ANCIENT HISTORY LIBRARY

THE HISTORY OF BABYLONIA

BY

HUGO WINCKLER

 

THE REGION OF WESTERN-ASIATIC CIVILIZATION

 

OF the two civilizations which sprang up almost contemporaneously with one another, the one in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, the other in the alluvial lands of the Nile, the Babylonian unquestionably exercised the greater influence. The culture of Greece owed much to Babylonia, and European civilization became, in turn, heir to her achievements through the Greeks. It is not yet possible to discover all the lines of communication along which the thought of the East passed over in historic times to the mainland of Greece. It is still less possible to determine the prehistoric paths by which Babylonian ideas reached European nations and others beyond the bounds of Babylonian empire. Nevertheless, it is sufficient to point to the single word μva (the Babylonian mana, or weight of sixty shekels) as presumptive evidence of an influence that was far-reaching. The timepieces that we carry in our pockets, and place upon our mantels, are constant witnesses to the scientific influence of Babylonia.

The faces of our watches are divided into twelve periods corresponding to the old Babylonian division of the day into twelve double hours (kasbu). It was from this kasbu that the mile, as a measure of distance, was derived, the old mile representing the space traversed in two hours. The routes by which these products of ancient Semitic thought were transferred to the West lie, at present, quite beyond the bounds of our vision, but the agreement that exists, even in matters of detail, between the Babylonian mythology and that of the ancient Germans, and other peoples as well, precludes the possibility of their independent development. "The common endowment of the race" is an hypothesis that fails utterly to account not only for the main features in which these mythologies are agreed, but also, and more especially, for the evident accord in unimportant particulars.

The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions and the hieroglyphs of Egypt has extended our historical knowledge of Western civilization to a period almost twice as remote as that previously known. The history of Greece was known to us from the seventh or eighth century B.C. The oldest records of Babylonia and Egypt have lifted the veil that shrouded the centuries of the fourth millennium before our era. The period that separates their authors from that of Lycurgus and the foundation of Rome is, consequently, as long as that which lies between us and the historical beginnings of Hellenic life.

Babylonian civilization and history was not confined to the region watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. A civilization so advanced as that of Babylonia could not exist without attracting to itself the assistance of neighbouring lands and carrying thither its own achievements. Thus we see, even in remote antiquity, Babylon reaching out toward Palestine, Armenia, Elam, and even to Arabia. Her merchants went forth in the pursuits of commerce, her soldiers to war and victory. The products of her artists and artisans were laid in foreign markets. Her superfluous population found homes on alien soil. There, however, they were often exposed to attack from barbarous neighbours and often succumbed to their superior numbers. Generally speaking, therefore, the history of the outlying countries and peoples is vitally connected with the history of Babylonia. It is no mere accident that we possess little or no knowledge of these peoples beyond that which has come to us from the Babylonians. The gaze of all these outlying peoples, and the direction of their movement, was toward the old culture-land, and that irrespective of the existing relation, whether ruled by the latter or imposing their rule upon it. Emphatic testimony is given to this fact in the extensive spread of the cuneiform writing, the pre-eminent achievement of the Babylonian intellect. Throughout the whole of Western Asia it became the medium of intellectual exchange. Everywhere, so far as we are at present able to see, we discover it. It was used in Elam, in Armenia, and even in Asia Minor, the home of the Hittite script, which still remains undeciphered. The peoples of Palestine were familiar with it, and through it with the Babylonian language and thought. It was studied at the court of the Pharaohs, and in the fifteenth century B.C. it was the medium of diplomatic and political correspondence between Egypt and the states of Western Asia.

Inasmuch, then, as the development of Babylonia conditioned the historical and cultural advance and political character of Western Asia, the task of presenting its history is many sided, especially so when this history is to deal with a civilization extending over three thousand years, developing in the midst of barbarian neighbours, and subject to the most varied succession of incursions from without. Babylonian civilization was not confined to a single people—on the contrary, it was enjoyed and transmitted by peoples, of different homes and blood, who entered in succession the great plain of the Tigris and Euphrates and there, under the influence of its dominant culture, started upon a fresh career. The same was true of the neighbouring lands which felt in a measure the effects of this civilization, though with regard to these our knowledge is much more defective owing to the scantiness of our material.

Just as the great civilizations have developed along the great natural highways of communication, the great rivers, so the great movements of peoples originate in the treeless plains which afford grazing for the herds by which man lives in the nomad stage.

But great though the extent of this territory may be, to which the nomad lays claim, it is, nevertheless, able to yield support to only a comparatively small population. As the people multiply they are compelled to seek fresh fields for support, and naturally the simple, vigorous sons of nature are enticed by the attractions of civilization and the hope of easy victory over men who through the seductions of refinement have lost in virility.

As regards Babylonia there were three of these original centres which contributed to its population: the steppes of Europe, whence migrations took place over the Caucasus, around the Caspian Sea, or to the west through Asia Minor; the steppes of Central Asia to the northeast; south and southwest Arabia.

Of these three regions the first is of minor importance owing to the unfavourable conditions for numerical growth; the second, Central Asia, occupies a more important place. This, however, was true of both these centres: every wave of migration which went out from them toward Babylonia struck first upon the border states that stood under Babylonian influence, viz.: those of Asia Minor, where the Hittites had developed their peculiar life, and those of Syria, Armenia, and Elam. Babylonia was consequently protected, in a measure, by these buffer-states from incursions from both of these quarters. On the south and southwest it was different. Arabia, with its extended steppes, touched immediately upon Babylonia, and Arabia from time immemorial was the home of nomad tribes possessed of overmastering predatory instincts. The only natural boundary between the two lands was the Euphrates River. The roving nomad could sweep over the plain and skirt the cities on the west bank unhindered; that, too, even when a sturdy arm checked his passage to the rich pasturage on the east. The boundary which the Babylonians were compelled to defend was an extended one, and ran in parts through dreary wastes. It rarely happened, therefore, in olden days, any more than now, that the rulers of Babylonia were able to command a sufficient force to repel the impetuous rush of nomads and prevent them crossing the river. It was from this quarter that the old homeland of culture was exposed to the most frequent and permanent incursions, each, in turn, to spoil its predecessor of its title to sovereignty over the fertile plain. So far as our knowledge reaches, Arabia is the home of that family of people which, on linguistic grounds, we designate as Semitic. The history of Babylonia is, therefore, for the most part Semitic; the history of its neighbouring peoples, so far as they were subject to her influence, is also Semitic. In so far as it was modified otherwise from without we must look to the other two main regions already referred to as the centres whence the influence proceeded. It was in Babylonia that the Semites achieved their greatest attainments. There they developed all that their natural endowments under the given conditions could effect; there Semitic history, so far as it is a history of civilized people, discovers its field of movement. Even Islamism has its proper seat there, but we can no more speak of a Semitic-Islamic civilization, indeed even less, than of a Babylonian-Semitic: the Arabs succeeded by virtue of the Persian-Byzantine culture.

The actors in Babylonian history, so far as it falls within our vision, are Semites. Their speech was preponderatingly Semitic despite the non-Semitic elements of admixture in the population. But our historical knowledge, it need not be stated, does not reach back to the beginnings of Babylonian civilization. History begins with written tradition. Written tradition, however, presupposes a long period of development during which the transition is made, on the one hand, from the first crude efforts to body forth an idea in written form to the achievement of a serviceable script, and, on the other hand, from incoordinated efforts in thought to the development of the reasoning powers. These stages must have been left behind before events could be handed down by written records. It is a long step from the pictographs of savages to written narratives of wars and records of temple-building, such as we find in old Babylonian inscriptions of the fourth millennium B.C., and to the records of administration drawn up in systematic form during the same period. Possibly the peoples who surmounted the difficulties of the early stages laboured longer to accomplish their tasks than the three or four thousand years through which we can follow the cuneiform script in its use and development. We shall see that the oldest documents, at present known to us, are of Semitic origin—the work of Semites who came into Babylonia from without and, through war with one another, united in forming greater states. These records, however, show distinctly the influence of the old civilized stock that was in possession of the country prior to the Semites. It is to them, therefore, we must ascribe the origin of Babylonian culture and the invention of the cuneiform writing—for us they are one people, for we see them only through the veil of prehistoric time. Of their rise, growth, and fortunes, which must have been as varied and changing as those of the Semites of Babylonia, whose history fills the next three thousand years, we know nothing

 

THE SUMERIANS

 

THE oldest records we have are written in a non-Semitic language—the language of the Sumerians, as they are called in the later texts. This language is all that we know of this ancient people, the inventors of the cuneiform writing and the originators of Babylonian culture. This, however, is the weightiest and most convincing testimony to their importance. For, long after Sumerian ceased to be a spoken language, when the most varied peoples had settled in the Babylonian plain and had passed again in turn from the stage of its history, as the old Sumerians themselves had; when the roles of the different Semitic peoples were ended, when Persians, Macedonians, and Parthians still ruled there—almost to the beginning of the Christian era—the Sumerian language continued to be cultivated in Babylonia in connection with the sacred cult. It enjoyed there the dignity accorded to Latin as the tongue of the learned and of the church in the Middle Ages and in more modern times, and maintained itself in this role for a period more than twice as long.

If then, up to the present, no Sumerian speaks to us out of his own inscription, if the past of this remarkable people belongs to the prehistoric age, though its final achievements descend in an uninterrupted chain of tradition into our own time and civilization, it, nevertheless, comes nearer to us in the preservation of its speech than it could have done by any other of its intellectual feats. Inscriptions and religious texts in the Sumerian language have descended to us from the fourth millennium BC. The oldest of these inscriptions are those of the kings of Lagash. But, in addition to these, other inscriptions in Semitic-Babylonian language have come down to us from their immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. These are written by Semites, and as we shall see later, by Semites who consequently form, so to speak, a second layer of the population. We must assume that about the end of the fourth millennium the Sumerian speech had wholly, or almost wholly, disappeared from vulgar use, and at this time played practically the same role as Latin at the time of the Merovingians. We can readily comprehend how the language, maintained only by artificial means in the succeeding centuries, should have suffered a fate similar to that of Latin in the Middle Ages. A rejuvenation through the evolution of classic ideas, such as came to the Latin with the Renaissance, was foreign to the Oriental mind. Sumerian, and its idiom known as Akkadian, suffered constant deterioration in later times. Semiticisms were freely incorporated. The later the texts the stronger is the impression that they are composed of shortened and inflected Sumerian expressions by rejecting the original and totally different syntax. This Sumerian exhibits the same characteristics as the Monks-Latin, and even those of the macaronic compositions, though, in the latter case, the linguistic hybridations were often humorously meant, whereas this mongrel Sumerian was always serious. It will be readily understood that we are but imperfectly acquainted with the proper pronunciation of this old language when it is further borne in mind that the older the texts the greater is the number of ideographs employed in them. These ideographs, or symbols, though they suggest the meaning of the word, or expression, do not tell us how the latter was read. While, therefore, the meaning of the old inscriptions can be made out with at least approximate, if not always absolute, certainty through our knowledge of the meaning of the signs, the pronunciation, in so far as it is discoverable, depends upon the information supplied by the scribes of later centuries.

Notwithstanding the fact that we are in possession of numerous texts there remains much in connection with the language that is still unknown or obscure. Enough, however, is established to enable us to comprehend in a general way the character of the Sumerian, the oldest language of civilization. It is agglutinative, in structure essentially like the Turkish, and consequently wholly unlike the Semitic. The following sentence may serve as an illustration:

egal Ur-gur ungal Ur gal e-An-na in-ru-a-ka-ta=palace+ Ur - gur + king +Ur + man + e-Anna + he built + genitive particle +

in the palace of Urgur, the king of Ur, the builder of (the temple) E-anna. The genitive relation, which, in English, is expressed by "of"' between palace and Urgur, and appears in the same place in Semitic languages, is here thrown to the end, where it is expressed by ka. The whole sentence is, therefore, somewhat after the manner of German word-formations, a kind of compositum. In the same way, the preposition “in”, which is so important for us, since it designates the place and, therefore, stands at the beginning, is here found last of all (ta). We may note further the expression of the Semitic participle by the circumlocution gal ... in-ru-a=man ... +he built. The effort to establish a relationship between this language and any of the ancient tongues, even of the different ones spoken by surrounding peoples, or those of the present day, must be renounced. What has already been said with respect to its pronunciation is in itself suggestive here. Phonetic decay had already reached an advanced stage. The majority of words consist of only simple syllables with a vowel and consonant, or of one compound syllable, a consonant, vowel and consonant; but most of the latter have lost the final consonant, becoming thus open syllables. Moreover, a large number of words which were originally different are phonetically indistinguishable. The Sumerian language has, therefore, undergone a similar process of detrition to that found in the Chinese. The question of the linguistic relationship of the Sumerian to the languages of other peoples is a very enticing one for the linguist. But at present we know far too little of the structure and vocabulary of this tongue to anticipate much success for investigations of this problem. It is easy enough to pose it, but it is almost impossible to solve it so long as we remain ignorant of the history of the people who spoke it. Moreover, a literature in which thought is prevailingly expressed by suggesting ideas (or by a succession of signs representing ideas), and not by sounds, fails to supply the primary data necessary to the determination of the development of a language phonetically. Future investigations are as likely to fail of important results in settling the precise linguistic relationship of this old speech as have those hitherto attempted.

Of the history of the Sumerians we know nothing. The same is true of early Egyptian life. In the first historical period of the Old Kingdom, when the Semites appeared in Babylonia, civilization was fully developed; but scarcely anything is known from the inscriptions of the earlier times when civilization was in its infancy and youth. We may nevertheless, by looking to later times, and allowing ourselves to be guided by the analogy of similar conditions, draw at least one conclusion with reasonable certainty—the development of these civilizations was not realized in an idyllic age on the fruitful banks of the Euphrates and Nile. Foes and friends met together. The same relationships as we find among the peoples of both lands in later ages, such as are found among all civilized peoples between whom communication is not prevented by insurmountable barriers, must have existed in the grey dawn and early development of Sumerian history. Then, too, trade had its movements either and thither, kings must have exchanged letters, and clashed in arms, and one people bowed subject to another’s yoke.

 

THE EARLIEST IMMIGRATIONS OF SEMITES

 

As soon as the darkness of the distant past is illumined by the light shed from historical inscriptions, the oldest monuments which speak to us directly, not by way of inference, show us Semites settled in the plain of the Tigris and Euphrates, where they have already won the mastery and exercise lordship. The name Semites is now commonly employed to designate that family of people which speaks the same language as the Hebrews, who, in the genealogical table of Genesis X are counted with the descendants of Shem. It is puerile to point to the correctness of this table for a justification of this designation, or to its errors, to prove its unfitness. The principles which guided the biblical compiler were by no means those of the nineteenth century with its emphasis upon language. Even language is very defective and much overrated as a means for the determination of racial origins and connections; but insufficient as it is, it was little considered in the ancient Orient. Lately, however, it has been discovered that Elam, the first mentioned son of Shem (X, 22), which hitherto has been regarded as erroneously classed with the Semites, not only used the cuneiform script but also wrote a form of Babylonian similar to that employed in Canaan. Unexpectedly, too, our discoveries show this to have been the case in the age of the first Babylonian rulers of whom we know. The French excavations in Susa have also shown that Susa and Elam were then considered to belong to Babylonia, and that it was not until later that the Elamite language was used in writing. The genealogical table is, therefore, correct as regards Elam if we read it as the writer intended it. That it should have put Lud, i.e., Lydia, before Aram excites surprise, and the opinion is unanimous that we have a scribal error here. Besides Arpakshad, the best suggestion is that Lullu ought to be read. Lullu was the name of the border land between Assyria and Babylonia and Media. The proposal made by Jensen to read Lubdi for Lud is less worthy of attention, as this name, so far as we know, was given only to a region situate between northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. It is, nevertheless, possible that it was once employed more comprehensively to designate the northern part of the Babylonian territory of Armenia.

The home of the Semites was Arabia. The consideration of any other centre is excluded on geographical grounds. Up to the present day the purest Semites are to be found in Arabia. There, under similar conditions, they live on the same plane of development as their tribal relations who in the fourth millennium won for themselves the fertile and cultivated lands of Babylonia. The eyes of the descendants still look longingly in the same direction despite the gloomy contrast between its present impoverishment and neglect and the richness and cultivation of the ancient days.

The only routes along which the nomad tribes of Arabia could migrate led toward Syria and Palestine. The ocean set bounds to their movements in other directions. Migrations westward or eastward would presuppose the use of ships, and this a transition from the nomadic life of the desert to settled homes. The fisherman, at least, must needs have pitched his tent, but large numbers are never nourished by the fisherman’s craft. From South Arabia, therefore, no exodus of importance occurred. It was only when the Sabmans, and the peoples united with them, had developed a semi-civilization of their own that settlers crossed over from South Arabia into Abyssinia and Africa, and of this movement very little is known.

We are able to determine, approximately at least, the course and the time of these migrations since we have a fairly accurate knowledge of the beginning and end of the last of them and a corresponding certainty with regard to the first. They are the natural result of overpopulation. They must, consequently, recur with a certain periodicity under similar conditions of life and society. This a priori consideration is amply supported by the inscriptions. We have definite knowledge of four main Semitic migrations northward. The last, the Arabian, we may take first, as it stands in the clearer light of later history, and culminated in the conquests of Islam. It began about the seventh or eighth century BC, when the influx of Arabs into Syria is known to have taken place. This was preceded by the Aramaic, the beginning of which we can also approximately discover. As early as the fifteenth to the thirteenth century we find Mesopotamia overrun by Aramaic nomads. The first advances of these tribes must have antedated this period. Prior to the Aramaic was the Canaanitic-Hebraic (Amorite). If, in view of what has been said, we allow in round numbers a thousand years between these great movements we shall arrive at a date or this latter one which is supported by the monuments. About 2400 to 2100 BC we find that Western Asia, Babylonia, Egypt likewise, are in possession of a people best described as Canaanite. Another thousand years, or more, earlier than this the Babylonian Semites have entered into the full inheritance of the old Sumerian civilization.

These are the four great groups of Semitic peoples whose successive movements most vitally affected the history of Western Asia. One must bear in mind, however, that computations such as the above are only approximate—the estimate may be a century too high or too low for any, or all, of the groups. To set definite limits to any great migration, however tempting, is manifestly impossible. In all such movements of great masses one people is driven before another, and the last part of a group is still on the move when the first contingent of the next takes up the march, as, for example, in the case of the Hebrews and Aramaeans about the middle of the second millennium BC.

 

THE PRINCIPAL CITIES

 

It is to be supposed that the Semites who entered Babylonia found there on arrival a highly developed civilization. This they accepted, and possessed themselves of the superior advantages which it offered as barbarians always do in similar circumstances. Our earliest sources make mention of a number of cities whose gods and their worship were held in high reverence. Centrally situated at the converging points of the great highways they remained throughout the course of history marts of business and fosterers of culture. The majority of them were pre-Semitic settlements, which were completely Semitized on the arrival of the Semitic nomad wanderers. To us they are Semitic cities, just as Cologne and Augsburg are German.

