Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments Part 1

Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments.

by Archibald Henry Sayce.

PREFACE.

Monument of a Hitt.i.te king, accompanied by an inscription in Hitt.i.te hieroglyphics, discovered on the site of Carchemish and now in the British Museum.

The object of this little book is explained by its t.i.tle. Discovery after discovery has been pouring in upon us from Oriental lands, and the accounts given only ten years ago of the results of Oriental research are already beginning to be antiquated. It is useful, therefore, to take stock of our present knowledge, and to see how far it bears out that "old story"

which has been familiar to us from our childhood. The same spirit of scepticism which had rejected the early legends of Greece and Rome had laid its hands also on the Old Testament, and had determined that the sacred histories themselves were but a collection of myths and fables. But suddenly, as with the wand of a magician, the ancient eastern world has been reawakened to life by the spade of the explorer and the patient skill of the decipherer, and we now find ourselves in the presence of monuments which bear the names or recount the deeds of the heroes of Scripture. One by one these "stones crying out" have been examined or more perfectly explained, while others of equal importance are being continually added to them.

What striking confirmations of the Bible narrative have been afforded by the latest discoveries will be seen from the following pages. In many cases confirmation has been accompanied by ill.u.s.tration. Unexpected light has been thrown upon facts and statements. .h.i.therto obscure, or a wholly new explanation has been given of some event recorded by the inspired writer. What can be more startling than the discovery of the great Hitt.i.te Empire, the very existence of which had been forgotten, and which yet once contended on equal terms with Egypt on the one side and a.s.syria on the other? The allusions to the Hitt.i.tes in the Old Testament, which had been doubted by a sceptical criticism, have been shown to be fully in accordance with the facts, and their true place in history has been pointed out.

But the account of the Hitt.i.te Empire is not the only discovery of the last four or five years about which this book has to speak. Inscriptions of Sargon have cleared up the difficulties attending the tenth and eleventh chapters of Isaiah's prophecies, and have proved that no "ideal"

campaign of an "ideal" a.s.syrian king is described in them. The campaign, on the contrary, was a very real one, and when Isaiah delivered his prophecy the a.s.syrian monarch was marching down upon Jerusalem from the north, and was about to be "the rod" of G.o.d's anger upon its sins. Ten years before the overthrow of Sennacherib's army his father, Sargon, had captured Jerusalem, but a "remnant" escaped the horrors of the siege, and returned in penitence "unto the mighty G.o.d."

Perhaps the most remarkable of recent discoveries is that which relates to Cyrus and his conquest of Babylonia. The history of the conquest as told by Cyrus himself is now in our hands, and it has obliged us to modify many of the views, really derived from Greek authors, which we had read into the words of Scripture. Cyrus, we know now upon his own authority, was a polytheist, and not a Zoroastrian; he was king of Elam, not of Persia. It was Elam, and not Persia, as Isaiah's prophecies declared, which invaded Babylon. Babylon itself was taken without a siege, and Mr. Bosanquet may therefore have been right in holding that the Darius of Daniel was Darius the son of Hystaspes.

Hardly less interesting has been the discovery of the inscription of Siloam, which reveals to us the very characters used by the Jews in the time of Isaiah, perhaps even in the time of Solomon himself. The discovery has cast a flood of light on the early topography of Jerusalem, and has made it clear as the daylight that the Jews of the royal period were not the rude and barbarous people it has been the fashion of an unbelieving criticism to a.s.sume, but a cultured and literary population. Books must have been as plentiful among them as they were in Phnicia or a.s.syria; nor must we forget the results of the excavations undertaken last year in the land of Goshen. Pithom, the treasure-city built by the Israelites, has been disinterred, and the date of the Exodus has been fixed. M. Naville has even found there bricks made without straw.

