Babylonian Empire

“ It is almost staggering even at this remote time to think of the pride and glory of Babylonian life, the splendor of its palaces, the wonder of its temples, being thus wantonly destroyed. Long periods of peace in the kingdom had given opportunity for art and literature to develop, and there can be no question that countless records of priceless worth were destroyed by the deed of this fierce Assyrian. The culture of Babylonia had indeed succumbed to the barbarism of Assyria. The inhabitants—scholars, artists, artisans, were taken captives, and deported to various points of the empire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The process of disintegration, which caused the Babylonian empire to crumble away, was doubtlessly hastened by its division into four regions, each of which in latter times possessed its capital and became the centre of various independent forms of rival cults. During many centuries Babylonia was closely associated with the cult of Marduk-Bel, the “lord of rest;” while Shamash, another form of the central supreme lord, was the deity of Larsa and Sippar. ”

“ In its general character the Babylonian Empire was little more than a reproduction of the Assyrian. The same loose organization of the provinces under native kings rather than satraps almost universally prevailed, with the same duties on the part of suzerain and subjects and the same results of ever-recurring revolt and re-conquest. Similar means were employed under both empires to check and discourage rebellion—mutilations and executions of chiefs, pillage of the rebellious region, and wholesale deportation of its population. ”

“ They made their capital in what had hitherto been a small up-river town, Babylon, and their empire is called the first Babylonian Empire. It was consolidated by a great king called Hammurabi (circa 2100 B.C.) who made the earliest code of laws yet known to history.
The narrow valley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic invasion than Mesopotamia, but about the time of Hammurabi occurred a successful Semitic invasion of Egypt and a line of Pharaohs was set up, the Hyksos or “shepherd kings,” which lasted for several centuries. ”

“ The physical and political circumstances alike pointed to hostile transactions between Babylon and her south-western neighbor. Whether destruction would come from this quarter, or from some other, it would have been impossible to predict. Perhaps, on the whole, it may be said that Babylon might have been expected to contend successfully with Egypt—that she had little to fear from Arabia—that against Persia Proper it might have been anticipated that she would be able to defend herself—but that she lay at the mercy of Media. The Babylonian Empire was in truth an empire upon sufferance. ”

“ As a consequence, the gods he worships conform to the social conditions under which he lives. In the desert the sacred stone becomes “the temple of the god”; in the organized monarchy of Babylonia each deity takes his appointed [96] place in an imperial court. Under the one supreme ruler there are princes and sub-princes, vice-regents and generals, while angel-messengers carry the commands of Bel to his subjects on earth, like the messengers who carried the letters of the Babylonian king along the high-roads of the empire. ”

“ It was never forgotten that Babylonia had once been the mistress of Western Asia, and it was, accordingly, the sceptre of Western Asia that was conferred by Bel Merodach upon his [pg 172] adopted sons. Like the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, Babylonian sovereignty brought with it a legal, though shadowy, right to rule over the civilized kingdoms of the world. It was this which made the Assyrian conquerors of the second Assyrian empire so anxious to secure possession of Babylon and there “take the hands of Bel.” ”

“ We have learnt from it that the Babylonian language and script were the [pg 164] common means of intercommunication from the Euphrates to the Nile in the century before the Exodus. It proves how long and how profound must have been the influence and rule of Babylonia in western Asia. Throughout the civilised world of Asia the educated classes were compelled to learn a foreign writing and language, and when the empire passed from Babylonia to Egypt, Egypt itself, whose script and literature went back to immemorial times, was forced to do the same. ”

“ From the days of Khammurabi onward there was a tendency to exalt Bel-Merodach at the expense of all his brother gods. The development of Babylonian religion, in fact, went hand in hand with that of the Babylonian State. The foundation of an empire had made the Babylonian familiar with the conception of a supreme sovereign, under whom there were vassal kings, and under them again a dependent nobility. ”

“ The whole empire was then divided between the Medes and the Babylonians. The new Babylonian empire lasted seventy years, and in the reign of its last king, Nabonidus, when under the command of Belshazzar, his son, Babylon was 114captured by Cyrus of Persia (B.C. 539) . From this time until its subjugation by Alexander the Great Babylon was under the Persians.
Fig. 154.—A Winged Bull, Assyria. (M)
The religion of the Chaldeo-Assyrian nation was the worship of the sun, moon, stars, and the various powers of nature. Their chief gods were Shamash, the sun; Sin, the moon ”

“ That the West-Semitic invasion of Babylonia differed so essentially from that of Egypt by the Hyksos is to be explained by this fringe of civilized settlements and petty kingdoms, which formed a check upon the nomad hordes behind them and dominated such of them as [Pg 133] succeeded in breaking through. In Egypt the damage wrought by the Semitic barbarians was remembered for generations after their expulsion, [25] whereas in Babylonia the invaders succeeded in establishing a dynasty which gave its permanent form to Babylonian civilization. ”

“ The Sumerian elements in the population of Southern Babylonia may now have enjoyed a last period of influence, and their racial survival in the Sea-Country may in part explain its continual striving for independence. But in Babylonia as a whole the effects of three centuries of West-Semitic rule were permanent. When, after the Kassite conquest, Babylon emerges once more into view, it is apparent that the traditions inherited from her first empire have undergone small change. ”

“ We already hear of them as attacking Babylonia in the 9th year of Samsu-iluna the son of Khammurabi, and about 1780 B.C. they overran Babylonia and founded a dynasty there which lasted for 576 years and nine months. In the course of centuries, however, they were absorbed into the Babylonian population; the kings adopted Semitic names and married into the royal family of Assyria. ”