The most important of these cities lying along the Euphrates, beginning with the most southerly, are Eridu (Abu Shahrein), the seat of the worship of Ea, the god who bestowed upon man all the elements of civilization; Ur (Mugheir), where Sin, the moon-god, was worshipped in southern Babylonia; Lagash, (or Sir-pur-la, as the ideogram is read phonetically). The modern Telloh represents the ancient site. It was here the French consul De Sarzec made his important discoveries. There is also a city whose site is not yet known, and whose name, written ideographically, is not yet read, but from whose rulers several inscriptions have come down to us. Since the second sign in the name was erroneously connected with the sign for bowl (Ban) the name “Bow-city” was given to it. But the sign is rather the one which later represented the war chariot and it might, therefore, more correctly be called the city of the War Chariot Isin (formerly read Nisin and also Pashe), likewise yet undiscovered, in later times the seat of a Babylonian dynasty; Larsa (Senkereh), the seat of the southern Babylonian sun-worship; Nippur(Nuf­far), the city of the god Bel, where the Americans have excavated with so much success; Uruk (Warka), the seat of the Nana-Ishtar cult. The latter two from their position looked toward North Babylonia and exercised a corresponding political influence. In North Babylonia the most important cities are Babylon, the city of Marduk, but it was not until later that it rose to preeminence; Kish (Uhaimir?); Cutha (Tel-Ibrahim), the city of Nergal; farther north Sippar(Abu-Habba), the seat of North Babylonian sun-worship. It is known to us chiefly by the excavations of Rassam and more recently of Schell. Abu Habba is the Sippar of Shamash, the sun-god. But there was another Sippar (of Anunit) whose site is unknown though it was probably not far distant from the former and, therefore, a sort of pendant to it. The modern Deir has been thought to represent its site. It is doubtless identical with the otherwise named Sippar of Arura. In one inscription we read also of a Sippar of the desert and called the Old Sippar in which designation there probably is reference merely to the more ancient ruins of the city. Dur-ilu, with its worship Anu, the sky-god, is still unidentified. It commanded the passes leading into Elam and was, therefore, the first city to bear the brunt of the Elamite attacks: Upi, (Opis), on the Tigris, was he most northerly of the large Babylonian cities. Others we need not mention here. Farther to the forth the Mesopotamian steppe begins, and here as we go northward on the Tigris we pass the larger cities: Ashur (Kalca-Shergat), Caleh (Nimrud), and Nineveh, which in later times became the capital of the Assyrian kingdom. Lying to the east, toward Media, lay Arbail (Arbela, the modern Irbil) commanding the eastern region of Assyria between the upper and lower Zab. Here, too, was the junction of the highways leading to Media and the regions around the Urumia Sea. To return again to the country between the two rivers, we note the mountainous region of the Singara, the Sinjar Range, which in former times must have counted many cities even though no race of them remains in our historical records. The valleys of the Khabur and Balikh, further westward, which run from north to south, offered the necessary physical conditions for larger settlements in the great Mesopotamian plain. Numerous mounds enclosing the remains of ancient cities dot this entire region and, doubtless, hold their treasures for the future pick and spade. The most important of all, and one that succeeded in maintaining a prosperous existence until late in history, was Harran on the upper Balik. It was the northern seat of the cult of the moon-god: Arban an Tel-Halaf will be referred to under Assyria.

These are by no means all of the important cities of Babylonia. With the exception of the more arid portions of these regions it is scarcely possible for us to overestimate the numerous towns and villages which dotted the plains and hillsides. Babylonia, especially in its prosperous periods, like Egypt, tilled its soil more after the style of the gardener than that of the agriculturalist, and this form of husbandry supports a greater population and lends itself to concentration. The cities above named are those only which on account of their political and religious importance were prominent in the life of the nation. They are, moreover, in part, those in which the excavations have been conducted which have given us a knowledge of the land. Numberless other mounds hold the secrets of their forgotten past.

 

THE BABYLONIAN KINGDOM - THE EARLIEST TIMES, CIR. 3000 BC

 

THE Semitic Babylonians on entering the country took possession of it in the same way as history teaches us their kinsmen obtained their possessions in later times—the Chaldeans in Babylonia, the Hebrews in Canaan. They pressed forward into the open country, asserting themselves there in the face of a half-hearted opposition. Gradually the cities fell into their hands, and, therewith, they were masters of the land. Formerly wandering nomads they now became dwellers in cities. The old civilization they took over without reserve. Political changes of great importance followed of necessity. Formerly they were free nomads under the leadership of a sheikh, now they became subjects of a king. The leader knew better than his "brothers" whom he led how to use the institutions which he found at hand to his own.. advantage.

We must, consequently, assume the existence at first of a number of city-kingdoms corresponding to the old centres of culture, which had been founded long before our knowledge of them begins. Each of the invading tribes took possession of one city or another for itself. As nomads, the different tribes were natural enemies unless there existed between them a blood-covenant. Now again, the kings were scarcely in possession of their new kingdoms before the old feeling of hostility asserted itself among them. New wars had to be waged. Here one emerged from the fray of battle victorious, another fell, until at length, and gradually, the numerous petty city-states were fashioned into several larger kingdoms. This accomplished, the old status quo of the Sumerian age, so far as relates to the cultural necessities of the land, was once more regained.

It is natural to expect that the oldest monuments of the Semitic period will be found in the inscriptions of the kings of the different large cities who were at war with one another. This expectation is confirmed by the latest discoveries. Few as these inscriptions are, in proportion to what remains to be unearthed, they are nevertheless quite sufficient to substantiate the correctness of our inferences, from the natural order of development, as to conditions of life in the primitive period.

The oldest inscriptions which have come down to us are from the kings of Lagash in South Babylonia, of Ur, Uruk, and Kish farther to the north, and of the city whose name we are unable to read, all of which were engaged with one another in a war of subjugation. All these are to be assigned to a period before 3000 BC, speaking generally from 3500 BC down to about 3000 BC. During this time the wars of the Semitic city-kings were fought. To enter into a detailed narrative of their conflicts would be a thankless task, and the recital of the unspeakable combination of signs which make up their heroes’ names, the correct pronunciation of which is still an enigma, would convey no meaning to the non ­specialist. The outcome of these wars was greater kingdoms. The king of the conquering city became the sovereign of the conquered princes, who thenceforth bear the title of patesi. All these kings, especially those in the South, still wrote in Sumerian; indeed, Sumerian continued to be used much longer as the literary language in South Babylonia than in North Babylonia—almost a thousand years longer. We have numerous inscriptions from patesis of Lagash, that is, from vassal princes of a ruling king. They belong to the closing period of the fourth millennium BC, and the last of them were contemporaries of the South Babylonian kings of Sumer and Akkad to be mentioned shortly.

Some of the earlier of these South Babylonian patesis were subject to North Babylonian kings, two of whom, Shargani-shar-ali (Sargon I) and his son Naram-Sin, we are acquainted with through their own inscriptions. The first of these still calls himself "King of Agade," a city in North Babylonia. Thus it is seen that the South was subjugated by the North. The inscriptions which relate to his reign and that of Naram-Sin’s prove that these kings extended their conquests over all Western Asia to an extent, at least, equal to that to which they were carried at any time under Babylonian influence. They ruled not only Babylonia and Mesopotamia, but also Syria and Palestine. Sargon is said to have embarked upon the Mediterranean. He records that in an expedition which lasted for three years he conquered regions beyond the sea. We do not know whether he here refers only to Cyprus, but the conquest would appear to have been more far-reaching than that. One thing is certain, namely, that this was no mere plundering exploit, but a lasting subjugation. He expressly states that he erected his monuments of victory in the subjugated territories, and established an organized government in the land. Captives were taken thence to Babylon. There Babylonian laws were imposed, and thither Babylon's mandates were carried. Most noteworthy of all, Babylonian governors and officials sent their official reports to the king couched in his own tongue. Two thousand years before a word of Greek was heard in the Midland Sea natives of its isles were familiar with the cuneiform script and read the language of Babylon. The traces of Babylonian influence there in ancient times are not wanting.

That wars were waged with the barbarians of the North lay in the very nature of the situation. Arabia, Dilmun (in the Persian Gulf), Magan (bordering on South Babylonia and the Persian Gulf), Melukha (on northwest of Arabia) likewise were called to arms against the forces of these kings. Thus, nothing short of a great Babylonian kingdom was founded, extending over the greater part of Western Asia, striving in extent with the dominions of Assyria in her most flourishing period. The names of Sargon and Naram­Sin are, therefore, linked with an early golden age in the history of Babylonian Semites. Their Semitism is attested even by their inscriptions, which in contrast to those of South Babylonia are written in Semitic. Their date is about 3000 BC.

Their contemporaries were patesis of Lagash. Conspicuous among them is Gudea, from whom several long inscriptions have come down to us. These bear witness, as do those of Sargon and his son, to the widespread rule of Babylonian power and civilization. In the accounts of his buildings, on which he dwells with pride, he tells us whence he procured the various materials for their construction. Cedars were brought from Mount Amanus, dolerite stone for his statues from Magan. This bears witness to the extension of peaceful intercourse at this period, and makes at the same time for the spread of Sumerian culture in the preceding days, when similar conditions existed. The ideas and political achievements of this and the preceding age continued to exert great influence down to the latest times, even when their origin was but little understood. When Nabunaid, the last king of Babylon, found an inscription of Sargon's son, Naram-Sin, and appealed to the scholars of his court for information as to its age, they had not the historical data at hand to make a correct computation. They roughly ascribed it to 3200 years before his own time, or to cir. 3800 BC, thereby exceeding its real age by 800 years or more. [The number is reached by a method of reckoning which prevailed everywhere in antiquity; it is based upon astrological cycles - 40 x 80 years. Forty is the number of the vernal constellation of the Pleiades, and eighty is also a customary cycle, and was known to Mohammed as khuqub. The savants of the king doubtless intended by adopting this method to appeal to his vanity. A reign that began a new epoch was illustrious as introducing a new world era; and so it happened, but not in the way the court flatterers intended. Cyrus came and with him a new epoch for the Orient.]

The more or less isolated facts known to us of these times do not furnish sufficient material for the framing of an adequate picture of them. It is, moreover, a matter of minor interest, even in connection with a more minute treatment of the history of Western Asia, to follow in detail the wars waged between these city-kingdoms and their varying fortunes, now winning the prize of victory, now bemoaning the fate of the vanquished. As it was in Islam after the fall of the Caliphate, and in Syria almost always when it was not under the rule of a greater power, so it was here. We have to do for the most part with kings of uncertain names whose deeds had significance only for their own age. It is still impossible to bring the majority of the events recorded in their inscriptions into sure and satisfactory relation either chronologically or geographically. At present they are of importance only to the specialist.

Of more general interest is the question as to the general development of Babylonia, in view of these mutual hostilities. It is very plain that a state of strife was general at the time. So far as our present knowledge extends only Sargon and Naram-Sin ruled over a large West Asiatic Kingdom. How far the rule of the kings of Kish, Uruk, Lagash, etc., reached cannot in each case be determined. It is true that Ungal-zag-gi-si of Uruk records that he marched from the lower sea to the upper sea, that is, from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. We must, therefore, conclude that these city-kings ruled at times over large territories; at all events we are compelled to think that this period did not belong to the primitive age of civilization, or that Babylonian cities and rulers then broke forth from their narrow boundaries for the first time. Even in these days of hoary antiquity there emerge practically the same conditions in this respect as existed later during the wars of Babylonia with Assyria, or at the time of the fall of the Caliphate.

A further question arises, viz.: to what body of Semites do the kings of this time belong? Incessant change and internecine wars point to a period of dissolution or disorder. The conditions are such as must have marked the beginning of the Canaanite immigration or the close of the period during which the first Semites held the country. The movements which we describe as immigrations are not completed at once and do not imply the immediate subjugation of the old inhabitants by the new intruders. The fait accompli is preceded by many attempts and reverses and often by centuries of intermittent struggle. In civilized lands the population is never, ethnologically speaking, of unmixed stock. When, therefore, in times of warfare we see first one city then another victorious, the victors in this instance may belong predominantly to one layer of the population, in that to another. We must then conceive of it as a transitional period, the period of the gradual influx of the new Canaanite hordes in the face of the determined opposition by the older Babylonians. In this connection we must bear in mind that the character of the political regime of a civilized state is dependent not upon its ethnic affinities but upon its civilization. The Normans who conquered England very soon—counting still by centuries—became Englishmen. The ruling houses of England and Russia are English and Russian despite their German descent.

The transitional period which we are inclined to assume for the earliest rulers was, consequently, strongly influenced by Canaanites. The state of things which confronts us is much the same as that which we shall meet again in Babylonia in consequence of the Chaldean immigration. It ended with victory for the Canaanites and their subsequent spread over the whole land. With the first dynasty of Babylon the victory is complete; and also in the time of the later kings of Ur. We must consequently regard Urgur and Dungi, and their contemporaries, the last patesis of Lagash, as ruling at a time when the Canaanite was already in the land.

The transitional and unstable character of the age is further attested by the noteworthy facts in connection with the development of the arts. The sculptures and writing of the first king of Lagash, Ur-Nina, are in part so crude that we might imagine ourselves face to face with the beginnings of civilization. But the character of the script, nevertheless, proves that the first stages of development then belonged to a distant past. Soon after this monuments of much better workmanship appear. Eannadu, the grandson of Ur-nina, left behind him a monument, the so-called Stele of Vultures, in which we note a great advance in the artist's work. The statues of Gudea manifest not only an aptness for technical work of the first order, but also an artistic comprehension on the part of the artist in all that is unconventional, which puts him in the same class with the brilliant artists of the old empire of Egypt. Furthermore, they show the development of a conventional idea in body-pose and arrangement of dress, which, with the execution of the work, presuppose centuries of patient study. Thus we are forced to conclude that the crudity of Ur-nina’s art finds its explanation in a temporal decline of culture in Lagash as a natural result of conquest, or of other unknown causes.

Although it is at present impossible to assign Sargon and Naram-Sin to their proper chronological places, so much at least is certain they belonged to the same centuries as the patesis of Lagash. Their sculptures and inscriptions show the same delicacy of execution, though to some extent there is an individuality of style, and their writing has a particularly definite character which is the certain result of long use for monumental purposes. They both employ Semitic instead of Sumerian in their inscriptions in common with the North Babylonian kings of Kish, whose writing is likewise strikingly similar to theirs. As a general rule Sumerian was employed as the official language in inscriptions of South Babylonia, whereas in the North the Babylonian-Semitic prevailed. And this was the case not only in Babylonia itself but also in subject lands, and in those which had yielded to the spell of her civilization during the time of the North Babylonian rulers. A dedicatory offering, which probably came from Sippar, contains an inscription of a king of Gutium (Armenia south of Lake Van), which is written exactly like those of Naram-Sin. Another from a king of the Lulubi, in the Zagros, shows the same character.

The picture which, with the help of the material at our disposal, we have sketched of the most important events, and the chronological succession of the kings suggested, are presented with many reservations which admit the possibility of fundamental changes. It may not be amiss at this point to enter briefly into a few matters of detail.

We know, for example, from an inscription found at Nippur of a king who calls himself "lord (?) of Kengi," that is, Sumer or South Babylonia, "and ..." The name of the city which should follow is broken off. It is impossible to determine his date and no reasons exist for placing him before those that follow. The inscription reads :

"To the God Bel, the lord of lands, En-shag­kush-an-na, the lord (?) of Kengi, king of ... the spoil of Kish, the wicked of heart, presented."

The inscription relates to a victory over the city of Kish, whose kings according to inscriptions referred to below were rulers of Babylonia. Man­ishdu-shu, the king of Kish, is known from a short inscription and also from a lengthy one upon an obelisk found in Susa. As it contains the record of a land-survey of North Babylonian territory it was doubtless brought to Susa from its original site. The name of Uru-ka-gina, son of En-gil-sa, patesi of Lagash, appears upon it. It is possible to identify this ruler, the son of a patesi, with the well-known Uru-ka-gina, king of Lagash. Mesalim, a son of his, is also mentioned, and he may be identified with great probability with the Mesalim to whom Ungal-kurum-zigum, patesi of Lagash, dedicated a mace-head.

Another king of Kish from whom we have inscriptions is Urumush. He tells of victories won over Elam and a border people known as the Barase. And one named Ur-zag-uddu calls himself "king of Kish and king of ..." He also consecrated an object of some kind to Bel of Nip­pur. Furthermore, a lance-head was found in Telloh, below the strata of Ur-nina, belonging to Ungal-da (?)-ak (?) king of Kish.

One or two other kings of Uruk are also known to us from the inscriptions of Nippur, who likewise can be assigned to this period only in a general way. The determination of their relation to one another or to those previously mentioned is not possible.

The one who left behind him the longest inscription is Ungal-zag-gi-si, “king of Uruk, king of the land, son of U-Kush, patesi of the city of the War Chariot”. He lays claim to the old culture cities of Ur, Larsa, and the city of the War Chariot, and boasts of subjugating all lands from east to west and of having marched in triumph from the lower sea (the Persian Gulf) to the upper sea (the Mediterranean).

Two other kings, Ungal-ki-gub-ni-du, and Un­gal-si-kisal, co-regent, and probably son of the former, claim sovereignty over Uruk and Ur.

 

KINGS AND PATESIS OF LAGASH

 

FROM Lagash we have in addition to some older and as yet undeciphered inscriptions those of Ur-nina, the son of Ni-gu-du, king of Lagash. He was succeeded by his son A-kur-gal, who in turn was followed by his son E-anna-du I.

A very important stele of victory, the so-called stele of vultures, and several inscriptions of E-anna-du have been discovered. In these he calls himself as well as his father patesi. It appears, therefore, that after Ur-nina Lagash lost its independence. Once, however, E-anna-du calls both himself and his father king, and since he reports victories over other cities he must at times have regained his independence. He conquered the mountains of Sumashtu. That is, Mesopotamia and Syria, and also the North Babylonian city Gish-gal, the city of the War Chariot, Uruk, Ur, Larsa, Az, Susa (?) and others—in short, an entire kingdom. The king of Opis appears to have been his chief opponent, and he may originally have been his sovereign with both Opis and Kish under him. E-anna-du subdued Kish and assumed sovereign title over it. Opis appears to have risen again to power after the defeat of its king.

E-anna-du was succeeded by his brother En­anna-du, and a cone inscription of his son and successor, Entemena, affords us a glance at the conditions of the time and the relations existing between several of the rulers and states. It tells of a certain boundary dispute that had existed. Mesalim, the king of Kish, had marked off by a stele the boundary line between Lagash and the city of the War Chariot. These cities were, therefore, neighbours, and also his vassals. Ush, the patesi of the city of the War Chariot, removed Mesalim’s stele and made an attack on the territory of Lagash, but was vigorously attacked and driven back by Mesalim, who exercised over him sovereign authority. Under E-anna­du I, the uncle of Entemena, the delimitation of the boundary was again effected, by means of a canal, in co-operation with En-a-kalli, the patesi of the city of the War Chariot, and Mesalim’s boundary stone, which had been removed by Ush was restored to its place. Then Ur-lumma, another patesi of the city of the War Chariot, and probably the successor, of En-a-kalli, entered upon fresh hostilities against En-arena-du, the brother and successor of E-anna-du, and destroyed the boundary stones. The war appears to have been waged at first chiefly by E-anna-du, then by Entemena who came off victor, putting Ur-lumma to rout and appointing Ili, a former priest, as patesi in his stead in the city of the War Chariot. Entemena’s inscription then tells us, in Col. IV, that he commanded Ili to construct certain canals and buildings and imposed upon him a tribute of 36,000 gur of grain.

