THE SUMERIANS
Among the first results of the decipherment of the Assyrian cuneiform
inscriptions was one which was so unexpected and revolutionary, that
it was received with incredulity and employed to pour discredit on
the fact of the decipherment itself. European scholars had long been
nursing the comfortable belief that the white race primarily, and
the natives of Europe secondarily, were _ipso facto_ superior
to the rest of mankind, and that to them belonged of right the
origin and development of civilization. The discovery of the common
parentage of the Indo-European languages had come to strengthen the
belief; the notion grew up that in Sanskrit we had found, if not the
primeval language, at all events a language that was very near to it,
and idyllic pictures were painted of the primitive Aryan community
living in its Asiatic home and already possessed of the elements of
its later culture. Outside and beyond it were the barbarians, races
yellow and brown and black, with oblique eyes and narrow foreheads,
whose intelligence was not much above that of the brute beasts. Such
culture as some of them may have had was derived from the white race,
and perhaps spoilt in the borrowing. The idea of the rise of a
civilization outside the limits of the white race was regarded as a
paradox.
It was just this paradox to which the first decipherers of Assyrian
cuneiform found themselves forced. And another paradox was added to it.
Not only had the civilization of the Euphrates and Tigris originated
amongst a race that spoke an agglutinative language, and therefore was
neither Aryan nor Semitic, the civilization of the Semitic Babylonians
and Assyrians was borrowed from this older civilization along with the
cuneiform system of writing. It seemed impossible that so revolutionary
a doctrine could be true, and Semitic philologists naturally denounced
it. For centuries Hebrew had been supposed to have been the language
of Paradise, and the old belief which made the Semitic Adam the first
civilized man still unconsciously affected the Semitic scholars of the
nineteenth century. It was hard to part with the prejudices of early
education, especially when they were called upon to do so by a small
group of men whose method of decipherment was an enigma to the ordinary
grammarian, and who were introducing new and dangerous principles into
the study of the extinct Semitic tongues.
The method of decipherment was nevertheless a sound one, and the
result, which seemed so incredible and impossible when first announced,
is now one of the assured facts of science. The first civilized
occupants of the alluvial plain of Babylonia were neither Semites nor
Aryans, but the speakers of an agglutinative language, and to them
were due all the elements of the Babylonian culture of later days. It
was they who first drained the marshes, and regulated the course of
the rivers by canals, thereby transforming what had been a pestiferous
swamp into the most fertile of lands; it was they who founded the
great cities of the country, and invented the pictorial characters,
the cursive forms of which became what we term cuneiform. The theology
and law of later Babylonia went back to them, and long after Semitic
Babylonian had become the language of the country, legal judgments were
still written in the old language and the theological literature was
still studied in it. The Church and the Law were as loth to give up the
dead language of Sumer as they were in modern Europe to give up the use
of Latin.
This dead agglutinative language has been called sometimes Akkadian,
sometimes Sumerian, but Sumerian is the name which has been finally
selected. In fact, this was the name applied to it by the Semitic
Babylonians themselves, who included in the term the two dialects--or
rather the two forms of the language at different periods of its
development--which have been preserved to us in the cuneiform tablets.
Strictly speaking, the dialect which had been most affected by contact
with the Semites, and had in consequence suffered most from phonetic
decay, was known as the language of Akkad, but this was because Akkad
represented Northern Babylonia, which had become Semitic at an earlier
date than the south and had been the seat of the first great Semitic
Empire.[66] Both names, Akkadian and Sumerian, are correct as applied
to the primitive language of Chaldæa, but of the two Sumerian is
preferable, not only because it was used by the Babylonian scribes
themselves, but also because it denoted the oldest and purest form of
the language before it had passed under foreign influence.
This, then, was the great archæological fact which resulted from the
decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. The earliest civilized
inhabitants of Babylonia did not speak a Semitic language, and
therefore presumably they were not Semites. It is perfectly true that
language and race are not synonymous terms, and that we are seldom
justified in arguing from the one to the other. But the Sumerian
language is one of the exceptions which proves the rule. Those who
spoke it were the first civilizers of Western Asia, the inventors and
perfecters of a system of writing which was destined to be one of
the chief humanizing agents of the ancient world, the authors of the
irrigation engineering of the Babylonian plain, and the builders of
its many cities. The language they spoke, accordingly, could not have
been forced upon them by conquerors who have otherwise left no trace
behind them, and they certainly would not have exchanged it of their
own accord for their native tongue. The Semitic languages have always
been conspicuous for the tenacity with which they have held their own,
and the conservatism with which they have resisted change. We may still
hear in the Egyptian Arabic of to-day the very words which were written
by Semitic Babylonian scribes upon their tablets some four or five
thousand years ago. A Semitic people would have been the last to borrow
the language of its less-civilized neighbours without any assignable
reason. The fact, consequently, that the pioneers of Babylonian culture
spoke an agglutinative language fully justifies us in concluding that
they belonged to a race that was not Semitic.
