ASIA MINOR
If it has been a surprise to learn that Palestine was once within
the circle of Babylonian culture, it has been equally a surprise to
learn that Asia Minor was so too. It is true that Herodotus traced the
Herakleid dynasty of Lydian kings to the gods of Nineveh and Babylon,
that Strabo knew of a “mound of Semiramis” in Cappadocia, and that in
the Book of Genesis Lud is called the son of Shem. But historians had
long agreed that all such beliefs were creations of a later day, and
rested on no substratum of fact. The northern limits of Babylonian
or Assyrian influence, it was held, were fixed by the Taurus and the
mountains of Kurdistan.
The discovery of cuneiform inscriptions on the stones and rocks of
Armenia made the first breach in this conclusion. Their existence was
known even before Botta and Layard had opened up Nineveh. In 1826
Schulz had been sent by the French Government at the instance of M.
Mohl to copy the mysterious characters which had already excited the
attention of Oriental writers. Schulz was unexpectedly successful in
his quest. The number of inscriptions he discovered was far larger
than had been imagined, and his copies of them, as we now know, were
remarkably accurate. But the explorer himself never lived to return
to Europe. He was murdered by a Kurdish chief, Nurallah Bey, in 1829,
while engaged in the work of exploration; his papers, however, were
eventually recovered, and the inscriptions he had copied were published
in 1840 in the Journal of the Société Asiatique. One of them was a
trilingual inscription of Xerxes, the Persian transcript of which was
just beginning to be deciphered; the rest were still a closed book.
Then came the discovery of Nineveh and the first essays at the
interpretation of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. Layard himself made
an expedition to Armenia, and besides recopying Schulz’s texts and
correcting certain inaccuracies in them, added considerably to the
collection. Dr. Hincks, with his usual genius for decipherment,
perceived that the syllabary in which they were written was the same as
that used at Nineveh, and utilized them for determining the values of
some of the Assyrian characters. He succeeded in reading most of the
proper names, in assigning the inscriptions to a group of kings whose
order he was able to fix, and in pointing out that many of them contain
an account of military campaigns and of the amount of booty which had
been carried off. But it was also clear that the inscriptions were not
in a Semitic language, and as the nominative and accusative of the noun
seemed to terminate in _-s_ and _-n_, while the patronymic
was expressed by the suffix _-khinis_, the decipherer assumed
that the language was Indo-European. The most important texts had been
found in or near Van, which had apparently been the capital of the
kings by whose orders they had been engraved, and the name of Vannic,
accordingly, was given to both texts and language.
It was soon recognized that Dr. Hincks had been in error in suggesting
that the Vannic language was Indo-European. It was, it is true,
inflectional, but with this any resemblance to the languages of the
Indo-European family ceased. Nor was there any other language or group
of languages to which it appeared to be related, and all attempts
failed to advance the decipherment much beyond the point at which
it had been left by Hincks. Thanks to the “determinatives,” which
indicate proper names and the like, and the ideographs, which are
fairly plentiful, the general sense of many of the inscriptions could
be made out; but beyond that it seemed impossible to go. Lenormant,
indeed, following Hincks, showed that the suffix _-bi_ denoted the
first person singular of the verb, and indicated Georgian as possibly a
related language; but in the hands of other would-be decipherers, like
Robert and Mordtmann, there was retrogression instead of advance.
[Illustration:
THE GARDENS AND HILL OF DHUSPAS OR VAN.]
So matters remained until 1882, when Stanislas Guyard pointed out the
parallelism between a formula which occurs at the end of many Vannic
inscriptions and the imprecatory formula of the Assyrian texts. I had
already been struck by the same fact, and was at the time preparing a
Memoir on the decipherment and translation of the inscriptions, which
shortly afterwards appeared in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society_. In this I had made use of Layard’s copies, which had never
been published; other copies also, including photographs, squeezes
and casts, had been placed at my disposal, and in 1882 I was able to
lay before cuneiform scholars a grammar and vocabulary of the Vannic
language, together with translations and analyses of all the known
texts.[133] These have been subsequently corrected and extended by
other Assyriologists--Guyard, D. H. Müller, Nikolsky, Scheil, Belck
and Lehmann, as well as by myself. An ordinary Vannic text can now
be translated with nearly as much completeness and certainty as an
Assyrian text, and the number of them known to us has been greatly
enlarged by the archæological explorations of Belck and Lehmann.
