Chaldea Part 3

[H] Ur of the Chaldees, from which Abraham went forth.

[I] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., p. 349.

[J] Figure 10.

[K] Figure 71, p. 281.

[L] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., pp. 317 and 318.

[M] See Fig. 20, p. 63. There is but one exception, in the case of a recent exploration, during which one solitary broken column-shaft was discovered.

[N] G. Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., pp. 467, 468.

[O] See Fig. 33, p. 83.

[P] Figures 34 and 35, p. 84.

[Q] Figs. 37 and 38, p. 87.

[R] Fig. 39, p. 89.

[S] See Fig. 59, p. 217.

[T] See Figs. 44 and 45, p. 101.

IV.

THE BOOK OF THE PAST.--THE LIBRARY OF NINEVEH.

1. When we wish to learn the great deeds of past ages, and of mighty men long dead, we open a book and read. When we wish to leave to the generations who will come long after us a record of the things that were done by ourselves or in our own times, we take pen, ink and paper, and write a book. What we have written is then printed, published in several hundreds--or thousands--of copies, as the case may be, and quickly finds its way to all the countries of the world inhabited by people who are trained from childhood to thought and study. So that we have the satisfaction of knowing that the information which we have labored to preserve will be obtainable any number of years or centuries after we shall have ceased to exist, at no greater trouble than procuring the book from the shelves of a bookstore, a public or a private library. It is all very simple. And there is not a small child who does not perfectly know a book by its looks, and even has not a pretty correct idea of how a book is made and what it is good for.

2. But books are not always of the shape and material so familiar to us.

Metal, stone, brick, walls and pillars, nay, the very rocks of nature's own making, can be books, conveying information as plainly as our volumes of paper sheets covered with written or printed lines. It only needs to know how to read them, and the necessary knowledge and skill may be acquired by processes as simple as the art of ordinary reading and writing, though at the cost of a somewhat greater amount of time and pains.

3. There are two natural cravings, which a.s.sert themselves strongly in every mind not entirely absorbed by the daily work for bread and by the anxious care how to procure that work: these are the wish, on the one hand, to learn how the people who came before us lived and what they did, on the other--to transmit our own names and the memory of our deeds to those who will come after us. We are not content with our present life; we want to stretch it both backward and forward--to live both in the past and the future, as it were. This curiosity and this ambition are but parts of the longing for immortality which was never absent from any human soul. In our own age they are satisfied mainly by books; indeed they were originally the princ.i.p.al causes why books began to be made at all. And how easy to satisfy these cravings in our time, when writing materials have become as common as food and far cheaper, and reading may be had for nothing or next to nothing! For, a very few dollars will supply a writer with as much paper as he can possibly use up in a year, while the public libraries, the circulating and college libraries and the reading-rooms make study a matter more of love and perseverance than of money.

4. Yet if the papermill and the printing press were the only material aid to our researches into the past, these researches would stop short very soon, seeing that printing was invented in Europe scarce four hundred years ago, and paper has not been manufactured for more than six hundred years at the outside. True, other materials have been used to write on before paper: bark of trees, skins of animals--(parchment)--cunningly worked fibres of plants--(papyrus, byblos)--even wooden tablets covered with a thin layer of wax, on which characters were engraved with a pointed instrument or "style,"--and these contrivances have preserved for us records which reach back many hundreds of years beyond the introduction of paper.

But our curiosity, when once aroused, is insatiable, and an area of some twenty, or thirty, or forty centuries seems to it but a narrow field. Looking back as far as that--and no kind of ma.n.u.script information takes us much further--we behold the world wondrously like what it is now. With some differences in garb, in manners, and a much greater one in the range of knowledge, we find men living very nearly as we do and enacting very nearly the same scenes: nations live in families cl.u.s.tered within cities, are governed by laws, or ruled by monarchs, carry on commerce and wars, extend their limits by conquest, excel in all sorts of useful and ornamental arts. Only we notice that larger regions are unknown, vaster portions of the earth, with their populations, are unexplored, than in our days. The conclusion is clearly forced on us, that so complicated and perfect an organization of public and private life, a condition of society implying so many discoveries and so long a practice in thought and handicraft, could not have been an early stage of existence. Long vistas are dimly visible into a past far vaster than the span as yet laid open to our view, and we long to pierce the tantalizing gloom.

