foreign race" who colonized Chaldea "in the beginning." It was a
universally admitted fact throughout antiquity that the population of
the country had always been a mixed one, but a fact known vaguely,
without particulars. On this subject, as on so many others, the
discoveries made in the royal library of Nineveh shed an unexpected and
most welcome light. The very first, so to speak preliminary, study of
the tablets showed that there were amongst them documents in two
entirely different languages, of which one evidently was that of an
older population of Chaldea. The other and later language, usually
called Assyrian, because it was spoken also by the Assyrians, being very
like Hebrew, an understanding of it was arrived at with comparative
ease. As to the older language there was absolutely no clue. The only
conjecture which could be made with any certainty was, that it must have
been spoken by a double people, called the people of Shumir and Accad,
because later kings of Babylon, in their inscriptions, always gave
themselves the title of "Kings of Shumir and Accad," a title which the
Assyrian sovereigns, who at times conquered Chaldea, did not fail to
take also. But who and what were these people might never have been
cleared up, but for the most fortunate discovery of dictionaries and
grammars, which, the texts being supplied with Assyrian translations,
served our modern scholars, just as they did Assyrian students 3000
years ago, to decipher and learn to understand the oldest language of
Chaldea. Of course, it was a colossal piece of work, beset with
difficulties which it required an almost fierce determination and
superhuman patience to master. But every step made was so amply repaid
by the results obtained, that the zeal of the laborers was never
suffered to flag, and the effected reconstruction, though far from
complete even now, already enables us to conjure a very suggestive and
life-like picture of those first settlers of the Mesopotamian Lowlands,
their character, religion and pursuits.
2. The language thus strangely brought to light was very soon perceived
to be distinctly of that peculiar and primitive type--partly
monosyllables, partly words rudely pieced together,--which has been
described in a preceding chapter as characteristic of the Turanian race,
and which is known in science by the general name of _agglutinative_,
i.e., "glued or stuck together," without change in the words, either by
declension or conjugation. The people of Shumir and Accad, therefore,
were one and the same Turanian nation, the difference in the name being
merely a geographical one. SHUMIR is Southern or Lower Chaldea, the
country towards and around the Persian Gulf,--that very land of Shinar
which is mentioned in Genesis xi. 2. Indeed "Shinar" is only the way in
which the Hebrews pronounced and spelt the ancient name of Lower
Chaldea. ACCAD is Northern or Upper Chaldea. The most correct way, and
the safest from all misunderstanding, is to name the people the
Shumiro-Accads and their language, the Shumiro-Accadian; but for
brevity's sake, the first name is frequently dropped, and many say
simply "the Accads" and "the Accadian language." It is clear, however,
that the royal title must needs unite both names, which together
represented the entire country of Chaldea. Of late it has been
discovered that the Shumiro-Accads spoke two slightly differing dialects
of the same language, that of Shumir being most probably the older of
the two, as culture and conquest seem to have been carried steadily
northward from the Gulf.
3. That the Accads themselves came from somewhere else, is plain from
several circumstances, although there is not the faintest symptom or
trace of any people whom they may have found in the country. They
brought into it the very first and most essential rudiments of
civilization, the art of writing, and that of working metals; it was
probably also they who began to dig those canals without which the land,
notwithstanding its fabulous fertility, must always be a marshy waste,
and who began to make bricks and construct buildings out of them. There
is ground to conclude that they came down from mountains in the fact
that the name "Accad" means "Mountains" or "Highlands," a name which
they could not possibly have taken in the dead flats of Lower Chaldea,
but must have retained as a relic of an older home. It is quite possible
that this home may have been in the neighboring wild and mountainous
land of SHUSHAN (Susiana on the maps), whose first known population was
also Turanian. These guesses take us into a past, where not a speck of
positive fact can be discerned. Yet even that must have been only a
station in this race's migration from a far more northern centre. Their
written language, even after they had lived for centuries in an almost
tropical country, where palms grew in vast groves, almost forests, and
lions were common game, as plentiful as tigers in the jungles of Bengal,
contained no sign to designate either the one or the other, while it was
well stocked with the signs of metals,--of which there is no vestige, of
course, in Chaldea,--and all that belongs to the working thereof. As the
ALTAÏ range, the great Siberian chain, has always been famous for its
rich mines of every possible metal ore, and as the valleys of the Altaï
are known to be the nests from which innumerable Turanian tribes
scattered to the north and south, and in which many dwell to this day
after their own nomadic fashion, there is no extravagance in supposing
that _there_ may have been our Accads' original point of departure.