But the old records of Egypt and a.s.syria have a further interest than a merely historical one. They tell us what were the religious doctrines and aspirations of those who composed them, and what was their conception of their duty towards G.o.d and man. We have only to compare the hymns and psalms and prayers of these ancient peoples-seeking "the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him"-with the fuller lights revealed in the pages of the Old Testament, to discover how wide was the chasm that lay between the two. The one was seeking what the other had already found.

The Hebrew prophet was the forerunner and herald of the Gospel, and the light shed by the Gospel had been reflected back upon him. He saw already "the Sun of Righteousness" rising in the east; the psalmist of Shinar or the devout worshipper of a.s.shur were like unto those "upon whom no day has dawned."

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.

_How the Cuneiform Inscriptions were deciphered.-Grotefend's guess.-La.s.sen and Rawlinson's studies.-Discoveries of Botta, Layard, George Smith, and Ra.s.sam.-Certainty of our present knowledge._

The decipherment of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped inscriptions of a.s.syria has been one of the most marvellous achievements of the present century.

It has often been asked how a.s.syrian scholars have been enabled to read an a.s.syrian text with almost as much certainty as a page of the Old Testament, although both the language and the characters in which it is written were utterly unknown but a few years ago. A brief history of the origin and progress of the decipherment will best answer the question.

Travellers had discovered inscriptions engraved in cuneiform, or, as they were also termed, arrow-headed, characters on the ruined monuments of Persepolis and other ancient sites in Persia. Some of these monuments were known to have been erected by the Achaemenian princes-Darius, the son of Hystaspes, and his successors-and it was therefore inferred that the inscriptions also had been carved by order of the same kings. The inscriptions were in three different systems of cuneiform writing; and, since the three kinds of inscription were always placed side by side, it was evident that they represented different versions of the same text. The subjects of the Persian kings belonged to more than one race, and just as in the present day a Turkish pasha in the East has to publish an edict in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, if it is to be understood by all the populations under his charge, so the Persian kings were obliged to use the language and system of writing peculiar to each of the nations they governed, whenever they wished their proclamations to be read and understood by them.

It was clear that the three versions of the Achaemenian inscriptions were addressed to the three chief populations of the Persian Empire, and that the one which invariably came first was composed in ancient Persian, the language of the sovereign himself. Now this Persian version happened to offer the decipherer less difficulties than the two others which accompanied it. The number of distinct characters employed in writing it did not exceed forty, while the words were divided from one another by a slanting wedge. Some of the words contained so many characters that it was plain that these latter must denote letters, and not syllables, and that consequently the Persian cuneiform system must have consisted of an alphabet, and not of a syllabary. It was further plain that the inscriptions had to be read from left to right, since the ends of all the lines were exactly underneath one another on the left side, whereas they terminated irregularly on the right; indeed, the last line sometimes ended at a considerable distance from the right-hand extremity of the inscription.

The clue to the decipherment of the inscriptions was first discovered by the successful guess of a German scholar, Grotefend. Grotefend noticed that the inscriptions generally began with three or four words, one of which varied, while the others remained unchanged. The variable word had three forms, though the same form always appeared on the same monument.

Grotefend, therefore, conjectured that this word represented the name of a king, the words which followed it being the royal t.i.tles. One of the supposed names appeared much oftener than the others, and as it was too short for Artaxerxes and too long for Cyrus, it was evident that it must stand either for Darius or for Xerxes. A study of the cla.s.sical authors showed Grotefend that certain of the monuments on which it was found had been constructed by Darius, and he accordingly gave to the characters composing it the values required for spelling "Darius" in its old Persian form. In this way he succeeded in obtaining conjectural values for six cuneiform letters. He now turned to the second royal name, which also appeared on several monuments, and was of much the same length as that of Darius. This could only be Xerxes; but if so, the fifth letter composing it (_r_) would necessarily be the same as the third letter in the name of Darius. This proved to be the case, and thus afforded the best possible evidence that the German scholar was on the right track.

