Chapter 13

10. However that may be, 5000 B.C. is a moderate and probable date. But ancient nations were not content with such, when they tried to locate and classify their own beginnings. These being necessarily obscure and only vaguely shadowed out in traditions which gained in fancifulness and lost in probability with every succeeding generation that received them and handed them down to the next, they loved to magnify them by enshrouding them in the mystery of innumerable ages. The more appalling the figures, the greater the glory. Thus we gather from some fragments of Berosus that, according to the national Chaldean tradition, there was an interval of over 259,000 years between the first appearance of Oannes and the first king. Then come ten successive kings, each of whom reigns a no less extravagant number of years (one 36,000, another 43,000, even 64,000; 10,800 being the most modest figure), till the aggregate of all these different periods makes up the pretty sum total of 691,200 years, supposed to have elapsed from the first appearance of Oannes to the Deluge. It is so impossible to imagine so prodigious a number of years or couple with it anything at all real, that we might just as well substitute for such a figure the simpler "very, very long ago," or still better, the approved fairy tale beginning, "There was once upon a time, ..." It conveys quite as definite a notion, and would, in such a case, be the more appropriate, that all a nation's most marvellous traditions, most fabulous legends, are naturally placed in those stupendously remote ages which no record could reach, no experience control. Although these traditions and legends generally had a certain body of actual truth and dimly remembered fact in them, which might still be apparent to the learned and the cultivated few, the ignorant masses of the people swallowed the thing whole, as real history, and found things acknowledged as impossible easy to believe, for the simple reason that "it was so very long ago!" A Chaldean of Alexander's time certainly did not expect to meet a divine Man-Fish in his walks along the sea-shore, but--there was no knowing what might or might not have happened seven hundred thousand years ago! In the legend of the six successive apparitions under the first ten long-lived kings, he would not have descried the simple sense so lucidly set forth by Mr. Maspero, one of the most distinguished of French Orientalists:--"The times preceding the Deluge represented an experimental period, during which mankind, being as yet barbarous, had need of divine assistance to overcome the difficulties with which it was surrounded. Those times were filled up with six manifestations of the deity, doubtless answering to the number of sacred books in which the priests saw the most complete expression of revealed law."[AI] This presents another and more probable explanation of the legend than the one suggested above, (end of § 7); but there is no more actual _proof_ of the one than of the other being the correct one.

11. If Chaldea was in after times a battle-ground of nations, it was in the beginning a very nursery and hive of peoples. The various races in their migrations must necessarily have been attracted and arrested by the exceeding fertility of its soil, which it is said, in the times of its highest prosperity and under proper conditions of irrigation, yielded two hundredfold return for the grain it received. Settlement must have followed settlement in rapid succession. But the nomadic element was for a long time still very prevalent, and side by side with the builders of cities and tillers of fields, shepherd tribes roamed peacefully over the face of the land, tolerated and unmolested by the permanent population, with which they mixed but warily, occasionally settling down temporarily, and shifting their settlements as safety or advantage required it,--or wandering off altogether from that common halting-place, to the north, and west, and south-west. This makes it very plain why Chaldea is given as the land where the tongues became confused and the second separation of races took place.

12. Of those principally nomadic tribes the greatest part did not belong, like the Cushites or Canaanites, to the descendants of Ham, "the Dark," but to those of SHEM, whose name, signifying "Glory, Renown," stamps him as the eponymous ancestor of that race which has always firmly believed itself to be the chosen one of God. They were Semites. When they arrived on the plains of Chaldea, they were inferior in civilization to the people among whom they came to dwell. They knew nothing of city arts and had all to learn. They did learn, for superior culture always asserts its power,--even to the language of the Cushite settlers, which the latter were rapidly substituting for the rude and poor Turanian idiom of Shumir and Accad. This language, or rather various dialects of it, were common to most Hamitic and Semitic tribes, among whom that from which the Hebrews sprang brought it to its greatest perfection. The others worked it into different kindred dialects--the Assyrian, the Aramaic or Syrian, the Arabic--according to their several peculiarities. The Phoenicians of the sea-shore, and all the Canaanite nations, also spoke languages belonging to the same family, and therefore classed among the so-called Semitic tongues. Thus it has come to pass that philology,--or the Science of Languages,--adopted a wrong name for that entire group, calling the languages belonging to it, "Semitic," while, in reality, they are originally "Hamitic." The reason is that the Hamitic origin of those important languages which have been called Semitic these hundred years had not been discovered until very lately, and to change the name now would produce considerable confusion.

