A Primer of Assyriology Part 1

A Primer of a.s.syriology.

by Archibald Henry Sayce.

CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE

Geography.--The civilizations of Babylonia and a.s.syria grew up on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. The Tigris was called Idikna and Idikla in the Sumerian or primitive language of Babylonia, from which the Semites formed the name Idiklat, by means of the feminine suffix _-t_. In later times the name was shortened into Diklat, and finally a.s.similated by the Persians to the word Tigra, which in their language signified 'an arrow.' It is from Tigra that the cla.s.sical name Tigris is derived. In Genesis (ii. 14), however, the ancient name Idikla, there written Hiddekel, is still preserved. The Euphrates was called Pura-nun, or 'great water,' in Sumerian, and was frequently known as simply the Pura or 'Water,' just as the Nile is known to-day to the modern Egyptians as simply 'the Sea.' Hence it is often spoken of in the Bible as 'the River,' without the addition of any other name. From Pura came the Semitic Purat, with the Semitic suffix _-t_; and Purat, the Perath of the Old Testament, was changed by the Persians into Ufratu, with a play upon their own word _u_ 'good.' The Persian Ufratu is the Greek Euphrates.

The alluvial plain of Babylonia was the gift of the two great rivers.

In the early days of Babylonian civilization they both flowed into the Persian Gulf. But salt marshes already existed at their mouths, and as time went on the marshes extended further and further to the south.

What had once been sea became dry land, the silt brought down by the rivers forming an ever-increasing delta in the north of the Gulf.

To-day the two rivers flow into one channel, and the point where they unite is eighty miles distant from the present line of coast. The marshes are called 'the country of Marratu' or 'the salt-sea' in the inscriptions, a name which reappears as Merathaim in Jer. 1. 21.

One of the oldest of Babylonian cities was Eridu, 'the good city,'

which was originally built on the sh.o.r.e of the Persian Gulf, though Abu-Shahrein, which now marks its site, is far inland, the sea having retreated from it for a distance of 100 miles. In early times, however, it was the chief Babylonian port, and through its intercourse with foreign countries it exercised a great influence on the culture and religion of Babylonia. Further to the north, but on the western side of the Euphrates, was Ur, the birth-place of Abraham, whose ruins are now called Mugheir or Muqayyar; and still further to the north, but on the opposite side of the river, were Larsa (probably the Ellasar of Gen.

xiv. 1) now Senkereh, and Uruk or Erech (Gen. x. 10) the modern Warka.

Considerably to the north of these again came Nipur (now Niffer), which played a leading part in the history of Babylonian religion. Nipur stood at the spot where the Tigris and Euphrates tended to approach one another, and northward, in the narrowest part of the territory which lay between them, were the important cities of Babel or Babylon, Kutha, and Sippara. Babylon, called Bab-ili, 'the gate of G.o.d,' on the monuments, lay on both sides of the Euphrates, its south-western suburb being Borsippa. The great temple of Bel-Merodach, called e-Saggila, rose within it; that of Nebo, the prophet and interpreter of Merodach, being at Borsippa. e-Zida, the temple of Nebo, is now known as the Birs-i-Nimrud. Kutha (now Tell-Ibrahim), to the north of Babylon, was surrounded by vast cemeteries, which were under the protection of its patron-G.o.d Nergal. Sippara, still further to the north, was a double city, one part of it, the present Abu-Habba, being termed 'Sippara of the Sun-G.o.d,' while the other half was 'Sippara of the G.o.ddess Anunit.'

It is in consequence of this double character that the Old Testament speaks of it as Sepharvaim 'the two Sipparas.'

Northward of Sippara the Tigris and Euphrates again trend apart from one another and enclose the great plateau of Mesopotamia. To the east of the Tigris come the mountains of Elam, 'the highlands,' and to the north of them the Kurdish ranges, which were known to the primitive Babylonians under the name of Guti or Gutium. At the foot of these ranges, and northward of the Lower or Little Zab, the kingdom of a.s.syria arose. It took its name from its original capital of a.s.sur, now Kalah-Sherghat, on the western bank of the Tigris, not far to the north of the junction of the latter river with the Lower Zab. The supremacy of a.s.sur afterwards pa.s.sed to Calah and Nineveh, which lay northward between the Tigris and the Upper or Greater Zab. Calah (now Nimrud) was close to the junction of the two rivers; Nineveh (now Kouyunjik and Nebi Yunus opposite Mosul) was built along the bank of the Tigris, the stream of the Khoser flowing through the middle of it. Some miles to the north, under the shelter of the hills, Sargon built a palace which he called Dur-Sargon (the modern Khorsabad), and between Nineveh and Calah lay Res-eni 'the head of the Spring,' the Resen of Gen. x. 12.

