A Primer of Assyriology Part 4

(4) a.s.syrian is a Semitic language, and the Semitic languages are as closely related to one another as are the Romanic languages (French, Italian, Spanish, &c.) in modern Europe. Consequently most of the words and grammatical forms found in a.s.syrian recur in one or other of the Semitic idioms.

(5) But above all, the a.s.syrian scribes themselves have provided us with the most abundant materials for interpreting the inscriptions.

The libraries.--The amount of a.s.syro-Babylonian literature already known is very large. If all the texts at present in the museums of Europe and America could be published, they would rival in extent the books of the Old Testament. Most of the texts are on tablets of clay and have come from the libraries of Nineveh and Babylonia. Every great Babylonian city had at least one library, and the a.s.syrian kings established other libraries in their own country in imitation of those of Babylonia. About two-thirds of the library of Nineveh, which was largely the creation of a.s.sur-bani-pal, is now in the British Museum.

Scribes were kept constantly at work there copying and re-editing old texts, and sometimes writing new ones. A considerable proportion of the texts was brought from Babylonia: a colophon attached to each tablet usually states from what library the text had originally come. The texts were carefully edited; when there was a lacuna in the original the scribe tells us so, and whether it was old or recent; also if the Babylonian character were one which he did not recognize he confesses that he could not read it. Besides the clay tablets, the libraries contained papyri which have now perished.

Varieties of literature.--The texts related to all the branches of knowledge studied at the time. Astronomy and astrology, mathematics, geography, medicine, law, history, religion, and mythology, private and public correspondence, mercantile transactions, political doc.u.ments, the pseudo-science of omens, lists of beasts, birds, vegetables, and stones, are all represented in it, and last, but not least, philology.

The necessity of translating and explaining the Sumerian texts doubtless gave philology so prominent a place. Under the head of philology come interlinear and parallel translations of Sumerian doc.u.ments, together with commentaries and exercises, reading-books and grammars of the two languages, endless lists of characters with their phonetic values and significations, and numerous vocabularies partly bilingual, partly containing catalogues of Semitic synonyms. The decipherer thus has at his command a most elaborate system for learning the a.s.syrian and Sumerian languages compiled by the a.s.syrians themselves. Time after time the signification of a new word is given by its synonym or synonyms in the lexical lists, and words of uncertain meaning in Hebrew have more than once been settled by means of their a.s.syrian equivalents.

The texts autotypes.--The cuneiform texts further possess an advantage of which the student of the Old and New Testament Scriptures might well be envious. They are the autotypes of the scribes who wrote them for the libraries in the ruins of which they have been found. The texts have never pa.s.sed through the hands of later copyists little acquainted with the language in which they were composed. The corruptions of the text, such as they are, go back to the scribes of a.s.sur-bani-pal or Nebuchadrezzar, in some cases to the scribes even of the pre-Semitic period.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PART OF AN a.s.sYRIAN BOOK.]

Astronomy.--The great work on astronomy and astrology in seventy-two chapters or books was originally compiled for the library of Sargon of Accad. It contained chapters on the eclipses or conjunction of the sun and moon, on the planets, the fixed stars, and the comets, and proves that observations of the heavens had been made for a long while previous to its composition. The path of the sun through the signs of the Zodiac had already been mapped out: in fact the Zodiacal Signs owe their origin to the astronomers of Babylonia. At the time they were first named the vernal equinox began with Taurus.

Mathematics.--Among the mathematical treatises may be mentioned tables of cube and square roots from the library of Senkereh. The Babylonian system of notation resembled that of the Romans, but by an ingenious application of the s.e.xagesimal system high numbers could be expressed in a very small number of figures.

Medicine and law.--The standard work on medicine was voluminous like that on astronomy. It contained a vast number of prescriptions for different diseases, which read very much like modern ones. Law occupied a large s.p.a.ce in Babylonian and a.s.syrian life, and codes of law, which protected the slave as well as the woman, went back to Sumerian times.

A considerable part of the law was based on cases which had already been decided by the judges. The judges were appointed by the king, and, at all events in a later age, were under a president. Important cases were heard before several judges at once; thus a case which was tried at Babylon in B.C. 547 was heard before six judges and registered by their two clerks.

