Chapter I: Ancient Chaldaea (1)

The Creation, the Deluge, the history of the gods--The country, its cities its inhabitants, its early dynasties.

“In the time when nothing which was called heaven existed above, and when nothing below had as yet received the name of earth,* Apsu, the Ocean, who first was their father, and Chaos-Tiamat, who gave birth to them all, mingled their waters in one, reeds which were not united, rushes which bore no fruit.” ** Life germinated slowly in this inert mass, in which the elements of our world lay still in confusion: when at length it did spring up, it was but feebly, and at rare intervals, through the hatching of divine couples devoid of personality and almost without form. “In the time when the gods were not created, not one as yet, when they had neither been called by their names, nor had their destinies been assigned to them by fate, gods manifested themselves. Lakhmu and Lakhamu were the first to appear, and waxed great for ages; then Anshar and Kishar were produced after them. Days were added to days, and years were heaped upon years: Anu, Inlil, and Ea were born in their turn, for Anshar and Kishar had given them birth.” As the generations emanated one from the other, their vitality increased, and the personality of each became more clearly defined; the last generation included none but beings of an original character and clearly marked individuality. Anu, the sunlit sky by day, the starlit firmament by night; Inlil-Bel, the king of the earth; Ea, the sovereign of the waters and the personification of wisdom.*** Each of them duplicated himself, Anu into Anat, Bel into Belit, Ea into Damkina, and united himself to the spouse whom he had deduced from himself. Other divinities sprang from these fruitful pairs, and the impulse once given, the world was rapidly peopled by their descendants. Sin, Shamash, and Kamman, who presided respectively over the moon, the sun, and the air, were all three of equal rank; next came the lords of the planets, Ninib, Merodach, Nergal, the warrior-goddess Ishtar, and Nebo; then a whole army of lesser deities, who ranged themselves around Anu as round a supreme master. Tiamat, finding her domain becoming more and more restricted owing to the activity of the others, desired to raise battalion against battalion, and set herself to create unceasingly; but her offspring, made in her own image, appeared like those incongruous phantoms which men see in dreams, and which are made up of members borrowed from a score of different animals. They appeared in the form of bulls with human heads, of horses with the snouts of dogs, of dogs with quadruple bodies springing from a single fish-like tail. Some of them had the beak of an eagle or a hawk; others, four wings and two faces; others, the legs and horns of a goat; others, again, the hind quarters of a horse and the whole body of a man. Tiamat furnished them with terrible weapons, placed them under the command of her husband Kingu, and set out to war against the gods.

* In Chaldaea, as in Egypt, nothing was supposed to have a
real existence until it had received its name: the sentence
quoted in the text means practically, that at that time
there was neither heaven nor earth.

** Apsu has been transliterated kiracruv [in Greek], by the
author an extract from whose works has been preserved by
Damascius. He gives a different version of the tradition,
according to which the amorphous goddess Mummu-Tiamat
consisted of two persons. The first, Tauthe, was the wife of
Apason; the second, Moymis, was the son of Apason and of
Tauthe. The last part of the sentence is very obscure in the
Assyrian text, and has been translated in a variety of
different ways. It seems to contain a comparison between
Apsu and Mummu-Tiamat on the one hand, and the reeds and
clumps of rushes so common in Chaldaea on the other; the two
divinities remain inert and unfruitful, like water-plants
which have not yet manifested their exuberant growth.

*** The first fragments of the Chaldaean account of the
Creation were discovered by G. Smith, who described them in
the _Daily Telegraph_ (of March 4, 1875), and published them
in the _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_,
and translated in his Chaldaean account of Genesis all the
fragments with which he was acquainted; other fragments have
since been collected, but unfortunately not enough to enable
us to entirely reconstitute the legend. It covered at least
six tablets, possibly more. Portions of it have been
translated after Smith, by Talbot, by Oppert, by Lenormant,
by Schrader, by Sayce, by Jensen, by Winckler, by Zimmern,
and lastly by Delitzsch. Since G. Smith wrote _The Chaldaean
Account_, a fragment of a different version has been
considered to be a part of the dogma of the Creation, as it
was put forth at Kutha.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from an Assyrian bas-relief from
Khorsabad

At first they knew not whom to send against her. Anshar despatched his son Anu; but Anu was afraid, and made no attempt to oppose her. He sent Ea; but Ea, like Anu, grew pale with fear, and did not venture to attack her. Merodach, the son of Ea, was the only one who believed himself strong enough to conquer her. The gods, summoned to a solemn banquet in the palace of Anshar, unanimously chose him to be their champion, and proclaimed him king. “Thou, thou art glorious among the great gods, thy will is second to none, thy bidding is Anu; Marduk (Merodach), thou art glorious among the great gods, thy will is second to none,* thy bidding is Anu.** From this day, that which thou orderest may not be changed, the power to raise or to abase shall be in thy hand, the word of thy mouth shall endure, and thy commandment shall not meet with opposition. None of the gods shall transgress thy law; but wheresoever a sanctuary of the gods is decorated, the place where they shall give their oracles shall be thy place.*** Marduk, it is thou who art our avenger! We bestow on thee the attributes of a king; the whole of all that exists, thou hast it, and everywhere thy word shall be exalted. Thy weapons shall not be turned aside, they shall strike thy enemy. O master, who trusts in thee, spare thou, his life; but the god who hath done evil, put out his life like water. They clad their champion in a garment, and thus addressed him: ‘Thy will, master, shall be that of the gods. Speak the word, ‘Let it be so,’ it shall be so. Thus open thy mouth, this garment shall disappear; say unto it, ‘Return,’ and the garment shall be there.” He spoke with his lips, the garment disappeared; he said unto it, “Return,” and the garment was restored.

