We often call America the "Melting-pot." When we use this term we mean
that many races from all over the earth have gathered along the banks of
the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans to find a new home and begin a new
career amidst more favorable surroundings than were to be found in the
country of their birth. It is true, Mesopotamia was much smaller than
our own country. But the fertile valley was the most extraordinary
"melting-pot" the world has ever seen and it continued to absorb new
tribes for almost two thousand years. The story of each new people,
clamoring for homesteads along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates
is interesting in itself but we can give you only a very short record of
their adventures.
[Illustration: HAMMURAPI.]
The Sumerians whom we met in the previous chapter, scratching their
history upon rocks and bits of clay (and who did not belong to the
Semitic race) had been the first nomads to wander into Mesopotamia.
Nomads are people who have no settled homes and no grain fields and no
vegetable gardens but who live in tents and keep sheep and goats and
cows and who move from pasture to pasture, taking their flocks and their
tents wherever the grass is green and the water abundant.
Far and wide their mud huts had covered the plains. They were good
fighters and for a long time they were able to hold their own against
all invaders.
But four thousand years ago a tribe of Semitic desert people called the
Akkadians left Arabia, defeated the Sumerians and conquered Mesopotamia.
The most famous king of these Akkadians was called Sargon.
He taught his people how to write their own Semitic language in the
alphabet of the Sumerians whose territory they had just occupied. He
ruled so wisely that soon the differences between the original settlers
and the invaders disappeared and they became fast friends and lived
together in peace and harmony.
The fame of his empire spread rapidly throughout western Asia and
others, hearing of this success, were tempted to try their own luck.
A new tribe of desert nomads, called the Amorites, broke up camp and
moved northward.
Thereupon the valley was the scene of a great turmoil until an Amorite
chieftain by the name of Hammurapi (or Hammurabi, as you please)
established himself in the town of Bab-Illi (which means the Gate of the
God) and made himself the ruler of a great Bab-Illian or
Babylonian Empire.
This Hammurapi, who lived twenty-one centuries before the birth of
Christ, was a very interesting man. He made Babylon the most important
town of the ancient world, where learned priests administered the laws
which their great Ruler had received from the Sun God himself and where
the merchant loved to trade because he was treated fairly and honorably.
Indeed if it were not for the lack of space (these laws of Hammurapi
would cover fully forty of these pages if I were to give them to you in
detail) I would be able to show you that this ancient Babylonian State
was in many respects better managed and that the people were happier and
that law and order was maintained more carefully and that there was
greater freedom of speech and thought than in many of our modern
countries.
But our world was never meant to be too perfect and soon other hordes of
rough and murderous men descended from the northern mountains and
destroyed the work of Hammurapi's genius.
The name of these new invaders was the Hittites. Of these Hittites I can
tell you even less than of the Sumerians. The Bible mentions them. Ruins
of their civilization have been found far and wide. They used a strange
sort of hieroglyphics but no one has as yet been able to decipher these
and read their meaning. They were not greatly gifted as administrators.
They ruled only a few years and then their domains fell to pieces.
Of all their glory there remains nothing but a mysterious name and the
reputation of having destroyed many things which other people had built
up with great pain and care.
Then came another invasion which was of a very different nature.
A fierce tribe of desert wanderers, who murdered and pillaged in the
name of their great God Assur, left Arabia and marched northward until
they reached the slopes of the mountains. Then they turned eastward and
along the banks of the Euphrates they built a city which they called
Ninua, a name which has come down to us in the Greek form of Nineveh. At
once these new-comers, who are generally known as the Assyrians, began a
slow but terrible warfare upon all the other inhabitants of Mesopotamia.
In the twelfth century before Christ they made a first attempt to
destroy Babylon but after a first success on the part of their King,
Tiglath Pileser, they were defeated and forced to return to their
own country.
Five hundred years later they tried again. An adventurous general by the
name of Bulu made himself master of the Assyrian throne. He assumed the
name of old Tiglath Pileser, who was considered the national hero of the
Assyrians and announced his intention of conquering the whole world.
[Illustration: NINEVEH.]
He was as good as his word.
Asia Minor and Armenia and Egypt and Northern Arabia and Western Persia
and Babylonia became Assyrian provinces. They were ruled by Assyrian
governors, who collected the taxes and forced all the young men to serve
as soldiers in the Assyrian armies and who made themselves thoroughly
hated and despised both for their greed and their cruelty.
Fortunately the Assyrian Empire at its greatest height did not last very
long. It was like a ship with too many masts and sails and too small a
hull. There were too many soldiers and not enough farmers--too many
generals and not enough business men.
The King and the nobles grew very rich but the masses lived in squalor
and poverty. Never for a moment was the country at peace. It was for
ever fighting someone, somewhere, for causes which did not interest the
subjects at all. Until, through this continuous and exhausting warfare,
most of the Assyrian soldiers had been killed or maimed and it became
necessary to allow foreigners to enter the army. These foreigners had
little love for their brutal masters who had destroyed their homes and
had stolen their children and therefore they fought badly.
Life along the Assyrian frontier was no longer safe.
Strange new tribes were constantly attacking the northern boundaries.
One of these was called the Cimmerians. The Cimmerians, when we first
hear of them, inhabited the vast plain beyond the northern mountains.
Homer describes their country in his account of the voyage of Odysseus
and he tells us that it was a place "for ever steeped in darkness." They
were a race of white men and they had been driven out of their former
homes by still another group of Asiatic wanderers, the Scythians.
The Scythians were the ancestors of the modern Cossacks, and even in
those remote days they were famous for their horsemanship.
[Illustration: NINEVEH DESTROYED.]
