BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE
Aids to the reading of the texts.--The origin of the cuneiform system
of writing has been already described, as well as its chief
peculiarities. We must now say something about the causes which have
led to our being able to read an ordinary Assyrian text almost as
easily as a page of the Old Testament.
(1) The 'determinatives' have already been mentioned which define so
many words and names.
(2) The ideographs often prove a great assistance, as words of unknown
meaning interchange with ideographs the signification of which is
already known.
(3) The fact that the characters express syllables gives us the precise
pronunciation of the words, and so enables us to read them with a
certainty which is impossible in Hebrew or Phoenician where the vowels
are not denoted in writing.
(4) Assyrian is a Semitic language, and the Semitic languages are as
closely related to one another as are the Romanic languages (French,
Italian, Spanish, &c.) in modern Europe. Consequently most of the words
and grammatical forms found in Assyrian recur in one or other of the
Semitic idioms.
(5) But above all, the Assyrian scribes themselves have provided us
with the most abundant materials for interpreting the inscriptions.
The libraries.--The amount of Assyro-Babylonian literature already
known is very large. If all the texts at present in the museums of
Europe and America could be published, they would rival in extent the
books of the Old Testament. Most of the texts are on tablets of clay
and have come from the libraries of Nineveh and Babylonia. Every great
Babylonian city had at least one library, and the Assyrian kings
established other libraries in their own country in imitation of those
of Babylonia. About two-thirds of the library of Nineveh, which was
largely the creation of Assur-bani-pal, is now in the British Museum.
Scribes were kept constantly at work there copying and re-editing old
texts, and sometimes writing new ones. A considerable proportion of the
texts was brought from Babylonia: a colophon attached to each tablet
usually states from what library the text had originally come. The
texts were carefully edited; when there was a lacuna in the original
the scribe tells us so, and whether it was old or recent; also if the
Babylonian character were one which he did not recognize he confesses
that he could not read it. Besides the clay tablets, the libraries
contained papyri which have now perished.
Varieties of literature.--The texts related to all the branches of
knowledge studied at the time. Astronomy and astrology, mathematics,
geography, medicine, law, history, religion, and mythology, private and
public correspondence, mercantile transactions, political documents,
the pseudo-science of omens, lists of beasts, birds, vegetables, and
stones, are all represented in it, and last, but not least, philology.
The necessity of translating and explaining the Sumerian texts
doubtless gave philology so prominent a place. Under the head of
philology come interlinear and parallel translations of Sumerian
documents, together with commentaries and exercises, reading-books and
grammars of the two languages, endless lists of characters with their
phonetic values and significations, and numerous vocabularies partly
bilingual, partly containing catalogues of Semitic synonyms. The
decipherer thus has at his command a most elaborate system for learning
the Assyrian and Sumerian languages compiled by the Assyrians
themselves. Time after time the signification of a new word is given by
its synonym or synonyms in the lexical lists, and words of uncertain
meaning in Hebrew have more than once been settled by means of their
Assyrian equivalents.
The texts autotypes.--The cuneiform texts further possess an advantage
of which the student of the Old and New Testament Scriptures might well
be envious. They are the autotypes of the scribes who wrote them for
the libraries in the ruins of which they have been found. The texts
have never passed through the hands of later copyists little acquainted
with the language in which they were composed. The corruptions of the
text, such as they are, go back to the scribes of Assur-bani-pal or
Nebuchadrezzar, in some cases to the scribes even of the pre-Semitic
period.
[Illustration: PART OF AN ASSYRIAN BOOK.]
Astronomy.--The great work on astronomy and astrology in seventy-two
chapters or books was originally compiled for the library of Sargon of
Accad. It contained chapters on the eclipses or conjunction of the sun
and moon, on the planets, the fixed stars, and the comets, and proves
that observations of the heavens had been made for a long while
previous to its composition. The path of the sun through the signs of
the Zodiac had already been mapped out: in fact the Zodiacal Signs owe
their origin to the astronomers of Babylonia. At the time they were
first named the vernal equinox began with Taurus.
Mathematics.--Among the mathematical treatises may be mentioned tables
of cube and square roots from the library of Senkereh. The Babylonian
system of notation resembled that of the Romans, but by an ingenious
application of the sexagesimal system high numbers could be expressed
in a very small number of figures.
Medicine and law.--The standard work on medicine was voluminous like
that on astronomy. It contained a vast number of prescriptions for
different diseases, which read very much like modern ones. Law occupied
a large space in Babylonian and Assyrian life, and codes of law, which
protected the slave as well as the woman, went back to Sumerian times.
