Part 4

Meantime, during what appears to have been an era of rivalries between pretenders, mutually jealous of and deposing one another, usurpers in succession seizing the crown without strength to keep it, the feudal lords displayed more than their old restlessness. The nomad tribes began to show growing hostility on the frontier, and the peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates were already pushing their vanguards into Central Syria. While Egypt had been bringing the valley of the Nile and the eastern corner of Africa into subjection, Chaldæa had imposed not only language and habits, but also her laws upon the whole of that part of Eastern Asia which separated her from Egypt. Thus the time was rapidly approaching when these two great civilised powers of the ancient world would meet each other face to face and come into fierce and terrible collision.

VII.--Ancient Chaldæa

The Chaldæan account of Genesis is contained on fragments of tablets discovered and deciphered in 1875 by George Smith. These tell legends of the time when "nothing which was called heaven existed above, and when nothing below had as yet received the name of earth. Apsu, the Ocean, who was their first father, and Chaos-Tiamat, who gave birth to them all, mingled their waters in one, reeds which were not united, rushes which bore no fruit. In the time when the gods were not created, Lakhmu and Lakhamu were the first to appear and waxed great for ages."

Then came Anu, the sunlit sky by day, the starlit firmament by night; Inlil-Bel, the king of the earth; Ea, the sovereign of the waters and the personification of wisdom. Each of them duplicated himself, Anu into Anat, Bel into Belit, Ea into Damkina, and united himself to the spouse whom he had produced from himself. Other divinities sprang from these fruitful pairs, and, the impulse once given, the world was rapidly peopled by their descendants. Sin, Samash and Ramman, who presided respectively over the sun, moon and air, were all three of equal rank; next came the lords of the planets, Ninib, Merodach, Nergal, Ishtar, the warrior-goddess, and Nebo; then a whole army of lesser deities who ranged themselves around Anu as around a supreme master.

Discord arose. The first great battle of the gods was between Tiamat and Merodach. In this fearful conflict Tiamat was destroyed. Splitting her body into halves, the conqueror hung up one on high, and this became the heavens; the other he spread out under his feet to form the earth, and made the universe as men have known it. Merodach regulated the movements of the sun and divided the year into twelve months.

The heavens having been put in order, he set about peopling the earth. Many such fables concerning the cosmogony were current among the races of the lower Euphrates, who seem to have belonged to three different types. The most important were the Semites, who spoke a dialect akin to Armenian, Hebrew and Phoenician. Side by side with these the monuments give evidence of a race of ill-defined character, whom we provisionally call Sumerians, who came, it is said, from some northern country, and brought with them a curious system of writing which, adopted by ten different nations, has preserved for us all that we know in regard to the majority of the empires which rose and fell in Western Asia before the Persian conquest. The cities of these Semites and Sumerians were divided into two groups, one in the south, near the sea, the other more to the north, where the Euphrates and the Tigris are separated by a narrow strip of land. The southern group consisted of seven, Eridu lying nearest the coast. Uru was the most important. Lagash was to the north of Eridu. The northern group consisted of Nipur, "the incomparable," Borsip, Babylon (gate of the god and residence of life, the only metropolis of the Euphrates region of which posterity never lost reminiscence), Kishu, Kuta, Agade, and, lastly, the two Sipparas, that of Shamash, and that of Annuit.

The earliest Chaldæan civilisation was confined almost to the banks of the lower Euphrates; except at the northern boundary it did not reach the Tigris and did not cross the river. Separated from the rest of the world, on the east by the vast marshes bordering on the river, on the north by the Mesopotamian table-land, on the west by the Arabian desert, it was able to develop its civilisation as Egypt had done, in an isolated area, and to follow out its destiny in peace.

According to Ferossasi the first king was Aloros of Babylon. He was chosen by the god Oannes, and reigned supernaturally for ten sari, or 36,000 years, each saros being 3,600 years. Nine kings follow, each in this mythical record reigning an enormous period. Then took place the great deluge, 691,000 years after the creation, in consequence of the wickedness of men, who neglected the worship of the gods, and excited their wrath. Shamashnapishtim, king at this time in Shurippak, was saved miraculously in a great ship. Concerning him and his voyage strange fables are recorded. After the deluge, 86 kings ruled during 34,080 years. One of these was Nimrod, the mighty hunter of the Bible, who appears as Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, and is the hero of extraordinary adventures.