* The Assyrian runs, “thy destiny is second to none.” This
refers not to the _destiny_ of the god himself, but to the
fate which he allots to others. I have substituted, here and
elsewhere, for the word “destiny,” the special meaning of
which would not have been understood, the word “will,”
which, though it does not exactly reproduce the Assyrian
expression, avoids the necessity for paraphrases or formulas
calculated to puzzle the modern reader.

** Or, to put it less concisely, “When thou commandest, it
is Anu himself who commands,” and the same blind obedience
must be paid to thee as to Anu.

*** The meaning is uncertain. The sentence seems to convey
that henceforth Merodach would be at home in all temples
that were constructed in honour of the other gods.

Merodach having been once convinced by this evidence that he had the power of doing everything and of undoing everything at his pleasure, the gods handed to him the sceptre, the throne, the crown, the insignia of supreme rule, and greeted him with their acclamations: “Be King!--Go! Cut short the life of Tiamat, and let the wind carry her blood to the hidden extremities of the universe.” * He equipped himself carefully for the struggle. “He made a bow and placed his mark upon it;” ** he had a spear brought to him and fitted a point to it; the god lifted the lance, brandished it in his right hand, then hung the bow and quiver at his side. He placed a thunderbolt before him, filled his body with a devouring flame, then made a net in which to catch the anarchic Tiamat; he placed the four winds in such a way that she could not escape, south and north, east and west, and with his own hand he brought them the net, the gift of his father Anu. “He created the hurricane, the evil wind, the storm, the tempest, the four winds, the seven winds, the waterspout, the wind that is second to none; then he let loose the winds he had created, all seven of them, in order to bewilder the anarchic Tiamat by charging behind her. And the master of the waterspout raised his mighty weapon, he mounted his chariot, a work without its equal, formidable; he installed himself therein, tied the four reins to the side, and darted forth, pitiless, torrent-like, swift.”

* Sayce was the first, I believe, to cite, in connection
with this mysterious order, the passage in which Berossus
tells how the gods created men from a little clay, moistened
with the blood of the god Belos. Here there seems to be a
fear lest the blood of Tiamat, mingling with the mud, should
produce a crop of monsters similar to those which the
goddess had already created; the blood, if carried to the
north, into the domain of the night, would there lose its
creative power, or the monsters who might spring from it
would at any rate remain strangers to the world of gods and
men.

** “Literally, he made his weapon known; “perhaps it would
be better to interpret it, “and he made it known that the
bow would henceforth be his distinctive weapon.”

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from the bas-relief from Nimrud
preserved in the British Museum.

He passed through the serried ranks of the monsters and penetrated as far as Tiamat, and provoked her with his cries. “‘Thou hast rebelled against the sovereignty of the gods, thou hast plotted evil against them, and hast desired that my fathers should taste of thy malevolence; therefore thy host shall be reduced to slavery, thy weapons shall be torn from thee. Come, then, thou and I must give battle to one another!’ Tiamat, when she heard him, flew into a fury, she became mad with rage; then Tiamat howled, she raised herself savagely to her full height, and planted her feet firmly on the earth. She pronounced an incantation, recited her formula, and called to her aid the gods of the combat, both them and their weapons. They drew near one to another, Tiamat and Marduk, wisest of the gods: They flung themselves into the combat, they met one another in the struggle. Then the master unfolded his net and seized her; he caused the hurricane which waited behind him to pass in front of him, and, when Tiamat opened her mouth to swallow him, he thrust the hurricane into it so that the monster could not close her jaws again. The mighty wind filled her paunch, her breast swelled, her maw was split. Marduk gave a straight thrust with his lance, burst open the paunch, pierced the interior, tore the breast, then bound the monster and deprived her of life. When he had vanquished Tiamat, who had been their leader, her army was disbanded, her host was scattered, and the gods, her allies, who had marched beside her, trembled, were scared, and fled.” He seized hold of them, and of Kingu their chief, and brought them bound in chains before the throne of his father.