We see from this that Mesalim was king of Kish and suzerain of Lagash (and the other cities of Babylonia) prior, at least, to E-anna-du. And since we know, from the mace-head inscription, the name of the patesi of Lagash who was subject to him we must, accordingly, assign him a place before Ur-nina. Furthermore, we find Lagash enjoying a more independent position and defending its rights after the victories of E-anna­du. It now appears as the suzerain of another state which up to that time stood upon an equality with itself. When, nevertheless, its patesi does not assume the title of king, it must on its part have recognized a higher imperium. It is possible, however, that this relation was now only a formal one, such as appears to have existed prior to Hammurabi between the kings of North and South Babylonia, and occasionally between the king of Egypt and his provincial princes.

Entemena was succeeded by his son, Enannadu II, and he in turn by his son, Lumma-dur, who is known to us from his own inscriptions. At this point the succession of the patesis of Lagash, so far as we know it, is interrupted. We are tempted to put next in the line of its rulers Urukagina, the king of Lagash. The general appearance of his inscriptions at least suggest this rather than priority to Ur-nina. But we are well aware that nothing is more certain than the inconclusiveness of arguments based upon such data. Urukagina takes at one time the title king of Lagash, at another king of Girsu. The site of Girsu is not yet determined; but it always stood in close connection with Lagash. The adoption of different titles proves, however, that the reign of Urukagina was not free from the usual civil strifes.

Within this chronological gap must fall also the reigns of Sargon and Naram-Sin, for they cannot be placed very much before Ur-gur of Ur, and the next series of patesis, as proved by documents, is immediately connected with them. We have seal impressions that were appended to dispatches sent by a patesi of Lagash to Sargon and Naram­Sin. This patesi, Ungai-ushum-gal by name, was servant to both, and his son Ur-e was in all probability his successor. Another patesi of Ur, viz., Ur-utu, appears as contemporary of Ur-e; thus the same relation of Ur to the North at this period is established. The next patesi of Lagash was Ur-bau, of whom we have a number of statues and inscriptions, which were found in Telloh (Lagash). Naim-makh-ni, who married Ur-bau’s daughter, was also a patesi of Lagash, and doubtless Ur-bau’s successor.

The next patesi known to us is Gudea, who cannot have been separated by a great space of time from Nam-makh-ni. He is the best known of the rulers of Lagash. We possess several of his statues, a large number of smaller monuments, two long inscriptions and numerous short ones. Lagash must have been a flourishing and wealthy city during his regime. His inscriptions tell of the buildings which he erected, for which he imported the material from all parts of the world known to him.

Ur-ningirsu, Gudea's son, united to his patesiate the honours of priesthood. He exercised the functions of the latter office under Dungi, the son of Ur-gur of Ur. At this point, then, the chronological nexus between the princes of Lagash and their overlords is again discovered. It would appear that Ur-ningirsu first held the patesiate, and that, for reasons unknown to us, he was deposed from that office. Convicted or suspected of inability to rule, he was not, however, deemed unworthy of the priesthood. At all events his son, Gal-ka-ni, possibly also his grandson, Khala-lama, still held rule under Dungi as patesi of Lagash. Khala-lama has left us a short inscription upon a fragment of a statue which he dedicated to the goddess Bau for the life of Dungi, which proves that they were contemporaries. The title patesi, however, is not clearly assumed in the inscription by Khala-lama, though it is given to his father.

The last of the patesis of Lagash known to us from inscriptions, is Ur-ningul, who brings us down to the time of the kings of “Ur and the Four Quarters of the World”.

During the last few pages we have diverged somewhat from the main course of our story for the purpose of introducing a few details as side­lights upon the historical situation. Let us now return to the larger movements of history. In learned circles and in political life the geographical names and political titles of these earliest times continued long in use, and even in the latest period were greatly in favour. The wars of the Semites, whether or not they were the continuation of Sumerian conditions, resulted in the formation of two great kingdoms in Babylonia. The one had its seat of empire in South Babylonia, and its kings bore the general title king of Shumer and Akkad. The other was in North Babylonia, and its kings called themselves "kings of the Four Quarters of the World." Farther still to the north, with its chief city (possibly Harran) in Mesopotamia, another kingdom developed whose kings assumed the title kings of the World. Between these three kingdoms wars were waged and frequently one king triumphed over the others. Thus we see here a further development of the period of the city-kingdoms. Only a few details of some of these rulers have come down to us. We know, however, that their titles maintained their significance down to the last days of Babylonian independence. All the later kings of Babylonia and Assyria, each according to his possessions, adopted them.

Within the sphere of Babylonian culture, at this time, stood Elam, Anzan, and Suri, now at war with her, now her subjects, as we can most plainly see from the testimony derived from the Assyrian period. Anzan, and Suri, from which came the later name Lyco-Syria, began on the west of Elam and stretched in a northerly course around the Mesopotamian plain, thus reaching virtually from Media to Cappadocia. To the northeast was the barbarous people known as the Unman­Manda, or Manda hordes, the Babylonian Scythians. On the north, practically corresponding to Armenia, lay Gutium, or the territory of the "Kuti," from one of whose kings we have an inscription in the Semitic language and in the style of the time of Naram-Sin. It relates to the dedication of an object set up in Babylonia, probably in Sippar, and is similar to the dedications made by foreigners to the Greek oracle. In Asia Minor, beginning with Cappadocia, lay the region of the Khatti, or Hittites, who came to the front later. The northern part of Palestine was known soon after as the "West-land." The statements, already referred to, about Sargon, whether historical or not, prove that the Mediterranean was navigated. Arabia on its western side was known as Melukha, and on the eastern as Magan, and appears to have been more accessible to the ancient Babylonians than it was later to the Assyrians or to us of modern times. Southward, the Persian Gulf must also have been navigated, for Dilmun, the island Bahrein, came within the bounds of Babylonian interests, and monuments with cuneiform inscriptions have been found there. It is, moreover, scarcely conceivable that Gudea brought the stone from Magan by any other means or route than the sea. As Naram­ Sin’s expeditions prove, Dilmun, Magan, and Melukha fell more within the Babylonian horizon (as, indeed, they did in Islamic times) than they did when Assyria was at the height of her power.

The numerous monuments of this period evince technical skill of the highest order. The earliest inscriptions and monuments of the kings of Lagash are naturally very crude, so markedly so that we are tempted to attribute lack of skill to a decline consequent upon the Semitic invasion. But there quickly followed a new stage comparable to that of the Old Empire in Egypt. The inscriptions of Sargon and Naram-Sin are distinguished by a beautiful script, and so excellent is the technical execution of Gudea’s statues that archaeologists once thought it necessary to assume a Greek influence. A vast number of documents of this period relating to the administration of temples and lands have been recovered. They belonged originally to the Lagash archives.

Such was Babylonia in her sphere of influence and cultural attainments 3000 BC and earlier. Possibly at that time she reached the zenith of her development. The age of the beginnings of civilization, the age when the Sumerians stood upon the level of the Italic peoples in the eighth century BC, of the Slavs from the eighth to the twelfth century AD, had then long passed away, leaving to history neither monument nor message... 

 

THE KINGS OF UR, ISIN, LARSA, CIR. 3000-2400 B.C.

 

THE last inscriptions of the patesis of Lagash, who are known to us, and who were immediate successors of Gudea, contain dedications to new kings from whom we have numerous inscriptions from the cities of South and North Babylonia. These rulers call themselves king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad. Their inscriptions, at least those from the southern cities, are, like those from Lagash, written in Sumerian. We have, in these facts, evidence of a complete change from the preceding time. The sceptre of sovereignty has passed from the north to the south. The kings of Ur rule Babylonia instead of the kings of Agade—inscriptions found in North Babylonia show that it, as well as the South, passed to their dominion.

This kingdom of Sumer and Akkad was ruled over by three dynasties. The first is known as the Dynasty of Ur, so-called in accordance with its title and seat of government. Chief among its kings were

UR-GUR AND HIS SON DUNGI

3000 B.C. Their numerous inscriptions contain only records of the building of temples in all the important cities of Babylonia, in the South as well as in the North. As regards their political deeds and power they convey no direct information. It is nevertheless clear from the expulsion of the North Babylonian rulers that they came into possession of their territory. Dungi in one of his North Babylonian inscriptions written in Semitic calls himself king of the Four Regions as Naram-Sin does. Apart, therefore, from the internal revolution, the Babylonian domain of power and culture remained as it was before. Just as Dungi in North Babylonia had previously done so his successors call themselves in their inscriptions, found in the South, kings of Ur, kings of the Four Regions, and omit the title king of Sumer and Akkad. Their seat of government must consequently be looked for in the North. The political centre moved steadily toward the capitals of Sargon and Naram-Sin, and the South, with its adherence to Sumerian thought and modes of life, lost proportionately in importance. Even the names of this dynasty, and all the following ones, are purely Semitic in form. It would, therefore, appear that Dungi’s successors, like Naram-Sin, were North Babylonians, who resided in the South. About 2600 or 2500 the dynasty came to an end. The supremacy passed into the hands of less vigorous rulers whose capital lay farther to the North.

THE KINGS OF ISIN-2600-2500 (?)

The second ruling-house is called the dynasty of Isin, after its capital. Its kings call themselves "kings of Isin," "kings of Sumer and Akkad." Here again we have evidence of another revolution. Even the names of the kings bear witness to this fact. For, notwithstanding their use of Sumerian in their inscriptions, in common with their predecessors and successors, they departed from the previously established custom in the South of giving to their own names a Sumerian form, it is evident at once that theirs are Semitic like those of the northern kings, Naram-Sin and others. The last of these kings was. called Ishme­Dagan ("Dagan heard"). His complete title was, "Ishme-Dagah, the governor of Nippur, the prince of Ur, the Uddadu of Eridu, lord of Uruk, king of Isin, king of Sumer and Akkad, the beloved spouse of the goddess Nana." It is clear from this compound that the name of the deity Dagan is "Canaanitic"; and we have even at this early period Canaanites before us, a fact of importance as we shall see when we come to discuss the first dynasty of Babylon. Five kings of this dynasty are known at present, ISHBIGIRRA,GAMIL-NINIB, LIBIT-ANUNIT, BUR-SIN, ISHMÉ-DAGAN. The close of the dynasty we may assign approximately to 2500-2400 B.C.

THE DYNASTY OF LARSA-2500-2400

The third and last series of the independent rulers of Southern Babylonia exercised sovereignty from Larsa, the capital, from which the dynasty derives its name. Three of its kings are known to us, viz., NUR-RAMMAN, SIN-IDDIN, and RIM­SIN, who succeeded in turn to the throne. From the time of these and the preceding kings a great number of business documents have come down to us, and these, since they are dated according to important events, furnish us with much valuable information about the military movements and other significant undertakings of the times. But no royal inscriptions giving a historical resume have been found. Instead of them we have only the usual building and dedicatory inscriptions. Rim-Sin, the last king of the dynasty, was an Elamite—not a Babylonian. He expressly states in his inscriptions that he was the son of the Elamite Kudur-Mabuk, who appears to have subjugated the entire domain of Babylonia as far as Phoenicia, and left his son upon the throne of Southern Babylonia as the last "king of Sumer and Akkad."

Elam was the most powerful opponent that Babylonia had, as is sufficiently apparent from the records of earlier times. At this time she must have descended with irresistible force, for the whole land of Babylonia and its dependent states became the vassals of Elam. When we bear this in mind, together with what has just been said of the probable Canaanite connection of the last dynasty, and with what we shall presently discover to have been the facts in connection with the first dynasty of Babylon, it will be evident that the role of the "Babylonian Semites" has come to an end. The first post-Sumerian period of Babylonian history has already passed, and we find ourselves in a time when new conditions are emerging into view. Other peoples are entering into the land, or are already there. The old wars are waged again, and once more there is no Babylonian kingdom. The powerful neighbour’s star is, for a time, in the ascendant and a heavy hand is laid upon the old culture-land—conditions which in later times frequently reoccur.

 

THE FIRST DYNASTY OF BABYLON—“CANAANITE”

 

WITH respect to the changes which occurred in the different dynasties previously described much remains uncertain and unknown. We are but imperfectly informed both as regards the exact time and the causes and conditions which produced them. In the period to which we now come the case is altered. The essential aspects of the change which followed these dynastic struggles emerge in the clear light of history. It was a change which culminated in new relations which were the natural outcome of the preceding wars.

At the same time that the Southern Babylonian kings of Larsa and some of their predecessors of the dynasty of Isin held sway there ruled in Northern Babylonia, in Babylon, or by preference in Sippar (owing perhaps to its connection with Agade, the capital of Sargon I), a succession of princes which, following the Babylonian king-lists we designate The First Babylonian Dynasty. After the time of Sargon and Naram-Sin, when the North was predominant, as we have already seen, kings of the South as early as the second dynasty of Ur lay claim in their titles to sovereignty over the North. Numerous business documents have been recovered from this period, and it is noteworthy that in them the rulers of Northern Babylonia are never called kings. It is not until the later subjugation of the South that the royal title is ascribed to them. The ready inference to be drawn is that the northern rulers exercised sovereignty as vassals of the kings of the South. The Southern Babylonian kings of Isin, similarly to the kings of the dynasty of Ur, and contrary to Naram-Sin, took up their residence again in the old capital of Sumer and Akkad, and left the rule of the North to the independent management of their vassals in Babylon. That, at least, was the formal state of affairs. It is, however, a very frequent occurrence in such relations that the alleged sovereign is dependent upon his vassals who possess the power, while the title alone is his. And it is quite possible that there existed between the kings of Sumer and Akkad and their vassals in Northern Babylonia a relation similar to that between the Caliphs of Bagdad and the Buyids, or other Sultans. The same relation existed under the kings of the Larsa dynasty. The last of these kings, the Elamite, Rim-Sin, was overthrown by the fifth king of this first Babylonian dynasty after the vassal relation had become weakened, doubtless long before, and at the time was virtually ineffective. With this change a new political era was ushered in. The independence of the South was destroyed for all time. Thereafter, the kings of Babylon rule the Southern Babylonian kingdom and bear the title king of Sumer and Akkad, a title which no later ruler bore alone with the exception of a few late and unimportant cases in which there was a division of inheritance. The political significance of the South thus came to an end. As under Sargon and Naram-Sin, now it became a province of the North Babylonian kingdom. From now on the kingdom of Babylon was the determining power. It had previously, probably with the fall of the Isin dynasty, taken possession of the North Babylonian kingdom whose rulers called themselves kings of the Four Quarters of the World. From this point on Babylonian history virtually becomes a history of Babylon.

But the house which transferred the rule to the city of Babylon, from which both the land and its culture were destined to be named as the result of this development of affairs, was not Semitic-Babylonian. It was Canaanite. The evidence is to be found in the names which compose it. These names, eleven in number, and the dates are procured from a Babylonian king-list, and are :

 

SUMU-ABI, cir. 2400-2375

STIMU-LA-ILU, cir. 2374-2353

ZABU, cir. 2352-2328

ABIL-SIN, cir. 2327-2303

SIN-MUBALLIT 2302-2268

KHAMMU-RABI 2267-2213

SAMSU-ILUNA 2212-2183

ABESHUA 2182-2165

AMMI-SATANA 2164-2151

AMMI-TSADOQ 2150-2116

SAMSU-SATANA 2115-2101

 

During the last ten years a great many documents belonging to the time of this dynasty have been recovered. From them we are afforded a glimpse into the economic life and ethnological connection of the ruling population of the time. The names of the kings, as we have already seen, prove that the great influx of people which had poured into the land was of Canaanite origin. The conclusion is further corroborated by the numerous names which appear in these letters and contracts. The greater proportion of them are such as we meet with in the Old Testament. This great wave of immigration, which may have spread over a considerable period, broke upon the highlands of the West and one portion of it flowed into the rich alluvial lands of Babylonia. There, in the meantime, had been a repetition of the same events which had occurred during the first immigration of the Semites. The advancing nomads pressed into the cities from the surrounding plains; a ruling population different from that formerly in possession now took its place, and these new inhabitants, like their predecessors, adopted the Babylonian culture and passed through the same experiences. This is the light in which we were inclined to view many of the phenomena appearing during the last South Babylonian dynasty. This, then, is the second period of Babylonian history, and at the same time the end of the political domination of Western Asia by Babylon. The same immigration reached Syria and Palestine, and it is possible that a portion of it entered Egypt, a fact which would account for the explanation of the Hyksos and the powerful Semitic influence noticeable in Egypt from that time forward. Babylon still held at this time rule over the West. The tribes and princes of Palestine were tributary to the kings of Babylon. The territorial limits of power remained unchanged and were preserved despite the confusion of tribal movements. The interior Orient was still Babylonian, and the conception which we must form of the importance of Babylonia for the rest of Asia Minor at this time corresponds essentially with that which we have presented of its influence a thousand years earlier. The Orient in possession of the Canaanites presented virtually the same aspects as the Orient of Semitic Babylonia: it was completely under the influence of Sumerian culture which was now further modified by this second influx of Semites.

The rule of this first dynasty of Babylon meant a new era ethnologically and politically for Babylonia. The political organization effected by the many wars through which the country passed, and of which we have but a limited knowledge, became normative for the future. North Babylonia with its central point, Babylon, the capital of the new rulers, exercised upon the future of the country an influence similar to, but much greater, than Bagdad later wielded in Islam. From now on the "kingdom of Babylon" is the province Karduniash as it was later called, with Babilu, the holy city of the god Marduk (Merodach), the seat of authority in the Babylonian world of culture. In the history of the world Rome alone can be compared with Babylon when we consider the important role which this city of Marduk played in Western Asia. As in the Middle Ages Rome exercised its power over men's minds and, through its teaching, dominated the world, so did Babylon from this time in the ancient Orient. Just as the German kings strove to gain for themselves world-sovereignty in papal Rome, as the heiress of world power, so shall we find later a similar claim by the kings of Assyria who look back to Babylon. The influence of this dynasty appears most conspicuously in the admiration in which it was held when Babylonian independence was hastening to its close. When after the fall of Nineveh Babylon again rose to political independence under Nebuchadnezzar, and, for the last time, appeared as mistress in Western Asia every exertion was put forth to represent the new kingdom as a rejuvenation of the ancient empire of Hammurabi. His was the golden age to which the latter looked back with reverence, and proudly judged itself to be a Renaissance of that splendid period. It was in Babylonia, as it was in later Judaism, which saw in the rule of David the zenith of Israel's glory. Even in the royal inscriptions the development of more than one and a half thousand years was ignored and, with the painful accuracy of pedantic schoolmasters, the royal scribes imitated the forms of the signs and characteristic orthography of Hammurabi’s age.

But we must not be misled by the extension of Babylon and the Babylonian empire during this period. It would be a serious error to look for the culmination of Babylonian civilization during the rule of this dynasty. On the contrary, even the execution of the monuments furnishes evidence that we are dealing with an epoch of decline. The monumental art of Sargon and Gudea, figures so dimly visible through the haze of antiquity, exhibit achievements of classic excellence when placed by the side of the work of the artists of the first dynasty. Babylonian rule and intercourse were never so widely extended as then, and the general intellectual measure as well as the artistic products of this second epoch are markedly inferior. This second Semitic invasion of Babylonia resulted in deterioration in the highest elements and evidences of national progress, notwithstanding the material and political improvements made, especially during the reign of Hammurabi.

As it was in Italy with the descent of the Germans, and in Western Asia with the intrusion of the Turks, so it was here. Babylonian history moves from now on along a descending plane. As long as the Semitic people dwelt there they enjoyed the fruits of previously won culture—they created nothing new, they rather corrupted what they found.