History and mythology.--Historical doc.u.ments are numerous and include the lists of a.s.syrian eponyms, after whom the successive years were named, as well as of the dynasties of kings and the number of years each king reigned. Religious literature, however, was still more largely represented. As has been stated, a considerable portion of it consisted of hymns to the G.o.ds, psalms, and ritual texts. But there were also lists of the mult.i.tudinous deities and their temples, and more especially religious myths and legends. One of these described the visit of the G.o.ddess Istar to Hades in search of her dead husband Tammuz, the Sun-G.o.d, and told how she left some of her adornment at each of its seven gates, until at last she stood stripped and bare before the mistress of the Underworld, where the waters of life gush forth. In another the adventures of the first man Adapa are related, and how he was summoned to heaven to answer the charge of having broken the wings of the south-wind. We possess two fragments of this myth, the earlier part being written on a broken tablet which was found in the library of Nineveh, while the latter part of it has been found on one of the cuneiform doc.u.ments discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt, where it had been copied for Egyptian or Canaanite students some eight centuries before the library of Nineveh was in existence.

The Chaldaean epic and the Deluge.--One of the most famous of the legends is the Chaldaean account of the Deluge, which was discovered by George Smith in 1872. Its close resemblance to the Biblical account of the same event is well known. It embodied at least two earlier versions of the story, and in its present form is inserted as an episode in the great Epic of the Babylonian hero Gilgames. The Epic was composed by a certain Sin-liqi-unnini in twelve books, and was arranged on an astronomical principle, the subject of each book corresponding with the name of a Zodiacal sign. Thus the account of the Deluge is introduced into the eleventh book, which answers to Aquarius the eleventh sign of the Zodiac.

Gilgames, it was said, was the fated child of whom it had been prophesied that he would slay his grandfather. Though his mother had been confined in a tower, he was nevertheless born and conveyed to safety on the wings of an eagle. When grown to man's estate he saved Erech from the enemy and made it the seat of his dominion. He overthrew Khumbaba the tyrant of the forest of cedars, and found a friend and guide in the satyr Ea-bani. The G.o.ddess Istar wooed him in marriage, but he reproached her with the woes she had already brought on her hapless lovers and scorned her beauty. In revenge she besought Anu, her father, to create a winged bull, which should attack the hero.

Gilgames, however, slew the bull and returned in triumph to Erech with his spoils. But misfortune fell upon him. Ea-bani was killed by the bite of a gad-fly, his soul rising up from the ground to the heaven of heroes, and Gilgames himself was smitten with a sore disease. To heal it he sailed beyond the mouth of the Euphrates and the river of death, and here conversed with Xisuthrus, the Chaldaean Noah, who, like Enoch, had been translated without seeing death. Xisuthrus told him the story of the Deluge, and instructed him how to cure his malady.

Epic of the Creation.--The a.s.syrian Epic of the Creation, the discovery of which was also due to George Smith, has already been alluded to. Its parallelism with the account of the Creation, in the first chapter of Genesis, was noticed from the first. The first tablet opens with a description of the deep or watery chaos, while the fifth tablet describes the appointment of the heavenly bodies for signs and for seasons, and in the seventh comes an account of the creation of the animals. The second and third tablets, however, and possibly the fourth, were occupied with the story of the struggle between Tiamat the dragon of darkness, and Merodach the Sun-G.o.d, which finds its echo in the Apocalypse (Rev. xii. 7-9). Out of the skin of Tiamat, Merodach formed the firmament which 'divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above it.' Other accounts of the Creation existed, which differed essentially from that of the Epic.

Thus there was one that was written for the Library of Kutha and described an imperfect creation which foreshadowed as it were the present one. Mr. Pinches, again, has discovered a Sumerian legend of the origin of things which seems to have been current at Eridu. But in the Epic a considerable number of the older cosmological legends were embodied and combined, and a gloss of materialistic philosophy put upon them. It is this gloss which makes it difficult to believe that the Epic can be of much antiquity. The materials of which it is composed doubtless go back to an early period, but in its present form it belongs to an age when the deities of the old faith were resolved into philosophical abstractions and the forces of nature. At present, at all events, we have no reasons for thinking that it is earlier than the time of the Second a.s.syrian Empire.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CONTRACT-TABLETS.]

