A. H. Sayce

“ May the dream I dream be favourable; may the dream I dream be fulfilled, 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 to prospering hands. May thy entering be exalted, may thy divinity be glorious; may the men of my city extol thy mighty deeds.”
The tone of this prayer is not very high, and it reveals how much superstition was mixed with even the best aspirations of Assyrian spiritual life. ”

“ Without fighting or battle he caused him to enter into Babylon; his city of Babylon feared; in a place difficult of access Nabonidos, the king, who worshipped him not, he gave into his hand. The men of Babylon, all of them, (and) the whole of Sumer and Accad, the nobles and priests who had revolted, kissed his feet, they rejoiced in his sovereignty, their faces shone. The god who in his ministry raises the dead to life, who benefits all men in difficulty and prayer, has in goodness drawn nigh to him, has made strong his name. ”

“ We may expect to discover hereafter that the influence exercised by the Hittites upon their Syrian neighbours was almost as profound as that exercised by them upon their neighbours in Asia Minor, and through these upon the fathers of the Greeks. For the present, however, we must be content with the startling results that have already been obtained in this new field of research. A people that once played an important part in the history of the civilised world has been again revealed to us after centuries of oblivion, and a forgotten empire has been again brought to light. ”

“ To wit: in the time of Mauthaner, the great king of the Hittites, his brother, Khita-sir, after his murder, placed himself on the throne of his father as the great king of the Hittites. I strove for friendship with Ramessu Mi-Amun, the great prince of Egypt, and it is (my wish) that the friendship and the concord may be better than the friendship and the concord which before existed, and which was broken. ”

“ The empire of Babylonia arose out of the ashes of the empire of Assyria. While the bands of the enemy were gathering round the doomed city of Nineveh, Nabopolassar, the viceroy of Babylonia, seized the opportunity for revolt. There were no armies now, as in former days, that could pour out of the gates of the Assyrian capital to punish the rebel, and Nabopolassar was allowed to establish his new monarchy undisturbed. But the fall of the imperial city left the other provinces of the Assyrian empire without a master or a defence. ”

“ The history of the conquest as told by Cyrus himself is now in our hands, and it has obliged us to modify many of the views, really derived from Greek authors, which we had read into the words of Scripture. Cyrus, we know now upon his own authority, was a polytheist, and not a Zoroastrian; he was king of Elam, not of Persia. It was Elam, and not Persia, as Isaiah's prophecies declared, which invaded Babylon. Babylon itself was taken without a siege, and Mr. Bosanquet may therefore have been right in holding that the Darius of Daniel was Darius the son of Hystaspes. ”

“ The reduction of the northern kingdom of Israel into an Assyrian province brought the Assyrian empire to the very borders of Judah, and the Assyrian kings began to cast longing eyes upon the territory of the latter. Its capital, Jerusalem, was an almost impregnable fortress, the possession of which would open the road into Egypt, as well as block the passage of an Egyptian army into Asia. ”

“ Fourteen thousand of their fighting men I slew with weapons; like the Air-god I bade the storm issue forth upon them; with their corpses I filled the face of the waters; their vast armies I brought down with my weapons; there was not room enough in the country for their dead bodies; to preserve the life of it I brought back a vast multitude, and distributed them among its men. The banks of the River Orontes I reached. In the midst of this battle I took away from them their chariots, their war-magazines, and their horses trained to the yoke. ”

“ The priests, the chief men, and the common people of Ekron, who had thrown into chains their king Padi because he was faithful to his oaths to Assyria, and had given him up to Hezekiah, the Jew, who imprisoned him like an enemy in a dark dungeon, feared in their hearts. The king of Egypt, the bowmen, the chariots and the horses of the king of Ethiopia, had gathered together innumerable forces and gone to their assistance. ”

“ The territory of Damascus was now devastated with fire and sword, its sixteen districts were “overwhelmed as with a flood,” and the beautiful gardens by which the capital was surrounded were destroyed, every tree being cut down for use in the siege. The city itself, however, proved too strong to be taken by assault; so, leaving a sufficient force before it to reduce it by famine, Tiglath-Pileser proceeded against the late allies of the Syrian king. ”