Indeed the Altaï is so indissolubly connected with the origin of most
Turanian nations, that many scientists prefer to call the entire Yellow
Race, with all its gradations of color, "the Altaïc." Their own
traditions point the same way. Several of them have a pretty legend of a
sort of paradise, a secluded valley somewhere in the Altaï, pleasant and
watered by many streams, where their forefathers either dwelt in the
first place or whither they were providentially conducted to be saved
from a general massacre. The valley was entirely enclosed with high
rocks, steep and pathless, so that when, after several hundred years, it
could no longer hold the number of its inhabitants, these began to
search for an issue and found none. Then one among them, who was a
smith, discovered that the rocks were almost entirely of iron. By his
advice, a huge fire was made and a great many mighty bellows were
brought into play, by which means a path was _melted_ through the rocks.
A tradition, by the by, which, while confirming the remark that the
invention of metallurgy belongs originally to the Yellow Race in its
earliest stages of development, is strangely in accordance with the name
of the Biblical Tubalcain, "the forger of every cutting instrument of
brass and iron." That the Accads were possessed of this distinctive
accomplishment of their race is moreover made very probable by the
various articles and ornaments in gold, brass and iron which are
continually found in the very oldest tombs.
4. But infinitely the most precious acquisition secured to us by the
unexpected revelation of this stage of remotest antiquity is a
wonderfully extensive collection of prayers, invocations and other
sacred texts, from which we can reconstruct, with much probability, the
most primitive religion in the world--for such undoubtedly was that of
the Accads. As a clear and authentic insight into the first
manifestation of the religious instinct in man was just what was wanting
until now, in order to enable us to follow its development from the
first, crudest attempts at expression to the highest aspirations and
noblest forms of worship, the value of this discovery can never be
overrated. It introduces us moreover into so strange and fantastical a
world as not the most imaginative of fictions can surpass.
5. The instinct of religion--"religiosity," as it has been called--is
inborn to man; like the faculty of speech, it belongs to man, and to man
only, of all living beings. So much so, that modern science is coming to
acknowledge these two faculties as _the_ distinctive characteristics
which mark man as a being apart from and above the rest of creation.
Whereas the division of all that exists upon the earth has of old been
into three great classes or realms--the "mineral realm," the "vegetable
realm" and the "animal realm," in which latter man was included--it is
now proposed to erect the human race with all its varieties into a
separate "realm," for this very reason: that man has all that animals
have, and two things more which they have not--speech and religiosity,
which assume a faculty of abstract thinking, observing and drawing
general conclusions, solely and distinctively human. Now the very first
observations of man in the most primitive stage of his existence must
necessarily have awakened in him a twofold consciousness--that of power
and that of helplessness. He could do many things. Small in size, weak
in strength, destitute of natural clothing and weapons, acutely
sensitive to pain and atmospheric changes as all higher natures are, he
could kill and tame the huge and powerful animals which had the
advantage of him in all these things, whose numbers and fierceness
threatened him at every turn with destruction, from which his only
escape would seem to have been constant cowering and hiding. He could
compel the earth to bear for him choicer food than for the other beings
who lived on her gifts. He could command the service of fire, the dread
visitor from heaven. Stepping victoriously from one achievement to
another, ever widening his sphere of action, of invention, man could not
but be filled with legitimate pride. But on the other hand, he saw
himself surrounded with things which he could neither account for nor
subdue, which had the greatest influence on his well-being, either
favorable or hostile, but which were utterly beyond his comprehension or
control. The same sun which ripened his crop sometimes scorched it; the
rain which cooled and fertilized his field, sometimes swamped it; the
hot winds parched him and his cattle; in the marshes lurked disease and
death. All these and many, many more, were evidently POWERS, and could
do him great good or work him great harm, while he was unable to do
either to them. These things existed, he felt their action every day of
his life, consequently they were to him living Beings, alive in the same
way that he was, possessed of will, for good or for evil. In short, to
primitive man everything in nature was alive with an individual life, as
it is to the very young child, who would not beat the chair against
which he has knocked himself, and then kiss it to make friends, did he
not think that it is a living and feeling being like himself. The
feeling of dependence and absolute helplessness thus created must have
more than balanced that of pride and self-reliance. Man felt himself
placed in a world where he was suffered to live and have his share of
what good things he could get, but which was not ruled by him,--in a
spirit-world. Spirits around him, above him, below him,--what could he
do but humble himself, confess his dependence, and pray to be spared?
