A. H. Sayce

“ Hebrew history is unintelligible as long as it stands alone, and the attempt to interpret it apart and by itself has led to little else than false and one-sided conclusions; it is only when read in the light of the history of the great empires which flourished beside it that it can be properly understood. Israel and the nations around it formed a whole, so far as the historian is concerned, which, like the elements of a picture, cannot be torn asunder. ”

“ The population of Assyria seems to have been more purely Semitic than that of Babylonia. Such at least was the case with the ruling classes. It was a population of free peasants, of soldiers, and of traders. Its culture was derived from Babylonia; even its gods, with the exception of Assur, were of Babylonian origin. We look in vain among the Assyrians for the peace-loving tendencies of the Babylonians; they were, on the contrary, the Romans of the East. They were great in war, and in the time of the Second Assyrian empire great also in law and administration. ”

“ The Babylonian civilisation, with which we are best acquainted, was the result of this amalgamation of Sumerian and Semitic elements.
Out of this mixture of Sumerians and Semites there arose a mixed people, a mixed language, and a mixed religion. The language and race of Babylonia were thus like those of England, probably also like those of Egypt. Mixed races are invariably the best; it is the more pure-blooded peoples who fall behind in the struggle for existence. ”

“ Thy soul is given into thy hands. Thy path is full of rocks and boulders, there is no way out near; it is overgrown with creepers and wolf's-foot. Abysses are on one side of thee, the mountain and the wall of rock on the other. Thou drivest in against it. The chariot jumps on which thou art. Thou art troubled to hold up thy horses. If it falls into the abyss, the pole drags thee down too. ”

“ Before the Hyksos conquest there was a great feudal aristocracy, rich in landed estates and influence, which served as a check upon the monarch, and at times even refused to obey his authority. When the Hyksos conquerors are finally expelled, we find that this feudal aristocracy has disappeared, and its place has been taken by a civil and military bureaucracy. The king has become a supreme autocrat, by the side of whom the priests alone retain any power. The land has passed out of the hands of the people; high and low alike are dependent for what they have on the favour of the king. ”

“ The Egyptian loved the country, with its fresh air and sunshine, as well as its outdoor amusements—hunting and fishing, fowling and playing at ball. Like his descendants to-day, he was an agriculturist at heart. The wealth and very existence of Egypt depended on its peasantry, and though the scribes professed to despise them and to hold the literary life alone worth living, the bulk of the nation was well aware of the fact. Even the walls of the tombs are covered with agricultural scenes. ”

“ Art, too, reached a high perfection. The seal-cylinders of the reign of Sargon of Akkad represent the highest efforts of the gem-cutter's skill in ancient Babylonia, and a bas-relief of Naram-Sin, found at Diarbekr in northern Mesopotamia, while presenting close analogies to the Egyptian art of the Old Empire, is superior to anything of the kind as yet discovered in Babylonia of either an earlier or a later date. As in Egypt, so too in Babylonia, the sculpture of later times shows retrogression rather than advance. ”

“ The Amalekite of the Old Testament is the Bedâwi of to-day. Now, as ever, he is the scourge of his more settled neighbours, whose fields he harries and whose families he murders. He lives by robbery and theft; too idle to work himself, he plunders those who do. A strong government forces him to hide himself in the depth of the wilderness; when the countries that skirt the desert fall into decay he emerges from his retreat like a swarm of flies. The ancient Oriental world saw in Amalek "the firstborn of nations;" ”

“ The Egyptian forces seem to have gone as far as Hamath; at all events, they occupied southern Palestine, capturing Gaza, Hebron, and Jerusalem, and made their way across the Jordan into Moab. Another campaign carried the Egyptian troops into Edom, where they burned the "tents" of the Bedâwin, and for the first and last time in history planted the Egyptian standard on the slopes of Mount Seir. Ramses now turned to the internal administration of his country, and the copper-mines of Sinai, like the gold-mines of the eastern desert, were worked with fresh vigour. ”

