Chaldees

“ The general character of this remarkable people will best appear from the account, presently to be given, of their manners, their mode of life, their arts, their science, their religion, and their history. It is not convenient to forestall in this place the results of almost all our coming inquiries. Suffice it to observe that, though possessed of not many natural advantages, the Chaldaean people exhibited a fertility of invention, a genius, and an energy which place them high in the scale of nations, and more especially in the list of those descended from a Hamitic stock. ”

“ The illuminated part of the moon’s disk is always turned directly towards the horizon, a position but rarely seen in nature.
The chief Chaldaean temple to the moon-god was at Ur or Hur (Mugheir) , a city which probably derived its name from him, and which was under his special protection. He had also shrines at Babylon and Borsippa, and likewise at Calah and Dur-Sargina (Khorsabad) . Few deities appear to have been worshipped with such constancy by the Chaldaean kings. His great temple at Ur was begun by Urukh, and finished by his son Ilgi—the two most ancient of all the monarchs. ”

“ The primitive civilization of Chaldæa, like that of Egypt, was cradled in the lower districts of a great alluvial basin, in which the soil was stolen from the sea by long continued deposits of river mud. In the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, as in that of the Nile, it was in the great plains near the ocean that the inhabitants first emerged from barbarism and organized a civil life. ”

“ It has been already noticed that in the ancient Chaldaea, the chief—almost the sole-geographical features, were the rivers. Nothing is more remarkable even now than the featureless character of the region, although in the course of ages it has received from man some interruptions of the original uniformity. On all sides a dead level extends itself, broken only by single solitary mounds, the remains of ancient temples or cities, by long lines of slightly elevated embankment marking the course of canals, ancient or recent, and towards the south—by a few sand-hills. ”

“ The number of warriors of the ancient Caddo is reduced to about one hundred, who are viewed as a distinguished military order of men; they have many old men and strangers, who live amongst them, amounting to nearly an equal number with the Caddos. This nation has great influence over the Yattassees, Nandakoes, Nabadaches, Inies, Nagogdoches, Keychies, Adaize, and Natchitoches, who all speak the Caddo language, look up to them as their fathers, intermarry among them, and join them in all their wars. They cultivate corn, beans, pumpkins, melons, and tobacco. ”

“ The antiquity of civilization in the valley of the Nile, which preceded by many centuries that even of primitive Chaldaea, is another argument in favor of the migration having been from west to east; and the monuments and traditions of the Chaldaeans themselves have been thought to present some curious indications of an East African origin. ”

“ Nowhere, neither here nor in any other of the great Assyrian inscriptions, do we find the signs of care, the look of simple and serious sincerity, that distinguishes the ancient writing of Chaldæa. At Calah and Nineveh we have before us the work of a society already far advanced, a society which lives in the past and makes use, with mere mechanical skill, of the processes created and brought to a first perfection many centuries before. ”

“ Far better for our beloved Chaldea if the superstitious brood had been left in their own country. May the gods grant that every Hebrew office-holder may so cling to his imaginary god as to walk straight from office into sure destruction. My motto is 'Chaldeans for Chaldea!' Personally, I have no hostility toward these young men. Nay! But, O my country! my country! it is for thee my heart bleeds! Sons! ye shall do well to be on your guard, and see to it that they escape not your vigilance. If they die, their offices will be vacant, and must soon be supplied by some persons of ability. ”

“ When Bel saw the land uninhabited and fruitful, he smote off his head and bade one of the gods mingle the blood which flowed from his head with earth, and form therewith men and animals and wild creatures, who could support the atmosphere. A great multitude of men of various tribes inhabited Chaldæa, but they lived without any order, like the animals. ”

“ When the early inhabitants of ChaldAea are pronounced to have belonged to the same race with the dwellers upon the Upper Nile, the question naturally arises, which were the primitive people, and which the colonists? Is the country at the head of the Persian Gulf to be regarded as the original abode of the Cushite race, whence it spread eastward and westward, on the one hand to Susiana, Persia Proper, Carmania, Gedrosia, and India itself ”

“ Each people no doubt modified in some measure the boon received, adding more or less of its own to the common inheritance. But Chaldaea stands forth as the great parent and original inventress of Asiatic civilization, without any rival that can reasonably dispute her claims. The great men of the Empire are Nimrod, Urukh, and Che-dor-laomer. Nimrod, the founder, has the testimony of Scripture that he was “a mighty one in the earth;” “a mighty hunter;” the establisher of a “kingdom,” when kingdoms had scarcely begun to be known ”

“ The Chaldæan artists have more than once represented the departure of the hero. They exhibit him closely attached to the body of his ally, and holding her in a strong embrace. A first flight has already lifted them above the earth, and the shepherds scattered over the country are stupefied at the unaccustomed sight: one announces the prodigy to another, while their dogs seated at their feet extend their muzzles as if in the act of howling with terror. “For the space of a double hour the eagle bore him—then the eagle spake to him, to him Etana: ‘Behold, my friend, the earth what it is ”

“ We have yet to visit more than one famous country. In our voyage across the plains where antique civilization was sketched out and started on its long journey to maturity, we shall, whenever we cross the frontiers of a new people, begin by turning our attention for a space to their inscriptions; and wherever we are met by those characters which are found in their oldest shapes in the texts from Lower Chaldæa, there we shall surely find plastic forms and motives whose primitive types are to be traced in the remains of Chaldæan art. ”

