Part 78

A gloomy lake called Avernus, which filled the crater of an extinct volcano, situated a little to the north of the Bay of Naples, was the object of many superstitious imaginations among the ancients. "There was a place near Lake Avernus called the prophetic cavern. Persons were in attendance there who called up ghosts. Anyone desiring it came thither, and, having killed a victim and poured out libations, summoned whatever ghost he wanted. The ghost came, very faint and doubtful to the sight, but vocal and prophetic; and, having answered the questions, went off."

_Maximus Tyrius, quoted by C. C. Felton, in Greece, Ancient and Modern, c. 2, lecture 9._

See, also, CUMÆ: AND BAIÆ.

AVERYSBORO, Battle of.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1865 (FEBRUARY-MARCH: THE CAROLINAS).

AVIGNON: 10th Century. In the Kingdom of Arles.

See BURGUNDY: A. D. 843-933.

AVIGNON: A. D. 1226. Siege by Louis VIII.

See ALBIGENSES: A. D. 1217-1229.

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AVIGNON: A. D. 1309-1348. Made the seat of the Papacy. Purchase of the city by Clement V.

See PAPACY: A. D. 1294-1348.

AVIGNON: A. D. 1367-1369. Temporary return of Urban V. to Rome.

See PAPACY: A. D. 1352-1378.

AVIGNON: A. D. 1377-1417. Return of Pope Gregory XI. to Rome. Residence of the anti-popes of the great Schism.

See PAPACY: A. D.1377-1417.

AVIGNON: A. D. 1790-1791. Revolution and Anarchy. Atrocities committed. Reunion with France decreed.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1790-1791.

AVIGNON: A. D. 1797. Surrendered to France by the Pope.

See FRANCE: A. D: 1796-1797 (OCTOBER-APRIL).

AVIGNON: A. D. 1815. Possession by France confirmed.

See VIENNA, THE CONGRESS OF.

AVIGNON: End----------

AVIONES, The.

"The Aviones were a Suevic clan. They are mentioned by Tacitus in connexion with the Reudigni, Angli, Varini, Eudoses, Suardones and Nuithones, all Suevic clans. These tribes must have occupied Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Sleswick-Holstein, the Elbe being their Eastern boundary. It is, however, impossible to define their precise localities."

_A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb, Minor Works of Tacitus, Geographical Notes to the Germany._

AVIS, The House of.

See PORTUGAL: A. D. 1383-1385.

AVIS, Knights of.

This is a Portuguese military-religions order which originated about 1147 during the wars with the Moors, and which formerly observed the monastic rule of St. Benedict. It became connected with the order of Calatrava in Spain and received from the latter its property in Portugal. Pope Paul III. united the Grand Mastership to the Crown of Portugal.

_F. C. Woodhouse, Military Religious Orders, part 4._

See, also, PORTUGAL: A. D. 1095-1325.

AVITUS, Roman Emperor (Western), A. D. 455-456.

AVVIM, The. The original inhabitants of the south-west corner of Canaan, from which they were driven by the Philistines.

_H. Ewald, History of Israel, book 1, section 4._

AYACUCHO, Battle of (1824).

See PERU: A. D. 1820-1826.

AYLESBURY ELECTION CASE.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1703.

AYLESFORD, Battle of (A. D. 455).

The first battle fought and won by the invading Jutes after their landing in Britain under Hengest and Horsa. It was fought at the lowest ford of the river Medway.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 449-473.

AYMARAS, The.

See PERU: THE ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS.

AYOUBITE OR AIYUBITE DYNASTY.

See SALADIN, THE EMPIRE OF.

AZINCOUR (AGINCOURT), Battle of.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1415.

AZOF OR AZOV: A. D. 1696. Taken by the Russians.

See TURKS: A. D. 1684-1696.

AZOF: A. D. 1711. Restoration to the Turks.

See SCANDINAVIAN STATES (SWEDEN): A. D. 1707-1718.

AZOF: A. D. 1736-1739. Captured by the Russians. Secured to them by the Treaty of Belgrade.

See RUSSIA: A. D. 1725-1739.

AZOF: End----------

AZTEC.

See MEXICO, ANCIENT; and A. D. 1325-1502; also, AMERICAN ABORIGINES: MAYAS.

AZTEC AND MAYA PICTURE-WRITING.