13. Most of the Semitic tribes who dwelt in Chaldea adopted not only the Cushite language, but the Cushite culture and religion. Asshur carried all three northward, where the Assyrian kingdom arose out of a few Babylonian colonies, and Aram westward to the land which was afterwards called Southern Syria, and where the great city of Damascus long flourished and still exists. But there was one tribe of higher spiritual gifts than the others. It was not numerous, for through many generations it consisted of only one great family governed by its own eldest chief or patriarch. It is true that such a family, with the patriarch's own children and children's children, its wealth of horses, camels, flocks of sheep, its host of servants and slaves, male and female, represented quite a respectable force; Abraham could muster three hundred eighteen armed and _trained_ servants who had been born in his own household. This particular tribe seems to have wandered for some time on the outskirts of Chaldea and in the land itself, as indicated by the name given to its eponym in Chap. X.: ARPHAXAD (more correctly ARPHAKSHAD), corrupted from AREPH-KASDÎM, which means, "bordering on the Chaldeans," or perhaps "boundaries"--in the sense of "land"--of the Chaldeans. Generation after generation pushed further westward, traversed the land of Shinar, crossed the Euphrates and reached the city of Ur, in or near which the tribe dwelt many years.

14. Ur was then the greatest city of Southern Chaldea. The earliest known kings of Shumir resided in it, and besides that, it was the principal commercial mart of the country. For, strange as it may appear when we look on a modern map, Ur, the ruins of which are now 150 miles from the sea, was then a maritime city, with harbor and ship docks. The waters of the Gulf reached much further inland than they do now. There was then a distance of many miles between the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Ur lay very near the mouth of the latter river. Like all commercial and maritime cities, it was the resort not only of all the different races which dwelt in the land itself, but also of foreign traders. The active intellectual life of a capital, too, which was at the same time a great religious centre and the seat of a powerful priesthood, must of necessity have favored interchange of ideas, and have exerted an influence on that Semitic tribe of whom the Bible tells us that it "went forth from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan," led by the patriarch Terah and his son Abraham (Genesis xi. 31). The historian of Genesis here, as throughout the narrative, does not mention any date whatever for the event he relates; nor does he hint at the cause of this removal. On the first of these points the study of Chaldean cuneiform monuments throws considerable light, while the latter does not admit of more than guesses--of which something hereafter.

15. Such is a broad and cursory outline of the theory according to which Cushite immigrations preceded the arrival of the Semites in the land of Shumir and Accad. Those who uphold it give several reasons for their opinion, such as that the Bible several times mentions a Cush located in the East and evidently different from the Cush which has been identified as Ethiopia; that, in Chap. X. of Genesis (8-12), Nimrod, the legendary hero, whose empire at first was in "the land of Shinar," and who is said to have "gone forth out of that land into Assyria," is called a son of Cush; that the most ancient Greek poets knew of "Ethiopians" in the far East as opposed to those of the South--and several more. Those scholars who oppose this theory dismiss it wholesale. They will not admit the existence of a Cushite element or migration in the East at all, and put down the expressions in the Bible as simple mistakes, either of the writers or copyists. According to them, there was only one immigration in the land of Shumir and Accad, that of the Semites, achieved through many ages and in numerous instalments. The language which superseded the ancient Shumiro-Accadian idiom is to them a Semitic one in the directest and most exclusive sense; the culture grafted on that of the earlier population is by them called purely "Semitic;" while their opponents frequently use the compound designation of "Cushito-Semitic," to indicate the two distinct elements of which, to them, it appears composed. It must be owned that the anti-Cushite opinion is gaining ground. Yet the Cushite theory cannot be considered as disposed of, only "not proven,"--or not sufficiently so, and therefore in abeyance and fallen into some disfavor. With this proviso we shall adopt the word "Semitic," as the simpler and more generally used.

16. It is only with the rise of Semitic culture in Southern Mesopotamia that we enter on a period which, however remote, misty, and full of blanks, may still be called, in a measure, "historical," because there is a certain number of facts, of which contemporary monuments give positive evidence. True, the connection between those facts is often not apparent; their causes and effects are frequently not to be made out save by more or less daring conjectures; still there are numerous landmarks of proven fact, and with these real history begins. No matter if broad gaps have to be left open or temporarily filled with guesses. New discoveries are almost daily turning up, inscriptions, texts, which unexpectedly here supply a missing link, there confirm or demolish a conjecture, establish or correct dates which had long been puzzles or suggested on insufficient foundations. In short, details may be supplied as yet brokenly and sparingly, but the general outline of the condition of Chaldea may be made out as far back as forty centuries before Christ.

