CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE

Cities have been, and vanished; fanes have sunk, Heaped into shapeless ruin; sands o’erspread Fields that were Edens; millions too have shrunk To a few starving hundreds, or have fled From off the page of being. Now the dead Are the sole habitants of Babylon; Kings, at whose bidding nations toiled and bled, Heroes, who many a field of carnage won, Their names--their boasted names to utter death are done.

--JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.

It should be explained here at the very beginning that in speaking of the Mesopotamian civilisation as a unit, we are adopting for the sake of convenience a form of expression that is not historically accurate. Even the word “Mesopotamia” cannot be justified on strict analysis. The word is from the Greek, and means, literally, “between the rivers,” an obvious reference to the fact that the important portion of the territory in question lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The word was used by the Greeks in indiscriminate application to Babylonia and Assyria, and its extreme convenience as a generic term has led to its retention in lieu of a better one; yet, as has been said, it cannot be applied with strict accuracy unless its etymological significance be quite overlooked; for, curiously enough, neither Babylon nor Nineveh was wholly situated in the territory which the Greek word describes. Babylon lay partly on the western shore of the Euphrates river, and Nineveh was situated on the eastern shore of the Tigris. But in common usage, as so often happens, the exact implication of the word “Mesopotamia” has been overlooked, and the word itself has come to be applied to the entire region of Babylonia and Assyria. In this sense, rather than in the more restricted one, we shall find it convenient as a substitute for the more cumbersome appellation, Babylonia-Assyria.

It has already been pointed out that we have to do with different races of people in dealing with Mesopotamian history. After a long dispute, carried on chiefly by philologists, it is now generally conceded that the earliest civilisation of southern Babylonia was due to a non-Semitic people, the Sumerians.[16] To this people, it would seem, must be ascribed the honour of developing the chief features of Mesopotamian civilisation, including the invention of the cuneiform system of writing. It is not at all clear at precisely what time the Semitic people, destined ultimately to become predominant in this region, made their appearance. Nor is the place of Semitic origin agreed upon among students of the subject. Some authors,[17] as Von Kremer, Guidi, and Hommel, hold that Babylonia was itself originally the cradle of the race. Others, including Sprenger, Sayce, Schrader, De Goeje, Wright, and Barton, contend that the Semites invaded Babylonia from Arabia. Yet others, including Palgrave, Gerland, Bertin, Brinton, Nöldeke, Jastrow, Keane, and Schmidt, hold to the African origin; while a modification of these views advocated by Wiedemann, De Morgan, and Erman supposes that both the Semites and Hamites rose in Arabia, and had their common civilisation before the Hamites went to Africa. Confronted with such conflict of opinions, the historian must be content to regard the exact antecedents of the Semites, previous to their appearance in Babylonia, as quite unknown.

As to the date of the beginnings of Semitic civilisation in Mesopotamia, Dr. John P. Peters, making use of Ainsworth’s estimates as to the amount and rate of alluvial deposit at the head of the Persian Gulf, computes that the seacoast must have been established this side of the site of the city of Ur about 6600 B.C., which date must, therefore, represent the earliest possible period for the foundation of that city. Ur was apparently the most southerly city of old Babylonia, and Nippur apparently the most northerly. Dr. Peters’ excavations at Nippur lead him to base its foundation at some period previous to 6000 B.C., and possibly previous to 7000 B.C.[a] He sums up his theory as follows:

“My suggestion, from the various facts here marshalled, would be that the original home of civilisation in Babylonia was the strip of land from Nippur southward to the neighbourhood of Ur, and not, as has sometimes been argued, the region about Babylonia and northward to Sippara; while the latter region is in itself older, it does not seem to have been older as the home of civilised man.

“The ancestors of the civilisation of Babylonia seem to have come from the region between Nippur and what was then the coast of the Persian Gulf. This would accord also with the tradition preserved to us in later sources that civilisation came to Babylonia out of the Persian Gulf. Possibly Eridu, on the Arabian plateau near the western shore and not far from the head of what was then the Persian Gulf, may represent the oldest seat of that civilisation. However that may be, at a very early period Nippur became the centre of civilisation and religion, being founded at a time when everything below Ur probably was still under water. As early as the close, if not the beginning, of the seventh millennium B.C., this strip of land at the head of the then Persian Gulf seems to have been the home of the civilised men, and from here civilisation spread northward.”[f]

THE LAND

The land of the Euphrates and Tigris lies between the Iranian country on the east and the Syrio-Arabian district on the west, from the chain of mountains of the Zagros to the rocky heights of the Lebanon and the Syrian desert. From the mountains of Armenia, in which both rivers have their source, the land gradually declines to the plain, extending from the point of their union to where they fall into the Persian Gulf.