"No nation ever reduced it [pictography] more to a system. It was in constant use in the daily transactions of life. They [the Aztecs] manufactured for writing purposes a thick coarse paper from the leaves of the agave plant by a process of maceration and pressure. An Aztec book closely resembles one of our quarto volumes. It is made of a single sheet, 12 to 15 inches wide, and often 60 or 70 feet long, and is not rolled, but folded either in squares or zigzags in such a manner that on opening there are two pages exposed to view. Thin wooden boards are fastened to each of the outer leaves, so that the whole presents as neat an appearance, remarks Peter Martyr, as if it had come from the shop of a skilful book binder. They also covered buildings, tapestries and scrolls of parchment with these devices. … What is still more astonishing, there is reason to believe, in some instances, their figures were not painted, but actually printed with movable blocks of wood on which the symbols were carved in relief, though this was probably confined to those intended for ornament only. In these records we discern something higher than a mere symbolic notation. They contain the germ of a phonetic alphabet, and represent sounds of spoken language. The symbol is often not connected with the idea, but with the word. The mode in which this is done corresponds precisely to that of the rebus. It is a simple method, readily suggesting itself. In the middle ages it was much in vogue in Europe for the same purpose for which it was chiefly employed in Mexico at the same time—the writing of proper names. For example, the English family Bolton was known in heraldry by a 'tun' transfixed by a 'bolt.' Precisely so the Mexican Emperor Ixcoatl is mentioned in the Aztec manuscripts under the figure of a serpent, coatl,' pierced by obsidian knives, 'ixtli.' … As a syllable could be expressed by any object whose name commenced with it, as few words can be given the form of a rebus without some change, as the figures sometimes represent their full phonetic value, sometimes only that of their initial sound, and as universally the attention of the artist was directed less to the sound than to the idea, the didactic painting of the Mexicans, whatever it might have been to them, is a sealed book to us, and must remain so in great part. … Immense masses of such documents were stored in the imperial archives of ancient Mexico. Torquemada asserts that five cities alone yielded to the Spanish governor on one requisition no less than 16,000 volumes or scrolls! Every leaf was destroyed. Indeed, so thorough and wholesale was the destruction of these memorials, now so precious in our eyes, that hardly enough remain to whet the wits of antiquaries. In the libraries of Paris, Dresden, Pesth, and the Vatican are, however, a sufficient number to make us despair of deciphering them, had we for comparison all which the Spaniards destroyed. Beyond all others the Mayas, resident on the peninsula of Yucatan, would seem to have approached nearest a true phonetic system. They had a regular and well understood alphabet of 27 elementary sounds, the letters of which are totally different from those of any other nation, and evidently originated with themselves. But besides these they used a large number of purely conventional symbols, and moreover were accustomed constantly to employ the ancient pictographic method in addition as a sort of commentary on the sound represented. … With the aid of this alphabet, which has fortunately been preserved, we are enabled to spell out a few words on the Yucatecan manuscripts and façades, but thus far with no positive results. The loss of the ancient pronunciation is especially in the way of such studies. In South America, also, there is said to have been a nation who cultivated the art of picture-writing, the Panos, on the river Ucayale."

_D. G. Brinton, The Myths of the New World, chapter 1._

AZTEC: End----------

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B.

BABAR, King of Ferghana, A. D. 1494-; King of Kabul, A. D. 1504-; Moghul Emperor or Padischah of India, A. D. 1526-1530.

BABENBERGS, The.

See AUSTRIA: A. D. 805-1246.

BABYLON: The City.

