201, 202, 204
Eden, 78, 79
Edin, the “Plain,” 78, 79, 93
Egypt, 47, 54, 102;
Asiatic influence on, 125;
excavations in, 42;
and Babylonia, 101, 107, 110, 133
Egyptian irrigation, 102;
chronology, 115;
hieroglyphs, 104;
language Semitic, 107, 110;
letter of an, 207;
neolithic culture, 125;
rule in Canaan, 213;
seal-cylinders, 112, 114
Egyptians, dynastic, 110, 114
Elam, 26, 46, 71, 73, 144;
copper age in, 51
Elamite pottery, 47, 48;
dialects, 71;
race, 73
El-Hibba, 41
El-Kab, sculpture at, 117
Elwend, inscription of, 20
Erech, 93
Eri-aku (Arioch), 143
Eridu, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 92, 118, 120;
excavations at, 55
Erman, 107
Etruscan model of liver, 186
Euphrates, 81, 102, 103
Evans, A. J., 141, 159, 183
Fibula, introduction of, 65, 66
Figurines in Elam, 52, 54;
at Kara Eyuk, 171
Flower, Samuel, 8
Garstang, 62
Gezer, 57, 60, 63, 65, 145, etc., 154, 158, 198, 204, 206;
graves at, 151
Gladstone, Dr., analysis of metals, 60, 61, 170
Gold, word for, 58
Gordium, pottery of, 171
Grotefend, 10–13, 17, 35
Gudea, 53, 59, 73, 141
Guyard, Stanislas, 33, 162
Hadad-nirari I., 57, 157, 172
Halévy, 28
Hall, H. R., 40
Hamadan, inscription of, 15
Hathor identified with Istar, 129
Haupt, 29
Haynes, 56
Hazael, 21
Hebrew, 142
Hebron, 203
Heeren, 13
Heraldic position in art, 117, 180
Herat, seal-cylinder from, 184
Herbert, Thomas, 9
Herodotus, 131
Heuzey, 40, 53, 117, 121, 133
Hezekiah, 21
Hierakonpolis, 62, 115, 117
Hilprecht, 56
Hincks, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 31, 161, 162
Hittite, 34;
art, 180 _et seq._;
chiefs, 197;
dirk, 65;
inscriptions, 195;
kings, vi., 175;
language, 34, 174, 176, 200;
mercenaries, 177, 193, 196, etc.;
pottery, vi., 63, 149, 178, 179, 206
Hittites, 169, 170, 173, 174, 179, 194, etc., 206
Hommel, 105, 106, 116, 120
Horus, followers of, 61, 110, 123, 124
Hut-urns, 171
Hyksos, 52, 145, 156, 190;
introduce bronze, 63;
axe-heads, 171
In-Susinak, 50
Iron, name of, 58;
in Armenia, 166;
in Egypt, 62
Isaac, 154
Israelites, their advent in Canaan, 212
Istar, 52, 128, 129, 153
Ivories of Ephesus, 184
Jacob-el (_see_ Ya’qub-el), 145, 190
Jebusites, 205, 213
Jehu, 21
Jensen, 34, 168
Jéquier, 121
Jerusalem, 21, 178, 201, 205, 210, 213;
king of, 196, 199, etc., 202, 204
Jones, F., 24
Kadish, 197, 208
Kara Eyuk, 47, 48, 53, 166, 169, 170, 171, 173, 181
Karnak, 54
Kas, 195, 201, 202
Kassites, 89;
dynasty of, 97
Khabiri, 196, 201, 202
Khaldis, Khaldian, 164, 165
Khammu-rabi (_see_ Amraphel), 81, 127, 143, 152, 157;
code of laws of, 153;
dynasty of, 155, 156, 167;
letters of, 45
Khattinâ (Hittites), 202
Khorsabad, 18, 19
King, L. W., 40
Knossus, clay tablets at, 183
Knudtzon, 174, 196, 200
Kossæeans (Kassites), 35, 144
Kretan script, 141, 159, 181;
pottery, 178;
monsters in art, 180
Krete, 141, 182
Kûyunjik, 18, 131. _See_ Nineveh.
Labbawa, Labbaya, 174, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204
Lachish, 146, 202, 209;
excavations at, 145, 149, 158, 206
Lagas, 73, 141
Language and race, 109
Lassen, 14
Layard, 18, 23, 32, 39, 131, 161
Lebanon, 152
Legrain, 54
Lehmann, 33, 163
Lenormant, Fr., 28, 162, 163
Libraries, Babylonian, 138
Lichtenberg, von, 53
Liver, bronze, 186
Loftus, 26, 80
Longpérier, de, 19
Macalister, 57, 63, 146, 147, 151, 154, 155
Mace-heads, 133
Magan, 134
Mal-Amîr, 27
Map of world, Babylonian, 80
Maspero, 131
Megiddo, 148, 156, 199
Merodach-baladan, 90
Merodach-nadin-akhi, 73
Messerschmidt, 28, 34, 168
Mitanni, 33, 34, 167, 193, 196;
language of, 168
Montellius, 64
Morgan, H. de, 55
Morgan, J. de, 27, 33, 46, 73, 74, 80, 82, 121
Moschians, 173
Münter, Bishop, 10
Muqayyar (_see_ Ur), 55
Mussian, excavations at, 50, 53
Mykenæ, 65
Mykenæan pottery, 171
Myres, J. L., 63, 178
Naharaim (Mitanni), 196, 202
Naram-Sin, 56, 73, 88, 140, 143
Nar-Buzau, palette of, 117, 121, 123
Nar-Mer, 117
Nebuchadrezzar, 17, 21, 45
Neolithic age not in Babylonia, 48, 57
Neo-Susian, 27
Niebuhr, Carsten, 9
Niffer (Nippur), excavations at, 40, 56, 76, 77, 78
Nimrûd, 18, 21
Nineveh, excavations at, 18, 57;
library of, 23, 24, 161
Niobê of Mount Sipylus, 54
Norris, Edwin, 16, 26
Nu-gidda, 128, 129
Oannes, 75
Obelisk, the Black, 20, 21, 179
Obsidian, 51, 171
Oppert, Jules, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28
Osiris, 119, 123
Palestine and Babylonia, 135 _et seq._;
Exploration Fund, 135, 145;
Hittites in, 193, 194
Palette of Nar-Buzau, 121, 123
Papyrus, 84
Pegasus, 180
Pehlevi inscriptions, 10
Pepi, statue of, 62;
Pyramid texts of, 120
Persian Gulf, 75;
land increases at head of, 80
Peters, Dr., 56
Petrie, Flinders, 52, 60, 61, 62, 117, 121, 156, 182
Philology, value of, 43, 44
Phœnician alphabet, 159, 183, 185
Picture-writing, Babylonian, 75, 82, 105;
analysed, 98–100
Pietro della Valle, 8
Pinches, Dr., 73, 74, 144, 171
Polyphony, 22
Postal service in Babylonia, 143;
in Canaan, 143, 189
Pottery, importance of, 36 _et seq._;
Babylonian, 39, 42;
Elamite, 47, 48, 54;
Hittite, 63, 149, 179;
Kretan, 178;
Mykenæan, 171;
South Canaanite, 63, 149, 178, 206;
Susian, 47, 51, 53;
Vannic, 166;
black with incised lines, 52, 53, 171
Ptah, Semitic origin of, 129
Pumpelly, Professor, 54, 64
Pyramid texts, 122
Qal’at Shirqât (Assur), 41
Ramsay, Sir W. M., 174, 195
Ramses II., treaty of, vi.