In the decipherment of the Vannic inscriptions the ideographs and
determinatives which are scattered through them took the place for me
of a bilingual text. The determinatives told me what was the nature of
the words which followed or preceded them, and so explained the general
sense of the passages in which they occurred, while from time to time a
phonetically-written word would be replaced in a parallel passage by an
ideograph the signification of which was known. I soon found, moreover,
that the cuneiform syllabary must have been brought from Nineveh to Van
in the age of Assur-natsir-pal II. (B.C. 884–859), and that
the actual phrases met with in the inscriptions of that monarch are
sometimes reproduced in a Vannic dress. The Vannic language, however,
still remains isolated, though the majority of those who have studied
it incline to Lenormant’s view that its nearest living representative
is Georgian. Not being a Georgian scholar myself, this is a point upon
which I can express no opinion.
Instead of “Vannic,” it has been proposed to call the language
“Khaldian.” The chief god of the people who spoke the language was
Khaldis, and in the inscriptions we find the people themselves
described as “the children of Khaldis.” Derivatives from the name are
found employed in a geographical sense northward of the region to which
the inscriptions belong. Thus the Khaldi “in the neighbourhood of
Colchis” are said to have been also called Khaldæi;[134] “Khaldees” are
frequently referred to by Armenian writers as living between Trapezont
and Batûm, and a Turkish inscription at Sumela shows that as late as
the beginning of the fifteenth century Lazistân was still known as
Khaldia. That the name was ever applied, however, to the kingdom which
had its chief seat at Van is not proved, and it is therefore best to
adhere to the term “Vannic,” which commits those who use it to no
theory.[135]
The decipherment of the Vannic texts has not only led to the discovery
of a new language, it has also thrown a flood of light on the early
history, geography and religion of the Armenian plateau. The military
campaigns of the Assyrian kings had brought it into contact with
Assyrian civilization, and in the ninth century before our era a
dynasty arose which adopted the literary culture and art of Assyria,
and founded a powerful kingdom which extended its sway from Urumia on
the east to Malatia on the west, and from the slopes of Ararat and the
shores of Lake Erivan to the northern frontiers of Assyria.
The main fact which has thus been disclosed is that the Armenians of
history--the Aryan tribes, that is to say, who spoke an Indo-European
language--did not enter the country and establish themselves in the
place of its older rulers before the end of the seventh century before
our era. The fall of the Vannic monarchy seems to have coincided with
the fall of the Assyrian Empire, with which it had once contended on
almost equal terms, and in each case the invasion of the so-called
Scythian hordes from the plains of Eastern Europe had much to do with
the result. The founders of Armenian civilization and of the cities of
the Armenian plateau had no connection with the Indo-European family.
Their type of language corresponded with that which distinguishes most
of the actual languages of the Caucasus, though no genetic relationship
is traceable between them. The break with the past, however, occasioned
by the irruption of the Indo-European invaders, was so great that not
only did the older language become extinct and forgotten, but even the
tradition of the older civilization was also lost. Like the recovery of
the Sumerian language and the culture it represented, the recovery of
the Vannic language and culture is the revelation of a new world.
At the head of the pantheon was a trinity consisting of Khaldis, the
supreme god of the race; Teisbas, the god of the air; and the Sun-god
Ardinis. Temples were erected in their honour, and shields and spears
dedicated to their service. The vine, which grows wild in Armenia,
was the sacred tree of the people, and there are inscriptions which
commemorate its planting and consecration, and describe the endowments
that were set apart for its maintenance. Wine was naturally offered
to the gods along with the domestic animals and prisoners of war. Dr.
Belck has discovered burial-places which go back to the neolithic age,
but the majority of the monuments scattered over the Vannic area belong
to the bronze age, and testify to a native adaptation of Assyrian art
and culture. Iron also makes its appearance, but scantily. The pottery
of the age of the inscriptions is related on the one side to the
Assyrian pottery of the same period, and on the other to the pottery
of Asia Minor. The polished red ware more especially points to the
west.[136]
[Illustration:
THE RUINS OF A PALACE OF URARTU AT TOPRAK-KALEH.]