The upper-river beds, winding through a high-lying, sometimes fertile steppe country, are surrounded by heights, where plane and cypress groves alternate with green meads and a rich growth of many-coloured flowers and plants.

As the land grows flatter, these valleys widen to fertile pastures on the river-banks, whilst the wide central plain grows more and more bare and treeless, until it ends at last in a desert trodden only by a few wandering shepherds with their flocks, and full of ostriches, bustards, and wild game. This is known as the between-river (Mesopotamia) district, which extends into a wide plain of rich brown soil, about a hundred miles above the mouth, where the two rivers approach most nearly, and the banks touch the so-called Median wall.

This plain, famous for its uncommon fertility as well as for its historic importance, the “Shinar” Land of the Semites, and the Babylonia of the Greeks, is as rainless as Egypt, and would have dried up into a sandy desert, had not nature and human artifice contrived means of irrigation.

For in the spring, when the snow melts on the Armenian mountains, both rivers overflow their banks and water the thirsty land. This overflowing of the gently moving Euphrates is as regular as that of the Nile; the wide tract of water is unopposed in its inundation of the plain and, like the Nile, it deposits a rich mud soil, and man’s resources are called into play to aid nature by the artificial conduct of water and by means of dams to give the neighbouring district a share in the fertilising irrigation.

But the bed of the Tigris growing decidedly more narrow as it nears the sea, receives the devastating stream from the eastern and northern mountains, and the force of the waters transports the fertile soil from the fields and transforms the plains into a wide swampy land, covered with reeds and rushes.

The inhabitants, therefore, had the double task of stemming the force of the stream to prevent destructive inundations, and of securing a course for the fertilising waters by canals and lakes. So the Babylonian plains were sown with such a number of small and great canals, dams and ditches, that the waterworks and means of irrigation were a source of wonder and astonishment to the whole of antiquity. These canals, cut in every direction and decreasing in size until they were almost rivulets, were furnished with countless machines and pump-works. Many of these canals, which should have been kept free by continuous clearing from the stoppage of mud, were lost in the sand; others, emptying into the Tigris, increased its size, the nearer it approached the sea, while the waters of the Euphrates were decreased through the drain of the canals.[b]

The Tigris and the Euphrates have both flood seasons and carry their waters over a wide extent of country, exactly as the Nile. This fact is so perfectly clear that there can be no doubt concerning it, though Herodotus directly asserts the contrary, saying, “The river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the corn lands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the help of engines.” The rise is indeed not so prolonged as the rise of the Nile, but its influence is, nevertheless, distinctly to be seen. Furthermore, the water was retained in sufficient quantity to supply an irrigation system far back from the river for the grain harvest, after the fall of the river. This entire system is now a vast ruin. The river rises and falls as it wills, and sweeping far over the western bank, turns the country into a morass. The harm of this is both negative and positive. It makes impossible any such great ingathering of grain as existed when this great valley was the world’s granary, and it fills the land with a dangerous miasma, which produces fevers and leaves the inhabitants weak and sickly. There are few instances in the world of a sadder waste of a beautiful and fertile country.[e]

Old writers give the most brilliant descriptions of the wonders of the district. Xenophon praises the quality and quantity of the dates, of the groves of palms which line the banks of the lower course of the two rivers and break the uniformity of the landscape, and are still very productive where the cruel Turkish rule has not changed the garden into a desert.

Herodotus lays particular stress upon the natural fertility of the country, for he writes: “Babylon is, as we know, famed for the best tillage of all lands, producing always two hundredfold of fruit and, in very good years, three hundredfold. The leaves of the wheat and barley are all four fingers wide, and I very well know, but I would rather not say, to what size the millet and seed grow; for I am certain that those who have not been in Babylon, will not believe it. There are few trees, no fig trees, no vine, no olive. They have no oil but what they make from sesame. But palm trees grow all over the country, and the fruit is eaten and honey and wine made from it.”

This country is now almost a desert, without buildings and vegetation, a world of tower-like ruins, which vary the monotony of the vast plains.