He had saved the gods from ruin, but this was the least part of his task; he had still to sweep out of space the huge carcase which encumbered it, and to separate its ill-assorted elements, and arrange them afresh for the benefit of the conquerors. He returned to Tiamat whom he had bound in chains. He placed his foot upon her, with his unerring knife he cut into the upper part of her; then he cut the blood-vessels, and caused the blood to be carried by the north wind to the hidden places. And the gods saw his face, they rejoiced, they gave themselves up to gladness, and sent him a present, a tribute of peace; then he recovered his calm, he contemplated the corpse, raised it and wrought marvels.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief at Koyunjik.
Behind the _kufa_ may be seen a fisherman seated astride on
an inflated skin with his fish-basket attached to his neck.

He split it in two as one does a fish for drying; then he hung up one of the halves on high, which became the heavens; the other half he spread out under his feet to form the earth, and made the universe such as men have since known it. As in Egypt, the world was a kind of enclosed chamber balanced on the bosom of the eternal waters.* The earth, which forms the lower part of it, or floor, is something like an overturned boat in appearance, and hollow underneath, not like one of the narrow skiffs in use among other races, but a kufa, or kind of semicircular boat such as the tribes of the Lower Euphrates have made use of from earliest antiquity down to our own times.

* The description of the Egyptian world will be found in
vol. i. p. 21 of the present work. So far the only
systematic attempt to reconstruct the Chaldaean world, since
Lenormant, has been made by Jensen, who, after examining all
the elements which went to compose it, one after another,
sums up in a few pages, and reproduces in a plate, the
principal results of his inquiry. It will be seen at a
glance how much I have taken from his work, and in what
respects the drawing here reproduced differs from his.

The earth rises gradually from the extremities to the centre, like a great mountain, of which the snow-region, where the Euphrates finds its source, approximately marks the summit. It was at first supposed to be divided into seven zones, placed one on the top of the other along its sides, like the stories of a temple; later on it was divided into four “houses,” each of which, like the “houses” of Egypt, corresponded with one of the four cardinal points, and was under the rule of particular gods. Near the foot of the mountain, the edges of the so-called boat curve abruptly outwards, and surround the earth with a continuous wall of uniform height having no opening. The waters accumulated in the hollow thus formed, as in a ditch; it was a narrow and mysterious sea, an ocean stream, which no living man might cross save with permission from on high, and whose waves rigorously separated the domain of men from the regions reserved to the gods. The heavens rose above the “mountain of the world” like a boldly formed dome, the circumference of which rested on the top of the wall in the same way as the upper structures of a house rest on its foundations. Merodach wrought it out of a hard resisting metal which shone brilliantly during the day in the rays of the sun, and at night appeared only as a dark blue surface, strewn irregularly with luminous stars. He left it quite solid in the southern regions, but tunnelled it in the north, by contriving within it a huge cavern which communicated with external space by means of two doors placed at the east and the west.* The sun came forth each morning by the first of these doors; he mounted to the zenith, following the internal base of the cupola from east to south; then he slowly descended again to the western door, and re-entered the tunnel in the firmament, where he spent the night,** Merodach regulated the course of the whole universe on the movements of the sun. He instituted the year and divided it into twelve months. To each month he assigned three decans, each of whom exercised his influence successively for a period of ten days; he then placed the procession of the days under the authority of Nibiru, in order that none of them should wander from his track and be lost. “He lighted the moon that she might rule the night, and made her a star of night that she might indicate the days:*** ‘From month to month, without ceasing, shape thy disk,**** and at the beginning of the month kindle thyself in the evening, lighting up thy horns so as to make the heavens distinguishable; on the seventh day, show to me thy disk; and on the fifteenth, let thy two halves be full from month to month.’” He cleared a path for the planets, and four of them he entrusted to four gods; the fifth, our Jupiter, he reserved for himself, and appointed him to be shepherd of this celestial flock; in order that all the gods might have their image visible in the sky, he mapped out on the vault of heaven groups of stars which he allotted to them, and which seemed to men like representations of real or fabulous beings, fishes with the heads of rams, lions, bulls, goats and scorpions.

* Jensen has made a collection of the texts which speak of
the interior of the heavens (Kirib shami) and of their
aspect. The expressions which have induced many
Assyriologists to conclude that the heavens were divided
into different parts subject to different gods may be
explained without necessarily having recourse to this
hypothesis; the “heaven of Ami,” for instance, is an
expression which merely affirms Anu’s sovereignty in the
heavens, and is only a more elegant way of designating the
heavens by the name of the god who rules them. The gates of
heaven are mentioned in the account of the Creation.

** It is generally admitted that the Chaldaeans believed that
the sun passed over the world in the daytime, and underneath
it during the night. The general resemblance of their theory
of the universe to the Egyptian theory leads me to believe
that they, no less than the Egyptians (cf. vol. i. pp. 24,
25, of the present work), for along time believed that the
sun and moon revolved round the earth in a horizontal plane.

*** This obscure phrase seems to be explained, if we
remember that the Chaldaean, like the Egyptian day, dated
from the rising of one moon to the rising of the following
moon; for instance, from six o’clock one evening to about
six o’clock the next evening. The moon, the star of night,
thus marks the appearance of each day and “indicates the
days.”