The third name, which was much longer than the other two, differed from the second chiefly at the beginning, the latter part of it resembling the name of Xerxes. Clearly, therefore, it could be nothing else than Artaxerxes, and that it actually was so, was rendered certain by the fact that the second character composing it was that which had the value of _r_.

Grotefend now possessed a small alphabet, and with this he proceeded to read the word which always followed the royal name, and therefore probably meant "king." He found that it closely resembled the word which signified "king" in Zend, the old language of the Eastern Persians, which was spoken in one part of Persia at the same time that Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenian princes, was spoken in another. There could, consequently, be no further room for doubt that he had really solved the great problem, and discovered the key to the decipherment of the cuneiform texts.

But he did little further himself towards the completion of the work, and it was many years before any real progress was made with it. Meanwhile, the study of Zend had made great advances, more especially in the hands of Burnouf, who eventually turned his attention to the cuneiform inscriptions. But it is to Burnouf's pupil, La.s.sen, as well as to Sir Henry Rawlinson, that the decipherment of these inscriptions owes its final completion. The discovery of the list of Persian satrapies in the inscription of Darius at Naksh-i-Rustem, and above all the copy of the long inscription of Darius on the rock of Behistun, made by Sir H.

Rawlinson, enabled these scholars independently of one another to construct an alphabet which differed only in the value a.s.signed to a single character, and, with the help of the cognate Zend and Sanskrit, to translate the language so curiously brought to light. The decipherment of the Persian cuneiform texts thus became an accomplished fact; what was next needed was to decipher the two versions which were inscribed at their side.

But this was no easy task. The words in them were not divided from one another, and the characters of which they were composed were exceedingly numerous. With the a.s.sistance, however, of frequently recurring proper names even these two versions gradually yielded to the patient skill of the decipherer; and it was then discovered that while one of them represented an agglutinative language, such as that of the Turks or Fins, the other was in a dialect which closely resembled the Hebrew of the Old Testament. The monuments found almost immediately afterwards in a.s.syria and Babylonia by Botta and Layard soon made it clear to what people this dialect must have belonged. The inscriptions of Nineveh turned out to be written in the same language and form of cuneiform script; and it must therefore have been for the Semitic population of a.s.syria and Babylonia that the kings of Persia had caused one of the versions of their inscriptions to be drawn up. This version served as a starting-point for the decipherment of the texts which the excavations in a.s.syria had brought to light.

It might have been thought that the further course of the decipherment would have presented little difficulty, now that the values of many of the a.s.syrian characters were known, and the close resemblance of the language they concealed to Hebrew had been discovered. But the complicated nature of the a.s.syrian system of cuneiform-the great number of characters used in it, the different phonetic values the same character might have, and the frequent employment of ideographs, which denoted ideas and not sounds-caused the progress of decipherment to be for some time but slow.

Indeed, had the a.s.syrian inscriptions been confined to those engraved on the alabaster bulls and other monuments of Nineveh, our knowledge of the language would always have remained comparatively limited. But, fortunately, the a.s.syrians, like the Babylonians before them, employed clay as a writing material, and established libraries, which were filled with a literature on baked bricks.

One of the most important results of Sir A. H. Layard's explorations at Nineveh was the discovery of the ruined library of the ancient city, now buried under the mounds of Kouyunjik. The broken clay tablets belonging to this library not only furnished the student with an immense ma.s.s of literary matter, but also with direct aids towards a knowledge of the a.s.syrian syllabary and language. Among the literature represented in the library of Kouyunjik were lists of characters, with their various phonetic and ideographic meanings, tables of synonymes, and catalogues of the names of plants and animals. This, however, was not all. The inventors of the cuneiform system of writing had been a people who preceded the Semites in the occupation of Babylonia, and who spoke an agglutinative language utterly different from that of their Semitic successors. These Accadians, as they are usually termed, left behind them a considerable amount of literature, which was highly prized by the Semitic Babylonians and a.s.syrians. A large portion of the Ninevite tablets, accordingly, consists of interlinear or parallel translations from Accadian into a.s.syrian, as well as of reading books, dictionaries, and grammars, in which the Accadian original is placed by the side of its a.s.syrian equivalent. It frequently happens that the signification of a previously unknown a.s.syrian word can be ascertained by our finding it given as the rendering of an Accadian word, with the meaning of which we are already acquainted. The bilingual texts have not only enabled scholars to recover the long-forgotten Accadian language; they have also been of the greatest possible a.s.sistance to them in their reconstruction of the a.s.syrian dictionary itself.

