Babylonians

“ To him, therefore, we may apply the magnificent description of the death of the last Babylonian monarch on the battle-field, and his descent into the under-world, which we read in Isaiah xiv. Illustrations have been taken by the prophet from Babylonian mythology, in order to heighten the horror of the scene. The king of Babylonia is compared to the morning star, whose movements the Babylonians had been the first of mankind to record. ”

“ The Babylonian was thus a compound of Sumerian, Semitic, and Kassite elements. They all went to form the culture which we term Babylonian, and which left such enduring traces on Western Asia and the world. Mixed races are invariably the best, and the Babylonians were no exception to the rule. We have only to compare them with their neighbors, the more purely blooded Semitic Assyrians, to assure ourselves of the fact. ”

“ The peculiar and distinct civilization of these primitive Babylonians must have continued through long ages. Their system of writing had developed from the simple pictorial lines into the cuneiform and these signs had become phonetic, expressing sound as well as ideas. They had also developed a syllabary.
Finally, there are evidences of the gradual increase among them of another race of people. This was a Semitic people who seem at first to have established themselves in northern Babylonia in the kingdom of Accad, finally becoming supreme in the land. ”

“ The literature of the Babylonians, like that of the Hindūs, claims a fabulous antiquity. They enumerated ten kings who lived before the flood, whose reigns occupied four hundred and thirty-two thousand years, or more than forty-three centuries each, and during this immense cycle of time, there were strange creatures, half man and half fish, who ascended from the ocean and taught the tribes of Babylonia the rudiments of civilization. There were men with the bodies of birds and the tails of fishes, 10and men also with the beaks and faces of birds who in other respects wore the form of humanity. ”

“ The Babylonians could not have regarded the continual and increasing desolation of their city with indifference, however, and it is not impossible that their loyalty to their king suffered somewhat in consequence. ”

“ The Babylonians were more religious than the Assyrians and their government was far more bound up in religious ceremonies. One fact alone bears out this statement: In Babylonia the king must each year celebrate anew the ceremony of taking his temporal power from the god Marduk by taking the hands of the god's image. This service took place on New Year's day, and no matter what might be the situation in other parts of the empire, to Babylon the king must come and observe the ancient custom would he remain possessor of the kingly crown. ”

“ From them it would seem that the Babylonians were of the opinion that if the people had in any way sinned, the gods averted their faces from them, and departing from their neighbourhood left them a prey to calamities of all kinds. ”

“ Their king was blinded and in chains. All the most intelligent people in the country were being led to a distant land, from which most of them would probably never return. The iron rule of the Babylonians was everywhere supreme. ”

“ Babylon only consented to accept an alien master provided he bowed himself respectfully before its superiority, and was willing to forget that he was a stranger within its gates, and was ready to comply with its laws and masquerade as a Babylonian. Tiglath-pileser III. never dreamt, therefore, of treating the Babylonians as slaves, or of subordinating them to their Assyrian descendants, but left their liberties and territory alike unimpaired. ”

“ He came afterwards to know that it was not a native of Babylonia whom he saw at the well, but one of a captive race resident in this Eastern land since the year when the city of Solomon fell before the armies of the great son of Nabopolassar. But there were Babylonians also as white as the Jews, their Semitic blood having at some time been mingled with that of Aryan races, Persians, Elamites, or, perhaps, Assyrians, whom a thousand years of a colder clime had materially bleached. ”

“ Over these primitive inhabitants a fresh tide of migration swept, probably in the early part of the third millennium b.c. The new-comers were Semites from Arabia, of the same stock as those nomadic hordes who had already overrun Babylonia and had established themselves in a great part of that country. After they had settled in Canaan and Syria they were known to the Babylonians as the Amurru or Amorites. They were taller and more vigorous than the neolithic Canaanites, and they seem to have brought with them a knowledge of the use of metal, acquired probably by traffic with southern Babylonia. ”

“ The Babylonians came out to meet him in mass, with their priests and rulers, each of whom individually brought gifts, and offered to surrender their city, citadel, and money. [2] Entering the city, he commanded the Babylonians to rebuild all the temples which Xerxes had destroyed, and especially that of Belus, whom the Babylonians venerate more than any other god. ”

“ We find in this early star-worship of the ancient Babylonians the common origin of religion and science. Just as magic partakes in some measure of the nature of real science (for some authorities hold that it is pseudo-scientific in origin) so does religion, or perhaps more correctly speaking, early science is very closely identified with religion. Thus we may believe that the religious interest in their early astronomy spurred the ancient star-gazers of Babylonia to acquire more knowledge concerning the motions of those stars and planets which they believed to be deities. ”

“ On the other hand, the natural strength of the region is so great that in the hands of brave and active men its defence is easy; and the Babylonians were not likely, if an aggressive spirit led to their pressing eastward, to make any serious impression in this quarter, or ever greatly to advance their frontier. ”