The existence of a language of the Caucasian type in Armenia, and its
association with a powerful kingdom and an advanced culture, is not
the only revelation of the kind that we owe to cuneiform decipherment.
We have learned that at a much earlier epoch Northern Mesopotamia was
occupied by a people who spoke a language of similar type but of far
more complicated form; and that here, too, the language in question was
accompanied by a high civilization, a powerful monarchy, and the
use of the cuneiform syllabary. The monarchy was that of Mitanni, and
its culture and script had been borrowed from Babylonia in the age of
Khammu-rabi, instead of from Assyria in the age of Assur-natsir-pal.
But it is interesting to observe that in borrowing the script the
people of Mitanni had adapted and simplified it in precisely the same
way as did the people of Van in after days. Superfluous characters were
discarded, a single phonetic value only assigned to each character,
and large use made of those which expressed vowels. In fact, in
both Mitannian and Vannic the system of writing begins to approach
the alphabetic. Whether this similarity in adaptation was due to a
similarity of phonetic structure in the two languages or to conscious
imitation on the part of the Vannic scribes it is difficult to say; it
is a point, however, which cannot be passed over.
The name of Mitanni meets us on the Egyptian monuments of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties. The kingdom played a considerable
part at that period of time in the politics of Western Asia, and the
daughters of its kings were married to the Egyptian Pharaohs. The
boundaries of the Egyptian Empire were coterminous with those of
Mitanni, and we gather from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence that the
Mitannian forces had more than once made their way into Palestine,
perhaps as far south as Jerusalem, and that Mitannian intrigue
was active in that portion of the Pharaoh’s dominions. Among the
Canaanitish governors are some who bear Mitannian names, and testify to
the continuance of a Mitannian element in that common meeting-place of
nationalities.
Several letters from the Mitannian king have been found among the
Tel el-Amarna tablets. Most of them are written in the Babylonian
language, but one--and fortunately an exceptionally long one--though
in cuneiform characters, is in the native language of the country.
A comparison of it with its companion letters, assisted by the
determinatives and ideographs which are employed in it from time to
time, has enabled Jensen, Leopold Messerschmidt and myself to decipher
a very considerable part of the letter, and so to compile a grammar and
vocabulary of the Mitannian language. That it is distantly related to
Vannic seems to admit of little doubt, but it comes before us in a much
more developed form; indeed, its system of suffixes is so elaborate and
ponderous as to remind us of the polysynthetic languages of America.
A legal document found in Babylonia and dated in the epoch of
Khammu-rabi contains a number of proper names which are of Mitannian
or allied origin, and show that persons of that race were already
settled in Babylonia.[137] As the Mitannian form of cuneiform script
must have been borrowed about the same time, we may infer that the
advanced guard of the northern race had already made its way as far
south as Mesopotamia, and there established its power in the midst of
a Semitic population. From that time forward a constant struggle went
on between the two races, the Semitic race striving to push back the
northern intruders and planting its own colonies in the very heart of
the northern area, while the northerners pressed ever more and more to
the southward, and at one time even seemed likely to possess themselves
of the heritage of the Babylonian Empire in Western Asia. Like Armenia,
Northern Mesopotamia was occupied by a people of Caucasian and Asianic
affinities, whose armies had crossed the Euphrates and won territory in
Syria and Palestine.
On the west, however, the Mitannians found themselves confronted by
another northern population, the Hittites, whose first home was in
Cappadocia. The Hittites also had passed under the spell of Babylonian
culture, and the cuneiform script had been carried to them at an early
date. Thanks to recent discoveries, we can now trace in some measure
the earlier fortunes of a race who made a profound impression, not only
on the future history of Asia Minor and its relations with Greece, but
also on the history of Palestine.
As far back as about B.C. 2000, Babylonian or Assyrian troops
had already made their way along the northern banks of the Tigris
and Euphrates to the borders of Cappadocia and the neighbourhood
of the Halys. I say Babylonian or Assyrian, for Assyria was at the
time a province of Babylonia, though as the colonies which settled
in the track of the invaders were distinctively Assyrian in their
municipal customs and the names of their inhabitants, the troops were
probably drafted from Assyria.[138] The mineral wealth of Cappadocia
was doubtless the attraction which led them to such distant and
semibarbarous lands; Dr. Gladstone’s analysis of the gold of the Sixth
Egyptian dynasty, with its admixture of silver, has shown that it was
imported from the north of Asia Minor,[139] and the silver itself was
probably already worked. Further south, in the Taurus, were mines of
copper.
