The History of Antiquity Volume I Part 16

"If the star of the great lion is gloomy, the heart of the people will not rejoice." "If the moon is seen on the first day of the month, Accad will prosper." One tablet supplies information for all the periods of the day and night in the 360 days of the year, telling us what day and what period is favourable or unfavourable for commencing a campaign, or a siege, for storming the enemy's walls, or for defence.[385]

Such was the faith and doctrine of the Babylonians. In the original conception of El as lord of the sky, and Adar as the highest of the star G.o.ds, there may have been n.o.bler and simpler traits, yet even these early views were not without their harshness and cruelty, as we are forced to conclude from the Hebrew accounts of the sacrifices offered to Adar. Such traits are also more than outweighed by the licentious wors.h.i.+p of Mylitta, in which the sensual elements of the Semitic character are seen in all their coa.r.s.eness. With the growth of the kingdom, and the consequent effeminacy and luxury of life in Babylonia, this side of their religion must have become predominant, while, on the other hand, the great conception of a world ruled and governed by the movements of the stars tended in time to degenerate into mere astrological computations and fortune-telling.

Our knowledge of the life and position of the priests of Babylon is scanty. The Greeks tell us that they took the same place as in Egypt.

Their rank was hereditary; the son was instructed by the father from an early age. Some occupied themselves with the offerings and purifications; others strove to avert existing or threatening evils by expiations and charms; others explained any miraculous phenomena of nature, interpreted dreams, and prophesied from the flight of birds. The Hebrew scriptures speak of interpreters of stars and signs, magicians and prophets.[386] According to the accounts of Western writers, the priests at Babylon inhabited a special quarter of the city, and there were schools of priests at Sippara.[387] The fragments of Berosus pointed out Babylon, Sippara, and Larancha (p. 239) as centres of priestly wisdom even before the flood, inasmuch as they attribute to these places special revelations of the G.o.ds Anu and Dakan. They speak of the sacred books saved in Sippara from the flood. These books they divide into ancient, mediaeval, and modern. By the "ancient" books we must understand the announcements which the G.o.d Anu caused to be made to the two earliest kings, Alorus and Alaparus, of Babylon. Under the "mediaeval" are comprised the revelations received by Ammenon and Daonus of Sippara, and lastly, under the "modern" the mysteries disclosed by Dagon to Edorankhus of Sippara (p. 239). Hence we may a.s.sume that the priests of Babylon arrived at an early age at a code which included their creed and ritual, as it would seem, in seven books (p. 245). How high the cosmogonies go, of which the most essential traits were found in the fragments of Berosus (p. 238), we cannot decide. In the conception which lies at the base of them the forces of nature are seen pouring forth in wild confusion. The name of the woman who rules these forces, or of this chaos inhabited by monsters, Omorka, has been explained as "Homer-Kai," _i.e._, "material of the egg," the world-egg, but more recently by "Um Uruk," _i.e._ "the mother," the "great G.o.ddess of Erech." In the cosmogony of Berosus we can see, though in a very rude and contradictory shape, the opposition of a material and intellectual, a natural and supernatural principle, and later accounts maintain that the Babylonians regarded the world as arising out of fire and water, that Chaos and Love were the parents of Life and Contention, and of Life and Contention Bel was the son.[388]

More important and far more valuable than these abstractions, to which the Babylonians obviously attained only at a late period, and in all probability under the influence of Greek ideas, are the results which their knowledge and acuteness gained in other fields. The cuneiform writing, according to the conclusions we have already been compelled to draw, was borrowed by the Elamites and Babylonians from the earlier inhabitants of the lower districts. It was originally a picture-writing, which, like the Egyptian, pa.s.sed from real pictures to indicatory and symbolic pictures or picture-signs. The necessity of abbreviating and compressing the picture-signs was here far more keenly felt than in Egypt, quite irrespective of the fact that the strong pictorial tendency of the Egyptians was probably wanting on the Lower Tigris. The stones and slabs on which the Egyptians engraved their hieroglyphics were not to be found in the plains of the two rivers, and the slabs of mud, clay, and brick on which they were compelled to write (the pictures and symbols were written on the soft slabs with the style, and these were then burnt), were ill-adapted for sketches. Such obstinate material made the abbreviation of the symbols an imperative necessity; and it was by sharp and straight strokes that the signs could be most easily traced upon slabs of mud and clay. The oldest bricks in the ruins of Mugheir, Warka, and Senkereh display pictures in outline; then beside bricks with inscriptions of this kind we find others repeating the same inscription in cuneiform signs, which now form a completely ideographic system of writing. The immediate comprehension of picture signs by the senses died away owing to abbreviations of the kind mentioned, and the picture-writing became symbolic writing. This writing, which consisted of groups of cuneiform symbols, attained a higher stage of development when a phonetic value was attributed to a part of the cuneiform groups, whether used to signify nouns or verbs and adjectives, or new groups were formed for this purpose. By cuneiform groups both simple and compound syllables are expressed. For simple syllables, _i.e._ for those consisting of a single consonant with a vowel before or after it in order to give the consonant a sound, the cuneiform writing of Babylon and a.s.syria possesses about one hundred groups, and several hundred groups for compound syllables, _i.e._ for those which have more than one consonant. Side by side with this syllabic writing the old abbreviated picture-writing was retained. Certain words of frequent occurrence, as king, battle, month, were always represented by picture signs, or ideograms, and so also were the names of deities and most proper names.