For surely, if those spirits existed and took enough interest in him to
do him good or evil, they could hear him and might be moved by
supplication. To establish a distinction between such spirits which did
only harm, were evil in themselves, and those whose action was generally
beneficial and only on rare occasions destructive, was the next natural
step, which led as naturally to a perception of divine displeasure as
the cause of such terrible manifestations and a seeking of means to
avert or propitiate it. While fear and loathing were the portion of the
former spirits, the essentially evil ones, love and gratitude, were the
predominant feelings inspired by the latter,--feelings which, together
with the ever present consciousness of dependence, are the very essence
of religion, just as praise and worship are the attempts to express them
in a tangible form.
6. It is this most primitive, material and unquestioning stage in the
growth of religious feeling, which a large portion of the
Shumiro-Accadian documents from the Royal Library at Nineveh brings
before us with a force and completeness which, however much room there
may still be for uncertainty in details, on the whole really amounts to
more than conjecture. Much will, doubtless, be discovered yet, much will
be done, but it will only serve to fill in a sketch, of which the
outlines are already now tolerably fixed and authentic. The materials
for this most important reconstruction are almost entirely contained in
a vast collection of two hundred tablets, forming one consecutive work
in three books, over fifty of which have been sifted out of the heap of
rubbish at the British Museum and first deciphered by Sir Henry
Rawlinson, one of the greatest, as he was the first discoverer in this
field, and George Smith, whose achievements and too early death have
been mentioned in a former chapter. Of the three books into which the
collection is divided, one treats "of evil spirits," another of
diseases, and the third contains hymns and prayers--the latter
collection showing signs of a later and higher development. Out of these
materials the lately deceased French scholar, Mr. François Lenormant,
whose name has for the last fifteen years or so of his life stood in the
very front of this branch of Oriental research, has been the first to
reconstruct an entire picture in a book not very voluminous indeed, but
which must always remain a corner-stone in the history of human culture.
This book shall be our guide in the strange world we now enter.[AC]
7. To the people of Shumir and Accad, then, the universe was peopled
with Spirits, whom they distributed according to its different spheres
and regions. For they had formed a very elaborate and clever, if
peculiar idea of what they supposed the world to be like. According to
the ingenious expression of a Greek writer of the 1st century A.D. they
imagined it to have the shape of an inverted round boat or bowl, the
thickness of which would represent the mixture of land and water
(_kî-a_) which we call the crust of the earth, while the hollow beneath
this inhabitable crust was fancied as a bottomless pit or abyss (_ge_),
in which dwelt many powers. Above the convex surface of the earth
(_kî-a_) spread the sky (_ana_), itself divided into two regions:--the
highest heaven or firmament, which, with the fixed stars immovably
attached to it, revolved, as round an axis or pivot, around an immensely
high mountain, which joined it to the earth as a pillar, and was
situated somewhere in the far North-East--some say North--and the lower
heaven, where the planets--a sort of resplendent animals, seven in
number, of beneficent nature--wandered forever on their appointed path.