However this may be, the remains of one of these early
Assyro-Babylonian colonies has been partially excavated a few miles
(twenty-three kilometres) to the north-east of Kaisariyeh.[140] The
site is now known as Kara Eyuk, “the Black Mound,” and numerous
cuneiform tablets have come from it. It has obtained its present name
from the marks of fire which are everywhere visible upon it, and bear
eloquent testimony to its final fate. Established as an outpost of
the Assyrian Empire in the distant west, a time came when, deserted
by the Government at home, its strong walls were battered down by the
besieging foe and the Assyrian settlers massacred among the ruins
of their burning town. According to M. Chantre, its excavator (who,
however, believes that it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption), the
whole mound is a mass of charred and burnt remains.
The construction of the walls, as well as the pottery found within
them, marks it off with great distinctness from the ruins of the
Hittite or native Cappadocian cities in its neighbourhood. While in
their case the city wall is made of unmortared blocks of stone, the
walls of Kara Eyuk are built of brick, and where stones are used
they are of small size and cemented with mortar. The pottery differs
considerably from that of the Hittite capital at Boghaz Keui. Some
of it is of black ware, especially characterized by the vases with
long spouts, which are also found in Phrygia and the Troad. Some of
it, again, is of the dark-red lustrous ware which has been met with
at Toprak Kaleh, near Van, and Boz Eyuk in Phrygia, while the yellow
ware with geometrical patterns in black and maroon-red which has been
discovered in Phrygia occurs in large quantities. This latter ware is
of the class known as “Mykenæan.”[141]
The cuneiform tablets which have come from the site are known as
“Cappadocian,” and were first noticed by Dr. Pinches. The forms of the
characters resemble those of the early Babylonian script, which was
still used in Assyria in the age of Khammu-rabi. Many of the proper
names, moreover, seem to be distinctive of that period. On the other
hand, a large proportion of them contain the name of Asur--often in its
primitive form of Asir--or are otherwise characteristic of Assyria.
The tablets are further dated by the archons who gave their names to
the years, a system of chronology which was peculiar to Assyria and
unknown in Babylonia, while the month was divided into “weeks” of five
days each. The language of the tablets also, which is full of dialectic
mispronunciations and strange words, points to Assyria rather than to
the southern kingdom, and we may therefore conclude that the colonists
were Assyrians, even though the colony may have been founded when
Assyria was still a Babylonian province.
There are indications in the Assyrian inscriptions themselves that
the road to Cappadocia was known to the Assyrian princes at an early
epoch. The earliest Assyrian kings whose annals have come down to us
are Hadad-nirari I. and his son Shalmaneser I. (B.C. 1300).
Hadad-nirari tells us that his greatgrandfather, Assur-yuballidh, whose
letters form part of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, had subdued
“the wide-spread” province of Subari, which lay near the sources of
the Euphrates, and in which Kara Eyuk was perhaps included, while he
himself restored the cities of the same province which had fallen into
ruin. Later, Shalmaneser I. conducted campaign after campaign towards
the same region. In his second year he overthrew the king of Malatia,
and the combined forces of the other “Hittite” states, who had come to
his assistance: “all were conquered,” from the borders of Cappadocia
to the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish. A military colony was settled
at the head waters of the Tigris which secured the high-road to Asia
Minor.
Two centuries later we learn from Tiglath-pileser I. that Moschians and
Hittites had overrun part of this Assyrian territory, and occupied some
of the Assyrian settlements. Once more, therefore, the Assyrian troops
marched to the north-west; the provinces which lay in the valley of the
Murad-chai were recovered, and the old province of Subari cleared of
intruders. Soon afterwards Tiglath-pileser forced his way into Southern
Cappadocia and the valley of the Sarus, making Comana tributary, razing
to the ground the fortresses that had resisted him, and erecting
on their site chambers of brick, with bronze tablets on which his
conquests were recorded. Eastern Cilicia was known at the time to the
Assyrians as Muzri, or “the Marchland,” a clear proof that it had long
formed a borderland and debatable territory between the Assyrian Empire
and the nations of Asia Minor.
