department of the library. Important as it is, it is scarcely more so
than the documentary department or Archive proper, where documents and
deeds of all kinds, both public and private, were deposited for safe
keeping. Here by the side of treatises, royal decrees and despatches,
lists of tribute, reports from generals and governors, also those daily
sent in by the superintendents of the royal observatories,--we find
innumerable private documents: deeds of sale duly signed, witnessed and
sealed, for land, houses, slaves--any kind of property,--of money lent,
of mortgages, with the rate of interest, contracts of all sorts. The
most remarkable of private documents is one which has been called the
"will of King Sennacherib," by which he entrusts some valuable personal
property to the priests of the temple of Nebo, to be kept for his
favorite son,--whether to be delivered after his (the king's) death or
at another time is not stated.
[Illustration: 48.--CLAY TABLET IN ITS CASE. (Hommel.)]
14. It requires some effort to bear in mind the nature and looks of the
things which we must represent to ourselves when we talk of Assyrian
"_books_." The above (Fig. 47) is the portrait of a "_volume_" in
perfect condition. But it is seldom indeed that one such is found.
Layard, in his first description of his startling "find," says: "They
(the tablets) were of different sizes; the largest were flat, and
measured nine inches by six and a half; the smaller were slightly
convex, and some were not more than an inch long, with but one or two
lines of writing. The cuneiform characters on most of them were
singularly sharp and well-defined, but so minute in some instances as to
be illegible without a magnifying glass." Most curiously, glass lenses
have been found among the ruins; which may have been used for the
purpose. Specimens have also been found of the very instruments which
were employed to trace the cuneiform characters, and their form
sufficiently accounts for the peculiar shape of these characters which
was imitated by the engravers on stone. It is a little iron rod--(or
_style_, as the ancients used to call such implements)--not sharp, but
_triangular_ at the end: [open triangle]. By slightly pressing this end
on the cake of soft moist clay held in the left hand no other shape of
sign could be obtained than a wedge, [closed triangle], the direction
being determined by a turn of the wrist, presenting the instrument in
different positions. When one side of the tablet was full, the other was
to be filled. If it was small, it was sufficient to turn it over,
continuing to hold the edges between the thumb and third finger of the
left hand. But if the tablet was large and had to be laid on a table to
be written on, the face that was finished would be pressed to the hard
surface, and the clay being soft, the writing would be effaced. This was
guarded against by a contrivance as ingenious as it was simple. Empty
places were left here and there in the lines, in which were stuck small
pegs, like matches. On these the tablet was supported when turned over,
and also while baking in the oven. On many of the tablets that have
been preserved are to be seen little holes or dints, where the pegs have
been stuck. Still, it should be mentioned that these holes are not
confined to the large tablets and not found on all large tablets. When
the tablet was full, it was allowed to dry, then generally, but not
always, baked. Within the last few years several thousands unbaked
tablets have been found in Babylonia; they crumbled into dust under the
finders' fingers. It was then proposed to bake such of them as could at
all bear handling. The experiment was successful, and numbers of
valuable documents were thus preserved and transported to the great
repository of the British Museum. The tablets are covered with writing
on both sides and most accurately classed and numbered, when they form
part of a series, in which case they are all of the same shape and size.
The poem discovered by George Smith is written out on twelve tablets,
each of which is a separate book or chapter of the whole. There is an
astronomical work in over seventy tablets. The first of them begins with
the words: "_When the gods Anu and ..._" These words are taken as the
title of the entire series. Each tablet bears the notice: First, second,
third tablet of "_When the gods Anu and ..._" To guard against all
chance of confusion, the last line of one tablet is repeated as the
first line of the following one--a fashion which we still see in old
books, where the last word or two at the bottom of a page is repeated at
the top of the next.
[Illustration: 49.--ANTIQUE BRONZE SETTING OF CYLINDER. (Perrot and
Chipiez.)]