Sumerian, however, was not the only language in the neighbourhood of
the Babylonian plain which was agglutinative. Further to the east,
in the highlands of Elam, other agglutinative languages were spoken,
monuments of one or more of which have been preserved to us. Whether or
not the agglutinative languages of Elam were related to the Sumerian
of Babylonia, I cannot tell; so far as our materials go at present
they do not warrant us in saying more than that, like Sumerian, they
were of the agglutinative type. It is only rarely that the scientific
philologist is able to separate some of the multitudinous languages of
the globe into genealogically related groups; for the most part they
stand isolated and apart from one another, and, however much we may
wish to group them together, it is seldom that we find such proofs of
a common descent as will satisfy the requirements of science. Families
of speech--or at all events such as can be scientifically proved to be
so--are the exception and not the rule.
Eastward of Sumer the type of language was thus agglutinative, as it
was in Sumer itself. And in the days when civilization first grew up
there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional.
The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in
Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the
old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since
been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist,[67]
and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must
be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent; the
tide of Semitic speech which eventually overflowed Babylonia, surged
northward and eastward into Assyria and Elam, but never succeeded in
passing Susiana, and was finally driven again from the ground it had
once gained there. The home of the Semite lay to the west and not to
the east of the Babylonian plain. Babylonian culture owed its origin to
a race whose type of language was that of the Finn, of the Magyar or
the Japanese.
The physical characteristics of this race cannot as yet be fully
determined. The oldest sculptures yielded by Babylonian excavation
belong to a time when the Semite was already in the land. It might
be supposed that the early monuments of Tello, which were erected by
Sumerian princes and go back to Sumerian times, would give us the
necessary materials; but not only are they too rude and infantile
to be of scientific use, they also indicate the existence of two
ethnological types, one heavily bearded, the other beardless, with
oblique eyes and negrito-like face. It is not until we come to the
age of Semitic domination that sculpture is sufficiently realistic
for exact anthropological purposes. At the same time, there was to
the last a marked contrast of both form and feature in the artistic
representation of the Babylonian and his more purely Semitic Assyrian
neighbour. The squat, thick figure, the full, well-shaven cheeks, the
large, almond-shaped eyes and round head of King Merodach-nadin-akhi in
the twelfth century B.C. still reproduce the characteristic
form and features of the statues found in the palace of Gudea, the
Sumerian high-priest of Lagas, who lived more than a thousand years
before. The aquiline or hooked nose, the thick lips and muscular limbs
which distinguished the Assyrian are generally wanting in Babylonia.
And, on the other hand, there is a likeness between the Babylonian
as he is portrayed on the monuments and the Elamite adversaries of
Assur-bani-pal, some of whom, it is noticeable, are depicted with
beards, though the excavations of Dieulafoy and de Morgan at Susa
have shown (according to Quatrefages and Hamy) that a beardless and
short-nosed negrito type with round heads was aboriginal in Elam. The
same type is reproduced in one of the heads found at Tello, and M.
de Morgan has pointed out that similar brachycephalic and beardless
negritos are represented on the monuments of Naram-Sin as serving in
the army of Akkad.[68] We may conclude, therefore, that they still
formed a part of the population of Northern Babylonia even in the age
when it had passed completely under Semitic rule. Indeed, Dr. Pinches
has shown that the pure Semitic type is not depicted in Babylonian art,
outside the kingdom of Akkad, “before the time of the First dynasty of
Babylon, which began to reign about B.C. 2300.”
It has often been maintained that the Sumerians themselves were an
immigrant people, who had descended from the mountains of Elam. There
is nothing unreasonable in the supposition; it was always difficult
to prevent the mountaineers of Elam from making raids in Babylonia,
and one of their tribes succeeded in settling in the country and
establishing at Babylon one of the longest-lived of its dynasties. But
the supposition mainly rests upon two facts. The pictorial hieroglyphs
out of which the cuneiform characters have developed had no special
sign for “river,” while the same character represented both “mountain”
and “country.” It would seem, therefore, that the land in which the
cuneiform system of writing was first invented was just the converse of
the Babylonian plain, being at once mountainous and riverless. That the
same character means both “mountain” and “country” is no doubt a strong
argument in favour of the Elamite origin of Babylonian civilization.
That the use of the primitive hieroglyphs should have survived in Elam
while it was lost in Babylonia, as M. de Morgan’s discoveries have
shown to be the case, is also another fact which may perhaps be claimed
on the same side; at any rate it indicates that they were known to the
Elamites before the cursive cuneiform had developed out of them. But
the want of a special character for “river” is not so decisive as it
appears at first sight to be. The word “river” is represented by two
ideographic signs which literally signify “the watery deep,” and so
point to the fact that those who originally invented them lived not in
the highlands of the East, but on the shores of that Persian Gulf which
the Babylonians of the historic period still called “the deep.” As it
was also known as “the salt river,” it is not difficult to understand
how, to those whose experience of navigable water had been confined
to the Persian Gulf, the Tigris and Euphrates would have seemed but
repetitions of the Gulf on a smaller scale.[69]
The rise of Sumerian culture on the shores of the Persian Gulf is in
accordance with Babylonian tradition. Babylonian myths told how Oannes
or Ea, the god of culture, had risen each morning out of his palace
in “the deep,” bringing with him the elements of civilization which
he communicated to mankind. Letters, science and art had all been
his gifts. He had instructed the wild tribes of the coast to build
houses and erect temples; he had compiled for them the first law-book,
and had instructed them in the mysteries of agriculture. Babylonian
civilization was sea-born. The system of cosmology which finally won
its way to acceptance with the priesthood and philosophers of Babylonia
was one which had been first conceived at Eridu, the site of which is
now more than a hundred miles distant from the sea, but in the early
days of Babylonian history, before the silting up of the shore, had
been its seaport. Here the first man Adam[70] was supposed to have
lived, and to have spent his time fishing in the waters of the Gulf.
