CHAPTER III--CHALDAEAN CIVILIZATION

_Royalty--The constitution of the family and its property--Chaldaean

commerce and industry_.

The Chaldaean kings, unlike their contemporaries the Pharaohs, rarely

put forward any pretensions to divinity. They contented themselves with

occupying an intermediate position between their subjects and the gods,

and for the purpose of mediation they believed themselves to be endowed

with powers not possessed by ordinary mortals. They sometimes designated

themselves the sons of Ea, or of Ninsun, or some other deity, but

this involved no belief in a divine parentage, and was merely pious

hyperbole: they entertained no illusions with regard to any descent from

a god or even from one of his doubles, but they desired to be recognized

as his vicegerents here below, as his prophets, his well-beloved,

his pastors, elected by him to rule his human flocks, or as priests

devotedly attached to his service. While, however, the ordinary priest

chose for himself a single master to whom he devoted himself, the

priest-king exercised universal sacerdotal functions and claimed to be

pontiff of all the national religions. His choice naturally was directed

by preference to the patrons of his city, those who had raised his

ancestors from the dust, and had exalted him to the supreme rank, but

there were other divinities who claimed their share of his homage

and expected of him a devotion suited to their importance. If he had

attempted to carry out these duties personally in detail, he would have

had to spend his whole life at the foot of the altar; even when he had

delegated as many of them as he could to the regular clergy, there still

remained sufficient to occupy a large part of his time. Every month,

every day, brought its inevitable round of sacrifices, prayers, and

processions. On the 1st of the second Elul, the King of Babylon had to

present a gazelle without blemish to Sin; he then made an offering of

his own choosing to Shamash, and cut the throats of his victims

before the god. These ceremonies were repeated on the 2nd without any

alteration, but from the 3rd to the 12th they took place during the

night, before the statues of Merodach and Ishtar, in turn with those

of Nebo and Tashmit, of Mullil and Ninlil, of Eamman and of Zirbanit;

sometimes at the rising of a particular constellation--as, for instance,

that of the Great Bear, or that of the sons of Ishtar; sometimes at the

moment when the moon “raised above the earth her luminous crown.” On such

a date a penitential psalm or a litany was to be recited; at another

time it was forbidden to eat of meat either cooked or smoked, to change

the body-linen, to wear white garments, to drink medicine, to sacrifice,

to put forth an edict, or to drive out in a chariot. Not only at

Babylon, but everywhere else, obedience to the religious rites weighed

heavily on the local princes; at Uru, at Lagash, at Nipur, and in

the ruling cities of Upper and Lower Chaldaea. The king, as soon as he

succeeded to the throne, repaired to the temple to receive his solemn

investiture, which differed in form according to the gods he worshipped:

at Babylon, he addressed himself to the statue of Bel-Merodach in the

first days of the month Nisan which followed his accession, and he “took

him by the hands” to do homage to him. From thenceforth, he officiated

for Merodach here below, and the scrupulously minute devotions, which

daily occupied hours of his time, were so many acts of allegiance which

his fealty as a vassal constrained him to perform to his suzerain. They

were, in fact, analogous to the daily audiences demanded of a great

lord by his steward, for the purpose of rendering his accounts and of

informing him of current business: any interruption not justified by a

matter of supreme importance would be liable to be interpreted as a want

of respect or as revealing an inclination to rebel. By neglecting the

slightest ceremonial detail the king would arouse the suspicions of

the gods, and excite their anger against himself and his subjects: the

people had, therefore, a direct interest in his careful fulfilment of

the priestly functions, and his piety was not the least of his virtues

in their eyes. All other virtues--bravery, equity, justice--depended on

it, and were only valuable from the divine aid which piety obtained for

them. The gods and heroes of the earliest ages had taken upon themselves

the task of protecting the faithful from all their enemies, whether men

or beasts. If a lion decimated their flocks, or a urus of gigantic size

devastated their crops, it was the king’s duty to follow the example

of his fabulous predecessors and to set out and overcome them. The

enterprise demanded all the more courage and supernatural help, since

these beasts were believed to be no mere ordinary animals, but were

looked on as instruments of divine wrath the cause of which was often

unknown, and whoever assailed these monsters, provoked not only them but

the god who instigated them. Piety and confidence in the patron of the

city alone sustained the king when he set forth to drive the animal back

to its lair; he engaged in close combat with it, and no sooner had he

pierced it with his arrows or his lance, or felled it with axe and

dagger, than he hastened to pour a libation upon it, and to dedicate it

as a trophy in one of the temples. His exalted position entailed on him

no less perils in time of war: if he did not personally direct the first

attacking column, he placed himself at the head of the band composed of

the flower of the army, whose charge at an opportune moment was wont to

secure the victory.

What would have been the use of his valour, if the dread of the gods had

not preceded his march, and if the light of their countenances had not

struck terror into the ranks of the enemy? As soon as he had triumphed

by their command, he sought before all else to reward them amply for the

assistance they had given him. He poured a tithe of the spoil into the

coffers of their treasury, he made over a part of the conquered country

to their domain, he granted them a tale of the prisoners to cultivate

their lands or to work at their buildings. Even the idols of the

vanquished shared the fate of their people: the king tore them from

the sanctuaries which had hitherto sheltered them, and took them as

prisoners in his train to form a court of captive gods about his patron

divinity. Shamash, the great judge of heaven, inspired him with justice,

and the prosperity which his good administration obtained for the people

was less the work of the sovereign than that of the immortals.

We know too little of the inner family life of the kings, to attempt

to say how they were able to combine the strict sacerdotal obligations

incumbent on them with the routine of daily life. We merely observe that

on great days of festival or sacrifice, when they themselves officiated,

they laid aside all the insignia of royalty during the ceremony and were

clad as ordinary priests. We see them on such occasions represented

with short-cut hair and naked breast, the loin-cloth about their waist,

advancing foremost in the rank, carrying the heavily laden “kufa,” or

reed basket, as if they were ordinary slaves; and, as a fact, they

had for the moment put aside their sovereignty and were merely temple

servants, or slaves appearing before their divine master to do his

bidding, and disguising themselves for the nonce in the garb of

servitors. The wives of the sovereign do not seem to have been invested

with that semi-sacred character which led the Egyptian women to be

associated with the devotions of the man, and made them indispensable

auxiliaries in all religious ceremonies; they did not, moreover, occupy

that important position side by side with the man which the Egyptian

law assigned to the queens of the Pharaohs. Whereas the monuments on the

banks of the Nile reveal to us princesses sharing the throne of their

husbands whom they embrace with a gesture of frank affection, in Chaldaea

the wives of the prince, his mother, sisters, daughters, and even his

slaves, remain invisible to posterity.

[Illustration: 244.jpg THE KING URNINA BEARING THE “KUFA.”]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey Sarzec.

The harem in which they were shut up by custom, rarely opened its doors:

the people seldom caught sight of them, their relatives spoke of them

as little as possible, those in power avoided associating them in any

public acts of worship or government, and we could count on our fingers

the number of those whom the inscriptions mention by name. Some of them

were drawn from the noble families of the capital, others came from the

kingdoms of Chaldaea or from foreign courts; a certain number never rose

above the condition of mere concubines, many assumed the title of queen,

while almost all served as living pledges of alliances made with rival

states, or had been given as hostages at the concluding of a peace on

the termination of a war.* As the kings, who put forward no pretensions

to a divine origin, were not constrained, after the fashion of the

Pharaohs, to marry their sisters in order to keep up the purity of their

race, it was rare to find one among their wives who possessed an equal

right to the crown with themselves: such a case could be found only in

troublous times, when an aspirant to the throne, of base extraction,

legitimated his usurpation by marrying a sister or daughter of his

predecessor.

* Political marriage-alliances between Egypt and Chaldaea

were of frequent occurrence, according to the Tel el-Amarna

tablets, and at a later period between Chaldaea and Assyria;

among the few queens of the very earliest times, the wife of

Nammaghani is the daughter of Urbau, vicegerent of Lagash,

and consequently the cousin or niece of her husband, while

the wife of Rimsin appears to be the daughter of a nobleman

of the name of Rimnannar.

The original status of the mother almost always determined that of her

children, and the sons of a princess were born princes, even if their

father were of obscure or unknown origin.* These princes exercised

important functions at court, or they received possessions which

they administered under the suzerainty of the head of the family;

the daughters were given to foreign kings, or to scions of the most

distinguished families. The sovereign was under no obligation to hand

down his crown to any particular member of his family; the eldest son

usually succeeded him, but the king could, if he preferred, select his

favourite child as his successor even if he happened to be the youngest,

or the only one born of a slave. As soon as the sovereign had made known

his will, the custom of primogeniture was set aside, and his word became

law. We can well imagine the secret intrigues formed both by mothers and

sons to curry favour with the father and bias his choice; we can picture

the jealousy with which they mutually watched each other, and the bitter

hatred which any preference shown to one would arouse in the breasts

of all the others. Often brothers who had been disappointed in their

expectations would combine secretly against the chosen or supposed heir;

a conspiracy would break out, and the people suddenly learn that their

ruler of yesterday had died by the hand of an assassin and that a new

one filled his place.

* This fact is apparent from the introduction to the

inscription in which Sargon I. is supposed to give an

account of his life: “My father was unknown, my mother was a

princess;” and it was, indeed, from his mother that he

inherited his rights to the crown of Agade.