Rask, 13, 14
Rassam, Hormuzd, 23, 32
Rawlinson, Sir H. C., 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 80
Razor, use of, 134
Reisner, 118
Resurrection, the Babylonian, 120
Rhind, 41, 42
Rich, 8
Royal Society, 8
Sacred trees of Egypt, 123
Sacy, de, 10
Saint-Martin, 13
Samsu-ditana, 28
Saqia, the, 132
Sardinians, 211
Sargon of Akkad, 19, 49, 56, 59, 87, 88, 132, 139, 140, 155, 182
Sarzec, M. de, 40, 121
Saulcy, de, 19, 20, 25
Scheil, 27
Schliemann, 54, 60, 61, 65, 166, 180
Schools, Babylonian, 138
Schulz, 31, 32, 160, 161
Schweinfurth, 108, 123
Scimitar, Semitic invention, 65, 66;
of Hadad-nirari, 157
Seal-cylinder, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 140, 152, 180, 181, 184;
dwarfs on, 128;
from Herat, 184;
in Cyprus, 140;
in Troy, 180
Sellin, 157
Semite culture, origin of, 30;
influence, 49, 52, 86, 90;
religion, 93 _et seq._;
kings deified, 95
Semites in Babylonia, 86
Semitic Empire, 69, 87
Semitic family of speech, 89;
languages, 70, 72;
types, 73, 74
Sennacherib, 21
Shadûf, 99, 130, 131 _et seq._
Shalmaneser I., 172
Shalmaneser II., 179;
annals of, 21
Shechem, 198, 204
“Shepherd” kings, 93
Sidonian seals, 35, 152
Silver, name of, 58
Sin (Sinai), 128, 129
Sippara, 46, 79, 142
Spouted vases, 134
Subari, 172, 181
Sumer, language of, 28, 29, 68 _et seq._, 86
Sumerian, 24, 28–30, 69;
animism, 94;
civilization, 98–100;
culture, 98;
-- in Canaan, 138;
dialects, 29, 69;
origin of, 74;
origin of culture, 75;
physical type, 72;
priest, 96;
study of, 29, 30;
survival in Southern Babylonia, 88
Sumerians, the, 67 _et seq._
Susa, 26;
excavations at, 27, 46, 73;
pottery of, 47, 53;
metal age of, 49
Swords, earliest, 65;
in Cyprus, 65;
in Krete, 65
Syros, 53
Taanach, excavations at, 148 _et seq._, 152, 157, 199, 212
Tablets, writing-, 82, 84
Talîsh, excavations at, 55
Tarkhundaraba, 175
Taylor, 55, 78
Tel el-Amarna, 136, 188;
tablets, 33, 35, 136, 144, 167, 168, 172, 174, 177, 178, 187,
191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 205
Tel el-Hesy, 147. _See_ Lachish
Tello, 29, 40, 53, 55, 72, 73, 91, 121, 122;
pottery of, 48
Thothmes III., annals of, 156
Thureau Dangin, 29, 87, 91, 141
Tiglath-pileser I., 173
Tigris, 80, 102, 103
Tin, 60, 64
Toprak Kaleh, 166, 171
Trees, sacred, in Egypt, 123
Troy, 54, 60, 61, 65, 166, 171, 182
Tychsen, 10
Uan, 175, 200
Ur, 78, 85, 141;
excavations at, 55
Valle, Pietro della, 8
Van (Biainas), 31, 161, 164
Vannic, 31, 162;
deciphered, 32, 162, 163, 164;
deities, 165;
kings, 31, 32
Vases, Egyptian, 121, 128
Vases of hard stone, 82, 121, 133
Vine, home of, 59, 165
Vishtaspa, 13
Vyse, 62
Ward, Hayes, 40, 79
Week, Babylonian, 122;
Cappadocian, 172
Weissbach, 27
Westergaard, 16, 25
Wheat, 132;
in prehistoric graves, 108
Wood, use of, 83, 84
Writing material, primitive, 83
Xerxes, 12, 35, 161;
Persian form of, 12;
name of, on vase, 13
Ya’qub-el (_see_ Jacob-el), 145
Year, division of, 122
Yortan, pottery of, 171
Zend, 10
_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In this year an elaborate edition of his work was brought out under
the title of _Voyages du Chevalier Chardin en Perse, et autres Lieux
de l’Orient, Enrichis de Figures en Tailledouce, qui représentent
les Antiquités et les Choses remarquables du Païs_ (Amsterdam),
two pages (167–8) in vol. ii. being devoted to the inscriptions, the
cuneiform being printed on plate lxix.
