Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments Part 6

Such are the records, which have risen up, as it were, out of the tomb, to revolutionise all our previous conceptions of that part of ancient history with which they are concerned. We must give up the belief that Cyrus was a monotheist, bent on destroying the idols of Babylon; on the contrary, from the time when we first hear of him, he is a worshipper of Bel-Merodach, the patron-G.o.d of Babylon, and the first care of himself and his son, after his conquest of Babylonia, is to restore the Babylonian G.o.ds to the shrines from which they had been impiously removed by Nabonidos. He asks the G.o.ds to intercede on his behalf with Bel and Nebo, the two supreme G.o.ds of Babylonian worship. It is clear, therefore, that Cyrus was a polytheist, who, like other polytheists in other ages, adopted the G.o.ds of the country he had conquered from motives of State policy. The Egyptian monuments give the same account of his son Kambyses. They show that the story told by Herodotus how Kambyses had scoffed at the G.o.ds of Egypt, had destroyed their images, and had finally stabbed the sacred bull Apis, was a mere Greek fable. Kambyses appears on contemporaneous monuments as the friend of the Egyptian priests, the adorer of their G.o.ds, and the benefactor of their temples. The very bull he was said to have murdered has been discovered in its huge sarcophagus of granite, with a sculpture above, wherein Kambyses is represented as kneeling before the bull-G.o.d, while an inscription states that the bull was honoured with the usual funeral, in which Kambyses himself took part.

The theory, accordingly, which held that Cyrus had allowed the Jews to return to their own land, because, like them, he believed in but one supreme G.o.d-the Ormazd or good spirit of the Zoroastrian creed-must be abandoned. G.o.d consecrated Cyrus to be His instrument in restoring His chosen people to their land, not because the king of Elam was a monotheist, but because the period of Jewish trial and punishment had come to an end. G.o.d's instruments may be unworthy as well as worthy; it was through the hardness of heart of an unbelieving Pharaoh that the deliverance from Egypt had been accomplished in days long before. Nor is there any contradiction between the treatment actually experienced by the Babylonians and that which is predicted for them in the Book of Isaiah.

The language of the prophet is necessarily figurative, and when he declares (Isa. xlvi. 1, 2) that Bel and Nebo had gone into captivity, nothing more is meant than that the people whose G.o.ds they were, and whom they represented, had pa.s.sed under the yoke of a foreign conqueror.

And yet, though the prophet's language was thus figurative, the prediction was eventually fulfilled in a very literal way. The empire of Cyrus was broken up after the death of Kambyses, and had to be reconquered by Darius the son of Hystaspes, the real founder of the Persian Empire. Darius was a Zoroastrian monotheist as well as a Persian, and under him and his successors polytheism ceased to be the religion of the State. Twice during his reign he had to besiege Babylon. Hardly had he been proclaimed king when it revolted under a certain Nidinta-Bel, who called himself "Nebuchadrezzar, the son of Nabonidos." A cameo exists with his helmeted profile, engraved by a Greek artist, and surrounded by the words, "To Merodach, his lord, Nebuchadrezzar, the king of Babylon, has made (it) for his life;" unless, perhaps, Professor Schrader is right in referring the portrait, not to the pretender, but to the real Nebuchadrezzar of Biblical history. Babylon endured a siege of two years, and was at last captured by Darius only by the help of a stratagem. Six years afterwards it again rose in revolt, under an Armenian, who professed, like his predecessor, to be "Nebuchadrezzar, the son of Nabonidos." Once more, however, it was besieged and taken, and this time the pretender was put to death by impalement. His predecessor, Nidinta-Bel, seems to have been slain while the Persian troops were forcing their way into the captured city. After the second capture of Babylon Darius pulled down its walls; and his son Xerxes completed the work of destruction by destroying the great temple of Bel, and carrying away the golden image of the G.o.d.

