FISH IN OFFERINGS, AUGURIES, ETC.
The Sumerian records leave no possibility of doubt as to offerings of
fish being made to the deities, not exclusively or specially to a deity
of fish. They show Eannatum in early days offering at Telloh certain
fish to various gods to secure their aid that the treaty which he had
just concluded with the city of Umma might be maintained for all time
unbroken.
Similar offerings present themselves all through the history of
Assyria. Numerous tablets detailing the nature of the enjoined
offerings include fish, and as numerous receipts by the temples
acknowledge offerings of fish.[969] In the course of time votive
offerings in ivory and bronze, etc., according to King, took the place
of actual fish.[970]
The striking resemblance of the institution of the Scape-Goat in
Palestine to the ancient _Mashhulduppu_ or Babylonian Scape-Goat,
both in object and high ceremonial ritual, is noted in my Jewish
chapter.[971] But we cannot for one moment assume that sacrifices and
oblations in Assyria evolved from perhaps the earliest primitive,
_i.e._ human, sacrifice, or followed the same lines as those of Israel
or of Rome. In the first nation human sacrifice probably prevailed
in the earlier times to a wide extent, and in the second (as Varro
indicates) “Populus pro se ignem animalia mittit,” and even “pisciculum
pro animis humanis” became a not unusual and cheaper alternative.[972]
On the other hand, we possess, in historic and prehistoric Assyria, no
trustworthy evidence of human sacrifice. Sayce, it is true, in 1875
published two texts, which, as he translated, demonstrated that human
sacrifice did prevail. These, refuted by Ball, are not accepted as even
a proper translation of the passage, much less a proof of the practice.
Jastrow has recently returned to the charge. He suggests that, “His
eldest son shall he burn at the Khamm of Adad,” and other passages,
establish that at one time children were offered in sacrifice, very
much on the same lines as the later Judæan immolation of their children
to Moloch, as when King Ahaz (2 Kings xvi. 3) “made his son to pass
through the fire” in the Tophet just outside the gates of Jerusalem.
But Jastrow finds even less favour now than Sayce did forty years
ago.[973]
Campbell Thompson, after remarking that the existence of human
sacrifice among either the Babylonian or Assyrian is not easy of
satisfactory proof, concludes, “The fact is that human sacrifice
goes out in proportion as civilisation comes in, and probably by
the time men are ready to commit their religious ritual to writing,
human sacrifice has ceased to be a regular and periodic rite: as the
Assyrians were the highest civilised of all the Semites before our
era, so in all probability fewest traces of this custom exist in their
records.”
A semi-religious practice, not dissimilar in object to that of the
Scape-Goat, can be discerned, if not as a vehicle for carrying away all
the sins of the people, yet as a method of ridding the individual by
the agency of some beast or fish of the affliction which lay upon him.
In one of the so-called Penitential Psalms or incantations, which the
tablets from the library of Asur-bani-pal bequeath us, the prayerful
desire to be free of suffering finds utterance in:—
“Let me cast off my evil that the birds may fly up to Heaven with it,
That the fish may carry off my affliction.”
This whole passage ought, however, to be regarded not as a Penitential
Psalm so much as “a ceremony for cleansing a man from _tabu_, when he
wishes to see something in a dream. It finds close connection with
the Levitical charm, originating from sympathetic magic, _e.g._ for
cleansing the leper or leprous house,” _i.e._ by the two doves, as in
Leviticus xiv. 4.[974]
Langdon asserts that in the Sumero-Babylonian religion each individual
in normal conditions was guided by a divine spirit or god (cf. the
δαὶμων of Socrates and the _genius_ of the Romans). When a man was
possessed by the powers of evil he was estranged from his personal god,
because some demon had attacked or driven out the protecting deity from
his body. In this ancient period there seems to be no moral element
whatever in the case. If a man became _tabu_ (which the eating of fish
in other countries than Assyria would involve), or possessed by some
dangerous unclean power, which made him unholy and filled him with
bodily or mental distress, this state came about solely because at some
unguarded moment a demon had expelled the indwelling god.
The demon had to be exorcised by some method of atonement, of which the
most important element was in Sumerian magic water, in Hebrew blood.
“In view of the great influence which Babylonian magic appears to have
exerted upon the Hebrew rituals, it is curious it did not succeed in
banishing this gross Semitic practice. Blood of animals does not occur
as a cleansing element in Babylonia,” an omission due apparently to the
culture of the Sumerians “not permitting such crude ideas, and to their
teaching those Semites with whom they came in contact a cleaner form of
magic.”[975]
In addition to the demons or spirits described above we find others,
which could and, unless the proper rites were paid to the dead, did
affect the living. The greatest misfortune which could befall a man
was to be deprived of proper burial.[976] His shade, ran the common
belief, could not reach Arallū, but wandered disconsolately about
the earth. When driven by pangs of hunger it perforce ate the offal
or leavings of the street. As the Egyptians, to ensure the continued
existence of the dead and his _ka_, provided sepulchral offerings (the
depictments of which included fish[977]), so did the Babylonians, not
only for a similar but also for the additional purpose of preserving
themselves from torments.