The Cimmerians, hard pressed by the Scythians, crossed from Europe into
Asia and conquered the land of the Hittites. Then they left the
mountains of Asia Minor and descended into the valley of Mesopotamia,
where they wrought terrible havoc among the impoverished people of the
Assyrian Empire.
Nineveh called for volunteers to stop this invasion. Her worn-out
regiments marched northward when news came of a more immediate and
formidable danger.
For many years a small tribe of Semitic nomads, called the Chaldeans,
had been living peacefully in the south-eastern part of the fertile
valley, in the country called Ur. Suddenly these Chaldeans had gone upon
the war-path and had begun a regular campaign against the Assyrians.
Attacked from all sides, the Assyrian State, which had never gained the
good-will of a single neighbor, was doomed to perish.
When Nineveh fell and this forbidding treasure house, filled with the
plunder of centuries, was at last destroyed, there was joy in every hut
and hamlet from the Persian Gulf to the Nile.
And when the Greeks visited the Euphrates a few generations later and
asked what these vast ruins, covered with shrubs and trees might be,
there was no one to tell them.
The people had hastened to forget the very name of the city that had
been such a cruel master and had so miserably oppressed them.
Babylon, on the other hand, which had ruled its subjects in a very
different way, came back to life.
During the long reign of the wise King Nebuchadnezzar the ancient
temples were rebuilt. Vast palaces were erected within a short space of
time. New canals were dug all over the valley to help irrigate the
fields. Quarrelsome neighbors were severely punished.
Egypt was reduced to a mere frontier-province and Jerusalem, the capital
of the Jews, was destroyed. The Holy Books of Moses were taken to
Babylon and several thousand Jews were forced to follow the Babylonian
King to his capital as hostages for the good behavior of those who
remained behind in Palestine.
But Babylon was made into one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Trees were planted along the banks of the Euphrates.
Flowers were made to grow upon the many walls of the city and after a
few years it seemed that a thousand gardens were hanging from the roofs
of the ancient town.
As soon as the Chaldeans had made their capital the show-place of the
world they devoted their attention to matters of the mind and of
the spirit.
Like all desert folk they were deeply interested in the stars which at
night had guided them safely through the trackless desert.
They studied the heavens and named the twelve signs of the Zodiak.
They made maps of the sky and they discovered the first five planets. To
these they gave the names of their Gods. When the Romans conquered
Mesopotamia they translated the Chaldean names into Latin and that
explains why today we talk of Jupiter and Venus and Mars and Mercury
and Saturn.
They divided the equator into three hundred and sixty degrees and they
divided the day into twenty-four hours and the hour into sixty minutes
and no modern man has ever been able to improve upon this old Babylonian
invention. They possessed no watches but they measured time by the
shadow of the sun-dial.
They learned to use both the decimal and the duodecimal systems
(nowadays we use only the decimal system, which is a great pity). The
duodecimal system (ask your father what the word means), accounts for
the sixty minutes and the sixty seconds and the twenty-four hours which
seem to have so little in common with our modern world which would have
divided day and night into twenty hours and the hour into fifty minutes
and the minute into fifty seconds according to the rules of the
restricted decimal system.
The Chaldeans also were the first people to recognize the necessity of a
regular day of rest.
When they divided the year into weeks they ordered that six days of
labor should be followed by one day, devoted to the "peace of the soul."
[Illustration: THE CHALDEANS.]
It was a great pity that the center of so much intelligence and industry
could not exist for ever. But not even the genius of a number of very
wise Kings could save the ancient people of Mesopotamia from their
ultimate fate.
The Semitic world was growing old.
It was time for a new race of men.
In the fifth century before Christ, an Indo-European people called the
Persians (I shall tell you about them later) left its pastures amidst
the high mountains of Iran and conquered the fertile valley.
The city of Babylon was captured without a struggle.
Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, who had been more interested in
religious problems than in defending his own country, fled.
A few days later his small son, who had remained behind, died.
Cyrus, the Persian King, buried the child with great honor and then
proclaimed himself the legitimate successor of the old rulers of
Babylonia.
Mesopotamia ceased to be an independent State.
It became a Persian province ruled by a Persian "Satrap" or Governor.
As for Babylon, when the Kings no longer used the city as their
residence it soon lost all importance and became a mere country village.
In the fourth century before Christ it enjoyed another spell of glory.
It was in the year 331 B.C. that Alexander the Great, the young Greek
who had just conquered Persia and India and Egypt and every other place,
visited the ancient city of sacred memories. He wanted to use the old
city as a background for his own newly-acquired glory. He began to
rebuild the palace and ordered that the rubbish be removed from
the temples.
Unfortunately he died quite suddenly in the Banqueting Hall of
Nebuchadnezzar and after that nothing on earth could save Babylon
from her ruin.
As soon as one of Alexander's generals, Seleucus Nicator, had perfected
the plans for a new city at the mouth of the great canal which united
the Tigris and the Euphrates, the fate of Babylon was sealed.
A tablet of the year 275 B.C. tells us how the last of the Babylonians
were forced to leave their home and move into this new settlement which
had been called Seleucia.
Even then, a few of the faithful continued to visit the holy places
which were now inhabited by wolves and jackals.
The majority of the people, little interested in those half-forgotten
divinities of a bygone age, made a more practical use of their
former home.
They used it as a stone-quarry.
For almost thirty centuries Babylon had been the great spiritual and
intellectual center of the Semitic world and a hundred generations had
regarded the city as the most perfect expression of their
people's genius.
It was the Paris and London and New York of the ancient world.
At present three large mounds show us where the ruins lie buried beneath
the sand of the ever-encroaching desert.