“ Here he lived with the adherents of the new creed, and here he erected a temple to the god of his worship and a stately palace for himself.
Along with the reformation in religion had gone a reformation in art. The old conventionalised art of Egypt was cast aside, and an attempt was made to imitate nature, exactly, even to the verge of caricature. The wall and floor paintings that have been discovered at Tel el-Amarna are marvels of realistic art. Plants and animals and birds are alike represented in them with a spirit and faithfulness to nature which is indeed astonishing. ”

“ Khata-sir, the great king of the Hittites, is in covenant with Ramessu Mi-Amun, the great prince of Egypt, from this very day forward, that there may subsist a good friendship and a good understanding between them for evermore.
He shall be my ally; he shall be my friend. I will be his ally; I will be his friend, for ever. ”

“ It was not until the Babylonian empire of Nebuchadrezzar had arisen on the ruins of that of Assyria that Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed, and the Davidic dynasty passed away. But they had accomplished their work; a nation had been created which through exile and disaster still maintained its religion and its characteristics, and was prepared, when happier days should come, to return again to its old home, to rebuild the temple, and carry out all the ordinances of its faith. ”

“ Let the word of thy mouth be established, thy judgment never be violated,
let none among the gods overpass thy bounds!
as an adornment has (thy hand) founded the shrine of the gods,
may the place of their gathering (?) become thy home.
O Merodach, thou art he that avenges us,
we give unto thee the sovereignty over the multitudes of the universe.
Thou givest counsel, let thy word be exalted;
may thy weapons be victorious, may thine enemies tremble! ”

“ Palestine, in fact, was for the eastern world what Athens was for the western world; Athens and Attica were alike insignificant in area and the Athenians were but a handful of men, but we derive from them the principles of our art and philosophic speculation just as we derive from Israel and Canaan the principles of our religion. ”

“ The "duke" consequently had no rival; the history of Edom knows nothing of judges or high-priests.
The law of evolution, however, which governed other Semitic communities prevailed also in Edom. The dukes had to give place to a king. The tribes were united under a single leader, and the loosely federated clans became a kingdom. As in Israel, so too in Edom the kingdom was elective. But, unlike Israel, it remained elective; there was no pressure of Philistine conquest, no commanding genius like David, no central capital like Jerusalem to make it centralised and hereditary. ”

“ The heyday of Babylonian art lay nearly two thousand years before it, in the epoch of Sargon and his son Naram-Sin. It was then that the Babylonian empire was established throughout western Asia as far as the Mediterranean, that a postal [pg xiii] service was organised along the highroads which led from one city of the empire to another, and that Babylonian art reached its climax. It was then, too, that the Babylonian system of writing practically took its final form.
The civilisation of western Asia is, as has been said, immensely old. That is the net result of modern discovery and research. ”

“ It is clear that the myth of Cannes points to foreign intercourse as the ultimate cause of Babylonian culture. It is natural that such should have been the case. Commerce is still the great civiliser, and the traders and sailors of Eridu created tastes and needs which they sought to satisfy.
The small states of Babylonia were constantly at war with each other, even though they shared in a common civilisation, worshipped the same gods, and presented their offerings to the same sanctuary of Nippur. ”

“ The history of the ancient East contains no record of the development of culture out of savagery. It tells us, indeed, of degeneracy and decay, but it knows of no period when civilisation began. So far as archaeology can teach us, the builders of the Babylonian cities, the inventors of the cuneiform characters, had behind them no barbarous past. ”

“ In days of which we are just beginning to have a glimpse it had been a province [pg vii] of the Babylonian empire, and when Egypt threw off the yoke of its Asiatic conquerors and prepared to win an empire for itself, Canaan was the earliest of its spoils. In a later age Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians again contended for the mastery on the plains of Palestine; the possession of Jerusalem allowed the Assyrian king to march unopposed into Egypt, and the battle of Megiddo placed all Asia west of the Euphrates at the feet of the Egyptian Pharaoh. ”