[Illustration: 50.--CHALDEAN CYLINDER AND IMPRESSION.(Perrot and Chipiez.)]
[Illustration: 51.--ASSYRIAN CYLINDER. (Perrot and Chipiez.)]
15. The clay tablets of the ancient Chaldeans are distinguished from the
Assyrian ones by a curious peculiarity: they are sometimes enclosed in a
case of the same material, with exactly the same inscription and seals
as on the inner tablet, even more carefully executed.[U] It is evidently
a sort of duplicate document, made in the prevision that the outer one
might be injured, when the inner record would remain. Rows of figures
across the tablet are impressed on it with seals called from their shape
cylinders, which were rolled over the soft moist clay. These cylinders
were generally of some valuable, hard stone--jasper, amethyst,
cornelian, onyx, agate, etc.,--and were used as signet rings were later
and are still. They are found in great numbers, being from their
hardness well-nigh indestructible. They were generally bored through,
and through the hole was passed either a string to wear them on, or a
metal axis, to roll them more easily.[V] There is a large and most
valuable collection of seal cylinders at the British Museum. Their size
ranges from a quarter of an inch to two inches or a little more. But
cylinders were also made of baked clay and larger size, and then served
a different purpose, that of historical documents. These are found in
the foundations of palaces and temples, mostly in the four corners, in
small niches or chambers, generally produced by leaving out one or more
bricks. These tiny monuments range from a couple of inches to half a
foot in height, seldom more; they are sometimes shaped like a prism with
several faces (mostly six), sometimes like a barrel, and covered with
that compact and minute writing which it often requires a magnifying
glass to make out. Owing to their sheltered position, these singular
records are generally very well preserved. Although their original
destination is only to tell by whom and for what purpose the building
has been erected, they frequently proceed to give a full though
condensed account of the respective kings' reigns, so that, should the
upper structure with its engraved annals be destroyed by the
vicissitudes of war or in the course of natural decay, some memorial of
their deeds should still be preserved--a prevision which, in several
cases, has been literally fulfilled. Sometimes the manner and material
of these records were still more fanciful. At Khorsabad, at the very
interior part of the construction, was found a large stone chest, which
enclosed several inscribed plates in various materials. "... In this only
extant specimen of an Assyrian foundation stone were found one little
golden tablet, one of silver, others of copper, lead and tin; a sixth
text was engraved on alabaster, and the seventh document was written on
the chest itself."[W] Unfortunately the heavier portion of this
remarkable find was sent with a collection which foundered on the Tigris
and was lost. Only the small plates,--gold, silver, copper and tin
(antimonium scholars now think it to be)--survived, and the inscriptions
on them have been read and translated. They all commemorate, in very
nearly the same terms, the foundation and erection of a new city and
palace by a very famous king and conqueror, generally (though not
correctly) called Sargon, and three of them end with a request to the
kings his successors to keep the building in good repair, with a prayer
for their welfare if they do and a heavy curse if they fail in this
duty: "Whoever alters the works of my hand, destroys my constructions,
pulls down the walls which I have raised,--may Asshur, Ninêb, Ramân and
the great gods who dwell there, pluck his name and seed from the land
and let him sit bound at the feet of his foe." Most inscriptions end
with invocations of the same kind, for, in the words of Ménant: "it was
not mere whim which impelled the kings of Assyria to build so
assiduously. Palaces had in those times a destination which they have no
longer in ours. Not only was the palace indeed _the dwelling of
royalty_, as the inscriptions have it,--it was also the BOOK, which each
sovereign began at his accession to the throne and in which he was to
record the history of his reign."[X]
[Illustration: 52.--PRISM OF SENNACHERIB. ALSO CALLED "TAYLOR
CYLINDER."]
[Illustration: 53.--INSCRIBED CYLINDER FROM BORSIP.]
And each such book of brick and stone we can with perfect truth call a
chapter--or a volume--of the great Book of the Past whose leaves are
scattered over the face of the earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[U] See Fig. 48, p. 111.
