A. H. Sayce

“ Semites of Assyria and the mixed population of Babylonia should differ from one another in many respects. The Babylonians were agriculturists, fond of literature and peaceful pursuits. The Assyrians, on the contrary, have been appropriately termed the Romans of the East: they were a military people, caring for little else save war and trade. Their literature, like their culture and art, was borrowed from Babylonia, and they never took kindly to it. Even under the magnificent patronage of Assur-bani-pal, Assyrian literature was an exotic. ”

“ We find there no tombs whose pictured walls set before us the daily life and doings of the people. We have to acquire our knowledge from the bas-reliefs of the royal palaces, which represent to us rather the pomp of the court and the conquest of foreign nations than scenes taken from ordinary Assyrian life. It is only incidentally that the manners and customs of the lower classes are depicted. It is true that we can learn a good deal from the contract-tablets and other kinds of what may be called the private literature of Babylonia and Assyria. ”

“ May the dream I dream turn to prosperity. May Makhir, the god of dreams, settle upon my head. Let me enter Beth-Saggil, the palace of the gods, the temple of the lord. Give me unto Merodach, the merciful, to prosperity, even unto prospering hands. [Pg 71] May thy entering (O Merodach) be exalted, may thy divinity be glorious; may the men of thy city extol thy mighty deeds.'
Along with these prayers, the Assyrians possessed a collection of penitential psalms, which were composed at a very remote period in Southern Babylonia. ”

“ Such, then, was the constitution of the great Assyrian Empire, which first endeavoured to organise Western [Pg 145] Asia into a single homogeneous whole, and in effecting its purpose cared neither for justice nor for humanity. Nineveh was 'full of lies and robbery,' but it was God's instrument in chastising His chosen people, and in preparing the way for the ages that were to come, and for a while, therefore, it was allowed to 'make the earth empty' and 'waste.' But the day came when its work was accomplished, and the measure of its iniquity was full. ”

“ The rites performed in her temples made Istar or Ashtoreth the darkest blot in Assyrian and Canaanitish religion, and excited the utmost horror and indignation of the prophets of God. When the moon came to be conceived as a female divinity, the pale reflection, as it were, of the sun, Istar, the evening star, became also the goddess of the moon. ”

“ In the midst stood the palace of Allat, the queen of the underworld, where the waters of life bubbled forth beside the golden throne of the spirits of earth, restoring those who might drink of them to life and the upper air. The entrance to this dreary abode of the departed lay beyond Datilla, the river of death, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and it was here that the hero Gisdhubar saw Xisuthros, the Chaldean Noah, after his translation to the fields of the blessed. ”

“ It was cultivated only by the few; whereas in Babylonia the greater part of the population seems to have been able to read and write. If the Assyrian was less luxurious than his Babylonian neighbour, he was also less humane. Indeed, the Assyrian annals glory in the record of a ferocity at which we stand aghast. On the other hand, the Assyrian was not so superstitious as the Babylonian, though he ascribed his successes to the favour of Assur, and impaled the inhabitants of conquered towns or burnt them alive because they did not believe in his national deity. ”

“ The records are not copies of older texts, with all the errors that human fallibility causes copyists and scribes to make. They are the original documents which were recited to the kings who ordered them to be compiled, and who may have held [Pg 10] them in their own hands. The gulf of centuries and forgetfulness that has divided us from Sennacherib is filled up when we read the account of his invasion of Judah, which seems to come from his own lips. Never again can the heroes of the Old Testament be to us as lay-figures, whose story is told by a voice that comes from a dark and unreal past. ”

“ The Assyrian Empire had now reached its widest limits. Elam had fallen after a long and arduous struggle. Shushan, its capital, was razed to the ground, and the three last Elamite kings were bound to the yoke of Assur-bani-pal's chariot, and made to drag their conqueror through the streets of Nineveh. The Kedarites and other nomad tribes of Northern Arabia were also chastised, the land of the Minni was overrun, and the Armenians of Van begged for an alliance with the Assyrian king. ”