The whole earth was believed to have grown out of a primeval deep like
the mud-flats which the inhabitants of Eridu saw slowly emerging from
the retreating sea. Philosophy and cosmology, with the theology with
which they were associated, looked back upon Eridu and the Babylonian
coast as their primeval home.[71]
In fact the physical conditions of the Babylonian plain rendered it
impossible for the first culture of the country to have sprung up in
it. Before it was reclaimed by engineering skill and labour the larger
part of it had been a pestiferous marsh. The science needed for making
it habitable, at least by civilized man, must have arisen outside its
boundaries. Only when he was already armed with a civilization which
enabled him to dig canals, to mould bricks, and pile his houses and
temples on artificial foundations could the Sumerian have settled in
the Babylonian plain and there developed it still further. The cities
of the plain grew up each round its sanctuary, which became a centre of
civilization and progress, of agriculture and trade. But the builders
of the sanctuaries must have brought their culture with them from
elsewhere.
Of these sanctuaries the most venerable was that of Bel the Elder at
Nippur. It has been systematically excavated by the Americans down to
its foundations, and the successive strata of its history laid bare.
Inscribed objects have been found in all the strata, carrying the
history of the cuneiform system of writing back to the days when the
temple was originally built. But it is still the cuneiform system of
writing as far back as we can go, that is to say the characters are the
cursive forms of earlier hieroglyphic pictures, the features of which
are in most cases scarcely traceable. Here and there, it is true, the
primitive pictorial form has been preserved, but this is the exception
and not the rule. As a rule the earliest writing found at Nippur, and
coeval with the foundation of its temple, is already the degenerated
and cursive hand which we call cuneiform.
The fact is very noteworthy. The cuneiform characters have assumed the
shapes which give them their name owing to their having been inscribed
on clay by a stylus of wood or metal, which obliged the writer to
substitute a series of wedge-like indentations for curves and straight
lines. As time went on, the number of the wedges was reduced, the forms
of the characters were simplified, and the resemblance to the pictures
they were once intended to represent became more and more indistinct.
The cuneiform script is, in short, a running hand, like the hieratic
of Egypt. But whereas in Egypt the hieratic running hand does not
come into common use until long after the beginning of the monumental
period, while the pictorial hieroglyphs continued to be employed to
the last, in Babylonia the cuneiform running hand has superseded the
primeval pictures as far back as our records carry us. When the temple
of Nippur was built--and it was probably one of the first, if not the
first, to be built in the Babylonian plain--the clay tablet was already
in use for writing purposes, and the cursive cuneiform had taken the
place of the older hieroglyphs.
The Babylonian plain was called by its Sumerian inhabitants the Edin,
or “Plain,” a name which was borrowed by the Semites and has been made
familiar to us by the book of Genesis. Originally it had meant all
the uncultivated flats on either side of the Euphrates, but it soon
acquired the sense of the country as opposed to the city, and so of the
cultivated plain itself. Most of the important Babylonian cities were
built in it between the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris on the
east. A few only lay beyond it on the western bank of the Euphrates.
One of these was Eridu, another was Ur, a third was Borsippa.
[Illustration:
THE TELL OF BORSIPPA, THE PRESENT BIRS-NIMRUD.]
Of Eridu I have already spoken. Some six or eight thousand years
ago it was the seaport of primitive Babylonia.[72] Ur, which stood
close to it, seems to have been a colony of Nippur, and therefore of
comparatively late origin.[73] Borsippa was a small and unimportant
town, which eventually became a suburb of Babylon, and Babylon, on
the eastern bank of the Euphrates, was itself a colony of Eridu.[74]
Hence of the cities which stood outside the Edin of Babylonia, and may
therefore belong to an age when Babylonian civilization was still in
its infancy, Eridu alone is of account. And the priority even of Eridu
was contested. Traditionally Sippara, which is expressly stated to have
been in “the Edin,” claimed to be the oldest of Babylonian cities; one
quarter of it bore the name of “Sippara that is from everlasting,” and
like Eridu, it believed itself to have been the abode of the first
man.[75] Thus far, however, the monuments have given us nothing to
substantiate the claim; the culture-god of Babylonia was Ea of Eridu,
not the Sun-god of Sippara, and for the present, therefore, we must
look to the shore of the Persian Gulf, rather than to the “land of
Eden” for the cradle of Babylonian civilization.
At any rate, both Sippara and Eridu were of Sumerian foundation, as
indeed were nearly all the great cities of Babylonia. Eridu was a later
form of the older Eri-dugga, “the good city,” a name which seems to
have been the starting-point of more than one legend. The growth of the
coast to the south of it gives us some idea as to the age to which its
foundation must reach back.