[2] The discovery has sometimes been claimed for Tychsen (_De cuneatis
Inscriptionibus Persepolitanis Lucubratio_, 1798, p. 24), but Tychsen
supposed that the wedge was used to divide sentences, not words.
[3] _Undersögelser om de Persepolitanske Inscriptioner_ (1800),
translated into German in 1802.
[4] _Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten
Völker der alten Welt_, vol. i. pp. 563 _sqq._; translated into
English in 1833. The revival of interest in Grotefend’s work was due
to the fact that Champollion, after the decipherment of the Egyptian
hieroglyphs, found the name of Xerxes on an alabaster vase at Paris on
which, according to Grotefend’s system, the same name was written in
Persian cuneiform. This led the Abbé Saint-Martin, who was a recognized
Orientalist, to adopt and follow up Grotefend’s discovery in a Memoir
which he read before the French Academy in 1822, and Saint-Martin’s
work attracted the attention of Rask and Burnouf.
[5] “Om Zendsprogets,” in the _Skandinaviske Literaturselskabs
Skrifter_, xxi., translated into German in 1826.
[6] _Mémoire sur deux Inscriptions cunéiformes trouvées près d’Hamadan_
(Paris, 1836).
[7] _Die Altpersischen Keil-Inschriften von Persepolis_ (Bonn, 1836).
[8] _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, x.
[9] _Monument de Ninive_, with plates drawn by Flandin.
[10] See his Memoir, “Sur l’écriture assyrienne,” in the _Journal
asiatique_, 1847–8, ix.-xi.
[11] _Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy_, xxi. pp. 240 _sqq._ See
also pp. 114 _sqq._
[12] _Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy_, xxii. pp. 3 _sqq._
[13] Edinburgh Meeting, p. 140.
[14] _Revue archéologique_, 1847, pp. 501 _sqq._
[15] _Recherches sur l’écriture cunéiforme assyrienne_ (1849).
[16] _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, xii. pp. 401 _sqq._ The
translation of the Black Obelisk inscription is given on pp. 431–48.
[17] _Athenæum_, December 27, 1851.
[18] In the Paper read by Hincks before the Royal Irish Academy in June
1849, and published the following year.
[19] For Hincks’s translation of the annals of Sennacherib, see
Layard’s _Nineveh and Babylon_, pp. 139 _sqq._
[20] _Literary Gazette_, July 5, 1846.
[21] _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, xiv.
[22] _A List of Assyro-Babylonian Characters_ (1852); also the
_Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy_, xxii. (1855), and more
especially _The Polyphony of the Assyro-Babylonian Cuneiform Writing_
(1863).
[23] See his _Asshur and the Land of Nimrod_ (1898).
[24] F. Jones, _Vestiges of Assyria_ (1855); _Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society_, xv. pp. 297 _sqq._; and more especially _Memoirs_,
edited by R. H. Thomas, 1857.
[25] _Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie._
[26] In the _Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes_, vi. pp. 337
_sqq._
[27] _Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy_, xxi. pp. 114 _sqq._ and
233 _sqq._
[28] _Journal asiatique_, xiv. pp. 93 _sqq._; xv. pp. 398 _sqq._
[29] _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, xv.
[30] _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, iii.
pp. 465 _sqq._; _Actes du VIième Congrès International des
Orientalistes en 1883_, ii. pp. 637 _sqq._ (1885).
[31] _Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse_; the volumes by Dr. Scheil on
the inscriptions that have thus far appeared are ii., iii., iv., v. and
vi.
[32] _Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, 1889, p. 434.
[33] _Ak-ka-du; Orientalische Literatur-Zeitung_, 1905, p. 268.
[34] _Journal of Philology_, iii. pp. 1 _sqq._ I endeavoured
to settle the nature of Sumerian phonology in a Memoir on “Accadian
Phonology,” published by the Philological Society, 1877–8.
[35] _Die Sumerischen Familiengesetze_ (1879).
[36] Göttingen _Nachrichten_, 17 (1880); _Die Akkadische Sprache_
(1883).
[37] _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, 1848, ix. pp. 387
_sqq._
[38] See my article, “On the Language of Mitanni,” in the
_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, 1900, pp.
171 _sqq._; and Leopold Messerschmidt in the _Mitteilungen der
Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft_, 1899, part iv. pp. 175 _sqq._
[39] Fr. Delitzsch, _Die Sprache der Kossäer_ (1884).
[40] They are now in the possession of M. de Clercq. For a translation
of the inscriptions upon them, see my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 250.
[41] _Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants_, pp. 62, 66.
[42] For the archæological results of M. de Morgan’s work, see his
_Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse_, vols. i. and vii. The eighth
volume, which will also be devoted to archæology, is in preparation.
[43] Chantre, _Mission en Cappadoce_, plates x.-xii.
[44] The yellow and red wheel-made ware, some of it inscribed with
characters of the age of Gudea, which has been disinterred at Tello,
is quite different. This class of pottery, by the way, seems to have
been preceded by a grey coarse ware, made with the hand. One fragment
of fine polished yellow ware with traces of black ornamentation
has recently been reported from Tello by Captain Cros (_Revue
d’Assyriologie_, 1905, p. 59), but the isolated character of the
discovery makes it probable that it was an importation from Elam.
[45] Copper figurines of the goddess, with hands pressed under the
breasts, found in one of the earliest substructures of Tello (_circa_
B.C. 4000), are published by M. Heuzey in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_,
1899, p. 44.
[46] Heuzey, in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, 1905, pp. 59 _sqq._ and
plate iii. Von Lichtenberg (_Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen
Gesellschaft_, 1906, 2) has lately pointed out that the black incised
pottery with white fillings is identical in Cyprus, Troy, the Laibach
bog and the Mondsee, and that the ornamentation which characterizes
it is found in the valley of the Danube and the pile-dwellings of
Switzerland. His attempt to derive it from Cyprus, however, cannot be
sustained in view of its occurrence in Elam.