The three expeditions conducted by Mr. George Smith, as well as the later ones of Mr. Hormuzd Ra.s.sam, have added largely to the stock of tablets from Kouyunjik originally acquired for the British Museum by Sir A. H.

Layard, and have also brought to light a few other tablets from the libraries of Babylonia. Although, therefore, only one of the many libraries which now lie buried beneath the ground in Babylonia and a.s.syria has, as yet, been at all adequately explored, the amount of a.s.syrian literature at the disposal of the student is already greater than that contained in the whole of the Old Testament. Apart from the help afforded by the old dictionaries and lists of words and characters, he has more facilities for determining the meaning of a word by a comparison of parallel pa.s.sages than the student of Biblical Hebrew; and in many instances, accordingly, a.s.syrian has made it possible to fix the signification of a Hebrew word, the sense of which has. .h.i.therto been doubtful.

The a.s.syrian student, moreover, possesses an advantage which is not shared by the Hebraist. Owing to its hieroglyphic origin, the cuneiform system of writing makes large use of what are called determinatives, that is to say, of characters which have no phonetic value, but which determine the cla.s.s to which the word they accompany belongs. It is, therefore, always possible to tell at a glance whether the word with which we are dealing is the name of a man, of a woman, of a deity, of a river, of a country, or of a city; or, again, whether it denotes an animal, a bird, a vegetable, a stone, a star, a medicine, or the like. With all these aids, accordingly, it is not wonderful that the study of a.s.syrian has made immense progress during the last few years, and that an ordinary historical text can be read with as much certainty as a page from one of the historical books of the Old Testament. Indeed, we may say that it can be read with even greater certainty, since it presents us with the actual words of the original writer; whereas the text of the Old Testament has come to us through the hands of successive generations of copyists, who have corrupted many pa.s.sages so as to make them grammatically unintelligible.

At the same time, the hieroglyphic origin of the cuneiform mode of writing has been productive of disadvantages as well as of advantages. The characters which compose it may express ideas as well as sounds; and though we may know what ideas are represented, we may not always know the exact p.r.o.nunciation to be a.s.signed to them. Thus, in English, the ideograph + may be p.r.o.nounced "plus," "added to," or "more," according to the pleasure of the reader. The a.s.syrian scribes usually attached one or more phonetic characters to the ideographs they employed, in order to indicate their p.r.o.nunciation in a given pa.s.sage; but these "phonetic complements," as they are termed, were frequently omitted in the case of well-known proper names, such as those of the native kings and deities.

Hence the exact p.r.o.nunciation of these names can only be settled when we find them written phonetically; and there are one or two proper names, such as that of the hero of the great Chaldean epic, which have never yet been met with phonetically spelt.

Another disadvantage due to the hieroglyphic origin of the a.s.syrian syllabary is the number of different phonetic values the same character may bear. This caused a good deal of trouble in the early days of a.s.syrian decipherment; but it was a difficulty that was felt quite as much by the a.s.syrians themselves as it is by us. Consequently they adopted various devices for overcoming it; and as these devices have become known the difficulty has ceased to be felt. In short, the study of a.s.syrian now reposes on as sure and certain a basis as the study of any ancient language, a knowledge of which has been traditionally handed down to us; and the antiquity of its monuments, the copiousness of its vocabulary, the perfection of its grammar, and the syllabic character of the writing-which expresses vowels as well as consonants-all combine to make it of the highest importance for the study of the Semitic languages. Its recovery has not only shed a flood of light on the history and antiquities of the Old Testament, it has served to ill.u.s.trate and explain the language of the Old Testament as well.