History proper begins with Sargon the Elder, king at the first in Agade, who soon annexed Babylon, Sippara, Kishu, Uruk, Kuta and Nipur. His brilliant career was like an anticipation of that of the still more glorious life of Sargon of Nineveh. His son, Naramsin, succeeded him about 3750 B.C. He conquered Elam and was a great builder. After him the most famous king of that epoch was Gudea, of Lagash, the prince of whom we possess the greatest number of monuments. But in these records we have but the dust of history rather than history itself. The materials are scanty in the extreme and the framework also is wanting.

VIII.--The Temples and the Gods of Chaldæa

The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of Egypt, by the magnificence of their ruins. They are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be traced--mounds of stiff greyish clay, containing the remains of the vast structures that were built of bricks set in mortar or bitumen. Stone was not used as in Egypt. While the Egyptian temple was spread superficially over a large area, the Chaldæan temple strove to attain as high an elevation as possible. These "ziggurats" were composed of several immense cubes piled up on one another, and diminishing in size up to the small shrine by which they were crowned, and wherein the god himself was supposed to dwell.

The gods of the Euphrates, like those of the Nile, constituted a countless multitude of visible and invisible beings, distributed into tribes and empires throughout all the regions of the universe; but, whereas in Egypt they were, on the whole, friendly to man, in Chaldæa they for the most part pursued him with an implacable hatred, and only seemed to exist in order to destroy him. Whether Semite or Sumerian, the gods, like those of Egypt, were not abstract personages, but each contained in himself one of the principal elements of which our universe is composed--earth, air, sky, sun, moon and stars. The state religion, which all the inhabitants of the same city were solemnly bound to observe, included some dozen gods, but the private devotion of individuals supplemented this cult by vast additions, each family possessing its own household gods.

Animals never became objects of worship as in Egypt; some of them, however, as the bull and the lion, were closely allied to the gods. If the idea of uniting all these gods into a single supreme one ever crossed the mind of a Chaldæan theologian, it never spread to the people as a whole. Among all the thousands of tablets or inscribed stones on which we find recorded prayers, we have as yet discovered no document containing the faintest allusion to a divine unity. The temples were miniature reproductions of the arrangements of the universe. The "ziggurat" represented in its form the mountain of the world, and the halls ranged at its feet resembled approximately the accessory parts of the world; the temple of Merodach at Babylon comprised them all up to the chambers of fate, where the sun received every morning the tablets of destiny.

Every individual was placed, from the very moment of his birth, under the protection of a god or goddess, of whom he was the servant, or rather the son. These deities accompanied him by day and by night to guard him from the evil genii ready to attack him on every side. The Chaldæans had not such clear ideas as to what awaited them in the other world as the Egyptians possessed.

The Chaldæan hades is a dark country surrounded by seven high walls, and is approached by seven gates, each guarded by a pitiless warder. Two deities rule within it--Nergal, "the lord of the great city," and Peltis-Allat, "the lady of the great land," whither everything which has breathed in this world descends after death. A legend relates that Allat reigned alone in hades and was invited by the gods to a feast which they had prepared in heaven. Owing to her hatred of the light she refused, sending a message by her servant, Namtar, who acquitted himself, with such a bad grace, that Anu and Ea were incensed against his mistress, and commissioned Nergal to chastise her. He went, and finding the gates of hell open, dragged the queen by her hair from the throne, and was about to decapitate her, but she mollified him by her prayers and saved her life by becoming his wife.

The nature of Nergal fitted him well to play the part of a prince of the departed; for he was the destroying sun of summer, and the genius of pestilence and battle. His functions in heaven and earth took up so much of his time that he had little leisure to visit his nether kingdom, and he was consequently obliged to content himself with the rôle of providing subjects for it by dispatching thither the thousands of recruits which he gathered daily from the abodes of men or from the field of battle.