In Nidinta-Bel the line of independent Babylonian kings may be regarded as having come to an end, since the leader of the second revolt was not a native, but an Armenian settler. To him, therefore, we may apply the magnificent description of the death of the last Babylonian monarch on the battle-field, and his descent into the under-world, which we read in Isaiah xiv. Ill.u.s.trations have been taken by the prophet from Babylonian mythology, in order to heighten the horror of the scene. The king of Babylonia is compared to the morning star, whose movements the Babylonians had been the first of mankind to record. He is represented as saying in his heart, "I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the (other) stars of G.o.d: I will sit also upon the mount of the a.s.sembly (of the G.o.ds) in the furthest regions of the north." This mount, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, was the Olympos of the Accadians, by whom it was called Kharsak-kurra "the mountain of the east." Its peak was the pivot on which the sky rested, and it was therefore also known as "the mountain of the world." It lay far away in the regions of the north-east, the entrance, as it was supposed, to the lower world, and it was sometimes identified with the mountain of Nizir, the modern Rowandiz, on whose summit the ark of the Chaldean Noah was believed to have rested. From the heights of this mountain, where he had vainly dreamed of sitting among the G.o.ds, the Babylonian king was to be hurled into the world below. Here again the prophet borrows his ill.u.s.tration from the mythology of Accad.

The heroes of the past are placed before us seated in Hades on their shadowy thrones, from which they rise to greet the arrival of their new comrade.

The best commentary on the description is to be found in the words of an old Babylonian poem, which tells of the descent of the G.o.ddess Istar into Hades, in search of her dead husband Tammuz. The poem opens as follows:-

"To Hades, the land whence none return, the land of darkness, Istar the daughter of the Moon-G.o.d inclined her ear, Yea, the daughter of the Moon-G.o.d inclined her ear.

To the house of darkness, the dwelling of the G.o.d Irkalla, To the house out of which there is no exit, To the road from which there is no return, To the house from whose entrance the light is taken, The place where dust is their nourishment, and mud their food; Light is never seen, in darkness they dwell."

Parallel with this is the description of Hades, supposed to be given by the dead friend of Gisdhubar, in the great Chaldean epic in which the account of the deluge is embodied. Here we read-

"To Hades, the land whence none return, I turn myself, I spread like a bird my hands.

I descend, I descend, to the house of darkness, the dwelling of the G.o.d Irkalla.

To the house out of which there is no exit.

To the road from which there is no return, To the house from whose entrance the light is taken, The place where dust is their nourishment, and mud their food, And its chiefs are like birds covered with feathers; Light is never seen, in darkness they dwell.

In that house, O my friend, which I shall enter.

There is treasured up for me a crown.

With those wearing crowns, who from days of old ruled the earth.

To whom the G.o.ds Anu and Bel have given names of rule."

But it is time for us to return to the inscriptions of Cyrus. Next to the fact that he was a polytheist, the most startling revelation they make is that he was not a king of Persia at all. Persia seems to have been acquired by him after his conquest of Astyages, at some time between the sixth and ninth year of Nabonidos. Both he and his ancestors were kings of Anzan or Elam. It is true, he could trace his descent back to a member of the royal Persian clan, Teispes, who appears to have taken possession of Elam during the troublous period that followed the fall of a.s.syria, and to have resigned his Persian dominions to his son Ariaramnes, the great-grandfather of Darius. It must be this conquest of Elam which was prophesied by Jeremiah at the beginning of Zedekiah's reign (Jer. xlix.

34-39), and the result of it was to make Cyrus an Elamite in education and religion. The empire which he founded was not a Persian one; Darius, the son of Hystaspes, was the real founder of that. It was only as the predecessor of Darius, and for the sake of intelligibility to the readers of a later day, that Cyrus could be called a king of Persia, as he is in the Book of Ezra, where the original words of his proclamation, "king of Elam" have been changed into the more familiar and intelligible "king of Persia" (Ez. i. 2.). Elsewhere in the Bible (Isa. xxi. 1-10), where the invasion of Babylonia is described, there is no mention of Persia, only of Elam and Media, that is to say, of the ancestral dominions of Cyrus and that kingdom of Ekbatana which he had annexed. This is in strict accordance with the revelations of the monuments, and is a most interesting testimony to the accuracy of the Old Testament records.

Another fact of an equally revolutionary kind which the inscriptions teach us is that Babylon was not besieged and taken by Cyrus. It opened its gates to his general long before he came near it, and needed neither fighting nor battle for its occupation. It thus becomes evident that the siege of Babylon described by Herodotus really belongs to the reign of Darius, and has been transferred by tradition to the reign of Cyrus, and that the late Mr. Bosanquet was right in a.s.serting that the Darius of the Book of Daniel is Darius the son of Hystaspes. Belshazzar, as we know from an inscription of Nabonidos, which mentions him, was the eldest son of that monarch, and he is no doubt the "king's son" who commanded the Babylonian army, according to the tablet translated above.