It was, as I have said, the primitive seaport of Babylonia, and its
legend of the first man Adamu made him a fisherman in the Persian Gulf.
Its site is now rather more than a hundred miles distant from the
present line of coast. The progress of alluvial deposit brought down by
the Euphrates and Tigris can be estimated by the fact that forty-seven
miles of it have been formed since Spasinus Charax, the modern
Mohammerah, was built in the age of Alexander the Great, and was for a
time the port of Chaldæa. During the last 2000 years, accordingly, the
rate of deposit would seem to have been about 115 feet a year. This,
however, does not agree with the observations of Loftus, who made the
rate not more than a mile in every seventy years,[76] while on the
other hand Sir Henry Rawlinson adduced reasons for believing it to have
been more rapid in the past than it is to-day, and that consequently
the rate must once have been as much as a mile in thirty years.[77] It
is desirable that some competent geologist should study the question
on the spot. Taking, however, as a basis of calculation, the one known
fact of the rate of growth since the foundation of Spasinus Charax, and
bearing in mind that before the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates
the rate of advance must have been comparatively slow, we should have
to go back to about B.C. 5000 as the latest date at which
Eridu could still have been the seaport of the country.
Was it here that the system of writing which was so closely entwined
with the origin of Babylonian civilization was first invented?
Babylonian tradition in later days certainly believed that such was the
case, and the fact that Ea of Eridu was the culture-god of Babylonia
is strongly in its favour. But there are difficulties in the way.
Eridu was the home of the “white witchcraft” of early Chaldæa; it was
here that the charms and incantations were composed which gave the
priesthood of Eridu its influence, and made the god they worshipped
the impersonation of wisdom. The belief that he was the originator of
Babylonian culture may have had its source in the system of magic which
was associated with his name. Eridu was built on the Semitic side of
the Euphrates, and the Semitic tribes who received their letters and
their civilization from the Sumerians of Eridu would naturally have
looked upon the city of their teachers as the primeval home of Sumerian
culture. The traditions that made Eridu the starting-point of Sumerian
civilization could thus be explained away, and we should be left free
to settle the question of its origin upon purely archæological evidence.
Unfortunately the site of Eridu has not yet been systematically
excavated. Once again the archæological materials for settling an
archæological question are not at hand, and we are thrown back upon an
examination of the picture-writing from which the cuneiform characters
are derived. Here the evidence on the whole may be said to be in
favour of tradition. It is true that there is no special ideograph for
“river,” but there is one for “the deep,” and “the spirit of the deep”
must have been a chief object of worship at the time when the primitive
hieroglyphs were first formed. The “ship,” too, played a prominent
part in the life of their inventors, and the picture of it represented
it as moved not by oars but by a sail.[78] The flowering reed was
equally prominent, and was even used to symbolize what stood firm and
established.[79] Houses, fortresses, temples, and cities were built of
brick, and vases were moulded out of clay.[80] The tablet, rectangular
or square, was already employed for the purpose of writing, but as it
was provided with a handle or a couple of rings at the top, I think
it was more probably of wood than of clay. The sheep, goat and ox were
domesticated,[81] and so also probably was the ass,[82] and corn was
cultivated in the fields. The symbol of the “earth” appears to have
been the picture of an island of circular or elliptical form. Among
trees the cedar was well known.
All this points to the sea-coast of Babylonia as the district in which
its civilization first arose. But on the other hand, there is the fact
that “country” and “mountain” are alike represented by the picture of
a mountainous land. There is also the fact that the land in which the
inventors of the hieroglyphs lived was one in which copper, gold and
silver were procurable--perhaps also meteoric iron; and the further
fact that hard wood was sufficiently plentiful for tools or weapons to
have been made of it before the employment of metal. That they should
have been made of wood, however, and not of stone, is a strong argument
in favour of the Babylonian coast.
It is on wood, moreover, that the first hieroglyphs must have been
painted or cut. Many of them represented round objects or were
formed of curved lines, which were transformed into a series of
wedge-like indentations when imprinted by a stylus upon clay. We
know, therefore, that clay was not the original writing material;
its use as such, in fact, is coeval with the rise of that cursive
script which, in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, is called
hieratic, but in Assyro-Babylonian is known as cuneiform. It was the
attempt to reproduce the old pictures upon clay that created the
cuneiform characters. As metal is not likely to have been employed
by the primitive scribes of Chaldæa, and there is no trace of stone
having been used--even the stone cylinder of later days being called
a _dup-sar_ or “written tablet”--we are left to choose between
wood and papyrus. In favour of papyrus is the fact that the circular
forms of so many of the pictures suggest that they were originally
painted rather than engraved; on the other hand, it is doubtful whether
the papyrus grows in the Babylonian rivers, or at any rate did so
in the prehistoric age. And the pictograph of a “written document”
is not a strip or roll of papyrus, as in Egypt, but a tablet with a
handle or loop. It is true that the primeval picture which denoted
“copper” has much the same form, but as even cutting instruments had
the determinative of “wood” attached to them in the early picture
writing, it is clear that the original tablet could not have been of
metal, whatever might have been the case with its later successors.