Sometimes discontent spread beyond the confines of the palace, the army

became divided into two hostile camps, the citizens took the side of one

or other of the aspirants, and civil war raged for several years till

some decisive action brought it to a close. Meantime tributary vassals

took advantage of the consequent disorder to shake off the yoke, the

Blamites and various neighbouring cities joined in the dispute and

ranged themselves on the side of the party from which there was most

to be gained: the victorious faction always had to pay dearly for this

somewhat dubious help, and came out impoverished from the struggle. Such

an internecine war often caused the downfall of a dynasty--at times,

indeed, that of the entire state.*

* The above is perfectly true of the later Assyrian and

Chalaean periods: it is scarcely needful to recall to the

reader the murders of Sargon II. and Sennacherib, or the

revolt of Assurdainpal against his father Shalmaneser III.

With regard to the earliest period we have merely

indications of what took place; the succession of King

Urnina of Lagash appears to have been accompanied by

troubles of this kind, and it is certain that his successor

Akurgal was not the eldest of his sons, but we do not at

present know to what events Akurgal owed his elevation.

The palaces of the Chaldaean kings, like those of the Egyptians,

presented the appearance of an actual citadel: the walls had to be

sufficiently thick to withstand an army for an indefinite period, and

to protect the garrison from every emergency, except that of treason or

famine. One of the statues found at Telloh holds in its lap the plan

of one of these residences: the external outline alone is given, but by

means of it we can easily picture to ourselves a fortified place, with

its towers, its forts, and its gateways placed between two bastions.

It represents the ancient palace of Lagash, subsequently enlarged and

altered by Oudea or one of the vicegerents who succeeded him, in which

many a great lord of the place must have resided down to the time of the

Christian era. The site on which it was built in the Girsu quarter of.

the city was not entirely unoccupied at the time of its foundation.

Urbau had raised a ziggurat on that very spot some centuries previously,

and the walls which he had constructed were falling into ruin.

[Illustration: 248.jpg THE PLAN OF A PALACE BUILT BY GUDEA.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey-Sarzec. The plan is

traced upon the tablet held in the lap of Statue E in the

Louvre. Below the plan can be seen the ruler marked with the

divisions used by the architect for drawing his designs to

the desired scale; the scribe’s stylus is represented lying

on the left of the plan. [Prof. Petrie has shown that the

unit of measurement represented on this ruler is the cubit

of the Pyramid-builders of Egypt.--Te.]

Gudea did not destroy the work of his remote predecessor, he merely

incorporated it into the substructures of the new building, thus

showing an indifference similar to that evinced by the Pharaohs for the

monuments of a former dynasty. The palaces, like the temples, never

rose directly from the soil, but were invariably built on the top of an

artificial mound of crude brick. At Lagash, this solid platform rises to

the height of 40 feet above the plain, and the only means of access

to the top is by a single narrow steep staircase, easily cut off or

defended.

[Illustration: 249.jpg TERRA-COTTA BARREL-right]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the facsimile by Place.

The palace which surmounts this artificial eminence describes a sort of

irregular rectangle, 174 feet long by 69 feet wide, and had, contrary

to the custom in Egypt, the four angles orientated to the four cardinal

points. The two principal sides are not parallel, but swell out slightly

towards the middle, and the flexion of the lines almost follows the

contour of one of those little clay cones upon which the kings were wont

to inscribe their annals or dedications. This flexure was probably

not intentional on the part of the architect, but was owing to the

difficulty of keeping a wall of such considerable extent in a straight

line from one end to another; and all Eastern nations, whether Chaldaeans

or Egyptians, troubled themselves but little about correctness of

alignment, since defects of this kind were scarcely ever perceptible in

the actual edifice, and are only clearly revealed in the plan drawn out

to scale with modern precision.*

* Mons. Heuzey thinks that the outward deflection of the

lines is owing “merely to a primitive method of obtaining

greater solidity of construction, and of giving a better

foundation to these long facades, which are placed upon

artificial terraces of crude brick always subject to cracks

and settlements.” I think that the explanation of the facts

which I have given in the text is simpler than that

ingeniously proposed by Mons. Heuzey: the masons, having

begun to build the wall at one end, were unable to carry it

on in a straight line until it reached the spot denoted on

the architect’s plan, and therefore altered the direction of

the wall when they detected their error; or, having begun to

build the wall from both ends simultaneously, were not

successful in making the two lines meet correctly, and they

have frankly patched up the junction by a mass of projecting

brickwork which conceals their unskilfulness.

[Illustration: 250.jpg PLAN OF THE EXISTING BUILDINGS OF TELLOH.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey-Sarzec.

The facade of the building faces south-east, and is divided into three

blocks of unequal size. The centre of the middle block for a length

of 18 feet projects some 3 feet from the main front, and, by directly

facing the spectator, ingeniously masks the obtuse angle formed by the

meeting of the two walls. This projection is flanked right and left by

rectangular grooves, similar to those which ornament the facades of the

fortresses and brick houses of the Ancient Empire in Egypt: the regular

alternation of projections and hollows breaks the monotony of the facing

by the play of light and shade. Beyond these, again, the wall surface

is broken by semicircular pilasters some 17 inches in diameter, without

bases, capitals, or even a moulding, but placed side by side like so

many tree-trunks or posts forming a palisade.

[Illustration: 251.jpg DECORATION OF COLOURED CONES ON THE FACADE AT URUK]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the sketch by Loftus.

Various schemes of decoration succeed each other in progressive

sequence, less ornate and at greater distances apart, the further

they recede from the central block and the nearer they approach to the

extremities of the facade. They stop short at the southern angle, and

the two sides of the edifice running from south to west, and again from

west to north, are flat, bare surfaces, unbroken by projection or groove

to relieve the poverty and monotony of their appearance. The decoration

reappears on the north-east front, where the arrangement of the

principal facade is partly reproduced. The grooved divisions here start

from the angles, and the engaged columns are wanting, or rather they

are transferred to the central projection, and from a distance have the

effect of a row of gigantic organ-pipes. We may well ask if this squat

and heavy mass of building, which must have attracted the eye from all

parts of the town, had nothing to relieve the dull and dismal colour of

its component bricks.

[Illustration: 252.jpg PILASTERS OF THE FACADE OF GUDEA’S PALACE]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey-Sarzec

The idea might not have occurred to us had we not found elsewhere an

attempt to lessen the gloomy appearance of the architecture by coloured

plastering. At Uruk, the walls of the palace are decorated by means of

terra-cotta cones, fixed deep into the solid plaster and painted red,

black, or yellow, forming interlaced or diaper patterns of chevrons,

spirals, lozenges, and triangles, with a very fair result: this mosaic

of coloured plaster covered all the surfaces, both flat and curved,

giving to the building a cheerful aspect entirely wanting in that of

Lagash.

A long narrow trough of yellowish limestone stood in front of the

palace, and was raised on two steps: it was carved in relief on the

outside with figures of women standing with outstretched hands, passing

to each other vases from which gushed forth two streams of water. This

trough formed a reservoir, which was filled every morning for the use of

the men and beasts, and those whom some business or a command brought to

the palace could refresh themselves there while waiting to be received

by the master. The gates which gave access to the interior were placed

at somewhat irregular intervals: two opened from the principal facade,

but on each of the other sides there was only one entrance. They were

arched and so low that admittance was not easily gained; they were

closed with two-leaved doors of cedar or cypress, provided with bronze

hinges, which turned upon two blackish stones firmly set in the masonry

on either side, and usually inscribed with the name of the founder or

that of the reigning sovereign. Two of the entrances possessed a sort

of covered way, in which the soldiers of the external watch could take

shelter from the heat of the sun by day, from the cold at night, and

from the dews at dawn. On crossing the threshold, a corridor, flanked

with two small rooms for porters or warders, led into a courtyard

surrounded with buildings of sufficient depth to take up nearly half

of the area enclosed within the walls. This court was moreover a

semi-public place, to which tradesmen, merchants, suppliants, and

functionaries of all ranks had easy access. A suite of three rooms shut

off in the north-east angle did duty for a magazine or arsenal. The

southern portion of the building was occupied by the State apartments,

the largest of which measures only 40 feet in length. In these rooms

Gudea and his successors gave audience to their nobles and administered

justice. The administrative officers and the staff who had charge of

them were probably located in the remaining part of the building. The

roof was flat, and ran all round the enclosing wall, forming a terrace,

access to it being gained by a staircase built between the principal

entrance and the arsenal. At the northern angle rose a ziggurat. Custom

demanded that the sovereign should possess a temple within his dwelling,

where he could fulfil his religious duties without going into the town

and mixing with the crowd. At Lagash the sacred tower was of older date

than the palace, and possibly formed part of the ancient building of

Urbau. It was originally composed of three stories, but the lower one

was altered by Gudea, and disappeared entirely in the thickness of the

basal platform. The second story thus became the bottom one; it was

enlarged, slightly raised above the neighbouring roofs, and was probably

crowned by a sanctuary dedicated to Ningirsu. It was, indeed, a monument

of modest proportions, and most of the public temples soared far above

it; but, small as it was, the whole town might be seen from the summit,

with its separate quarters and its belt of gardens; and beyond, the

open country intersected with streams, studded with isolated villages,

patches of wood, pools and weedy marshes left by the retiring

inundation, and in the far distance the lines of trees and bushes which

bordered the banks of the Euphrates and its confluents. Should a troop

of enemies venture within the range of sight, or should a suspicious

tumult arise within the city, the watchers posted on the highest terrace

would immediately give the alarm, and ‘through their warning the king

would have time to close his gates, and take measures to resist the

invading enemy or crush the revolt of his subjects.

