Damascus or of Israel. They record, as his twenty-seventh campaign, a
great war in Armenia that brought about the submission of all the
districts of that country that still resisted the Assyrian monarch. In
the thirty-first campaign (873), the last mentioned on the obelisk, the
King sent the general-in-chief of his armies, Tartan, again into
Armenia, where he gave up to pillage fifty cities, among them Van; and
during this time he himself went into Media, subjected part of the
northern districts of that country, which were in a state of rebellion,
chastised the people in the neighborhood of Mount Elwand, where in
after-times Ecbatana was built, and finally made war on the Scythians of
the Caspian Sea.
The official chronology of the Assyrians dates the termination of the
reign of Shalmaneser IV in 870, the period of his death. But during the
last two years his power was entirely lost, and he was reduced to the
possession of two cities, Nineveh and Calah. His second son,
Asshurdaninpal, in consequence of circumstances unknown to us, raised
the standard of revolt against his father, assumed the royal title, and
was supported by twenty-seven of the most important cities in the
empire. One of the monuments has preserved a list of these cities, and
among them we find Arrapkha, capital of the province of Arrapachitis,
Amida (now Diarbekr), Arbela, Ellasar, and all the towns of the banks of
the Tigris. War broke out between the father and his rebellious son; the
army embraced the cause of the latter; he was recognized by all the
provinces, and kept Shalmaneser until his death shut up and closely
blockaded in his capital.
Shalmaneser died in B.C. 870; his son, Shamash-Bin, continued the
legitimate line. He succeeded in repressing the revolt of his brother
Asshurdaninpal and in depriving him of the authority he had usurped. The
monument recording the exploits of his first years gives no details,
however, of the civil war; it merely records, after enumerating the
cities that had joined the revolt of Asshurdaninpal, "With the aid of
the great gods, my masters, I subjected them to my sceptre."
The usurpation of the second son of Shalmaneser and a civil war of five
years had introduced many disorders into the empire and shaken the
fidelity of many provinces. The early years of Shamash-Bin were occupied
in reducing the whole to order. In the narrative which has been
preserved, extending only to his fourth year, we find that the King
overran and chastised with terrible severity Osrhoene or Aramæan
Mesopotamia, where the people had been in rebellion, and reduced to
obedience the mountainous districts, where are the sources of the Tigris
and Euphrates, and finally Armenia proper. In his fourth year he marched
against Mardukbalatirib, king of Babylon, who had taken advantage of the
disorders in Assyria to assert his independence, and who was supported
by the Susianians or Elamites. He completely defeated him and compelled
him to fly to the desert, killed very many of his army in the battle,
took two hundred war chariots, and made seven thousand prisoners, of
whom five thousand were put to death on the field of battle as an
example. Unfortunately our information ceases at that period and we know
absolutely nothing of the greater part of the reign of Shamash-Bin, or
of the expeditions to the west of Asia, Syria, and Palestine, that must
have been made after the termination of the campaigns by which the royal
authority was reëstablished in all the ancient provinces of the empire.
This King remained on the throne until 857. In 859 and 858 he had to
repress a great revolt in Babylon and Chaldæa.
Binlikhish [or Binnirari] III, the next king, reigned twenty-nine years,
from 857 to 828. An inscription of his, engraved in the first years of
his reign, describing the extent of the empire, says that he governed
on one side "From the land of Siluna, toward the rising sun, the
countries of Elam, Albania (at the foot of Caucasus), Kharkhar,
Araziash, Misu, Media, Giratbunda (a portion of Atropatene, frequently
mentioned in the cuneiform inscriptions), the lands of Munna, Parsua
(Parthia), Allabria (Hyrcania), Abdadana (Hecatompyla), Namri (the
Caspian Scythians), even to all the tribes of the Andiu (a Turanian or
Scythian people, whose country is far off), the whole of the mountainous
country as far as the sea of the rising sun, the Caspian Sea; on the
other side from the Euphrates, Syria, all Phoenicia, the land of Tyre,
of Sidon, the land of Omri (Samaria), Edom, the Philistines, as far as
the sea of the setting sun (the Mediterranean)"; on all these countries
he says that "he imposed tribute."