CHAPTER II. THE BOOK OF GENESIS.

Recent discoveries, especially in Babylonia and a.s.syria, have thrown much light on Genesis.-The Accadians.-An a.s.syrian account of the Creation.-The Babylonian Sabbath.-Traces of an account of the Fall.-Site of Paradise.-"Adam" a Babylonian word.-The Chaldean story of the Deluge.-This compared with the record in Genesis.-The Babylonian account of the building of Babel.-The light thrown by the a.s.syrian inscriptions on the names in Gen. x.-Gomer; Madai; Javan; Cush and Mizraim; Phut; Canaan; Elam; a.s.shur; Arphaxad; Aram; Lud; Nimrod.-The site of Ur.-Approximate date of the rescue of Lot by Abraham.-Egypt in the time of Abraham.-Records of famines.-The date of Joseph's appointment as second ruler in Egypt.-The Tale of the Two Brothers.-Goshen.

There is no book in the world about which more has been written than the Bible, and perhaps there is no portion of the Bible which has given rise to a larger literature than the Book of Genesis. Every word in it has been carefully scrutinised, now by scholars who sought to discover its deepest meaning or to defend it against the attacks of adversaries, now again by hostile critics anxious to expose every supposed flaw, and to convict it of error and inconsistency. a.s.sailants and defenders had long to content themselves with such evidence as could be derived from a study of the book itself, or from the doubtful traditions of ancient nations, as reported by the writers of Greece and Rome. Such reports were alike imperfect and untrustworthy; historical criticism was still in its infancy in the age of the cla.s.sical authors, and they cared but little to describe accurately the traditions of races whom they despised. It was even a question whether any credit could be given to the fragments of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phnician mythology or history extracted by Christian apologists from the lost works of native authors who wrote in Greek. The Egyptian dynasties of Manetho, the Babylonian stories of the Creation and Flood narrated by Berossus, the self-contradicting Phnician legends collected by Philo Byblius, were all more or less suspected of being an invention of a later age. The earlier chapters of Genesis stood almost alone; friends and foes alike felt the danger of resting any argument on the apparent similarity of the accounts recorded in them to the myths and legends contained in the fragments of Manetho, of Berossus, and of Philo Byblius.

All is changed now. The marvellous discoveries of the last half-century have thrown a flood of light on the ancient oriental world, and some of this light has necessarily been reflected on the Book of Genesis. The monuments of Egypt, of Babylonia, and of a.s.syria have been rescued from their hiding-places, and the writing upon them has been made to speak once more in living words. A dead world has been called again to life by the spade of the excavator and the patient labour of the decipherer. We find ourselves, as it were, face to face with Sennacherib, with Nebuchadnezzar, and with Cyrus, with those whose names have been familiar to us from childhood, but who have hitherto been to us mere names, mere shadowy occupants of an unreal world. Thanks to the research of the last half-century, we can now penetrate into the details of their daily life, can examine their religious ideas, can listen to them as they themselves recount the events of their own time or the traditions of the past which had been handed down to them.