[Illustration: 255.jpg STONE SOCKET OF ONE OF THE DOORS IN THE PALACE OF

GUDEA.( right)]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey-Sarzec.

The northern apartments of the palace were appropriated to Gudea and his

family. They were placed with their back to the entrance court, and

were divided into two groups; the sovereign, his male children and their

attendants, inhabited the western one, while the women and their slaves

were cloistered, so to speak, in the northern set. The royal dwelling

had an external exit by means of a passage issuing on the north-west of

the enclosure, and it also communicated with the great courtyard by a

vaulted corridor which ran along one side of the base of the ziggurat:

the doors which, closed these two entrances opened wide enough to admit

only one person at a time, and to the right and left were recesses in

the wall which enabled the guards to examine all comers unobserved, and

stab them promptly if there were anything suspicious in their behaviour.

Eight chambers were lighted from the courtyard. In one of them were kept

all the provisions for the day, while another served as a kitchen:

the head, cook carried on his work at a sort of rectangular dresser of

moderate size, on which several fireplaces were marked out by little

dividing walls of burnt bricks, to accommodate as many pots or pans

of various sizes. A well sunk in the corner right down below the

substructure provided the water needed for culinary purposes. The king

and his belongings accommodated themselves in the remaining five or six

rooms as best they could. A corridor, guarded as carefully as the one

previously described, led to his private apartments and to those of his

wives: these comprised a yard, some half-dozen cells varying in size,

a kitchen, a well, and a door through which the servants could come and

go, without passing through the men’s quarters. The whole description in

no way corresponds with the marvellous ideal of an Oriental palace which

we form for ourselves: the apartments are mean and dismal, imperfectly

lighted by the door or by some small aperture timidly cut in the

ceiling, arranged so as to protect the inmates from the heat and

dust, but without a thought given to luxury or display. The walls were

entirely void of any cedar woodwork inlaid with gold, or panels of

mosaic such as we find in the temples, nor were they hung with dyed or

embroidered draperies such as we moderns love to imagine, and which we

spread about in profusion, when we attempt to reproduce the interior of

an ancient house or palace.*

* Mons. de Sarzec expressly states that he was unable to

find anywhere in the palace of Gudea “the slightest trace of

any coating on the walls, either of colour or glazed brick.

The walls appear to have been left bare, without any

decoration except the regular joining of the courses of

brickwork.” The wood panelling was usually reserved for the

temples or sacred edifices: Mons. de Sarzec found the

remains of carbonized cedar panels in the ruins of a

sanctuary dedicated to Ningirsu. According to Mons. Heuzey,

the wall-hangings were probably covered with geometrical

designs, similar to those formed by the terra-cotta cones on

the walls of the palace at Uruk; the inscriptions, however,

which are full of minute details with regard to the

construction and ornamentation of the temples and palaces,

have hitherto contained nothing which would lead us to infer

that hangings were used for mural decoration in Chaldoa or

Assyria.

The walls had to remain bare for the sake of coolness: at the most they

were only covered with a coat of white plaster, on which were painted,

in one or two colours, some scene of civil or religious life, or troops

of fantastic monsters struggling with one another, or men each with a

bird seated on his Wrist. The furniture was not less scanty than the

decoration; there were mats on the ground, coffers in which were kept

the linen and wearing apparel, low beds inlaid with ivory and metal and

provided with coverings and a thin mattress, copper or wooden stands to

support lamps or vases, square stools on four legs united by crossbars,

armchairs with lions’ claw feet, resembling the Egyptian armchairs

in outline, and making us ask if they were brought into Chaldaea by

caravans, or made from models which had come from some other country.

A few rare objects of artistic character might be found, which bore

witness to a certain taste for elegance and refinement; as, for

instance, a kind of circular trough of black stone, probably used to

support a vase. Three rows of imbricated scales surrounded the base of

this, while seven small sitting figures lean back against the upper

part with an air of satisfaction which is most cleverly rendered.

The decoration of the larger chambers used for public receptions and

official ceremonies, while never assuming the monumental character which

we observe in contemporary Egyptian buildings, afforded more scope for

richness and variety than was offered by the living-rooms.

[Illustration: 258.jpg STAND OF BLACK STONE FROM THE PALACE OF TELLOH.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey-Sarzec.

Small tablets of brownish limestone, let into the wall or affixed to

its surface by terra-cotta pegs, and decorated with inscriptions,

represented in a more or less artless fashion the figure of the

sovereign officiating before some divinity, while his children and

servants took part in the ceremony by their chanting. Inscribed

bricks celebrating the king’s exploits were placed here and there in

conspicuous places. These were not embedded like the others in two

layers of bitumen or lime, but were placed in full view upon bronze

statues of divinities or priests, fixed into the ground or into some

part of the masonry as magical nails destined to preserve the bricks

from destruction, and consequently to keep the memory of the dedicator

continually before posterity. Stelaa engraved on both sides recalled the

wars of past times, the battle-field, the scenes of horror which took

place there, and the return of the victor and his triumph. Sitting

or standing figures of diorite, silicious sandstone or hard limestone,

bearing inscriptions on their robes or shoulders, perpetuated the

features of the founder or of members of his family, and commemorated

the pious donations which had obtained for him the favour of the gods:

the palace of Lagash contained dozens of such statues, several of which

have come down to us almost intact--one of the ancient Urbau, and nine

of Gudea.

To judge by the space covered and the arrangement of the rooms, the

vicegerents of Lagash and the chiefs of towns of minor importance

must, as a rule, have been content with a comparatively small number of

servants; their court probably resembled that of the Egyptian barons who

lived much about the same period, such as Khnumhotpu of the nome of the

Gazelle, or Thothotpu of Hermopolis. In great cities such as Babylon

the palace occupied a much larger area, and the crowd of courtiers was

doubtless as great as that which thronged about the Pharaohs. No exact

enumeration of them has come down to us, but the titles which we come

across show with what minuteness they defined the offices about the

person of the sovereign. His costume alone required almost as many

persons as there were garments. The men wore the light loin-cloth or

short-sleeved tunic which scarcely covered the knees; after the fashion

of the Egyptians, they threw over the loin-cloth and the tunic a large

“abayah,” whose shape and material varied with the caprice of fashion.

They often chose for this purpose a sort of shawl of a plain material,

fringed or ornamented with a flat stripe round the edge; often they seem

to have preferred it ribbed, or artificially kilted from top to bottom.*

* The relatively modern costume was described by Herodotus,

i. 114; it was almost identical with the ancient one, as

proved by the representations on the cylinders and monuments

of Telloh. The short-sleeved tunic is more rarely

represented, and the loin-cloth is usually hidden under the

abayah in the case of nobles and kings. We see the princes

of Lagash wearing the simple loin-cloth, on the monuments of

Urnina, for example. For the Egyptian abayah, and the manner

of representing it, cf. vol. i. pp. 69, 71.

The favourite material in ancient times, however, seems to have been

a hairy, shaggy cloth or woollen stuff, whose close fleecy thread hung

sometimes straight, sometimes crimped or waved, in regular rows like

flounces one above another. This could be arranged squarely around the

neck, like a mantel, but was more often draped crosswise over the left

shoulder and brought under the right arm-pit, so as to leave the upper

part of the breast and the arm bare on that side. It made a convenient

and useful garment--an excellent protection in summer from the sun, and

from the icy north wind in the winter. The feet were shod with sandals,

a tight-fitting cap covered the head, and round it was rolled a thick

strip of linen, forming a sort of rudimentary turban, which completed

the costume.*

*Cf. the head belonging to one of the statues of Telloh,

which is reproduced on p. 112 of this volume. We notice the

same head-dress on several intaglios and monuments, and also

on the terra-cotta plaque which will be found on p. 330 of

this volume, and which represents a herdsman wrestling with

a lion. Until we have further evidence, we cannot state, as

G. Raw-linson did, that this strip forming a turban was of

camel’s hair; the date of the introduction of the camel into

Chaldoa still remains uncertain.

It is questionable whether, as in Egypt, wigs and false beards formed

part of the toilette. On some monuments we notice smooth faces and

close-cropped heads; on others the men appear with long hair, either

falling loose or twisted into a knot on the back of the neck.* While

the Egyptians delighted in garments of thin white linen, but slightly

plaited or crimped, the dwellers on the banks of the Euphrates preferred

thick and heavy stuffs patterned and striped with many colours. The

kings wore the same costume as their subjects, but composed of richer

and finer materials, dyed red or blue, decorated with floral, animal,

or geometrical designs;** a high tower-shaped tiara covered the

forehead,*** unless replaced by a diadem of Sin or some of the other

gods, which was a conical mitre supporting a double pair of horns, and

sometimes surmounted by a sort of diadem of feathers and mysterious

figures, embroidered or painted on the cap. Their arms were loaded with

massive bracelets and their fingers with rings; they wore necklaces and

earrings, and carried each a dagger in the belt.

* Dignitaries went bareheaded and shaved the chin; see, for

example, the two bas-reliefs given on pp. 105 and 244 of

this volume; cf. the heads reproduced as tailpieces on pp.

2, 124. The knot of hair behind on the central figure is

easily distinguished in the vignette on p. 266 of this

volume.