[V] See above, Figs. 49 and 50.
[W] Dr. Julius Oppert, "Records of the Past," Vol. XI., p. 31.
[X] "Les Écritures Cunéiformes," of Joachim Ménant: page 198 (2d
edition, 1864).
[Illustration: CHALDEA AND NEIGHBORING COUNTRIES]
THE STORY OF CHALDEA.
I.
NOMADS AND SETTLERS.--THE FOUR STAGES OF CULTURE.
1. Men, whatever their pursuit or business, can live only in one of two
ways: they can stay where they are, or they can go from one place to
another. In the present state of the world, we generally do a little of
both. There is some place--city, village, or farm--where we have our
home and our work. But from time to time we go to other places, on
visits or on business, or travel for a certain length of time to great
distances and many places, for instruction and pleasure. Still, there is
usually some place which we think of as home and to which we return.
Wandering or roving is not our natural or permanent condition. But there
are races for whom it is. The Bedouin Arabs are the principal and best
known of such races. Who has not read with delight accounts of their
wild life in the deserts of Arabia and Northern Africa, so full of
adventure and romance,--of their wonderful, priceless horses who are to
them as their own children,--of their noble qualities, bravery,
hospitality, generosity, so strangely blended with love of booty and a
passion for robbing expeditions? They are indeed a noble race, and it is
not their choice, but their country which has made them robbers and
rovers--Nomads, as such wandering races are called in history and
geography. They cannot build cities on the sand of the desert, and the
small patches of pasture and palm groves, kept fresh and green by
solitary springs and called "oases," are too far apart, too distant from
permanently peopled regions to admit of comfortable settlement. In the
south of Arabia and along the sea-shore, where the land is fertile and
inviting, they live much as other nations do, and when, a thousand years
ago, Arabs conquered vast and wealthy countries both in Europe and Asia,
and in Africa too, they not only became model husbandmen, but built some
of the finest cities in the world, had wise and strictly enforced laws
and took the lead in literature and science. Very different are the
scattered nomadic tribes which still roam the steppes of Eastern Russia,
of Siberia and Central Asia. They are not as gifted by far as the Arabs,
yet would probably quickly settle down to farming, were it not that
their wealth consists in flocks of sheep and studs of horses, which
require the pasture yielded so abundantly by the grassy steppes, and
with which they have to move from one place, when it is browsed bare, to
another, and still another, carrying their felt-tents and simple
utensils with them, living on the milk of their mares and the meat of
their sheep. The Red Indian tribes of the far West present still another
aspect of nomadic life--that of the hunter, fierce and entirely untamed,
the simplest and wildest of all.
2. On the whole, however, nomadic life is at the present day the
exception. Most of the nations that are not savages live in houses, not
in portable tents, in cities, not encampments, and form compact, solidly
bound communities, not loose sets of tribes, now friendly, now hostile
to one another. But it has not always been so. There have been times
when settled life was the exception and nomadic life the rule. And the
older the times, the fewer were the permanent communities, the more
numerous the roving tribes. For wandering in search of better places
must have been among the first impulses of intelligent humanity. Even
when men had no shelter but caves, no pursuit but hunting the animals,
whose flesh was their food and in whose skins they clothed themselves,
they must frequently have gone forth, in families or detachments, either
to escape from a neighborhood too much infested with the gigantic wild
beasts which at one time peopled the earth more thickly than men, or
simply because the numbers of the original cave-dwellers had become too
great for the cave to hold them. The latter must have been a very usual
occurrence: families stayed together until they had no longer room
enough, or quarrelled, when they separated. Those who went never saw
again the place and kindred they left, although they carried with them
memories of both, the few simple arts they had learned there and the
customs in which they had been trained. They would stop at some
congenial halting-place, when, after a time, the same process would be
repeated--and so again and again.