It is thus evident that even before the rise of the Assyrian monarchy,
the road that led to the mining districts of Cappadocia, along the
valleys of the Upper Tigris, Euphrates and Tokhma Su, was not only
known to the Assyro-Babylonians, but had actually constituted Assyrian
territory, which was colonized by Assyrian garrisons and paid tribute
to Nineveh whenever Assyria was strong enough to enforce its authority.
At the eastern extremity of the road stood the city of unknown name,
now represented by “the Burnt Mound” of Kara Eyuk, whose existence as
an Assyro-Babylonian city probably dates back to the age of Khammu-rabi.
It was the outpost of Babylonian culture in Asia Minor. Babylonian
art, and, above all, the Babylonian system of writing, were brought by
it into the heart of the Hittite region, and the archæological objects
found there consequently become important for chronological dating. Not
far off, on the other side of the Halys, rose the Hittite capital, now
known as Boghaz Keui, the centre from which, as Professor Ramsay has
shown,[142] the early roads of Asia Minor radiated in all directions.
Boghaz Keui is being excavated at the present moment. Hundreds of
clay tablets have already been found there, inscribed with cuneiform
characters, the majority of which are in the native Hittite language,
though many are in Semitic Babylonian, including a copy of the famous
treaty between Ramses II. and the Hittite king. So far as the tablets
have been examined, they show that the Hittite empire extended from the
west of Asia Minor to the Egyptian frontier, and that the cuneiform
characters were used in ordinary life.
[Illustration:
THE RUINS AT BOGHAZ KEUI.]
By one of those coincidences which sometimes happen in archæological
research, the discovery fits with another fact which had long been
in the possession of the Assyriologist, though the full meaning of
it was unknown to him. Among the Tel el-Amarna letters are two in a
language unlike any with which we are acquainted. One of them is from a
Hittite leader of condottieri,[143] who has left us two other letters
which are in the Assyrian language, and who came from a town in the
neighbourhood of Cilicia. The second letter was written to the king of
Arzawa by one of the foreign secretaries of the Egyptian Government.
But the situation of Arzawa was wholly uncertain; as the king bore the
Hittite name of Tarkhundaraba, I suggested that it lay in the Hittite
territory, and that consequently in the language of the letter we had
a fragment of the Hittite language. For many years, however, this
remained a mere conjecture, without any definite proofs.
When the fragmentary tablets from Boghaz Keui came to be copied, it
was at once perceived that they were in a language which resembled
that of the Arzawa letters, but it was not until the new tablet
from Constantinople had been cleaned and copied by Dr. Pinches and
myself that the actual facts became clear. The Arzawa and Boghaz Keui
texts agree in the forms given to the characters, in grammar and in
vocabulary. Arzawa, therefore, must have been the Hittite kingdom which
had its centre at Boghaz Keui, and already in the age of the Eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty it was employing a form of the cuneiform script which
implied a long preceding period of use and adaptation. A new realm has
thus to be added to the domain of the cuneiform system of writing; in
Syria the Hittite king of Kadesh wrote to the Pharaoh in Babylonian,
but in his old home in the north, though the Babylonian syllabary
had been adopted, the language it served to express was that of the
Hittites themselves.
A certain amount of this Hittite language of Arzawa can be deciphered,
thanks to those same determinatives and ideographs which have assisted
so materially towards the decipherment of the Vannic texts, and more
especially to the recurrence in the two Tel el-Amarna letters of
phrases that are common to the whole correspondence. The new tablet,
however, is more than usually helpful, since it contains Assyrian words
and grammatical forms which in parallel passages of the same text are
replaced by native equivalents. In this way a sketch of Arzawan grammar
can now be made, as well as a list of Arzawan words. The language which
is thus disclosed is of an Asianic type, with features that remind us
of Lycian on the one side, and of Mitannian and Vannic on the other.
But in what may be termed the fundamentals of grammar it agrees with
Mitannian and Vannic.