** The details of colour and ornamentation, not furnished by

the Chaldaean monuments, are given in the wall-painting at

Beni-Nasan representing the arrival of Asiatics in Egypt,

which belongs to a period contemporary with or slightly

anterior to the reign of Gudea. The resemblance of the

stuffs in which they are clothed to those of the Chaldaean

garments, and the identity of the patterns on them with the

geometrical decoration of painted cones on the palace at

Uruk, have been pointed out with justice by H. G. Tomkins

*** The high tiara is represented among others on the head

of Mardukna-dinakhe, King of Babylon: cf. what is said of

the conical mitre, the headdress of Sin, on pp. 14, 169 of

this volume.

[Illustration: 262.jpg FEMALE SERVANT BARE TO THE WAIST.(left)]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the bronze figure in the

Louvre, published by Heuzey-Sarzec, _Decouvertes en

Chaldee_, pl. 14.

The royal wardrobe, jewels, arms, and insignia formed so many distinct

departments, and each was further divided into minor sections for

body-linen, washing, or for this or that kind of headdress or sceptre.

The dress of the women, which was singularly like that of the men,

required no less a staff of attendants. The female servants, as well

as the male, went about bare to the waist, at all events while working

indoors. When they went out, they wore the same sort of tunic or

loin-cloth, but longer and more resembling a petticoat; they had the

same “abayah” drawn round the shoulders or rolled about the body like

a cloak, but with the women it nearly touched the ground; sometimes an

actual dress seems to have been substituted for the “abayah,” drawn in

to the figure by a belt and cut out of the same hairy material as that

of which the mantles were made. The boots were of soft leather, laced,

and without heels; the women’s ornaments were more numerous than those

of the men, and comprised necklaces, bracelets, ankle, finger, and ear

rings; their hair was separated into bands and kept in place on the

forehead by a fillet, falling in thick plaits or twisted into a coil on

the nape of the neck.

[Illustration: 262.jpg COSTUME OF A CHALDAEN LADY (right)]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the alabaster statuette in the

Louvre, published in Heuzey. She holds in her hand the jar

full of water, analogous to the streaming vase mentioned

above.

A great deal of the work was performed by foreign or native slaves,

generally under the command of eunuchs, to whom the king and royal

princes entrusted most of the superintendence of their domestic

arrangements; they guarded and looked after the sleeping apartments,

they fanned and kept the flies from their master, and handed him his

food and drink. Eunuchs in Egypt were either unknown or but little

esteemed: they never seem to have been used, even in times when

relations with Asia were of daily occurrence, and when they might have

been supplied from the Babylonian slave-markets.

All these various officials closely attached to the person of the

sovereign--heads of the wardrobe, chamberlains, cupbearers, bearers of

the royal sword or of the flabella, commanders of the eunuchs or of

the guards--had, by the nature of their duties, daily opportunities of

gaining a direct influence over their master and his government,

and from among them he often chose the generals of his army or the

administrators of his domains. Here, again, as far as the few

monuments and the obscurity of the texts permit of our judging, we find

indications of a civil and military organization analogous to that

of Egypt: the divergencies which contemporaries may have been able to

detect in the two national systems are effaced by the distance of

time, and we are struck merely by the resemblances. As all business

transactions were carried on by barter or by the exchange of merchandise

for weighed quantities of the precious metals, the taxes were

consequently paid in kind: the principal media being corn and other

cereals, dates, fruits, stuffs, live animals and slaves, as well as

gold, silver, lead, and copper, either in its native state or melted

into bars fashioned into implements or ornamented vases. Hence we

continually come across fiscal storehouses, both in town and country,

which demanded the services of a whole troop of functionaries and

workmen: administrators of corn, cattle, precious metals, wine and oil;

in fine, as many administrators as there were cultures or industries in

the country presided over the gathering of the products into the

central depots and regulated their redistribution. A certain portion

was reserved for the salaries of the employes and the pay of the workmen

engaged in executing public works: the surplus accumulated in the

treasury and formed a reserve, which was not drawn upon except in cases

of extreme necessity. Every palace, in addition to its living-rooms,

contained within its walls large store-chambers filled with provisions

and weapons, which made it more or less a fortress, furnished with

indispensable requisites for sustaining a prolonged siege either against

an enemy’s troops or the king’s own subjects in revolt. The king always

kept about him bodies of soldiers who perhaps were foreign mercenaries,

like the Mazaiu of the armies of the Pharaohs, and who formed his

permanent body-guard in times of peace. When a war was imminent, a

military levy was made upon his domains, but we are unable to find out

whether the recruits thus raised were drawn indiscriminately from the

population in general, or merely from a special class, analogous to that

of the warriors which we find in Egypt, who were paid in the same way by

grants of land. The equipment of these soldiers was of the rudest kind:

they had no cuirass, but carried a rectangular shield, and, in the case

of those of higher rank at all events, a conical metal helmet, probably

of beaten copper, provided with a piece to protect the back of the neck;

the heavy infantry were armed with a pike tipped with bronze ox-copper,

an axe or sharp adze, a stone-headed mace, and a dagger; the light

troops were provided only with the bow and sling. As early as the third

millennium b.c., the king went to battle in a chariot drawn by onagers,

or perhaps horses; he had his own peculiar weapon, which was a curved

baton probably terminating in a metal point, and resembling the sceptre

of the Pharaohs. Considerable quantities of all these arms were stored

in the arsenals, which contained depots for bows, maces, and pikes, and

even the stones needed for the slings had their special department for

storage. At the beginning of each campaign, a distribution of weapons

to the newly levied troops took place; but as soon as the war was at an

end, the men brought back their accoutrements, which were stored till

they were again required. The valour of the soldiers and their chiefs

was then rewarded; the share of the spoil for some consisted of cattle,

gold, corn, a female slave, and vessels of value; for others, lands or

towns in the conquered country, regulated by the rank of the recipients

or the extent of the services they had rendered.

[Illustration: 266.jpg A SOLDIER BRINGING PRISONERS AND SPOIL.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the Chaldaean intaglio in the

British. Museum.

Property thus given was hereditary, and privileges were often added to

it which raised the holder to the rank of a petty prince: for instance,

no royal official was permitted to impose a tax upon such lands, or take

the cattle off them, or levy provisions upon them; no troop of soldiers

might enter them, not even for the purpose of arresting a fugitive. Most

of the noble families possessed domains of this kind, and constituted in

each kingdom a powerful and wealthy feudal aristocracy, whose relations

to their sovereign were probably much the same as those which bound

the nomarchs to the Pharaoh. The position of these nobles was not more

stable than that of the dynasties under which they lived: while some

among them gained power by marriages or by continued acquisitions of

land, others fell into disgrace and were ruined. As the soil belonged to

the gods, it is possible that these nobles were supposed, in theory, ‘to

depend upon the gods; but as the kings were the vicegerents of the gods

upon earth, it was to the king, as a matter of fact, that they owed

their elevation. Every state, therefore, comprised two parts, each

subject to a distinct regime: one being the personal domain of the

suzerain, which he managed himself, and from which he drew the revenues;

the other was composed of fiefs, whose lords paid tribute and owed

certain obligations to the king, the nature of which we are as yet

unable to define.

The Chaldaean, like the Egyptian scribe, was the pivot on which the

machinery of this double royal and seignorial administration turned.

He does not appear to have enjoyed as much consideration as his

fellow-official in the Nile Valley: the Chaldaean princes, nobles,

priests, soldiers, and temple or royal officials, did not covet the

title of scribe, or pride themselves upon holding that office side

by side with their other dignities, as we see was the case with their

Egyptian contemporaries. The position of a scribe, nevertheless, was an

important one. We continually meet with it in all grades of society--in

the palace, in the temples, in the storehouses, in private dwellings; in

fine, the scribe was ubiquitous, at court, in the town, in the country,

in the army, managing affairs both small and great, and seeing that they

were carried on regularly. His education differed but little from that

given to the Egyptian scribe; he learned the routine of administrative

or judicial affairs, the formularies for correspondence either with

nobles or with ordinary people, the art of writing, of calculating

quickly, and of making out bills correctly. We may well ask whether he

ever employed papyrus or prepared skins for these purposes. It would,

indeed, seem strange that, after centuries of intercourse, no caravan

should have brought into Chaldaean any of those materials which were in

such constant use for literary purposes in Africa;* yet the same clay

which furnished the architect with such an abundant building material

appears to have been the only medium for transmitting the language which

the scribes possessed. They were always provided with slabs of a fine

plastic clay, carefully mixed and kept sufficiently moist to take easily

the impression of an object, but at the same time sufficiently firm to

prevent the marks once made from becoming either blurred or effaced.

When a scribe had a text to copy or a document to draw up, he chose out

one of his slabs, which he placed flat upon his left palm, and taking in

the right hand a triangular stylus of flint, copper, bronze, or bone,**

he at once set to work. The instrument, in early times, terminated in a

fine point, and the marks made by it when it was gently pressed upon

the clay were slender and of uniform thickness; in later times, the

extremity of the stylus was cut with a bevel, and the impression then

took the shape of a metal nail or a wedge.

* On the Assyrian monuments we frequently see scribes taking

a list of the spoil, or writing letters on tablets and some

other soft material, either papyrus or prepared skin. Sayce

has given good reasons for believing that the Chaldaeanns of

the early dynasties knew of the papyrus, and either made it

themselves, or had it brought from Egypt.