**** The word here translated by “disk” is literally the
royal cap, decorated with horns, “Agu,” which Sin, the moon-
god, wears on his head.

The heavens having been put in order,* he set about peopling the earth, and the gods, who had so far passively and perhaps powerlessly watched him at his work, at length made up their minds to assist him. They covered the soil with verdure, and all collectively “made living beings of many kinds. The cattle of the fields, the wild beasts of the fields, the reptiles of the fields, they fashioned them and made of them creatures of life.” ** According to one legend, these first animals had hardly left the hands of their creators, when, not being able to withstand the glare of the light, they fell dead one after the other. Then Merodach, seeing that the earth was again becoming desolate, and that its fertility was of no use to any one, begged his father Ea to cut off his head and mix clay with the blood which welled from the trunk, then from this clay to fashion new beasts and men, to whom the virtues of this divine blood would give the necessary strength to enable them to resist the air and light. At first they led a somewhat wretched existence, and “lived without rule after the manner of beasts. But, in the first year, appeared a monster endowed with human reason named Oannes, who rose from out of the Erythraean sea, at the point where it borders Babylonia. He had the whole body of a fish, but above his fish’s head he had another head which was that of a man, and human feet emerged from beneath his fish’s tail; he had a human voice, and his image is preserved to this day. He passed the day in the midst of men without taking any food; he taught them the use of letters, sciences and arts of all kinds, the rules for the founding of cities, and the construction of temples, the principles of law and of surveying; he showed them how to sow and reap; he gave them all that contributes to the comforts of life. Since that time nothing excellent has been invented. At sunset this monster Oannes plunged back into the sea, and remained all night beneath the waves, for he was amphibious. He wrote a book on the origin of things and of civilization, which he gave to men.” These are a few of the fables which were current among the races of the Lower Euphrates with regard to the first beginnings of the universe. That they possessed many other legends of which we now know nothing is certain, but either they have perished for ever, or the works in which they were recorded still await discovery, it may be under the ruins of a palace or in the cupboards of some museum.

* The arrangement of the heavens by Merodach is described at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth tablets. The text, originally somewhat obscure, is so mutilated in places that it is not always possible to make out the sense with certainty.

** The creation of the animals and then of man is related on the seventh tablet, and on a tablet the place of which, in the series, is still undetermined. I have been obliged to translate the text rather freely, so as to make the meaning clear to the modern reader.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief from
Nimrud.

They do not seem to have conceived the possibility of an absolute creation, by means of which the gods, or one of them, should have evolved out of nothing all that exists: the creation was for them merely the setting in motion of pre-existing elements, and the creator only an organizer of the various materials floating in chaos. Popular fancy in different towns varied the names of the creators and the methods employed by them; as centuries passed on, a pile of vague, confused, and contradictory traditions were amassed, no one of which was held to be quite satisfactory, though all found partisans to support them. Just as in Egypt, the theologians of local priesthoods endeavoured to classify them and bring them into a kind of harmony: many they rejected and others they recast in order to better reconcile their statements: they arranged them in systems, from which they undertook to unravel, under inspiration from on high, the true history of the universe. That which I have tried to set forth above is very ancient, if, as is said to be the case, it was in existence two or even three thousand years before our era; but the versions of it which we possess were drawn up much later, perhaps not till about the VIIth century B.C.* It had been accepted by the inhabitants of Babylon because it flattered their religious vanity by attributing the credit of having evolved order out of chaos to Merodach, the protector of their city.** He it was whom the Assyrian scribes had raised to a position of honour at the court of the last kings of Nineveh:*** it was Merodach’s name which Berossus inscribed at the beginning of his book, when he set about relating to the Greeks the origin of the world according to the Chaldeans, and the dawn of Babylonian civilization.

* The question as to whether the text was originally written
in Sumerian or in the Semitic tongue has frequently been
discussed; the form in which we have it at present is not
very old, and does not date much further back than the reign
of Assurbanipal, if it is not even contemporary with that
monarch. According to Sayce, the first version would date
back beyond the XXth century, to the reign of Khammurabi;
according to Jensen, beyond the XXXth century before our
era.

** Sayce thinks that the myth originated at Eridu, on the
shores of the Persian Gulf, and afterwards received its
present form at Babylon, where the local schools of theology
adapted it to the god Merodach.

*** The tablets in which it is preserved for us come partly
from the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, partly from
that of the temple of Nebo at Borsippa; these latter are
more recent than the others, and seem to have been written
during the period of the Persian supremacy.