To these were opposed seven evil demons, sometimes called "the Seven
Fiery Phantoms." But above all these, higher in rank and greater in
power, is the Spirit (_Zi_) of heaven (_ana_), ZI-ANA, or, as often,
simply ANA--"Heaven." Between the lower heaven and the surface of the
earth is the atmospheric region, the realm of IM or MERMER, the Wind,
where he drives the clouds, rouses the storms, and whence he pours down
the rain, which is stored in the great reservoir of Ana, in the heavenly
Ocean. As to the earthly Ocean, it is fancied as a broad river, or
watery rim, flowing all round the edge of the imaginary inverted bowl;
in its waters dwells ÊA (whose name means "the House of Waters"), the
great Spirit of the Earth and Waters (_Zi-kî-a_), either in the form of
a fish, whence he is frequently called "Êa the fish," or "the Exalted
Fish," or on a magnificent ship, with which he travels round the earth,
guarding and protecting it. The minor spirits of earth (_Anunnaki_) are
not much spoken of except in a body, as a sort of host or legion. All
the more terrible are the seven spirits of the abyss, the MASKIM, of
whom it is said that, although their seat is in the depths of the earth,
yet their voice resounds on the heights also: they reside at will in the
immensity of space, "not enjoying a good name either in heaven or on
earth." Their greatest delight is to subvert the orderly course of
nature, to cause earthquakes, inundations, ravaging tempests. Although
the Abyss is their birth-place and proper sphere, they are not
submissive to its lord and ruler MUL-GE ("Lord of the Abyss"). In that
they are like their brethren of the lower heaven who do not acknowledge
Ana's supremacy, in fact are called "spirits of rebellion," because,
being originally Ana's messengers, they once "secretly plotted a wicked
deed," rose against the heavenly powers, obscured the Moon, and all but
hurled him from his seat. But the Maskim are ever more feared and
hated, as appears from the following description, which has become
celebrated for its real poetical force:
8. "They are seven! they are seven!--Seven they are in the depths of
Ocean,--seven they are, disturbers of the face of Heaven.--They arise
from the depths of Ocean, from hidden lurking-places.--They spread like
snares.--Male they are not, female they are not.--Wives they have not,
children are not born to them.--Order they know not, nor
beneficence;--prayers and supplication they hear not.--Vermin grown in
the bowels of the mountains--foes of Êa--they are the throne-bearers of
the gods--they sit in the roads and make them unsafe.--The fiends! the
fiends!--They are seven, they are seven, seven they are!
"Spirit of Heaven (_Zi-ana, Ana_), be they conjured!
"Spirit of Earth (_Zi-kî-a, Êa_), be they conjured!"
9. Besides these regular sets of evil spirits in sevens--seven being a
mysterious and consecrated number--there are the hosts untold of demons
which assail man in every possible form, which are always on the watch
to do him harm, not only bodily, but moral in the way of civil broils
and family dissensions; confusion is their work; it is they who "steal
the child from the father's knee," who "drive the son from his father's
house," who withhold from the wife the blessing of children; they have
stolen days from heaven, which they have made evil days, that bring
nothing but ill-luck and misfortune,--and nothing can keep them out:
"They fall as rain from the sky, they spring from the earth,--they steal
from house to house,--doors do not stop them,--bolts do not shut them
out,--they creep in at the doors like serpents,--they blow in at the
roof like winds." Various are their haunts: the tops of mountains, the
pestilential marshes by the sea, but especially the desert. Diseases are
among the most dreaded of this terrible band, and first among these
NAMTAR or DIBBARA, the demon of Pestilence, IDPA (Fever), and a certain
mysterious disease of the head, which must be insanity, of which it is
said that it oppresses the head and holds it tight like a tiara (a heavy
headdress) or "like a dark prison," and makes it confused, that "it is
like a violent tempest; no one knows whence it comes, nor what is its
object."