"The city stands on a broad plain, and is an exact square, a hundred and twenty furlongs in length each way, so that the entire circuit is four hundred and eighty furlongs. While such is its size, in magnificence there is no other city that approaches it. It is surrounded, in the first place, by a broad and deep moat, full of water, behind which rises a wall fifty royal cubits in width and two hundred in height. … And here I may not omit to tell the use to which the mould dug out of the great moat was turned, nor the manner wherein the wall was wrought. As fast as they dug the moat the soil which they got from the cutting was made into bricks, and when a sufficient number were completed they baked the bricks in kilns. Then they set to building, and began with bricking the borders of the moat, after which they proceeded to construct the wall itself, using throughout for their cement hot bitumen, and interposing a layer of wattled reeds at every thirtieth course of the brick. On the top, along the edges of the wall, they constructed buildings of a single chamber facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to turn. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side posts. The bitumen used in the work was brought to Babylon from the Is, a small stream which flows into the Euphrates at the point where the city of the same name stands, eight days' journey from Babylon. Lumps of bitumen are found in great abundance in this river. The city is divided into two portions by the river which runs through the midst of it. This river is the Euphrates. … The city wall is brought down on both sides to the edge of the stream; thence, from the corners of the wall, there is carried along each bank of the river a fence of burnt bricks. The houses are mostly three and four stories high; the streets all run in straight lines; not only those parallel to the river, but also the cross streets which lead down to the water side. At the river end of these cross streets are low gates in the fence that skirts the stream, which are, like the great gates in the outer wall, of brass, and open on the water. The outer wall is the main defence of the city. There is, however, a second inner wall, of less thickness than the first, but very little inferior to it in strength. The centre of each division of the town was occupied by a fortress. In the one stood the palace of the kings, surrounded by a wall of great strength and size: in the other was the sacred precinct of Jupiter Belus, a square enclosure, two furlongs each way, with gates of solid brass; which was also remaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. … On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple."

_Herodotus, History, translated by G. Rawlinson, book 1, chapters 178-181._

According to Ctesias, the circuit of the walls of Babylon was but 360 furlongs. The historians of Alexander agreed nearly with this. As regards the height of the walls, "Strabo and the historians of Alexander substitute 50 for the 200 cubits of Herodotus, and it may therefore be suspected that the latter author referred to hands, four of which were equal to the cubit. The measure, indeed, of 50 fathoms or 200 royal cubits for the walls of a city in a plain is quite preposterous. … My own belief is that the height of the walls of Babylon did not exceed 60 or 70 English feet."

_H. C. Rawlinson, note to above._-

See, also, BABYLONIA: B. C. 625-539.

BABYLON OF THE CRUSADERS, The.

See CRUSADES: A. D. 1248-1254.

BABYLONIA, Primitive.

(So much new knowledge of the ancient peoples in the East has been and is being brought to light by recent search and study, and the account of it in English historical literature is so meagre as yet, that there seems to be good reason for deferring the treatment of these subjects, for the most part, to a later volume of this work. The reader is referred, therefore, to the article "Semites," in the hope that, before its publication is reached, in the fourth or fifth volume, there will be later and better works to quote from on all the subjects embraced. Terrien de Lacouperie's interesting theory, which is introduced below, in this place, is questioned by many scholars; and Professor Sayce, whose writings have done much to popularize the new oriental studies, seems to go sometimes in advance of the sure ground.)

The Sumirians, inhabitants of the Shinar of the Old Testament narrative, and Accadians, who divided primitive Babylonia between them, "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 Chaldeans in the authorized version, is the Babylonian 'casidi' or conquerors, a title which continued to cling to them in consequence of their conquest. The Accadiaus had been the inventors of the pictorial hieroglyphics which afterwards developed into the cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing; they had founded the great cities of Chaldea, and had attained to a high degree of culture and civilization. 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. {239} The books were numerous, and related to a variety of subjects. … 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 Assyria and Babylonia, the educated classes were taught the old extinct Accadian, just as in modern Europe they are taught Latin."

_A. H. Sayce, Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, chapter 2._

"Since Sumir, the Shinar of the Bible, was the first part of the country occupied by the invading Semites, while Accad long continued to be regarded as the seat of an alien race, the language and population of primitive Chaldea have been named Accadian by the majority of Assyrian scholars. The part played by these Accadians in the intellectual history of mankind is highly important. They were the earliest civilizers of Western Asia, and it is to them that we have to trace the arts and sciences, the religious traditions and the philosophy not only of the Assyrians, but also of the Phœnicians, the Aramæans, and even the Hebrews themselves. It was, too, from Chaldea that the germs of Greek art and of much of the Greek pantheon and mythology originally came. Columnar architecture reached its first and highest development in Babylonia; the lions that still guard the main entrance of Mykenæ are distinctly Assyrian in character; and the Greek Herakles with his twelve labours finds his prototype in the hero of the great Chaldean epic. It is difficult to say how much of our present culture is not owed to the stunted, oblique-eyed people of ancient Babylonia; Jerusalem and Athens are the sacred cities of our modern life; and both Jerusalem and Athens were profoundly influenced by the ideas which had their first starting-point in primæval Accad. The Semite has ever been a trader and an intermediary, and his earliest work was the precious trade in spiritual and mental wares. Babylonia was the home and mother of Semitic culture and Semitic inspiration; the Phœnicians never forgot that they were a colony from the Persian Gulf, while the Israelite recounted that his father Abraham had been born in Ur of the Chaldees. Almost the whole of the Assyrian literature was derived from Accad, and translated from the dead language of primitive Chaldea."