CHAPTER VI

SOCIAL LIFE

The Contract-tablets.--We have learnt a great deal about the social life of Babylonia and a.s.syria from the contract-tablets which have been found in enormous numbers in Babylonia. A few have also come from the library of Nineveh, relating for the most part to the sale and lease of house property. Some of them have Aramaic dockets attached to them, giving the names of the persons mentioned in the contract and the nature of its contents. These dockets serve to verify the method of cuneiform decipherment, and are an indication that in the time of Tiglath-pileser III and his successors Aramaic was the common language of trade.

Some of the Babylonian contract-tablets go back to the time of Khammurabi and his dynasty, and are in Sumerian. But the larger number are of much later date, and extend from the reign of Kandalanu, the predecessor of Nabopola.s.sar, to that of Xerxes. For many years we have a continuous series of doc.u.ments dated month by month in each year. A contract-tablet was often enclosed in an envelope of clay, on which its princ.i.p.al contents were inscribed. They were kept in large jars which answered to our modern safes.

Married Life.--From the contracts relating to matrimony we learn that polygamy was very rare, and that the wife enjoyed a considerable amount of independence. The dowry she brought with her on marriage had to be restored to her in case of divorce. Moreover the woman could act apart from her husband, entering into partnership, trading with her money and conducting law-suits in her own name. In B.C. 555 we find a father transferring all his property to his daughter, and reserving only the use of it during the rest of his life. On the other hand wives, like concubines, could sometimes be purchased, though in this case if the husband married again he stipulated that he would send his first wife back to her home along with a certain sum of money. Children could be adopted, and there was the utmost freedom as regards the devolution of property, which could be 'tied up' by will.

Burial.--The dead were buried after complete or partial cremation. With the exception of the kings they were interred in cemeteries outside the towns, tombs and tombstones being erected over them, with rivulets, which symbolized 'the water of life,' flowing at their side.

Slavery.--Slavery was an ancient inst.i.tution, but the slave was protected by law as far back as the Sumerian period. In later times he could even appear as party to a suit, and could recover his freedom by manumission, by purchase, by proving that he had been unlawfully enslaved, or by his adoption into the family of a citizen. Slaves could be impressed into the royal service, so that in selling a slave it was usual to stipulate that the seller should be responsible for any trouble arising from such a cause. Poor parents sometimes sold their children into slavery, and the Sumerian law ordered a son who denied his father to be shorn and sold as a slave.

Lowness of Wages.--Few persons were so poor as not to be able to keep one slave at least. But the existence of slavery caused wages to be low, and lowered the character and position of the free labourer. Thus we find that a skilled labourer, like a coppersmith, received only six _qas_ (about 8-1/2 quarts) of flour for overlaying a chariot with a lining of copper, and that only 1_s._ 6_d._ was paid for painting the stucco of a wall.

Property.--The tenure of a farm was of various kinds. Sometimes the property belonged half to the landlord, half to the tenant, the tenant doing all the work and handing the landlord's half of the produce to his agent. Sometimes while the tenant gave his work, the landlord provided him with carts, oxen, and other necessaries. At other times the tenant received only a third, a fourth, or even a tenth of the produce, besides paying a fixed rent of two-thirds of the dates gathered from the palms on the estate. The landlord could dismiss the tenant, who was also required to build the farm house if one did not already exist.

When house property or land was let or sold it was minutely described, and numerous witnesses to the deed of sale or lease were required. The length of the lease as well as the rent had to be stated, any transgression of the terms of the lease being punished with a severe fine. The tenant had to return the property in the state in which he found it. The rent of course depended on the size and value of the property, and could be paid half-yearly as well as three times a year.

Houses, further, might be bought and sold through the intervention of an agent.

Taxes.--Taxation was probably heavy. In the time of Sennacherib, Nineveh had to pay the treasury 30 talents a year, while Carchemish was a.s.sessed at 100 talents. Taxes were also levied in kind, and there was an _octroi_ duty upon goods entering the town. The metal,--gold, silver, and bronze,--was measured out by weight, a coinage not making its appearance until late in Babylonian history, though, as in Egypt, rings of gold or silver, which took the place of coins, were used at an early time.