Like the Egyptian civilization, it had had its birth between the sea and the dry land on a low, marshy, alluvial soil, flooded annually by the rivers which traverse it, devastated at long intervals by tidal waves of extraordinary violence. The Euphrates and the Tigris cannot be regarded as mysterious streams like the Nile, whose source so long defied exploration that people were tempted to place it beyond the regions inhabited by man. The former rise in Armenia, on the slopes of the Niphates, one of the chains of mountains which lie between the Black Sea and Mesopotamia, and the only range which at certain points reaches the line of eternal snow. At first they flow parallel to one another, the Euphrates from east to west as far as Malatiyeh, the Tigris from the west towards the east in the direction of Assyria. Beyond Malatiyeh, the Euphrates bends abruptly to the south-west, and makes its way across the Taurus as though desirous of reaching the Mediterranean by the shortest route, but it soon alters its intention, and makes for the south-east in search of the Persian Gulf. The Tigris runs in an oblique direction towards the south from the point where the mountains open out, and gradually approaches the Euphrates. Near Bagdad the two rivers are only a few leagues apart. However, they do not yet blend their waters; after proceeding side by side for some twenty or thirty miles, they again separate and only finally; unite at a point some eighty leagues lower down. At the beginning of our geological period their course was not such a long one. The sea then penetrated as far as lat. 33 deg., and was only arrested by the last undulations of the great plateau of secondary formation, which descend from the mountain group of Armenia: the two rivers entered the sea at a distance of about twenty leagues apart, falling into a gulf bounded on the east by the last spurs of the mountains of Iran, on the west by the sandy heights which border the margin of the Arabian Desert.* They filled up this gulf with their alluvial deposit, aided by the Adhem, the Diyaleh, the Kerkha, the Karun, and other rivers, which at the end of long independent courses became tributaries of the Tigris. The present beds of the two rivers, connected by numerous canals, at length meet near the village of Kornah and form one single river, the Shatt-el-Arab, which carries their waters to the sea. The mud with which they are charged is deposited when it reaches their mouth, and accumulates rapidly; it is said that the coast advances about a mile every seventy years.** In its upper reaches the Euphrates collects a number of small affluents, the most important of which, the Kara-Su, has often been confounded with it. Near the middle of its course, the Sadjur on the right bank carries into it the waters of the Taurus and the Amanus, on the left bank the Balikh and the Khabur contribute those of the Karadja-Dagh; from the mouth of the Khabur to the sea the Euphrates receives no further affluent. The Tigris is fed on the left by the Bitlis-Khai, the two Zabs, the Adhem, and the Diyaleh. The Euphrates is navigable from Sumeisat, the Tigris from Mossul, both of them almost as soon as they leave the mountains. They are subject to annual floods, which occur when the winter snow melts on the higher ranges of Armenia. The Tigris, which rises from the southern slope of the Niphates and has the more direct course, is the first to overflow its banks, which it does at the beginning of March, and reaches its greatest height about the 10th or 12th of May. The Euphrates rises in the middle of March, and does not attain its highest level till the close of May. From June onwards it falls with increasing rapidity; by September all the water which has not been absorbed by the soil has returned to the river-bed. The inundation does not possess the same importance for the regions covered by it, that the rise of the Nile does for Egypt. In fact, it does more harm than good, and the river-side population have always worked hard to protect themselves from it and to keep it away from their lands rather than facilitate its access to them; they regard it as a sort of necessary evil to which they resign themselves, while trying to minimize its effects.***

* This fact has been established by Ross and Lynch in two
articles in the _Journal of the Royal Geographical Society_,
vol. ix. pp. 446, 472. The Chaldaeans and Assyrians called
the gulf into which the two rivers debouched, Nar Marratum,
or “salt river,” a name which they extended to the Chaldaean
Sea, i.e. to the whole Persian Gulf.

** Loftus estimated, about the middle of the last century,
the progress of alluvial deposit at about one English mile
in every seventy years; H. Rawlinson considers that the
progress must have been more considerable in ancient times,
and estimates it at an English mile in thirty years. Kiepert
thinks, taking the above estimate as a basis, that in the
sixth century before our era the fore-shore came from about
ten to twelve German miles (47 to 56 English) higher up than
the present fore-shore. G. Rawlinson estimates on his part
that between the thirtieth and twentieth centuries B.C., a
period in which he places the establishment of the first
Chaldaean Empire, the fore-shore was more than 120 miles
above the mouth of Shatt-el-Arab, to the north of the
present village of Kornah.

*** Fr. Lenormant has energetically defended this hypothesis
in the majority of his works: it is set forth at some length
in his work on _La Langue primitive de la Chaldee_. Hommel,
on the other hand, maintains and strives to demonstrate
scientifically the relationship of the non-Semitic tongue
with Turkish.

The traveller Olivier noticed this, and writes as follows: “The land there is rather less fertile [than in Egypt], because it does not receive the alluvial deposits of the rivers with the same regularity as that of the Delta. It is necessary to irrigate it in order to render it productive, and to protect it sedulously from the inundations which are too destructive in their action and too irregular.”