** See the triangular stylus of copper or bronze reproduced

by the side of the measuring-rule, and the plan on the

tablet of Gudea, p. 248 of this volume. The Assyrian Museum

in the Louvre possesses several large, flat styli of bone,

cut to a point at one end, which appear to have belonged to

the Assyrian scribes. Taylor discovered in a tomb at Eridu a

flint tool, which may have served for the same purpose as

the metal or bone styli.

[Illustration: 268.jpg MANUSCRIPT ON PAPYRUS IN HEIROGLYPHICS]

They wrote from left to right along the upper part of the tablet, and

covered both sides of it with closely written lines, which sometimes ran

over on to the edges. When the writing was finished, the scribe sent his

work to the potter, who put it in the kiln and baked it, or the writer

may have had a small oven at his own disposition, as a clerk with us

would have his table or desk. The shape of these documents varied, and

sometimes strikes us as being peculiar: besides the tablets and the

bricks, we find small solid cones, or hollow cylinders of considerable

size, on which the kings related their exploits or recorded the history

of their wars or the dedication of their buildings. This method had a

few inconveniences, but many advantages. These clay books were heavy to

hold and clumsy to handle, while the characters did not stand out well

from the brown, yellow, and whitish background of the material; but, on

the other hand, a poem, baked and incorporated into the page itself,

ran less danger of destruction than if scribbled in ink on sheets of

papyrus. Fire could make no impression on it; it could withstand water

for a considerable length of time; even if broken, the pieces were still

of use: as long as it was not pulverized, the entire document could be

restored, with the exception, perhaps, of a few signs, or ‘some

scraps of a sentence. The inscriptions which have been saved from the

foundations of the most ancient temples, several of which date back

forty or fifty centuries, are for the most part as clear and legible

as when they left the hands of the writer who engraved them or of the

workmen who baked them. It is owing to the material to which they were

committed that we possess the principal works of Chaldaean literature

which have come down to us--poems, annals, hymns, magical incantations;

how few fragments of these would ever have reached us had their authors

confided them to parchment or paper, after the manner of the Egyptian

scribes! The greatest danger that they ran was that of being left

forgotten in the corner of the chamber in which they had been kept,

or buried under the rubbish of a building after a fire or some violent

catastrophe; even then the _debris_ were the means of preserving them,

by falling over them and covering them up. Protected under the ruins,

they would lie there for centuries, till the fortunate explorer should

bring them to light and deliver them over to the patient study of the

learned.

The cuneiform character in itself is neither picturesque nor decorative.

It does not offer that delightful assemblage of birds and snakes, of men

and quadrupeds, of heads and limbs, of tools, weapons, stars, trees,

and boats, which succeed each other in perplexing order on the Egyptian

monuments, to give permanence to the glory of Pharaoh and the greatness

of his gods. Cuneiform writing is essentially composed of thin short

lines, placed in juxtaposition or crossing each other in a somewhat

clumsy fashion; it has the appearance of numbers of nails scattered

about at haphazard, and its angular configuration, and its stiff and

spiny appearance, gives the inscriptions a dull and forbidding aspect

which no artifice of the engraver can overcome.

[Illustration: 271.jpg Page image]

[Illustration: 272.jpg Page Image]

Yet, in spite of their seemingly arbitrary character, this mass of

strokes had its source in actual hieroglyphs. As in the origin of the

Egyptian script the earliest writers had begun by drawing on stone or

clay the outline of the object of which they desired to convey the idea.

But, whereas in Egypt the artistic temperament of the race, and the

increasing skill of their sculptors, had by degrees brought the drawing

of each sign to such perfection that it became a miniature portrait of

the being or object to be reproduced, in Chaldaea, on the contrary,

the signs became degraded from their original forms on account of the

difficulty experienced in copying them with the stylus on the clay

tablets: they lost their original vertical position, and were placed

horizontally, retaining finally but the very faintest resemblance to the

original model. For instance, the Chaldaean conception of the sky was

that of a vault divided into eight segments by diameters running from

the four cardinal points and from their principal subdivisions [symbol]

the external circle was soon omitted, the transverse lines alone

remaining [symbol], which again was simplified into a kind of irregular

cross [symbol]. The figure of a man standing, indicated by the lines

resembling his contour, was placed on its side [symbol] and reduced

little by little till it came to be merely a series of ill-balanced

lines [symbol] [symbol]. We may still recognize in [symbol] the five

fingers and palm of a human hand [symbol]; but who would guess at the

first glance that [symbol] stands for the foot which the scribes strove

to place beside each character the special hieroglyph from which it had

been derived. Several fragments of these still exist, a study of which

seems to show that the Assyrian scribes of a more recent period were at

times as much puzzled as we are ourselves when they strove to get at the

principles of their own script: they had come to look on it as nothing

more than a system of arbitrary combinations, whose original form had

passed all the more readily into oblivion, because it had been borrowed

from a foreign race, who, as far as they were concerned, had ceased to

have a separate existence. The script had been invented by the Sumerians

in the very earliest times, and even they may have brought it in an

elemental condition from their distant fatherland. The first articulate

sounds which, being attached to the hieroglyphs, gave to each

an unalterable pronunciation, were words in the Sumerian tongue;

subsequently, when the natural progress of human thought led

thi Chaldaeans to replace, as in Egypt, the majority of the signs

representing ideas by those representing sounds, the syllabic values

which were developed side by side with the ideographic values were

purely Sumerian. The group [symbol] throughout all its forms,

designates in the first place the sky, then the god of the sky, and

finally the concept of divinity in general. In its first two senses it

is read ana, but in the last it becomes dingir, dimir; and though it

never lost its double force, it was soon separated from the ideas which

it evoked, to be used merely to denote the syllable an wherever it

occurred, even in cases where it had no connection with the sky or

heavenly things. The same process was applied to other signs with

similar results: after having merely denoted ideas, they came to stand

for the sounds corresponding to them, and then passed on to be mere

syllables--complex syllables in which several consonants may be

distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and

one vowel, or vice versa. The Egyptians had carried this system still

further, and in many cases had kept only one part of the syllable,

namely, a mute consonant: they detached, for example, the final u from

pu and bu, and gave only the values b and p to the human leg J and the

mat Q. The peoples of the Euphrates stopped halfway, and admitted actual

letters for the vowel sounds a, i, and u only. Their system remained a

syllabary interspersed with ideograms, but excluded an alphabet.

[Illustration: 274.jpg Page image]

It was eminently wanting in simplicity, but, taken as a whole, it would

not have presented as many difficulties as the script of the Egyptians,

had it not been forced, at a very early period, to adapt itself to the

exigencies of a language for which it had not been made. When it came to

be appropriated by the Semites, the ideographs, which up till then had

been read in Sumerian, did not lose the sounds which they possessed in

that tongue, but borrowed others from the new language. For example,

“god” was called ilu, and “heaven” called shami: [symbol], when

encountered in inscriptions by the Semites, were read [symbol] when

the context showed the sense to be “god,” and shami when the character

evidently meant “heaven.” They added these two vocables to the preceding

ana, an, dingir, dimir; but they did not stop there: they confounded

the picture of the star [symbol] with that of the sky, and sometimes

attributed to [symbol], the pronunciation kakkabu, and the meaning of

star. The same process was applied to all the groups, and the Semitic

values being added to the Sumerian, the scribes soon found themselves in

possession of a double set of syllables both simple and compound. This

multiplicity of sounds, this polyphonous character attached to their

signs, became a cause of embarrassment even to them. For instance,

[symbol] when found in the body of a word, stood for the syllables hi

or hat, mid, mit, til, ziz; as an ideogram it was used for a score of

different concepts: that of lord or master, inu, bilu; that of blood,

damu; for a corpse, pagru, shalamtu; for the feeble or oppressed, kahtu,

nagpu; as the hollow and the spring, nakbu; for the state of old age,

labaru; of dying, matu; of killing, mitu; of opening, pitu; besides

other meanings. Several phonetic complements were added to it; it was

preceded by ideograms which determined the sense in which it was to be

read, but which, like the Egyptian determinatives, were not pronounced,

and in this manner they succeeded in limiting the number of mistakes

which it was possible to make. With a final [symbol] it would always

mean [symbol] bilu, the master, but with an initial [symbol] (thus

[symbol]) it denoted the gods Bel or Ea; with [symbol]. which indicates

a man [symbol], it would be the corpse, pagru and shalamtu; with

[symbol] prefixed, it meant [symbol]--mutanu, the plague or death and

so on. In spite of these restrictions and explanations, the obscurity of

the meaning was so great, that in many cases the scribes ran the risk of

being unable to make out certain words and understand certain passages;

many of the values occurred but rarely, and remained unknown to those

who did not take the trouble to make a careful study of the syllabary

and its history. It became necessary to draw up tables for their use,

in which all the signs were classified and arranged, with their meanings

and phonetic transcriptions. These signs occupied one column, and in

three or four corresponding columns would be found, first, the name

assigned to it; secondly, the spelling, in syllables, of the phonetic

values which the signs expressed, thirdly, the Sumerian and Assyrian

words which they served to render, and sometimes glosses which completed

the explanation.

[Illustration: 276.jpg Tables]

Even this is far from exhausting the matter. Several of these

dictionaries went back to a very early date, and tradition ascribes to

Sargon of Agade the merit of having them drawn up or of having collected

them in his palace. The number of them naturally increased in the course

of centuries; in the later times of the Assyrian empire they were so

numerous as to form nearly one-fourth of the works in the library at

Nineveh under Assurbanipal. Other tablets contained dictionaries of

archaic or obsolete terms, grammatical paradigms, extracts from laws

or ancient hymns analyzed sentence by sentence and often word by word,

interlinear glosses, collections of Sumerian formulas translated into

Semitic speech--a child’s guide, in fact, which the savants of those

times consulted with as much advantage as those of our own day have

done, and which must have saved them from many a blunder.