To leave a body unburied was not unattended with danger to the living.
The shade of the dead man might bewitch any person it met and cause him
grievous sickness. The wandering shade of a man was called _ekimmu_,
_i.e._ spectre. Only sorcerers possessed the power of casting a spell
whereby the _ekimmu_ might be made to harass a man. On the other hand,
the spectre sometimes settled on a man of its own accord, in the hope
that its victim would be driven to give it burial to free himself from
its clutches.[978]
The Babylonian conception of the condition of the dead was an utterly
joyless one. Arallū, or the House of the Dead, was dark and gloomy.
Its dwellers never beheld the light of the sun, but sat in unchanging
gloom. The Babylonians possessed no hope of a joyous life beyond the
grave, nor did they imagine a paradise in which the deceased would live
a life similar to that on earth.
The nature of the under-world can be gathered from the description
given to Gilgamesh by the spirit of Enkidu risen from the grave
(sometimes cited as an instance of necromancy), “the place where was
the worm that devoured, and where all was cloaked in dust.”[979] The
Hymn of the Descent of Ishtar into Hell goes farther:
“To the land whence none return, the place of darkness,
To the house wherein he who enters is excluded from the light,
To the place where dust is their bread and mud their food.”[980]
The very curious bronze of the Le Clerq collection in Paris, in which
ichthyic garments and gods of the under-world, Arallū, occur, must be
my excuse for this too lengthy and almost fishless digression on the
Babylonian dead. It shows several figures, two clad in garments of the
form of a fish, with their scales very visible.
Two explanations of the bronze have been offered. The first, hitherto
generally accepted, suggests that the figures are representations of
the gods of the under-world, or of the dead waiting on a sick person,
together with some demons of the under-world and two priests wearing
fishlike raiment.[981]
My friend Professor Langdon has furnished me with another explanation,
more detailed and more interesting.
This so-called representation of a scene in the lower world from
a bronze talisman has been misunderstood. The obverse has three
registers. In the upper register are depicted the seven devils, all
with animal heads, in attitude of ferocious attack upon a human soul.
The middle register represents a sick man who is supposed to be
possessed by the seven devils. He lies upon a bed. At his head and feet
stand two priests each arrayed to appear like fish: these are symbolic
of Ea, god of the sea and patron of all magic. They clothed themselves
in a fishlike robe to signify that they derived their divinations and
incantations from the sacred water, of which Ea was the god.
In the lower register are drawings of cult utensils, such as holy water
bowls, censers, etc., and of the fever demon Labartu, who has been
driven from the body of the man and is in flight by boat. The reverse
of this bronze has in deep relief one of the seven devils who is in the
act of peering over the upper edge of the bronze, and gazing upon the
scene of atonement and magical healing below.
The cuneiform texts prescribe that fumigation, either for cleansing a
person or exorcising a demon, may be performed by the wizard, with or
without a censer, a bowl, or lighted torch.[982]
Apart from its permeation of Israel in legislation as indicated in
connection with Hammurabi’s Code, the influence of Assyria stands out
in other ways clearly. The semi-similarity of treatment of the Deluge
has already been noticed, while the rendering in the stories of Sargon
and Moses of a widespread legend[983] differs only in such points
of detail as the substitution of the Nile or (according to Arabic
tradition) of a fish-pond for the Euphrates, and of the irrigator Akki
as the discoverer of the chest of reeds for Pharaoh’s daughter.[984]
“My lowly mother conceived me, in secret she brought me forth:
She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she closed my door:
She cast me into the river, which rose not over me:
The river bore me up, unto Akki the irrigator it carried me.
* * * * *
And for ... four years I ruled the kingdom.”
The assertion that the Old Testament is fairly saturated with
Babylonian culture and folklore, and that even in the days of the New
Testament we have not passed beyond the sphere of its impression hardly
overshoots the mark, when the similarity of these and other instances
is borne in mind.
The earliest point of contact between Babylon and Palestine is recorded
in Genesis xiv. 1, which makes Abraham the contemporary of “Amraphel
King of Shinar,” who most probably can now be identified with Hammurabi
in the light of the recent discoveries of Kugler.[985]
The first connection of Israel with Assyria proper occurs in the reign
of Shalmaneser II., in whose Monolith Inscription figures, as one of
the allies of Benhadad I. of Damascus, the name of Ahâbbu Sir’lai,
generally identified with Ahab, King of Israel.