The greater number of the cuneiform groups were then used in a phonetic as well as an ideographic sense, and without any correlation between the phonetic and actual meaning. Thus the symbol for the word "father" had the phonetic value of the syllable _at_, but "father" in the Babylonian language is _abu_. In Babylon this system of writing became even more complicated by the fact that different meanings and different phonetic values were ascribed to the same cuneiform groups. There are symbols which have four different phonetic values and four different meanings.[389] In order to lessen to some degree the great difficulty in understanding the meaning which was caused by the varying use of the same symbol as an ideogram and a sound, and the multiplicity of meanings and sounds attached to certain signs--key-symbols were placed before the names of G.o.ds, lands, cities, and persons, and occasionally one or more syllables were attached to ideograms of more than one meaning, which formed the termination of the word intended to be expressed by the ideogram in the particular instance.

Complicated and difficult as this writing was, it was applied on a considerable scale in a.s.syria and Babylonia, and it remained in use even after the fall of the Babylonian empire, as is shown by bricks and tablets of the time of Cyrus, Cambyses, Artaxerxes I., and the Seleucidae.[390] These are princ.i.p.ally records of business or legal matters, of which, in this way, a selection has come down to us extending from the times of Hammurabi (p. 261) to the first century B.C.

The Armenians adopted this system from the Babylonians and a.s.syrians; and they also made it shorter and simpler. In the same way the Medes and Persians borrowed it. But in the Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenids it has already become a mere phonetic mode of writing but little removed from an ordinary alphabet. Beyond doubt the Babylonian system was known to the Western Semitic tribes; it even pa.s.sed over from Syria to Cyprus, where we find it a.s.suming a peculiar form, and displaying throughout the character of a syllabic mode of writing. At the same time among the Syrians and Phenicians a cursive method was developed, just as in Egypt the hieratic writing grew up beside the hieroglyphic. This cursive writing of the Western Semitic nations has not, however, arisen out of the cuneiform symbols, but out of the hieratic writing of the Egyptians.

The Phenicians must claim the merit of having abbreviated still further, for their own use, the cursive writing of the Egyptians. But the picture-symbols of the hieratic writing were not merely contracted and simplified; the mixture of pictorial, syllabic, and alphabetic symbols--beyond which the Egyptians did not rise--was abandoned, and then for the first time an alphabet was discovered. This Phenician alphabet was in use in Syria as early as the year 1000 B.C.[391] In Babylonia also this alphabetic writing was in use beside the cuneiform.

We find it in Babylon side by side with the corresponding cuneiform on a weight, of which the inscription tells us: "Thirty minae of standard weight: the palace of Irba Merodach (Marduk) king of Babylon." The exact date of this king cannot be ascertained: we only know that he must have belonged to the old kingdom. a.s.syrian weights with inscriptions in the Phenician alphabet, beside the cuneiform inscriptions, are found of the eighth century B.C., the time of King Tiglath Pilesar II., Shalmanesar IV., and Sennacherib.[392]