17. Of one thing there can be no doubt: that our earliest glimpse of the political condition of Chaldea shows us the country divided into numerous small states, each headed by a great city, made famous and powerful by the sanctuary or temple of some particular deity, and ruled by a _patesi_, a title which is now thought to mean _priest-king_, i.e., priest and king in one. There can be little doubt that the beginning of the city was everywhere the temple, with its college of ministering priests, and that the surrounding settlement was gradually formed by pilgrims and worshippers. That royalty developed out of the priesthood is also more than probable, and consequently must have been, in its first stage, a form of priestly rule, and, in a great measure, subordinate to priestly influence. There comes a time when for the title of _patesi_ is substituted that of "king" simply--a change which very possibly indicates the assumption by the kings of a more independent attitude towards the class from which their power originally sprang. It is noticeable that the distinction between the Semitic newcomers and the indigenous Shumiro-Accadians continues long to be traceable in the names of the royal temple-builders, even after the new Semitic idiom, which we call the Assyrian, had entirely ousted the old language--a process which must have taken considerable time, for it appears, and indeed stands to reason, that the newcomers, in order to secure the wished for influence and propagate their own culture, at first not only learned to understand but actually used themselves the language of the people among whom they came, at least in their public documents. This it is that explains the fact that so many inscriptions and tablets, while written in the dialect of Shumir or Accad, are Semitic in spirit and in the grade of culture they betray. Furthermore, even superficial observation shows that the old language and the old names survive longest in Shumir,--the South. From this fact it is to be inferred with little chance of mistake that the North,--the land of Accad,--was earlier Semitized, that the Semitic immigrants established their first headquarters in that part of the country, that their power and influence thence spread to the South.

18. Fully in accordance with these indications, the first grand historical figure that meets us at the threshold of Chaldean history, dim with the mists of ages and fabulous traditions, yet unmistakably real, is that of the Semite SHARRUKIN, king of Accad--or AGADÊ, as the great Northern city came to be called--more generally known in history under the corrupt modern reading of SARGON, and called Sargon I., "the First," to distinguish him from another monarch of the same name who was found to have reigned many centuries later. As to the city of Agadê, it is no other than the city of Accad mentioned in Genesis x., 10. It was situated close to the Euphrates on a wide canal just opposite Sippar, so that in time the two cities came to be considered as one double city, and the Hebrews always called it "the two Sippars"--SEPHARVAIM, which is often spoken of in the Bible. It was there that Sharrukin established his rule, and a statue was afterwards raised to him there, the inscription on which, making him speak, as usual, in the first person, begins with the proud declaration: "Sharrukin, the mighty king, the king of Agadê, am I." Yet, although his reforms and conquests were of lasting importance, and himself remained one of the favorite heroes of Chaldean tradition, he appears to have been an adventurer and usurper. Perhaps he was, for this very reason, all the dearer to the popular fancy, which, in the absence of positive facts concerning his birth and origin, wove around them a halo of romance, and told of him a story which must be nearly as old as mankind, for it has been told over and over again, in different countries and ages, of a great many famous kings and heroes. This of Sharrukin is the oldest known version of it, and the inscription on his statue puts it into the king's own mouth. It makes him say that he knew not his father, and that his mother, a princess, gave him birth in a hiding-place, (or "an inaccessible place"), near the Euphrates, but that his family were the rulers of the land. "She placed me in a basket of rushes," the king is further made to say; "with bitumen the door of my ark she closed. She launched me on the river, which drowned me not. The river bore me along; to Akki, the water-carrier, it brought me. Akki, the water-carrier, in the tenderness of his heart lifted me up. Akki, the water-carrier, as his own child brought me up. Akki, the water-carrier, made me his gardener. And in my gardenership the goddess Ishtar loved me...."

