CHAPTER I.

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[Illustration: MONOLITH OF SHALMANESER II.

(_From the original in the British Museum._)]

By-Paths of Bible Knowledge.

VII.

ASSYRIA

ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE.

by

A. H. SAYCE, M.A.

Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology, Oxford,

Hon. LL.D. Dublin, etc.

Author of 'Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments,'

'An Introduction to Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther,' etc.

London:

The Religious Tract Society,

56, Paternoster Row, 65, St. Paul's Churchyard,

and 164, Piccadilly.

1885.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

List of Illustations 6

Preface 7

Chronological Table of the Kings of Assyria 17

Table of Biblical Dates according to

Assyrian Monuments 19

I. The Country and People 21

II. Assyrian History 27

III. Assyrian Religion 55

IV. Art, Literature, and Science 86

V. Manners and Customs; Trade and Government 122

Appendix 146

Index 153

Index of Scripture References 166

ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

Monolith of Shalmaneser II. (from the original in the

British Museum) Frontispiece

Assur-bani-pal and his Queen. (from the original in the

British Museum) 49

Nergal. (from the original in the British Museum) 65

Fragment now in the British Museum showing primitive

Hieroglyphics and Cuneiform Characters side by side. 93

An Assyrian Book. (from the original in the British

Museum) 99

Part of an Assyrian Cylinder containing Hezekiah's

Name. (from the original in the British Museum) 104

Assyrian King in his Chariot. 125

Siege of a City. 127

PREFACE.

Among the many wonderful achievements of the present century there is

none more wonderful than the recovery and decipherment of the monuments

of ancient Nineveh. For generations the great oppressing city had slept

buried beneath the fragments of its own ruins, its history lost, its

very site forgotten. Its name had passed into the region of myth even in

the age of the classical writers of Greece and Rome; Ninos or Nineveh

had become a hero-king about whom strange legends were told, and whose

conquests were fabled to have extended from the Mediterranean to India.

Little was known of the history of the mighty Assyrian Empire beyond

what might be learnt from the Old Testament, and that little was

involved in doubt and obscurity. Scholars wrote long treatises to

reconcile the statements of Greek historians with those of Scripture,

but they only succeeded in evolving theories which were contradicted and

overthrown by the next writer. There was none so bold as to suggest that

the history and life of Assyria were still lying hidden beneath the

ground, ready to rise up and disclose their secrets at the touch of a

magician's rod. The rod was the spade and the patient sagacity which

deciphered and interpreted what the spade had found. It might have been

thought that the cuneiform or wedge-shaped inscriptions of Assyria could

never be forced to reveal their mysteries. The language in which they

were written was unknown, and all clue to the meaning of the

multitudinous characters that composed them had long been lost. No

bilingual text came to the aid of the decipherer like the Rosetta Stone,

whose Greek inscription had furnished the key to the meaning of the

Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nevertheless the great feat was accomplished.

Step by step the signification of the cuneiform characters and the words

they concealed was made out, until it is now possible to translate an

ordinary Assyrian text with as much ease and certainty as a page of the

Old Testament.

And the revelation that awaited the decipherer was startling in the

extreme. The ruins of Nineveh yielded not only sculptures and

inscriptions carved in stone, but a whole library of books. True, the

books are written upon clay, and not on paper, but they are none the

less real books, dealing with all the subjects of knowledge known at the

time they were compiled, and presenting us with a clear and truthful

reflection of Assyrian thought and belief. We can not only trace the

architectural plans of the Assyrian palaces, and study the bas-reliefs

in which the Assyrians have pictured themselves and the life they led;

we can also penetrate to their inmost thoughts and feelings, and read

their history as they have told it themselves.

It is a strange thing to examine for the first time one of the clay

tablets of the old Assyrian library. Usually it has been more or less

broken by the catastrophe of that terrible day when Nineveh was captured

by its enemies, and the palace and library burnt and destroyed together.