The picture, moreover, of the “tablet” is distinguished from that of
a “plate of bronze” by the addition of a string which is tied to the
handle.
On the whole, therefore, the only archæological evidence available at
present is on the side of the tradition which made Babylonian culture
move northward from the coast. The only fact against it of which I know
is that, as I have already stated, the word for land was symbolized by
the picture of a triple mountain. But this fact is not insuperable.
Before the silting up of the shore, the old coast-line of Babylonia
would have stretched away north-eastward of Eridu towards the mountains
of Elam. Whether the mountains that fringed what would then have been
the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf are visible from the site of
Eridu, I do not know; if the clear light of Upper Egypt exists there
they would be so. Nor do I know whether on the western side there
are mountain ranges visible in Arabia; these are points which can be
cleared up only when the country has been thoroughly explored.
Eridu lay five miles southward of Ur,[83] that “Ur of the Chaldees”
from which Hebrew history affirmed the ancestor of the nation had
come. Ur was never a maritime port like Eridu; it stood on the Arabian
plateau and looked towards the west. Its face was turned to the Semitic
rather than to the Sumerian world. From the first, therefore, it must
have been in touch with Semitic tribes. And a curious reminiscence
of the fact survived in the western Semitic languages, Ur or Uru
signifies “the city”; it was a Sumerian word, another form of which was
_eri_. The word was borrowed by the Semites, and in the Hebrew
of the Old Testament, accordingly, the idea of “city” is expressed by
_’îr_. The Assyrians of the north, whose vocabulary was otherwise
so full of Sumerian loan-words, preferred the native _âlu_, “a
tent,” to which the meaning of “city” was assigned when Sumerian
culture had been passed on to the Semitic race and the tent had been
exchanged for the city. The history of the word is a history of early
culture as well.
But I am far from saying that it was through Ur that the civilization
of Sumer came to be handed on to its Semitic neighbours. On the
contrary, such facts as there are point in a different direction.
Western Semites, whom linguistically we may call Arabs or Aramæans, or
Canaanites or Hebrews, doubtless mingled with the Sumerian population
of Ur, and adopted more or less of its manners and civilization, but it
was further north, in the Babylonian Eden itself, that the Semite first
came under the influence of the higher culture, and soon outstripped
his masters in the arts of life.
The entrance of the Semitic element into Babylonia is at present one of
the most obscure of problems. All we can be sure of are certain main
facts. First of all, as we have seen, the early culture of Babylonia,
including so integral a part of it as the script, was of Sumerian
origin. So, too, were the great cities and sanctuaries of the country,
as well as the system of irrigation engineering which first made it
habitable. Sumerian long continued to be the language of theology and
law; indeed a large part of the Babylonian pantheon of later days
was frankly non-Semitic. As was inevitable under such conditions,
the Assyrian language contained an immense number of words--many of
them compound--which were borrowed from the older language, and its
idioms and grammar equally showed signs of Sumerian influence. I have
sometimes been tempted, from a scientific point of view, to speak of
Semitic Babylonian as a mixed language.
On the other hand, if the elements of Babylonian civilization were
Sumerian, the superstructure was Semitic. When the Semites entered into
the heritage of Sumerian culture, the cuneiform script must have still
been in a very inchoate and immature state. Its pictorial ancestry must
still have been clear, and no scruples were felt about altering or
adding to the characters. The phonetic application of the characters,
which was still in its initial stage in the Sumerian period, was
developed and carried to perfection by the Semitic scribes, and a very
considerable proportion of their values and ideographic meanings is of
Semitic derivation. The theological system was transformed, and a new
literature and a new art came into existence. As Sumerian words had
been borrowed by the Semites, so, too, Semitic words were borrowed by
the Sumerians, and it is possible that examples of them may occur in
some of the oldest Sumerian texts known to us.[84] The Babylonians of
history, in short, were a mixed people; and their culture and language
were mixed like our own.
This, then, is one main fact. A second is that the Semitic element
first comes to the front in the northern part of Babylonia. It is in
Akkad, and not in Sumer, that the first Semitic Empire--that of Sargon
the Elder, B.C. 3800--had its seat, and old as that empire
is, it presupposes a long preceding period of Semitic settlement and
advance in power and civilization. The cuneiform system of writing
is already complete and has ceased to be Sumerian, archive-chambers
of Semitic literature are founded, and Semitic authority is firmly
established from Susa in the east to the Mediterranean in the west.
Art is no longer Sumerian, and in the hands of the Semitic subjects of
Sargon and his son Naram-Sin has reached a perfection which in certain
directions was never afterwards surpassed. The engraved seal-cylinders
of the period are the finest that we possess. Naturally the Semitic
language has superseded the Sumerian in official documents, and the
physical type as represented on the monuments is also distinctly
Semitic. At the beginning of the fourth millennium before our era, the
civilization and culture of Northern Babylonia have thus ceased to be
Sumerian, and the sceptre has fallen into the hands of a Semitic race.