A considerable part of the law was based on cases which had already
been decided by the judges. The judges were appointed by the king, and,
at all events in a later age, were under a president. Important cases
were heard before several judges at once; thus a case which was tried
at Babylon in B.C. 547 was heard before six judges and registered by
their two clerks.
History and mythology.--Historical documents are numerous and include
the lists of Assyrian eponyms, after whom the successive years were
named, as well as of the dynasties of kings and the number of years
each king reigned. Religious literature, however, was still more
largely represented. As has been stated, a considerable portion of it
consisted of hymns to the gods, psalms, and ritual texts. But there
were also lists of the multitudinous deities and their temples, and
more especially religious myths and legends. One of these described the
visit of the goddess Istar to Hades in search of her dead husband
Tammuz, the Sun-god, and told how she left some of her adornment at
each of its seven gates, until at last she stood stripped and bare
before the mistress of the Underworld, where the waters of life gush
forth. In another the adventures of the first man Adapa are related,
and how he was summoned to heaven to answer the charge of having broken
the wings of the south-wind. We possess two fragments of this myth, the
earlier part being written on a broken tablet which was found in the
library of Nineveh, while the latter part of it has been found on one
of the cuneiform documents discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt, where
it had been copied for Egyptian or Canaanite students some eight
centuries before the library of Nineveh was in existence.
The Chaldaean epic and the Deluge.--One of the most famous of the
legends is the Chaldaean account of the Deluge, which was discovered by
George Smith in 1872. Its close resemblance to the Biblical account of
the same event is well known. It embodied at least two earlier versions
of the story, and in its present form is inserted as an episode in the
great Epic of the Babylonian hero Gilgames. The Epic was composed by
a certain Sin-liqi-unnini in twelve books, and was arranged on an
astronomical principle, the subject of each book corresponding with the
name of a Zodiacal sign. Thus the account of the Deluge is introduced
into the eleventh book, which answers to Aquarius the eleventh sign of
the Zodiac.
Gilgames, it was said, was the fated child of whom it had been
prophesied that he would slay his grandfather. Though his mother had
been confined in a tower, he was nevertheless born and conveyed to
safety on the wings of an eagle. When grown to man's estate he saved
Erech from the enemy and made it the seat of his dominion. He overthrew
Khumbaba the tyrant of the forest of cedars, and found a friend and
guide in the satyr Ea-bani. The goddess Istar wooed him in marriage,
but he reproached her with the woes she had already brought on her
hapless lovers and scorned her beauty. In revenge she besought Anu, her
father, to create a winged bull, which should attack the hero.
Gilgames, however, slew the bull and returned in triumph to Erech with
his spoils. But misfortune fell upon him. Ea-bani was killed by the
bite of a gad-fly, his soul rising up from the ground to the heaven of
heroes, and Gilgames himself was smitten with a sore disease. To heal
it he sailed beyond the mouth of the Euphrates and the river of death,
and here conversed with Xisuthrus, the Chaldaean Noah, who, like Enoch,
had been translated without seeing death. Xisuthrus told him the story
of the Deluge, and instructed him how to cure his malady.
Epic of the Creation.--The Assyrian Epic of the Creation, the discovery
of which was also due to George Smith, has already been alluded to. Its
parallelism with the account of the Creation, in the first chapter of
Genesis, was noticed from the first. The first tablet opens with a
description of the deep or watery chaos, while the fifth tablet
describes the appointment of the heavenly bodies for signs and for
seasons, and in the seventh comes an account of the creation of the
animals. The second and third tablets, however, and possibly the
fourth, were occupied with the story of the struggle between Tiamat the
dragon of darkness, and Merodach the Sun-god, which finds its echo in
the Apocalypse (Rev. xii. 7-9). Out of the skin of Tiamat, Merodach
formed the firmament which 'divided the waters which were under the
firmament from the waters which were above it.' Other accounts of the
Creation existed, which differed essentially from that of the Epic.
Thus there was one that was written for the Library of Kutha and
described an imperfect creation which foreshadowed as it were the
present one. Mr. Pinches, again, has discovered a Sumerian legend of
the origin of things which seems to have been current at Eridu. But in
the Epic a considerable number of the older cosmological legends were
embodied and combined, and a gloss of materialistic philosophy put upon
them. It is this gloss which makes it difficult to believe that the
Epic can be of much antiquity. The materials of which it is composed
doubtless go back to an early period, but in its present form it
belongs to an age when the deities of the old faith were resolved into
philosophical abstractions and the forces of nature. At present, at all
events, we have no reasons for thinking that it is earlier than the
time of the Second Assyrian Empire.
[Illustration: CONTRACT-TABLETS.]