“ There is no doubt about his religious faith—in his inscriptions he appears as a monotheist of the severest type, and for this reason he must have had but little sympathy with the polytheism of the Babylonians, and the other nationalities over which he ruled, whose faith was in a plurality of gods. It is true that offerings seem to have been made in his name in the temples of Babylonia, but these must have been due to old grants which had not been rescinded, and which the king and his advisers probably would have regarded as bad policy to abolish. ”

“ Dominating and covering at first the whole earth, it was she who was the first producer of living things, but when the land appeared, and creatures of higher organization and intelligence began, under the fostering care of the higher divinities, to make their appearance, she saw, so the Babylonians seem to have thought, that with the advent of man, whom the gods purposed forming, her power and importance would, in a short time, disappear, and rebellion on her part was the result. ”

“ The Babylonians apparently made the formation of man and of the animals which at present inhabit the earth simultaneous, and placed the creation of the sun, moon, and planets after, instead of before, that of men and animals. In other respects the Babylonian narrative either adds to the Mosaic account, as in its description of the monsters and their destruction, or clothes in mythic language, that could never have been understood literally, the truth which in Scripture is put forth with severe simplicity. ”

“ The Chaldaeans.—When the Semites first obtained political power in Babylonia we do not know. The earliest Semitic empire known to us is that of Sargon of Accad. Babylon did not become the capital of a united kingdom till much later, Khammurabi (b.c. 2350) being apparently the first who made it so. Strictly speaking, it is only after this event that the name of 'Babylonia' is applicable to the whole country. In the Old Testament the Babylonians are called Kasdim, a word of uncertain origin. ”

“ The site of the great city of Babylon is now a marsh, formed by inundations of the river, due to the destruction of the embankments and the choking up of the canals.
IV. CIVILIZATION IN BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA Commerce and Manufactures.—The Babylonians were a commercial and luxurious people; the Assyrians were pre-eminently warlike. The position of the great city of Babylon on the Lower Euphrates, near to the Persian Gulf, made it a great emporium for the trade between India and eastern Asia and western Asia, with the nearest parts of Africa and Europe. From Ceylon came ivory, cinnamon and ebony ”

“ That the Babylonians were among the most ingenious of all the nations of antiquity, and had made considerable progress in the arts and sciences before their conquest by the Persians, is generally admitted. ”

“ We have, indeed, no written records which go back to so distant a past; it belongs, perhaps, to an epoch when the art of writing had not as yet been invented. But there was already civilization in Babylonia, and the elements of its future social life were already in existence. Babylonian culture is immeasurably old. ”

“ Babylonia is still a holy land to the people of Western Asia. The old feeling in regard to it still survives, and the bodies of the dead are still carried, sometimes for hundreds of miles, to be buried in its sacred soil. Mohammedan saints have taken the place of the old gods, and a Moslem chapel represents the temple of the past, but it is still to Babylonia that the corpse is borne, often covered by costly rugs which find their way in time to an American or European drawing-room. “The old order changes, giving place to new,” but the influence of Chaldean culture and religion is not yet past. ”

“ The world, it was believed, originated in a watery chaos, like that in which the first settlers had found the Babylonian plain. The earth not only rested on the waters, but the waters themselves, dark and unregulated, were the beginning of all things. This cosmological conception was carried with the rest of Babylonian culture to the West, and after passing through Canaan found its way into Greek philosophy. ”

“ but he lectures with such ardour that he quite forgets himself. I once listened to him. As long as he was holding forth about the Assyrians and Babylonians, it was all right ; ”

“ 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. ”

“ The rise of Sumerian culture on the shores of the Persian Gulf is in accordance with Babylonian tradition. Babylonian myths told how Oannes or Ea, the god of culture, had risen each morning out of his palace in “the deep,” bringing with him the elements of civilization which he communicated to mankind. Letters, science and art had all been his gifts. He had instructed the wild tribes of the coast to build houses and erect temples; he had compiled for them the first law-book, and had instructed them in the mysteries of agriculture. Babylonian civilization was sea-born. ”

“ We shall see that the problems we have to face concern the possible influence of Babylon, rather than of Egypt, upon Hebrew tradition. And one last example, drawn from the later period, will serve to demonstrate how Babylonian influence penetrated the ancient world and has even left some trace upon modern civilization. It is a fact, though one perhaps not generally realized, that the twelve divisions on the dials of our clocks and watches have a Babylonian, and ultimately a Sumerian, ancestry. For why is it we divide the day into twenty-four hours? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The new-comers probably owed their speedy success in Babylonia in great part to the fact that many of the immigrant tribes had already acquired the elements of Babylonian culture. During their previous residence within the sphere of settled civilization they had adopted a way of life and a social organization which differed but little from that of the country into which they came. That they should have immigrated at all in a south-easterly direction, in preference to remaining within their own borders, was doubtless due to racial pressure to which they themselves had been subjected. ”

“ It was under the Neo-Babylonian kings that the Hebrew race first came into close contact with her culture, and there can be no doubt that the Jews, in the time of their captivity, renewed their interest in her mythology when they found it presented some parallels to their own. But in the course of this history it has been shown that, during far earlier periods, the civilization of Babylon had penetrated throughout a great part of Western Asia. ”