“ But he was a philosopher by nature rather than a king. The purpose of his life was to reform the religion of Egypt, to replace it, in fact, by a pantheistic monotheism, the visible symbol of which was the solar disk. For the first time in history a religious persecution was entered on; the worship of Amon, the god of Thebes, was proscribed, and his very name erased from the monuments. Amen-hotep changed his own name to Khu-n-Aten, "the glory of the solar disk," and every effort was made to extirpate the state religion, of which he was himself the official head. ”

“ Thou openest wide the aperture of thy mouth in order to eat. Thou findest that the maid who keeps the garden is fair. She does whatever thou wantest of her.... Thou art recognised, thou art brought to trial, and owest thy preservation to being a Mohar. Thy girdle of the finest stuff, thou payest it as the price of a bad rag. Thou sleepest every evening with a rug of fur over thee. Thou sleepest a deep sleep, for thou art weary. A thief takes thy bow and thy sword from thy side ”

“ As far back as we can go we find there all the elements of culture; man has already invented a system of writing, and has made some progress in art. It is true that by the side of all this civilisation there were still races living in the lowest barbarism of the Stone Age, just as there were Tasmanians who employed stone weapons of palaeolithic shape less than sixty years ago; but between the civilised man of the Babylonian plain and the barbarians around him there existed the same gulf that exists to-day between the European and the savage. ”

“ All the governors are destroyed, no governor remains to the king my lord. May the king turn his face to the men and send the troops of the king my lord. No provinces remain unto the king; the Khabiri have wasted all the provinces of the king. If troops come this year, the provinces of the king my lord will be preserved; but if no troops come, the provinces of the king my lord will be destroyed.—To the Secretary of the king my lord, Ebed-Tob thy servant: make a clear report of my words to the king my lord that all the provinces of the king my lord are being destroyed. ”

“ It was a land of culture, it was a land of wealth and abundance, but it was also a land of popular superstition and idolatry, and the idolatry and culture were too closely associated in the minds of the Israelites to be torn apart. In turning their backs on the Egyptian idols, it was necessary that they should turn them on Egyptian civilisation as well. Hence it was that intercourse with Egypt was forbidden, and the King of Israel who began by marrying an Egyptian princess and importing horses from the valley of the Nile, ended by building shrines to the gods of the heathen. ”

“ Canaan had ever been the refuge of the Asiatic population of Egypt, the goal at which they aimed when driven out of the land of the Nile. The Hyksos conquerors from Asia had retreated to Jerusalem when the native Egyptians recovered their independence and had expelled them from their seats in the Delta. Though Moses had assured the Pharaoh that all the Israelites needed was to go a short journey of three days into the wilderness, and there sacrifice to their God, it was well understood that the desert was not [pg 70] to be the end of their pilgrimage. ”

“ The Pharaonic Egyptians are the Egyptians of history. They were acquainted with the art of writing, they mummified their dead, and they possessed to a high degree the faculty of organisation. The gods they worshipped were beneficent deities, forms of the [pg 150] Sun-god from whom their kings derived their descent. It was a religion which easily passed into a sort of pantheistic monotheism in the more cultivated minds, and it was associated with a morality which is almost Christian in its character. A belief in a future world and a resurrection of the flesh formed an integral part of it ”

“ The Sumerians had called it "the land whence none return," though in the theology of Eridu and Babylon Asari or Merodach was already a god who, through the wisdom of his father Ea, "restored the dead to life." But as the centuries passed, new and less gloomy ideas grew up in regard to the future life. In a prayer for the Assyrian king the writer asks that he may enjoy an endless existence hereafter in "the land of the silver sky," and the realms of the gods of light had been peopled with the heroes of Babylonian literature at an early date. ”

“ The religion of southern Arabia was highly polytheistic. Each district and tribe had its special god or gods, and the goddesses were almost as numerous as the gods. Along with Babylonian culture had come the adoption of several Babylonian divinities;—Sin, the Moon-god, for instance, or Atthar, the Ashtoreth of Canaan. How far westward the worship of Sin was carried may be judged from the fact that Sinai, the sacred mountain whereon the law of Israel was promulgated, took its name from that of the old Babylonian god. ”