10. All these evil beings are very properly classed together under the
general name of "creations of the Abyss," births of the nether world,
the world of the dead. For the unseen world below the habitable earth
was naturally conceived as the dwelling place of the departed spirits
after death. It is very remarkable as characteristic of the low standard
of moral conception which the Shumiro-Accads had attained at this stage
of their development, that, although they never admitted that those who
died ceased to exist altogether, there is very little to show that they
imagined any happy state for them after death, not even as a reward for
a righteous life, nor, on the other hand, looked to a future state for
punishment of wrongs committed in this world, but promiscuously
consigned their dead to the ARALI, a most dismal region which is called
the "support of chaos," or, in phrase no less vague and full of
mysterious awe, "the Great Land" (_Kî-gal_), "the Great City"
(_Urugal_), "the spacious dwelling," "where they wander in the dark,"--a
region ruled by a female divinity called by different names, but most
frequently "Lady of the Great Land" (_Nin-kî-gal_), or "Lady of the
Abyss" (_Nin-ge_), who may then rather be understood as Death
personified, that Namtar (Pestilence) is her chief minister. The
Shumiro-Accads seem to have dimly fancied that association with so many
evil beings whose proper home the Arali was, must convert even the human
spirits into beings almost as noxious, for one or two passages appear to
imply that they were afraid of ghosts, at least on one occasion it is
threatened to send the dead back into the upper world, as the direst
calamity that can be inflicted.
11. As if all these terrors were not sufficient to make life a burden,
the Shumiro-Accads believed in sorcerers, wicked men who knew how to
compel the powers of evil to do their bidding and thus could inflict
death, sickness or disasters at their pleasure. This could be done in
many ways--by a look, by uttering certain words, by drinks made of herbs
prepared under certain conditions and ceremonies. Nay, the power of
doing harm sometimes fatally belonged even to innocent persons, who
inflicted it unintentionally by their look--for the effect of "the evil
eye" did not always depend on a person's own will.
12. Existence under such conditions must have been as unendurable as
that of poor children who have been terrified by silly nurses into a
belief in ogres and a fear of dark rooms, had there not existed real or
imaginary defences against this array of horrible beings always ready to
fall on unfortunate humanity in all sorts of inexplicable ways and for
no other reason but their own detestable delight in doing evil. These
defences could not consist in rational measures dictated by a knowledge
of the laws of physical nature, since they had no notion of such laws;
nor in prayers and propitiatory offerings, since one of the demons' most
execrable qualities was, as we have seen, that they "knew not
beneficence" and "heard not prayer and supplication." Then, if they
cannot be coaxed, they must be compelled. This seems a very presumptuous
assumption, but it is strictly in accordance with human instinct. It has
been very truly said[AD] that "man was so conscious of being called to
exercise empire over the powers of nature, that, the moment he entered
into any relations with them, it was to try and subject them to his
will. Only instead of studying the phenomena, in order to grasp their
laws and apply them to his needs, he fancied he could, by means of
peculiar practices and consecrated forms, compel the physical agents of
nature to serve his wishes and purposes.... This pretension had its root
in the notion which antiquity had formed of the natural phenomena. It
did not see in them the consequence of unchangeable and necessary laws,
always active and always to be calculated upon, but fancied them to
depend on the arbitrary and varying will of the spirits and deities it
had put in the place of physical agents." It follows that in a religion
which peoples the universe with spirits of which the greater part are
evil, magic--i.e., conjuring with words and rites, incantations,
spells--must take the place of worship, and the ministers of such a
religion are not priests, but conjurers and enchanters. This is exactly
the state of things revealed by the great collection of texts discovered
by Sir H. Rawlinson and G. Smith. They contain forms for conjuring all
the different kinds of demons, even to evil dreams and nightmares, the
object of most such invocations being to drive them away from the
habitations of men and back to where they properly belong--the depth of
the desert, the inaccessible mountain tops, and all remote, waste and
uninhabited places generally, where they can range at will, and find
nobody to harm.