Population and Language.--Babylonia already had a long history behind it when the kingdom of a.s.syria first arose. The main bulk of the a.s.syrian population was Semitic, and the common language of the country was Semitic also. But it was otherwise in Babylonia. Here the pioneers of civilization, the builders of the great cities, the inventors of the cuneiform system of writing, of astronomy, of mathematics, and of other arts and sciences, belonged to a non-Semitic race and spoke an agglutinative language. It is in this language that the earliest records of the country are written and that the older clay-books were compiled. For want of a better name scholars have called the language and people to whom it belonged Accadian or Sumerian, or even Accado-Sumerian. Accad and Sumer were the names given to the northern and southern divisions of Babylonia respectively, and as it was in Sumer that the old race and language lingered the longest, 'Sumerian'

would appear to be the best t.i.tle to apply to them. Indeed it is possible that the city of Agade or Accad, from which the district of Accad seems to have derived its name, was of Semitic foundation. In any case the Semitic element in Accad was from very early times stronger than that in Sumer, and consequently the Sumerian dialect spoken in the north was more largely affected by Semitic influence and the resulting phonetic decay than was the dialect spoken in the south. Sumerian was agglutinative, like the languages of the modern Finns or Turks, the relations of grammar being expressed by suffixes (or prefixes) which retain an independent meaning of their own. Thus _dingir_ is 'G.o.d,'

_dingir-ene_ 'G.o.ds,' _dingir-ene-ku_ 'to the G.o.ds;' _mu-ru_ 'I built,'

_mu-na-ru_ 'I built it.'

The Semitic dialects of Babylonia and a.s.syria differed very slightly from one another, and they are therefore called by the common name of a.s.syrian. We can trace the history of a.s.syrian by means of contemporaneous monuments for nearly 4,000 years, beginning with the records of Sargon of Accad (B.C. 3800) and ending with doc.u.ments of the Parthian epoch.

a.s.syrian belongs to the northern group of Semitic languages, being more closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic than it is to Arabic or Ethiopic.

The Chaldaeans.--When the Semites first obtained political power in Babylonia we do not know. The earliest Semitic empire known to us is that of Sargon of Accad. Babylon did not become the capital of a united kingdom till much later, Khammurabi (B.C. 2350) being apparently the first who made it so. Strictly speaking, it is only after this event that the name of 'Babylonia' is applicable to the whole country. In the Old Testament the Babylonians are called Kasdim, a word of uncertain origin. It is rendered 'Chaldaeans' in the Authorized Version; the cla.s.sical Chaldaeans, however, took their name from the Kalda, a tribe settled in the salt-marshes, of whom we first hear in an inscription of the twelfth century B.C. One of their princes was Merodach-baladan (Isaiah x.x.xix) who made himself master of all Babylonia. It is probable that Nebuchadrezzar was also of Kalda descent. After the time of Merodach-baladan the Kalda formed so integral a part of the population as to give their name to the whole of it in the writings of the Greeks and Romans, and after the fall of Babylonia, when Babylonian astrologers and fortune-tellers made their way to the west, 'Chaldaean' became synonymous with 'diviner.'

The Ka.s.si.--Another element in the Babylonian population consisted of the Ka.s.si (the Kossaeans or Kissians of the Greeks), who came from the mountains of Elam. They spoke originally a non-Semitic language, and gave a dynasty of kings to Babylonia which lasted 576 years and nine months. The dynasty was reigning in the century before the Exodus when the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna were written, and we learn from them that the Babylonians were at that time called Ka.s.si (or Kasi) in Canaan.

Natural Products.--The soil of Babylonia was exceedingly fertile. It was the natural home of the wheat which still grows wild in the neighbourhood of Anah. Herodotus tells us that 'the leaf of the wheat and barley is as much as four fingers in width, and the stalks of the millet and sesame are so tall that no one who has never been in that country would believe me were I to mention their height.' It was calculated that grain produced on an average a return of two hundred for one on the seed sown, the return in favourable seasons being as much as three hundred. The chief tree of the country was the palm.

Prices were frequently calculated in corn and dates, and the dates among other uses served to make wine. Though vines seem to have been grown, most of the grape-wine drunk in the country was imported from abroad.