“From these heights,” says Ritter in his _Geography_, “one sees in the solemn stillness of this ruined world the far-reaching wide mirror of the Euphrates, winding majestically through that solitude like a royal pilgrim among the silent ruins of his departed kingdom. The palaces and temples, and the magnificent buildings, have all dropped into dust and ruin; hanging gardens and blooming paradises have fallen into gray, rush-grown, swampy marshes; and even there, where once the captive Israelites hung up their harps in the royal capital, and sang their songs of mourning over fallen Jerusalem, only a few imperishable willows remain, and the silence is unbroken by a voice of joy or mourning.”

Assyria, a mountainous district between the Tigris and the mountainous western boundary of Iran, is not so fertile as Babylonia, but its high position gives it a bracing climate.

Like the southern plains, it has little rain, but it is partially watered by the numerous rivers which flow eastward and westward to the Tigris, and partially by the canals and water conduits, and is rendered tolerably fertile by careful cultivation.

In the south only a few palm trees and cypresses break the monotony of the wide tilled fields, as in the Babylonian plain, but in the centre of the country are Aturia and Arbelitis (Adiabene) where the Upper Zab, the Zabatus or Lycus of classical writers, pours its blue waters into the Tigris, and there are fruitful hills, with protected valleys, full of corn, wine, sesame, figs, olives, and oranges; naphtha streams give forth their precious oil, and farther northward on the borders of Armenia and Media there are mountainous districts, the heights of which are crowned with woods of oak and pine. The eastern district at the foot of the Zagros (Chalonitis) is particularly prized for its wealth of palms, fruit trees, and olives, and the country of Arpakha (Arrapachitis) in the Chaldean mountains is considered the home of Abraham. From hence he descended into the river district of the centre and settled in the land around Kharran.

Northward lies the pasture land of Mesopotamia, whose wide plains became the scenes of bloody battles, and where races and royal families sought to eternalise their transitory power by the foundation of cities, which have mostly vanished, leaving no trace behind them. Like the Assyrian hill country, it gradually declines into grass-grown steppes until, in the south, it becomes a desert whose waterless wastes are trodden only by wandering Arabs.[b]

So far back as we have yet been able to penetrate, we find in the southern part of Mesopotamia a number of petty independent kingdoms, governed from their capital cities. Our present knowledge of this land and its inhabitants may be briefly summed up.

After the river Euphrates, with countless windings and sharp falls, has cleft the Syrio-Mesopotamian plain where it fertilises the districts contiguous on its banks, it approaches to within a few miles of the Tigris, and both streams water a completely flat plain, intersected by numerous rivers and canals, and, for the most part, flooded by the Euphrates in the summer.

The numerous districts on both sides of the lower Tigris and west of the Euphrates which are out of reach of the irrigation have a desert character, as rain is as rare here as in Egypt. But the irrigated land was proportionately fertile; at least it was so in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The district at the mouth of the streams was of a marshy character with numerous swamps and lakes. In olden times the confluence of both rivers, at latitude about 31° N., formed a long narrow bay which has now been filled up by their deposits. The Arabian Desert lies at the west of the Euphrates, or rather on its western arm, the Pallakopas. The country on the east of the Tigris rises gradually to the wild mountainous boundary of the Iranian highlands, which descends in terrace form to the Tigris, to which it sends numerous rivers, which in earlier times flowed direct into the sea.

At the present time the greater part of this district is a swampy desert traversed only by wandering tribes, whilst in antiquity, and again at the time of the Caliphs, it was made one of the most fertile countries in the world by dint of careful irrigation, regulation, and the construction of dams and canals.[18]

The most ancient population of this country formed several closely related races which had no connection with the other nations of Western Asia, but in the course of historical evolution they lost their language and nationality and were submerged in the neighbouring races.

In the land of Makan, the district of the mouth of the two chief rivers, were the Sumerians (Sumer, with its chief city of Ur, on the Euphrates); and in the northern part of the river country (Melucha land) from Erech, now Warka, upwards to the borders of the Mesopotamian steppes, lived the Accadians, so called from Agade, their capital, north of Babylon. To the east of the Tigris, far into the pathless districts of the Zagros Mountains, dwelt the warlike races of the Kossæans (Assyrian Kasshu). From their home, mode of life and character, they were evidently the predecessors of the modern Kurds, who belong, by language, to the Iranians. Next came the land of Elam, or Anshan, as it was called in the language of the country, the district of the rivers Choaspes and Eulæos, called by the Greeks Kissian, with the capital Shushan, the Susa of the Greeks.