But there is a third fact. The displacement of the Sumerian by the
Semite was the case only in Northern Babylonia. In the south, in the
land of Sumer, the older population continued to be dominant. Sumerian
dynasties continued to rule there from time to time, and the old
agglutinative language continued to be spoken. When a West-Semitic
dynasty governed the country about B.C. 2200, state proclamations
and similar official documents had still to be drawn up in the two
languages, Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian. Sumerian did not become
extinct till a later day. Indeed, after the fall of the empire of
Sargon of Akkad there seems to have been a Sumerian reaction. While
Susa was lost to the Semites and became the capital of a non-Semitic
people who spoke an agglutinative language, the power of the Sumerian
princes in Southern Babylonia appears to have revived. At all events
even the dynasty which followed that of the West-Semites bore
Sumerian names.[85] It was only under the foreign domination of the
Kassites, apparently, who governed Babylonia for nearly 600 years,
that the Sumerian element finally became merged in the Semitic and the
Babylonian of later history was born.
[Illustration: THE SEAL OF SHARGANI-SHAR-ALI (SARGON OF AKKAD):
GILGAMES WATERS THE CELESTIAL OX.]
[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF OF NARAM-SIN.]
The last fact is that while what we call Assyrian is Semitic Babylonian
with a few dialectal variations, it stands apart from the other Semitic
languages. A scientific comparison of its grammar with those of the
sister-tongues leads us to believe that it represents one of the two
primeval dialects of the Semitic family of speech, the other dialect
being that which subsequently split up into the varying dialects of
Canaanite or Hebrew, Arabic, South-Arabic and Aramæan--or, adopting
the genealogical form of linguistic relationship, Assyro-Babylonian
would have been one daughter of the primitive parent-speech, while the
other daughter comprised the remaining Semitic languages.[86] There
are two conclusions to be drawn from this; one is that the Babylonian
Semites must have separated from their kinsfolk and come under Sumerian
influence at a very early period, the other that they moved northward,
along the banks of the Tigris into Assyria.
With these two inferences we have to be content. Upon the first home
of the Semitic race or its affinities with other branches of the white
race, Babylonia can naturally throw no light. The earliest glimpses
we catch of the Semites of Babylonia are those of a people who have
already come under the influences of Sumerian civilization, who are
mingling with their teachers and helping with them to build up the
stately edifice of historical Babylonia. There were ruder Semitic
tribes, it is true, who continued to live their own nomad life on the
western bank of the Euphrates or in the marshes that bordered the
Persian Gulf. But like the Bedâwîn of to-day on the outskirts of Egypt
they were little, if at all, affected by the civilization at their
sides. They remained the same wild savages of the desert as their
descendants who encamp in the swamps of modern Babylonia; they neither
traded nor tilled the ground, and the language they spoke was not the
same as that of their Babylonian kindred. They served, however, as the
herdsmen and shepherds of their Babylonian neighbours, and the vast
flocks whose wool was so important an article of Babylonian trade, were
entrusted to their care. But Bedâwîn they were born, and Bedâwîn they
continued to be.
Even the Aramæan tribes of the coast-land kept apart from the
Babylonians, whether Sumerian or Semitic, until the day when one of
their tribes, the Kaldâ or Chaldæans, made themselves masters of
Babylon under their prince Merodach-baladan, and from henceforward
became an integral factor in the Babylonian population. They must
have settled on the borders of Babylonia at a comparatively late
date, when Semitic Babylonian had definitely marked itself off from
its sister-tongues and the Babylonian Semite had acquired distinctive
characteristics of his own. The West-Semitic elements in the
population of Babylonia could have entered the country only long after
the mixture of Sumerian and Semite had produced the Babylonian of
history.
The Babylonian of history came to forget that he had ever had another
fatherland than the Babylonian plain, the Eden of the Old Testament,
the land whose southern border was formed by “the salt river” or
Persian Gulf of early Sumerian geography, with its four branches
which were themselves “heads.” Here the first man Adamu[87] had been
created in Eridu, “the good city,” and here therefore the Babylonian
Semite placed the home of the first ancestor of his race. But it was a
borrowed belief, borrowed along with the other elements of Babylonian
culture, and no argument can be drawn from it as to the actual cradle
of the Semitic race. Like the story of the deluge, it was part of the
Sumerian heritage into which the Semite had entered.
The Semitic tradition which made the first man a tiller of the ground
may also have been borrowed from the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia.
At all events it is significant that the garden in which he was
placed was in the land of Eden, and that the picture of a garden or
plantation is one of the primitive hieroglyphs of Sumer. The beginnings
of Babylonian civilization were bound up with the cultivation of the
Babylonian soil; the reclamation of the great alluvial plain was at
once the effect and the cause of Sumerian culture. Sumerian culture, in
fact, was at the outset essentially that of an agricultural people.
Trade would have come later, when Eridu had become a seaport, and
ships ventured on the waters of the Persian Gulf. It grew up under the
shelter of the great sanctuaries. Supported at first by the labour
of their serfs, the priests in time came to exchange their surplus
revenues--the wool of their sheep, the wheat and sesame of their
fields, or the wine yielded by their palms--for other commodities, and
the temples themselves formed safe and capacious store-houses in which
such goods could be kept. In the historical period Babylonia is already
a great trading community, and as the centuries passed trade absorbed
more and more the energies of its population, agriculture fell into the
background, and the Babylonia conquered by Cyrus could be described
with truth as “a nation of shopkeepers.” Even the crown prince was a
merchant who dealt in wool.[88]
The increasing preponderance of trade goes along with the increasing
preponderance of the Semitic element in the country, and it is
tempting to suppose that there was a connection between the two. At
present, however, there is no positive evidence that such was the case.