There, in that gloom, lurk the beginnings of the races whose high achievements we admire, emulate, and in many ways surpa.s.s; there, if we could but send a ray of light into the darkness of ages, we must find the solution of numberless questions which suggest themselves as we go: Whence come those races? What was the earlier history of other races with which we find them contending, treating, trading? When did they learn their arts, their songs, their forms of worship? But here our faithful guide, ma.n.u.script literature, forsakes us; we enter on a period when none of the ancient subst.i.tutes for paper were yet invented. But then, there were the stones. _They_ did not need to be invented--only hewn and smoothed for the chisel.

5. Fortunately for us, men, twenty-five, and forty, and fifty centuries ago, were actuated by the same feelings, the same aspirations as they are now, and of these aspirations, the pa.s.sionate wish of perpetuating their names and the memory of their deeds has always been one of the most powerful. This wish they connected with and made subservient to the two things which were great and holy in their eyes: their religion and the power of their kings. So they built, in brick and stone, at an almost incalculable expense of time, human labor and human life, palaces and temples. On these huge piles they lavished treasures untold, as also all the resources of their invention and their skill in art and ornament; they looked on them with exulting pride, not only because they thought them, by their vastness and gorgeousness, fit places for public worship and dwellings worthy of their kings, but because these constructions, in their towering grandeur, their ma.s.sive solidity, bid fair to defy time and outlast the nations which raised them, and which thus felt a.s.sured of leaving behind them traces of their existence, memorials of their greatness. That a few defaced, dismantled, moss-grown or sand-choked fragments of these mighty buildings would one day be the _only_ trace, the sole memorial of a rule and of nations that would then have past away forever, even into nothingness and oblivion, scarcely was antic.i.p.ated by the haughty conquerors who filled those halls with their despotic presence, and entered those consecrated gates in the pomp of triumph to render thanks for b.l.o.o.d.y victories and warlike exploits which elated their souls in pride till they felt themselves half divine.

Nothing doubting but that those walls, those pillars, those gateways would stand down to the latest ages, they confided to them that which was most precious to their ambition, the record of their deeds, the praises of their names, thus using those stony surfaces as so many blank pages, which they covered with row after row of wondrous characters, carefully engraved or chiselled, and even with painted or sculptured representations of their own persons and of the scenes, in war or peace, in which they had been leaders and actors.

6. Thus it is that on all the points of the globe where sometime great and flourishing nations have held their place, then yielded to other nations or to absolute devastation--in Egypt, in India, in Persia, in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, in the sandy, now desert plains of Syria, in the once more populous haunts of ancient Rome and Greece--the traveller meets cl.u.s.ters of great ruins, lofty still in their utter abandonment, with a strange, stern beauty hovering around their weather-beaten, gigantic shafts and cornices, wrapt in the pathetic silence of desolation, and yet not dumb--for their pictured faces eloquently proclaim the tale of buoyant life and action entrusted to them many thousands of years ago. Sometimes, it is a natural rock, cut and smoothed down at a height sufficient to protect it from the wantonly destructive hand of scoffing invaders, on which a king of a deeper turn of thought, more mindful than others of the law which dooms all the works of men to decay, has caused a relation of the princ.i.p.al events of his reign to be engraved in those curious characters which have for centuries been a puzzle and an enigma. Many tombs also, besides the remains of the renowned or wealthy dead, for whom they have been erected at a cost as extravagant and with art as elaborate as the abodes of the living, contain the full description of their inmate's lineage, his life, his habits and pursuits, with prayers and invocations to the divinities of his race and descriptions or portrayed representations of religious ceremonies. Or, the walls of caves, either natural, or cut in the rock for purposes of shelter or concealment, yield to the explorer some more chapters out of the old, old story, in which our interest never slackens. This story man has himself been writing, patiently, laboriously, on every surface on which he could trace words and lines, ever since he has been familiar with the art of expressing his thoughts in visible signs,--and so each such surviving memorial may truly be called a stray leaf, half miraculously preserved to us, out of the great Book of the Past, which it has been the task of scholars through ages, and especially during the last eighty years, to decipher and teach others how to read.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 44.--HEAD OF ANCIENT CHALDEAN. FROM TELL-LOH (SIR-GULLA).