The regulation of commercial life at this time has been amply illustrated by the discovery of the Hammurabi code of laws in Sicsa, whither it was carried, like the stele of Naram-Sin, by the same conqueror. It is the oldest code of laws known. One may, therefore, be inclined to attribute to Hammurabi and his age a lofty role in the historical development of the race, and they are doubtless entitled to this recognition. But we must, nevertheless, not forget that there previously existed a high culture and social development which must not be underestimated because we know less concerning it. Fragments of laws exist which antedate Hammurabi's age which reveal an organized life not inferior in its cultural development to that attested by his code. The earlier period has the merit of initiative and attainment, the later adopted and imitated and not infrequently imitated badly.

One general characteristic of the social life of that earlier time which distinguishes it from that of the later is, perhaps, discoverable in the fact that religion, and the organized forms of human society dictated by it, were much more fundamentally effective, whereas from now on the temporal power appears in the forefront. Hammurabi professes to have received his laws from the hand of the god Shamash, but it is no longer "divine law" that the code presents. It is clearly the "law of the king" which assigns to the hierarchy, as to other classes of society, its appropriate position, according to it no recognition of leadership. Babylonia at this time occupied a position midway between the earlier state and the later one of military rule in Assyria, which arose partly upon the ruins of the old Babylonian civilization as Oriental cities arose upon the tells of ancient settlements.

 

THE SECOND DYNASTY OF BABYLON-THE SEA-LAND

 

IN both the "king-lists" the first dynasty is suc­ceeded by a second, called the dynasty of Shishku, likewise of eleven kings. Notwithstanding that numerous documents of the time of the first dynasty have come down to us very few have been recovered from the time of the second. This in itself is a sufficient indication that the same condi­tion existed then as we shall be obliged to chroni­cle frequently in the history of Assyria. Periods of retrogression and impotence are generally shrouded in obscurity. Babylonia has now, in fact, entered upon a time when many and fruit­less struggles are put forth to maintain herself as a World-Power. Her best efforts prove abor­tive. She is forced to retreat until, finally, every shred of political independence has been wrested from her; but, all the more clearly shines out her superiority in the works of civilization and science.

The names of the eleven kings of this second dynasty are known to us almost entirely from the king-lists. They are, for the most part, put into Babylonian form, or, rather, Sumerian and, consequently, appear almost as strange to us as those of the oldest kings of Ur. In reality, however, these new conquerors of Northern Babylonia had not hitherto been established in the South.

Inasmuch as the movement of civilization was always from the south northward the region at the mouth of the two rivers, and along the Persian Gulf, was naturally more open to migrations. We shall see that, at a later time, this territory was a sort of border-land of Babylonian civilization which was first seized by those who aimed at conquests in the north. The Babylonians called it The Sea-Land. Its position corresponded, at times, to that of ancient Sumer in so far as the latter had definite geographical and political boundaries. The cultural significance of the Sea-Land was not, however, co-extensive with that of Sumer.

It lay in the nature of things that a people resident here, and that was constantly adding to its strength by fresh accessions from Arabia, was ever upon the alert for the favourable opportunity of political weakness or disintegration in the North. The lust and perhaps necessity of expansion was there, and, at the opportune moment, the march upstream began. The course of events is the same as was frequently witnessed in later times in the case of the Assyrians and Elamites; the same as so often exists where a powerful and conquering state stands face to face with a rich and powerless one.

Thus, it would seem, Babylon now fell under the domination of a dynasty which ruled according to the king-lists 368 years. About 1000 years later there ruled another dynasty of the Sea-Land, the first of whose three kings, Simmash-shikhu, is connected by descent with the former dynasty.

In the last millennium BC, when Chaldean tribes were in possession of large parts of Babylonia it was the Sea-Land that formed the strongest of their numerous kingdoms. In the time of Sargon, king of Assyria, we shall find as his adversary Merodach-baladan, the king of the Sea-Land, who for a long time successfully disputed with him the throne of Babylon. He calls himself the offspring of Irba-Marduk, who, therefore, must have reigned before him. Moreover, during the reign of the following Kassite dynasty we know of kings of the Sea-Land who bear Kassite names and probably were related to the Babylonian royal family. The name Simmash-shikhu (clearly Kassite) points to the same relationship. The existence of an independent state at the mouth of the two rivers barred Babylonia from the Persian Gulf, whereas in the time of Gudea her commerce still found there an easy outlet to adjacent as well as distant lands. The presence of this state and its temporary rule over Babylon herself proves that Babylonia has fallen from her former greatness. Henceforth, it is an inland state whose claim to importance rests upon the strength of its ancient culture and historical traditions, not upon its actual national power. Thus weakened, her boundaries were open to every ambitious conqueror.

The names of the eleven kings and the few facts known about them at present may be added to this meagre sketch of the dynasty which ruled from cir. 2100-1732:

 

AN-MA-ILU 51? years.

KI-AN-NI-BI 55? years.

DAM-KI-ILI-SHU 30 ? years.

ISH-KI-BAL 15 years.

SHIJ-USH-SHI-AKHI 27 years.

GUL-KI-SHAR2 55 years.

KIR-GAL-DARA-BAR 50 years.

AI (Malik)-DARA-KALAMAMA 28 years, son of preceding.

E-KUR-UL-ANNA 26 years.

MELAM-KURKURA 6 years.

EA-GAMIL 9 years.

 

The sum of the regal years amounts to 368. In the lists the dynasty is called the dynasty of Shish-ku in opposition to the first which is called the dynasty of Tintir (Babylon). Shish-ku appears also to have been a name of Babylon which may have been introduced intentionally by this dynasty in reference to the cult of the capital.

 

THE THIRD DYNASTY OF BABYLON-THE KASSITES

 

THE third ruling house was also a foreign one, and, unlike the preceding, issued from the East, from Elam-Media. Kassite soldiers were found in the service of Babylonia during the first dynasty, and the people whose kings were now to occupy the throne of Babylon for the next five centuries called themselves Kashshu (Kassites). Their descendants still existed in the high ranges of the Zagros in the time of Sennacherib. They had several strongly fortified cities and numerous smaller ones, all of which fell before the army of Sennacherib on his second expedition. Their appearance in Babylonia at this time must have resulted from a great movement which, starting from the east and northeast, overran the civilized countries as they went, as the Turks and Mongols did in later times. Of that portion of this stock which flowed into Babylonia we have but a limited knowledge. For the relations which were established between them and Media and other countries we must await further discoveries. At all events, the influx of these barbarous hordes, was of no inconsiderable proportions. From now on we meet frequently in Babylonia with Kassite names even among families of aristocratic birth. To the mixture of races in Babylonia a new element was, therefore, introduced, and in the "confusion of tongues" of Babel there resounded the well-known Kassite vocables with which we have become acquainted through the word-lists and proper names. The Babylonian dynastic tablet ascribes to this dynasty 36 kings with a rule of 546 years. It lasted accordingly from about 1700 to 1130. The names of the majority of these kings have been preserved, and we have a considerable amount of information from royal inscriptions, and other documents, relating to the events of this period. But great gaps in the story remain.

We are afforded a glimpse into the development of affairs during the early years of the dynasty by an inscription of

AGU-KAKRIME

who, it seems almost certain, was the sixth in succession. He calls himself “king of Kashshu and Akkad, king of the great land of Babylon who settled with numerous people the land of Dupli­ash (Umliash, on the border of Elam), king of Padan and Alman (bordering on Media), king of Guti (Northlands?), the king who rules the four quarters of the world”. These titles which differ entirely from the customary ones, and the precedence given to the Kassites, show that this king was one of the earliest of the new rulers. Karaindash, who reigned a couple of centuries later, adopts the usual titles and closes the list with king of Kashshu, and his successors omit it altogether. These barbarians, like the rest, soon adopted the old civilization, and became Babylonians.

That the weakened condition of Babylonia must have preceded the conquest may be assumed as certain. The kingdom of Hammurabi must, therefore, have gone the way of its predecessors before the barbarian hordes could enter in and possess the land. Its strength must have been broken; disturbances must have arisen and decay followed. We have testimony to this effect in the inscription of Agu-kakrime, already mentioned. There we learn that Agu-kakrime brought back to Babylon the statues of Marduk, and his spouse Tsarpanit, from the land of Khani. A couple of centuries later a region in Western Media, on the confines of Assyria, bore this name. Changes in geographical boundaries and names of countries were wont to be made quickly at this time. The country of Mitani was also known as Khanigalbat, the last part of which is probably to be referred to the so-called Hittite language, of which nothing is known as yet. Since we see in the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Mitanni the result of a forward movement of the Hittites it is natural to connect these two names of countries and regard them as the designations respectively of the eastern and western parts of one temporary state (Khani) whose existence explains the later kingdom of Mitanni. We have, therefore, here, as we have in the union of Anzan and Suri in old Babylonian geography, a precursor of the later Median kingdom. We are possibly justified in connecting with this view of the case the fragment of an oracle-text according to which Marduk was captive in the land of Khatti (the Hittites) for twenty-four or thirty-four years. And, as Khani-galbat belonged to Khatti, the latter must, at that time, have reached to Western Media and there included the region known as Arbach. This view of the situation would enable us to see clearly how the two great streams of migration, the one, the Hittite, moving from the west, the other, the Kassite, coming from the east, cease, modify each other, and at the same time by their counter effects influence the old civilization. The case of the Chaldees and Medes from the eighth century to the sixth was similar to that described.

This weakness of Babylonia and the complete assimilation of the Canaanite population appear more clearly in two other phenomena of this time. The third Semitic immigration, the Aramaic, occurred during this Kassite period, approximately from 1700-1100, and, further, Babylonia’s supremacy over the West was contested, and, finally, wrested from her hands by Assyria, a new power ambitious of conquest, which was rapidly developing from a city-kingdom. The future was reserved for these two. The Kassites, the previous rulers of Babylonia, shared the fate of that empire and must now relinquish their power. As the march of empire was at first from the south toward Babylon, so now it moves further, along the Tigris, to Assyria. This fact constitutes the pivotal point around which the history of Western Asia turns, from about the sixteenth century, when Assyria appears as the rising power upon the field of history.

During the Kassite dynasty the struggle began between Babylonia and Assyria for supremacy over the old cradle of civilization. The varying changes of fortune which accompanied this struggle we can follow, thanks to the ever increasing sources at command, more clearly than we could the events of the earlier period. This war between the old and the new kingdoms and its result is of paramount importance in the political history of the future. The history of Babylonia and that of Assyria concern us, therefore, primarily, in so far as they touch and are interwoven with one another. That which we have to consider is two different developments running parallel to one another which can be pursued most easily when presented together. On the other hand, Babylon asserted her independence as a state almost continuously, long after she had fallen from power, and, even at the last, rose again victorious. Moreover, at the beginning of this struggle she was the superior power, and when she stood directly under Assyrian influence she never ceased to have a history and development of her own. If we wish, therefore, to do more than recount the wars between Ashur and Babylon, if, indeed, we wish to do justice to the importance of Babylon as the seat of the old culture, so frankly recognized by Assyria herself, we must follow the history of this independent state by itself.

We have already seen to what territory Agu­kakrime, the Babylonian ruler, laid claim. His power extended no longer over Mesopotamia and the West. The reasons for this we shall see when we come to treat of the development of these regions. In the next inscription known to us after Agu-kakrime's, viz., that of

KARAINDASH I,

sovereignty is asserted likewise only over Babylonia. We shall see that the first attempts to bring Mesopotamia again under the sceptre were made when Assyria, the ruling power there, was forced to retreat. In Palestine Babylonian rule gave way to Egyptian. It would appear from the manner in which Karaindash’s successors speak of him in their letters that he was the head of a new family in the Kassite dynasty. His date was about 1500. That which we know of him, apart from his inscription already mentioned, is that he formed a treaty with Ashur-bel-nisheshu, the king of Assyria, and carried on a correspondence with the king of Egypt. This last fact is attested by a letter which one of his successors, Burnaburiash, sent about sixty years later to the king of Egypt, Amenophis IV. The discovery of the collection of tablets to which this letter belongs is one of the most surprising and important that has been made in the Orient. To tell the story is at the same time to write of history. In 1887 there were found in Tell-Amarna, the site of the ancient capital of Amenophis IV, in Middle Egypt, about 180 miles from Memphis on the east bank of the Nile, more than three hundred cuneiform tablets and fragments of tablets. They are a remnant of the national archives of Egypt and consist chiefly of letters which were sent to the kings of Egypt, Amenophis III, and his successor Amenophis IV, by kings of Western Asia and by the Syrian and Palestinian vassal-princes of Egypt. Among them are letters from the kings of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, which lay to the north of the Euphrates between the Balikli tributary and its western boundary; from the kings of the Hittites and others. These letters constitute the most valuable documents we possess for the history of Western Asia during this period, and frequent reference to them will be made in what follows. The letters from Babylon, with which we are at present interested, say nothing of her greatness and power. Nevertheless, the existence of the whole collection speaks in unmistakable language of the controlling influence of Babylon in earlier times—it is written in the cuneiform script, and with three exceptions in the Semitic-Babylonian language. And, what is of still greater significance, two of the letters from the king of Egypt, one addressed to the king of Babylon, the other to one of his own vassals in Northern Palestine, are in the same script and language. The cuneiform script and the Babylonian language were at that time the literary means of communication throughout Western Asia. And a knowledge of the language implied a study of the literature. This is abundantly proven by the discovery among the tablets of a couple inscribed with a Babylonian myth, which was written in Babylon, and apparently used as a text-book in Egypt.

The two kings, eleven of whose letters sent to the Egyptian kings have been recovered, were

KA-DASHMAN-BEL AND BURNABURIASH.

The former corresponded with Amenophis III, the latter with his successor, Amenophis IV. It is possible that they were brothers and that the younger overthrew the elder. The letters give no information of great national occurrences. They relate chiefly to marriages between the royal houses.

The Pharaohs have taken Babylonian princesses to their harem, but to their Babylonian friends they are not so generous with their own daughters—princesses, at least, could not be given to Babylonians. It would require the pen of a Mark Twain to deal adequately with one point that bulks large in these letters, viz., the presents. The Babylonian king, like other kings, evinces in his persistent demands upon the Pharaoh all the characteristics of the baksheesh-begging Oriental. That which he sends is always declared to be trivial—the gold that he gets is tested in the purifying fires of the crucible and found wanting, and more and better is demanded.

From the historical point of view the relation of these two old centres of civilization to one another disclosed by the letters is more important. Babylonia (and even Mitanni) sends as presents such products of her industry as artificially wrought lapis lazuli, so highly favoured in Babylon. Egypt, on the contrary, sends gold. It seems almost as if diplomatic dealings were intrusted to oral explanation and argument and the astuteness of well bribed court officials, for political questions are rarely touched upon. Letters reflect the life of a people. Even kings engaged in trade, and, it seems, were exempt from customary taxation. Business men from Babylon, who were in the king's service, appear in Akko, where, apparently, they are about to embark for Egypt, when suddenly they are arrested and maltreated for reasons unknown.

The Babylonian king demands of Pharaoh the immediate release of the men and indemnification as well, since Akko lies within the latter's territory. In only one instance does a political dispute arise. At the expense of Babylon plans for territorial expansion had been formed by the Assyrian king, Ashur-uballit, and these were recognized at the Egyptian court of Amenophis III and support promised. Burnaburiash protested against this procedure on the ground that Assyria was a vassal state under him and, therefore, could not be treated with independently. He pointed to the conduct of his father, Kurigalzu, who, when he had been urged by Canaanite subjects of Egypt to join them in an uprising against her, had promptly declined to participate in the plot. But in Egypt too much confidence was not placed in the ardent friend of Egyptian gold, and his assurances of loyalty can scarcely have been accepted with unquestioning faith. When the Phoenician princes wished in their rivalry to discredit one another at the Egyptian court they were wont to raise the cry of treason, and to declare that their rivals were intriguing with the king of Mitanni, of the Hittites, or of Kash, i.e., the Kassites of Babylon. The situation referred to in the case of Kurigalzu is exactly the same as we meet with again in the time of Sargon and Merodach-baladan II. The Canaanites asked the support of the Babylonians against Egypt, and urged them to unite with them in their designs against her. On the other hand, Merodach­baladan sent his ambassadors to Hezekiah to induce him to join forces against Assyria. Later Taharka and Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar and Necho (and in 587 Hophra) constituted the support and hope of the Canaanite states.

As a matter of fact we have evidence that portly afterward, when the death of Amenophis was followed by disturbances in Egypt, Babylonia attempted to regain the West. Despite the anxiety manifested in the letter of Burnaburiash to Amenophis IV over the territorial seizures of Assyria, and the fact that he waged wars with her, he married his son Karaindash II to the daughter of the energetic Assyrian king, Ashur­uballit. Her son

KADASHMAN-KHARBE

succeeded to the throne, a fact which shows the influence of Assyria. It was under him that Babylonia sought to regain a firm foothold in the West. At this time Assyria had a strong grasp of Mesopotamia and this compelled Babylonia to send her army straight through the Syrian desert. Kadashman-Kharbe sought to make the desert road secure by chastising the nomad tribes which roamed there and which were called the Suti. He made wells, and also erected military posts and settlements and filled them with Babylonians. He thus established a highway of communication with the West and made the circuitous route through Mesopotamia unnecessary. This scion of the Assyrian house was apparently a determined opponent of Assyria such as later was never lacking. It is possible that his plans were based upon what previously existed. At all events, he recognized that the wisest course was to satisfy his threatening rival with territory still to be conquered and, in the meantime, to deprive it of value by diverting from it the trade so important for Babylonia. Therein lay the solution of the disputed question of the time as to who should possess Mesopotamia. Kadashman-Kharbe might have come to a peaceful understanding with Assyria about the determination of the territory which affected both their interests if his plans had succeeded, and thus have proved his ability to strengthen his power by mightier weapons than those of war, especially where industrial Babylonia was face to face with the military power, Assyria.

SHUZIGASH

Kadashman-Kharbe cannot have reigned long. He was murdered in an insurrection excited by the Kassites, but we are not informed what was the immediate motive of the act. At bottom it was possibly due to the fact that the kings and the ruling classes of the Kassites had, in the meanwhile (after 1400), become Babylonians in all essential respects. The Kassites who at the distribution of spoil came off empty-handed, or who had lost their share through the accidents of business or industrial life, formed a party of mal­contents who longed for the old times when the Kassite was lord and the Babylonian was plundered. We find, at least, that the insurrectionists raised a man of common origin to the throne, who is called in the two chronicles Shuzigash and Nazibugash, "the son of nobody." To Ashur­uballit, the grandfather of Kadaslaman-Kharbe, who was still active on the throne of Assyria, this was a welcome incentive to secure the upper hand by the extension of his kingdom. As the avenger of his grandson and the restorer of order he appeared in Babylon, quelled the insurrection, and placed his great-grandson,

KURIGALZU,

while still in his minority, upon the throne.

But the might of circumstance is stronger than the bonds of relationship and good deeds of doubtful intention. As long as Ashur-uballit lived, and during the reign of his son, Assyria continued to struggle for possession of Mesopotamia. But when Adad-nirari I drove out thence the Mitanni, and long after Kadashman-Kharbe’s undertakings had proved abortive, Babylon saw her opportunity again to gain Mesopotamia and thus insure her connection with the West. As Assyria was now in possession of it war broke out between her and Babylon. The clash of arms between the two states began in the reigns of Kurigalzu and Adad-nirari I.