The first races to colonize this country of rivers, or at any rate the first of which we can find traces, seem to have belonged to three different types. The most important were the Semites, who spoke a dialect akin to Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenician. It was for a long time supposed that they came down from the north, and traces of their occupation have been pointed out in Armenia in the vicinity of Ararat, or halfway down the course of the Tigris, at the foot of the Gordysean mountains. It has recently been suggested that we ought rather to seek for their place of origin in Southern Arabia, and this view is gaining ground among the learned. Side by side with these Semites, the monuments give evidence of a race of ill-defined character, which some have sought, without much success, to connect with the tribes of the Urall or Altai; these people are for the present provisionally called Sumerians.* They came, it would appear, from some northern country; they brought with them from their original home a curious system of writing, which, modified, transformed, and adopted by ten different nations, has preserved for us all that we know in regard to the majority of the empires which rose and fell in Western Asia before the Persian conquest. Semite or Sumerian, it is still doubtful which preceded the other at the mouths of the Euphrates. The Sumerians, who were for a time all-powerful in the centuries before the dawn of history, had already mingled closely with the Semites when we first hear of them. Their language gave way to the Semitic, and tended gradually to become a language of ceremony and ritual, which was at last learnt less for everyday use, than for the drawing up of certain royal inscriptions, or for the interpretation of very ancient texts of a legal or sacred character. Their religion became assimilated to the religion, and their gods identified with the gods, of the Semites. The process of fusion commenced at such an early date, that nothing has really come down to us from the time when the two races were strangers to each other. We are, therefore, unable to say with certainty how much each borrowed from the other, what each gave, or relinquished of its individual instincts and customs. We must take and judge them as they come before us, as forming one single nation, imbued with the same ideas, influenced in all their acts by the same civilization, and possessed of such strongly marked characteristics that only in the last days of their existence do we find any appreciable change. In the course of the ages they had to submit to the invasions and domination of some dozen different races, of whom some--Assyrians and Chaldaeans--were descended from a Semitic stock, while the others--Elamites, Cossaaans, Persians, Macedonians, and Parthians--either were not connected with them by any tie of blood, or traced their origin in some distant manner to the Sumerian branch. They got quickly rid of a portion of these superfluous elements, and absorbed or assimilated the rest; like the Egyptians, they seem to have been one of those races which, once established, were incapable of ever undergoing modification, and remained unchanged from one end of their existence to the other.

* The name _Accadian_ proposed by H. Rawlinson and by Hincks, and adopted by Sayce, seems to have given way to _Sumerian_, the title put forward by Oppert. The existence of the Sumerian or Sumero-Accadian has been contested by Halevy in a number of noteworthy works. M. Halevy wishes to recognize in the so-called Sumerian documents the Semitic tongue of the ordinary inscriptions, but written in a priestly syllabic character subject to certain rules; this would be practically a _cryptogram_, or rather an _allogram_. M. Halevy won over Messrs. Guyard and Pognon in France, Delitzsch and a part of the Delitzsch school in Germany, to his view of the facts. The controversy, which has been carried on on both sides with a somewhat unnecessary vehemence, still rages; it has been simplified quite recently by Delitzcsh’s return to the Sumerian theory. Without reviewing the arguments in detail, and while doing full justice to the profound learning displayed by M. Halevy, I feel forced to declare with Tiele that his criticisms “oblige scholars to carefully reconsider all that has been taken as proved in these matters, but that they do not warrant us in rejecting as untenable the hypothesis, still a very probable one, according to which the difference in the graphic systems corresponds to a real difference in. idiom.”

Their country must have presented at the beginning very much the same aspect of disorder and neglect which it offers to modern eyes. It was a flat interminable moorland stretching away to the horizon, there to begin again seemingly more limitless than ever, with, no rise or fall in the ground to break the dull monotony; clumps of palm trees and slender mimosas, intersected by lines of water gleaming in the distance, then long patches of wormwood and mallow, endless vistas of burnt-up plain, more palms and more mimosas, make up the picture of the land, whose uniform soil consists of rich, stiff, heavy clay, split up by the heat of the sun into a network of deep narrow fissures, from which the shrubs and wild herbs shoot forth each year in spring-time. By an almost imperceptible slope it falls gently away from north to south towards the Persian Gulf, from east to west towards the Arabian plateau. The Euphrates flows through it with unstable and changing course, between shifting banks which it shapes and re-shapes from season to season.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief of the
palace of Nimrud.

The slightest impulse of its current encroaches on them, breaks through them, and makes openings for streamlets, the majority of which are clogged up and obliterated by the washing away of their margins, almost as rapidly as they are formed. Others grow wider and longer, and, sending out branches, are transformed into permanent canals or regular rivers, navigable at certain seasons. They meet on the left bank detached offshoots of the Tigris, and after wandering capriciously in the space between the two rivers, at last rejoin their parent stream: such are the Shatt-el-Hai and the Shatt-en-Nil. The overflowing waters on the right bank, owing to the fall of the land, run towards the low limestone hills which shut in the basin of the Euphrates in the direction of the desert; they are arrested at the foot of these hills, and are diverted on to the low-lying ground, where they lose themselves in the morasses, or hollow out a series of lakes along its borders, the largest of which, Bahr-i-Nedjif, is shut in on three sides by steep cliffs, and rises or falls periodically with the floods. A broad canal, which takes its origin in the direction of Hit at the beginning of the alluvial plain, bears with it the overflow, and, skirting the lowest terraces of the Arabian chain, runs almost parallel to the Euphrates. In proportion as the canal proceeds southward the ground sinks still lower, and becomes saturated with the overflowing waters, until, the banks gradually disappearing, the whole neighbourhood is converted into a morass. The Euphrates and its branches do not at all times succeed in reaching the sea: they are lost for the most part in vast lagoons to which the tide comes up, and in its ebb bears their waters away with it. Reeds grow there luxuriantly in enormous beds, and reach sometimes a height of from thirteen to sixteen feet; banks of black and putrid mud emerge amidst the green growth, and give off deadly emanations. Winter is scarcely felt here: snow is unknown, hoar-frost is rarely seen, but sometimes in the morning a thin film of ice covers the marshes, to disappear under the first rays of the sun.*