"It can be maintained with good reason," says Diodorus, "that the Chaldaeans are far before all other nations in their knowledge of the heavens; and that they devoted the greatest attention and labour to this science." At an early period, by comparing the course of the sun with that of the moon, they had perceived that the sun returned to the same position after pa.s.sing through about twelve cycles of the moon; hence they fixed the year at twelve months of thirty days, which they, by intercalations of various kinds, brought into harmony with the astronomical year of 365-1/4 days.[393] The observation, that the sun after a course of twelve months returns to the same constellation, led them on to determine the changing position of the sun in the other months by constellations. Thus the Babylonians marked off the constellations which seemed to touch nearest upon the course of the sun, and arrived at the signs of the ecliptic or zodiac. Each of these twelve stations through which the sun pa.s.sed they again divided into thirty parts. The week they fixed at seven days by the course of the moon; to the day they allotted twelve hours, to correspond to the twelve months of the year; the hours they divided into sixty parts, and each of these sixtieths was again subdivided into sixty parts. Their measures were also duodecimal. The cubit was twenty-four finger-breadths; and on the same system, their numerals were based upon the _sossus_, or sixty,--a derivative from twelve, and the _sarus_, or square of the _sossus_. When they attempted to fix the position and intervals of the stars in the sky, the basis taken for their measurements was the diameter of the sun.

They divided the daily course of the sun, like the ecliptic, into 360 parts, and then attempted to measure these at the equinox. At the moment when the sun was seen in the sky on the morning of the equinox, a jar filled with water was opened. From this the water was allowed to run into a second small jar, till the orb of the sun was completely visible; then it ran into a third and larger jar, till the sun was again seen on the horizon on the following morning. They concluded that the diameter of the sun must stand in the same proportion to the cycle it pa.s.sed through as the water in the small jar stood to the water in the large one. Hence they found that the diameter of the sun was contained 720 times in its course, and this diameter they fixed at 1/30 of an hour.[394] The observation that an active foot-courier could accomplish a certain distance in the thirtieth part of an equinoctial hour, and thirty times as much in the whole hour, supplied the Chaldaeans with a longitudinal measurement on the same basis. The measure of the hour was the parasang (3/4 of a geographical mile), and the thirtieth part of the parasang was the stadium. Till we obtain help from the inscriptions we must remain acquainted only with the Persian name of the first measure and the Greek name of the second. At the equator the sun was supposed in every hour to traverse a distance of thirty stadia. On this system also the Chaldaeans fixed the length of their cubit. The stadium was divided into 360 cubits, and the sixth part of the stadium, or plethron, into sixty cubits, and the foot was fixed at 3/5 of this cubit. Consequently the Babylonian cubit was fixed at twenty-one inches of our measure (525 millimeters).[395]

From this division of the sphere the Babylonians, though aided by very simple instruments, the polus and gnomon,[396] arrived at very exact astronomical observations and results. They discovered a period of 223 months, within which all eclipses of the moon occurred in a similar number and equal extent. By means of this period they fixed the average length of the synodic and periodic month with such accuracy that our astronomers here found the first to be too large by four seconds only, and the last by one second. Their observations of ten lunar eclipses, and three conjunctions of planets and fixed stars, have come down to us.

The oldest of these observations is that of a lunar eclipse of the year 721 B.C., which took place "a good hour after midnight." The second took place in 720 B.C., "about midnight;" the third in the same year "after the rising of the moon." In these observations also our astronomers have found but little to correct.

As the Chaldaeans brought their measures of the sphere, of time and length into correlation, so also they attempted to preserve the same relation in their cubic measures and weights. For their weights and cubic measures the division of the units into sixtieths (minae, _i.e._ parts) was retained. The quadrantal, or _Maris_, contained one Babylonian cubic foot, and the sixtieth part of this was the _Log_. The weight in water of a Babylonian cubic foot was, according to the statistics of our physicists, about sixty-six pounds (32,721 kilogrammes), but the Chaldaeans reckoned it at only 60-3/5 pounds (30,300 kilogrammes).[397]

The weight of the cubic measure was also the standard for imperial weight in Babylonia. The oldest weight which we know dates from the time of Ilgi, king of Ur. The stone, which in shape is not unlike a duck, has the inscription: "Ten minae of Ilgi."[398] There was a heavy talent (Kikkar, _i.e._ "orb") arranged to weigh twice as much as the quadrantal. Hence it weighed 121-1/5 pounds (60,600 kils.), and the sixtieth, or mina, weighed over two pounds. The light talent weighed one quadrantal, according to the estimate of the Chaldaeans, _i.e._ 60-3/5 pounds, and the mina was a little heavier than a pound of our weight.