IX.--Chaldæan Civilisation

The Chaldæan kings, unlike their contemporaries, the Pharaohs, rarely put forward any pretension to divinity. They contented themselves with occupying an intermediate position between their subjects and the gods. While the ordinary priest chose for himself a single deity as master, the priest-king exercised universal sacerdotal functions. He officiated for Merodach here below, and the scrupulously minute devotions daily occupied many hours. On great days of festival or sacrifice they laid aside all insignia of royalty and were clad as ordinary priests.

Women do not seem to have been honoured in the Euphratean regions as in Egypt, where the wives of the sovereign were invested with that semi-sacred character that led the women to be associated with the devotions of the man, and made them indispensable auxiliaries in all religious ceremonies. Whereas the monuments on the banks of the Nile reveal to us princesses sharing the throne of their husbands, whom they embrace with a gesture of frank affection, in Chaldæa, the wives of the prince, his mother, sisters, daughters and even his slaves, remain absolutely invisible to posterity. The harem in which they were shut up by force of custom rarely, if ever, opened its doors; the people seldom caught sight of them; and we could count on our fingers the number of these whom the inscriptions mention by name.

Life was not so pleasant in Chaldæa as in Egypt. The innumerable promissory notes, the receipted accounts, the contracts of sale and purchase--these cunningly drawn-up deeds which have been deciphered by the hundred, reveal to us a people greedy of gain, exacting, litigious, and almost exclusively absorbed in material concerns. The climate, too, variable and oppressive in summer and winter alike, imposed on the Chaldæan painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of which the majority of Egyptians would not have felt themselves capable. And the plague of usury raged with equal violence in city and country.

In proportion, however, as we are able to bring this wonderful civilisation to light we become more and more conscious that we have indeed little or nothing in common with it. Its laws, customs, habits and character, its methods of action and its modes of thought, are so far apart from those of the present day that they seem to belong to a humanity utterly different from our own. It thus happens that while we understand to a shade the classical language of the Greeks and of the Romans, and can read their works almost without effort, the great primitive literatures of the world, the Egyptian and Chaldæan, have nothing to offer us for the most part but a sequence of problems to solve or of enigmas to unriddle with patience.

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The Struggle of the Nations

Maspero in this work gives us the second volume of his great historical trilogy. He shows in parallel views the part played in the history of the ancient world by the first Chaldæan Empire, by Syria, by the Hyksos, or shepherd kings, of Egypt, and by the first Cossæan kings who established the greatness of Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire. The great Theban dynasty is then exhibited in its romantic rise under the Pharaohs. Maspero writes not as a mere chronicler or reciter of events, but as a philosophical historian. He makes the reader understand how fatally the chronic militarism of these competing empires drained each of its manhood and brought Babylon and Assyria simultaneously into a hopeless condition of national anæmia. Equally pathetic is the picture drawn of the gradual but sure decay of the grand empire of the Pharaohs. Maspero, with masterly skill, passes a processional of these despots before our eyes.

I.--The Chaldæan Empire and the Hyksos

Some countries seem destined from their origin to become the battlefields of the contending nations which environ them. Into such regions neighbouring peoples come to settle their quarrels, and bit by bit they appropriate it, so that at best the only course open to the inhabitants is to join forces with one of the invaders. From remote antiquity this was the experience of Syria, which was thus destined to become subject to foreign rule. Chaldæa, Egypt, Assyria and Persia in turn presided over its destinies. Semites dwelt in the south and the centre, while colonies from beyond the Taurus occupied the north. The influence of Egypt never penetrated beyond the provinces lying nearest the Dead Sea. The remaining populations looked rather to Chaldæa, and received the continuous impress of the kingdoms of the Euphrates.

The lords of Babylon had, ordinarily, a twofold function, the priest at first taking precedence of the soldier, but gradually yielding to the latter as the city increased in power. Each ruler was obliged to go in state to the temple of Bel Merodach within a year of his accession, there to do homage to the divine statue. The long lists of early kings contain semi-legendary names, including those of mythical heroes. Towards the end of the twenty-fifth century, however, before the Christian era, a dynasty arose of which all the members come within the range of history.

The first of these kings, Sumuabim, has left us some contracts bearing the dates of one or other of the fifteen years of his reign. Of the ten kings who followed during the period embraced between the years 2416 B.C. and 2112 B.C., the one who ruled for the longest term was the. famous and fortunate Khammurabi (son of Sinmuballit), who was on the throne for fifty-five years.