“ There is no book in the world about which more has been written than the Bible, and perhaps there is no portion of the Bible which has given rise to a larger literature than the Book of Genesis. Every word in it has been carefully scrutinised, now by scholars who sought to discover its deepest meaning or to defend it against the attacks of adversaries, now again by hostile critics anxious to expose every supposed flaw, and to convict it of error and inconsistency. ”

“ When Abraham went down into Egypt the empire was already very old. Its history begins with Menes, who united the independent states of the Nile valley into a single kingdom, and established his capital at Memphis. The first six dynasties of kings, who reigned 1,478 years, represent what is called the Old Empire. It was under the monarchs of the fourth dynasty that the pyramids of Gizeh were built; and at no time during its later history did the art and culture of Egypt reach again so high a level as it did under the Old Empire. ”

“ The empire which he founded was not a Persian one; Darius, the son of Hystaspes, was the real founder of that. It was only as the predecessor of Darius, and for the sake of intelligibility to the readers of a later day, that Cyrus could be called a king of Persia, as he is in the Book of Ezra, where the original words of his proclamation, “king of Elam” have been changed into the more familiar and intelligible “king of Persia” (Ez. i. 2.) ”

“ The allusions to the Hittites in the Old Testament, which had been doubted by a sceptical criticism, have been shown to be fully in accordance with the facts, and their true place in history has been pointed out.
But the account of the Hittite Empire is not the only discovery of the last four or five years about which this book has to speak. Inscriptions of Sargon have cleared up the difficulties attending the tenth and eleventh chapters of Isaiah's prophecies, and have proved that no “ideal” campaign of an “ideal” Assyrian king is described in them. ”

“ We must give up the belief that Cyrus was a monotheist, bent on destroying the idols of Babylon; on the contrary, from the time when we first hear of him, he is a worshipper of Bel-Merodach, the patron-god of Babylon, and the first care of himself and his son, after his conquest of Babylonia, is to restore the Babylonian gods to the shrines from which they had been impiously removed by Nabonidos. He asks the gods to intercede on his behalf with Bel and Nebo, the two supreme gods of Babylonian worship. ”

“ God consecrated Cyrus to be His instrument [pg 150] in restoring His chosen people to their land, not because the king of Elam was a monotheist, but because the period of Jewish trial and punishment had come to an end. God's instruments may be unworthy as well as worthy; it was through the hardness of heart of an unbelieving Pharaoh that the deliverance from Egypt had been accomplished in days long before. Nor is there any contradiction between the treatment actually experienced by the Babylonians and that which is predicted for them in the Book of Isaiah. ”

“ The ancient high road from Damascus to the sea-coast led along the gorge through which this river makes its way to the sea, and traces of it can still be seen cut here and there in the rock. The foreign conquerors of Asia, whether Egyptian or Assyrian have left monuments of themselves carved by the side of this old road, where it winds round a promontory that forms the southern bank of the river. Ramses II, Sennacherib, Esar-haddon, all have recorded their names and deeds upon the face of the cliff; and the obliterated monuments of other and perhaps older kings may still be seen near to them. ”

“ As the power of Assyria had dwindled, the power of Egypt had increased. The Egyptian kings began to dream again of an Asiatic empire, such as they had once held in days long gone by, and their first efforts were directed towards securing afresh the cities of the Philistines. Gaza and Ashdod were captured after a long siege;12 Cyprus became an Egyptian province, and Pharaoh Necho, whose Phœnician fleet had circumnavigated Africa, set about the task of conquering Asia. ”

“ The title given to Merodach—“the god who raises the dead to life”—is a remarkable one, but it was a title which was applied to the god as early as the Accadian epoch. In the religious hymns of the Accadians, Merodach plays the part of a mediator and intercessor; if the gods are angry, it is Merodach who intercedes for man. Mankind, in fact, are his especial care ”