[47] _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, 1905, p. 28.
[48] _Ilios_, p. 337. Schliemann called it the Third city. Dörpfeld’s
subsequent excavations, however, have shown that it really was the
Second city, whose history fell into three periods.
[49] Some of these represent the goddess with the arms folded, and not
pressed against the breasts. See, for example, the photograph of one
found at Naxos in the _Comptes rendus du Congrès international d’
Archéologie_, 1905, p. 221. For Trojan examples, see _Ilios_,
pp. 331–6.
[50] See _Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse_, viii. pp. 336–7. A
report of some of the results of the Pumpelly expedition is given by
Dr. Hubert Schmidt in the _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 1906_, Pt.
iii, p. 385.
[51] Flint implements, however, were discovered by Taylor in his
excavations at Abu Shahrein, the site of Eridu (_Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society_, xv. p. 410 and plate ii.).
[52] See Taylor’s “Notes on the Ruins of Muqeyer,” in the _Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society_, xv. pp. 271–3 and 415.
[53] _Nippur_, vol. ii. pp. 381–6.
[54] _The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania_, i.
2, pp. 26–7.
[55] _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, 1876,
pp. 347–8.
[56] Figured in the _Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration
Fund_, October 1904, p. 335.
[57] Layard, _Nineveh and Babylon_, pp. 571–3.
[58] ANA-BAR. _Bar_ is given as the Sumerian pronunciation of the
word for “stone” (_Syllabary_ 5, iv. 11, in Delitzsch’s _Assyrische
Lesestücke_, 3rd edition). In Old Egyptian “iron” was similarly
_ba-n-pet_, “stone of heaven,” while “silver” was “white gold,” “gold”
being symbolized by a collar. We may compare the Indo-European “white”
metal as a name of “silver.” The Sumerian _azag-gi_, “gold,” was a form
of _azagga_, “precious,” more especially “precious metal”; the more
specific word for “gold” was _guskin_, with which the Armenian _oski_
must be connected. “Silver” was _bábara_, the “bright” metal, _nagga_
being “lead,” the Armenian _anag_. The identity of the Armenian and
Sumerian words for “gold” and “lead,” coupled with the Armenian origin
of the vine, and the fact that the mountain on which the ark of the
Babylonian Noah rested was Jebel Judi, south of Lake Van, raises an
interesting question as to the origin of Sumerian civilization.
[59] It must be remembered, however, that, according to Aristotle, the
copper of the Mossynœci in Northern Asia Minor was brilliant and white,
owing to its mixture with a species of earth, the exact nature of which
was kept a secret. The Babylonian ideograph for “bronze,” therefore,
may have been a similar kind of hardened copper, which was transferred
to denote “bronze” when the alloy of copper and tin became known.
[60] See Garstang, _El-Arâbah_, p. 10. Dr. Gladstone, however, after
giving the results of his analysis of the Sixth-dynasty copper
discovered by Professor Petrie at Dendera, suggests that the small
amount of tin observable in it (about one per cent.) may have been
added to it artificially (_Dendereh_, p. 61). Bronze was “the normal
metal” of the Amorite period at Gezer (Macalister, _Quarterly Statement
of the Palestine Exploration Fund_, April 1904, p. 119), and the
three cities which represent this period go back beyond the age of
the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty, to at least B.C. 2900 (see _Quarterly
Statement_, January 1905, pp. 28–9). At Troy also Schliemann found
numerous bronze weapons in the Second (prehistoric) city (_Ilios_, pp.
475–9). In Krete bronze daggers of the Early Minoan period (coeval
with the Middle Empire of Egypt) have been found at Patema and Agia
Triada (_Annual of the British School at Athens_, x. p. 198), and the
pottery of the Middle Minoan period (B.C. 2000–1500) was associated
at Palaikastro with a bronze button, two miniature bronze sickles,
and a pair of bronze tweezers (_ibid._ p. 202). As for the Caucasus,
bronze was not known there till a late date. Wilke (_Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1904, pp. 39–104) has shown that the bronze culture of
the Caucasus was derived from the valley of the Danube, and made its
way eastward along the northern coast of Pontus; see also Rössler,
_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1905, p. 118.
[61] _Dendereh_ (Egypt Exploration Fund), p. 62, for the gold of
the Sixth dynasty; _The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties_,
pp. 39–40, for that of the First dynasty.
[62] Vyse, _Pyramids of Gizeh_, i. p. 276. The clamp was actually
found by his assistant Hill, after blasting away the two outer stones
behind which it had been placed.
[63] _Abydos_, part ii. p. 33. An iron pin of the age of the
Eighteenth dynasty was found by Garstang at Abydos (_El-Arâbah_,
p. 30).
[64] _Illahun, Kahun and Gurob_, p. 12. Dr. Gladstone’s analyses
give only about 2 parts of tin to 96·35 of copper. The bronze of the
Eighteenth dynasty found at Gurob yielded a less proportion of tin
(about 7 parts to 90 of copper) than the bronze of the Second Assyrian
Empire. A ring of pure tin, however, was also discovered at Gurob.
[65] _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxiii. pp. 367
_sqq._
[66] The two dialects were called _eme_-KU (i.e. _eme-lakhkha_, W.A.I.
iii. 4, 31, 32), “the language of the enchanter,” and _eme_-SAL, “the
woman’s language,” which are rendered in Semitic Babylonian, _lisan
Sumeri_ and (_lisan_) _Akkadi_, “the language of Sumer” and “the
language of Akkad.” In a tablet (81, 7–27, 130, 6, 7) they are said
to be “like” one another. Other dialects were termed “the language of
the sacrificer” and “the language of the anointer,” as being used by
these two classes of priests. They differed, perhaps, from the standard
dialects in intonation or the use of technical words. We hear also of
“a carter’s language” in which _anbarri_--which, it is noticeable, is a
Sumerian word--meant “yoke and reins,” _i.e._ “harness” (_Zeitschrift
für Assyriologie_, ix. p. 164).