But whether it is a fragment or a complete tablet, it is impossible not

to handle it reverently when cleaning it from the dirt with which its

long sojourn in the earth has encrusted it, and spelling out its words

for the first time for more than 2,000 years. When last the characters

upon it were read, it was in days when Assyria was still a name of

terror, and the destruction that God's prophets had predicted was still

to come. When its last reader laid it aside, Judah had not as yet

undergone the chastisement of the Babylonish exile, the Old Testament

was an uncompleted volume, the kingdom of the Messiah a promise of the

distant future. We are brought face to face, as it were, with men who

were the contemporaries of Isaiah, of Hezekiah, of Ahaz; nay, of men

whose names have been familiar to us since we first read the Bible by

our mother's side.

Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib can never again be to us mere names. We

possess the records which they caused to be written, and in which they

told the story of their campaigns in Palestine. The records are not

copies of older texts, with all the errors that human fallibility causes

copyists and scribes to make. They are the original documents which were

recited to the kings who ordered them to be compiled, and who may have

held them in their own hands. The gulf of centuries and forgetfulness

that has divided us from Sennacherib is filled up when we read the

account of his invasion of Judah, which seems to come from his own lips.

Never again can the heroes of the Old Testament be to us as lay-figures,

whose story is told by a voice that comes from a dark and unreal past.

The voice is now become a living one, and we can realise that Isaiah and

those of whom Isaiah wrote were men of flesh and blood like ourselves,

with the same passions, the same needs, the same temptations.

This realisation of Old Testament history is not the only result of the

recovery of Assyria upon Biblical studies. It is a very important

result, but there are others besides of equal importance. One of these

is the unexpected confirmation of the correctness of Holy Writ which

Assyrian discovery has afforded. The later history of the Old Testament

no longer stands alone. Once it was itself the sole witness for the

truth of the narratives it contains. Classical history or legend dealt

with other lands and other ages; there were no documents besides those

contained in the Old Testament to which we could appeal in support of

its statements. All is changed now. The earth has yielded up its

secrets; the ancient civilisation of Assyria has stepped forth again

into the light of day, and has furnished us with records, the

authenticity of which none can deny, which run side by side with those

of the Books of Kings, confirming, explaining, and illustrating them. It

has been said that just at the moment when sceptical criticism seemed

to have achieved its worst, and to have resolved the narratives of the

Old Testament into myths or fables, God's Providence was raising up from

the grave of centuries a new and unimpeachable witness for their truth.

Indeed, so strikingly was this the case, that one of the objections

brought against the correctness of Assyrian decipherment in its early

days was that Assyrian monarchs could never have concerned themselves

with petty kingdoms like those of Samaria and Judah, as the decipherers

made them do. Before the cuneiform monuments were interpreted, no one

could have suspected that they would have poured such a flood of light

upon Old Testament history.

This light is manifold. The very language of the inscriptions has helped

to explain difficult passages in the Hebrew Bible. Assyrian turns out to

be very closely related to Hebrew, as closely related, in fact, as two

strongly marked English dialects are to one another. There is no other

Semitic language (except, of course, Phœnician, which is practically the

same as Hebrew) which is so nearly allied to it. And thanks to the

library of Nineveh, and its lexicons and lists of synonymous words, we

have a larger literature, and a larger vocabulary, to draw upon in the

case of Assyrian than we have in the case of Hebrew. The consequence is

that Assyrian may sometimes settle the meaning of a word which occurs

only once or very rarely in the Old Testament. Thus the word _z'bhûl_,

which Hebrew scholars had supposed to mean 'a dwelling,' is shown by

the Assyrian texts to signify a 'height,' so that in 1 Kings viii. 13,

Solomon does not declare to God that he had built Him 'an house to dwell

in,' as the Authorised Version renders the passage, but 'a lofty

temple.' Naturally words of Assyrian origin, like Rab-shakeh and Tartan,

have first received their explanation from the decipherment of the

Assyrian inscriptions. They are not proper names, but titles, the

Rab-shakeh being 'the chief of the princes,' or Vizier, and the Tartan,

the commander-in-chief.