SARZEC COLLECTION. (Perrot and Chipiez.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 45.--SAME, PROFILE VIEW.]

7. Of this venerable book the walls of the a.s.syrian palaces, with their endless rows of inscriptions, telling year for year through centuries the history of the kings who built them, are so many invaluable pages, while the sculptures which accompany these annals are the ill.u.s.trations, lending life and reality to what would otherwise be a string of dry and unattractive records. But a greater wonder has been brought to light from amidst the rubbish and dust of twenty-five centuries: a collection of literary and scientific works, of religious treatises, of private and public doc.u.ments, deposited in rooms constructed on purpose to contain them, arranged in admirable order, in short--a LIBRARY. Truly and literally a library, in the sense in which we use the word. Not the only one either, nor the first by many hundred years, although the volumes are of singular make and little like those we are used to.

8. When Layard was at work for the second time amidst the ruins along the Tigris, he devoted much of his labor to the great mound of Koyunjik, in which the remains of two sumptuous palaces were distinctly discerned, one of them the royal residence of Sennacherib, the other that of his grandson a.s.shurbanipal, who lived some 650 years before Christ--two of the mightiest conquerors and most magnificent sovereigns of the Eastern world. In the latter palace he came upon two comparatively small chambers, the floor of which was entirely littered with fragments--some of considerable size, some very small--of bricks, or rather baked-clay tablets, covered on both sides with cuneiform writing. It was a layer more than a foot in height which must have been formed by the falling in of the upper part of the edifice. The tablets, piled in good order along the walls, perhaps in an upper story--if, as many think, there was one--must have been precipitated promiscuously into the apartment and shattered by the fall. Yet, incredible as it may appear, several were found entire. Layard filled many cases with the fragments and sent them off to the British Museum, fully aware of their probable historical value.

9. There they lay for years, heaped up at random, a mine of treasures which made the mouths of scholars water, but appalled them by the amount of labor, nay, actual drudgery, needful only to sift and sort them, even before any study of their contents could be begun. At length a young and ambitious archaeologist, attached to the British Museum, George Smith, undertook the long and wearisome task. He was not originally a scholar, but an engraver, and was employed to engrave on wood cuneiform texts for the magnificent atlas edited by the British Museum under the t.i.tle of "Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia."

Being endowed with a quick and enquiring mind, Smith did not content himself, like most of his colleagues, with a conscientious and artistic, but merely technical reproduction; he wished to know _what_ he was doing and he learned the language of the inscriptions. When he took on himself the sorting of the fragments, it was in the hope of distinguishing himself in this new field, and of rendering a substantial service to the science which had fascinated him. Nor was he deceived in this hope. He succeeded in finding and uniting a large quant.i.ty of fragments belonging together, and thus restoring pages of writing, with here and there a damaged line, a word effaced, a broken corner, often a larger portion missing, but still enough left to form continuous and readable texts. In some cases it was found that there was more than one copy of this or that work or doc.u.ment, and then sometimes the parts which were hopelessly injured in one copy, would be found whole or nearly so in another.

10. The results accomplished by this patient mechanical process were something astonishing. And when he at length restored in this manner a series of twelve tablets containing an entire poem of the greatest antiquity and highest interest, the occasion seemed important enough to warrant the enterprising owners of the London _Daily Telegraph_ in sending the young student to resume excavations and try to complete some missing links. For of some of the tablets restored by him only portions could be found among the fragments of the British Museum. Of course he made his way straight to the Archive Chambers at Koyunjik, had them opened again and cleared them of another large instalment of their valuable contents, among which he had the inconceivable good fortune to find some of the very pieces which were missing in his collection.