“ The most interesting of the old myths and traditions of Babylonia are those in which we can trace, more or less clearly, the lineaments of the accounts of the creation of the world and the early history of man, given us in the early chapters of Genesis. There was more than one legend of the creation. In a text which came from the library of Cuthah, it was described as taking place on evolutionary principles, the first created beings being the brood of chaos, men with 'the bodies of birds' and 'the faces of ravens,' who were succeeded by the more perfect forms of the existing world. ”

“ Excellent as they were as soldiers, they never became sailors. The boats of the Tigris and Euphrates were either rafts or circular coracles of skins stretched on a wooden framework. When Sennacherib wished to attack the Chaldeans of Beth-Yagina in their place of refuge on the Persian Gulf, he had to transport Phœnicians from the west to build his galleys, and to navigate them afterwards. It was the Babylonians 'whose cry was in their ships;' the Assyrians fought and traded on shore.
It was not until the rise of the Second Assyrian Empire that the trade of Assyria became important. ”

“ An Assyrian court-poet prays thus on behalf of his king: 'The land of the silver sky, oil unceasing, the benefits of blessedness may he obtain among the feasts of the gods, and a happy cycle among their light, even life everlasting, and bliss; such is my prayer to the gods who dwell in the land of Assur.' Even at a far earlier time we find the great Chaldean epic of Gisdhubar concluding with a description of the blissful [Pg 77] lot of the spirit of Ea-bani: 'On a couch he reclines and pure water he drinks. Him who is slain in battle thou seest and I see. ”

“ Assur-natsir-pal was at once one of the most ferocious and most energetic of the [Pg 29] Assyrian kings. His track was marked by impalements, by pyramids of human heads, and by other barbarities too horrible to be described. But his campaigns reached further than those of Tiglath-Pileser had done. Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Kurdistan, were overrun again and again; the Babylonians were forced to sue for peace; Sangara, the Hittite king of Carchemish, paid tribute, and the rich cities of Phœnicia poured their offerings into the treasury of Nineveh. ”

“ Heaven itself had not always been 'the land of the silver sky' of later Assyrian belief. The Babylonians once believed that the gods inhabited the snow-clad peak of Rowandiz, 'the mountain of the world' and 'the mountain of the East,' as it was also termed, which supported the starry vault of heaven. It is to this old Babylonian belief that allusion is made in Isaiah xiv. ”

“ It was long before the Armenians recovered from the blow, and for the next century they ceased to be formidable to Assyria. Tiglath-Pileser's northern frontier was now secure, and he therefore gladly seized the opportunity of interfering in the affairs of the west which was offered him by Ahaz, the Jewish king. Ahaz, whom the Assyrian inscriptions call Jehoahaz, had been hard pressed by Rezon of Damascus and Pekah of Israel, who had combined to overthrow the Davidic dynasty and place a vassal prince, 'the son of Tabeal,' on the throne of Jerusalem. ”

“ Assyrian sculpture was for the most part in relief. The Assyrians carved badly in the round, unlike the Babylonians, some of whose sitting statues are not wanting in an air of dignity and repose. But they excelled in that kind of shallow relief of which so many examples have been brought to the British Museum. We can trace three distinct periods in the history of this form of art. The first period is that which begins, so far as we know at present, with the age of Assur-natsir-pal. ”

“ With very few exceptions, faces and figures are drawn in profile. But with all this want of skill, the work is often striking from the spirit with which it is executed, and the naturalness with which animals, more especially, are depicted. A bas-relief representing a lion-hunt of Assur-natsir-pal has been often selected as a typical, though favourable, illustration of the art of this age.
The second period extends from the foundation of the Second Assyrian Empire to the reign of Esar-haddon. The artist has lost in vigour, but has compensated for it by care and accuracy. ”

“ The reem or wild bull and the lion became their favourite sport, smaller animals like the gazelle, the hare, and the wild ass being left to their subjects to pursue. It was not until the reign of Assur-bani-pal that the lion-hunt ceased to be a dangerous and exciting pastime. With Esar-haddon, however, the old race of warrior kings had come to an end, and the new king introduced a new style of sport. ”