[67] Fick, however, is an exception (_Beiträge zur Kunde der
indogermanischen Sprachen_, xxix. pp. 229–247.)
[68] _Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse_, i. pp. 152–3. Photographs of
the two types--Sumerian and Semitic--represented on the early monuments
of Babylonia are given by Dr. Pinches in an interesting Paper in the
_Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, January 1900, pp. 87–93.
[69] It is noticeable that the script of the other people whose
civilization grew up on the banks of a river, the Egyptians namely,
contains no special ideograph for “river.” The word is expressed by the
phonetically-written _atur_, with the determinative of “water” or
“irrigation basin.” As in the primitive hieroglyphs of Babylonia, “the
sea” was a “circle.”
[70] For proof of this reading see _Expository Times_, xvii. p. 416 and
note _infra_, p. 91.
[71] See my _Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, pp. 373–84.
[72] Taylor found quantities of sea-shells in its ruins (_Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society_, xv. p. 412). At the time of its
foundation an arm of the sea probably ran up to it from the south-east,
though the myth of Adamu describes him as fishing each day in the
waters of the actual Gulf, rather than in an arm of it.
[73] The Moon-god of Ur was a “son” of El-lil, the god of Nippur.
[74] For proof of this see my _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, p.
105.
[75] A tablet obtained by Dr. Hayes Ward divides Sippara into four
quarters, “Sippara of Eden,” “Sippara that is from everlasting,”
“Sippara of the Sun-god,” and “Sippara,” which may be the “Sippara
of Anunit” or “Sippara of Aruru,” the creatress of man, of other
inscriptions. Amelon or Amelu, “man,” who corresponds with the Enos of
Scripture, is said in the fragments of Berossus to have belonged to
Pantibibla, or “Book-town,” and since Euedoranchus of Pantibibla, the
counterpart of the Biblical Enoch, is the monumental Enme-dhur-anki
of Sippara, it is clear that Pantibibla is a play on the supposed
signification of Sippara (from _sipru_, “a writing” or “book”). The
claim to immemorial antiquity made on behalf of Sippara may be due to
the fact that Akkad, the seat of the first Semitic empire, was either
in the immediate neighbourhood of Sippara or another name of one of the
four quarters of Sippara itself.
[76] _Chaldæa and Susiana_, p. 282.
[77] _Journal of the Royal Geographical Society_, xxvii. p. 186.
Rawlinson calculated the rate of advance from that made by the
Babylonian Delta between 1793 and 1833. In the age of Strabo and
Arrian the Tigris and Euphrates were not yet united, while in the
time of Nearchus (B.C. 335) the mouth of the Euphrates was 345 miles
from Babylon. De Morgan calculates that between the age of Nearchus
and that of Sennacherib, when the Euphrates had not yet joined the
more rapid Tigris, the rate of increase must have been much slower
than it is to-day and have not exceeded eighty metres a year. In the
age of Sennacherib Eridu was already seventy miles distant from the
coast (de Morgan, _Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse_, i. pp. 5–23).
The distance from the Shatt el-Arab (the united stream of the Tigris
and Euphrates) to the end of the alluvium in the Persian Gulf is 277
kilometres, or 172 miles. Some idea of the appearance of the coast in
the Abrahamic age may be gained from the map of the world drawn by a
Babylonian tourist in the time of Khammu-rabi which I have published in
the _Expository Times_, November 1906.
[78] There is a striking resemblance between the primitive Babylonian
picture of a boat and the sailing boat depicted on the prehistoric
pottery of Egypt, for which last see Capart, _Les Débuts de l’Art en
Egypte_, p. 116.
[79] Perhaps, however, this was really due to the accidental similarity
of sound between _gi_, “a reed,” and _gin_, “to be firm.”
[80] The various forms of vases represented in the early pictography
are given by de Morgan in a very instructive article, “Sur les procédés
techniques en usage chez les scribes babyloniens,” in the _Recueil
des Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et
assyriennes_, xxvii. 3, 4 (1905). Among special vases were those
for oil, wine and honey. The butter or oil jar was closed with a clay
sealing exactly like those of early Egypt. Vases with spouts were also
used.
[81] The American excavations at Askabad have shown that the
domestication of animals, including the camel, took place during the
neolithic age, the goat being one of the last to be tamed.
[82] This, however, is not absolutely certain, since the ideograph
which, denotes an “ass” originally signified merely “a yoked beast.”
[83] Peters, _Nippur_, ii. p. 299.
[84] Thus in the great historical inscription of Entemena, King of
Lagas (B.C. 4000), M. Thureau Dangin is probably right in seeing in
_dam-kha-ra_ (col. i. 26) a Semitic word. In fact where a word is
written syllabically, that is to say phonetically, in a Sumerian text
there is an _a priori_ probability that it is a loan-word.
[85] This may of course have been only a literary archaism. But if the
kings were really of Semitic origin, it is difficult to understand why
they should have been ashamed of being called by their native Semitic
names.
[86] See Hommel, _Grundriss der Geographie und Geschichte des Alten
Orients_, i. pp. 79–82.
[87] Hitherto read A-da-pa. But the character =PA= had the value
of _mu_ when it signified “man,” according to a tablet quoted by
Fossey, _Contribution au Dictionnaire Sumérien-assyrienne_, No.
2666, and in writing early Babylonian names or words the characters
with the requisite phonetic values were selected which harmonized
ideographically with the sense of the words. Thus out of the various
characters which had the phonetic value of _mu_ that was chosen
which denoted “man” when the name of the first man was needed to be
written. The Semitic Adamu, which M. Thureau Dangin has found used as
a proper name in tablets from Tello of the age of Sargon of Akkad,
was borrowed from the Sumerian _adam_, which signified “animal,”
and then, more specifically “man.” Thus in the bilingual story of the
creation we have (l. 9) _uru nu-dim adam nu-mun-ya_, “a city was
not built, a man was not made to stand upright,” and a list of slaves
published by Dr. Scheil (_Recueil de Travaux_, etc., xx. p. 65) is
dated in “the year when Rim-Anum the king (conquered) the land of ...
bi and its inhabitants” (_adam-bi_). See above, p. 76.