3. How was the first horse conquered, the first wild-dog tamed and
conciliated? How were cattle first enticed to give man their milk, to
depend on his care and follow his movements? Who shall tell? However
that may have happened, it is certain that the transition from a
hunter's wild, irregular and almost necessarily lawless existence to the
gentler pursuits of pastoral life must have been attended by a great
change in manners and character. The feeling of ownership too, one of
the principal promoters of a well-regulated state of society, must have
quickly developed with the possession of rapidly increasing wealth in
sheep and horses,--the principal property of nomadic races. But it was
not a kind of property which encouraged to settling, or uniting in close
communities; quite the contrary. Large flocks need vast pasture-grounds.
Besides, it is desirable to keep them apart in order to avoid confusion
and disputes about wells and springs, those rare treasures of the
steppes, which are liable to exhaustion or drying up, and which,
therefore, one flock-owner is not likely to share with another, though
that other were of his own race and kin. The Book of Genesis, which
gives us so faithful and lively a picture of this nomadic pastoral life
of ancient nations, in the account of the wanderings of Abraham and the
other Hebrew patriarchs, has preserved such an incident in the quarrel
between the herdsmen of Abraham and his nephew Lot, which led to their
separation. This is what Abraham said to Lot: "Is not the whole land
before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take
the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the
right hand, then I will go to the left."[Y] So also it is said of Esau
that he "went into the country from the face of his brother Jacob: for
their riches were more than they might dwell together, and the land
wherein they were strangers could not bear them because of their
cattle."[Z] This was a facility offered by those immense plains,
unclaimed as yet by any one people in particular, and which must
oft-times have averted strife and bloodshed, but which ceased from the
moment that some one tribe, tired of wandering or tempted by some more
than usually engaging spot, settled down on it, marking that and the
country around it, as far as its power reached, for its own. There is
even now in the East something very similar to this mode of occupation.
In the Turkish Empire, which is, in many places, thinly peopled, there
are large tracts of waste land, sometimes very fertile, accounted as
nobody's property, and acknowledged to belong, legally and forever, to
the first man who takes possession of them, provided he cultivates them.
The government asks no purchase price for the land, but demands taxes
from it as soon as it has found an owner and begins to yield crops.
4. The pastoral nomad's life is, like the hunter's, a singularly free
one,--free both from restraint, and, comparatively, from toil. For
watching and tending flocks is not a laborious occupation, and no
authority can always reach or weigh very heavily on people who are here
to-day and elsewhere to-morrow. Therefore, it is only with the third
stage of human existence, the agricultural one, that civilization, which
cannot subsist without permanent homes and authority, really commences.
The farmer's homestead is the beginning of the State, as the hearth or
fireplace was the beginning of the family. The different labors of the
fields, the house, and the dairy require a great number of hands and a
well-regulated distribution of the work, and so keep several generations
of the settler's family together, on the same farm. Life in common makes
it absolutely necessary to have a set of simple rules for home
government, to prevent disputes, keep up order and harmony, and settle
questions of mutual rights and duties. Who should set down and enforce
these rules but the head of the family, the founder of the race--the
patriarch? And when the family has become too numerous for the original
homestead to hold it, and part of it has to leave it, to found a new
home for itself, it does not, as in the primitive nomadic times, wander
off at random and break all ties, but settles close by on a portion of
the family land, or takes possession of a new piece of ground somewhat
further off, but still within easy reach. In the first case the land
which had been common property gets broken up into lots, which, though
belonging more particularly to the members who separate from the old
stock, are not for that withdrawn from the authority of the patriarch.
There are several homesteads now, which form a village, and, later on,
several villages; but the bond of kindred, of tradition and custom is
religiously preserved, as well as subordination to the common head of
the race, whose power keeps increasing as the community grows in numbers
and extent of land, as the greater complications of relationships,
property, inheritance, demand more laws and a stricter rule,--until he
becomes not so much Father as King. Then naturally come collisions with
neighboring similar settlements, friendly or hostile, which result in
alliances or quarrels, trade or war, and herewith we have the State
complete, with inner organization and foreign policy.