* Loftus attributes the lowering of the temperature during
the winter to the wind blowing over a soil impregnated with
saltpetre. “We were,” he says, “in a kind of immense
freezing chamber.”

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by J. Dieulafoy. For six weeks in November and December there is much rain: after this period there are only occasional showers, occurring at longer and longer intervals until May, when they entirely cease, and the summer sets in, to last until the following November. There are almost six continuous months of depressing and moist heat, which overcomes both men and animals and makes them incapable of any constant effort.* Sometimes a south or east wind suddenly arises, and bearing with it across the fields and canals whirlwinds of sand, burns up in its passage the little verdure which the sun had spared. Swarms of locusts follow in its train, and complete the work of devastation. A sound as of distant rain is at first heard, increasing in intensity as the creatures approach. Soon their thickly concentrated battalions fill the heavens on all sides, flying with slow and uniform motion at a great height. They at length alight, cover everything, devour everything, and, propagating their species, die within a few days: nothing, not a blade of vegetation, remains on the region where they alighted.

* Loftus says that he himself had witnessed in the
neighbourhood of Bagdad during the daytime birds perched on
the palm trees in an exhausted condition, and panting with
open beaks. The inhabitants of Bagdad during the summer pass
their nights on the housetops, and the hours of day in
passages within, expressly constructed to protect them from
the heat.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the country was not lacking in resources. The soil was almost as fertile as the loam of Egypt, and, like the latter, rewarded a hundredfold the labour of the inhabitants.* Among the wild herbage which spreads over the country in the spring, and clothes it for a brief season with flowers, it was found that some plants, with a little culture, could be rendered useful to men and beasts. There were ten or twelve different species of pulse to choose from--beans, ‘lentils, chick-peas, vetches, kidney beans, onions, cucumbers, egg-plants, “gombo,” and pumpkins. From the seed of the sesame an oil was expressed which served for food, while the castor-oil plant furnished that required for lighting. The safflower and henna supplied the women with dyes for the stuffs which they manufactured from hemp and flax. Aquatic plants were more numerous than on the banks of the Nile, but they did not occupy such an important place among food-stuffs. The “lily bread” of the Pharaohs would have seemed meagre fare to people accustomed from early times to wheaten bread. Wheat and barley are considered to be indigenous on the plains of the Euphrates; it was supposed to be here that they were first cultivated in Western Asia, and that they spread from hence to Syria, Egypt, and the whole of Europe.** “The soil there is so favourable to the growth of cereals, that it yields usually two hundredfold, and in places of exceptional fertility three hundredfold. The leaves of the wheat and barley have a width of four digits. As for the millet and sesame, which in altitude are as great as trees, I will not state their height, although I know it from experience, being convinced that those who have not lived in Babylonia would regard my statement with incredulity.” Herodotus in his enthusiasm exaggerated the matter, or perhaps, as a general rule, he selected as examples the exceptional instances which had been mentioned to him: at present wheat and barley give a yield to the husbandman of some thirty or forty fold.

* Olivier, who was a physician and naturalist, and had
visited Egypt as well as Mesopotamia, thought that Babylonia
was somewhat less fertile than Egypt. Loftus, who was
neither, and had not visited Egypt, declares, on the
contrary, that the banks of the Euphrates are no less
productive than those of the Nile.

** Native traditions collected by Berossus confirm this, and
the testimony of Olivier is usually cited as falling in with
that of the Chaldaean writer. Olivier is considered, indeed,
to have discovered wild cereals in Mesopotamia. Pie only
says, however, that on the banks of the Euphrates above Anah
he had met with “wheat, barley, and spelt in a kind of
ravine;” from the context it clearly follows that these were
plants which had reverted to a wild state--instances of
which have been observed several times in Mesopotamia. A. de
Oandolle admitted the Mesopotamian origin of the various
species of wheat and barley.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a cylinder in the Museum at the
Hague. The original measures almost an inch in height.