Fish are discovered playing a part in auguries and divinations very
similar to their _rôle_ in Rome. Augury in both nations was regarded
with deep veneration. It reached in Assyria a very high plane. It was
practised as a recognised science by a large and organised body of the
priesthood under the direct control and patronage of the King.
All strange occurrences in heaven or earth were referred to the seers.
Almost every event of common life was believed by the pious Babylonian
to require prophetic decision whether it boded well or ill.
Among the reforms undertaken by Urukagina was that of the college of
the diviners, for he tells us that “he, who hitherto received one
shekel for his work, took money no more.”
In the letters of Hammurabi these diviners were recognised as a
regular Guild. Knowledge of the tablets of recorded answers, which,
suiting the individual circumstances of each interrogator, had for
generations been stored in the library, enabled them to render an
interpretation of practically all events. Their forecasts had resort
not only to astrology, but to other means, such as the observations of
the movements of fish, of the flight of birds, and of the entrails and
livers of sheep and other sacrificial animals, all of which were the
subject of minute inspection.
The Babylonians in seeking to determine the future watched carefully
the movements, etc., of fish. Although the greater part of the
known divination tablets regarding fish omens are in a sad state of
preservation, the following will serve as an example: “If fish in a
river keep in a school and steadily face up stream, in that place will
be peaceful habitation,” a deliverance hardly fraught with comfort at
times of flood or drought!
Then again the passage (in Ezekiel xxi. 21-22), “The King of Babylon
stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use
divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim,
he looked in the liver,” etc., is of great interest, as evidence that
the Babylonians employed both Belomancy or divination by arrows, and
Hepatoscopy or inspection of the liver.
Belomancy was practised by other nations,[986] notably in Arabia (as
witness Mohammed’s command against the use of arrows, “an abomination
of Satan’s work!”)[987] more frequently than in Babylonia. There it
attained but secondary importance. The general method required the
shaking or shuffling before the image or the sacred place of the deity
of a set of arrows. In the temple of Mecca the three important arrows
were named, _The Commanding_, _The Forbidding_, _The Waiting_.
Hepatoscopy: the liver among the Assyrians, the Jews,[988] the Greeks,
and the Etruscans,[989] contested with the heart the honour of being
the central organ of life. Its convulsive movements, when taken from
the sacrificed victim, gave warnings of the future. So sacred was
the liver held in Israel, that eating it was forbidden: it had to be
returned to the Giver of Life.[990]
Fish were early utilised for the calendar of the year. The signs of the
Zodiac showing Pisces, possibly derived from connection with the god of
water, and Scorpio, possibly representing one of the Crustacea, date
back to _c._ 3000 B.C.[991]
FOOTNOTES:
[969] See Nikolski, _Documents de la plus ancienne époque chaldéenne_,
Nos. 265 and 269; this last tablet (_c._ 2900 B.C.) records the
delivery of large numbers of fish of various kinds by fishermen for two
great festivals.
[970] Cf. _antea_, p. 217, as regards Rome.
[971] _Postea_, p. 427.
[972] See Greek-Roman section, Chapter XVI.
[973] _Op. cit._, p. 358.
[974] _Semitic Magic_ (London, 1908), pp. 181, 186.
[975] _Babylonian Magic_ (Bologna, 1914), pp. 237-8.
[976] “In Israel not to be buried was a terrible disgrace which one
could hardly wish for one’s enemy: the spirits of the unburied wandered
restlessly about. Burial alone so bound the spirit to the body that it
had rest and could harm no one.” Cheyne’s assertion in _Encyl. Bibl._
(_op. cit._), p. 1041, seems to me hardly warranted, at any rate by
the O.T. passages which he adduces in support of this statement, in
attributing to Israel the idea of the unburied dead being condemned
to miserable wandering. For the Greek conception see _inter alia_ the
_Antigone_ of Sophocles.
[977] See Egyptian _Book of the Dead_ (London, 1910), ch. LIII., with
reference to the deceased being obliged, from lack of proper food in
the under-world, to eat filth—“Let me not be obliged to eat thereof
in place of the sepulchral offerings.” To provide food for the dead,
asphodel was planted near tombs (_Odyssey_, XI. 539 and 573) by the
Greeks. From Hesiod (_Op._ 41) we learn that the _roots_ of the
asphodel were eaten as a common vegetable, as was the mallow. Merry
states that in the Greek islands, where customs linger longer than on
the mainland, this “kind of squill is still planted on graves.” If the
Homeric ‘mead of asphodel’ turns out, as some editors maintain, to have
had a strictly utilitarian significance, how many poets and poetasters
have mistaken ‘greens’ for ‘greenery!’
[978] King, _Babylonian Religion_ (_op. cit._), p. 45, and _Babylonian
Magic and Sorcery_ (London, 1896), pp. 119 ff., where the incantation
appropriate for exorcising demons is set out.