“ To father and mother be thou a father, and to brother and child be thou a father.
To friend and neighbour be thou a father, and to handmaid and man be thou a father.
To the field thou hast made and thy ... be thou a father. [Pg 115]
May the name of my god be a father where there is no justice.
To mankind, the flock of the god Ner, whatever be their names, who are in field and city,
speak, O Sun-god, mighty lord, and bid the evil enchantment be at rest.'
Even the science of the Babylonians and their Assyrian disciples was not free from superstition. ”

“ The higher minds of the nation struggled now and again towards the conception of one supreme God and of a purer form of faith, but the dead weight of polytheistic beliefs and practices prevented them from ever really reaching it. In the best examples of their religious literature we constantly fall across expressions and ideas which show how wide was the gulf that separated them from that kindred people of Israel to whom the oracles of God were revealed. ”

“ Writing begins with pictures, and the writing of the Babylonians formed no exception to the rule. The pictures were at first painted on the papyrus leaves which grew in the marshes of the Euphrates, but as time went on a new and more plentiful writing material came to be employed in the shape of clay. Clay was literally to be found under the feet of every one. ”

“ He was symbolised by the snake, and was held to be the creator and benefactor of mankind. One of his most frequent titles is 'lord of wisdom,' and the chief seat of his worship was at Eridu, 'the holy city,' near which was the sacred grove or 'garden,' the centre of the world, where the tree of life and knowledge had its roots. It was Ea who had given to mankind not only life, but all the arts and appliances of culture also, and it was his help that the Babylonian invoked when in trouble. He was emphatically the god of healing, who had revealed medicines to mankind. ”

“ Assyrian art was, speaking generally, imported from Babylonia. Even the palace of the king was built of bricks, and raised upon a mound like the palaces and temples of Babylonia, although stone was plentiful in Assyria, and there was no marshy plain where inundations might be feared. ”

“ As in all old forms of heathen faith, religion and mythology were inextricably mixed together. Myths were told of most of the gods. Reference has already been made to the myth of Istar and Tammuz, the prototype [Pg 78] of the Greek legend of Aphroditê and Adonis. So, too, the Greek story of the theft of fire by Prometheus has its parallel in the Babylonian story of the god Zu, 'the divine storm-bird,' who stole the lightning of Bel, the tablet whereon the knowledge of futurity is written, and who was punished for his crime by the father of the gods. ”

“ As god of the great deep, he was often figured as a man with the tail of a fish, and in this form was known to the Greeks under the name of Oannes or 'Ea the fish.' Sometimes the skin of a fish was suspended behind his back. Oannes, it was said, had in early days ascended out of the Persian Gulf, and taught the first inhabitants of Babylonia letters, science, and art, besides writing a history of the origin of mankind and their different ways of life. ”

“ The supreme god, Assur, is often spoken of in language which at first sight [Pg 84] seems monotheistic: to him the Assyrian monarchs ascribe their victories, and in his name they make war against the unbeliever. A similar inconsistency prevailed in the character of Assyrian worship itself. There was much in it which commands our admiration: the Assyrian confessed his sins to his gods, he begged for their pardon and help, he allowed nothing to interfere with what he conceived to be his religious duties. ”

“ Babylonia, Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia made common cause against the oppressor. Lydia sent Karian and Ionic mercenaries to Psammetikhos of Sais, with whose help he succeeded in overthrowing his brother satraps, and in delivering Egypt from the Assyrian yoke. The revolt in Babylonia took long to quell, and for a time the safety of Assur-bani-pal himself was imperilled. At last in 647 Babylon and Cuthah were reduced by famine, and Samas-sum-yukin burnt himself to death in his palace. Fire and sword were carried through Elam, and the last of its monarchs became an outlawed fugitive. ”

“ Samaria was taken and placed under an Assyrian governor, 27,280 of its leading inhabitants being carried captive to Gozan and Media. But Sargon soon found that the task of cementing and completing the empire founded by Tiglath-Pileser was by no means an easy one. Babylonia had broken away from Assyria on the news of Shalmaneser's death, and had submitted itself to Merodach-Baladan the hereditary chieftain of Beth-Yagina in the marshes on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The southern portion of Sargon's dominions was threatened by the ancient and powerful kingdom of Elam ”