“ Tirhakah the Ethiopian, whom the Assyrians had driven out, invaded it from the south, and Esar-haddon came down upon it from the north. He it is who is “the fierce king” who, the Lord declared, should rule over the Egyptians. For about twenty years the unhappy country was wasted with fire and sword. The twenty governors appointed by the Assyrians were constantly intriguing against one another and their suzerain; and again and again the Assyrian armies were called upon to return to Egypt to suppress a revolt. ”

“ Instead of causing a flood, let lions increase, that men may be minished; instead of causing a flood, let hyænas increase, that men may be minished; instead of causing a flood, let a famine happen, that men may be (wasted) ; instead of causing a flood, let plague increase, that men may be (reduced) . I did not reveal the determination of the great gods To Sisuthros alone a dream I sent, and he heard the [pg 034] determination of the gods.’ When Bel had again taken counsel with himself, he went up into the midst of the ship. ”

“ He was a very different man from his father, weak and vain-glorious, fonder of boasting than of deeds. Trusting to the support of Tirhakah, the Ethiopian king of Egypt, Hezekiah threw off his allegiance to Assyria, and refused to send the yearly tribute to Nineveh. The Phœnicians did the same, while the Jewish king reasserted his former supremacy over the cities of the Philistines. Padi, the king of Ekron, who remained faithful to Assyria, was carried in chains to Jerusalem, and Zedekiah, who is named in the Assyrian records as the king of Ashkelon, was probably of Jewish origin. ”

“ The Assyrian student, moreover, possesses an advantage which is not shared by the Hebraist. Owing to its hieroglyphic origin, the cuneiform system of writing makes large use of what are called determinatives, that is to say, of characters which have no phonetic value, but which determine the class to which the word they accompany belongs. It is, therefore, always possible to tell at a glance whether the word with which we are dealing is the name of a man, of a woman, of a deity, of a river, of a country, or of a city ”

“ The Median empire, which rose upon the ruins of Nineveh, was really the creation of the kings of Ekbatana, the modern Hamadan. The population of this district was known among the Babylonians as manda, or “barbarians;” and through a confusion of the latter word with the proper name Madâ, or “Medes,” historians have been led to suppose that the empire of Ekbatana was a Median one.
Javan is the Greek word “Ionian,” but in the Old Testament it is generally applied to the island of [pg 040] Cyprus, which is called the Island of Yavnan, or the Ionians, on the Assyrian monuments. ”

“ While Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah, was still reigning, Isaiah uttered a prophecy in which he made allusion to “the waters of Shiloah that go softly.” Now this can hardly refer to anything else than the gently flowing stream which still runs through the tunnel of Siloam. In this case the conduit would have been in existence before the time of Hezekiah; and, since we know of no earlier period when a great engineering work of the kind could have been executed until we go back to the reign of Solomon, it is possible that the inscription may actually be of this ancient date. ”

“ Scholars had learned from the Egyptian inscriptions that before the days of the Exodus the Egyptian monarchs had been engaged in fierce struggles with the powerful nation of the Hittites, whose two chief seats were at Kadesh on the Orontes and Carchemish on the Euphrates, and who were able to summon to their aid subject-allies not only from Palestine, but also far away from Lydia and the Troad, on the western coast of Asia Minor. Ramses II himself, the Pharaoh of the oppression, had been glad to make peace with his antagonists ”

“ No account of the Fall of Man, similar to that in Genesis, has as yet been found among the fragments of the Assyrian libraries. Mr. George Smith, indeed, supposed that he had discovered one, but the text which he referred to the Fall, is really an ancient hymn to the Creator. It is, nevertheless, pretty certain that such an account once existed. An archaic Babylonian gem represents a tree, on either side of which are seated a man and woman, with a serpent behind them, and their hands are stretched out towards the [pg 026] fruit that hangs from the tree. ”

“ If so, we shall have an approximate date for the rescue of Lot by Abraham, and consequently for the age of Abraham himself.
The fourteenth chapter of Genesis is the last in the Book that relates to Babylonia. The history now turns to Egypt; and it is, therefore, from the monuments of Egypt, and not from those of Babylonia and Assyria, that we henceforth have to look for light and information.
No traditions of a deluge had been preserved among the Egyptians. They believed, however, that there was a time when the greater part of mankind had been destroyed by the angry gods. ”