Ca.n.a.ls.--The whole country was intersected by ca.n.a.ls, and carefully irrigated by means of machines. The ca.n.a.ls thus regulated the supply of water and enabled it to be carried beyond the reach of the rivers. The two princ.i.p.al ca.n.a.ls were called the Nahar-Malcha or Royal River and the Pallacopas (Pallukat in the inscriptions).

Architecture.--Babylonia was devoid of stone, which had to be brought from the mountains of Elam or elsewhere. In this respect it offered a striking contrast to a.s.syria, where good stone was plentiful. To this absence of stone may be traced some of the peculiarities of its early culture. It caused clay to become the common writing material of the country, the cuneiform characters being impressed with a stylus upon the tablet while the clay was still moist. It further obliged every building to be of brick. This led to a great development of columnar architecture, the wooden columns which supported the roof being subsequently imitated in brick. The use of brick further led to the use of stucco and painting. The walls of the Chaldaean houses, as we learn from Ezekiel (xxiii. 14), were decorated with 'images portrayed with vermilion,' unlike those of the a.s.syrian palaces which were lined with slabs of sculptured alabaster. a.s.syrian art was, however, borrowed from that of Babylonia; hence the colouration of the a.s.syrian bas-reliefs on stone; hence also the great mounds on which the a.s.syrian palaces were built. Such mounds were needful in the flat country of Babylonia where inundations were frequent; in a.s.syria they were not required.

Asphalt and Naphtha.--Besides clay, Babylonia also furnishes asphalt and naphtha. According to Poseidonios the naphtha was partly white, partly black, the latter being that which was used for lamps. Naphtha is still found near Hit, 130 miles to the north of Babylon.

Character of the Babylonians and a.s.syrians.--The contrast between the physical characteristics of Babylonia and a.s.syria was paralleled by a contrast between the characters of their inhabitants. The population of Babylonia was pre-eminently agricultural and peaceable, that of a.s.syria pre-eminently military. Babylonia was the land of letters; in a.s.syria the power to read and write was mainly confined to the scribes. Both Babylonians and a.s.syrians, however, were keen traders and merchants, but while 'the cry of the Chaldaeans was in their s.h.i.+ps,' the a.s.syrians had no taste for the sea. The Babylonians seem to have been a gentler people, more pious and superst.i.tious; the a.s.syrians, on the other hand, had a genius for organization and administrative work. Such differences may be traced as much to a difference in the conditions under which they lived as to a difference in race.

CHAPTER II

THE DISCOVERY AND DECIPHERMENT OF THE INSCRIPTIONS

The Site of Babylon.--The site of Babylon was never forgotten. In the twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela describes the ruins of Nebuchadrezzar's palace which he saw there, and in 1573 the English traveller Eldred visited the spot, and found the Tower of Babel in the Birs-i-Nimrud, which he states to be a mile in circ.u.mference and about as high as St. Paul's Cathedral. Other travellers have left notices of the ruins. But the first to explore them scientifically was Rich, the Resident of the East India Company at Bagdad, who surveyed and made a map of them. His work on the site of the old city was published in 1811. But it was not until 1850 that the first excavations were made by Sir A. H. Layard, which were followed in 1851-4 by the French expedition under Fresnel, Thomas, and Oppert. The fruit of the expedition was an elaborate memoir by Oppert, which marks an epoch in the history of cuneiform decipherment, and determined the ancient topography of Babylon. The excavations were resumed by Sir H. Rawlinson in 1854, who discovered the architectural records of Nebuchadrezzar, at the same time that other ancient sites of Babylonian civilization were being excavated by Loftus and Taylor. At a much later period (in 1879 and 1882) the work of excavation was again taken up by Mr. Hormuzd Ra.s.sam, who discovered the site of Sippara, and disinterred the ancient temple there of the Sun-G.o.d. Equally important were the discoveries made by the French consul, M. de Sarzec, in 1877-81 at Tello (the ancient Lagas) in southern Chaldaea. Monuments of the early Sumerian period of Babylonian history were brought to light, including seated statues and bas-reliefs, which are now in the Museum of the Louvre.

The Site of Nineveh.--The identification of Nineveh was less easy than that of Babylon. Its site was lost, although the natives of the district had not altogether forgotten the name of Nunia, and Niebuhr in the last century, believed that it marked the site of the a.s.syrian capital[1]. But its real discovery was due to Rich. Shortly before his visit to Mosul a bas-relief had been found on the opposite side of the Tigris, which the Mohammedans had destroyed as being the work of the 'infidels.' His examination of the mounds from which it had come led to the discovery of walls and cuneiform inscriptions, which left no doubt in his mind that the site was that of Nineveh. He accordingly drew up a map of the ruins, which he sent to Europe along with his collection of Babylonian and a.s.syrian antiquities. A single case, three feet in diameter, was sufficient for their accommodation in the British Museum.