“The date palm meets all the other needs of the population; they make from it a kind of bread, wine, vinegar, honey, cakes, and numerous kinds of stuffs; the smiths use the stones of its fruit for charcoal; these same stones, broken and macerated, are given as a fattening food to cattle and sheep.” Such a useful tree was tended with a loving care, the vicissitudes in its growth were observed, and its reproduction was facilitated by the process of shaking the flowers of the male palm over those of the female: the gods themselves had taught this artifice to men, and they were frequently represented with a bunch of flowers in their right hand, in the attitude assumed by a peasant in fertilizing a palm tree. Fruit trees were everywhere mingled with ornamental trees--the fig, apple, almond, walnut, apricot, pistachio, vine, with the plane tree, cypress, tamarisk, and acacia; in the prosperous period of the country the plain of the Euphrates was a great orchard which extended uninterruptedly from the plateau of Mesopotamia to the shores of the Persian Gulf.

The flora would not have been so abundant if the fauna had been sufficient for the supply of a large population. A considerable proportion of the tribes on the Lower Euphrates lived for a long time on fish only. They consumed them either fresh, salted, or smoked: they dried them in the sun, crushed them in a mortar, strained the pulp through linen, and worked it up into a kind of bread or into cakes. The barbel and carp attained a great size in these sluggish waters, and if the Chalaeans, like the Arabs who have succeeded them in these regions, clearly preferred these fish above others, they did not despise at the same time such less delicate species as the eel, murena, silurus, and even that singular gurnard whose habits are an object of wonder to our naturalists. This fish spends its existence usually in the water, but a life in the open air has no terrors for it: it leaps out on the bank, climbs trees without much difficulty, finds a congenial habitat on the banks of mud exposed by the falling tide, and basks there in the sun, prepared to vanish in the ooze in the twinkling of an eye if some approaching bird should catch sight of it. Pelicans, herons, cranes, storks, cormorants, hundreds of varieties of seagulls, ducks, swans, wild geese, secure in the possession of an inexhaustible supply of food, sport and prosper among the reeds. The ostrich, greater bustard, the common and red-legged partridge and quail, find their habitat on the borders of the desert; while the thrush, blackbird, ortolan, pigeon, and turtle-dove abound on every side, in spite of daily onslaughts from eagles, hawks, and other birds of prey.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief from Nimrud, in
the British Museum.

Snakes are found here and there, but they are for the most part of innocuous species: three poisonous varieties only are known, and their bite does not produce such terrible consequences as that of the horned viper or Egyptian uraeus. There are two kinds of lion--one without mane, and the other hooded, with a heavy mass of black and tangled hair: the proper signification of the old Chaldaean name was “the great ‘dog,” and they have, indeed, a greater resemblance to large dogs than to the red lions of Africa.* They fly at the approach of man; they betake themselves in the daytime to retreats among the marshes or in the thickets which border the rivers, sallying forth at night, like the jackal, to scour the country. Driven to bay, they turn upon the assailant and fight desperately. The Chaldaean kings, like the Pharaohs, did not shrink from entering into a close conflict with them, and boasted of having rendered a service to their subjects by the destruction of many of these beasts.

* The Sumerian name of the lion is ur-malch “the great dog.” The best description of the first-mentioned species is still that of Olivier, who saw in the house oL the Pasha of Bagdad five of them in captivity; cf. Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, p. 487. Father Scheil tells me the lions have disappeared completely since the last twenty years.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief from
Nimrud (Layard, Monuments of Nineveh, 1st series, pi. 11).

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief in the British
Museum.

The elephant seems to have roamed for some time over the steppes of the middle Euphrates;* there is no indication of its presence after the XIIIth century before our era, and from that time forward it was merely an object of curiosity brought at great expense from distant countries. This is not the only instance of animals which have disappeared in the course of centuries; the rulers of Nineveh were so addicted to the pursuit of the urus that they ended by exterminating it. Several sorts of panthers and smaller felidae had their lairs in the thickets of Mesopotamia. The wild ass and onager roamed in small herds between the Balikh and the Tigris. Attempts were made, it would seem, at a very early period to tame them and make use of them to draw chariots; but this attempt either did not succeed at all, or issued in such uncertain results, that it was given up as soon as other less refractory animals were made the subjects of successful experiment.

* The existence of the elephant in Mesopotamia and Northern
Syria is well established by the Egyptian inscription of
Amenemhabi in the XVth century before our era.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief from
Kouyunjik.

The wild boar, and his relative, the domestic hog, inhabited the morasses. Assyrian sculptors amused themselves sometimes by representing long gaunt sows making their way through the cane-brakes, followed by their interminable offspring. The hog remained here, as in Egypt, in a semi-tamed condition, and the people were possessed of only a small number of domesticated animals besides the dog--namely, the ass, ox, goat, and sheep; the horse and camel were at first unknown, and were introduced at a later period.*

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief from Kouyunjik.

* The horse is denoted in the Assyrian texts by a group of
signs which mean “the ass of the East,” and the camel by
other signs in which the character for “ass” also appears.
The methods of rendering these two names show that the
subjects of them were unknown in the earliest times; the
epoch of their introduction is uncertain. A chariot drawn by
horses appears on the “Stele of the Vultures.” Camels are
mentioned among the booty obtained from the Bedouin of the
desert.