At the same time, certain of these same fundamentals have a curious but
superficial resemblance to what we have hitherto been accustomed to
regard as characteristics of Indo-European grammar. The nominative and
accusative of the noun, for example, are distinguished by the suffixes
_-s_ and _-n_, the plural nominative and accusative often terminate
in _-s_, and the possessive pronouns of Arzawan are _mi-s_, “mine”;
_ti-s_, “thine”; and _sa(s)_, “his”; while _si_ is “(to) her.” The
third person of the present tense ends in _-t_; _es-tu_, is “may it
be”; _es-mi_, “may I be.” Yet with all these remarkable coincidences, I
can assure the comparative philologist that Arzawan is certainly not an
Indo-European language, and I must leave him to explain them as best
he may.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE PROCESSIONS IN THE RAVINE OF BOGHAZ.
(_See p. 174._)]
We have, however, learnt a good deal more about the Hittite populations
of Asia Minor from the Tel el-Amarna tablets than the nature of the
language which they spoke. In the closing days of the Eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty we find them on the southern side of the Taurus,
sending forth bands of adventurers, who hired their services to the
king of Egypt and to the rival governors and princes of Palestine,
and from time to time carved out principalities of their own with the
sword. We are even able to follow the fortunes of some of the leaders
of the condottieri, who had no scruple in transferring their allegiance
from one vassal prince to another when tempted by the prospect of
better pay, or in murdering their employer when the opportunity
arose, and plundering or occupying his city. They had, it is true, a
wholesome awe of Egyptian power and of the Egyptian army, and some of
the letters they wrote to the Egyptian court are amusing examples of
the excuses they offered for their misdeeds. But they never hesitated
about seizing the Pharaoh’s property when they thought they could do
so with impunity, while they were all the time professing to be his
devoted slaves. A considerable number of the vassal princes of Canaan
kept these mercenaries in their pay, and in many cases the Egyptian
Foreign Office thought it wisest to confirm one of their leaders in the
government of a district, however doubtful might have been the means by
which it had come into his hands. So long as the tribute was paid, and
the imperial authority acknowledged, no further questions were asked.
The mercenaries were useful at times to the imperial forces, and the
mutual jealousies and quarrels of the local governors were perhaps not
altogether displeasing to the home Government.[144]
In this way bands of Hittite mercenaries came to be settled in
various parts of Palestine, even in the extreme south. The sons of
Arzawaya, “the Arzawan,” established themselves in the neighbourhood
of Jerusalem, whose king, by the way, seems to bear a Mitannian name.
The statement in the Book of Genesis that Heth was the son of Canaan
receives a new signification from the Tel el-Amarna tablets.
But Hittite influence in Southern Palestine goes back to an earlier
epoch than the age of the tablets. The painted pottery found in the
“Amorite” strata of Lachish and Gezer shows remarkable affinities
to the pottery discovered by Chantre at Boghaz Keui, and Mr. J. L.
Myres has succeeded in tracing it in a fairly continuous line to the
region north of the Halys.[145] Here was found the red ochre--or
_sandarakê_, as it was called--which was used in the decoration
of the pottery, and after the introduction of two other colours still
remained the principal feature in the system of ornamentation. This
Hittite or Cappadocian pottery was carried westward along the road
which led from Boghaz Keui towards the Troad, and south-eastwards
across the Taurus into Syria. It was probably the ultimate origin of
the painted Minoan or “Kamâres” pottery of Krete.
The introduction of Hittite pottery into Canaan where it tended to
supersede the native ware, was doubtless the result of trade. But in
ancient Asia the trader and the soldier were very apt to march side by
side. The soldier opened the way for the trader and kept it for him,
quite as much as the trader opened it for the soldier. Hence it is
not surprising that the Assyrian monuments should furnish incidental
evidence of the Hittite occupation of Palestine at an early date. In
the inscriptions of Babylonia, as we have seen, Palestine and Syria
are “the land of the Amorites”; the name went back to an immemorial
antiquity, and indicates that at the time it was first given the
Amorites were the ruling population in the West. But in the Assyrian
inscriptions the place of the Amorites is taken by the Hittites. For
the Assyrians, Syria is “the land of the Hittites,” and in the later
historical texts even the Israelites and Philistines are classed as
“Hittite.”[146]
Canaan, however, was already well known to the Assyrians in the age of
the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, when the ambassadors of the Assyrian
king carried letters and presents through it to the Pharaoh. It must,
therefore, have been at a still earlier period that they first became
acquainted with it, and at this period Hittite influence must have
been so predominant as to cause them to discard the name of Amorite,
consecrated though it was by the long-continued usage of Babylonian
literature, and to employ instead of it the name of Hittite.