We have an interesting bit of information of a war waged by the Babylonian, Kurigalzu, against Khurbatila, the king of Elam, in which he worsted and took prisoner the latter on Babylonian soil. Elam was, therefore, the invader. Kurigalzu must have followed up his victory. On the reverse of an inscription dedicated, by a subject of Dungi of the ancient dynasty of Ur, to the goddess Nana of Erech appears a dedication of Kurigalzu’s as follows: “Kurigalzu, king of Karduniash, captured the palace of the city of Shasha in Elam, and presented this tablet to Belit (the god of Nippur) for his life”. This tablet was, accordingly, carried off at some time from Erech by Elamites, and now on this victorious expedition of Kurigalzu’s against Elam, found again in a temple, more than 1200 years after it was dedicated in Erech. Then it was rediscovered a few years ago by the American expedition, and brought to Constantinople. Books are not the only things that have their fate!

These wars prove that the conditions already exist which are always apparent in the future; Babylonia is the prize coveted by both Assyria and Elam. For the present she is able to cope with both, and, if at times worsted, at others she proves superior. The contest is waged through the following centuries to the fall of Assyria. In later times Babylonia was a vassal state of the one or the other.

Even at this time the same shifting of national fortune can be traced. Soon after Kurigalzu, as we shall see in the history of Assyria, Babylonia and Babylon fell into the hands of Tukulti-Ninib, king of Assyria. Not long before, during the year and a half that

NADIN-SHUM

reigned, Kidin-Khutrutash, king of Elam, invaded Babylonia and laid waste Dur-ilu, the Babylonian city situated on the western terminus of the highway from Elam. He then conquered Nippur, which was especially favoured by the Kassite kings, and where, doubtless, at times they chose to reside. A similar expedition was undertaken by the Elamite during the reign of the second successor of the Babylonian king,

ADAD-SHUM-IDDIN,

who was enthroned by Tukulti-Ninib. This time it was Isin that suffered. Many an elegiac verse mourns in the tone of the penitential psalms the devastation of the land and especially of certain cities. In the centuries of Babylonian history the same thing, it is true, frequently occurred. But these songs of lament suit this period admirably, and if they did not originate then they are revisions of older ones which now resounded in the temples of Babylon. The remaining kings of the dynasty ruled for the most part under the protection of Elam.

It is clear that we have again come to the end of a period. The Kassites have long ago become Babylonians and now have played their role on the stage of history—the Kassite dynasty draws to a close. There remain only four kings, and

MARDUK-APLU-IDDIN,

Merodach-baladan I, was the only one of these who appears to have successfully opposed Assyria and asserted himself over Mesopotamia. The change of the dynasties indicates, as always, a time of tumult and weakness, and brings to the throne a royal line whose work it is to wit stand Assyria and renew the struggle for Mesopotamia.

The American expedition at Nippur has proved that this city of the Lord of Lands, Bel-Matate was especially favoured by the Kassites. This may have been due to some similarity that existed between their national cult and that of Nippur. They had a strong predilection for names compounded with buriash, that is, Bel-Matate. On the other hand, we may, perhaps, discern therein efforts intended to counteract the preponderating influence of Babylonia which had been greatly strengthened by the dynasty of Hammurabi. It was necessary for it to overcome Nippur since she rose to power over the dynasties of Isin an Larsa. But the kings of Isin also appear to have attributed the same importance to Nippur as the Kassites.

The thirty-six Kassite kings, so far as the can be determined at present, and the most important events of their time are the following:

 

GANDISH. His name appears also as Gaddash, and Gande, on a fragment and votive tablet, reigned 16 years.

AGUM-SHI (an abbreviated name), his son, reigned 22 year:

GU-YASHI (otherwise read Bibe-yashi) reigned 22 years.

USHSHI [otherwise read Dushi, Abu (ad) shi] reigned 8 (?) years.

ADU-METASH reigned — years.

TASHI-GURUMASH reigned — years.

AGUM-KAKRIME, successor of preceding, reigned — years.

. . . lacuna.

KARAINDASH I, belongs to a new family(?); the beginning of relations with Egypt; alliance with Assyria, reigned — years.

. . . lacuna, one or more kings, reigned — years.

BURNA-BURIASH I., contemporary of Amenophis III, compact with Puzur-Ashur of Assyria relative to certain territory, reigned — years.

KURIGALZU I, relations with Egypt under Amenophis III, and with Assyria under Ashur-nadin-akhi, reigned —years.

KADASHMAN-BEL, brother of preceding; correspondence with Amenophis III, with whose death the end of his reign practically synchronizes. There is extant a copy of an inscription of his that was made by the scribes of Ashurbanipal's library, which contains the dedication of a wagon to Bel of Nippur, reigned — years.

BURNA-BURIASH II, son of Kurigalzu I; he wrested the throne from his predecessor, maintained a friendly correspondence with Amenophis IV. Four of these letters are now in the British Museum, and two in Berlin. Ashur-nadin-akhi, contemporary king of Assyria, extends his dominions, reigned — years.

KARA-INDASH II, son of Burna-buriash II, married Muballitat-sherua, the daughter of Ashur-muballit. Bel-nirari and Pudu-ilu, probably ruling in Assyria, reigned — years.

KADASHMAN-KHARBE I, the son of Karaindash II, and Muballitat-sherua, attempts to establish communication with the West by repressing the Suti and opening the way through the Syrian desert inasmuch as Mesopotamia is in the hands of the Mitani. In a rebellion, probably incited by Kassite distrust of Assyrian influence, he was murdered. Reigned — years.

SHUZIGASH, or Nazibugash, was placed on the throne by the rebels; deposed and killed by Ashuruballit. Reigned — years.

KURIGALZU II, son of Kadashman-Kharbe, who was yet a child, was appointed in his stead by his great-grand­father, Ashur-uballit. Appears to have had a long reign. War with Khurbatila of Elam; Bel-nirari, Pudu-ilu, Adad-nirari I, his contemporaries in Assyria. Reigned ---/ years.

NAZI-MARUTTASH, son of the preceding. War with Adad­nirari I, over territory on the east of the Tigris; defeated by Adad-nirari. Reigned 26 years.

KADASHMAN-TURGU; Adad-nirari I rules in Assyria, and now after expelling the Mitani from Mesopotamia and causing the retreat of Babylonia, he takes possession. Shalmaneser I, a contemporary. Reigned 17 years.

KADASHMAN-BURIASH waged war with Shalmaneser I, chiefly over Mesopotamia. Reigned 2 years.

KUDUR-BEL reigned 6 years.

SHAGARAKTI-SHURIASH, contemporary of Shalmaneser I. Reigned 13 years.

BITILIASHU, son of Shagarakti-Shuriash, succeeded. About this time Tukulti-Ninib, King of Assyria, invaded Babylonia and conquered Babylon. Reigned 8 years.

BEL-NADIN-SHUM I. During his reign Kidin-Khutrutash, the King of Elam, invaded Babylonia, took the cities of Nippur and Dur-ilu, wasted the land, and deported many of the inhabitants. Reigned 1 year, 6 months.

KADASHMAN-KHARBE II. In his reign Babylon was in turn conquered by the Assyrian King, Tukulti-Ninib, under whose supremacy Kadashman-Kharbe continued to rule. Reigned 1 year, 6 months.

ADAD-SHUM-IDDIN. In the early part of his reign he was apparently deposed by the Elamite king, Kidin­Khutrutash, and after he had succeeded in regaining the throne, probably with the aid of Assyria, the Elamites again overran the country. Isin was spoiled and Nippur, Babylon, and other cities plundered. The hymns of the time lament the desolation wrought. About the same time the Assyrian power was overthrown by a rebellion in Babylonia, and Tukulti-Ninib lost his life in an insurrection in Assyria under the leadership of his son. Thus the two reigns ended contemporaneously. Reigned 6 years.

ADAD-SHUM-UTSUR ascended the throne and reigned 30 years.

MELISHIKHU. This was a time of weakness and unrest in Assyria which was followed by fresh attacks by Baby­onia. Reigned 15 years.

MERODACH-BALADAN I took Mesopotamia; Ninib-apal­Ekur and Ashurdan ruled in Assyria. Reigned 13 years.

ZAMAMA-SHUM-IDDIN. Ashurdan invaded Babylonia and plundered three of its cities. Elamites attack Babylonia and Bel-nadin-shum was dethroned. Kudur­nakhundi the son of the king of Elam was placed on the throne and wasted Babylonia. Reigned 1 year.

BEL-NADIN-AKHE. Babylon subject to the overlordship of Elam. Later there appears to have arisen a conflict with Elam. Bel-nadin-akhe was apparently forced to turn to Assyria, but failed to receive the necessary support. Contemporary of Ashurdan. Reigned 3 years.

According to a summary item in one of the king-lists this Kassite dynasty had 36 kings and lasted five hundred and seventy-six years and nine months from cir. 1700 to 1130.

 

THE DYNASTY OF PASHE

 

THE following dynasty is called in the king-lists the dynasty of Pashe, the name of a quarter of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar I, the prosperous king of this dynasty, expressly speaks of himself as the offspring of Babylon. It is, therefore, clear that this line of kings lays claim to national origin. It consisted of 11 kings who held the throne of Babylon for 132 years. The conditions which brought the new house into power, as we may gather from the picture of the times, so far as they are at present discernible, are what we had reason to expect. As at the end of the Kassite dominion, the conflicts with Elam and Assyria were continued and the struggle for the recovery of Mesopotamia, or for sovereign rights there, was renewed. Of the first two or three kings of the dynasty we have no information whatever, except that the first ruled 17 years and the second 6 years.

The third or fourth king,

NEBUCHADREZZAR I,

waged victorious war with Elam and acquired possession of Mesopotamia and the Westland. He extended once again, and for the last time, the sovereignty of Babylon to the shores of the Mediterranean. The war with Elam proves that the pitiful condition of affairs that obtained when Kidin-Khutrutash attacked Babylonia had grown worse under Nebuchadnezzar’s predecessors and the last of the Kassite kings. Even the statue of the god Marduk had been carried off in triumph to Elam. It may be that this occurred at the time of the deposition of Bel-nadin-akhe and was, therefore, connected with the change of dynasty. The deportation of the god implied the loss of national independence and degradation to a state of vassalage. Just as Marduk had now to do obeisance in the temple of a foreign god, so the Babylonian ruler was no longer a king, but only a servant of the Elamite sovereign. As long as the divine statue was absent from Babylon Nebuchadnezzar, therefore, did not call himself king but only governor. It was not until he had recovered the statue of Marduk, which presupposes a decisive victory over Elam, that he took the title king of Babylon. The statue had been in captivity thirty years. The length of his reign corresponded, accordingly, with the thirty years after the close of the Kassite dynasty. Hymns lamenting the absence of Marduk from Babylon and celebrating his return have been preserved for us. Whatever the outcome of this victory may have been it is at least evident that for some time a check was put upon the advance of Elam. Our further knowledge of events connected with this dynasty is gleaned from sources which tell of the wars with Assyria. In the history of Assyria we shall see that the success of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign continued to exert an influence long after, and that the advantages gained by Assyria, which paved the way for the conquest of Babylon by Tiglathpileser I, were not enduring.

The list of the kings of the Pashe dynasty may be restored, in some instances provisionally, in others with reasonable assurance, with the help of the king-lists and other available documentary sources, as follows:

 

MARDUK-AKHI-IRBA(?). The name is broken off. Ashur­dan, king of Assyria and probably vassal of Elam. Reigned 171(?) years.

NINIB-NADIN-AKHI, the father of Nebuchadnezzar I (?). Mutakkil-Nusku, probably as vassal of Elam, reigned in Assyria 6 years.

NEDUCHADREZZAR I. takes possession of Mesopotamia. Ashur-resh-ishi contemporary in Assyria. Reigned — years.

BEL-NA.DIN-APLI. Mesopotamia lost to Assyria. Reigned — years.

MARDUK-NADIN-AKHI. Wars with Tiglathpileser I and regains Mesopotamia. Reigned — years.

MARDUK-SHAPIK-ZER-MATI, a contemporary of Ashur-bel­kala, during whose reign he died. Reigned — years.

ADAD-APLU-IDDIN, “the son of a nobody”, raised to the throne. Ashur-bel-kala marries his daughter.

If three Kings preceded Nebuchadrezzar I, Adad-aplu-iddin would occupy the seventh position. Reigned 22 years.

MARDUK-NADIN-SHUM reigned 1 year, 6 months.

MARDUK-ZIR reigned 13 years.

The length of reigns appended above are taken from the king-list "b," and nothing more than this has come down to us with respect to the close of the dynasty.

 

THE ELAMITES AS RULERS OF BABYLON

 

THE following years witnessed frequent changes in the ruling houses, but little information has come down to us of the progress of events in Babylonia and Assyria. The king-lists and a very brief chronicle furnish us with the following facts :

SHIBARLSHIKHU, "the son of Erba-Sin of the dynasty of Damiq-Marduk was murdered and buried in the palace of Sargon". Reigned 17 years.

EA-MUKIN-SHUN reigned 5 (or 3) months.

KASHSHU-NADIN-AKHE reigned 3 (or 6) years.

These three kings are assigned to the dynasty of The Sea-Land, that is, the land about the mouth of the two rivers on the Persian Gulf. We learn from a late document that they repaired the temple of the sun-god at Sippar which had been partly destroyed by the Suti. This is the same people whom we have already met with as nomad tribes of the Syrian desert in the time of Kadashman­Kharbe I. They still continue to make inroads into Babylonia as they did shortly before, and to menace even the cities. We are confronted, as it appears, with a part of a new immigration. This is the most important fact which the record yields, and it is readily explained by the presence of foreign rulers in Babylon. As regards the nationality of these three kings it is to be observed that the first and third names reflect a lingering ray of the glory of the Kassite dominion, which accordingly must have maintained itself longest in the South.

THE DYNASTY OF BAZI, CIR. 985

The next three kings are designated in the king-lists and chronicle as the Dynasty of Bazi, a border district of Elam. Their names and the length of their reigns are given as follows:

 

E-DUBAR-SHTIQAMUNA reigned 17 (or 15) years.

NINIB-KUDIM-UTSUR reigned 3 (or 2) years.

SHILANI-SHUQAMUNA reigned 3 months.

 

Following upon these one king appears in a dynasty by himself—and he is an Elamite.

We thus see that Babylonia was in a state of decline and the prey of every foreign invader. The Elamites were her most aggressive enemy when not held in check by Assyria. The period which these three dynasties lasted extends from about 1000 to 960. At the end of this time Assyria, that heretofore had been impotent to act, begins anew her conquests.

Who it was that wrested the power from Elam, or what was effected by a new dynasty, we have no means of knowing. The king-lists are broken off at this point and we are forced to revert to Assyrian sources for almost all that we can learn until about 750. From these, however, we can see distinctly what was the dominant force of the time even though the history of the separate reigns cannot be written.

 

THE CHALDEANS

 

BABILONIA, which had been the coveted spoil of the two great kingdoms of Assyria and Elam, is now overrun by a great tide of immigration similar to the hordes of Semites who had settled there previously, and in the course of centuries had become completely naturalized. These newcomers were compelled to struggle with varying fortunes for possession of the land. The progress of events may be best illustrated by comparing them with the occupation of Palestine by the Hebrews. From now on the Chaldeans press forward into Babylonia and seek to make themselves masters of the cities.

Later ages have much to say of the Chaldeans, and numerous details of information respecting their relation to Babylonia have come down to us. But, despite all this, it still remains impossible to draw for ourselves a satisfactory picture of their national life. All the Chaldeans who are known to us bear Babylonian names. No new element of speech seems to have been introduced into the Babylonian language by their arrival, so that we have no particular data by which we can determine their racial connections. Nevertheless, on general grounds, since they undoubtedly, issued from the South and first settled in the regions bordering on the Persian Gulf, we must look upon them as Semites who in the first instance came from Eastern Arabia. The previous migrations bad been from the West, and Mesopotamia and North Babylonia were the first entered in their line of movement. The Chaldean migration would, accordingly, fall between the Aramaic and Arabian, and in these two groups the Chaldean would find its closest kin, or, perhaps, it is to be connected with one or the other. If they were Semites the rapidity with which they adapted themselves to the Babylonian conditions would be explained. The similarity of their languages would facilitate intercourse, and, as we know, Aramaic tribes had already poured into Babylonia. With this attempt to envisage the situation the scant material which exists for a characterization of the Chaldeans is in perfect accord. The designation of Ur, the city of the moon-god, as Kamapini, is probably to be traced to Berosus, and this cannot be explained from any other language than Arabic in which qamar means moon. The chiefs of the Chaldeans are called rasani, which is the Arabic for chiefs (Hebrew rashim). The only god whose cult may have been introduced by the Chaldeans is the war-god, designated Girra, whom Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar and Neriglissar especially exalt. This would indicate that among the Chaldeans, or, at least, in the tribe of Nabopolassar, he was the chief god.

From this time forward we find in addition to a number of Aramaic tribes also a number of petty Chaldean kingdoms, or tribes, each of which is designated by the Babylonians and Assyrians as house (bit) of a princely family. Thus we have Bit-Yakin, the Sea-Land, whose Kassite ruler, as we have just seen, occupied the throne of Babylon after he had been carried forward possi­bly by the new movement. Bit-Sa'alli, Bit­Khilani, Bit-Amukkani, Bit-Adini, Bit-Dakuri, in close proximity to Babylon and Borsippa, are among the most important of the others. The one aim of the princes of these houses was to get possession of the larger cities and, to crown their achievements, ascend the throne of Babylon. Chaldea enters now as the third contestant by the side of Assyria and Elam for Babylonian sovereignty, and the Babylonian people grew less and less able to assert their independence. An unstable condition of affairs was the natural outcome. In general the Chaldeans and Elamites were more closely united, whereas the Assyrian kings posed rather as the protectors of national independence, or of what they would have dignified by this phrase. The usual successes and reverses of war attended this struggle until, finally, with the fall of Assyria, the Chaldeans reached their goal, and Babylon once more, under a Chaldean dynasty, rose to the rank of a powerful kingdom.

Our knowledge of the period before Assyria regained control in Babylonia is limited, and almost wholly confined to records of war between the two states. The first king of the dynasty was, perhaps,

NABU-KIN-APLI, CIR. 960,

who reigned, at least, twenty-six years. One document of his age appears to ascribe to him the rule over Mesopotamia, about 960. He would, in that case, be the last who was able to boast of this supremacy. In that same period, and continuously from that time forward, the Assyrian kings claimed the title to sovereignty there. The name of Nabu-kin-apli’s successor is missing on the king-lists, but he is there said to have ruled six months and twelve days. A gap in the lists then follows until we reach the name of Nabu­natsir, who began to reign in 747. There are possibly two other royal names to be supplied after Nabu-kin-apli, which we cannot discover from other sources. The next king,

SHAMASH-MUDAMMIQ,

is known to us from his wars with Assyria in the reign of Adad-nirari II. He died during the conflict.

NABU-APLU-IDDIN, ?-854,

reigned at least thirty-one years, and died in 854. He came into conflict with Ashur-natsirpal and Shalmaneser, and sought during the reign of the former to advance along the Euphrates into Mesopotamia. In the year 879 he lent support to the princes of Sukhi, which was situated along the Euphrates and was under Babylonian influence, in their opposition to Assyria. But Ashur­natsirpal defeated the Babylonian contingent. From the manner in which he speaks of this vic­tory it would appear that Nabu-aplu-iddin was a Chaldean. It is quite consonant with this that he seems especially desirous, in an inscription which relates to the restoration of the temple at Sippar, to put himself on record as a good Babylonian. During his reign Assyria refrained from overt acts against Babylonia. Ashur-natsirpal contented himself with Mesopotamia, but later he appears to have spread out toward North Babylonia and to have taken possession of the former kingdom of the Four Quarters of the World.