[88] _Records of the Past_, New Series, iii. pp. 124–7.
[89] Erech was one of the earliest of the Semitic settlements in the
Babylonian plain, and Erech was known later as _’supuru_, “the
sheepfold,” as is shown by its ideographic equivalent.
[90] _The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, pp. 276–80.
[91] See my _Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, pp. 276–89,
348–61.
[92] If, however, the Sumerian pictograph for “city” represents a
tower on a mound, as seems to be the case, the identity in form of the
Egyptian hieroglyph cannot be an accident, since both the tower and
the artificial platform were essentially Babylonian. In the cursive
cuneiform two separate pictographs have coalesced, one representing a
seat, the other what appears to be a tower on a mound.
[93] In Egyptian, however, the bird stands over a door, while in
Babylonian it is over the two-legged stool on which two vases of
offerings are set when it is used to denote the image of a god.
The Sumerian pictograph for “(divine) lord” or “lady” (NIN) is the
representation of a similar vase on a mat, and thus has the same form
as the Egyptian _hotep_. The Egyptian _nefer_, “good,” finds its exact
counterpart in the Babylonian pictograph of “ornament” (ME-TE). The
Babylonian “house,” too, is given the same tower-like shape as the
Egyptian (_āhā_).
[94] In a short Paper entitled _Lexicalische Belege zu meinen Vortrag
über die sprachliche Stellung des Altægyptischen_ (1895), in which
he has attempted to draw up a list of phonetic equivalences between
Egyptian and Sumerian. In this, however, I am unable to follow him, as
his comparisons of Egyptian and Sumerian words are not convincing.
[95] See de Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Egypte_, pp.
94, 95. According to Schweinfurth, barley, which is also found in the
prehistoric graves of Egypt, must originally have come from Babylonia
like the wheat. _Qemḥu_ is found in the Pyramid texts (Maspero,
_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie
égyptiennes et assyriennes_, v. p. 10). _Boti_, whence the Coptic
_bôti_ and the _battawa_ or “durra cake” of modern Egyptian Arabic, was
“durra,” not “wheat.”
[96] See Maspero, _Études de Mythologie_, ii. pp. 313 _sqq._
[97] I have put “Lower” between parentheses since it is very
questionable whether this particular system of registering time was
known in the Delta until it was introduced from Upper Egypt. On the
Palermo stone a list of the early kings of Lower Egypt is given, but
without any dates, which make their appearance along with the kings of
the First dynasty, who belonged to Upper Egypt. It is interesting to
observe that the ideograph for “year” is denoted in exactly the same
way in both the Babylonian and the Egyptian hieroglyphs by the branch
of a (palm) tree. Such a curious symbol for the idea can hardly have
been invented independently. Professor Hommel further draws attention
to the fact that while the literal translation of a common ideographic
mode of representing “year” in Babylonian is “name of heaven,” that of
the two syllables of the Egyptian word _renpet_, “year,” would
also be “name of heaven.”
[98] _Hierakonpolis_, part i. plate xxix. The name of the king is
usually (but erroneously) written Nar-Mer.
[99] As the royal figures wear no crowns, they can hardly depict the
king in his double office of king of Upper and Lower Egypt, and the
duplication of the Pharaoh must consequently have a purely artistic
origin. That this artistic origin is closely connected with the origin
of the seal-cylinders is shown by the fact that the figures correspond
with one of the most common designs on the latter, in which the _ka_ of
the person to whom the cylinder belonged is seated on a chair similar
to that of the El-Kab king, an altar with offerings of bread being set
before him.
[100] The eye and the ideograph of city or place. Since the eye here
has the phonetic value of _eri_ or _ari_, the ideograph of “city,”
which is _eri_ in Sumerian, must have the Egyptian value of _as_.
[101] See my _Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, p. 238.
[102] _Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles
Lettres_, 4 Sér., 1899, xxvii. pp. 60–67; see _Hierakonpolis_, part ii.
plate xxviii. In the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, v. pp. 29–32, Heuzey has
lately drawn attention to the resemblance between the early Egyptian
and Babylonian bowls of calcite or Egyptian alabaster.
[103] _Lectures on the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, 1887,
p. 33.
[104] _Nature_, August 9, 1883, p. 341.
[105] Daressy, “Le Cercueil d’Emsaht,” in the _Annales du Service des
Antiquités de l’Égypte_, 1899, i. pp. 79–90.
[106] I have called Upper Egypt the seat of the first Pharaohs, not
only because the earliest dynastic monuments we possess come from
thence, but also because it was of Upper Egypt and its ruling caste
that the hawk-god Horus was the guardian deity. From Upper Egypt he
was carried to Lower Egypt and its nomes, presumably through conquest,
as is monumentally attested by the “palette” of Nar-Buzau discovered
at Hierakonpolis (Capart, _Débuts de l’Art en Égypte_, p. 236).
So, too, the anthropomorphic Osiris--the duplicate of Anhur--made his
way from the south to the north. That Southern Arabia should have been
the connecting-link between Babylonia and Egypt was the result of its
being the source of the incense which was imported for religious use
into both countries alike at the very beginning of their histories.
That this foreign product should have been considered an indispensable
adjunct of the religions of the two civilizations is one of the best
proofs we have of their connection with one another. Dr. Schweinfurth
has shown that the sacred trees of Egypt--the sycamore and the
persea--which needed artificial cultivation for their preservation
there, came from Southern Arabia, where he found them growing wild
under the names of _Khanes, Burra and Lebakh_ (_Verhandlungen
der Gesellschaft für Erdkünde zu Berlin_, July 1889, No. 7).
[107] In the possession of Lord Amherst of Hackney. On an early
Babylonian seal-cylinder, bought by Dr. Scheil at Mossul and figured in
the _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie
égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xix. 1, 2, No. 7 of the plate, we have:
“Ili-su-bani son of Aminanum, servant of the gods Bel and Anupum.”