Whilst the Kossæans were always a wild mountainous people, and the inhabitants of the plains of Elam, although they had a firmly established state organization, were dependent on their western neighbours for culture, Sumer and Accad (_i.e._ Babylonia) possessed an ancient and a complete, independently evolved culture, which, although second to that of the Lower Nile in innate worth and exclusive evolution, perhaps exceeded it in historical influence. The surplus of water from inundations was distributed over the country by means of canals and dykes. Thus ensued a better-ordered life of the state from the closer union of the different provinces. The temples of the great gods formed the centres of the different districts from which, as with the Egyptians, the cities of Babylonia arose first everywhere.

In Ur (now El-Mugheir) there was a temple of the moon-god Sin (or Nannar). In Eridu (now Abu Shahrein) was the temple of Ea, the ancient god of the ocean, and in Larsa (now Senkereh) that of the sun-god Babbar (or Shamash), the lord of the city. The latter was worshipped in like manner in Sippar (now Abu Habba), whilst in the neighbouring Agade (Accad) the goddess Anunit was the deity of the city. On the south lay the sacred “Gate of the Gods” Ka-Dingira, the Semitic Babel (Babylon), the capital of the country. [With it was later united the city of Borsippa.] The city Erech (Orchoë, now Warka), the sanctuary of the goddess Nana (Ishtar), was held in special veneration. North of Larsa was Girsu; on the canal Shatt-el-Khai was probably Lagash (now Telloh); north of this the city of Isin; near it was for a time the chief city of all Babylonia, Nippur, which was the home of the god Bel. It is here that the excavations of the University of Pennsylvania have been so fruitful. About fifteen miles northeast of Babylon was Kutha (now Tel-Ibrahim), whose god was Nergal; near Kutha was Kish. In the northern limit of Babylonia were Dur-Kurigalzu, nearly opposite the present Baghdad; and Upi [or Opis.]

It seems therefore that the lay dynasty arose mainly from the priesthood of these temples, for the kings are universally found in closest relation to the city deities, in whose honour they built or restored the temples, and down to their last day the priestly dignity ranked foremost in the title of the Babylonian kings.[c]

ORIGINAL PEOPLES OF BABYLON: THE SUMERIANS

It is coming to be a common agreement among Assyriologists that the original peoples of Babylon were of a race that was not Semitic. Just what it was these scholars are not yet prepared to say; although the inclination of belief is that it was an Indo-European race and most likely of the Turanian family. An attempt has recently been made to connect the aborigines with the Ugro-Finnish branch of the Ural-Altaic family, but with what success it is still too soon to say. But whatever these people, the Sumerians, may have been, they occupied the land of Babylonia until dislodged by a great wave of Semitic migration. This fact has not gone unchallenged, and from the ranks of Philology there has come a strong contention for a Semitic origin of the Babylonians, and the assertion that the Sumerian texts “do not represent a real language, but a kind of cipher written according to an artificial system of grammar.” And throughout the following discussion, written by Professor Hommel, it must not be forgotten that Professor Halévy, the originator of the theory of the Sumerian texts summarised above, still champions his contention and adduces evidence for it that seems to him conclusive.[a]

It has often been observed that southern Babylonia was originally the proper home of the Sumerians, while as early as the beginning of the fourth millennium before the Christian era the Semitic Babylonians were already settled in northern Babylonia, and, as is proved by the Naram-Sin inscription and several dating from the time of Sargon, his father (_circa_ 3800 B.C.) had already acquired the Sumerian character (and, by inference, the Sumerian civilisation). In the case of southern Babylonia, the discoveries at Telloh have put us in possession of a number of sculptures--some of them in relief, others severed heads of statues, dating from the period between _circa_ 4000 B.C., or earlier, and _circa_ 3000. These present two different types. One is characterised by a rounded head with slightly prominent cheek bones, always beardless, and usually with clean-shaven crown. To this type certainly belong the representations of vanquished foes on the archaic sculpture, known as the Vulture stele, though the primitive method of representing the brow and nose by a single slightly curved line gives a merely superficial resemblance to the Semitic cast of countenance. The other is a longer-skulled (dolichocephalous) type, with thick, black hair and long, flowing beard.