Prices.--The value of grain and dates necessarily varied from time to time. Under Nebuchadrezzar, the quart of sesame cost a little over a penny, in the twelfth year of Nabonidos it was a little less than 1-1/2_d._ In the seventh year of Nebuchadrezzar dates were about a halfpenny a quart, in his thirty-eighth year the quart was only 1/25 of a penny. In the reign of Cambyses a quart of corn cost 2-1/2_d._

The prices of other things were higher. In the reign of Darius a lady sold 200 sheep for 135, in that of Nebuchadrezzar an ox, sacrificed in the temple of the Sun-G.o.d at Sippara, cost 2. We hear of a.s.ses sold for 7 10_s._, and 2, and of five casks of wine purchased for 1 10_s._

Usury.--Deeds of partnership are common; so also are deeds relating to money-lending. The usurer, in fact, was a prominent person in the trading community of Babylonia. Under Nebuchadrezzar and his successors the usual rate of interest was 20 per cent., the interest being paid each month, though we also hear of 13-1/3 per cent. In concluding a bargain, it was usually stipulated that if the money were not paid by a specified date, interest should be paid upon it until it was paid in full.

The Army.--By the side of the commercial cla.s.s stood a numerous body of military and civil officials. At the head of the a.s.syrian army was the Tartan (_turtannu_) or Commander-in-chief, and under him came a large staff of officers. The army itself was highly organized. In addition to the infantry and cavalry there were numerous chariots, in one of which the king rode when he commanded in person. In the time of Tiglath-pileser III, saddles, leathern drawers, and high boots were introduced for the cavalry, and a corps of slingers and pioneers was created by Sennacherib. The infantry were divided into heavy-armed and light-armed, many of the heavy-armed wearing coats of mail formed of metal scales sewn to a leather shirt. Helmets were largely used, as well as shields. The army carried with it on the march various engines for attacking the walls of a town--battering-rams, ladders, crow-bars, and the like--as well as tents. The royal tent was accompanied by a cooking and a dining-tent, and was elaborately furnished. We learn from the contract-tablets, that in the reign of Nabonidos, rather more than 2-1/2 bushels of wheat were furnished to each of the bowmen, while 54 _qas_ (75 quarts) of beer were provided on a particular day, 'for the troops which had marched from Babylon.'

Navy.--A fleet was kept in Babylonia, and the king had a State-barge on the Euphrates. The a.s.syrians, however, were not a naval people, and the biremes, employed by Sennacherib when he attacked the Chaldaean colony in the Persian Gulf, were built and manned by Phoenicians.

The Bureaucracy.--The prefects or satraps of the a.s.syrian provinces and subject cities were appointed by the king, like the military officers, and were responsible to him. A certain number of them were eligible for the post of _limmu_, or eponym, after whom the year was named--an honour which they shared with the monarch. The office does not appear to have existed in Babylonia.

Among the tablets which have come from the library of Nineveh are some which contain long lists of a.s.syrian officials. They were a very numerous body, but we need mention only the Rab-shakeh (_Rab-saki_), 'chief of the princes,' or Vizier, the Rab-saris (_Rab-sa-resi_) or 'chief of the n.o.bles,' and the Rab-mag (_Rab-mugi_) or 'chief physician.' The identification of the two last is due to Mr. Pinches.

The priests and judges have already been alluded to, as also the clerks or scribes, many of whom, at least in Babylonia, were also priests.

Poets and musicians were attached to the court, and we hear of a grant of land being made to a court-poet, in Babylonia, for some verses in which he had doubtless flattered the king. Society, in short, was highly organized, and the principle of a subdivision of labour was fully understood.

In one important respect, however, the basis upon which society rested in Babylonia and in a.s.syria was different. The government of Babylonia was theocratic, that of a.s.syria was military. While a.s.syria with its bureaucratic centralization is an antic.i.p.ation of imperial Rome, Babylonia with its theocratic const.i.tution is an antic.i.p.ation of papal Rome. The king was the adopted son of Bel, and his right to rule was based on the fact that Bel, the true lord and ruler of the State, had delegated to him his power.