Aminanum may be a Semitized form of the Egyptian Ameni.
[108] Pp. 133, 139, 485.
[109] De Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, p. 65.
[110] Scheil, _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à
l’Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xix. pp. 50, 54; Sayce,
_Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, p. 485. The dwarf
is represented as dancing before the god Sin on an early Babylonian
seal-cylinder published by Scheil in the _Recueil_, xix. 1, 2, No.
16 of the plate.
[111] It is worth notice that the dwarf-god Bes, who is called “God of
Punt” in inscriptions of the Ptolemaic age, appears on Arab coins of
the Roman period (Schweinfurth, _Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für
Erdkunde 1889_, No. 7).
[112] Layard, _Monuments of Nineveh_, Second Series, pl. 15.
[113] Herodotus, i. 193.
[114] The rope appears to have been _makutum_; see _W. A. I._ v. 26, 61.
[115] K. 56, ii. 14.
[116] For other evidences of contact between primitive Babylonia and
early Egypt, see Heuzey in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, 1899, v.
2, pp. 53–6. He there enumerates (1) the resemblance between the stone
mace-heads of the two countries in “prehistoric times,” as well as
between the flat dishes of veined and ribboned onyx marble, hollowed
and rounded by the hand; (2) between the lion-heads of stone, the onyx
stone of one of which is stated in an inscription to have come from
Magan; (3) the extraordinary likeness in the delineation of animal
forms, which extends to conventional details “like the two concentric
curves artificially arranged so as to allow the two corners of the
profile to be visible at the same time”; (4) the use of a razor and
the custom of completely shaving the face, and even the skull; and (5)
the ceremonial form of libation by means of a vase of peculiar shape,
with a long curved spout and without a handle. This libation vase was
practically the same in both countries, in spite of its peculiar and
somewhat complicated form. Of later introduction into Egypt was the
inscribed cone of terra-cotta, which was of early Babylonian origin,
but is not met with in Egypt before the age of the Twelfth dynasty.
At any rate, the first specimens of it hitherto found there were
discovered by myself at Ed-Dêr, opposite Esna, in 1905 (_Annales du
Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte_, 1905, pp. 164–5).
[117] _Recueil de Travaux_, etc., xvi. p. 190.
[118] In the later bronze or “Mykenæan” age the seal-cylinders are of a
different type, and are engraved on a black artificial paste resembling
hæmatite (Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter, _Catalogue of the Cyprus
Museum_, p. 32).
[119] Sayce, _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_,
1877, v. part ii.; Bezold, _Zeitschrift für Keilinschrift_, 1885,
pp. 191–3.
[120] _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, November
1905, plate No. 11
[121] A cadastral survey, which was drawn up at this period under
Uru-malik, or Urimelech, “the governor of the land of the Amorites,”
would, if perfect, have given us an interesting description of Syria
and Palestine in the third millennium before our era; see Thureau
Dangin in the _Revue Sémitigue_, Avril 1897.
[122] See Heuzey, in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, 1897, pp. 1–12.
[123] This was “the year when Samsu-iluna the king gave Merodach a
shining mace of gold and silver, the glory of the temple; it made
E-Saggil (the temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon) shine like the stars
of heaven.” The title of the year was derived from the chief event, or
events, that characterized it. See Dr. Pinches, in the _Quarterly
Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund_, April and July 1900,
pp. 269–73.
[124] See my analysis of some of the Hyksos names in the _Proceedings
of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, 1901, pp. 95–8. Since the
publication of the Paper other names of the same type, like Rabu and
Sakti, have come to light. The characteristic names of the Hyksos
princes recur among the “Amorite” names found in the contract tablets
of the Khammu-rabi period, but not later. The abbreviated forms of the
names met with on the Egyptian scarabs are also found in the tablets.
Indeed, the contracted form of Ya’qub-el, that is to say, Yakubu,
with _k_ instead of _q_, must have been transcribed from a cuneiform
original.
[125] Macalister, _Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration
Fund_, January 1903, p. 28. It is the seventh stone, however,
which alone has been brought from a distance--the neighbourhood of
Jerusalem--all the others being of local origin (_Quarterly Statement_,
July 1904, pp. 194–5).
[126] See Sellin, _Tell Ta’annek_ (1904) and _Eine Nachlese auf dem
Tell Ta’annek in Palästina_ (1905).
[127] _Tell Ta’annek_, pp. 27–8. The cylinder is earlier than B.C. 2000.
[128] See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, pp. 60, 61.
[129] _Collection De Clercq, Catalogue méthodique et raisonné_, i.
p. 217.
[130] _Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund_, January
1905, pp. 28, 29.
[131] The chronological difficulty, however, would be partially solved
if the date recently proposed by Professor Petrie (_Researches in
Sinai_, ch. xii.) for the Twelfth dynasty--B.C. 3459–3250--be adopted.
The Twelfth dynasty would in this case have reigned a thousand years
before the dynasty of Khammu-rabi, whose domination in Palestine would
have been an interlude in the history of the Hyksos period, while the
conquest of Canaan by Sargon and Naram-Sin would have coincided with
the supersession of the neolithic population by the “Amorites,” who
brought with them the copper and the culture of Babylonia.
[132] Unless we except the gold and silver ornaments found on the body
of a woman in a deserted house at Taanach, which, as Dr. Sellin says,
are by themselves sufficient to remove “all grounds for doubting such
accounts as those in Joshua vii. 21, and Judges viii. 26” (_Eine
Nachlese auf dem Tell Ta’annek_, p. 32).
[133] _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, New Series, xiv. 3,
4, pp. 377–732.
[134] Eustathius on Dion. Perieget. 767. See Lehmann in the
_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, 1894, pp. 90 and 358–60.
[135] The Vannic kings always call themselves kings, not of the
Khaldians, but of Biainas or Bianas, the Byana of Ptolemy, the Van of
to-day.