But it was in the direction of the Greek seas that Hittite influence
was most powerful. Through Asia Minor Babylonian culture penetrated to
the West. A native imitation of the Babylonian seal-cylinder was found
by Dr. Schliemann in the ruins of Hissarlik,[147] and the so-called
“heraldic” position of the lions at Mykenæ can be traced back through
Asia Minor to the designs of the Babylonian gem-cutters. The winged
horse, Pegasus, is found on Hittite seals, and, like the double-headed
eagle of Eyuk and other composite figures, is derived from Babylonian
prototypes.[148] They represented the first attempts of the creative
power, as conceived of by Babylonian cosmology, and an old Babylonian
legend of the creation accordingly describes the monsters suckled
by Tiamât as “warriors with the bodies of birds, men with the faces
of ravens.”[149] The fantastic monsters of “Minoan” art, which have
been brought to light by the excavations in Krete, claim an intimate
connection with the similar composite beings which are a characteristic
of Hittite art.[150]
The early Hittite art of Asia Minor, as I pointed out many years ago,
is dependent on that of Babylonia, and has little in common with the
art of Assyria.[151] It is not until we come to the later Hittite
monuments of Cilicia and Syria that the influence of Assyrian art makes
itself visible. Hence was derived the partiality of the Hittite artist
for the composite animals that adorn the seal-cylinders of Babylonia,
and which consequently became known wherever the seal-cylinder and
the literary culture it accompanied had made their way. As I have
already stated, though Subari was an Assyrian province and Kara Eyuk
an Assyrian colony, the form of the cuneiform script that was used in
Cappadocia was of Babylonian origin.
The writing material of “Minoan” Krete, we now know, consisted of clay
tablets. The fact is a proof that the influence of Babylonian culture
had extended thus far. But it was an indirect influence only. Though
the clay tablet was employed, the characters impressed upon it were
the native Kretan. This in itself, however, demonstrates how strong
the influence must have been, for the Kretan characters, whether
hieroglyphic or linear, were less easy to inscribe on clay than the
cuneiform. Krete, moreover, is a land of rock and stone rather than of
clay. We may infer, therefore, from the use of the Babylonian material
that the first impulse to write was inspired by the civilization of
Babylonia.
How it was brought to Krete we do not know. It may have passed over
from the shores of Canaan; it may have come from Cyprus or Asia Minor.
A seal-cylinder, which I have lately published, and which was found in
the early copper-age cemetery of Agia Paraskevi in Cyprus, shows that
the so-called Cypriote syllabary was already in use in the island at
a remote date,[152] and this syllabary is closely connected with the
linear characters of Krete. Inscriptions in the same form of script
have been found on the site of Troy, and the pre-Israelitish pottery of
Southern Palestine is marked with signs which seem to be derived from
it. So, too, is certain Egyptian pottery of the age of the Eighteenth
dynasty, and even of the age of the Twelfth.[153]
It is possible that Krete was the birthplace of the picture writing
which developed into the linear script of Knossos and the Cypriote
syllabary; it is possible that it was rather Cyprus. I do not think,
as I once did, that it comes from Asia Minor, for Asia Minor had its
own pictographic system, which we see represented in the Hittite
inscriptions, and an increased knowledge of this system tends to
dissociate it from the pictographs and syllabaries of Krete and Cyprus.
Wherever it arose, however, it was associated with the Babylonian
writing material and the Babylonian seal-cylinder. So far as our
present knowledge goes, Cyprus is more likely than any other part of
the world to have been the meeting-point of Babylonian culture and the
nascent civilization of the West. The numerous seal-cylinders which
characterize the early copper age of the island are native imitations
of Babylonian seal-cylinders of the epoch of Sargon of Akkad, when the
boundaries of the Babylonian Empire were pushed to the coasts of the
Mediterranean, if not into Cyprus itself, and the great eastern plain
of Cyprus was better fitted to provide clay for the tablet than any
other Mediterranean district with which I am acquainted.
That no written tablets have been found by the excavators in Cyprus
is not surprising. In an island climate where heavy rains occur the
unbaked tablet soon becomes hardly distinguishable from the earth in
which it is embedded. It was almost by accident that even the practised
eye of Dr. A. J. Evans was first led to notice the clay tablets of
Knossos.