"I marched," he says again, "against the land of Syria, and I took
Marih, king of Syria, in Damascus, the city of his kingdom. The great
dread of Asshur, my master, persuaded him; he embraced my knees and made
submission."
Binlikhish III was a warlike prince; every year of his reign was marked
by an expedition. We have a summary of these in a chronological tablet
in the British Museum, containing a fragment--from the end of the reign
of Shamash-Bin to that of Tiglath-pileser II--of a canon of eponymes
mentioning the principal events year by year. They nearly all occurred
in Southern Armenia and in the land of Van, where obedience was only
maintained by incessant military demonstrations, and subsequently in the
countries to the north of Media as far as the Caspian Sea. Other
expeditions were also made as far as Parthia, toward Ariana and the
various countries that, to the Assyrians, were the extreme East. We do
not, however, know what that region was called by them, as it is always
designated by a group of ideographic characters of unknown
pronunciation. By the defeat of Marih, king of Damascus, the submission
of the western provinces was secured for the remainder of this reign,
for there is no record of any other campaign there.
The year 849 was marked by a great plague in Assyria; 834 by a religious
festival, of which unfortunately no particulars are known; and, lastly,
833 by the solemn inauguration of a new temple to the god Nebo, in the
capital.
But the most interesting monument of the reign of Binlikhish III is the
statue of Nebo, one of the great gods of Babylon, discovered by Mr.
Loftus and now in the British Museum; the inscription on the base of the
statue mentions the wife of the King, and calls her "the queen
Sammuramat"; this is the only historical Semiramis, the one mentioned by
Herodotus. He places her correctly about a century and a half before
Nitocris, the wife of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon. "Semiramis," says
the father of history, "raised magnificent embankments to restrain the
river (Euphrates), which till then used to overflow and flood the whole
country round Babylon." But why did Herodotus, and the Babylonian
tradition he has so faithfully reported, attribute these useful works to
the queen and not to her husband, Binlikhish? It was once supposed, as a
solution of this problem, that Sammuramat had governed alone for some
time, as queen regnant, after the death of her husband. But this
conjecture is absolutely contradicted by the table of eponymes in the
British Museum, where it can be seen that Sammuramat never reigned
alone. In our opinion the only possible explanation will be found in
regarding Binlikhish and Sammuramat as the Ferdinand and Isabella of
Mesopotamia. The restless desire of Babylonia and Chaldæa to form a
state separate from Assyria grew more decided as time went on; in the
time of Binlikhish it had already gained great strength, and the day was
not far distant when the separation was definitely to take place, and to
occasion the utter ruin of Nineveh. In this position of affairs it was
natural for a king of Assyria to seek to strengthen his authority in
Chaldæa by a marriage with a daughter of the royal line of that country,
who were his vassals, and thus, in the opinion of the people of Babylon,
acquire a legitimate right to the possession of the country by means of
his wife, as well as the advantages to be derived from the attachment of
the people to their own legitimate sovereign. We shall therefore
consider Sammuramat as a Babylonian princess married by Binlikhish, and
as reigning nominally at Babylon while her husband occupied the throne
at Nineveh, and as being the only sovereign registered by the
Babylonians in their national annals. In fact, her position must have
been a peculiar one; she must have been considered the rightful queen
in one part of the empire, to have been named as queen, and in the same
rank as the king, in such an official document as the inscription on the
statue of the god Nebo. She is the only princess mentioned in any of the
Assyrian texts, as we might naturally suppose; for unless under such
very exceptional circumstances as we imagine in the case of Sammuramat,
there can have been no queens, but only favorite concubines, under the
organization of harem life, such as it was under the Assyrian kings, and
as it still is in our days.
The exaggerated development of the Assyrian empire was quite unnatural;
the kings of Nineveh had never succeeded in welding into one nation the
numerous tribes whom they subdued by force of arms, or in checking in
them the spirit of independence; they had not even attempted to do so.
The empire was absolutely without cohesion; the administrative system
was so imperfect, the bond attaching the various provinces to each
other, and to the centre of the monarchy, so weak that at the
commencement of almost every reign a revolt broke out, sometimes at one
point, sometimes at another.
