THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF
ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POT
THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. Columbus tried
to find a way to the island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and
unsuspected continent. An Austrian bishop equipped an expedition which
was to travel eastward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy,
a voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not visited by
western men until a generation later. Meanwhile a certain Venetian
by the name of Barbero had explored the ruins of western Asia and had
brought back reports of a most curious language which he had found
carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless
pieces of baked clay.
But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the
end of the eighteenth century that the first "cuneiform inscriptions"
(so-called because the letters were wedge-shaped and wedge is called
"Cuneus" in Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named
Niebuhr. Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-master
by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four letters, the
D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius.
And another twenty years had to go by until a British officer, Henry
Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a
workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.
Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of
Champollion had been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the
Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon
the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded
pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been
developed. A few examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning a
star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows: {illust.}
This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the
meaning of "heaven" was added to that of star the picture was simplified
in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same
way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.} and a fish changed from
{illust.} into {illust.} The sun was originally a plain circle {illust.}
and became {illust.} If we were using the Sumerian script today we would
make an {illust.} look like {illust.}. This system of writing down our
ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries it
was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the
Persians and all the different races which forced their way into the
fertile valley.
The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First
the Sumerians came from the North. They were a white People who had
lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods
on the tops of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed
artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They
did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their
towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea, as
you may see in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries lead
from one floor to another. We may have borrowed other ideas from the
Sumerians but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-sorbed
by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later date. Their
towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw
them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and they called
them towers of Babillli, or towers of Babel.
In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered
Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-powered by the Akkadians,
one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common
dialect and who are known as the "Semites," because in the olden days
people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the
three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced to
submit to the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe whose
great King Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy
city of Babylon and who gave his people a set of laws which made the
Babylonian state the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next
the Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-ran the
Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not carry away. They
in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert God, Ashur,
who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the
center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia
and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until the end
of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans,
also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and made that city the most
important capital of that day. Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their
Kings, encouraged the study of science, and our modern knowledge of
astronomy and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles
which were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a crude
tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and overthrew the
empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years later, they in turn were
overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the Fertile Valley, the
old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next
came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the
second centre of the world's civilisation, became a vast wilderness
where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.