MARDUK-NADIN-SHUM, 854-823.

In 854 Nabu-aplu-iddin died. Death, by the way, is one of the commonest occurrences in the Orient, and his was the occasion for a determined conflict between his sons Marduk-nadin-shum and Marduk-bel-usati for the throne. Babylonia was divided between them, probably in agreement with their father's disposition, so that North Babylonia and Babylon fell to the former, South Babylonia, and therewith the motherland of Chaldea, to the latter. War between the Chaldean princes and the Babylonian king, as might be expected, broke out immediately, and, as usual, the forces of the Chaldeans proved more than a match for those of the North. Marduk-nadin-shum then turned for assistance to Shalmaneser II, king of Assyria, and thereby invoked the suzerainty of the latter. The ultima thule of Assyrian politics was the establishment of sovereignty over Babylonia and, naturally enough, Shalmaneser responded to Marduk-nadin-shurn’s invitation with foreboding alacrity. He poured his seasoned and disciplined troops into the country, and Marcluk-bel-usati’s Chaldean peasants fled to the marshlands for refuge. Shalmaneser entered the Babylonian cities, offered up the sacrifices as lord-paramount over the country, and received the homage of the Chaldean princes. Marduk-nadin-shum reigned from 854 to cir. 823 under Assyrian suzerainty. North Babylonia, the "kingdom of the Four Quarters of the World," which from the time of Ashurnatsirpal had been under Assyrian domination, had, as a matter of course, been subject to Shalmaneser from the beginning. It appears, indeed, that at the end of his reign, when he was forced to flee Assyria, by the insurrection headed by his son, Ashur-danin-pal, he turned for support to this part of his kingdom, and that his son, Shamshi-Adad, used it and Mesopotamia as his base in subjugating Assyria.

The impossibility during this time of making a serious attack upon Babylonia must have given the ever envious Chaldean another welcome opportunity to push northward. As soon, therefore, as Shamshi-Adad was free from the assaults of more pressing enemies he turned toward Babylonia. Mardunadin-shum, who outlived the beginning of the reign of Shamshi-Adad, as is witnessed by a text in which their names appear together, died, or was deposed, in 823. The next to ascend the throne was

MARDUK-BALATSU-IQBI, 823-?,

a Chaldean prince, who was supported by the Kaldi, Babylonian Aramaean tribes, Elam and Median peoples, especially the Namri. He owed his throne, therefore, to Elamite assistance, and consequently, stood in the same relation to Elam as Marduk-nadin-shum did to Assyria. This is the first time that we discover clearly the relations sustained by Babylonia to its neighbours, relations which we meet with again and again—Ashur, or Elam as suzerain of Babylonia with her king under their protection.

Shamshi-Adad's inscription does not record his success; but it informs us of expeditions undertaken in 813 and 812 against Chaldea and Babylon. The first of these presupposes the subjugation of the Chaldean king by Assyria, and, therewith, the restoration of Assyrian supremacy. The second took place during the first year of Adad-nirari III. It is possible, as so often happened, that the change of rulers offered to the Chaldeans, who were but partially conquered, an opportune moment for a forward movement.

BAU-AKHI-IDDIN, 812-785,

appears to have been king of Babylon at this time. He was besieged and taken prisoner by the Assyrians, and as Shalmaneser had previously offered up his sacrifices in the cities, so Adad-nirari did now as supreme lord. It is uncertain whether all this occurred in 812, or in the later expeditions of 796 and 795 against North Babylonia and that of 791 against Chaldea, the issues of which are unknown. This much, however, is established, viz., that the characteristic note of the time is: the attempts of Chaldean princes, with the assistance of Elam, to obtain the throne of Babylon, and the superiority of Assyria when not engaged in other quarters. But with every change of rulers, or whenever Assyria was involved elsewhere, a fresh blow for independence was struck. The same acts in the historical drama are played upon every stage, and are best attested in the prophets of Judah and Israel: Two great parties at home turning for aid to two rival powers abroad and a constant vacillation between the two.

We cannot determine when Adad-nirari ascended the throne of Babylon, neither have we any information of the time which immediately followed. This is due to the reverse of Assyrian power after Adad-nirari’s reign and the loss of influence upon Babylonia which accompanied it. But Assyria did not relinquish her claim to supremacy without a struggle, for several expeditions against Chaldea are attested, for example, immediately after in 783 and 782 with the accession of Shalmaneser III, and again under him in 777. So, also, his successor, Ashur-dan, immediately after he ascended the throne in 771 marched against North Babylonia and two years later against Chaldea. The explanation of this is to be found in the previous history, and we can picture the course of events in the light of the expeditions of Shalmaneser and Adad-nirari. But since we have no inscriptions of the Assyrian kings referred to, and only brief references in the "chronicles" none of the names of the Babylonian kings of this period are known. Three of them are probably lacking in our sources. One of them may have been ERBA-MARDUK, who is mentioned by Marduk-apal-iddin II, as his ancestor.

In the tumultuous time which now succeeded Assyrian influence must have been utterly lost, and as a result Babylonia fell into the hands of the Chaldeans. From the Babylonian king-lists we learn that the next king who ruled in Babylonia was

NABU-SHUM-ISHK(UN?), ?-748.

He ruled until 748. If the restoration of the name is correct we have an inscription which furnishes us with a clear picture of prevailing Babylonian conditions. Nabu-shum-imbi, the governor of Borsippa, the sister city of Babylon, in an account of the building operations connected with the temple of Nebo relates as follows: “When there arose in Borsippa, the city of justice and order, tumult, devastation, riot and revolution, during the reign of Nabu-shum-ishkun of Bit-Dakuri, then the Babylonians, the people of Borsippa, and Dush­ulti from the shore of the Euphrates, all the Chaldeans, Arameans, Dilbateans (from a Babylonian city) turned against one another in arms, smote one another and fought with the people of Borsippa over their boundary. And Nabu-shum-iddin (a high official of the temple of Nebo) worked up independently (a revolt) against Nabu-shum-imbi, the governor of Borsippa. At night, like a thief, enemy, bandit, etc., he collected them and led them into the temple of Nebo ... They raised a tumult. But the people of Borsippa and others who rendered assistance surrounded the house of the governor and defended it with bows and arrows”. We have here revealed what was to be expected, the king of Babylon is a Chaldean of the Dakuri tribe, and the Chaldeans and Arameans take possession of the regions about the cities which are divided by opposing factions within them. It was but natural that under these conditions the property-holding classes should greet the appearance of an Assyrian king as a deliverer, as they often did later on. Chaldean rule meant anarchy for Babylonia. The divisions of the Chaldeans among themselves, and the natural opposition of their ambitious projects to that of the city population in actual possession prevented the appearance of a strong Chaldean prince and settled conditions. To speak of an orderly, well-organized state constitution would be wide of the mark. The land again lay open for conquest as so often before and afterward.

NABU-NATSIR, 747-734,

or as the Ptolemaic Canon gives his name, Nabonassar, was the next king. He reigned from 747 to 734. The condition of affairs just described continued to exist under him. The lawless state that existed in Borsippa, as described by Nabu­shum-imbi, led to an attempt on the part of Borsippa during the reign of Nabu-natsir to cut loose from Babylon. This was met by determined opposition on the part of the king. Little more remains to be said of Nabu-natsir's deeds. Only one statement which rests upon Berosus, the Babylonian historiographer who lived in the Seleucid age, affirms that he issued a decree for the introduction of a new era. And, in fact, the Ptolemaic Canon, and a Babylonian chronicle written in the time of Darius, begin with his reign in 747. It was the Ptolemaic Canon that made his name known. From that time on all astronomy, and therewith all scientific Assyriology of antiquity, reckoned a new era from the beginning of his reign. The occasion for the change was brought about by the entrance of the vernal equinox into the zodiacal sign Aries, whereas it had been from 3000 BC in Taurus. The ancients then began to count Aries first in the zodiacal signs, and we still continue to do so although the equinoctial point is now in Pisces. The change of the era necessitated a change in the calendar, and also in numberless doctrines connected therewith and based thereon. It is upon the introduction of this reform, by which scientific teaching was translated into practice, that the importance of Nabu­natsir’s reign rests. His change of the calendar was an act of as great importance to antiquity as the introduction of Julian's Calendar was for Rome and the civilized world dependent upon her, or as the Gregorian for the modern world. But for the ancient Orient a reform of the calendar implied an infinitely greater effect upon the intellectual and religious life than it would with us.

For convenience of reference we add the following list of kings :

Broken off. Reigned 13 years.'

Broken off. Reigned 6 months, 12 days.

? ? or,

SHAMASH-MUDAMMIQ.

NABU-APLU-IDDIN, reigned at least 31 years, is mentioned by Ashur-natsirpal in 854. Reigned 885-854.

MARDUIC-NADIN-SHUM reigned 853-829(?).

MARDUK-BALATSU-IQBI, opponent of Shamshi-Adad. Reigned 823-812(?).

BAU-AKHI-IDDIN, conquered by Andad-nirari M. Reigned ?-785.

. . . Three other kings, ERBA-MARDUK one of them?

NABU-SHUM-(ISHKUN? or iqisha?) reigned ?-748.

NABU-NATSIR, reigned 747-733.

 

BABYLONIA UNDER THE NEW ASSYRIAN EMPIRE

 

NABU-NATSIR’S third year, 745, was the beginning of a new period for Assyria under Tiglathpileser III, and Babylonia soon became aware of the change that took place. The first movement of the new king was into Babylonia where he chastized the Arameans and the northernmost tribes of the Chaldeans, and, apparently, assumed a protectorship over Nabu-natsir. It is reasonable to conclude from this that the latter was a Babylonian and not a Chaldean. Tiglathpileser at once assumed the titles "king of Sumer and Akkad" and "king of the Four Quarters of the World," and marched southward as far as Nippur. The Chaldeans, it is to be supposed, promptly submitted. Beyond this, however, he was unable to carry out his plans owing to threatening unrest in Armenia and Syria. Nabu-natsir thus exercised rule under the protection of Assyria. Though the insurrection of Borsippa shows that his power did not extend beyond the limits of Babylon, it must be remembered first, that it was not in the interest of Assyria to shield him from minor troubles, and, secondly, that Tiglathpileser was too busily engaged at first to give himself more concern for Babylon than the exigencies of the situation demanded. It is, nevertheless, an eloquent testimony to the wholesome respect in which he was held that for fourteen years no Chaldean attempted the reduction of Babylon. In the year 734 Nabu-natsir died. He was succeeded by his son,

NABU-NADIN-ZIR, 734-733,

or Nadinu, by abbreviation, whence the form Nadios of Ptolemy. Quite in keeping with the times, after he had reigned two years, 734-733, an insurrection broke out. The king was dethroned by a provincial governor,

NABU-SHUM-UKIN,

a Babylonian, and the leader of the party inimical to Assyria. He held the reins of government only two months, when he was forced to give place to the Chaldean,

UKIN-ZIR, 732-730,

the "Chimer" of Ptolemy, the prince of Bit-Amukani. The time had come for Assyria to interfere again, for a Chaldean upon the throne of Babylon could have no other ultimate aim than the conquest of the whole of Babylonia, which up to this had been under the control of Tiglath­pileser III. As soon, therefore, as the latter had squared accounts with Syria, and taken Damascus after a three-years’ siege, during which the throne of Ukin-zir was free from attack, he led his troops into Babylonia. There he besieged Bit-Amukani, Ukin-zir’s native land, together with some other Chaldean principalities, and took Ukin-zir prisoner. To put a stop to ceaseless disturbances, despite the onerous duty of being present every year at the New Year's ceremony in Babylon, and of residing there when possible to do so, he decided to take the crown of Marduk's kingdom himself. For the two following years of his life Tiglathpileser caused himself to be proclaimed king of Babylon. But the rights of the Babylonians had to be maintained. Tiglathpileser, and the other kings who adopted a like policy, ruled as kings in Babylon under other names. Shalmaneser was called in Babylonia Ululai, and Ashurbanipal received the name of Kandalanu. Tiglathpileser appears in the Babylonian lists as PULU, a name by which he is also known in the Old Testament.

Peace ruled during these two years, 729 and 728, and during the reign of his successor, Shalmaneser IV, who reigned in Babylon also, under the name of

ULULAI, 727-722.

But with his death, when the great revolution occurred which placed Sargon II upon the throne of Assyria, a Chaldean prince,

MARDUK-APLU-IDDIN II, 721-710,

king of the "Sea-Land," used the opportunity to seize the Babylonian crown with the connivance of Khumbanigash, the king of Elam.

Sargon’s troops were quickly turned against him, but the Elamite hastened to render assistance. A battle was fought at Dur-ilu, the outcome of which Sargon claims as a victory for himself and the Babylonians over Khumbanigash. Sargon, however, did not succeed in forcing Merodach-Baladan to withdraw from Babylon. He nevertheless established his authority over the most northerly part, the region known as The Four Quarters of the World, including Dur-ilu. Marduk-aplu-iddin calls himself king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad. He ruled as Marduk-aplu-iddin II, under Elamite protection, from 721 to 710, while Sargon was busily engaged in Syria-Palestine and Armenia, as Tiglathpileser had been shortly before.

On the termination of these wars Sargon marched on Babylon, and put to flight Marduk­aplu-iddin, who after the loss of Dur-Yakin, his capital in the Sea-Land, sought refuge at the court of Susa. The Assyrian party in Babylon, especially the priesthood, welcomed the invader as saviour and restorer of order. Sargon assumed the title of "overnor of Babylon, that is, he undertook the post of royal representative, when in fact there was none in name. In this capacity he ruled Babylon and all Babylonia from 709 to 705, when his career was ended by death.

The following two years Babylon enjoyed peace, but at the end of this time an insurrection arose which placed

MARDUK-ZAKIR-SHUM, 702,

upon the throne for one month. Marduk-aplu­iddin immediately seized upon the opportunity presented and set out from Elam, with Elamite support, to recapture Babylon. But his triumph was of short duration. Sennacherib, more for­tunate than his predecessor Sargon, had not his army on other fields and, therefore, appeared before Babylon nine months after Marduk-aplu­iddin’s return. The armies met at Kish and the battle turned against Marduk-aplu-iddin and his Elamite allies. He fled again to Elam where lie awaited a fresh opportunity. Sennacherib adopted a mild policy toward Babylon. It was not, indeed, the Babylonians who were the cause of the trouble, and only the possessions of Mar­duk-aplu-iddin and his supporters were confiscated. The Chaldeans were driven back into their own territory and the cities were given back the lands which formerly belonged to them. The Aramaean tribes, likewise, who under similar conditions always joined with the Chaldeans, were compelled to fall back to their old domain. Sennacherib now placed upon the throne of Babylon a scion of a noble family of Babylon who had grown up at the court of Nineveh, viz.,

BEL-IBNI, 702-700,

who reigned from 702 to 700. In the year 702 two provinces bordering on Elam were secured. The force of circumstances, however, ran counter to Bel-ibni's loyalty to Assyria, even though he may have had the best of intentions. Sennacherib 's policy of making Nineveh the first city of the Orient may have been apparent. In any case, Bel-ibni was compelled during Sennacherib's engagement in Palestine to cut loose from Assyria and join forces with his own rival, Marduk­aplu-iddin, Mushezib-Marduk, another Chaldean prince, and Elam; in other words, acknowledge subjection to Elam. This step was, doubtless, not voluntarily taken. However, just as the Palestinians miscalculated and took the field too late, so now, the Babylonians and Elamites counted amiss. Sennacherib abandoned the siege of Jerusalem after he had conquered the entire land, turned against his ambitious rivals and scattered the hosts of the allied armies in confusion. Marduk­aplu-iddin betook himself and his gods to Elam. The Chaldean, Mushezib-Marduk, fell back upon his desert swamps, and Bel-ibni with his followers had to return whence he came—to the court of Nineveh. From this it appears that he joined Elam and the Chaldeans under compulsion, otherwise he would certainly have suffered a severer punishment.

ASHUR-NADIN-SHUM, 699-694,

a son of Sennacherib was enthroned in Babylon and ruled from 699-694. Marduk-aplu-iddin must have died soon after, for nothing more is heard of him. Commotions in Elam were now rife, consequently peace prevailed for five years in Babylonia. In the year 694 Sennacherib advanced against the inhabitants of "The Sea-Land," who had fled with Marduk-aplu-iddin to Elam. They had settled in some of the coast cities and were a constant menace to Babylonia, hence the determination of Sennacherib to drive them out. He gives a detailed description of the work he undertook to effect his purpose—how he built ships and brought them to Opis on the Tigris, thence over to the Euphrates and down to the Persian Gulf. He conquered the temptations which may have arisen within himself to dare the dangerous element, but he transported his army by ship to Elam. It proceeded a short distance up the river Karun (Ulai), devastated the Elamite provinces along the coast, and dispersed, or took prisoners the Chaldean settlers.

While the Assyrian army remained here in Elam Khalludush, the king of Elam, was not idle. Marching along the usual military highway he entered Northern Babylonia at Dur-ilu, conquered Sippar, took Ashur-nadin-shum prisoner and deported him to Elam. He appointed in his stead

NERGAL-USHEZIB, 694-693,

a Babylonian, king of Babylon. Sennacherib tells us only of the courageous face he presented to the threatening sea and of his success in Elam. The counter-stroke of the Elamite we know of only from the Babylonian chronicle. Neither is anything more heard of Sennacherib's deposed son, Ashur-nadin-shum. The new king at first had possession only of Northern Babylonia, but later he attempted to expel the Assyrians from the South also. He conquered Nippur; but Uruk, which appears to have gone over to him, was retaken by the Assyrians, and soon afterward the Assyrian forces appeared before Nippur. Nergal-ushezib marched out and met them in open battle which went against him. He was defeated and taken prisoner. He reigned only one and a half years, from 694-693.

While Sennacherib in the same year set out on a war of retaliation against Elam, the Chaldean,

MUSHEZIB-MARDUK, 692-689,

already mentioned, seized the opportunity to establish himself in Babylon, where he continued to rule from 692 to 689. He put himself completely in the hands of Elam and even sacrificed the treasures of the temple of Marduk that he might pay Umman-menanu, the Elamite, his presents, that is, the price exacted for assistance rendered. Here, again, it appears that the priestly party relied on Assyria. Sennacherib did not find it so easy this time to put Elam, the actual foe, to rout. In the year 691 a battle was waged near Khalule in Northern Babylonia, with Umman-menanu, his vassal Mushezib-Marduk, the son of Marduk-aplu-iddin, and the rest of the Chaldeans. Sennacherib gives a glowing narrative of the engagement and naturally claims the victory. The Babylonian chronicle ascribes it to Umman-menanu and, in so doing is, at least, virtually correct, for Sennacherib reaped no advantage from it: Babylon remained under Elamite protection. In 689 Umman-menanu died, and, in the same year, Babylon fell into the hands of Sennacherib, and Mushezib-Marduk was carried a prisoner to Assyria. We must infer that the Assyrian party in Babylon at this time was insignificant. It had apparently become clear that Sennacherib's policy aimed at the destruction of the city. Desperation led to a union with the Chaldeans. Sennacherib then hastened to effect his purpose by the quickest means: Babylon was completely demolished and her gods carried to Assyria. The possibility of reinhabiting the ancient city was, therewith, removed for some time.