_A. H. Sayce, Babylonian Literature, pages 6-7._

_A. H. Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, appendix 2._

"The place of China in the past and future is not that which it was long supposed to be. Recent researches have disclosed that its civilization, like ours, was variously derived from the same old focus of culture of south-western Asia. … It was my good fortune to be able to show, in an uninterrupted series of a score or so of papers in periodicals, of communications to the Royal Asiatic Society and elsewhere, published and unpublished, and of contributions to several works since April 1880, downwards, that the writing and some knowledge of arts, science and government of the early Chinese, more or less enumerated below, were derived from the old civilization of Babylonia, through the secondary focus of Susiana, and that this derivation was a social fact, resulting not from scientific teaching but from practical intercourse of some length between the Susian confederation and the future civilizers of the Chinese, the Bak tribes, who, from their neighbouring settlements in the N., moved eastwards at the time of the great rising of the XXIII. century B. C. Coming again in the field, Dr. J. Edkins has joined me on the same line."

_Terrien de Lacouperie, Babylonia and China (Academy, Aug. 7, 1880)._

"We could enumerate a long series of affinities between Chaldean culture and Chinese civilization, although the last was not borrowed directly. From what evidence we have, it seems highly probable that a certain number of families or of tribes, without any apparent generic name, but among which the Kutta filled an important position, came to China about the year 2500 B. C. These tribes, which came from the West, were obliged to quit the neighbourhood, probably north of the Susiana, and were comprised in the feudal agglomeration of that region, where they must have been influenced by the Akkado-Chaldean culture."

_Terrien de Lacouperie, Early History of Chinese Civilization, page 32._

See, also, CHINA: THE ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE.

BABYLONIA: The early (Chaldean) monarchy.

"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 every where 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. … There comes a time when for the title of patesi is substituted that of king. … 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. … 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. 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 Agade, 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 a very famous Assyrian monarch of the same name who reigned many centuries later. As to the city of Agade, 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. … The tremendously ancient date of 3800 B. C. is now generally accepted for Sargon of Agade—perhaps the remotest authentic date yet arrived at in history."

_Z. A. Ragozin, Story of Chaldea, chapter 4._

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"A horde of Cassites or Kossæans swept down from the mountains of Northern Elam under their leader, Khammuragas; Accad was conquered, a foreign dynasty established in the land, and the capital transferred from Agade to Babylon. Babylon now became a city of importance for the first time; the rank assigned to it in the mythical age was but a reflection of the position it held after the Cassite conquest. The Cassite dynasty is probably the Arabian dynasty of Berosos. … A newly-found inscription of Nabonidos makes the date [of its advent] B. C. 3750 [_foot-note_]. … The first care of Khammuragas, after establishing himself in Accad, was to extend his sway over the southern kingdom of Sumer as well. … Khammuragas became king of the whole of Babylonia. From this time onward the country remained a united monarchy. The Cassite dynasty must have lasted for several centuries, and probably included more than one line of kings. … It was under the Cassite dynasty that the kingdom of Assyria first took its rise,— partly, perhaps, in consequence of the Asiatic conquests of the Egyptian monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty. … In B. C. 1400 the Cassite king married an Assyrian princess. Her son, Kara-Murdas, was murdered by the party opposed to Assyrian influence, but the usurper, Nazi-bugas, was quickly overthrown by the Assyrians, who placed a vassal-prince on the throne. This event may be considered the turning-point in the history of the kingdoms of the Tigris and Euphrates; Assyria henceforth takes the place of the worn-out monarchy of Babylonia, and plays the chief part in the affairs of Western Asia until the day of its final fall. In little more than a hundred years later the Assyrians were again in Babylonia, but this time as avowed enemies to all parties alike; Babylon was captured by the Assyrian monarch Tiglath-Adar in B. C. 1270, and the rule of the Cassite dynasty came to an end."

_A. H. Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, appendix 2._

ALSO IN: _G. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies: Chaldea, chapter 8._

See, also, ASSYRIA.

BABYLONIA: B. C. 625-539. The later Empire.