19. Whatever his origin and however he came by the royal power, Sargon was a great monarch. It is said that he undertook successful expeditions into Syria, and a campaign into Elam; that with captives of the conquered races he partly peopled his new capital, Agadê, where he built a palace and a magnificent temple; that on one occasion he was absent three years, during which time he advanced to the very shores of the Mediterranean, which he calls "the sea of the setting sun," and where he left memorial records of his deeds, and returned home in triumph, bringing with him immense spoils. The inscription contains only the following very moderate mention of his military career: "For forty-five years the kingdom I have ruled. And the black-head race (Accadian) I have governed. In multitudes of bronze chariots I rode over rugged lands. I governed the upper countries. Three times to the coast of the (Persian) sea I advanced...."[AJ]

20. This Sharrukin must not be confounded with another king of the same name, who reigned also in Agadê, some 1800 years later (about 2000 B.C.), and in whose time was completed and brought into definite shape a vast religious reform which had been slowly working itself out ever since the Semitic and Accadian elements began to mix in matters of spiritual speculation and worship. What was the result of the amalgamation will form the subject of the next chapter. Suffice it here to say that the religion of Chaldea in the form which it assumed under the second Sharrukin remained fixed forever, and when Babylonian religion is spoken of, it is that which is understood by that name. The great theological work demanded a literary undertaking no less great. The incantations and magic forms of the first, purely Turanian, period had to be collected and put in order, as well as the hymns and prayers of the second period, composed under the influence of a higher and more spiritual religious feeling. But all this literature was in the language of the older population, while the ruling class--the royal houses and the priesthood--were becoming almost exclusively Semitic. It was necessary, therefore, that they should study the old language and learn it so thoroughly as not only to understand and read it, but to be able to use it, in speaking and writing. For that purpose Sargon not only ordered the ancient texts, when collected and sorted, to be copied on clay tablets with the translation--either between the lines, or on opposite columns--into the now generally used modern Semitic language, which we may as well begin to call by its usual name, Assyrian, but gave directions for the compilation of grammars and vocabularies,--the very works which have enabled the scholars of the present day to arrive at the understanding of that prodigiously ancient tongue which, without such assistance, must have remained a sealed book forever.

21. Such is the origin of the great collection in three books and two hundred tablets, the contents of which made the subject of the preceding chapter. To this must be added another great work, in seventy tablets, in Assyrian, on astrology, i.e., the supposed influence of the heavenly bodies, according to their positions and conjunctions, on the fate of nations and individuals and on the course of things on earth generally--an influence which was firmly believed in; and probably yet a third work, on omens, prodigies and divination. To carry out these extensive literary labors, to treasure the results worthily and safely, Sargon II. either founded or greatly enlarged the library of the priestly college at Urukh (Erech), so that this city came to be called "the City of Books." This repository became the most important one in all Chaldea, and when, fourteen centuries later, the Assyrian Asshurbanipal sent his scribes all over the country, to collect copies of the ancient, sacred and scientific texts for his own royal library at Nineveh, it was at Erech that they gathered their most abundant harvest, being specially favored there by the priests, who were on excellent terms with the king after he had brought back from Shushan and restored to them the statue of their goddess Nana. Agadê thus became the headquarters, as it were, of the Semitic influence and reform, which spread thence towards the South, forming a counter-current to the culture of Shumir, which had steadily progressed from the Gulf northward.

22. It is just possible that Sargon's collection may have also comprised literature of a lighter nature than those ponderous works on magic and astrology. At least, a work on agriculture has been found, which is thought to have been compiled for the same king's library,[AK] and which contains bits of popular poetry (maxims, riddles, short peasant songs) of the kind that is now called "folk-lore." Of the correctness of the supposition there is, as yet, no absolute proof, but as some of these fragments, of which unfortunately but few could be recovered, are very interesting and pretty in their way, this is perhaps the best place to insert them. The following four may be called "Maxims," and the first is singularly pithy and powerfully expressed.

1. Like an oven that is old Against thy foes be hard and strong.

2. May he suffer vengeance, May it be returned to him, Who gives the provocation.

3. If evil thou doest, To the everlasting sea Thou shalt surely go.

4. Thou wentest, thou spoiledst The land of the foe, For the foe came and spoiled Thy land, even thine.

23. It will be noticed that No. 3 alone expresses moral feeling of a high standard, and is distinctively Semitic in spirit, the same spirit which is expressed in a loftier and purely religious vein, and a more poetical form in one of the "Penitential Psalms," where it says:

Whoso fears not his god--will be cut off even like a reed. Whoso honors not the goddess--his bodily strength shall waste away; Like a star of heaven, his light shall wane; like waters of the night he shall disappear.

Some fragments can be well imagined as being sung by the peasant at work to his ploughing team, in whose person he sometimes speaks:

5. A heifer am I,--to the cow I am yoked; The plough handle is strong--lift it up! lift it up!

6. My knees are marching--my feet are not resting; With no wealth of thy own--grain thou makest for me.[AL]