It was therefore easy to foresee that, so soon as the reins of
government were no longer in a really strong hand--so soon as the king
of Assyria should cease to be an active and warlike king, always in the
field, always at the head of his troops--the great edifice laboriously
built up by his predecessors of the tenth and ninth centuries would
collapse, and the immense fabric of empire would vanish like smoke with
such rapidity as to astonish the world. And this is exactly what
occurred after the death of Binlikhish III.
The tablet in the British Museum allows us to follow year by year the
events and the progress of the dissolution of the empire. Under
Shalmaneser V, who reigned from B.C. 828 to 818, some foreign
expeditions were still made, as, for instance, to Damascus in B.C. 819;
but the forces of the empire were especially engaged during many
following years in attempting to hold countries already subdued, such as
Armenia, then in a chronic state of revolt; the wars in one and the same
province were constant, and occupied some six successive campaigns--the
Armenian war was from B.C. 827 to 822--proving that no decisive results
were obtained.
Under Asshur-edil-ilani II, who reigned from B.C. 818 to 800, we do not
see any new conquests; insurrections constantly broke out, and were no
longer confined to the extremities of the empire; they encroached on the
heart of the country, and gradually approached nearer to Nineveh. The
revolutionary spirit increased in the provinces, a great insurrection
became imminent, and was ready to break out on the slightest excuse. At
this period, B.C. 804, it is that the British Museum tablet registers,
as a memorable fact in the column of events, "Peace in the land." Two
great plagues are also mentioned under this reign, in 811 and 805, and
on the 13th of June, B.C. 809--30 Sivan in the eponymos of
Bur-el-salkhi--an almost total eclipse of the sun, visible at Nineveh.
The revolution was not long in coming. Asshurlikhish [Assurbanipal]
ascended the throne in B.C. 800, and fixed his residence at Nineveh,
instead of Ellasar, where his predecessor had lived after quitting
Nineveh; he is the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, the ever-famous prototype
of the voluptuous and effeminate prince. The tablet in the British
Museum only mentions two expeditions in his reign, both of small
importance, in 795 and 794; to all the other years the only notice is
"in the country," proving that nothing was done and that all thought of
war was abandoned.
Sardanapalus had entirely given himself up to the orgies of his harem,
and never left his palace walls, entirely renouncing all manly and
warlike habits of life. He had reigned thus for seven years, and
discontent continued to increase; the desire for independence was
spreading in the subject provinces; the bond of their obedience each
year relaxed still more, and was nearer breaking, when Arbaces, who
commanded the Median contingent of the army and was himself a Mede,
chanced to see in the palace at Nineveh the King, in a female dress,
spindle in hand, hiding in the retirement of the harem his slothful
cowardice and voluptuous life.
He considered that it would be easy to deal with a prince so degraded,
who would be unable to renew the valorous traditions of his ancestors.
The time seemed to him to have come when the provinces, held only by
force of arms, might finally throw off the weighty Assyrian yoke.
Arbaces communicated his ideas and projects to the prince then
intrusted with the government of Babylon, the Chaldæan Phul (Palia?),
surnamed Balazu (the Terrible), a name the Greeks have made into
Belesis; he entered into the plot with the willingness to be expected
from a Babylonian, one of a nation so frequently rising in revolt.
Arbaces and Balazu consulted with other chiefs, who commanded
contingents of foreign troops, and with the vassal kings of those
countries that aspired to independence; and they all formed the
resolution of overthrowing Sardanapalus. Arbaces engaged to raise the
Medes and Persians, while Balazu set on foot the insurrection in Babylon
and Chaldæa. At the end of a year the chiefs assembled their soldiers,
to the number of forty thousand, in Assyria, under the pretext of
relieving, according to custom, the troops who had served the former
year.
When once there, the soldiers broke into open rebellion. The tablet in
the British Museum tells us that the insurrection commenced at Calah in
B.C. 792. Immediately after this the confusion became so great that from
this year there was no nomination of an eponyme.
Sardanapalus, rudely interrupted in his debaucheries by a danger he had
not been able to foresee, showed himself suddenly inspired with activity
and courage; he put himself at the head of the native Assyrian troops
who remained faithful to him, met the rebels, and gained three complete
victories over them.