Joyfully he returned to England twice with his treasures, and hopefully set out on a third expedition of the same kind. He had reason to feel buoyant; he had already made his name famous by several works which greatly enriched the science he loved, and had he not half a lifetime before him to continue the work which few could do as well? Alas, he little knew that his career was to be cut short suddenly by a loathsome and brutal foe: he died of the plague in Syria, in 1876--just thirty-six years old. He was faithful to the end. His diary, in which he made some entries even within a very few days before his death, shows that at the last, when he knew his danger and was fast losing hope, his mind was equally divided between thoughts of his family and of his work. The following lines, almost the last intelligible ones he wrote, are deeply touching in their simple, single-minded earnestness:--"Not so well. If Doctor present, I should recover, but he has not come, very doubtful case; if fatal farewell to ... _My work has been entirely for the science I study...._ There is a large field of study in my collection. I intended to work it out, but desire now that my antiquities and notes may be thrown open to all students. I have done my duty thoroughly. I do not fear the change but desire to live for my family. Perhaps all may be well yet."--George Smith's death was a great loss, which his brother-scholars of all countries have not ceased to deplore. But the work now proceeds vigorously and skilfully. The precious texts are sorted, pieced, and cla.s.sified, and a collection of them, carefully selected, is reproduced by the aid of the photographer and the engraver, so that, should the originals ever be lost or destroyed, (not a very probable event), the Museum indeed would lose one of its most precious rarities, but science would lose nothing.

11. An eminent French scholar and a.s.syriologist, Joachim Menant, has the following picturesque lines in his charming little book "_La Bibliotheque du Palais de Ninive_": "When we reflect that these records have been traced on a substance which neither fire nor water could destroy, we can easily comprehend how those who wrote them thus thirty or forty centuries ago, believed the monuments of their history to be safe for all future times,--much safer than the frail sheets which printing scatters with such prodigious fertility.... Of all the nations who have bequeathed to us written records of their past life, we may a.s.sert that none has left monuments more imperishable than a.s.syria and Chaldea. Their number is already considerable; it is daily increased by new discoveries. It is not possible to foresee what the future has in store for us in this respect; but we can even now make a valuation of the entire material which we possess.... The number of the tablets from the Nineveh Library alone pa.s.ses ten thousand.... If we compare these texts with those left us by other nations, we can easily become convinced that the history of the a.s.syro-Chaldean civilization will soon be one of the best known of antiquity. It has a powerful attraction for us, for we know that the life of the Jewish people is mixed up with the history of Nineveh and Babylon...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 46.--CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTION. (ARCHAIC CHARACTERS.) (Perrot and Chipiez.)]

12. It will be seen from this that throughout the following pages we shall continually have to refer to the contents of a.s.shurbanipal's royal library. We must therefore dispense in this place with any details concerning the books, more than a general survey of the subjects they treated. Of these, religion and science were the chief. Under "science"

we must understand princ.i.p.ally mathematics and astronomy, two branches in which the old Chaldeans reached great perfection and left us many of our own most fundamental notions and practices, as we shall see later on. Among the scientific works must also be counted those on astrology, i.e., on the influence which the heavenly bodies were supposed to exert on the fate of men, according to their positions and combinations, for astrology was considered a real science, not only by the Chaldeans, but by much later nations too; also hand-books of geography, really only lists of the seas, mountains and rivers, nations and cities then known, lastly lists of plants and animals with a very rude and defective attempt at some sort of cla.s.sification. History is but scantily represented; it appears to have been mostly confined to the great wall inscriptions and some other objects, of which more hereafter. But--what we should least expect--grammars, dictionaries, school reading-books, occupy a prominent place. The reason is that, when this library was founded, the language in which the venerable books of ancient sages were written not only was not spoken any longer, but had for centuries been forgotten by all but the priests and those who made scholarship their chief pursuit, so that it had to be taught in the same way that the so-called "dead languages," Latin and Greek, are taught at our colleges.