But not only do we find parallels to Hebrew in the individual words of

Assyrian, we also find parallel expressions which illustrate and explain

those of the Hebrew text. We all remember the statement that the 'Lord

rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out

of heaven.' The same phrase occurs in an unpublished Accadian hymn

addressed to a deity whose name is lost, but who was probably Rimmon the

Air-god. The Accadian original describes him as 'raining fire and stones

upon the enemy,' which the Assyrian translation changes into 'raining

stones and fire upon the foe' in exact conformity with the Hebrew

phrase. The familiar expression 'the Lord of Hosts,' similarly finds its

analogue and illustration in the common Assyrian title of the supreme

god Assur: 'lord of the legions of heaven and earth,' these legions

being the multitudinous spirits and angels whose home was in 'the heaven

above and the earth below.'

We can hardly speak here of the accounts of the Creation, the Deluge,

and the Tower of Babel, to which Mr. George Smith gave the name of 'the

Chaldean Genesis,' and which agree so closely with the corresponding

accounts in the Hebrew Book of Genesis. Though found in the library of

Nineveh, they are really copies of older Babylonian works, and therefore

belong rather to Babylonian than to Assyrian history. It is only the

account of the Creation in six days which may perhaps be of purely

Assyrian origin. What a resemblance it offers to the first chapter of

Genesis will be seen from the extracts from it in the chapter on

Assyrian Religion.

It is in the domain of history that the light cast upon Old Testament

Scripture by Assyrian research has been fullest and strongest. No one

can read the sketch of Assyrian history as revealed by the monuments

which is given in the following pages, without perceiving how important

it is for the proper understanding of the ancient Scriptures. For the

first time the prophecies in Isaiah which refer to a capture of

Jerusalem receive their explanation, and the sceptical criticism is

answered which found in them a prediction of events that never took

place. The chapter in which Isaiah describes the onward march of the

Assyrian host against Jerusalem (ch. x.) is no 'ideal' description of

'an ideal campaign,' the verses in which he tells us of the sufferings

endured by the beleaguered inhabitants of the Jewish capital (ch. xxii.)

are no 'exaggerated account of a possible catastrophe,' the prophecies

in which he declares that the devoted city was about to fall into the

hands of its enemies (x. 34, xxii. 14) were not unfulfilled threats. We

learn from the inscriptions of Sargon that already, ten years before the

campaign of his son Sennacherib, the Assyrian monarch had swept through

'the wide-spread land of Judah,' and had made it a tributary province.

It was not the army of Sennacherib to which Isaiah was alluding on the

day whereon he declared that the Assyrian host was at Nob, only a short

half-hour to the north of Jerusalem, but the more terrible veterans of

Sargon who marched against the holy city along the northern road.

Similar light is thrown by the Assyrian monuments upon another prophecy

of Isaiah, in which he pronounces the doom upon the land of Egypt (ch.

xix.). The prophecy has sometimes been referred by critics to a later

age than that of the great prophet; but the records of Esar-haddon prove

that it is strictly applicable to his time, and to his time only. The

unexpected revelation they have made to us of the Assyrian conquest of

Egypt, and its division into twenty vassal satrapies shows us who was

the 'cruel lord' and 'fierce king' into whose hands the Egyptians were

given, and paints the picture of an epoch in which 'the Egyptians'

fought 'every one against his brother, and every one against his

neighbour; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom.' The Isaianic

authorship of 'the burden of Egypt' can never again be denied.

Nahum, again, we can now read with a new interest and a new

understanding. The very date of his prophecy, so long disputed, can be

fixed approximately by the reference it contains to the sack of No-Amon

or Thebes (iii. 8). The prophecy was delivered hard upon sixty years

before the fall of Nineveh, when the Assyrian Empire was at the height

of its prosperity, and mistress of the Eastern world. Human foresight

could little have imagined that so great and terrible a power was so

soon to disappear. And yet at the very moment when it seemed strongest

and most secure, the Jewish prophet was uttering a prediction which the

excavations of Botta and Layard have shown to have been carried out

literally in fact. As we thread our way among the ruins of Nineveh, or

trace the after history of the deserted and forgotten site, we see

everywhere the fulfilment of Nahum's prophecy. Of the words that he

pronounced against the doomed city, there is none which has not come to

pass.