After the destruction of Babylon Nineveh might have become the leading city in the Orient. But it is an easier matter to destroy the products of civilization than to charm them again into existence, and the economical conditions of thousands of years could not with impunity be ignored. For eight years there was “no king in Babylon,” as the Babylonian chronicle sadly relates. There was indeed no Babylon. But, when Sennacherib was murdered, the first act of his son Esarhaddon, who succeeded him, and who appears to have previously been governor of Babylon, was to issue a decree commanding the rebuilding of the city and the temple of Marduk. The years that Babylon lay in ruins were naturally used by the Chaldeans of the neighbouring Bit-Dakuri to transgress the Babylonian boundary. Esarhaddon was obliged to expel them. Descendants of Mard-uk­aplu-iddin sought alliances with Elam, in the hope of renewing the policy of their ancestor; but these attempts were also rendered abortive. Conditions, however, had changed after Sennacherib's death. The latter stood for a purely Assyrian and, therefore, a strong military policy, but Esarhaddon was forced to depend on the priesthood as Sargon had been. Thus the reconstruction of Babylon was exactly upon the old lines. Evidently enough the military party did not disappear with the death of Sennacherib, but the condition of affairs in Assyria controlled it. These two strenuous parties appear to have set their hopes for the future upon the two princes Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin. We shall see in the history of Assyria how the military party compelled Esarhaddon to crown their head, Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, therewith securing control just as Babylon was ready and was again on the point of occupying the throne of Babylonia. Esarhaddon was able to secure only Babylon and Southern Babylonia to

SHAMASH-SHUM-UKIN, 668-648.

In the year 668 the statue of Marduk was returned to Babylon and the two princes proclaimed, kings of their respective realms while their father still lived. But the old situation still continued—Babylon stood under Assyrian Over-lordship, and the new king of Assyria offered up sacrifices in Babylon, Sippar and Kutha as the protector of Babylonian deities.

Therewith the way was opened for the old rivalries and the outbreak of hostilities was only a question of time. For the first few years the inscriptions of both of them abound with vain expressions of good will and brotherly love, and then the clang of weapons rings out anew. Sha­mash-shum-ukin sought for allies wherever the enemies of Assyria were to be found, and these were rarely lacking wherever her rule was felt or feared. Elam, the Arabians, the lands along the Mediterranean, Gutium (North Countries), he incited to arms against Assyria. In the war which followed the question to be decided was again: Shall Babylon or Assyria dominate the Orient? It was about the middle of the seventh century that the war broke out owing to the refusal of Shamash-shum-akin to allow his brother Ashurbanipal to perform the sacrifices which, as protector of Babylonia, he was wont to offer. It ended with a disastrous siege of Sippar, Kutha, and Babylon, and the death of Shamash-shum­ukin, who perished in the flames into which, according to the account of Ashurbanipal, his desperate subjects cast him. In 648 the war came to a close, and Babylonia had suffered enough from it to make peace seem desirable for some time. From 647-626 the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, wore the crown of Babylon under the name of

KANDALANU, 647-626

His speech, delivered on the occasion of his accession, has come down to us. The susses which he won over Elam prevented the latter from further hostile movements against Babylonia. So the land had rest until he died.

But as so often before, so it was now, change of rulers gave opportunity to a Chaldean to grasp the throne of Babylon. From 625 the lists designate

NABU-APLU-UTSUR, 625­

or, as the name has come down to us through the Greeks somewhat distorted, as other names and facts delivered to us from the same source, Nabopolassar. He was a Chaldean, but we do not know which was his native state. He is the first of the last dynasty of Babylon, which raised her again to the leading power of Western Asia and extended her dominion once more as far as the Mediterranean. In the uninterrupted struggle between Assyria and the Chaldeans over Babylon the latter were eventually victors, after their efforts were repeatedly thwarted for a couple of centuries. Babylonia was now Chaldean. The Chaldean migration had reached its goal and therewith also its end.

 

HISTORICAL RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK

A. THE SOURCES

OUR knowledge of the ancient Orient is of recent date. The decipherment of the monuments which have supplied us with our information is the result of the last half century. Even from this brief period a large portion must be deducted when actual work is considered, so inadequate are the means with which science is compelled to labour. Even today it cannot be said that anything approaching a systematic exploration of these old culture lands has yet been undertaken. The monuments which thus far have been recovered and which have furnished us with the most reliable sources extant for the history of the times, constitute but an infinitely small part of that which we might recover and is lying in reserve for future excavators. Every attempt, therefore, to construct for ourselves a connected history of the development of ancient Oriental peoples is doomed to partial failure beforehand. We know the essential conditions of certain periods that are illuminated by abundant sources which accident has put into our hands, or, at least, we can note the effect of certain forces that operate to produce results. But of other periods we have only a few details from which far-reaching conclusions must be drawn to derive from them the most general knowledge of events. Of many others—and they are many—we know nothing—the most we can do is to insert the names of two or three kings of whose deeds nothing has come down to us.

It is further natural that the sources accessible to us should relate rather to the political events than to the active thought and dominant forces controlling the inner life of the people. The numerous inscriptions of the Assyrian kings were the first to be discovered, and that part of the history which is based upon them is as yet the most complete. But these records relate almost entirely to wars and territorial conquests, to battles waged and booty won; that which we would more gladly learn of the people's life is to be gathered from scanty suggestions.

The consideration of the cultural achievements and attainments of the ancient Orient remains, therefore, in default of sufficient sources, unsatisfactory. For some periods as, for example, the time of the first dynasty of Babylon and, in Assyria, the time from Tiglathpileser III onward, again, in Babylon, from Nebuchadnezzar to the Persian Conquest, and even for the age of the Seleucids, we have thousands of documents in our possession. They consist of contracts, judicial decisions, business documents of all kinds, and private letters and despatches. These supply a varied abundance of detailed facts touching the private life of the respective periods. But they have not yet been sufficiently studied to enable us to draw from the confusing mass of details the general characteristics of the cultural development—to sketch in clear and full lines the typical life of the times. The foundation for a thorough insight into the private life has as yet been laid only for the New-Babylonian period. Until this mass of material is mastered, and the numerous documents of the other periods have revealed their contents, there will be a demand for much studious toil and talent. And until the breaks between these periods, separated from each other by centuries and millenniums, are filled up by means of new inscriptions generations will have passed, and this notwithstanding the incomparably rapid strides which Assyriology has made. The civilization of three millenniums, forgotten for two thousand years, cannot be called forth again from the silence of buried cities, from a language unknown, and a script so complex in three or four decades.

But even if these numerous documents, for whose mastery the strength of the few workers in this field is inadequate, were forced to yield up their secrets they would still reveal, for the most part, only one side of the life of the Babylonians and Assyrians, viz., that connected with business, and especially private business life. But so far as the popular and civic life of the people as a whole is concerned—in other words the social-economic conditions—less light is shed. Of much that remains of great importance to us in modern life we shall have to content ourselves for long with little or no knowledge. Business activities, and industrial life in the large, the conditions attaching to property ownership in lands and their effect upon the welfare of the state, governmental restraints, etc., are matters concerning which we receive little information from the royal inscriptions, and in a contract drawn up between A and B we naturally look in vain for such enlightenment.

As we have already seen we know as yet nothing concerning the beginnings of that civilization which was native to Babylonia. The Sumerians belong to the prehistoric age, as much so as the Babylonians and Assyrians did when history was supposed to begin with Greece. The long ages in which man was resident in the valley of the Euphrates and developed there a civilization, which, at the time of our earliest records, had stirred the conquering spirit of the foreigner, are still lost in the mists of antiquity. The time is yet distant when we shall be able to say from contemporary documents, or works of art, how the first inhabitants of the Euphrates valley, struggling against barbarous conditions and adapting themselves to the requirements of the country, raised themselves to the higher stages of civilization. When and how the more important achievements were made, how, for example, the greatest of intellectual feats, the development of writing, was accomplished, no sources have yet been discovered to tell us. The remotest antiquity of Babylonia, of which we have knowledge, had a fully developed system of writing as that of Egypt had in the valley of the Nile.

B. THE LAND IN ITS ORIGINAL STATE

The low land of the Euphrates now, for the most part barren and marshy, was once the most fruitful portion of the earth. The productiveness of the soil is described as remarkable in the records of every age. The land, through the rich alluvial deposits of the Euphrates, like the Nile, gave to the agriculturalist the richest return for the least labour. In the climate of the Orient, where rain falls seldom, the lands through which these rivers coursed were the only ones which in the initial stages of cultivation promised an adequate return to the tiller of the soil. On the other hand, in times of drouth, necessity compelled the Bedouin herdsmen to abandon the parched steppes with their flocks and herds and betake themselves to these fertile regions. Here bountiful nature provided them, at little cost of labour, with fodder sufficient to tide them over the dry season. The transition from nomadic to agricultural life thus finds its explanation in the nature of the soil.

The step from an agricultural state to life in fortified cities is not very great and is quickly taken in a land exposed on all sides to attack from nomad tribes. But even this stage of transitional activity in the Euphrates valley was completed long before the time where our sources begin. The ancient centres of civilization: Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Larsa, have already an immemorial past when first they appear in history. Ages before they had reached the development which they maintained through all the varying changes of politics for three thousand years ; they were the seats of old sanctuaries that had commanded reverence for unknown generations, the homes of city-bred populations that lived by business and industry.

Even at that time we must assume the existence of the regulations governing landed property and the various forms of professional activity borrowed from the Sumerians, just as they continued to reassert themselves through the long period of Babylonian culture. In contrast to Occidental civilizations, whose growth we can follow from their beginnings, we meet here with a perfected organization of society such as would correspond to that which European peoples arrived at in the Middle Ages. Through all the storm and stress of the following three thousand years it continued. Each new tide of immigrants that poured over the land quickly felt the power of the old culture and submitted to it. Certainly, even the less fortunate of the conquerors would get their share of the spoils, but an apportionment of the land among the peasantry has never been the custom. We cannot watch the progress of the people from the beginning. The leaders in the different conquests always took the place of the former kings. If they did not wish to destroy all the civilization they found they had to accept it with its temples and cities, its disposition of landed property, and its social classes. That is one reason why the different peoples were so quickly assimilated. They did not develop gradually, but leaped at one bound to a higher stage, beyond which they could not go.

We find consequently that a land system prevailed from the earliest times which we know onward which may best be described as cleric-feudal. The deity was the landlord. He bestowed the land upon the priesthood and the king; hence there was temple property and state property. The king had control over the country lands, which he let out to his vassals. His authority did not extend over the territory which stood in the domain of the god: this belonged to the city in which the god dwelled, and there, naturally to the patricians and the temple. The land was tilled by dependent tenants who were required to deliver their share of produce to the owners—the temple, king, nobles, citizens. This organiza­tion which was ever adopted anew (with fresh arrivals) was never favourable under the circumstances to the development of a peasant class. If, in the case of a new immigration, a strip of added territory was divided among the conquerors this could not be long maintained against the greater power of the crown possessions, which reached out and appropriated it as vassal land. This did not necessarily result in bondage. These tenants were in most cases free—as free as a man can be who retains just so much of his products, won from the soil with the sweat of his brow, as may permit him to enjoy life in an Oriental fashion. Bondage rarely resulted from force or legal oppression. The necessary complement of slaves was furnished from prisoners of war. These, however, were employed more likely in the industries of the cities than in the cultivation of the lands. The frequently occurring cases of manumission met with in business life come from this class.

The disposition of the land was, therefore, rather into small tracts, which were cultivated by the tenants for the owners. With the simple means afforded by this petty farming, and all the strenuous industry and use of every foot of earth which this system enforced, it was more akin to gardening than to agriculture.

C. IRRIGATION

The most important requirement of a fruitful cultivation of the ground in the Orient, with its rainless summers, is a regular supply of water. Just as the lack of it led the Bedouins from the steppes to the river valley, so it is the task of the agriculturalist to irrigate as much of the land's surface as possible. On the other hand, the great rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, when the snows begin to melt in the mountains, flow down with such volumes of water that they submerge the most productive parts of the country. The river-beds become Choked with the earthy deposits and the adjoining lands are turned into swamps, as is now the case with large tracts that once yielded bountiful harvests. Want of rain and spring floods combined to compel the inhabitants to cope with these unfavourable conditions. They were forced to collect the overflow for the rainless season. Self-preservation demanded the regula­tion of the water supply.

Thus it happened that the land from the earliest historical beginnings onward was intersected by a network of canals. This was a prime necessity in its development. By this means the overflowing waters at high flood were led off from the parts liable to inundation into the artificial channels, whence in time of drouth it returned to irrigate them. Some of these canals are constructed higher than the surrounding land so that the water can be let out upon it by means of sluices. Some of them are lower, and from these, as in Egypt, the water is raised by means of water-wheels, or, where less is required, by buckets. (The Shadduf of modern Egypt.)

Though the construction of these smaller means was the work of the individual who held the land, the building of the great canals was a national enterprise designed to regulate the water supply of the entire land. Thus we find among the meagre accounts which we have of royal measures for the national good accounts of the construction of canals. It is clear that they were fully aware of the economic value of these interior improve­ments. In the older times, when they dated not by the regular years but by important events, we find this entry: “In the year when such and such a war occurred” and following it: “When the king built such and such a canal”. “After the conquest of Southern Babylonia”, Hammurabi says, “when Anu and Bel intrusted me with the rule of Sumer and Akkad and placed the reins of government in my hands I dug the canal Nar­Hammurabi, the Blessing of Men, the bringer of abundance of water to the land of Sumer and Akkad. The land upon both sides thereof I restored to tillage; storehouses for the grain I built; water for ages to come I procured for the land of Sumer and Akkad”. In similar speech Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar tell of the waterways they built. These canals were also used for purposes of national defence as in Holland. We learn that Nebuchadnezzar in the last days of Babylonia built the Median Wall, and Nabunaid with its help converted his entire Babylonian empire into an island. Two famous canals traversed the whole of Babylonia; the one called Palakuttu (Palakottas - identified by Friedrich Delitzsch, Wo Lag das Paradies?, with an Assyrian word pisanu-canal which occurs in the vocabularies, and this again with the biblical Pishon), the other Neir-sharri, or Aramaic Nahr-Malket, i.e., “the kings’ canal”, a name which is met with in Hellenistic times. The first runs almost parallel to the Euphrates on its southern side; the other joins the Tigris and Euphrates.

Great canals and smaller ones stretched in all directions through the land as well as rude irrigating ditches. Upon the maintenance of them depended the habitableness of the whole valley. Consequently the care of these internal waterways and works of irrigation occupied a prime place in the policy of the kings down to the destruction of the country by the Mongols. With the ruin of the canals a large part of the land was filled with pestilential swamps. The first task to be performed whenever the attempt is made to restore these waste regions to their former unparalleled prolific state is the reopening and building of the canals, many of whose beds are still traceable.

While these numerous constructions were demanded by the nature of the Babylonian plain they were neither necessary nor possible in the higher lying regions, especially in the highlands of Assyria, where the climate is more temperate. But, on the other hand, we meet here with instances in which the water supply of the city was brought from a distance. By means of canals Sennacherib conducted the waters from the mountainous regions of Bavian to the city of Nineveh, and Esarhaddon constructed a tunnel at Negub through which lie brought the waters of the Zab to the city of Kalkhi as Ashur-natsirpal had done by other works. A relief from the palace of Ashurbanipal, now in the British Museum, represents a great Babylonian park which is supplied with water through an arched conduit which corresponds exactly to those of classical antiquity.

D. THE ARTS

In architecture invention and style depend largely upon the material at the disposal of the builder. In Babylonia there was neither stone nor suitable wood. Date palms, fig, and olive trees, were practically alone in their arboreta. Whereas in Egypt stone in abundance for their large buildings was found on the Upper Nile, and was easily transported down the river, the Babylonians were compelled to bring even those which they used for their statues from afar, and for the most part overland. Thus we find Gudea bringing the diorite for his sculptures from Magan (Arabia). The colossal statues of Egypt were, therefore, utterly unknown in Babylonia, and their buildings were constructed of the only material at hand, viz., clay. Babylonia was the land par excellence of brick buildings, and the influence of Babylon upon the Orient nowhere appears more clearly than in the imitation of her architecture by Elamites, Assyrians, and Syrians in their art and use of brick, though they had stone in abundance. In default of wood and stone for pillars necessity led to the invention of pillars built of brick, but, so far as our present knowledge reaches, these were not in general use. Cedars from Mount Amanus, and from Lebanon, after the former was denuded of its supply, were found to be ready substitutes for the pillars and neces­sary beams. But these were only occasionally employed in construction. Assyria copied Babylonia even in this.

The brick most largely used was sun-dried; but for more substantial buildings kiln-dried were employed, and these when used for veneering the walls were enamelled with varicoloured scenes and representations. Instead of mortar they used asphaltum with which the country abounds.

One of the most characteristic products of Babylonian construction in brick is their stepped-pyramids (zikurrat) which were carried upward, story upon story, to the number of seven at times, the wall of each successive one receding several feet from the one below. These constituted the glory of the great temples, and the topmost story was no doubt regarded as the dwelling-place of the deity.

The story of the Tower of Babel is connected with the tower (or zikurrat) of E-saggil, the temple of Bel-Merodach in Babylon. E-saggil means “the temple with the lofty tower”. Owing to the statements of classical writers the invention of the arch has hitherto been attributed to the Etruscans, but the Babylonians made use of it in their most ancient buildings in Lagash, or Telloh. Their technical skill rested on scientific principles no less unattainable in modern architecture than the Grecian idea of beauty in the plastic art. The buildings which they constructed with brick must have been built according to rules and laws unknown to modern architecture, which views many of these ancient works with the same astonishment as is evoked by the Pyramids of Egypt.

The temples are by far the most excellent examples of Babylonian architecture. To a greater degree than the churches and convents of the Middle Ages they united in themselves all that Babylonian culture had developed in spiritual and material ability. We have already seen that they were in possession of a large part of the land and we must look upon them as the centres of intellectual life. The influence of the priesthood was not confined to religion; the cultivation of science, and even the technical arts, no doubt, shared their attention. Such an organization with its temple forms a city with governing powers of its own, and the means is in our hands for obtaining full information respecting their administration of affairs. Countless clay tablets furnish data of importance, but, unfortunately, they have not yet received much attention from Assyriologists.

E. RELIGION AND SCIENCE

The nature of our sources makes it difficult for us to acquire a knowledge of the spiritual side of life. It was natural that education and instruction in religious matters should be assumed by the priests. They alone, in early times, understood the secret of writing and consequently were the protectors and patrons of all literature, sacred or profane, and the so-called practical sciences. Of the latter we have little documentary knowledge—only a few mathematical tablets being found in our collections. Their astronomical observations on an extended scale are attested by hundreds of tablets. Babylonia is the motherland of astronomy, and of astrology, which in the Orient is inseparable from it. As late as Hellenistic-Roman times the "Chaldeans" were still the reputed masters of the science. The observation and record of the movements of the heavenly bodies were accurate. Omens were put forth and all manner of conjunctions were prophecies written upon the scroll of heaven. An eclipse of the sun is recorded even in the Assyrian-Eponym Canon as an event as noteworthy as a war. When Thales, the Ionic philosopher, astounded the Ionic-Greek world by foretelling a solar eclipse he borrowed his wisdom from the Babylonians, as Pythagoras drew his philosophy, with its symbolism of numbers from the same Semitic source. A vast number of these observations of the heavenly bodies have come down to us, and numerous are the omens of the commonest arts of the prognosticator which we would gladly exchange for other material. Just as the Babylonians have lately proved their title to honour over the Etruscans for the invention of the arch found in classical Italy, so, too, the knowledge of the Etruscans, the masters and teachers of Rome, was of old Babylonian origin. Etruscan hepatoscopy and divination has lately been traced to the same source through a most interesting tablet in the British Museum which represents the liver of an animal divided by lines into a number of sections for this purpose. The Babylonian omens are the precursors of the old Sibylline Books (not the pseudepi­graphic writings that have come down to us).