It is more especially in Babylonia and a.s.syria that we find ill.u.s.trations of the earlier chapters of Genesis, as, indeed, is only natural. The Semitic language spoken in these two countries was closely allied to that of the Old Testament, as closely, in fact, as two modern English dialects are allied to each other; and it was from Babylonia, from Ur of the Chaldees, now represented by the mounds of Mugheir, that Abraham made his way to the future home of his descendants in the west. It is to Babylonia that the Biblical accounts of the Fall, of the Deluge, and of the Confusion of Tongues particularly look: two of the rivers of Paradise were the Tigris and Euphrates, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, and the city built around the Tower which men designed should reach to heaven was Babel or Babylon. Babylonia was an older kingdom than a.s.syria, which took its name from the city of a.s.sur, now Kalah Sherghat, on the Tigris, the original capital of the country. It was divided into two halves, Accad (Gen. x. 10) being Northern Babylonia, and Sumir, the Shinar of the Old Testament, Southern Babylonia. The primitive populations of both Sumir and Accad were related, not to the Semitic race, but to the tribes which continued to maintain themselves in the mountains of Elam down to a late day. They spoke two cognate dialects, which were agglutinative in character, like the languages of the modern Turks and Fins; that is to say, the relations of grammar were expressed by coupling words together, each of which retained an independent meaning of its own. Thus _in-nin-sun_ is "he gave it," literally "he-it-gave," _e-mes-na_ is "of houses," literally "house-many-of." At an early date, which cannot yet, however, be exactly determined, the Sumirians and Accadians were overrun and conquered by the Semitic Babylonians of later history, Accad being apparently the first half of the country to fall under the sway of the new-comers. It is possible that Casdim, the Hebrew word translated "Chaldees" or "Chaldaeans" in the Authorised Version, is the Babylonian _casidi_, or "conquerors," a t.i.tle which continued to cling to them in consequence of their conquest.

The Accadians had been the inventors of the pictorial hieroglyphics which afterwards developed into the cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing; they had founded the great cities of Chaldea, and had attained to a high degree of culture and civilisation. Their cities possessed libraries, stocked with books, written partly on papyrus, partly on clay, which was, while still soft, impressed with characters by means of a metal stylus.

The books were numerous, and related to a variety of subjects. Among them there were more particularly two to which a special degree of sanct.i.ty was attached. One of these contained magical formulae for warding off the a.s.saults of evil spirits; the other was a collection of hymns to the G.o.ds, which was used by the priests as a kind of prayer-book. When the Semitic Babylonians, the kinsmen of the Hebrews, the Aramaeans, the Phnicians and the Arabs, conquered the old population, they received from it, along with other elements of culture, the cuneiform system of writing and the literature written in it. The sacred hymns still continued to serve as a prayer-book, but they were now provided with interlinear translations into the Babylonian (or, as it is usually termed, the a.s.syrian) language. Part of the literature consisted of legal codes and decisions; and since the inheritance and holding of property frequently depended on a knowledge of these, it became necessary for the conquerors to acquaint themselves with the language of the people they had conquered. In course of time, however, the two dialects of Sumir and Accad ceased to be spoken; but the necessity for learning them still remained, and we find accordingly that down to the latest days of both a.s.syria and Babylonia the educated cla.s.ses were taught the old extinct Accadian, just as in modern Europe they are taught Latin.

From time to time, indeed, the scribes of Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar attempted to write in the ancient language, and in doing so sometimes made similar mistakes to those that are made now-a-days by a schoolboy in writing Latin.

The Accadians were, like the Chinese, pre-eminently a literary people.

Their conception of chaos was that of a period when as yet no books were written. Accordingly, a legend of the Creation, preserved in the library of Cuthah, contains this curious statement: "On a memorial-tablet none wrote, none explained, for bodies and produce were not brought forth in the earth." To the author of the legend the art of writing seemed to mount back to the very beginning of mankind.

This legend of the Creation, however, is not the only one that has been recovered from the shipwreck of a.s.syrian and Babylonian literature.

Besides the account given in the fragments of Berossus, there is another, which bears a striking resemblance to the account of the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis. It does not appear, however, that this last was of Accadian origin; at all events, there is no indication that it was translated into a.s.syrian from an older Accadian doc.u.ment, and there are even reasons for thinking that it may not be earlier-in its present form at least-than the seventh century B.C. We possess, unfortunately, only portions of it, since many of the series of clay tablets on which it was inscribed have been lost or injured. The account begins as follows:-

1. At that time the heavens above named not a name,