Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/assyriaitsprinceOOsaycrich Monolith of Shalmaneser II. {Ft;''m the or'igtital in the British Mjisewn VII. ASSYRIA ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS; AND PEOPLE. BY A. H. SAYCE, M.A. DEPUTY PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY, OXFORD, HON. LL.D. DUBLIN, HTC, AUTHOR OF 'fresh LIGHT FROM THE ANCIENT MONUMENTS,' ' AN INTRODUCTION, TO EZRA, NEHEMIAH, AND ESTHER,' ETC. FLEMING II. REVELL COMPANY NEW YORK 112 Fifth Avenue CHICAGO 148 & 150 Madison STREr* 7 he Re^igiotis Tract Society London, 1893 -5 e,'^\ ^"^^ Fjrst Edition^ July, 1885. REPRiNTEr-, October, 1887 ; November, 1SS9 ; October, 1891 ; June, 1893. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE The Country and People 21 CHAPTER II. Assyrian History... •.. ... ... 27 CHAPTER III. Assyrian Religion ... ... ... ... ... 55 CHAPTER IV. Art, Literature, and Science 86 CHAPTER V. Manners and Customs ; Trade and Government ... 122 421896 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Monolith of Shalmaneser II (from the original in the British Museum) — Frontispiece. Assurbani-pal and his Queen (from the original in the British Museum) ... ... ... ... ... 49 Nergal (from the original in the British Museum) ... 65 Fragment now in the British Museum showing Primitive Hieroglyphics and Cuneiform Characters side by side 92 An Assyrian Book (from the original in the British Museum) ... ... ... ... ... ... 98 Part of an Assyrian Cylinder containing Hezeklah's Name (from the original in the British Museum) ... 104 Assyrian King in his Chariot 125 Siege of a City ».. ., 127 PREFACE. AMiONG the many wonderful achievements of the present century there is none more wonderful than the recovery and decipherment of the monuments of ancient Nineveh. For generations the great oppressing city had slept buried beneath the fragments of its own ruins, its his tory lost, its very site forgotten. Its name had passed into the region of myth even in the age of the classical writers of Greece and Rome ; Ninos or Nineveh had become a hero-king about whom strange legends were told, and whose conquests were fabled to have extended from the Mediterranean to India. Little was known of the history of the mighty Assyrian Empire beyond what might be learnt from the Old Testament, and that little was involved in doubt and obscurity. Scholars wrote long treatises to reconcile the statements of Greek his- torians with those of Scripture, but they only succeeded in evolving theories which were contradicted and over- thrown by the next writer. There was none so bold as to suggest that the history and life of Assyria were still lying hidden beneath the ground, ready to rise up and disclose their secrets at the touch of a magician's rod. The rod was the spade and the x)atient sagacity which 8 PREFACE. deciphered and interpreted what the spade had found. It might have been thought that the cuneiform or wedge- shaped inscriptions of Assyria could never be forced to reveal their mysteries. The language in which they w^ere written was unknown, and all clue to the meaning of the multitudinous characters that composed them had long been lost. No bilingual text came to the aid of the decipherer like the Rosetta Stone, whose Greek inscrip- tion had furnished the key to the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nevertheless the great feat was accomplished. Step by step the signification of the cuneiform characters and the words they concealed was made out, until it is now possible to translate an ordinary Assyrian text with as much ease and certainty as a page of the Old Testament. And the revelation that awaited the decipherer was startling in the extreme. The ruins of Nineveh yielded not only sculptures and inscriptions carved in stone, but a whole library of books. True, the books are written upon clay, and not on paper, but they are none the less real books, dealing with all the subjects of knowledge known at the time they were compiled, and presenting us with a clear and truthful reflection of Assyrian thought and belief. We can not only trace the archi- tectural plans of the Assyrian palaces, and study the bas-reliefs in which the Assyrians have pictured them- selves and the life they led ; we can also penetrate to- their inmost thoughts and feelings, and read their history as they have told it themselves. PREFACF. 9 It IS a strange thing to examine for the first time one of the clay tablets of the old Assyrian library. Usually it has been more or less broken by the catastrophe of that terrible day when Nineveh was captured by its enemies, and the palace and library burnt and destroyed together. But whether it is a fragment or a complete tablet, it is impossible not to handle it reverently when cleaning it from the dirt with which its long sojourn in the earth has encrusted it, and spelling out its words for the first time for more than 2,000 years. When last the characters upon it were read, it was in days when Assyria was still a name of terror, and the destruction that God's prophets had predicted was still to come. When its lasli reader laid it aside, Judah had not as yet undergone the chastisement of the Babylonish exile, the Old Testament was an uncompleted volume, the kingdom of the Messiah a promise of the distant future. We are brought face to face, as it were, with men who were the contemporaries of Isaiah, of Hezekiah, of Ahaz ; nay, of men whose names have been familiar to us since we first read the Bible by our mother's side. Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib can never again be to us mere names. W^e possess the records which they caused to be written, and in which they told the story of their campaigns in Palestine. The records are not copies of older texts, with all the errors that human fallibility causes copyists and scribes to make. They are the original documents which were recited to the kings who ordered them to be compiled, and who may have held lO ' PREFACE. them in their own hands. The gulf of centuries and forgetfulness that has divided us from Sennacherib is filled up when we read the account of his invasion of Judah, which seems to come from his own lips. Never again can the heroes of the Old Testament be to us as lay-figures, whose story is told by a voice that comes from a dark and unreal past. The voice is now become a living one, and we can realise that Isaiah and those of whom Isaiah wrote were men of flesh and blood like ourselves, w^ith the same passions, the same needs, the same temptations. This realisation of Old Testament history is not the only result of the recovery of Assyria upon Biblical studies. It is a very important result, but there are others besides of equal importance. One of these is the unexpected confirmation of the correctness of Holy Writ which Assyrian discovery has afforded. The later his- tory of the Old Testament no longer stands alone. Once it was itself the sole witness for the truth of the narra- tives it contains. Classical history or legend dealt with other lands and other ages ; there were no documents besides those contained in the Old Testament to which we could appeal in support of its statements. All is changed now. The earth has yielded up its secrets ; the ancient civilisation of Assyria has stepped forth again into the light of day, and has furnished us with records, the authenticity of which none can deny, w^hich run side by side with those of the Books of Kings, confirming, explaining, and illustrating them. It has been said that PREFACE. 1 1 just at the moment when sceptical criticism seemed to liave achieved its worst, and to have resolved the narra- tives of the Old Testament into myths or fables, God's Providence was raising up from the grave of centuries a new and unimpeachable witness for their truth. Indeed, so strikingly was this the case, that one of the objections brought against the correctness of Assyrian decipher- ment in its early days v/as that Assyrian monarchs could never have concerned themselves with petty kingdoms like those of Samaria and Judah, as the decipherers made them do. Before the cuneiform monuments were inter- preted, no one could have suspected that they would have poured such a flood of light upon Old Testament history. This light is manifold. The very language of the inscriptions has helped to explain difficult passages in the Hebrew Bible. Assyrian turns out to be very closely related to Hebrew, as closely related, in fact, as two strongly marked English dialects are to one another. There is no other Semitic language (except, of course, Phoenician, which is practically the same as Hebrew) which is so nearly allied to it. And thanks to the library of Nineveh, and its lexicons and lists of synony- mous words, we have a larger literature, and a larger vocabulary, to draw upon in the case of Assyrian than we have in the case of Hebrew. The consequence is that Assyrian may sometimes settle the meaning of a word which occurs only once or very rarely in the Old Testament. Thus the word z'bJiid, which Hebrew 12 PREFACE. scholars had supposed to mean *a dweHing/ 13 shown by the Assyrian texts to signify a * height,' so that ii? I Kings viii. 13, Solomon does not declare to God that he had built Him *an house to dwell in/ as the Authorised Version renders the passage, but 'a lofty temple.' Naturally words of Assyrian origin, like Rab- shakeh and Tartan, have first received their explanation from the decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions. They are not proper names, but titles, the Rab-shakeh being 'the chief of the princes,' or Vizier, and the Tartan, the commander-in-chief. But not only do we find parallels to Hebrew in the individual words of Assyrian, we also find parallel expressions which illustrate and explain those of the Hebrew text. We all remember the statement that the * Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brim- stone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.* The same phrase occurs in an unpublished Accadian hymn addressed to a deity whose name is lost, but who was probably Rimmon the Air-god. The Accadian original describes him as 'raining fire and stones upon the enemy,' which the Assyrian translation changes into * raining stones and fire upon the foe ' in exact confor- mity with the Hebrew phrase. The familiar expression * the Lord of Hosts,' similarly finds its analogue and illus- tration in the common Assyrian title of the supreme god Assur : ' lord of the legions of heaven and earth,' these legions being the multitudinous spirits and angels whose home was in ' the heaven above and the earth below.' PREFACE. 