[979] Gilgamesh here learns how infinitely better is the condition of
those to whom the rites of burial have been paid, compared with that of
those who have been unburied. R. F. Harper, _Assyrian and Babylonian
Literature_ (New York, 1901), 363 ff.
[980] The Hebrew conception of Sheol coincides in regarding it as “a
land whence none return,” Job vii. 9-10; as “a place of darkness,” Job
x. 21-22; as a place of “dust,” Psalm xxx. 9, and Job xvii. 16.
[981] Priests dressed as fish or with some fish-like raiments often
attend the Sacred Tree (see Ward, _op. cit._, Nos. 687, 688, 689).
These are held by some to be genii of the deep. In Ward, No. 690, two
fish-men are guarding the Tree of Life.
[982] Compare the exorcism by Tobias of Sara’s demon in Tobit. Langdon,
_Babylonian Magic and Sorcery_ (_op. cit._), p. 223, commenting on the
difficulty, which Semitic philology does not clear up, as to whether a
wizard is one who cuts himself (as Robertson Smith and most scholars
suppose), or whether he is one who casts his spell by whispering or
ventriloquy, holds that “from the Sumerian word and the Sumerian
ideogram of the word _uhdugga_ which means one who whispers as he casts
saliva, we can settle at once the most primitive method of sorcery
known to us.”
[983] Cf. with those of Moses and Sargon the stories of Gilgamesh King
of Babylon (Ælian, XII. 22), of Semiramis Queen of Assyria (Diodorus
Siculus, ii. 4), and of Karna in the Indian Epic of Mahabharata
(Cheyne’s _Traditions and Beliefs of Ancient Israel_ London, 1907),
p. 519. “It has been conjectured,” writes Frazer (_op. cit._), II. p.
454 ff, “that in stories like that of the exposure of Moses in the
water (in this case, unlike most others, all supernatural elements are
absent) we have a reminiscence of the old custom as practised by the
Celtæ on the Rhine, and according to Speke by some Central African
tribes in the last century, of testing the legitimacy of children by
throwing them into the water to sink or swim; the infants which sank
were rejected as bastards. In the light of this conjecture it may be
significant that in several of these stories the birth of the child is
represented as supernatural, which in this connection cynics are apt to
regard as a delicate synonym for illegitimate.” On p. 454 he touches on
the question whether Moses, the son of Amram by his (Amram’s) paternal
_aunt_, was thus the offspring of an incestuous marriage, and therefore
exposed on the Nile.
[984] See Rogers, _Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament_ (London,
1912), pp. 135 ff.
[985] From Astronomy many Assyrian dates have been ascertained. Kugler
by stellar researches has settled the vexed question of the date of
Hammurabi, and probably that of Abram, at about 2120 B.C., which unites
within one year the latest conclusions of King, Jastrow, and Rogers,
and so establishes an important degree of accord among Assyriologists
on events subsequent to 2200 B.C. as regards which they have hitherto
been wide apart. Then again modern astronomers have worked out that
there was a total eclipse of the sun at Nineveh on June 15, 763 B.C.
The importance of the fixing of this date can as regards Assyrian
chronology hardly be exaggerated. The Assyrians, rejecting the
Babylonian system of counting time, invented a system of their own, by
naming the year after certain officers or terms of office, not unlike
the system of the Archonates at Athens, and the Consulates at Rome.
These were termed _limus_: a list of these functionaries during four
centuries has come down to us. In the time of one of them, Pur Sagali,
there is a mention of the eclipse of the sun. As this eclipse has now
been fixed for the year 763 B.C., we possess an automatic date for
every year after of the _limus_.
[986] Apollo to the Greeks was at once archer-god and god of
divination. The word ἀγεῖλε, “he gave as his oracular response,” means
literally “he picked up” (the arrows). Indeed the curious fact that
λέγω in Greek denotes “I say” and in Latin “I read” is best explained
by O. Schrader, who points out that it meant originally “I pick up” or
“collect” (the arrows of divination) and so both read and declare the
will of heaven. See O. Schrader, _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan
Peoples_, trans. F. B. Jevons (London, 1890), p. 279.
[987] Koran, _Sur._ v. 92.
[988] Proverbs, vii. 23.
[989] See, _e.g._ C. Thulin, _Die Götter des Martianus Capella und der
Bronzeleber von Piacenza_, Gieszen, 1906.
[990] _Ency. Bibl._, p. 1118.
[991] According to Langdon, _Tammuz and Ishtar_ (_op. cit._), p.
47, “Ninâ, a water deity, was identified at an early date with the
constellation, Scorpio; for this reason her brother Ningirsu, also a
water deity, was identified with one of the stars of Scorpio.”