[136] See more especially Belck’s comparison of the Vannic pottery
with that of the Assyrian colony of Kara Eyuk, near Kaisariyeh, in
the _Verhandlungen der Berliner anthropologischen Gesellschaft_,
December 1901, p. 493. Besides the highly-polished lustrous red ware,
he found at Kara Eyuk fragments of the same wheel-made wine-jars, “of
gigantic size,” which characterized Toprak Kaleh, near Van. Similar
jars, as well as lustrous red pottery, were discovered by Schliemann
in the “prehistoric” strata at Troy. The animals’ heads in terra-cotta
found at Kara Eyuk are stated by Dr. Belck to be similar to those of
the Digalla Tepé, near Urumiya. For further details see _infra._
[137] See Pinches in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_,
1897, pp. 589–613; and myself in the _Proceedings of the Society of
Biblical Archæology_, 1897, p. 286.
[138] Thus we find from the Cappadocian cuneiform tablets discovered
at Kara Eyuk, north-east of Kaisariyeh, that time was reckoned by the
annual succession of officers called _limmi_ as in Assyria.
[139] _Dendereh_, p. 62.
[140] Chantre, _Mission en Cappadoce_, pp. 71–91.
[141] See Belck, _Verhandlungen der Berliner anthropologischen
Gesellschaft_, December 1901, p. 493; and the admirable plates, iii.,
vii.–xiv., in Chantre, _Mission en Cappadoce_. As has been already
mentioned (_supra_, p. 166), Dr. Belck noticed at Kara Eyuk coarse
sherds of great thickness coming from wine-jars similar to those of
Toprak Kaleh. The black vases with long spouts have been found at
Yortan and Boz Eyuk in Phrygia; long-spouted vases of yellow ware with
geometrical patterns in maroon-red on the site of Gordium.
Chantre discovered numerous spindle-whorls in the ruins similar to
those discovered at Troy. He also found terra-cotta figurines, among
which the ram is the most plentiful, as well as covers and handles of
vases in the shape of animals’ heads, and some curious hut-urns not
unlike those of Latium. Few bronze objects were met with, but among
them were five flanged axe-heads of the incurved Egyptian Hyksos type,
totally unlike the straight bronze axe-heads from Troy and Angora
(of Egyptian I-XII dynasty form), with which M. Chantre compares
them. The obsidian implements and stone celts were of the ordinary
Asianic pattern. M. Chantre notes that whereas at Troy the terra-cotta
figurines represented the heads of oxen or cows, at Kara Eyuk they were
the heads of sheep, horses, and perhaps dogs.
[142] _Historical Geography of Asia Minor_, ch. i., ii.; _Cities and
Bishoprics of Phrygia_, i. p. xiv.
[143] Labawa, or Labbaya, for whom see the next chapter. A revised
transcript of his letter in Arzawan (Hittite) is given by Knudtzon,
_Die zwei Arzawa-Briefe_, pp. 38–40. The introductory paragraph
should read: _Ata-mu kît Labbaya ... memis-ta Uan-wa-nnas
iskhani-tta-ra atari-ya ueni_.--“To my lord says Labbaya ... thy
servant of Uan (a district west of Aleppo); seven times I prostrate
myself.” In other letters Labbaya is called prince of Rukhizzi, the
Rokhe’s-na of the treaty between Ramses II. and the Hittites.
[144] The facts were first stated in my article in the _Contemporary
Review_, August 1905, pp. 264–77, which is reprinted as chapter vii.
of the present book.
[145] _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, 1903, xxxiii. pp.
367–400.
[146] By Shalmaneser II. (_Black Obelisk_, 61) and Sargon. Sennacherib
describes his famous campaign against Phœnicia and Judah as made “to
the land of the Hittites.”
[147] _Ilios_, p. 693. What seem to be similar characters on a
seal-cylinder found in the copper-age cemetery of Agia Paraskevi in
Cyprus have recently been published by me in the _Proceedings of the
Society of Biblical Archæology_, June 1906, plate ii. No. xi. See
above, p. 141.
[148] One of these seals, with the name of Tua-is, “the Charioteer,” in
Hittite hieroglyphs, is in the possession of M. de Clercq. Another is
figured by Layard, _Culte de Mithra_, xliv. 3.
[149] See Sayce, _Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, pp. 377–9
[150] See Hogarth, “The Zakro Sealings,” in the _Journal of Hellenic
Studies_, xxii. pp. 76–93, and plates vi.-x.
[151] _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, 1881, vii.
2, p. 27.
[152] See above, p. 141.
[153] Professor Petrie finds similar marks on Egyptian pottery of the
prehistoric and early dynastic age; see his table of signs in _The
Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty_ (Egypt Exploration Fund), i. p. 32.
[154] _Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal_, xi. pp. 316 _sqq._
The cylinder was bought by Major Pottinger, but afterwards lost.
The inscription seems to read: _AN Nin(?)-zi-in Su-lukh(?)-me-am-el
Khi-ti-sa ARAD-na_--“To the god Nin(?)-zin, Sulukh-ammel (?) son of
Khiti, his servant.”
[155] The Etruscan monument is described by Deecke, _Das Templum von
Piacenza_ (_Etruskische Forschungen_, iv. 1880) and _Etruskische
Forschungen und Studien_, part ii. (1882). For the Babylonian
prototype, see Boissier, _Note sur un Monument babylonien se rapportant
â l’extispicine_ (1899).
[156] Labbawa, or Labawa, is written Labbaya in the letter which is in
the Arzawan language.
[157] A copy of the text (Louvre, C 1) is given by Professor Breasted
in the _American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature_,
xxi. 3 (1905). The determinative attached to the name is not that of
“country” but of “going,” showing that the scribe supposed the name to
be connected with some otherwise unknown word that signified “to go,”
just as in Gen. xxiii. “The sons of Heth” are supposed by the Hebrew
writer to derive their name from the Hebrew _khath_, “terror.”
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.
2. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the
original.
3. Superscripts are represented using the caret character, e.g. D^r. or
X^{xx}. Italics are shown as _xxx_.
4. Italics are shown as _xxx_.
5. Bold text is shown as =xxx=.
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