It is certainly by no mere accident that the heads of the Telloh statues, most of which are supposed to represent kings, are of the first-mentioned (Sumerian) type, while the bronze votive offerings, which likewise bear the name of Gudea, are carried, as is evident at a glance, by Semites. And as there were Semites among the subjects of Gudea, where the Sumerians were the dominant race, so we find the same Semitic type clearly marked in the figures round the stem of a vase; while the party of musicians, who are seen approaching with submissive gestures on the fragment of a bas-relief, which probably also dates from the reign of Gudea, must likewise be of Semitico-Babylonian descent.

Fortunately, ancient Babylonian art gives us the opportunity, not merely of studying the wholly non-Semitic language of the earliest inhabitants of Babylonia in lengthy bilingual original inscriptions such as many of the statues of Gudea bear, but of seeing with our own eyes the bodily semblance of this singular people, and so observing the striking correspondence of non-Semitic elements in speech and facial type. In this connection we would draw attention to an ancient Babylonian statue of a female figure, now in the Louvre at Paris. We may confidently assume that the woman represented is a Sumerian and not a Semitic Babylonian; and it may thus be regarded as a splendid counterpart to the Gudea statues, which by the whole character of workmanship it calls to mind. Whether we have here a queen or some other lady of high rank (the supposition that she is a goddess appears to be excluded by the absence of the head-dress goddesses are wont to wear) cannot, of course, be determined with certainty. It is only natural that various mixed types should have developed in course of time, especially in northern Babylonia; and many of the faces we meet with--on the seal-cylinders more particularly--may be representations of such.

That the Sumerians, like the Semites, were not an autochthonous race in Babylonia follows from the condition of the soil, which had to be rendered fit for agriculture, and indeed, for human habitation, by a system of canals. Whence, then, did the Sumerians originally come, before they took possession of the swampy Euphrates valley and settled there?

There is a word in Sumerian, “Kar” (Turkish _yer_), which means “country” (as does the Turkish word). But in Sumerian it has also come to signify “mountain” and likewise “east” (since the mountains lie only in the east of Babylonia)--meanings which the Turkish word does not bear. This is, therefore, a clear indication that, even after the Sumerians had settled in Babylonia, the range on the Median frontier and what lay behind it always passed with them for their true country, the original home whence they had come. There is also extreme significance in the fact that they were originally unacquainted with both the lion and the horse, as also with wine (and consequently with the vine) and the palm tree; for they had no names for them, and called the lion “great dog” (_nug magh_), the horse “ass of the mountains” or “of the east,” wine the “drink of life” (_gish-tin_, from _gash-tin_), and the palm “tree of Magan” (_mis-magan_), or “the upright” (_ügin_, in its Semitic form _mus-ukannu_).

THE SEMITIC BABYLONIANS

By far the greater part of Babylonian literature, as well as the many official documents of the kings of Babylon (in the more restricted sense of the term) and Asshur is written in a language which was clearly perceived, as early as 1849, to be intimately related to the so-called Semitic languages of Anterior Asia. The relationship is but confirmed by the type presented to us in various statues and sculptures in relief, apart, of course, from the Sumerian sculptures of the very oldest period; though in Babylonia we frequently meet with a hybrid type, yet even in this the Semitic element is unmistakable. In the heads of Assyrian figures the Semitic characteristics are very strikingly marked. But since the Babylonians and Assyrians were a single nation as far as language is concerned, and differed in blood only by the fact that there seems to have been a strong admixture of some foreign element in the former, while the latter presents a strongly marked and far purer racial type, it may be taken as proved that this type is that of the Semitic races, a conclusion which is doubly vouched for by language and by facial conformation. It has already been remarked in the foregoing chapter, that (unlike the Sumerians) the Semitic population of Babylonia, which we meet with in northern Babylonia as early as 3800 B.C., and which predominated there from 2500 B.C. (or even earlier) onwards, was distinguished by an abundant growth of black hair and long beards.