But in weighing the precious metals, the Chaldaeans used units, which differed from the imperial weights in use for all other purposes. They calculated by little circular pieces, or rings, or bars (tongues) of silver and gold, and the smallest of these was equivalent to the shekel, or sixtieth part of the mina of the heavy talent. These shekels were the commonest and most indispensable measure of value. It was found easier to reckon by units of 3,000 shekels, than by units of 3,600. And so it came about that the mina contained fifty shekels instead of sixty, and the talent 3,000 shekels instead of 3,600. The three thousand shekels as a whole, no longer weighed 121-1/5 pounds, but only 101 pounds, and the mina, or sixtieth part, instead of weighing fully two pounds, weighed only about 1-3/5 pounds.[399]

This weight, or the half of it (50-1/2 pounds), was retained for the heavy and light gold talent. In the weight of silver trade caused a further deviation. It was necessary to exchange gold and silver, and in the East in antiquity the value of gold and silver was estimated at 13 : 1, or more accurately 13-1/3 : 1.[400] By making the silver shekel (_i.e._ the fiftieth part of the silver mina), which corresponded to the weight of the light gold talent, a little heavier, a silver coin was obtained which stood to the fiftieth of the light gold mina, nearly in the ratio of 10 : 1. Ten silver shekels of this weight could therefore without any further trouble be exchanged for the fiftieth of the gold mina, or gold shekel of the light gold talent. Hence arose a silver talent of 67-1/3 pounds (33,660 kil.), a silver mina of 1-1/10 pound, and a silver shekel of about eleven milligrammes.

FOOTNOTES:

[359] Diod. 2, 30.

[360] Nicol. Damasc. Fragm. 9, 10, ed. Muller.

[361] Pindari Fragm. adesp. 83, ed. Bergk.

[362] Schrader, "a.s.syr.-babyl. Keilschriften," s. 123; "Keilschriften und Alt. Test." s. 280.

[363] G. Rawlinson, "Five Monarchies," p. 130.

[364] 2 Kings xvii. 31.

[365] Amos v. 26.

[366] Eberhard Schrader, "Theologg. Studien und Kritiken," 1874, 2, 324 ff.

[367] Schrader, "Keilschriften und Alt. Test." s. 167, 272; "a.s.syr.-babyl. Keilschriften," s. 88, 129, 140.

[368] Menant, "Babylone," pp. 201-203.

[369] Munter, "Religion der Babylonier," s. 28.

[370] Herod. 1, 199.

[371] Baruch, vi. 42, 43 (Ep. Jerem.); cf. Genesis x.x.xviii. 14 ff.

[372] Menant, "Babylone," p. 204.

[373] Schrader, "Abstammung der Chaldaeer," s. 405. So, too, Istar of Agane is opposed to Istar of Erech.

[374] G. Smith, "Discov." p. 220; Schrader, "Hollenfahrt," p. 15 ff.

[375] Schrader, "Keilschriften und Alt. Test." s. 69, 85, 86.

[376] G. Smith, "a.s.surbanipal," p. 201.

[377] Diod. 2, 30.

[378] Plutarch, "De Isid." c. 48.

[379] Diod. 2, 30.

[380] Diod. 2, 31.

[381] Sayce, "Bibl. Arch." 3, p. 137.

[382] 2 Kings xxiii. 5-7.

[383] Diod. 2, 31.

[384] Stuhr, "Die Religionsysteme der Volker des Orients," 1, 424.

[385] Sayce, "Bibl. Archaeol." 3, p. 153.

[386] Diod. 2, 30, 31; Daniel 4, 4.

[387] Above, p. 268; Strabo, p. 739.

[388] Movers, "Religion der Phoenizier," 2, 262, 275.

[389] Schrader, "a.s.syrisch. Babyl. Keilschriften," s. 105.

[390] G. Smith, "Discov." pp. 387, 388; Menant, "Les Achaemenides."

Recently a tablet has been found, supposed to belong to the time of Caesar.

[391] De Rouge, "Sur l'Origine Egyptienne de l'Alphabet Phenicien;"

Lauth, "Sitzungsber. d. Bair. Akad. d." 10, 1867, pp. 84-124. The inscription of Mesha, king of Moab, proves by the formation and use of the letters that this alphabet had been known for a long time.

[392] The Basalt duck of Irba Marduk--no doubt a piece of Babylonian booty--was found at Nineveh.--Layard, "Discoveries," p. 601; Schrader, "a.s.syr. Babyl. Keilschrift," s. 175; De Vogue, "Rev. Arch." 11, 366.