Those who would learn how marvellously the monuments of Assyria

illustrate and corroborate the pages of sacred history, need only

compare the records they contain with the narratives of the Books of

Kings which relate to the same period. The one complements and supplies

the missing chapters given by the other. The Bible informs us why

Sennacherib left Hezekiah unpunished, and never despatched another army

to Palestine; the cuneiform annals explain the causes of his murder, and

the reason of the flight of his sons to Ararat or Armenia. The single

passage in Scripture in which the name of Sargon is mentioned, no

longer remains isolated and unintelligible; we have no longer any need

to identify him with Tiglath-Pileser, or Shalmaneser, or any other

Assyrian prince with whom the fancy of older commentators confounded

him; we now know that he was one of the most powerful of Assyrian

conquerors, and we have his own independent testimony to that siege and

capture of Ashdod which is the occasion of the mention of his name in

Scripture. Between the history of the monuments and the history of the

Bible there is perpetual contact; and the voice of the monuments is

found to be in strict harmony with that of the Old Testament.

Before concluding this Preface, I have to thank Mr. W. G. Hird for his

kindness in undertaking the task of compiling an Index to the volume.

* * * * *

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE KINGS

OF ASSYRIA.

B.C.

Bel-kapkapi 1700(?)

Adasi

Bel-bani, his son 1650(?)

Assur-sum-esir 1600(?)

Adar-tiglath-Assuri 1600(?)

Irba-Rimmon 1550(?)

Assur-nadin-akhi, his son

Assur-bel-nisi-su _cir._ 1450

Buyur-Assur 1420

Assur-yuballidh 1400

Bel-nirari, his son 1380

Pudil (Pedael), his son 1350

Rimmon-nirari I, his son 1320

Shalmaneser I, his son 1300

Tiglath-Adar I, his son 1280

Bel-kudur-utsur (Belchadrezzar), his son 1260

Assur-narara and Nebo-dân 1240

Adar-pal-esar (Adar-pileser) 1220

Assur-dân I, his son 1200

Mutaggil-Nebo, his son 1180

Assur-ris-ilim, his son 1160

Tiglath-pileser I, his son 1140

Assur-bel-kala, his son 1110

Samas-Rimmon I, his brother 1090

Assur-rab buri

Assur-zalmati

Assur-dân II 930

Rimmon-nirari II, his son 911

Tiglath-Adar II, his son 889

Assur-natsir-pal, his son 883

Shalmaneser II, his son 858

Samas-Rimmon II, his son 823

Rimmon-nirari III, his son 810

Shalmaneser III 781

Assur-dân III 771

Assur-nirari 753

Pulu (Pul) usurps the throne and founds

the 2nd Empire under the name of

Tiglath-Pileser II 12th of Iyyar 745

Ululâ (Elulæos) of Tinu, usurper, takes

the name of Shalmaneser IV 727

Sargon, usurper 722

Sennacherib of Khabigal, his son 12th of Ab 705

Esar-haddon, his son 681

Assur-bani-pal (Sardanapalos), his son 668

Assur-etil-ili-yukinni, his son _cir._ 640

(Bel)-sum-iskun

Esar-haddon II (Sarakos)

Fall of Nineveh 606(?)

* * * * *

TABLE OF BIBLICAL DATES ACCORDING

TO THE ASSYRIAN MONUMENTS.

B.C.

Battle of Karkar; Ahab ally of Damascus

against Shalmaneser of Assyria 853

Death of Ahab 851

Campaign of Shalmaneser against Hadadezer

(Benhadad II) of Damascus 850

Second campaign against Hadadezer 845

Murder of Hadadezer by Hazael 843

Campaign of Shalmaneser against Hazael;

tribute paid by Jehu of Samaria 841

Damascus captured by the Assyrians;

tribute paid by Samaria 804

Campaign of the Assyrians against Damascus 773

Tiglath-Pileser II attacks Hamath;