From the circumstance that in the third millennium before the Christian era the old Babylonian kings who resided in Middle Babylonia (particularly at Nisin and Erech) and in Ur and Larsa bore Semitic names, though the inscriptions that have come down to us from their reigns are written entirely in Sumerian, we are probably justified in concluding that in Middle Babylonia, where the dominant Sumerian population of the south and the dominant Semitic population of the north must have come most directly into contact, the interfusion of the two races was at that time taking place on a very large scale. On the other hand, in northern Babylonia, where Sumerians had lived from the very earliest period, but had never risen to any political importance as compared with the Semitic immigrants, the two must have lived strictly apart down to 2000 B.C. (the latest date of which we can be certain), for not long before that time colonists went out from northern Babylonia and founded the empire of Assyria. The far greater purity of the Semitic type among the Assyrians, together with the absolute identity of their language and civilisation with that of Babylonia, leads inevitably to the inference that the intermixture of Sumerian blood with Semitic in North Babylonia had either not begun, or had as yet proceeded but a very little way.

Tested thus by philology, the Assyrio-Babylonian language, together with Canaanitish (under which title we include Phœnician, Hebrew, and Moabitish), Aramaic (Syrian, the so-called Biblical Chaldee, Palmyrene, etc.), and Arabic (and under this heading not only the Sabæan tongue of southern Arabia, but the Ethiopian and Amharic languages of Abyssinia, should be placed), belong to a single well-defined group which we have long been accustomed to call Semitic (cf. Stade’s _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_) and the races which spoke and speak them are known to ethnology as Semites. From the remotest antiquity down to modern times these races have maintained a singular purity of blood and racial type; the Canaanites represented in Egyptian tombs of the XIIth Dynasty, the Assyrian heads in the bas-reliefs of Nineveh, the features of Jews at the present time living in the midst of Indo-Germanic nations, and the Bedouins who to-day roam the Syrian and Arabian deserts, all exhibit a family likeness so remarkable that we see that throughout the whole course of history they can have mingled but little with alien races. The question of how and from what causes the Semitic type in Assyria came to be preserved in greater purity than in Babylonia itself, whence the Assyrians emigrated, is one that has been briefly touched upon above.

Under these circumstances it is only to be expected that the constant type of character proper to other Semites should be discoverable, or, at least, in part recognisable in the Babylonians and Assyrians; although we are bound to take into account the fact that even in later days the Hebrews retained much of their old nomadic habits, that the Aramæans of the Assyrian period were for the most part nomadic, and that the Arabs are so still; while from the very beginning of their appearance in history the Semitic inhabitants of the regions about the Euphrates and Tigris are a home-dwelling people on a high level of civilisation. Many traits of primitive national character tend to be obliterated or modified by such an advance to a superior stage of civilisation, while others, foreign to the brother or kindred races which remained longer or still remain in the nomadic stage, are developed.

In the Assyrians and Babylonians, as a matter of fact, we must meet with so much that recalls instinctively their kin with those whom the Bible and universal history have long rendered us familiar that it offers the fullest confirmation of the conclusions arrived at by a study of their language and physical type. It is very difficult to compress into a few words a correct description of Semitic national character.

Eduard Meyer, in his otherwise admirable _Geschichte des Alterthums_, says, “A very matter of fact habit of thought, keen observation of detail, a calculating intellect ever directed to practical aims, keeping the creations of the imagination completely under control and averse from any freer flight of the spirit into the Illimitable, such are the characteristics that distinguish the Arabs and Phœnicians, Hebrews and Assyrians,”--a judgment which, though in the main correct, is nevertheless not exhaustive. [Some of Professor Meyer’s other estimates are less satisfactory to Professor Hommel, who quotes the following with entire disapproval, claiming that they quite misrepresent the true character of the Semitic mind: “This same abominably matter-of-fact habit of thought, which dominates the Koran and by means of which it wrought its effect, lies at the root of the human sacrifices of the Canaanites, the religious phrases of the Assyrians, and, finally, of Yahvism” (_i.e._ the religion of the Old Testament). “The relation of the individual to the god is regarded in a strictly rationalistic and calculating spirit. An ethical or mystical relation to the Deity is wholly alien to the Semitic mind.”] Compare these and other passages of the same sort [Professor Hommel continues] with the fact that, on the contrary, a monotheistic tendency stronger than in any other race in the world, and combining with it the idea of a heartfelt surrender of the whole man to the Deity, was one of the principal characteristics of the Semitic mind as a whole (though most highly developed among the Israelites).