When once accustomed to the difficulties and intricacies of their

calling, the scribes were never at a standstill. The stylus was plied

in Chaldaea no less assiduously than was the calamus in Egypt, and the

indestructible clay, which the Chaldaeans were as a rule content to use,

proved a better medium in the long run than the more refined material

employed by their rivals: the baked or merely dried clay tablets have

withstood the assaults of time in surprising quantities, while the

majority of papyri have disappeared without leaving a trace behind.

If at Babylon we rarely meet with those representations, which we find

everywhere in the tombs of Saqqara or Gizeh, of the people themselves

and their families, their occupations, amusements, and daily

intercourse, we possess, on the other hand, that of which the ruins of

Memphis have furnished us but scanty instances up to the present time,

namely, judicial documents, regulating the mutual relations of the

people and conferring a legal sanction on the various events of their

life. Whether it were a question of buying lands or contracting a

marriage, of a loan on interest, or the sale of slaves, the scribe was

called in with his soft tablets to engross the necessary agreement. In

this he would insert as many details as possible--the day of the month,

the year of the reigning sovereign, and at times, to be still more

precise, an allusion to some important event which had just taken place,

and a memorial of which was inserted in official annals, such as the

taking of a town, the defeat of a neighbouring king, the dedication of

a temple, the building of a wall or fortress, the opening of a canal, or

the ravages of an inundation: the names of the witnesses and magistrates

before whom the act was confirmed were also added to those of the

contracting parties. The method of sanctioning it was curious. An

indentation was made with the finger-nail on one of the sides of the

tablet, and this mark, followed or preceded by the mention of a name,

“Nail of Zabudamik,” “Nail of Abzii,” took the place of our more or less

complicated sign-manuals. In later times, only the buyer and witnesses

approved by a nail-mark, while the seller appended his seal; an

inscription incised above the impress indicating the position of the

signatory. Every one of any importance possessed a seal, which he wore

attached to his wrist or hung round his neck by a cord; he scarcely

ever allowed it to be separated from his person during his lifetime, and

after death it was placed with him in the tomb in order to prevent any

improper use being made of it. It was usually a cylinder, sometimes

a truncated cone with a convex base, either of marble, red or green

jasper, agate, cornelian, onyx or rock crystal, but rarely of metal.

Engraved upon it in intaglio was an emblem or subject chosen by

the owner, such as the single figure of a god or goddess, an act of

adoration, a sacrifice, or an episode in the story of Gilgames, followed

sometimes by the inscription of a name and title. The cylinder was

rolled, or, in the case of the cone, merely pressed on the clay, in the

space reserved for it. In several localities the contracting parties had

recourse to a very ingenious procedure to prevent the agreements being

altered or added to by unscrupulous persons. When the document had been

impressed on the tablet, it was enveloped in a second coating of clay,

upon which an exact copy of the original was made, the latter thus

becoming inaccessible to forgers: if by chance, in course of time, any

disagreement should take place, and an alteration of the visible text

should be suspected, the outer envelope was broken in the presence of

witnesses, and a comparison was made to see if the exterior corresponded

exactly with the interior version. Families thus had their private

archives, to which additions were rapidly made by every generation;

every household thus accumulated not only the evidences of its own

history, but to some extent that of other families with whom they had

formed alliances, or had business or friendly relations.*

* The tablets of Tell-Sifr come from one of these family

collections. They all, in number about one hundred, rested

on three enormous bricks, and they had been covered with a

mat of which the half-decayed remains were still visible:

three other crude bricks covered the heap. The documents

contained in them relate for the most part to the families

of Sininana and Amililani, and form part of their archives.

[Illustration: 279.jpg THE TABLET OF TELL-SIFR, BROKEN TO SHOW THE TWO

TEXTS.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Loftus.

[Illustration: 280.jpg TABLET BEARING THE IMPRESS OF A SEAL]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Layard.

The constitution of the family was of a complex character. It would

appear that the people of each city were divided into clans, all of

whose members claimed to be descended from a common ancestor, who had

flourished at a more or less remote period. The members of each clan

were by no means all in the same social position, some having gone down

in the world, others having raised themselves; and amongst them we find

many different callings--from agricultural labourers to scribes, and

from merchants to artisans. No mutual tie existed among the majority

of these members except the remembrance of their common origin, perhaps

also a common religion, and eventual rights of succession or claims upon

what belonged to each one individually. The branches which had become

gradually separated from the parent stock, and which, taken all

together, formed the clan, possessed each, on the contrary, a very

strict organization. It is possible that, at the outset, the woman

occupied the more important position, but at an early date the man

became the head of the family,* and around him were ranged the wives,

children, servants, and slaves, all of whom had their various duties and

privileges.

* The change in the condition of women would be due to the

influence of Semitic ideas and customs in Chaldaea.

He offered the household worship to the gods of his race, in accordance

with special rites which had come down to him from his father; he made

at the tombs of his ancestors, at such times as were customary, the

offerings and prayers which assured their repose in the other world, and

his powers were as extensive in civil as in religious matters. He had

absolute authority over all the members of his household, and anything

undertaken by them without his consent was held invalid in the eyes of

the law; his sons could not marry unless he had duly authorized them

to do so. For this purpose he appeared before the magistrate with the

future couple, and the projected union could not be held as an actual

marriage, until he had affixed his seal or made his nail-mark on the

contract tablet. It amounted, in fact, to a formal deed of sale, and the

parents of the girl parted with her only in exchange for a proportionate

gift from the bridegroom. One girl would be valued at a silver shekel by

weight, while another was worth a mina, another much less;* the handing

over of the price was accompanied with a certain solemnity. When the

young man possessed no property as yet of his own, his family advanced

him the sum needed for the purchase. On her side, the maiden did not

enter upon her new life empty handed; her father, or, in the case of

his death, the head of the family at the time being, provided her with

a dowry suited to her social position, which was often augmented by

considerable presents from her grandmother, aunts, and cousins.**

* Shamashnazir receives, as the price of his daughter, ten

shekels of silver, which appears to have been an average

price in the class of life to which he belonged.

** The nature of the dowry in ancient times is clear from

the Sumero-Assyrian tablets in which the old legal texts are

explained, and again from the contents of the contracts of

Tell-Sifr, and the documents on stone, such as the Micliaux

stone, in which we see women bringing their possessions into

the community by marriage, and yet retaining the entire

disposition of them.

The dowry would consist of a carefully marked out field of corn, a grove

of date-palms, a house in the town, a trousseau, furniture, slaves, or

ready money; the whole would be committed to clay, of which there

would be three copies at least, two being given by the scribe to the

contracting parties, while the third would be deposited in the hands of

the magistrate. When the bride and bridegroom both belonged to the same

class, or were possessed of equal fortunes, the relatives of the woman

could exact an oath from the man that he would abstain from taking

a second wife during her lifetime; a special article of the marriage

agreement permitted the woman to go free should the husband break his

faith, and bound him to pay an indemnity as a compensation for the

insult he had offered her. This engagement on the part of the man,

however, did not affect his relations with his female servants. In

Chaldaea, as in Egypt, and indeed in the whole of the ancient world,

they were always completely at the mercy of their purchaser, and the

permission to treat them as he would had become so much of a custom

that the begetting of children by their master was desired rather than

otherwise: the complaints of the despised slave, who had not been taken

into her master’s favour, formed one of the themes of popular poetry at

a very early period. When the contract tablet was finally sealed, one

of the witnesses, who was required to be a free man, joined the hands

of the young couple; nothing then remained to be done but to invite the

blessing of the gods, and to end the day by a feast, which would unite

both families and their guests. The evil spirits, however, always in

quest of an easy prey, were liable to find their way into the nuptial

chamber, favoured by the confusion inseparable from all household

rejoicing: prudence demanded that their attempts should be frustrated,

and that the newly married couple should be protected from their

attacks. The companions of the bridegroom took possession of him, and,

hand to hand and foot to foot, formed as it were a rampart round him

with their bodies, and carried him off solemnly to his expectant bride.

He then again repeated the words which he had said in the morning: “I

am the son of a prince, gold and silver shall fill thy bosom; thou, even

thou, shalt be my wife, I myself will be thy husband;” and he continued:

“As the fruits borne by an orchard, so great shall be the abundance

which I shall pour out upon this woman.” * The priest then called down

upon him benedictions from on high: “Therefore, O ye (gods), all that is

bad and that is not good in this man, drive it far from him and give him

strength. As for thee, O man, exhibit thy manhood, that this woman may

be thy wife; thou, O woman, give that which makes thy womanhood, that

this man may be thy husband.” On the following morning, a thanksgiving

sacrifice celebrated the completion of the marriage, and by purifying

the new household drove from it the host of evil spirits.**

* This part of the ceremony is described on a Sumero-

Assyrian tablet, of which two copies exist, discovered and

translated by Pinches. The interpretation appears to me to

result from the fact that mention is made, at the

commencement of the column, of impious beings without gods,

who might approach the man; in other places magical

exorcisms indicate how much those spirits were dreaded “who

deprived the bride of the embraces of the man.” As Pinches

remarks, the formula is also found in the part of the poem

of Gilgames, where Ishtar wishes to marry the hero, which

shows that the rite and its accompanying words belong to a

remote past.