“ and during the long period which elapsed between the Egyptian and the Babylonian servitudes, the hopes as well as fears of the Jews appear to have been confined within the narrow compass of the present life. ”

“ But the reappearance of the Sumerians in the rôle of leading race in Western Asia was destined not to last long, and was little more than the last flicker of vitality exhibited by this ancient and exhausted race. Thus the Second Dynasty fell in its turn before the onslaught of the Kassite tribes who descended from the mountainous districts in the west of Elam, and, having overrun the whole of Mesopotamia, established a new dynasty at Babylon, and adopted Babylonian civilization. ”

“ Nîsin, the city in which, as we have seen, we first obtain an indication of the presence of West-Semitic rulers, probably lay in Southern Babylonia, and we may picture the earlier immigrants as descending the course of the Euphrates until they found an opportunity of establishing themselves in the Babylonian plain. The Elamite conquest, which put an end to the dynasty of Ur, and stripped Babylonia of her eastern provinces, [26] afforded Nîsin the opportunity of claiming the hegemony. ”

“ And it is true that from the second millennium onwards we have evidence of the gradual spread of Babylonian culture throughout the greater part of Western Asia. Before the close of the fifteenth century, to cite a single example of such influence, we find that Babylonian had become the language of Eastern diplomacy. It is not surprising perhaps that the Egyptian king should have adopted the Babylonian tongue and method of writing for his correspondence with rulers of Babylon itself or of Assyria. ”

“ With the permanent loss of Babylon's independence, the period covered by this history draws to an end. The epoch forms a convenient stopping-place; but, unlike the fall of the Assyrian empire, her conquest made but little difference to the life and activities of [Pg 285] the population as a whole. It may therefore be permissible to glance ahead a little, and note her subsequent fortunes as a subject province, under the foreign domination of the powers which succeeded one another in the rule of that region of Western Asia. ”

“ But even at that time the trade-routes had been open to the west, and before the rise of Babylon both soldier and merchant had passed from the lower Euphrates into Syria. With the expansion of the Western Semites the two regions were drawn into more intimate relationship, and the political control of the middle Euphrates, first established in the age of Hammurabi, was followed by an increased commercial traffic, which continued with few interruptions into the Neo-Babylonian and later periods. ”

“ If a great people has frequently evolved a legal code of sterling merit there are cases on record where such an institution has served to make a people great, and it is probably no injustice to the Semites of Babylonia to say of them that the code of Khammurabi made them what they were. A copy of this world-famous code was found at Susa by J. de Morgan, and is now in the Louvre.
What the Babylonian chronologists called 'the First Dynasty of Babylon' fell in its turn, and it is claimed that a Sumerian line of eleven kings took its place. ”

“ Seven years after the conquest of Babylonia revolts broke out against the emperor in Assyria and Babylonia, and he was murdered in his palace, which had been besieged and captured by an army headed by his own son, Ashur-natsir-pal I, who succeeded him. The Babylonian nobles meantime drove the Assyrian garrisons from their cities, and set on the throne the Kassite prince Adad-shum-utsur. ”

“ Babylonia was a land of merchants and agriculturists; Assyria was an organized camp. The Assyrian dynasties were founded by successful generals; in Babylonia it was the priests whom a revolution raised to the throne. The Babylonian king remained a priest to the last, under the control of a powerful hierarchy; the Assyrian king was the autocratic general of an army, at whose side stood in early days a feudal nobility, and from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III. onwards an elaborate bureaucracy. His palace was more sumptuous than the temples of the gods, from which it was quite separate. ”

“ Thanks to Babylon's misfortunes at this time, we have recovered some of her finest memorials, including the famous Stele of Narâm-Sin, Hammurabi's Code of Laws, and an important series of the Kassite kudurrus, or boundary-stones, which, as we have seen, throw considerable light upon the economic condition of the country. These doubtless represent but a small proportion of the booty secured by Elam at this period, but they suffice to show the manner in which the great Babylonian cities were denuded of their treasures. ”

“ Babylonia suffered less than Assyria by defeat in battle; its natural resources gave it great recuperative powers, and the native population was ever so intensely patriotic that centuries of alien sway could not obliterate their national aspirations. A conqueror of Babylon had to become a Babylonian. The Amorites and Kassites had in turn to adopt the modes of life and modes of thought of the native population. Like the Egyptians, the Babylonians ever achieved the intellectual conquest of their conquerors. ”

“ That within her own borders Babylon maintained an effective administration is clear from a boundary-stone of the period of Nebuchadnezzar's successor, Enlil-nadin-apli, recording a grant of land in the district of Edina in Southern Babylonia by E-anna-shum-iddina, a governor of the Sea-Country, who administered that [Pg 256] district under the Babylonian king and owed his appointment to him. [11] But in the reign of Marduk-nadin-akhê, she was to suffer her second great defeat at the hands of Assyria. ”

“ How like our boys was this boy who wrote the queer-looking characters on this bit of clay which we may hold in our hand!
The Faults of the Babylonian Civilization
With all their gifts and achievements there were certain great evils in Babylonian life. For one thing they were inclined to be greedy and covetous. They lived on a soil almost incredibly rich, and they were constantly increasing their wealth by trade. Babylonian merchants or their agents were to be found in almost every city and town of western Asia and perhaps even as far east as China. ”

“ It may thus appear a paradox to assert that the civilization, with which the name of Babylon is associated, was not Babylonian. But it is a fact that for more than a thousand years before the appearance of that city as a great centre of culture, the civilization it handed on to others had acquired in all essentials its later type. In artistic excellence, indeed, a standard had been already reached, which, so far from being surpassed, was never afterwards attained in Mesopotamia. ”