[1] In Dapper's _Circ.u.mstantial Description of Asia_, it is stated that opposite Mosul is 'a little town called up to the present day by Arab writers Nennouwi, and by the Turks Eski Mosul,' or Old Mosul.

Excavations.--These antiquities, however, inspired the French _savant_, Mohl, with the conviction that if excavations were undertaken at the place where they had been found, important results would follow.

Accordingly, he induced Botta, who had been sent as French Consul to Mosul in 1842, to commence digging there the following year. Botta was led by a native to the mound of Khorsabad, and his labours were soon rewarded by the discovery of a.s.syrian sculptures covered with cuneiform writing. The French government granted funds for the continuation of the work, and before 1845 the palace of Sargon was laid bare.

Meanwhile Layard had arrived on the spot, and with the help of funds princ.i.p.ally supplied by Sir Stratford Canning, had opened trenches in the mound of Nimrud (the ancient Calah). The spoils of the palaces he found here were transported to England in 1847. Among them was the famous Black Obelisk, on which mention is made of Jehu of Israel. At Kouyunjik also, among the ruins of the palaces of Sennacherib and a.s.sur-bani-pal, excavations had been begun. But it was only after the return of Sir A. H. Layard to Mosul in 1849, with a grant from the British Museum, that a systematic exploration of this mound took place.

a.s.sisted by Mr. Hormuzd Ra.s.sam, he discovered here the libraries of clay books from which most of our knowledge of a.s.syria and Babylonia is derived. Excavations were further undertaken at Kalah Sherghat (the ancient a.s.sur), where the records of Tiglath-pileser I were disinterred, in the ruined palaces of Sennacherib and Esar-haddon at Nebi Yunus, at Arban on the Khabour (the ancient Sidikan), and at several other places. When the work was closed in 1852, a new world of art and literature had been revealed. Nothing further was done till the beginning of 1873, when George Smith was sent to Nineveh by the proprietors of the _Daily Telegraph_ in order to search for the missing portions of the Deluge-tablet, and a year later he was again sent out to excavate by the British Museum. After his death, near Aleppo, in 1876, the excavations were entrusted to Mr. Hormuzd Ra.s.sam, who, in 1878, discovered the bronze gates of Balawat, and three years later the site of Sippara in Babylonia, as well as a library in the temple of its Sun-G.o.d. A similar library has since been discovered (in 1891) by the American expedition in the mounds of Niffer, where monuments of Sargon of Accad (B.C. 3800) have been brought to light.

The Decipherment of the Inscriptions.--The decipherment of the cuneiform texts has been one of the scientific triumphs of the present century. The key was given by the inscriptions on the ruined palaces and tombs of ancient Persia. Travellers at an early date had noticed these inscriptions at Persepolis and elsewhere, and while some compared the forms of the characters composing them to arrows, others considered them to be wedges, _cunei_ in Latin. The latter comparison was the origin of the term 'cuneiform,' ordinarily applied to them. We find it already used by Hyde in his _Historia Religionis veterum Persarum_, which was published at Oxford in 1700[2].

[2] Hyde's words are 'ductuli pyramidales seu cuneiformes.'

The Italian traveller, Pietro della Valle, in 1621, was the first who made the characters known in Europe by printing a few of them; at the same time he put forward the correct suggestion that the inscriptions were to be read from left to right. A more important collection of signs, however, was published in 1693, in one of the early volumes (No.

201) of the _Philosophical Transactions_ of the Royal Society from the papers of Mr. Flower, who had been specially charged by the East India Company with the duty of investigating the antiquities of Persia. But it was not till the middle of the eighteenth century that Cornelius van Bruyn (1714) and Carsten Niebuhr (1774-8), the father of the historian, first copied and published the inscriptions in anything like a complete and accurate manner. Niebuhr further pointed out that they comprised three different systems of cuneiform writing, which in the case of every text followed one another in a regular order. The first system of writing was the simplest, as it consisted of only forty-two different characters, whereas the number of characters in the second and third systems was very large.

With Niebuhr's publication the work of decipherment became possible.

In 1798, Professor Tychsen, of Rostock, discovered that in the first system an oblique wedge was used to divide the words from one another, and in 1802 the Danish Bishop, Munter, starting from this basis, showed that the language possessed suffixes, pointed out that certain characters denoted vowels, and even divined the word for 'king,' as well as the value of two letters, one of them being _a_. He also maintained that while the first system of writing was alphabetic, the second was syllabic, and the third ideographic, and that as the inscriptions were found in Persia and on the buildings of the Achaemenian kings, the text which always comes first must represent the language of ancient Persia, which he identified, though erroneously, with Zend.