** The text that describes these ceremonies was discovered

and published by Pinches. As far as I can judge, it

contained an exorcism against the “knotting of the tag,” and

the mention of this subject called up that of the marriage

rites. The ceremony commanded on the day following the

marriage was probably a purification: as late as the time of

Herodotus, the union of man and woman rendered both impure,

and they had to perform an ablution before recommencing

their occupations.

The woman, once bound, could only escape from the sovereign power of her

husband by death or divorce; but divorce for her was rather a trial to

which she submitted than a right of which she could freely make use. Her

husband could repudiate her at will without any complicated ceremonies.

It was enough for him to say: “Thou art not my wife!” and to restore

to her a sum of money equalling in value the dowry he had received with

her;* he then sent her back to her father, with a letter informing

him of the dissolution of the conjugal tie.** But if in a moment of

weariness or anger she hurled the fatal formula at him: “Thou are not

my husband!” her fate was sealed: she was thrown into the river and

drowned.***

* The sum is fixed at half a mina by the text of the

Sumerian laws; but it was sometimes less, e.g. ten shekels,

and sometimes more, e.g. a whole mina.

** Repudiation of a wife, and the ceremonial connected with

it, are summarized, as far as ancient times are concerned,

by a passage in the Sumero-Assyrian tablet, published by

Rawlinson, and translated by Oppert-Menant. Bertin, on the

contrary, takes the same text to be a description of the

principal marriage-rites, and from it he draws the

conclusion that the possibility of divorce was not admitted

in Chaldaea between persons of noble family. Meissner very

rightly returns to Oppert’s interpretation, a few details in

which he corrects.

*** This fact was evident from the text of the so-called

_Sumerian Laws concerning the Organization of the Family_,

according to the generally received interpretation:

according to that proposed by Oppert-Menant, it was the

woman who had the right of causing the husband who had

wronged her to be thrown into the river. The publication of

the contracts of Iltani and of Bashtum appear to have shown

conclusively the correctness of the ordinary translation:

uncertainty with regard to one word prevents us from knowing

whether the guilty wife were strangled before being thrown

into the water, or if she were committed to the river alive.

The adulteress was also punished with death, but with death by the

sword: and when the use of iron became widespread, the blade was to be

of that metal. Another ancient custom only spared the criminal to devote

her to a life of infamy: the outraged husband stripped her of her fleecy

garments, giving her merely the loin-cloth in its place, which left her

half naked, and then turned-her out of the house into the street, where

she was at the mercy of the first passer-by. Women of noble or wealthy

families found in their fortune a certain protection from the abuse of

marital authority. The property which they brought with them by their

marriage contract, remained at their own disposal.* They had the entire

management of it, they farmed it out, they sold it, they spent the

income from it as they liked, without interference from any one: the man

enjoyed the comforts which it procured, but he could not touch it, and

his hold upon it was so slight that his creditors could not lay their

hands on it.

* In the documents of the New Chaldaean Empire we find

instances of married women selling their property

themselves, and even of their being present, seated, at the

conclusion of the sale, or of their ceding to a married

daughter some property in their own possession, thus

renouncing the power of disposing of it, and keeping merely

the income from it; we have also instances of women

reclaiming valuables of gold which their husbands had given

away without their authorisation, and also obtaining an

indemnity for the wrong they had suffered; also of their

lending money to the mother-in-law of their brother; in

fine, empowered to deal with their own property in every

respect like an ordinary proprietor.

If by his own act he divorced his wife, he not only lost all benefit

from her property, but he was obliged to make her an allowance or to pay

her an indemnity;* at his death, the widow succeeded to these, without

prejudice to what she was entitled to by her marriage contract or the

will of the deceased. The woman with a dowry, therefore, became more or

less emancipated by virtue of her money. As her departure deprived the

household of as much as, and sometimes more than, she had brought into

it, every care was taken that she should have no cause to retire from

it, and that no pretext should be given to her parents for her recall

to her old home; her wealth thus obtained for her the consideration and

fair treatment which the law had, at the outset, denied to her.

* The restitution of the dowry after divorce is ascertained,

as far as later times are concerned, from documents similar

to that published by Kohler-Peiser, in which we see the

second husband of a divorced wife claiming the dowry from

the first husband. The indemnity was fixed beforehand at six

silver minae, in the marriage contract published by Oppert.

When, however, the wife was poor, she had to bear without complaint the

whole burden of her inferior position. Her parents had no other resource

than to ask the highest possible price for her, according to the rank

in which they lived, or in virtue of the personal qualities she was

supposed to possess, and this amount, paid into their hands when they

delivered her over to the husband, formed, if not an actual dowry for

her, at least a provision for her in case of repudiation or widowhood:

she was not, however, any less the slave of her husband--a privileged

slave, it is true, and one whom he could not sell like his other

slaves,* but of whom he could easily rid himself when her first youth

was passed, or when she ceased to please him.**

* It appears, however, in certain cases not clearly

specified, that the husband could sell his wife, if she were

a shrew, as a slave.

** This form of marriage, which was of frequent occurrence

in ancient times, fell into disuse among the upper classes,

at least of Babylonian society. A few examples, however, are

found in late times. It continued in use among the lower

classes, and Herodotus affirms that in his time marriage

markets were held regularly, as in our own time fairs are

held for hiring male and female servants.

In many cases the fiction of purchase was set aside, and mutual consent

took the place of all other formalities, marriage then becoming merely

cohabitation, terminating at will. The consent of the father was not

required for this irregular union, and many a son contracted a marriage

after this fashion, unknown to his relatives, with some young girl

either in his own or in an inferior station: but the law refused to

allow her any title except that of concubine, and forced her to wear a

distinctive mark, perhaps that of servitude, namely, the representation

of an olive in some valuable stone or in terra-cotta, bearing her own

and her husband’s name, with the date of their union, which she kept

hung round her neck by a cord. Whether they were legitimate wives

or not, the women of the lower and middle classes enjoyed as much

independence as did the Egyptian women of a similar rank. As all the

household cares fell to their share, it was necessary that they should

be free to go about at all hours of the day: and they could be seen

in the streets and the markets, with bare feet, their head and face

uncovered, wearing their linen loin-cloth or their long draped garments

of hairy texture.* Their whole life was expended in a ceaseless toil for

their husbands and children: night and morning they went to fetch water

from the public well or the river, they bruised the corn, made the

bread, spun, wove, and clothed the entire household in spite of the

frequent demands of maternity.** The Chaldaean women of wealth or noble

birth, whose civil status gave them a higher position, did not enjoy so

much freedom. They were scarcely affected by the cares of daily life,

and if they did any work within their houses, it was more from a natural

instinct, a sense of duty, or to relieve the tedium of their existence,

than from constraint or necessity; but the exigencies of their rank

reduced them to the state of prisoners. All the luxuries and comforts

which money could procure were lavished on them, or they obtained them

for themselves, but all the while they were obliged to remain shut in

the harem within their own houses; when they went out, it was only to

visit their female friends or their relatives, to go to some temple

or festival, and on such occasions they were surrounded with servants,

eunuchs, and pages, whose serried ranks shut out the external world.

* For the long garment of the women, see the statue

represented on p. 263 of the present work; for the loin-

cloth, which left the shoulders and bust exposed, see the

bronze figure on p. 262. The latter was no doubt the garment

worn at home by respectable women; we see by the punishment

inflicted on adulteresses that it was an outdoor garment for

courtesans, and also, doubtless, for slaves and women of the

lower classes.

** Women’s occupations are mentioned in several texts and on

several ancient monuments. On the seal, an impress of which

is given on p. 233 of this volume, we see above, on the

left, a woman kneeling and crushing the corn, and before her

a row of little disks, representing, no doubt, the loaves

prepared for baking. The length of time for suckling a child

is fixed at three years by the Sumero-Assyrian tablet

relating the history of the foundling; protracted suckling

was customary also in Egypt.

There was no lack of children in these houses when the man had several

mistresses, either simultaneously or successively. Maternity was before

all things a woman’s first duty: should she delay in bearing children,

or should anything happen to them, she was considered as accursed or

possessed, and she was banished from the family lest her presence should

be a source of danger to it.* In spite of this many households remained

childless, either because a clause inserted in the contract prevented

the dismissal of the wife if barren, or because the children had died

when the father was stricken in years, and there was little hope of

further offspring. In such places adoption filled the gaps left by

nature, and furnished the family with desired heirs. For this purpose

some chance orphan might be brought into the household--one of those

poor little creatures consigned by their mothers to the river, as in

the case of Shargani, according to the ancient legend; or who had been

exposed at the cross-roads to excite the pity of passers-by,** like the

foundling whose story is given us in an old ballad. “He who had neither

father nor mother,--he who knew not his father or mother, but whose

earliest memory is of a well--whose entry into the world was in the

street,” his benefactor “snatched him from the jaws of dogs--and took

him from the beaks of ravens.--He seized the seal before witnesses--and

he marked him on the sole of the foot with the seal of the

witness,--then he entrusted him to a nurse,--and for three years he

provided the nurse with flour, oil, and clothing.” When the weaning was

accomplished, “he appointed him to be his child,--he brought him up

to be his child,--he inscribed him as his child,--and he gave him the

education of a scribe.” The rites of adoption in these cases did not

differ from those attendant upon birth. On both occasions the newly born

infant was shown to witnesses, and it was marked on the soles of its

feet to establish its identity; its registration in the family archives

did not take place until these precautions had been observed, and

children adopted in this manner were regarded thenceforward in the eyes

of the world as the legitimate heirs of the family.