Nor is there any positive evidence that the Semites who settled in
Babylonia were not already agriculturists. The circumstances in which
a people lives are mainly responsible for its being agricultural or
pastoral, and the fact that the Bedâwîn neighbours of the Babylonians
on the western side of the Euphrates remained a pastoral race does
not exclude the possibility that there were other branches of the
Semitic family who had already passed out of the pastoral into the
agricultural stage before coming into contact with the Sumerians. On
the other hand, it is at least noticeable that in Semitic Babylonian
the usual word for “city” continued to be one which properly meant a
“tent”--the home of the pastoral nomad--and that no Semitic traditions
have come down to us of the beginnings of agricultural life outside the
limits of the Babylonian “Plain.” The title of “Shepherd,” moreover,
was at times given to the Babylonian kings in days subsequent to the
Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to
judge, city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive Semitic
nomad.[89]
To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown in my Lectures on
Babylonian religion,[90] we must ascribe an important theological
conception. In historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in
the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods
themselves were men. But the conception cannot be traced back further
than the age when the Sumerians and Semites came into contact with one
another. In pre-Semitic Sumer there are no anthropomorphic gods. We
hear, instead, of the _zi_ or “spirit,” a word properly signifying
“life” which manifested itself in the power of motion. All things
that moved were possessed of life, and there was accordingly a “life”
or “spirit” of the water as well as of man or beast. In place of the
divine “lord of heaven” whom the Semites adored there was “a spirit of
heaven”; in place of Ea, the later Babylonian god of the deep, there
was “a spirit of the abyss.” Sumerian theology, in fact, was still on
the level of animism, and the inventors of the script represented the
idea of “god” by the picture of a star. Vestiges of the old animism can
still be detected even in the later cult: by the side of the human gods
an Assyrian prayer invokes the mountains, the rivers and the winds,
and from time to time we come across a worship of deified towns. It
was the town itself that was divine, not the deity to whom its chief
temple was dedicated. So, again, the god or goddess continued to be
symbolized by some sacred animal or object whose figure appears upon
seals and boundary-stones, and in some cases we learn that the Sumerian
prototypes of the later Babylonian divinities bore such names as “the
gazelle,” “the antelope” or “the bull.”
With the advent of the Semite all is changed. The gods have become men
and women with intensified powers and the gift of immortality, but in
all other respects they live and act like the men and women of this
nether world. Like them, too, they are born and married, and the court
of the early prince finds its counterpart in the divine court of the
supreme Bel, or “Lord.” The Semitic god of Babylon was “lord of gods”
and men, of heaven and earth; Assur of Assyria was “king of the gods”
and lord of “the heavenly hosts.”
It was natural that, corresponding with this lord of the heavenly
hosts, there should be a lord of the hosts of earth, and that as the
divine king was clothed in the attributes of man, the human king should
take upon him the divine nature. Like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the
emperors of Rome, the early kings of Semitic Babylonia were deified.
And the deification took place during their lifetime,--in fact, so far
as we can judge, upon their accession to the throne. In the eyes of
their subjects they were incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions
they give themselves the title of god. One of them is even called “the
god” of Akkad, his capital.[91]
Here, then, in the conception of the divine, we have a clear dividing
line between the Semite and his non-Semitic predecessor. So far back as
the cuneiform monuments allow us to carry his history, the Semite is
anthropomorphic. As a consequence, the gods he worships conform to the
social conditions under which he lives. In the desert the sacred stone
becomes “the temple of the god”; in the organized monarchy of Babylonia
each deity takes his appointed place in an imperial court. Under the
one supreme ruler there are princes and sub-princes, vice-regents and
generals, while angel-messengers carry the commands of Bel to his
subjects on earth, like the messengers who carried the letters of the
Babylonian king along the high-roads of the empire. On the other hand,
the earthly king receives his power and attributes from the god whose
adopted son and representative he claims to be. Nowhere has “the divine
right of kings” been more fully insisted on than in ancient Babylonia.
The laws of the monarch had to be obeyed, foreign nations had to become
his vassals, because he was a god on earth as the supreme Bel was god
in heaven.
But the reflection of the divine upon the human brought with it not
only the exaltation of sovereignty, but also the rise of a priesthood.
There were priests of a sort in Sumer of whom many different classes
are enumerated. But when we examine the signification of the names
attached to them we find that they were not priests in the true sense
of the word. They were rather magicians, sorcerers, wizards, masters
of charms. They do not develop into priests until after the Semite has
entered upon the scene. The god and the priest make their appearance
together.