The confederates already began to despair of success, when Phul, calling
in the aid of superstition to a cause that seemed lost, declared to them
that if they would hold together for five days more, the gods, whose
will he had ascertained by consulting the stars, would undoubtedly give
them the victory.
In fact, some days afterward a large body of troops, whom the King had
summoned to his assistance from the provinces near the Caspian Sea, went
over, on their arrival, to the side of the insurgents and gained them a
victory. Sardanapalus then shut himself up in Nineveh, and determined to
defend himself to the last. The siege continued two years, for the walls
of the city were too strong for the battering machines of the enemy,
who were compelled to trust to reducing it by famine. Sardanapalus was
under no apprehension, confiding in an oracle declaring that Nineveh
should never be taken until the river became its enemy.
But, in the third year, rain fell in such abundance that the waters of
the Tigris inundated part of the city and overturned one of its walls
for a distance of twenty _stades_. Then the King, convinced that the
oracle was accomplished and despairing of any means of escape, to avoid
falling alive into the enemy's hands constructed in his palace an
immense funeral pyre, placed on it his gold and silver and his royal
robes, and then, shutting himself up with his wives and eunuchs in a
chamber formed in the midst of the pile, disappeared in the flames.
Nineveh opened its gates to the besiegers, but this tardy submission did
not save the proud city. It was pillaged and burned, and then razed to
the ground so completely as to evidence the implacable hatred enkindled
in the minds of subject nations by the fierce and cruel Assyrian
government. The Medes and Babylonians did not leave one stone upon
another in the ramparts, palaces, temples, or houses of the city that
for two centuries had been dominant over all Western Asia.
So complete was the destruction that the excavations of modern explorers
on the site of Nineveh have not yet found one single wall slab earlier
than the capture of the city by Arbaces and Balazu. All we possess of
the first Nineveh is one broken statue. History has no other example of
so complete a destruction.
The Assyrian empire was, like the capital, overthrown, and the people
who had taken part in the revolt formed independent states--the Medes
under Arbaces, the Babylonians under Phul or Balazu, and the Susianians
under Shutruk-Nakhunta. Assyria, reduced to the enslaved state in which
she had so long held other countries, remained for some time a
dependency of Babylon.
This great event occurred in the year B.C. 789.
[When the noble sculptures and vast palaces of Nimrud had been first
uncovered, it was natural to suppose that they marked the real site of
ancient Nineveh; a passage of Strabo, and another of Ptolemy, lent
confirmation to this theory. Shortly afterward a rival claimant started
up in the region farther to the north.
"After a while an attempt was made to reconcile the rival claims by a
theory the grandeur of which gained it acceptance, despite its
improbability. It was suggested that the various ruins, which had
hitherto disputed the name, were in fact all included within the circuit
of the ancient Nineveh, which was described as a rectangle, or oblong
square, eighteen miles long and twelve broad. The remains at Khorsabad,
Koyunjik, Nimrud, and Keremles marked the four corners of this vast
quadrangle, which contained an area of two hundred and sixteen square
miles--about ten times that of London!
"In confirmation of this view was urged, first, the description in
Diodorus, derived probably from Ctesias, which corresponded (it was
said) both with the proportions and with the actual distances; and,
next, the statements contained in the Book of Jonah, which, it was
argued, implied a city of some such dimensions. The parallel of Babylon,
according to the description given by Herodotus, might fairly have been
cited as a further argument; since it might have seemed reasonable to
suppose that there was no great difference of size between the chief
cities of the two kindred empires."--_Rawlinson_.]
THE FOUNDATION OF ROME
B.C. 753
BARTHOLD GEORG NIEBUHR
Rome occupies a unique position in the history of the world. The
whole Mediterranean basin was at one time merely a Roman lake, and
the adjacent countries were Roman in letters, law, religion and the
practice of war. Roman roads crossed the continents east and west
and penetrated to the depths of Asia and Africa. Roman garrisons
were stationed in every important city of the provinces, and when
the great city on the banks of the Tiber at last fell before
successive irruptions of northeasterly barbarians and Roman power
was at its extreme ebb, the spirit of Roman institutions still
survived in the civilization of Spain, France, Italy, Britain, even
in Greece and Asia. Roman law had become the code of the world.