submission of Uzziah; fall of Arpad 743-40

Tribute paid to Tiglath-Pileser by Menahem

of Samaria and Rezon of Damascus 738

Damascus besieged by the Assyrians; the tribes

beyond the Jordan carried away; Jehoahaz

(Ahaz) of Judah becomes a vassal of

Tiglath-Pileser 734

Damascus taken and Rezon slain; Ahaz

at Damascus 732

Samaria besieged by Shalmaneser V 723

Accession of Sargon 722

Merodach-baladan conquers Babylonia 721

Capture of Samaria by Sargon 720

Hamath conquered by Sargon; Sabako (So) of

Egypt defeated at Raphia 719

Embassy of Merodach-baladan to Hezekiah 712

Capture of Jerusalem and Ashdod by Sargon 711

Merodach-baladan driven from Babylonia 710

Merodach-baladan recovers Babylonia for six

months 703

Sennacherib's campaign against Judah; battle

of Eltekeh; overthrow of the Assyrian army

at Jerusalem 701

Murder of Sennacherib by his two sons 681

Manasseh appears among the Assyrian

tributaries; Egypt conquered by Esar-haddon 676

Destruction of Thebes (No-Amun) by the

Assyrians 665

* * * * *

ASSYRIA:

ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE.

CHAPTER I.

THE COUNTRY AND PEOPLE.

Assyria was the name given to the district which had been called 'the

land of Assur' by its own inhabitants. Assur, however, had originally

been the name, not of a country, but of a city founded in remote times

on the western bank of the Tigris, midway between the Greater and the

Lesser Zab. It was the primitive capital of the district in which it

stood, and to which, accordingly, it lent its name. It seems to have

been built by a people who spoke an agglutinative language, like the

languages of the modern Fins and Turks, and who were afterwards

supplanted by the Semitic Assyrians. The name in their language probably

signified 'water-boundary.' When the country was occupied by the Semitic

Assyrians the name was slightly changed, so as to assume the form of a

word which in Assyrian meant 'gracious.'

It so happened that Assyrian mythology knew of a deity who represented

the firmament, and was addressed as Sar. The name of Sar came in time

to be confused with that of Assur, the divine patron of the Assyrian

capital, the result being that Assur signified not only a city and

country, but also the supreme deity worshipped by their inhabitants.

Assur, in fact, became the divine impersonation of the power and

constitution of Assyria; at the same time he was also 'the gracious' god

and the primæval firmament of heaven.

Assur, whose ruins are now called Kalah Sherghat, did not always remain

the capital of Assyria. Its place was taken by a group of cities some 60

miles to the north, above the Greater Zab, and on the eastern side of

the Tigris, namely, Nineveh, Calah, and Dur-Sargon. The foundation of

Nineveh, the modern Kouyunjik, probably goes back to as early an age as

that of Assur, but it was not until a much later period that it became

an important city, and supplanted the older capital of the kingdom.

Calah, now called Nimrûd, though built some four centuries before, was

not made the seat of royalty until the reigns of Assur-natsir-pal and

Shalmaneser II, in the 9th century B.C., and Dur-Sargon (the modern

Khorsabad), as its name implies, was the creation of Sargon. Instead of

Dur-Sargon the Book of Genesis (x. 11) mentions Resen 'between Nineveh

and Calah.' The site of Resen has not been identified, though its name

has been met with in the Assyrian inscriptions under the form of

Res-eni, 'the head of the spring.'

The passage of Genesis in which Resen is referred to unfortunately

admits of a double translation. If we adopt the rendering of the margin,

and translate 'out of that land he went forth into Assyria and builded

Nineveh,' we might infer that Nineveh and its neighbouring towns had no

existence before the days when Babylonian emigrants settled in the

territory of the city of Assur, and superseded its older inhabitants.

However this may be, we know from the cuneiform monuments that the rise

of Assyria did not take place until the Babylonian monarchy was already

growing old. The country afterwards known as Assyria had been comprised

in Gutium or Kurdistan, a name which has been identified, with great

probability, by Sir H. Rawlinson, with the Goyyim or 'nations' of

Genesis xiv. over which Tidal was king. There seems to have been a time

when the rulers of Assur were mere governors appointed by the Babylonian

monarchs; at all events, the earliest of whom we know do not give

themselves the title of king, but use a word which signifies 'viceroy'

in the Chaldean inscriptions.