I do not think, however, that we are justified in concluding that the
elaborate hierarchy of Babylonia was of purely Semitic origin. On the
contrary, like the theological system with which it was associated,
it was a composite product. Behind the gods and goddesses of Semitic
Babylonia lay the primitive “spirits” and fetishes of Sumer; its
mythology and cosmological theories rested on Sumerian foundations;
and in the same way the priestly hierarchy was the result of a racial
amalgamation in which the Semitic element had adopted and adapted the
ideas and institutions of the older people. We do not find the theology
and priesthood of Babylonia among other Semitic populations, except
where they had been borrowed from the Babylonians (as in Assyria); in
the form in which we know them they were peculiarly and distinctively
Babylonian. Like the language of Semitic Babylonia, which is permeated
with Sumerian elements, or the script, which is a Semitic adaptation of
the Sumerian system of writing, they presuppose a mixture of race.
The priesthood eventually proved irreconcilable with “the divine
right” of the monarch, though both alike had the same origin. The
priests prevailed over the king, and as in England the doctrine of
divine right was unable to survive the accession of a German line
of princes, so in Babylonia the accession of a foreign, non-Semitic
dynasty (that of the Kassites) dealt a death-blow to the belief in a
deified king. The king became merely the representative and deputy
of the divine “Lord” of heaven, deriving his right to rule from his
adoption by the god as a son; Bel-Merodach came to be regarded as the
true ruler of Babylonia, lord of the earth as well as of the heavens,
and a theocratic state affords but little room for a secular king.
The priests of Bel decided whom their god should recognize or not,
and little by little the controlling power of the state passed into
their hands It was in a sense a triumph for the non-Semitic element
in the population. While the deification of the sovereign may be said
to have been purely Semitic in its origin, the necessary corollary of
an anthropomorphic conception of the deity, the supernatural powers
supposed to be inherent in the priesthood went back to Sumerian times.
It was because he had once been a master of spells that the priest of
the anthropomorphic god could influence the spiritual world. The final
triumph of the theocratic principle in Babylonia, where the Semite
had been so long dominant, showed that the old racial element was
still strong, and ready to reassert itself when the favourable moment
arrived. Such, indeed, is generally the history of a mixed people: the
conquering or immigrant race may seem to have suppressed or absorbed
the earlier population of the country, but as generations pass the
foreign element becomes weaker, and the nation in greater or less
degree reverts to the older type.
NOTE
So far as the primitive culture of Sumer may be recovered from such
of the primitive pictographs as can be at present identified, it may
be described as follows. The inventors of them lived on the sea-coast
within sight of mountains, but in a marshy district where reeds
abounded. Trees also grew there, and the cedar was known. Stone was
scarce, but was already cut into blocks and seals. Tablets were used
for writing purposes, and copper, gold and silver were worked by the
smith. Daggers with metal blades and wooden handles were worn, and
copper was hammered into plates, while necklaces or collars were made
of gold. Brick was the ordinary building material, and with it cities,
forts, temples and houses were constructed. The city was provided with
towers and stood on an artificial platform; the house also had a
tower-like appearance. It was provided with a door which turned on a
hinge, and could be opened with a sort of key; the city gate was on a
larger scale, and seems to have been double. By the side of the house
was an enclosed garden planted with trees and other plants; wheat and
probably other cereals were sown in the fields, and the shaddûf was
already employed for the purpose of irrigation. Plants were also grown
in pots or vases. That floods took place is evident from the existence
of a pictograph denoting “inundation,” and representing a fish left
stranded above the foliage of a tree. Canals or aqueducts had already
been dug. The sheep, goat, ox and probably ass had been domesticated,
the ox being used for draught, and woollen clothing as well as
rugs were made from the wool or hair of the two first. A feathered
head-dress was worn on the head. Beds, stools and chairs were used,
with carved legs resembling those of an ox. There were fire-places and
fire-altars, and apparently chimneys also. Pottery was very plentiful,
and the forms of the vases, bowls and dishes were manifold; there were
special jars for honey, butter, oil and wine, which was probably made
from dates, and one form of vase had a spout protruding from its side.
Some of the vases had pointed feet, and stood on stands with crossed
legs; others were flat-bottomed, and were set on square or rectangular
frames of wood. The oil-jars--and probably others also--were sealed
with clay, precisely as in early Egypt. Vases and dishes of stone were
made in imitation of those of clay, and baskets were woven of reeds or
formed of leather. Knives, drills, wedges and an instrument which looks
like a saw were all known, while bows, arrows and daggers (but not
swords nor, probably, spears) were employed in war. Time was reckoned
in lunar months. Sacred cakes were offered to the gods, whose images
were symbolized sometimes by a bearded human head with a feather crown,
sometimes by a two-legged table of offerings on which stand two vases
(of incense?). Demons were feared who had wings like a bird, and the
foundation stones--or rather bricks--of a house were consecrated by
certain objects that were deposited under them. A “year” was denoted by
the branch of a tree, as in Egypt, and a “name” by a bird placed over
the sacred table of offerings. The country was full of snakes and other
creeping things, and wild beasts lurked in the jungle. The pictographs
were read from left to right, and various expedients were devised for
making them express ideas. Thus _mud_, “to beget,” was denoted by the
picture of a bird dropping an egg. At other times the pictograph was
used to express an idea, the pronunciation of which was the same as
that of the object which it represented. The bent knee, for example,
was used to express _dug_ or _tuk_, “to have,” since it represented a
“knee,” which was called _dug_ in Sumerian.