This was the more necessary as the prayers had to be recited in the old language called the Accadian, that being considered more holy--just as, in Catholic countries, the common people are even now made to learn and say their prayers in Latin, though they understand not a word of the language. The ancient Accadian texts were mostly copied with a modern a.s.syrian translation, either interlinear or facing it, which has been of immense service to those who now decipher the tablets.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 47.--INSCRIBED CLAY TABLET. (Smith's "a.s.syria.")]

13. So much for what may be called the cla.s.sical and reference department of the library. Important as it is, it is scarcely more so than the doc.u.mentary department or Archive proper, where doc.u.ments and deeds of all kinds, both public and private, were deposited for safe keeping. Here by the side of treatises, royal decrees and despatches, lists of tribute, reports from generals and governors, also those daily sent in by the superintendents of the royal observatories,--we find innumerable private doc.u.ments: deeds of sale duly signed, witnessed and sealed, for land, houses, slaves--any kind of property,--of money lent, of mortgages, with the rate of interest, contracts of all sorts. The most remarkable of private doc.u.ments is one which has been called the "will of King Sennacherib," by which he entrusts some valuable personal property to the priests of the temple of Nebo, to be kept for his favorite son,--whether to be delivered after his (the king's) death or at another time is not stated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 48.--CLAY TABLET IN ITS CASE. (Hommel.)]

14. It requires some effort to bear in mind the nature and looks of the things which we must represent to ourselves when we talk of a.s.syrian "_books_." The above (Fig. 47) is the portrait of a "_volume_" in perfect condition. But it is seldom indeed that one such is found.

Layard, in his first description of his startling "find," says: "They (the tablets) were of different sizes; the largest were flat, and measured nine inches by six and a half; the smaller were slightly convex, and some were not more than an inch long, with but one or two lines of writing. The cuneiform characters on most of them were singularly sharp and well-defined, but so minute in some instances as to be illegible without a magnifying gla.s.s." Most curiously, gla.s.s lenses have been found among the ruins; which may have been used for the purpose. Specimens have also been found of the very instruments which were employed to trace the cuneiform characters, and their form sufficiently accounts for the peculiar shape of these characters which was imitated by the engravers on stone. It is a little iron rod--(or _style_, as the ancients used to call such implements)--not sharp, but _triangular_ at the end: [open triangle]. By slightly pressing this end on the cake of soft moist clay held in the left hand no other shape of sign could be obtained than a wedge, [closed triangle], the direction being determined by a turn of the wrist, presenting the instrument in different positions. When one side of the tablet was full, the other was to be filled. If it was small, it was sufficient to turn it over, continuing to hold the edges between the thumb and third finger of the left hand. But if the tablet was large and had to be laid on a table to be written on, the face that was finished would be pressed to the hard surface, and the clay being soft, the writing would be effaced. This was guarded against by a contrivance as ingenious as it was simple. Empty places were left here and there in the lines, in which were stuck small pegs, like matches. On these the tablet was supported when turned over, and also while baking in the oven. On many of the tablets that have been preserved are to be seen little holes or dints, where the pegs have been stuck. Still, it should be mentioned that these holes are not confined to the large tablets and not found on all large tablets. When the tablet was full, it was allowed to dry, then generally, but not always, baked. Within the last few years several thousands unbaked tablets have been found in Babylonia; they crumbled into dust under the finders' fingers. It was then proposed to bake such of them as could at all bear handling. The experiment was successful, and numbers of valuable doc.u.ments were thus preserved and transported to the great repository of the British Museum. The tablets are covered with writing on both sides and most accurately cla.s.sed and numbered, when they form part of a series, in which case they are all of the same shape and size.

The poem discovered by George Smith is written out on twelve tablets, each of which is a separate book or chapter of the whole. There is an astronomical work in over seventy tablets. The first of them begins with the words: "_When the G.o.ds Anu and ..._" These words are taken as the t.i.tle of the entire series. Each tablet bears the notice: First, second, third tablet of "_When the G.o.ds Anu and ..._" To guard against all chance of confusion, the last line of one tablet is repeated as the first line of the following one--a fashion which we still see in old books, where the last word or two at the bottom of a page is repeated at the top of the next.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 49.--ANTIQUE BRONZE SETTING OF CYLINDER. (Perrot and Chipiez.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 50.--CHALDEAN CYLINDER AND IMPRESSION.(Perrot and Chipiez.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 51.--a.s.sYRIAN CYLINDER. (Perrot and Chipiez.)]