These viceroys, however, managed eventually to shake off the yoke of

their Babylonian masters, and one of them, Bel-kapkapi by name,

established an independent kingdom at Assur in the 17th or 16th century

before our era. His kingdom extended on both sides of the Tigris, and

doubtless included the country north of the Greater Zab, where Nineveh

was situated. The exact frontiers of Assyria, however, were never

accurately fixed. They varied with the military power and conquests of

its monarchs. Sometimes portions of the plateau of Mesopotamia on the

west were comprehended within it, as well as the country through which

the Tigris flowed, as far south as the borders of Babylonia, and as far

north as the Kurdish mountains. At other times Assyria was confined to

the narrow space within which its great cities stood.

The inhabitants of Assyria belonged to the Semitic stock, that is to

say, they were allied in blood and language to the Hebrews, the

Aramæans, and the Arabs. The older population had been either expelled

or destroyed. The Assyrians thus differed from the Babylonians, who were

a mixed race, partly Semitic and partly non-Semitic. The non-Semitic

element is generally termed Accadian; it spoke agglutinative dialects,

and was the original possessor of the plain of Chaldæa. The Accadians

invented the cuneiform system of writing, founded the chief cities and

civilisation of Babylonia, and erected the earliest Babylonian monuments

with which we are acquainted. It was only gradually that they yielded to

the advance of the Semites; in fact, the final triumph of the Semites in

Babylonia was only effected by their amalgamation with the old

population of the country, and their complete acceptance of Accadian

culture. The Accadian language lingered long, and when it died out was

preserved as a learned language, like Latin in our own day, which every

educated Babylonian was expected to know.

It was natural, therefore, that the pure-blooded Semites of Assyria and

the mixed population of Babylonia should differ from one another in many

respects. The Babylonians were agriculturists, fond of literature and

peaceful pursuits. The Assyrians, on the contrary, have been

appropriately termed the Romans of the East: they were a military

people, caring for little else save war and trade. Their literature,

like their culture and art, was borrowed from Babylonia, and they never

took kindly to it. Even under the magnificent patronage of

Assur-bani-pal, Assyrian literature was an exotic. It was cultivated

only by the few; whereas in Babylonia the greater part of the population

seems to have been able to read and write. If the Assyrian was less

luxurious than his Babylonian neighbour, he was also less humane.

Indeed, the Assyrian annals glory in the record of a ferocity at which

we stand aghast. On the other hand, the Assyrian was not so

superstitious as the Babylonian, though he ascribed his successes to the

favour of Assur, and impaled the inhabitants of conquered towns or burnt

them alive because they did not believe in his national deity. He was,

as Nahum declared, the lion which 'did tear in pieces enough for his

whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his holes with prey,

and his dens with ravin.'

Assyria was so wholly a military power, that the destruction of Nineveh

not only destroyed the Assyrian Empire but blotted out the Assyrian

nation itself. When 'the gates of the rivers' of Nineveh—the Tigris and

Khusur—were opened, and 'the palace dissolved,' Assyria ceased to

exist. In the Sassanian period the mounds which covered the ruins of the

old city were for a short time occupied by the houses of a village, but

these, too, disappeared after a while, and the very site of Nineveh

remained for centuries unknown. Rich, in 1818, conjectured that the

mounds of Kouyunjik, opposite the modern town of Mosul, concealed its

ruins beneath them, but it was not until the excavations of the

Frenchman Botta, in 1842, and the Englishman Layard, in 1845, that the

remains first of Dur-Sargon, and then of Nineveh itself, were revealed

to the eyes of a wondering world. The capital of the Assyrian Empire was

recovered, and with it the sculptured monuments of its kings, and the

relics of its clay-inscribed library. The discovery came at an opportune

moment. The cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had at last yielded up

their secrets to the patient sagacity of European scholars, and had

furnished the key to other inscriptions,—also in cuneiform characters,

but of a wholly different kind, and expressing a wholly different

language—which now proved to be the long-lost records of the Assyrian

people. Little by little the records were deciphered; fresh expeditions

to the buried cities of Assyria and Babylonia returned to Europe with

fresh spoils, and it is now possible to describe the history and even

the daily life and thoughts of a people who but half a century ago were

but a mere name. The following pages are intended to give a picture of

that history and life.

* * * * *