But besides the main facts to be derived from these newly found inscriptions, there is much else in them which is worthy of regard. This is especially the case with the inscription on the clay cylinder, in which we find a reference to the restoration of the Babylonian captives to their several homes. The experience of Cyrus had taught him that the old a.s.syrian and Babylonian system of transporting conquered nations was an error, and did but introduce a dangerously disaffected people into the country to which they had been brought. Through this conviction, which seemed to Cyrus himself merely the result of his own experience and political sagacity, G.o.d worked to bring about the fulfilment of His promises to the Jewish exiles. Those who chose to return to Jerusalem were allowed to do so, and there rebuild a fortress which Cyrus considered would be useful to him as a check upon Egypt. The nations which had been brought from east and west were restored to their lands, along with their G.o.ds, whom they were henceforth to worship in peace. Among them, as we learn from the Old Testament, were the captives of Judah, the worshippers of the one true G.o.d.

Another fact which we gather from the words of Cyrus is that Nabonidos had offended the Babylonian priesthood, and had been accused by some of them of impiety. His removal of the images of the local deities from their shrines seems to have been regarded as a peculiar sin; and Cyrus goes so far as to a.s.sert that Nabonidos had brought them into Babylon, "to the anger of the lord of G.o.ds." Indeed, he even says that the Babylonian king had not worshipped the patron G.o.d of his own capital. How little, however, this statement was really justified may be seen from the inscription of Nabonidos quoted above, in which reference is made for the first time to Cyrus, "the young servant" of Merodach.

The language used of himself by Cyrus reminds us sometimes of the inspired words in which he is spoken of in the prophecies of Isaiah. When he says that he "governed in justice and righteousness," and that Merodach "beheld with joy the deeds of his vicegerent, who was righteous in hand and heart," we cannot help thinking of G.o.d's declaration that He had "raised him up in righteousness," (Isa. xlv. 13). When he says that "Merodach, who in his ministry raises the dead to life, who benefits all men in difficulty and prayer, has in goodness drawn nigh to him, has made strong his name," we almost fancy we hear an echo of the words of Scripture: "For Jacob My servant's sake, and Israel Mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name; I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me. I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no G.o.d beside Me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me" (Isa. xlv. 4, 5).

The t.i.tle given to Merodach-"the G.o.d who raises the dead to life"-is a remarkable one, but it was a t.i.tle which was applied to the G.o.d as early as the Accadian epoch. In the religious hymns of the Accadians, Merodach plays the part of a mediator and intercessor; if the G.o.ds are angry, it is Merodach who intercedes for man. Mankind, in fact, are his especial care; he was supposed to heal their diseases and to raise them after death to life. Whether there was any reference here to the doctrine of the resurrection is doubtful: more probably nothing further was meant than that the spirit of the dead man, through the help of Merodach, was allowed to drink of "the waters of life," that bubbled up in Hades beneath the golden throne of the spirits of earth, and so to ascend to the Accadian heaven, "the land of the silver sky," where the heroes lay reclined among the G.o.ds on couches, feasting at banquets which knew no end.

Merodach was originally the Sun-G.o.d, and when Babylonia pa.s.sed into the hands of the Semites he still continued to be worshipped, as the interceding G.o.d who hears prayers and "raises the dead to life." But he was now more specially honoured as Bel or Baal, "lord" a t.i.tle which properly belonged to an older deity, but which came in time to be almost confined to Merodach, alone. When Bel and Nebo are mentioned together in the Bible (Isa. xlvi. 1), it is Merodach, the tutelary divinity of Babylon, that is meant, Nebo, "the prophet," to whom peculiar honour was paid at Babylon after the rise of the dynasty of Nebuchadrezzar, being usually a.s.sociated with him.