The observation of the movements of the heavenly bodies was naturally accompanied by the determination of the times and seasons. Greece and Rome, significant as the fact is, borrowed their calendar from the Babylonians. Their year, month, and week we have still. The naming of days of the week after the gods of the sun and moon and the other five planets known to them has descended to us from them. We still divide the day into 12 double hours, as the faces of our watches prove.

In connection and harmony with these divisions stands their numeral system. This was the sexagesimal system, with the subdivisions 5 and 12, apparently founded upon astronomical observations and calculations. In conjunction with this, however, the decimal system was also used. Our sources do not reach back to the time when either of these two systems was introduced nor to a period when one of them was used exclusively. The systems of weights and measures rests upon the same method of computation. Ancient Babylonia had, therefore, a system of reckoning that has only lately in modern times been carried out in our decimal system, after the unity of that original method of computation had, during thousands of years of development, been lost to science. We can see now that some recollection of its source continued down to our own days, as in the case of our chronological divisions; and we can also watch its effects upon the peoples of the Occident and elsewhere, in the new expressions of it which continually appear, without, however, being able to decide by what intermediaries it passed over from the Orient. All such questions belong to fields of investigation scarcely touched upon, in which interesting discoveries relating to the prehistoric connections of our modern civilizations await the future.

We are confronted with serious difficulties when we attempt to sketch the service of the temple and priesthood, worship and religion. It would require an extensive treatise to set forth the manifold changes of ideas which took place in connection with the cultus in the course of three thousand years. Our sources here are much more fragmentary than in the field of political history, and we have scarcely begun to grasp the ideas in their origin and growth. So long as the primitive times of Babylonia and the beginning of its civilization are veiled from view it will scarcely be possible to reach a certainty of knowledge sufficient to throw a clear light upon the essential nature and origin of the multiplex pantheon revealed by the inscriptions. The fundamental character, however, of the Babylonian religion is discernible at a glance. It is an astral religion; the moon, sun, and stars are the central objects around which it turns. But it would be a gross misunderstanding to suppose that Babylonian theology identified the gods with the heavenly bodies. To do so would be as incorrect as to describe the Christian religion as a worship of heaven (or the heavens). The stellar world was, on the contrary, according to Babylonian theology only the supremest revelation of divine power, that revelation in which the governance and purposes of the gods could be most plainly observed. Moreover, all that is, the visible and invisible, is but an expression or part of the divine being. There are, it is true, countless gods, but these are only the forms through which the one divine Power is revealed. Such are the moon, the sun, the earth, the water, etc., from the greatest of objects to the smallest. In these the deity reveals himself; they are the forms of the divine becoming in matter, but behind them lies the one great Power.

The heavenly bodies are, consequently, only the most important forms through which the divine power is revealed. Whether this conception of things comes so near to the truth when judged by modern thought is, perhaps, worthy of reflection. The conception itself is unmistakably uttered in an explanatory astronomical tablet. This says of the planet Jupiter, the planet of Marduk, the head of the Babylonian pantheon: “When Jupiter stands some degrees above the horizon he is the god of the planet Mercury; when he stands higher he is the god of the planet Jupiter; when he reaches his culmination he is the god of Mars”. Jupiter always remains the same planet independently of its position, but a different divine power reveals itself in it, is active in it, according to the position reached: another aspect of the divine activity appears with each succeeding change, just as others appear in the water, in the earth, in the individual stone, tree, metal, fire, man, etc. Therefore, among the Babylonians the science of the stars, astronomy, was the science of sciences. It pointed out to them the divine will and taught them how this will revealed itself everywhere in nature. The starry heavens is the open book in which the destiny of heaven and earth, and of all that is upon it, is recorded and in which it may be read. It is, consequently, no accident which made the Babylonians the world's teachers in astronomy. This conception of the universe was astronomy, and out of it alone could an astronomy be developed, just as our conception of the universe also grew out of astronomy.

In the stars, the Babylonian beheld the whole divine will and, therefore, all earthly things must be images of the heavenly. For that which exists above as archetype must find its counter type here below. The organized state must conform exactly to the heavenly prototype.

Times and seasons were determined by the greater heavenly bodies, as they were also by later Judaism in the post-exilic priestly code. The conceptions of the Babylonians and the importance of their astronomy can, therefore, be most clearly perceived in the science of their calendar. For the calendar, based on the observation of the planetary movements, is the first requisite and, for practical daily life, the most important requisite for a conception of the world which concludes what its destiny is by observation of the courses of the stars. This calendrical-science stands in the closest organic connection with the doctrine as to all that is; it reflects the entire system of the universe and forms its basis.

A complete pantheon by itself appears in the inscriptions of the early rulers of Lagash (Telloh). It is possible that this still points back to the Sumerian influence of an early epoch which, nevertheless, was Semitic. This is suggested by the names and cults of certain gods. The period stands historically even almost by itself. It is nevertheless clear that peculiarities of the "Canaanite" inhabitants are discernible in it, and, on the other hand, that the broad general views as to God and the universe are specifically Babylonian. Here, as elsewhere, we are forced to recognize the fact that we are far from the beginning of civilization. But that which we meet with in the inscriptions of the Southern Babylonian dynasties helps us who have to study history back­ward. There the deities we meet with are the same deities that from then on constantly reappear. The simple explanation of that is found in the fact that these Southern Babylonian cities maintained their importance throughout the whole period of Babylonian civilization, whereas Lagash comes before us as the relic of a city of bygone times that was prematurely destroyed. But we are still too imperfectly informed to account for the peculiar phenomena which we meet with here for the first time.

That which we do meet with is Semitic or Semitized, but how does it stand related to the past? The question cannot be answered until it is known how the old culture-cities—Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Isin, Uruk—stood in relation to the older culture. The names of the deities show at once what was the dominant cult: In Ur the moon-god, in Larsa the worship of the sun, in Uruk Nana or Ishtar, the female principle, in Nippur was the temple of Bel, the "Lord of Lands," i.e., the earth. But each one of these, and many another unknown centre, had developed in its temple during the centuries and millenniums a theology of its own. Mixed up with this, and matured by the effort to reconcile it with the teaching of other centres, was an independent view, as to the causa rerun, that grew up around the god. In addition the different immigrations left behind them a "deposit of faith." The newly introduced ideas and the old native views had always to be adjusted and adapted to one another. It is true that the cultus, so far as we can follow it historically, had already acquired considerable fixity. The Semitic immigrations of the three millennials known to us introduced nothing very essential. Still, some important ideas appear even now for the first time as, for example, the change of the worship of the god of the atmosphere, Adad or Ramman, by the Canaanites. But, the less we are able to follow the development of ideas, the more necessary it is to seek for their origin in a time that as yet is wrapped in obscurity. At best it would be a herculean task to disentangle the various threads that cross one another in the different traditions of the temples and follow them back to their beginnings. It is very doubtful if this can ever be done. At present, however, we are immeasurably far from the beginning, for we know nothing of the real object of the investigation, viz., the tem­ple traditions, with the exception of the little that we know of the Marduk-cult in Babylon.

The farther North we go the purer appears the Semitic in the period known to us; Sumerian is no longer written here in the oldest discovered inscriptions of the time of Naram-Sin. The duplication of the cultus shows that the country stood divided into North and South. There was a South Babylonian sun-god in Larsa, and a North Babylonian one in Sippar. The Ishtar of Uruk in the South had a rival in the Northern city of Agade. We know less of the North in the early times than of the South. Later, after the first Babylonian dynasty, other cities appear; Cutha with its cult of Nergal, the god of the under world. Moon worship, which had its chief seat in Ur, had not the same importance in the North; but in Harran of Mesopotamia stood the most famous sanctuary of the moon-god.

Babylon has not yet come to light in the inscriptions of the oldest period. It is possible and probable that it owes its importance to political conditions of a comparatively late age. It may have been first founded by Sargon of Agade, if a much mutilated passage in the omens relating to his reign may be made to bear this interpretation. It became the most influential city of Babylonia, as we have seen, during the first dynasty. When it became the capital of the Babylonian empire, and thereby gained at the same time authority in economic life, there was developed in accordance with the Oriental way of thinking a theologico-historico justification of Babylon’s greatness. Just as Athens sought, when it reached the hegemony, through mythology and history to establish its antiquity, so the learned priests and scribes of Babylon tried to conjure forth witnesses and proofs to show that she was the seat of the oldest culture and the centre of the world, and they did it with greater success.

Marduk, the biblical Merodach, and former god of the city, becomes at once, by the priestly manipulation, the chief god in the work of creating the world. We have fragments of the creation­ myth of Babylon which ascribe the leading role to Marduk. In Southern Babylonian temples there doubtless existed similar works of early origin which reflected the conditions of the most flourishing period of their respective cities. The creation-epic anticipates the predominance of Babylon which was first established by the dynasty of Sumuabi and Hammurabi. It is Marduk who is made to enter the lists in a world-struggle for the rule of the dii superi which is threatened by the chaotic Tihaniat, and who, after cutting in two the monster, conceived of as a great serpent or dragon, creates the world and its firmament out of the two halves. In Nippur the hero was doubtless Bel, the god of that city. In the sanctuaries of the other cities the leading role of Shamash (sun), Sin (moon), Ishtar would be illuminated. The later the myth the greater the necessity for giving due consideration to those that preceded. Whether we shall ever become acquainted with the time in which the growth of these separate myths will appear clear to view we cannot say. At present we know chiefly some fragments of the latest which enable us to make out the connection. Of some of the others we have only insignificant remnants. Although we must assume that a copious literature of such epics and myths grew up during the thousands of years, we know, at present, not much beyond the fact that they received their final redaction in Babylon during the first dynasty. The Gilgamish epic, it is true, is for the most part known to us from the copies made for the library of Ashurbanipal. Some fragments of it, however, from copies made in the time of the First Dynasty, have lately been found. The deluge narrative had at that time been cast into the form in which it has come down to us; but this was by no means an ancient period in the life of Babylonia.

The creation-myths of Babylonia are the patterns after which the biblical are composed; just as Babylonia was the teacher of Western Asia in all intellectual matters. We have almost no other witnesses of this than the comparatively few fragments of Assyro-Babylonian literature which thus far have been recovered from the ruins (and for the most part from the library of Ashurbani­pal) and the remnants of Jewish literature which have been saved for us through canonization in the Bible. The relation of each to the other is that existing between the focusing point of all culture and an insignificant, inferior state—that between origination and imitation. But so long as we have nothing more we must attempt to form from what we have our view of the religious life of the Orient.

Religion undoubtedly played a role in the life of this people which the modern man may only too easily underestimate. The priests were the fosterers of science. Consequently every doctrine, every attempt to penetrate into the essential nature of things, every confirmation and justification of that which is, and every attempt to introduce something new, had to be tested by reference to the hoary doctrine of Beginnings, and, by that, justified or disapproved. The mental attitude of the Middle Ages which tested the rightness and righteousness of everything by the teachings of the Bible, as the reformers and their opponents appealed to the Bible in support of their religious and political demands, was exactly that of the ancient Orient. And more than this, these teachings whose power is still often more potent over the life of modern peoples than is clear to those not historically educated—these old Babylonian doctrines, carried forward in various forms by Jews and other peoples into the varied conditions of civilized life, remain in essence what they were—the expression of the Babylonian hierarchy as the representative of all intellectual life in the most ancient civilization. We may, perhaps, think we are justified in maintaining that the prayers and ideas of Judaism reveal a different world of thought from that presented by the polytheism of the rest of the Orient. But, the view, or pious belief in the development of Judaism, and in its later manifestations, takes on quite a different aspect in the light of universal history.

Proof of this in matters of detail cannot be adduced from the fragmentary literature; but it is evident to the simplest reflection on the nature and origin of human thoughts that the ideas which conquered the old civilized world did not spring up in some remote corner. In brief, where the exciting cause is present an idea may arise, and the same mental struggles which Israel and Judah had to pass through for the first time under the kings, or in the exile, Babylonia passed through frequently long before in the course of her prosperous periods. The fruits of such struggles had long since been acquired in the intellectual life of the Babylonians. It was thence that the "Prophet" of Israel got his spiritual weapons, his education, and his knowledge, and there Judaism must have received not only its impulse, but also its entire system.

In the life of a civilized people, such as the Babylonian, numerous occasions arise where discontent with existing conditions bring together large assemblies who frame their demands into a system, and, after the manner of the Orient, justify it. As all Oriental history teaches, life for many must also have assumed at such time the form of a sect, which grew out of social conditions, and which sought to establish its teachings especially on religious grounds. Many such sects must have arisen and have been favoured by the force of circumstances; and from the ideas they promulgated Judaism must have drawn for its own. That the hidden courses of human thought and history which led to the development of these ideas shall be again made clear to view cannot be expected. This much, however, we may confidently conclude from what we know, and from the laws of human development, that the origins of the fundamental teachings of Judaism not yet discovered in cuneiform literature shall yet be found there. The doctrine of a coming Deliverer could arise only in the centre of culture where the prestige of power was no longer what it was in a greater past. The doctrine is genetically related to that view of the universe which inferred from the circuits of the planets the reoccurrence of everything else in the world, whether great or small, and which read by the light of the stars the future development of all things on the earth, and in the universe.

Next to the teachings of religion and closely connected therewith mental activity finds expression in the development of mythology. In so far as this is a doctrine of gods and temples we have already seen how limited our knowledge is. We have to lament the same limitation with respect to the fragments of this literature which deals with mythological heroes and which always takes a prime place in the non-religious poetry. A great number of fragments bear witness to the existence of a whole series of epics, but of very few have we recovered enough to enable us to ascertain their contents, or conjecture them. The best known of all is the Gilgamish Epic. The name of the hero is written Is-tu-bar, and so he was at first called; and, as he was supposed to be the biblical Nimrod, the name Nimrod-epic became general. Gilgamish is the Babylonian Heracles, whose deeds are glorified in the poem which furnished the Hellenic Alexander-romance with the legendary material it wove around the name of the Macedonian conqueror. The form in which the epic has come down to us it received in Uruk. According to tradition the old Ishtar-Nana city had been founded by Gilgamish, and the epic reflects the conditions into which it had fallen as the result of Elamite oppression. Gilgamish, like Heracles, is essentially a solar mythological figure. One of the episodes described in the epic is the story of the Deluge which forms the basis of the biblical account. The brief epic of Ishtar's descent into the under-world to restore from the world of spirits her dead brother and spouse, Tammuz (Adonis), is preserved in its entirety.

Other epics, portions of which exist, are Etana and the Eagle, the legends of the Plague Demon, and of the Storm-god, Zit. But these are not yet perfectly understood.

The Fables of Animals, so natural to the Oriental, were also complete in early times in Babylonia. We have fragments of the “Ox and Horse”, the Fox, the Serpent-god, and others of which, however, we must be content to know even less than of the preceding until more has been discovered. Numerous unpublished fragments, too broken to be understood, as is the case with many similar compositions, create a hope that the future may reward us with a completer knowledge.

F. COMMERCE, BUSINESS, INDUSTRY

To present clearly the importance of Babylonian industry and trade would be one of the most worthy tasks and one accompanied by most satisfactory results. But we are by no means in a position to do this, though it is clear that during three thousand years the ups and downs of business were as great as the changes in political life. We can take it for granted that Babylonia's, and particularly Babylon's, importance and preponderance rested upon her industry and business. In the entire period through which we can follow Assyria's power, Babylon was as a political unity, powerless. It was compelled to purchase its independence from Assyria or, on the other hand, to win with gold the support of Elam against her. It lacked the men necessary to wage a war on its own account, as it could not otherwise be under the conditions which controlled landed property. This fact alone is sufficient to show that it was predominantly an industrial land. It was doubtless part of Sennacherib's intention in the destruction of Babylon to divert a part of its trade and industry to his own newly chosen capital, Nineveh.

We have previously seen that Babylonian politics from the time of the Kassite dynasty were bent on controlling the way through Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean, and that Kadashman­Kharbe then attempted to secure a road through the desert to Syria and the Phoenician harbors. In this effort there can be no doubt that he had Babylonian trade in mind. As to the conditions of trade in earlier times Gudea’s inscriptions furnish us data for some conclusions. Gudea transported both stone and wood for his buildings from Phoenicia, Syria, and Arabia. The Tel-Amarna letters also throw some light on Babylonian industry. Both Babylonians and the princes of Mitanni demanded gold from Egypt. The quid pro quo was industrial products, especially lapis lazuli, so highly prized by the Egyptians, or an imitation of it, one of the chief products of Babylonian exports. The Egyptians got weapons and battle chariots from Mitanni and even from Assyria. When the Babylonians ordered inlaid work in ivory and ebony in Egypt they were dealing only in fashionable objects in Egyptian style such as have been found in Nineveh. These signified no more with them than Chinese porcelain or Japanese handiwork among ourselves.

Little is known as yet of the shipping trade on the Persian Gulf, and, consequently, the other question related to this, viz., the commercial route to India, by which the eastern and western worlds communicated, cannot be answered. It is inconceivable that the oldest civilization of Babylonia which grew up in the South did not develop navigation on the “Sea of the Rising Sun”. At the point at which our knowledge begins we find that it has already advanced inland toward the North. Naturally, in view of the contents, no mention of such matters is to be found in the oldest inscriptions, and there is little prospect that the near future will add to our knowledge. In later times the Chaldeans kept up navigation on the gulf. The country known as the "Sea-Land," which prospered for centuries, doubtless owed a part of its prosperity and its power to withstand Assyria to the wealth acquired through traffic with the East. Merodach-baladan possessed ships on which he fled across the “bitter-waters”, or great Lagoon, to Elam. At that time there was no fleet in Babylonia. Sennacherib had to employ naval architects from Phoenicia to build ships for him in Assyria, and these were thence taken South by river. Under these circumstances there could not have been any trade with the East. Dilmun, the island of Bahrein, including also the adjoining coast lands, which the early Babylonians regarded as a part of their territory, was in the time of Sar­gon II a distant island from which he alone among the kings of the period collected tribute. None of his successors mention it. The traffic on the Persian Gulf was probably under the control of Elam.

Few products of Babylonian industry have come down to us. Only a very few and comparatively insignificant monumental remains of architecture and sculpture, of which Assyria has furnished so many, have been recovered from the mounds of the mother-land. Those of Telloh have yielded the most and have supplied us with a goodly number of statues and sculptures of the kings and patesis of Lagash. Starting from the crude beginnings of the first kings, and rapidly progressing, the statues of Gudea and his age, the sculptures of Naram-Sin, show the highest attainment in technique. It appears as if we had here a sudden renaissance after a period of great decline. The careful and exquisite work on a monument of Merodach-baladan, in which he is represented in the act of clothing a vassal with the investiture of office, is one of the few known products of later art. A great number of similar monuments, dating from the Kassite period onward, cannot compare with this in point of execution. Some few representations in clay from real life prove only that the future may yet reveal to us evidence of keen and humorous portrayal of private life.

The same limitations extend to our knowledge of the rules and form of the state constitution, the administration, and army. The Babylonian inscriptions, in contrast to the Assyrian, never deal with the wars and other deeds of the rulers. That which we are able to present on these points is rather to be inferred from the better attested methods of Assyria, which, since they sprang up under like conditions, manifest, in the main features, similar forms of development.