5. This stage of culture, in its higher development, combines with the
fourth and last--city-building, and city-life, when men of the same
race, and conscious of a common origin, but practically strangers to
each other, form settlements on a large scale, which, being enclosed in
walls, become places of refuge and defence, centres of commerce,
industry and government. For, when a community has become very numerous,
with wants multiplied by continual improvements and increasing culture,
each family can no longer make all the things it needs, and a portion of
the population devotes itself to manufacture and arts, occupations best
pursued in cities, while the other goes on cultivating the land and
raising cattle, the two sets of produces--those of nature and those of
the cunning hand and brain--being bartered one for the other, or, when
coin is invented, exchanged through that more convenient medium. In the
same manner, the task of government having become too manifold and
complicated for one man, the former Patriarch, now King, is obliged to
surround himself with assistants--either the elders of the race, or
persons of his own choice,--and send others to different places, to rule
in his name and under his authority. The city in which the King and his
immediate ministers and officers reside, naturally becomes the most
important one--the Capital of the State.
6. It does not follow by any means that a people, once settled, never
stirred from its adopted country. The migratory or wandering instinct
never quite died out--our own love of travelling sufficiently proves
that--and it was no unfrequent occurrence in very ancient times for
large tribes, even portions of nations, to start off again in search of
new homes and to found new cities, compelled thereto either by the
gradual overcrowding of the old country, or by intestine discords, or by
the invasion of new nomadic tribes of a different race who drove the old
settlers before them to take possession of their settlements, massacred
them if they resisted and reduced those who remained to an irksome
subjection. Such invasions, of course, might also be perpetrated with
the same results by regular armies, led by kings and generals from some
other settled and organized country. The alternative between bondage
and emigration must have been frequently offered, and the choice in
favor of the latter was helped not a little by the spirit of adventure
inborn in man, tempted by so many unexplored regions as there were in
those remote ages.
7. Such have been the beginnings of all nations. There can be no other.
And there is one more observation which will scarcely ever prove wrong.
It is that, however far we may go back into the past, the people whom we
find inhabiting any country at the very dawn of tradition, can always be
shown to have come from somewhere else, and not to have been the first
either. Every swarm of nomads or adventurers who either pass through a
country or stop and settle there, always find it occupied already. Now
the older population was hardly ever entirely destroyed or dislodged by
the newcomers. A portion at least remained, as an inferior or subject
race, but in time came to mix with them, mostly in the way of
intermarriage. Then again, if the newcomers were peaceable and there was
room enough--which there generally was in very early times--they would
frequently be suffered to form separate settlements, and dwell in the
land; when they would either remain in a subordinate condition, or, if
they were the finer and better gifted race, they would quickly take the
upper hand, teach the old settlers their own arts and ideas, their
manners and their laws. If the new settlement was effected by conquest,
the arrangement was short and simple: the conquerors, though less
numerous, at once established themselves as masters and formed a ruling
nobility, an aristocracy, while the old owners of the land, those at
least that did not choose to emigrate, became what may be called "the
common people," bound to do service and pay tribute or taxes to their
self-instituted masters. Every country has generally experienced, at
various times, all these modes of invasion, so that each nation may be
said to have been formed gradually, in successive layers, as it were,
and often of very different elements, which either finally amalgamated
or kept apart, according to circumstances.
The early history of Chaldea is a particularly good illustration of all
that has just been said.
FOOTNOTES:
[Y] Genesis, xiii. 7-11.
[Z] Genesis, xxxvi. 6-7.
II.
THE GREAT RACES.--CHAPTER X. OF GENESIS.
1. The Bible says (Genesis xi. 2): "And it came to pass, as they
journeyed in the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar;
and they dwelt there."