A large number of prayers have been discovered addressed for the most part to Merodach, though there are some which are addressed also to the other deities. These prayers are written in a.s.syrian, and const.i.tute a sort of manual of devotion. They are seldom of great length, one of the longest being a prayer after a bad dream, which is, however, addressed to the G.o.ddess Istar as well as to Merodach. Portions of it have been lost; what remains may be quoted as an example of this species of literature, and is as follows: "May the lord set my prayer at rest, (may he remove) my heavy (sin)! May the lord (grant) a return of favour. By day direct unto death all that disquiets me. O my G.o.ddess, be gracious unto me; when (wilt thou hear) my prayer? May they pardon my sin, my wickedness, (and) my transgression. May the exalted one deliver, may the holy one love. May the seven winds carry away my groaning. May the worm lay it low, may the bird bear it upwards to heaven. May a shoal of fish carry it away; may the river bear it along. May the creeping thing of the field come unto me; may the waters of the river as they flow cleanse me. Enlighten me like a mask of gold. Food and drink perpetually before thee may I get. Heap up the worm, take away his life. The steps of thine altar, thy many ones, may I ascend. With the worm make me pa.s.s, and may I be kept with thee. Make me to be fed, and may a favourable dream come. May the dream I dream be favourable; may the dream I dream be fulfilled, May the dream I dream turn to prosperity. May Makhir, the G.o.d of dreams, settle upon my head. Let me enter Beth-Saggil, the palace of the G.o.ds, the temple of the lord. Give me unto Merodach, the merciful, to prosperity, even to prospering hands. May thy entering be exalted, may thy divinity be glorious; may the men of my city extol thy mighty deeds."

The tone of this prayer is not very high, and it reveals how much superst.i.tion was mixed with even the best aspirations of a.s.syrian spiritual life. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that a series of penitential psalms exists, coming down from the earliest period of Babylonian history, which breathe a much more exalted and purer spirit.

These psalms are not written in Accadian, but in the closely-allied dialect of Sumer or Shinar, and an a.s.syrian interlinear translation is attached to them. From time to time expressions that occur in them remind us of the Book of Psalms. No more suitable way can be found of concluding our review of the ill.u.s.trations of the Old Testament Scriptures afforded by modern discovery, than by giving at full length a translation of one of these touching relics of old time. In reading it we do indeed feel that even in the darkest ages of ignorance and heathenism G.o.d was still moving the hearts of men, "that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him:"

"My Lord is wroth in his heart; may he be appeased again.

May G.o.d be appeased again, for I knew not that I sinned.

May Istar, my mother, be appeased again, for I knew not that I sinned.

G.o.d knoweth that I knew not; may he be appeased.

Istar, my mother, knoweth that I knew not; may she be appeased.

May the heart of my G.o.d be appeased.

May the heart of Istar, my mother, be appeased.

May G.o.d and Istar, my mother, be appeased.

May G.o.d cease from his anger.

May Istar, my mother, (cease from her anger).

The transgression (I committed my G.o.d) knew.

[The next few lines are obliterated.]

The transgression (I committed Istar, my mother, knew).

(My tears) I drink like the waters of the sea.

That which was forbidden by my G.o.d, I ate without knowing.

That which was forbidden by Istar, my mother, I trampled on without knowing.

O my Lord, my transgression is great, many are my sins.

O my G.o.d, my transgression is great, many are my sins.

O Istar, my mother, my transgression is great, many are my sins.

O my G.o.d, who knowest that I knew not, my transgression is great, many are my sins.

O Istar, my mother, who knowest that I knew not, my transgression is great, many are my sins.

The transgression that I committed I knew not.

The sin that I sinned I knew not.

The forbidden thing did I eat.

The forbidden thing did I trample on.

My Lord, in the anger of his heart, has punished me.

G.o.d in the strength of his heart has received me.

Istar, my mother, has seized upon me and put me to grief.

G.o.d, who knoweth that I knew not, has afflicted me.

Istar, my mother, who knoweth that I knew not, has caused darkness.

I prayed and none takes my hand.

I wept and none held my palm.

I cry aloud; but there is none that will hear me.

I am in darkness and hiding, I dare not look up.

To G.o.d I refer my distress, I utter my prayer.

The feet of Istar, my mother, I embrace.

To G.o.d, who knoweth that I knew not, my prayer I utter.

To Istar, my mother, who knoweth that I knew not, my prayer I address.

[The next four lines are lost.]

How long, O G.o.d (shall I suffer)?

How long, O Istar, my mother (shall I suffer)?

How long, O G.o.d, who knoweth that I knew not, (shall I feel thy) strength?

How long, O Istar, my mother, who knoweth that I knew not, shall thy heart (be angry)?

Thou writest the number (?) of mankind, and none knoweth it.

Thou callest man by his name, and what does he know?

Whether he shall be afflicted, or whether he shall be prosperous, there is no man that knows.

O my G.o.d, thou givest not rest to thy servant.

In the waters of the raging flood take his hand.