It is true that the cruelty of the Assyrians to foreign prisoners of war, which often shocks us and estranges our sympathies from the whole nation, recall certain instances of a like defect among the ancient Israelites too strongly not to tempt us to think of it as a Semitic propensity; but nevertheless these are mere excesses and excrescences which must not be set to the account of national character. The Semite is not naturally cruel. If he were so, the trait must have come out most strongly in the Bedouin Arabs, who for centuries have remained at the barbaric stage in religious matters; whereas this is not so, but rather the reverse. With many races (some of them Indo-Germanic) of whom the most unspeakable horrors and acts of violence are recorded in the course of history, sheer lust of blood and torture has been the motive of such actions (or rather crimes), while the cruelties just referred to sprang from the dark side (revolting, it must be confessed) of a national virtue: true zeal for the Holiest.

THE ORIGINAL HOME OF THE BABYLONIAN SEMITE

On such questions as the degree of kinship in which the Babylonians and Assyrians stood to other Semites, their original home, their last halting-places, and consequently the sequence of Semitic migrations, Eduard Meyer holds the same views as the famous orientalist, Sprenger, to wit, that Arabia, _i.e._ the desert as distinct from the arable land, used from the very earliest times to send forth the surplus of her predatory and rapacious Bedouin population to the great pastoral districts in the vicinity, that is, to Palestine, the plain of Mesopotamia (Aram), and, in times long out of mind, to northern Babylonia also; that they were, so to speak, deposited there from time to time, and that all Semitic nations whom we meet with in a state of civilisation in the course of subsequent history have come into being in this manner.

“But this ingenious theory has been directly refuted by later investigations set on foot by A. von Kremer, and followed up by Ign. Guidi at Rome, and, more especially, by myself, with a view to discovering what domestic animals and cultivated plants were known to the original Semitic stock. By the year 1879 Guidi and I had come independently and, to some extent, by different ways to the conclusion that the original home of the Semites could not possibly be Arabia, but must be sought farther to the northeast. In the treatise, _Die sprachgeschichtliche Stellung des Babylonisch-Assyrischen_, I succeeded in proving further that the people who afterwards became the Babylonians and Assyrians must have separated from the common stock in some part of central Asia where the lion was indigenous, and emigrated into northern Babylonia through one of the passes of the Medio-Elamite range certainly no later than the fifth millennium B.C. The rest, however, came by way of the southern shore of the Caspian Sea--probably towards the end of the fourth millennium and at all events later than the Hamites of northern Babylonia--and entered what was afterwards Aramæan Mesopotamia from the north, then occupied it, and spread gradually from thence to Syria, Palestine, and Arabia.” (Hommel.) So, by subsequent offshoots and migrations, they became the Aramæans, Canaanites, and Arabs.

This theory furnishes, on the one hand, the first satisfactory explanation of many points in which Babylonian development, in language and various respects, differs from that of other Semites. On the other hand, it sets the large amount they have in common in a most interesting light, since it proves to be the primitive heritage of the Semitic race.

The whole question of the manner of Semitic migrations and offshoots is one that cannot be a matter of indifference to the historian, as may be objected in some quarters; and for a right understanding of the history of Babylonia in the earliest times, it is of the utmost consequence that we should know whether the Semitic Babylonians were a distinct branch, as compared with their brethren, whose relations among themselves were much closer, and whether the beginning of their migration had led their steps through the land where grew the olive, fig, vine, and other cultivated plants not to be found in Babylonia; and lastly, it is imperative for a right comprehension of the history of Semitic civilisation to arrive at a decision on these questions. The fact that we find in the Assyrio-Babylonian language no trace of the common Semitic name (found in Aramaic, Canaanitish, and Arabic) for the three plants just mentioned, and others of the same nature, constitutes, together with weighty philological considerations, the positive argument in favour of the theory I have set forth: namely, that the route by which the Semitic settlers of the lower Euphrates came did not lie through regions where these plants are indigenous, but that they migrated in advance of the rest of the Semites straight from the east or northeast into anterior Asia and so to their new home of Babylonia.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[16] [Compare, however, Professor Halévy’s Introductory Essay.]

[17] [See _Sketch of Semitic Origins_, by G. A. Barton, Ph.D. New York and London, 1902.]

[18] [This entire system is now a vast ruin, according to Rogers, who adds: “The great valley has a climate which appears little fitted to produce men of energy and force, for the temperature over its entire surface is very high in the summer season. It is, however, altogether probable that in the period of the ancient history neither the heat nor the sand was such a menace.… During the period of the glory of Babylon these sand waves (from Arabia) had certainly not gone beyond the Euphrates, and they could hardly have reached it.”]