* Divorce for sterility was customary in very early times.

Complete sterility or miscarriage was thought to be

occasioned by evil spirits; a woman thus possessed with a

devil came to be looked on as a dangerous being whom it was

necessary to exorcise.

** Many of these children were those of courtesans or women

who had been repudiated, as we learn from the Sumero-

Assyrian tablet of Rawlinson: “She will expose her child

alone in the street, where the serpents in the road may bite

it, and its father and mother will know it no more.”

People desiring to adopt a child usually made inquiries among their

acquaintances, or poor friends, or cousins who might consent to give up

one of their sons, in the hope of securing a better future for him. When

he happened to be a minor, the real father and mother, or, in the case

of the death of one, the surviving parent, appeared before the scribe,

and relinquished all their rights in favour of the adopting parents; the

latter, in accepting this act of renunciation, promised henceforth to

treat the child as if he were of their own flesh and blood, and often

settled upon him, at the same time, a certain sum chargeable on their

own patrimony. When the adopted son was of age, his consent to the

agreement was required, in addition to that of his parents. The adoption

was sometimes prompted by an interested motive, and not merely by the

desire for posterity or its semblance. Labour was expensive, slaves were

scarce, and children, by working for their father, took the place of

hired servants, and were content, like them, with food and clothing. The

adoption of adults was, therefore, most frequent in ancient times. The

introduction of a person into a fresh household severed the ties which

bound him to the old one; he became a stranger to those who had borne

him; he had no filial obligations to discharge to them, nor had he

any right to whatever property they might possess, unless, indeed, any

unforeseen circumstance prevented the carrying out of the agreement, and

legally obliged him to return to the status of his birth. In return, he

undertook all the duties and enjoyed the privileges of his new position;

he owed to his adopted parents the same amount of work, obedience, and

respect that he would have given to his natural parents; he shared

in their condition, whether for good or ill, and he inherited their

possessions. Provision was made for him in case of his repudiation by

those who had adopted him, and they had to make him compensation: he

received the portion which would have accrued to him after their death,

and he then left them. Families appear to have been fairly united, in

spite of the elasticity of the laws which governed them, and of the

divers elements of which they were sometimes composed. No doubt polygamy

and frequently divorce exercised here as elsewhere a deleterious

influence; the harems of Babylon were constantly the scenes of endless

intrigues and quarrels among the women and children of varied condition

and different parentage who filled them. Among the people of the middle

classes, where restricted means necessarily prevented a man having

many wives, the course of family life appears to have been as calm

and affectionate as in Egypt, under the unquestioned supremacy of the

father: and in the event of his early death, the widow, and later the

son or son-in-law, took the direction of affairs. Should quarrels arise

and reach the point of bringing about a complete rupture between parents

and children, the law intervened, not to reconcile them, but to repress

any violence of which either side might be guilty towards the other.

It was reckoned as a misdemeanour for any father or mother to disown a

child, and they were punished by being kept shut up in their own house,

as long, doubtless, as they persisted in disowning it; but it was a

crime in a son, even if he were an adopted son, to renounce his parents,

and he was punished severely. If he had said to his father, “Thou art

not my father!” the latter marked him with a conspicuous sign and sold

him in the market. If he had said to his mother, “As for thee, thou art

not my mother!” he was similarly branded, and led through the streets or

along the roads, where with hue and cry he was driven from the town and

province.*

* I have adopted the generally received meaning of this

document as a whole, but I am obliged to state that Oppert-

Menant admit quite a different interpretation. According to

them, it would appear to be a sweeping renunciation of

children by parents, and of parents by children, at the

close of a judicial condemnation. Oppert has upheld this

interpretation against Haupt, and still keeps to his

opinion. The documents published by Meissner show that the

text of the ancient Sumerian laws applied equally to adopted

children, but made no distinction between the insult offered

to the father and that offered to the mother: the same

penalty was applicable in both cases.

The slaves were numerous, but distributed in unequal proportion among

the various classes of the population: whilst in the palace they might

be found literally in crowds, it was rare among the middle classes to

meet with any family possessing more than two or three at a time. They

were drawn partly from foreign races; prisoners who had been wounded and

carried from the field of battle, or fugitives who had fallen into the

hands of the victors after a defeat, or Elamites or Gutis who had been

surprised in their own villages during some expedition; not to mention

people of every category carried off by the Bedouin during their raids

in distant parts, such as Syria or Egypt, whom they were continually

bringing for sale to Babylon and Uru, and, indeed, to all those cities

to which they had easy access. The kings, the vicegerents, the temple

administration, and the feudal lords, provided employment for vast

numbers in the construction of their buildings or in the cultivation of

their domains; the work was hard and the mortality great, but gaps were

soon filled up by the influx of fresh gangs. The survivors intermarried,

and their children, brought up to speak the Chaldaean tongue and

conforming to the customs of the country, became assimilated to the

ruling race; they formed, beneath the superior native Semite and

Sumerian population,an inferior servile class, spread alike throughout

the towns and country, who were continually reinforced by individuals of

the native race, such as foundlings, women and children sold by husband

or father, debtors deprived by creditors of their liberty, and criminals

judicially condemned. The law took no individual account of them,

but counted them by heads, as so many cattle: they belonged to their

respective masters in the same fashion as did the beasts of his flock or

the trees of his garden, and their life or death was dependent upon

his will, though the exercise of his rights was naturally restrained

by interest and custom. He could use them as pledges or for payment of

debt, could exchange them or sell them in the market. The price of a

slave never rose very high: a woman might be bought for four and a half

shekels of silver by weight, and the value of a male adult fluctuated

between ten shekels and the third of a mina. The bill of sale was

inscribed on clay, and given to the purchaser at the time of payment:

the tablets which were the vouchers of the rights of the former

proprietor were then broken, and the transfer was completed. The

master seldom ill-treated his slaves, except in cases of reiterated

disobedience, rebellion, or flight; he could arrest his runaway slaves

wherever he could lay his hands on them; he could shackle their ankles,

fetter their wrists, and whip them mercilessly. As a rule, he permitted

them to marry and bring up a family; he apprenticed their children,

and as soon as they knew a trade, he set them up in business in his own

name, allowing them a share in the profits. The more intelligent among

them were trained to be clerks or stewards; they were taught to read,

write, and calculate, the essential accomplishments of a skilful scribe;

they were appointed as superintendents over their former comrades, or

overseers of the administration of property, and they ended by becoming

confidential servants in the household. The savings which they had

accumulated in their earlier years furnished them with the means of

procuring some few consolations: they could hire themselves out for

wages, and could even acquire slaves who would go out to work for them,

in the same way as they themselves had been a source of income to their

proprietors. If they followed a lucrative profession and were successful

in it, their savings sometimes permitted them to buy their own freedom,

and, if they were married, to pay the ransom of their wife and children.

At times, their master, desirous of rewarding long and faithful service,

liberated them of his own accord, without waiting till they had saved

up the necessary money or goods for their enfranchisement: in such cases

they remained his dependants, and continued in his service as freemen

to perform the services they had formerly rendered as slaves. They then

enjoyed the same rights and advantages as the old native race; they

could leave legacies, inherit property, claim legal rights, and acquire

and possess houses and lands. Their sons could make good matches among

the daughters of the middle classes, according to their education and

fortune; when they were intelligent, active, and industrious, there was

nothing to prevent them from rising to the highest offices about the

person of the sovereign.

[Illustration: 294.jpg AN EGYPTIAN SLAVE MERCHANT]

[Illustration: 294-text.jpg]

If we knew more of the internal history of the great Chaldaean cities, we

should no doubt come to see what an important part the servile element

played in them; and could we trace it back for a few generations, we

should probably discover that there were few great families who did

not reckon a slave or a freedman among their ancestors. It would be

interesting to follow this people, made up of such complex elements, in

all their daily work and recreation, as we are able to do in the case

of contemporary Egyptians; but the monuments which might furnish us with

the necessary materials are scarce, and the positive information to be

gleaned from them amounts to but little. We are tolerably safe, however,

in supposing the more wealthy cities to have been, as a whole, very

similar in appearance to those existing at the present day in the

regions which as yet have been scarcely touched by the advent of

European civilization. Sinuous, narrow, muddy streets, littered with

domestic refuse and organic detritus, in which flocks of ravens and

wandering packs of dogs perform with more or less efficiency the duties

of sanitary officers; whole quarters of the town composed of huts made

of reeds and puddled clay, low houses of crude brick, surmounted perhaps

even in those times with the conical domes we find later on the Assyrian

bas-reliefs; crowded and noisy bazaars, where each trade is located in

its special lanes and blind alleys; silent and desolate spaces occupied

by palaces and gardens, in which the private life of the wealthy

was concealed from public gaze; and looking down upon this medley of

individual dwellings, the palaces and temples with their ziggurats

crowned with gilded and painted sanctuaries. In the ruins of Uru,

Eridu, and Uruk, the remains of houses belonging doubtless to well-to-do

families have been brought to light. They are built of fine bricks,

whose courses are cemented together with a thin layer of bitumen, but

they they are only lighted internally by small appertures pierced at

irregular distances in the upper part of the walls: the low arched

doorway, closed by a heavy two-leaved door, leads into a blind passage,

which opens as a rule on the courtyard in the centre of the building.