It is, however, to George Frederick Grotefend, of Hanover, that the discovery of the key which has unlocked the secrets of cuneiform literature is really due. On September 4, 1802, he read before the Royal Society of Gottingen a Memoir, in which he announced his discovery of the names of certain Achaemenian kings in the cuneiform inscriptions, and explained the method by which he had arrived at his results. By a curious coincidence it was at the same meeting of the Society that Heyne described the first efforts that had been made towards deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Grotefend first showed convincingly that the inscriptions must be read from left to right, a portion of a word which ends a line on the right side in one of the texts beginning the next line on the left side in a duplicate copy of it. He next pointed out that the a.n.a.logy of the Sa.s.sanian inscriptions, which had just been deciphered by de Sacy, indicated that the Persepolitan texts must commence with the names of the kings who had erected the monuments, followed by their t.i.tles, and that a comparison of the texts one with another made it pretty evident that such was actually the case. In this way he succeeded in finding (like Munter before him) the word for 'king,' and in addition to this the royal names preceding it. Those on the Persepolitan monuments represented a father and a son, though in certain cases the father added his own father's name, but without the royal t.i.tles. Thanks to the cla.s.sical writers, it was known that the monuments were of Achaemenian origin, and the names of the Achaemenian kings had also been preserved. It only remained to fit them to the characters in the cuneiform texts.

Hystaspes, Darius, and Xerxes alone suited, since Cyrus was too short and Artaxerxes too long; moreover, the letters _a_, _r_, and _sh_, in the names of Darius and Xerxes appeared in their right places if these names were adopted. So, too, did _a_ and _sh_ in the name of Hystaspes.

Such a coincidence was sufficient to prove that Grotefend was right in his guess that the words in question represented proper names, for guess it was, though founded on strong probability and scientific induction. He had noticed that two of the names (those of Darius and Xerxes) occurred separately on two particular groups of monuments, whereas the word which followed them was always the same. It was natural to conclude that the latter word denoted 'king,' while those which preceded it were proper names.

The alphabet Grotefend had constructed out of the proper names enabled him to read the word for 'king,' and thus to show its near affinity to the corresponding word in Zend. But he was a cla.s.sical scholar rather than an orientalist, better known by his Latin grammar than by his knowledge of Eastern languages, and consequently as soon as his pioneering work of decipherment was accomplished, he lacked the philological knowledge which would have allowed him to continue it.

Moreover, he was hampered by the false theory that the language of the inscriptions was identical with Zend. The next step of importance was taken by Rask in 1826, who discovered the termination of the genitive plural and the true reading of the t.i.tle 'Achaemenian.' Rask was followed in 1836 by the great Zendic scholar Burnouf at Paris, and by La.s.sen at Bonn. Burnouf demonstrated that the language of the Achaemenian texts was not Zend, but a sister dialect spoken in western Persia, and his discovery of the names of the satrapies, in one of the inscriptions copied by Niebuhr, enabled him and La.s.sen simultaneously almost to complete what we may henceforth call the Old Persian alphabet. A few corrections in it were subsequently made by Beer, Jacquet, Holzmann, and La.s.sen himself.

Meanwhile a young English officer in the East India Company's service, now Sir Henry Rawlinson, had been working in Persia una.s.sisted, and at a distance from libraries, upon the Old Persian texts. He knew that Grotefend had discovered in them the names of the early Achaemenian monarchs, and with this clue he set himself to construct an alphabet and interpret the inscriptions. He soon found means of providing himself with fuller materials for the work of decipherment than those at the disposal of scholars in Europe, by copying the great inscription which Darius had caused to be engraved on the sacred rock of Bagistana or Behistun in commemoration of his accession to the throne of Persia, and re-conquest of the empire of Cyrus. The task of copying the inscription--by far the longest Persian one known--was an arduous one, and not unattended with danger, and it occupied several years.

Rawlinson first saw the inscription in 1835; it was not till 1839 that the whole of it was copied. A few years later he revised it again, but his memoir upon it and upon the other Old Persian texts was not ready for publication till 1845. In the following year the text was published by the Royal Asiatic Society, and the translation and commentary followed in 1849. Dr. Hincks, of Dublin, had already (in 1846) given the last touch to the decipherment of the Old Persian alphabet by the discovery that the consonants composing it contained inherent vowels.