15. The clay tablets of the ancient Chaldeans are distinguished from the a.s.syrian ones by a curious peculiarity: they are sometimes enclosed in a case of the same material, with exactly the same inscription and seals as on the inner tablet, even more carefully executed.[U] It is evidently a sort of duplicate doc.u.ment, made in the prevision that the outer one might be injured, when the inner record would remain. Rows of figures across the tablet are impressed on it with seals called from their shape cylinders, which were rolled over the soft moist clay. These cylinders were generally of some valuable, hard stone--jasper, amethyst, cornelian, onyx, agate, etc.,--and were used as signet rings were later and are still. They are found in great numbers, being from their hardness well-nigh indestructible. They were generally bored through, and through the hole was pa.s.sed either a string to wear them on, or a metal axis, to roll them more easily.[V] There is a large and most valuable collection of seal cylinders at the British Museum. Their size ranges from a quarter of an inch to two inches or a little more. But cylinders were also made of baked clay and larger size, and then served a different purpose, that of historical doc.u.ments. These are found in the foundations of palaces and temples, mostly in the four corners, in small niches or chambers, generally produced by leaving out one or more bricks. These tiny monuments range from a couple of inches to half a foot in height, seldom more; they are sometimes shaped like a prism with several faces (mostly six), sometimes like a barrel, and covered with that compact and minute writing which it often requires a magnifying gla.s.s to make out. Owing to their sheltered position, these singular records are generally very well preserved. Although their original destination is only to tell by whom and for what purpose the building has been erected, they frequently proceed to give a full though condensed account of the respective kings' reigns, so that, should the upper structure with its engraved annals be destroyed by the vicissitudes of war or in the course of natural decay, some memorial of their deeds should still be preserved--a prevision which, in several cases, has been literally fulfilled. Sometimes the manner and material of these records were still more fanciful. At Khorsabad, at the very interior part of the construction, was found a large stone chest, which enclosed several inscribed plates in various materials. "... In this only extant specimen of an a.s.syrian foundation stone were found one little golden tablet, one of silver, others of copper, lead and tin; a sixth text was engraved on alabaster, and the seventh doc.u.ment was written on the chest itself."[W] Unfortunately the heavier portion of this remarkable find was sent with a collection which foundered on the Tigris and was lost. Only the small plates,--gold, silver, copper and tin (antimonium scholars now think it to be)--survived, and the inscriptions on them have been read and translated. They all commemorate, in very nearly the same terms, the foundation and erection of a new city and palace by a very famous king and conqueror, generally (though not correctly) called Sargon, and three of them end with a request to the kings his successors to keep the building in good repair, with a prayer for their welfare if they do and a heavy curse if they fail in this duty: "Whoever alters the works of my hand, destroys my constructions, pulls down the walls which I have raised,--may a.s.shur, Nineb, Raman and the great G.o.ds who dwell there, pluck his name and seed from the land and let him sit bound at the feet of his foe." Most inscriptions end with invocations of the same kind, for, in the words of Menant: "it was not mere whim which impelled the kings of a.s.syria to build so a.s.siduously. Palaces had in those times a destination which they have no longer in ours. Not only was the palace indeed _the dwelling of royalty_, as the inscriptions have it,--it was also the BOOK, which each sovereign began at his accession to the throne and in which he was to record the history of his reign."[X]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 52.--PRISM OF SENNACHERIB. ALSO CALLED "TAYLOR CYLINDER."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 53.--INSCRIBED CYLINDER FROM BORSIP.]

And each such book of brick and stone we can with perfect truth call a chapter--or a volume--of the great Book of the Past whose leaves are scattered over the face of the earth.

FOOTNOTES:

[U] See Fig. 48, p. 111.