“ While Caddy apostrophized the cook, Martha was loud in vituperation; the men-servants were noisy as Bedlamites; and the cuisinier himself, a recently imported Frenchman, imprecated, very loudly, in his own language,—consigning Caddy, the scullion, coachman, and his fellow-domestics, with all other the English people, past, present, and to come, in one lot, to the care of King Pluto and his sable adherents. Alarmed at the uproar, the guests at Caddy Castle came in by twos and threes, and, in a few minutes, the kitchen was thronged. ”

“ Fate had given Chad the early life of one, and like blood with the other; and, curiously enough, in his own short life, he already epitomized the social development of the nation, from its birth in a log cabin to its swift maturity behind the columns of a Greek portico. Against the uncounted generations of gentlepeople that ran behind him to sunny England, how little could the short sleep of three in the hills count! It may take three generations to make a gentleman, but one is enough, if the blood be there, the heart be right, and the brain and hand come early under discipline. ”

“ In those characteristics and qualities of execution which permit of a definition, the style is no doubt the same as in Chaldæa. The artists of Babylon and those of Nineveh were pupils in one school—they saw nature with the same eyes; the same features interested and attracted the attention of both; they had the same prejudices and the same conventions. The symbols and combinations of forms we have noticed as proper to Chaldæan art are here also; scenes of invocation to gods and genii; ornamental groups and motives. ”

“ By their risings and settings, and by the colours they assume, the Chaldaeans predict great winds and storms and waves of excessive heat, comets, and earthquakes, and in general all changes fraught with weal or woe not only to nations and regions of the world, but to kings and to ordinary men and women. Beneath the Seven are thirty Gods of Counsel, half below and half above the Earth ”

“ The châlet stood on a little clearing, in a little circle of pines. From it the ground sloped down towards the valley, and at some distance beneath smoke curled from a house lost amid clouds of foliage, the abounding green life of this damp and brooding hollow. A great window looking down the woodside filled one side of the châlet, and the others were dark with books, an occasional picture or figured jar lighting up the shadow. A small fire flickered beneath a quaintly devised mantel, though it was summer—for the mists crept up the hill at night and chilled the souls of the books. ”

“ Meeting his sweetheart part way down the mountain, the herdsman joyfully escorted her to the châlet, where she duly admired all his arrangements, and encouraged his extravagance by throwing butter into the fire to keep up a bright flame. The revelry up in the châlet grew more fast and furious hour after hour, and the lovers feasted and sang, while the poor parents, faint from lack of food, lay shivering on their hard pallets down in the valley. ”

“ Centuries must, however, still elapse before we find record of any noteworthy attempts to arrive at precise definitions of the nature and origin of literary property, or to analyze the proper relations of the literary producer as well to the generation for [5] which he originally worked, as to such later generations as derived benefit from his creations.
Chaldea.—The earliest literature of which the archæologists have thus far found trustworthy evidence appears to be that of the Chaldeans. ”

“ Among the arts which the first Ethiopic settlers on the shores of the Persian Gulf either brought with them from their former homes, or very early invented in their new abode, must undoubtedly have been the two whereby they were especially characterized in the time of their greatest power—architecture and agriculture. Chaldaea is not a country disposing men to nomadic habits. ”

“ What is true of one Chaldæan city is equally true of all of them, and the dynasties of Uruk and of Lagash, like those of Uru, can be reconstructed from the revelations of their brickwork. The lords of heaven promised to the lords of the earth, as a reward of their piety, both glory and wealth in this life, and an eternal fame after death: they have, indeed, kept their word. ”

“ It was a rich and fertile tract, resembling Chaldaea in its general character, with the exception that the vicinity of the mountains lent it freshness, giving it cooler streams, more frequent rains, and pleasanter breezes.
Capable of maintaining with ease a dense population, it was likely, in the early times, to be a powerful rival to the Mesopotamian kingdom, over which we shall find that in fact it sometimes exercised supremacy. ”

“ Near to this is the region of the Chaldaeans, the nurse of the ancient philosophy, as the Chaldeans themselves affirm; and where the art of true divination has most especially been conspicuous. This district is watered by the noble rivers already mentioned, by the Marses, by the Royal river, and by that best of all, the Euphrates, which divides into three branches, and is navigable in them all, having many islands, and irrigating the fields around in a manner superior to any industry of cultivators, making them fit both for the plough and for the production of trees. ”

“ She has no distinctive titles or important position in the Pantheon, but, like Anata, takes her husband’s epithets with a mere distinction of gender.
SIN, or HURKI.
The first god of the second Triad is Sin, or Hurki, the moon-deity. It is in condescension to Greek notions that Berosus inverts the true Chaldaean order, and places the sun before the moon in his enumeration of the heavenly bodies. Chaldaean mythology gives a very decided preference to the lesser luminary, perhaps because the nights are more pleasant than the days in hot countries. ”

“ A mathematician used one system for his own studies, and another for documents which had to be read by the public. The doubts attending the question are gradually being resolved, however, by the combined efforts of Assyriologists and mathematicians. At the beginning of their civilization the Chaldæans did as other peoples have done when they have become dissatisfied with that mere rough opposition of unity to plurality which is enough for savage races, and have attempted to establish the series of numbers and to define their properties. ”

“ As we have already confessed, we can form but a very imperfect notion of what the art of Chaldæa was in its best days, in its period of youth and freshness. The remains are few and small; they are heads separated from the bodies to which they once belonged, chips from broken reliefs and a few small bronze and terra-cotta statuettes. Even supposing that new discoveries come to fill up the gaps, so that the development of Chaldæo-Assyrian art may be embraced as a whole, even then it would, [288] we believe, be interior to that of Egypt. ”

“ You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu. Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always championed by people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not savage. Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass. Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look at this umbrella. ”