The Greek term δέλτος, which was borrowed from the language of Canaan,
is evidence that the tablet was once known to the Greeks. For the
letters of the Phœnician and Greek alphabet rolls of papyrus or
leather were needed; the fact that the writing material was a tablet
and not a roll refers us back to Babylonia. With the introduction
of the Phœnician letters the word δέλτος necessarily changed its
meaning, and became synonymous with a wooden board. But it is possible
that a reminiscence of its original signification is preserved in a
famous passage of the _Iliad_ (vi. 169), where the later “board”
has been substituted for the earlier “tablet.” Here we are told how
Bellerophon carried with him to Lycia “baleful signs”--which may have
been the pictographs of Krete or the Hittites, or even cuneiform
characters--written upon “a folded board.” The expression would have
most naturally originated in the folded clay tablet of early Babylonia,
the inner tablet being enclosed in an envelope on which the address or
a description of the contents of the document is written.
On the literary side, however, this is the utmost contribution that
we can claim for Babylonia to have made to historical Greece. In the
sphere of religion it is possible that the anthropomorphism of Greece
was influenced by the anthropomorphism of Babylonia through Asia
Minor, where the rock sculptures of Boghaz Keui show how the primitive
Hittite fetishes had become human deities like those of Chaldæa; in
the sphere of philosophy Thales and Anaximander clothed in a Greek
dress the cosmological theories of the Babylonians; and in the domain
of art the heraldry and composite monsters of Babylonia made their
way to Europe, while the Ionic artists of Ephesus carved ivories into
forms so Oriental in character that similar figures found in the palace
of Sargon have been pronounced to be the work of Phœnicians. But the
literary culture of historical Greece did not begin until the tide of
Babylonian influence had already rolled back from Western Asia, when
the Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the cuneiform syllabary
in Syria, and the Hittite populations of Asia Minor had returned to
their clumsy hieroglyphs.
It is, however, remarkable how very nearly the cuneiform script became
what the Phœnician alphabet has been called, “the mother of the
alphabets of the world.” At one time it covered nearly the whole area
of the civilized globe. A seal-cylinder with a cuneiform inscription in
an unknown language has been discovered on the hills near Herat;[154]
in the west its use extended as far as Cappadocia, perhaps further.
Northward it made its home in Armenia; southward it obliged even the
Egyptian Foreign Office to employ it for correspondence, while military
scribes wrote in it their memoranda of the Pharaoh’s campaigns. In
both Mitanni and Van the syllabary was on the high-road to becoming an
alphabet; in Persia it actually became one.
But this final evolution came too late. A simpler script had already
entered the field, and won its way in lands where clay was scarce
and other writing materials more easily procurable. Indeed, it is
probable that the presence or absence of clay suitable for writing
purposes had quite as much to do with the spread of the cuneiform
script as the political events which transformed the map of Western
Asia. Canaan still continued to write in cuneiform characters after the
empire of Babylonia had been exchanged for that of Egypt, while the
use of the script never penetrated far into the limestone regions of
the Mediterranean. It was probably the geological formation of Europe
more than anything else which saved us to-day from having to learn the
latest modification of the cursive writing of the Babylonian plain.
But it had been a potent instrument of civilization in its day, perhaps
more potent even than the Phœnician alphabet, for its sway lasted
for thousands of years. It was at once the symbol and the inspiring
spirit of a culture whose roots go back to the very beginnings of
human civilization, and to which we still owe part of our own heritage
of civilized life. Babylonia was the mother-land of astronomy and
irrigation; from thence a knowledge of copper seems to have spread
through Western Asia; it was there that the laws and regulations of
trade were first formulated, and the earliest legal code, so far as
we know, was compiled. Babylonian theology and cosmology left their
impress upon beliefs and views of the world which have passed through
Judæa to Europe, and the astrology and magic which played so active
a part in the mental history of the Middle Ages were Babylonian
creations. It is not a little remarkable that an Etruscan model of the
liver in bronze (discovered at Piacenza), divided and inscribed for
the purposes of haruspicy, finds its counterpart and probably also its
prototype in the clay copy of a liver, similarly divided and inscribed,
which was found in Babylonia.[155] We are children of our fathers, and
amongst our spiritual fathers must be reckoned the Babylonians.