Iberian, Gaul, and Italian had modified in varying degree their
native dialects in conformity with the more copious and logical
idiom of Latium.
A group of legends gathers round the birthplace of the Eternal
City. It is Æneas who escapes from Troy and brings into the land of
Italian Latinus his native gods. His son Ascanius conquers and
slays Mezentius in a battle between Latins and Etruscans, and
eleven kings of Alba, all surnamed Silvius, succeeded him on the
throne. The last king of Alba Longa is Procas, whose usurping son
Amulius drives his eldest brother Numitor from the throne.
Numitor's daughter, Silvia, becomes the mother of the immortal
twins Romulus and Remus, by Mamers, the god of war; the children
are exposed by cruel Amulius, suckled by a wolf, and become
founders of Rome.
Such is the outline of the poem, or rather tissue of poetry in
which the founding of Rome is embalmed.
The critical acumen of Niebuhr may have dispelled some of the
clouds and contradictions in which early historians and poets have
wrapped the record of this great event. But no critic can ever
destroy the beauty and charm of the old Latin chronicles or
diminish the glory of the day that saw the first walls rise about
the seven hills of the most important of ancient European cities.
I believe that few persons, when Alba is mentioned, can get rid of the
idea, to which I too adhered for a long time, that the history of Alba
is lost to such an extent, that we can speak of it only in reference to
the Trojan time and the preceding period, as if all the statements made
concerning it by the Romans were based upon fancy and error; and that
accordingly it must be effaced from the pages of history altogether. It
is true that what we read concerning the foundation of Alba by Ascanius,
and the wonderful signs accompanying it, as well as the whole series of
the Alban kings, with the years of their reigns, the story of Numitor
and Amulius and the story of the destruction of the city, do not belong
to history; but the historical existence of Alba is not at all doubtful
on that account, nor have the ancients ever doubted it. The _Sacra
Albana_ and the _Albani tumuli atque luci_, which existed as late as the
time of Cicero, are proofs of its early existence; ruins indeed no
longer exist, but the situation of the city in the valley of Grotta
Ferrata may still be recognized. Between the lake and the long chain of
hills near the monastery of Palazzuolo one still sees the rock cut steep
down toward the lake, evidently the work of man, which rendered it
impossible to attack the city on that side; the summit on the other side
formed the arx. That the Albans were in possession of the sovereignty of
Latium is a tradition which we may believe to be founded on good
authority, as it is traced to Cincius. Afterward the Latins became the
masters of the district and temple of Jupiter. Further, the statement
that Alba shared the flesh of the victim on the Alban mount with the
thirty towns, and that after the fall of Alba the Latins chose their own
magistrates, are glimpses of real history. The ancient tunnel made for
discharging the water of the Alban Lake still exists, and through its
vault a canal was made called _Fossa Cluilia_: this vault, which is
still visible, is a work of earlier construction than any Roman one. But
all that can be said of Alba and the Latins at that time is, that Alba
was the capital, exercising the sovereignty over Latium; that its temple
of Jupiter was the rallying point of the people who were governed by it;
and that the gens Silvia was the ruling clan.
It cannot be doubted that the number of Latin towns was actually thirty,
just that of the Albensian demi; this number afterward occurs again in
the later thirty Latin towns and in the thirty Roman tribes, and it is
moreover indicated by the story of the foundation of Lavinium by thirty
families, in which we may recognize the union of the two tribes. The
statement that Lavinium was a Trojan colony and was afterward
abandoned, but restored by Alba, and further that the sanctuary could
not be transferred from it to Alba, is only an accommodation to the
Trojan and native tradition, however much it may bear the appearance of
antiquity. For Lavinium is nothing else than a general name for Latium,
just as Panionium is for Ionia, _Latinus_, _Lavinus_, and _Lavicus_
being one and the same name, as is recognized even by Servius. Lavinium
was the central point of the Prisci Latini, and there is no doubt that
in the early period before Alba ruled over Lavinium, worship was offered
mutually at Alba and at Lavinium, as was afterward the case at Rome in
the temple of Diana on the Aventine, and at the festivals of the Romans
and Latins on the Alban mount.