13 We can hardly speak here of the accounts of the Creation, the Deluge, and the Tower of Babel, to which Mr. George Smith gave the name of 'the Chaldean Genesis,' and which agree so closely with the corre- sponding accounts in the Hebrew Book of Genesis. Though found in the library of Nineveh, they are really copies of older Babylonian works, and therefore belong rather to Babylonian than to Assyrian history. It is only the account of the Creation in six days which may perhaps be of purely Assyrian origin. What a resem- blance it offers to the first chapter of Genesis will be seen from the extracts from it in the chapter on Assyrian Religion. It is in the domain of history that the light cast upon Old Testament Scripture by Assyrian research has been fullest and strongest. No one can read the sketch of Assyrian history as revealed by the monuments which is given in the following pages, without perceiving how important it is for the proper understanding of the ancient Scriptures. For the first time the prophecies in Isaiah which refer to a capture of Jerusalem receive their explanation, and the sceptical criticism is answered which found in them a prediction of events that never took place. The chapter in which Isaiah describes the onward march of the Assyrian host against Jerusalem (ch. X.) is no * ideal ' description of ' an ideal campaign/ the verses in which he tells us of the sufferings endured by the beleaguered inhabitants of the Jewish capital /'ch. xxii.) are no 'exaggerated account of a possible 14 PREFACE. catastrophe/ the prophecies in which he declares that the devoted city was about to fall into the hands of its enemies (x. 34, xxii. 14) were not unfulfilled threats. We learn from the inscriptions of Sargon that already, ten years before the campaign of his son Sennacherib, the Assyrian monarch had swept through * the wide- spread land of Judah/ and had made it a tributary province. It was not the army of Sennacherib to which Isaiah was alluding on the day whereon he declared that the Assyrian host was at Nob, only a short half-hour to the north of Jerusalem, but the more terrible veterans of Sargon who marched against the holy city along the northern road. Similar light is thrown by the Assyrian monuments upon another prophecy of Isaiah, in which he pronounces the doom upon the land of Egypt (ch. xix.). The prophecy has sometimes been referred by critics to a later age than that of the great prophet ; but the records of Esar-haddon prove that it is strictly applicable to his time, and to his time only. The unexpected revelation they have made to us of the Assyrian conquest of Egypt, and its division into twenty vassal satrapies shows us who was the * cruel lord ' and * fierce king ' into whose hands the Egyptians were given, and paints the picture of an epoch in which ' the Egyptians' fought 'every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour ; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom.' The Isaianic authorship of ' the burden of Egypt ' can never again be denied. Nahum, again, we can now read with a new interest PREFACE. 15 and a new understanding. The very date of his pro- phecy, so long disputed, can be fixed approximately by the reference it contains to the sack of No-Amon or Thebes (iii. 8). The prophecy was delivered hard upon sixty years before the fall of Nineveh, when the Assyrian Empire was at the height of its prosperity, and mistress of the Eastern world. Human foresight could little have imagined that so great and terrible a power was so soon to disappear. And yet at the very moment when it seemed strongest and most secure, the Jewish prophet was uttering a prediction which the excavations of Botta and Layard have shown to have been carried out literally in fact. As we thread our way among the ruins of Nineveh, or trace the after history of the deserted and forgotten site, we see everywhere the fulfilment of Nahum's prophecy. Of the words that he pronounced against the doomed city, there is none which has not come to pass. Those who would learn how marvellously the monu- ments of Assyria illustrate and corroborate the pages of sacred history, need only compare the records they contain with the narratives of the Books of Kings which relate to the same period. The one complements and supplies the missing chapters given by the other. The Bible informs us why Sennacherib left Hezekiah unpunished, and never despatched another army to Palestine ; the cuneiform annals explain the causes of his murder, ?Lnd the reason of the flight of his sons to Ararat or Armenia. TIic single passage in Scripture in 1 6 PREFACE. which the name of Sargon is mentioned, no longer remains isolated and unintelligible ; we have no longer any need to identify him with Tiglath-Pileser, or Shalmaneser, or any other Assyrian prince with whom the fancy of older commentators confounded him ; w^e now know that he was one of the most powerful of Assyrian conquerors, and we have his own independent testimony to that siege and capture of Ashdod which is the occasion of the mention of his name in Scripture. Between the history of the monuments and the history of the Bible there is perpetual contact ; and the voice of the monuments is found to be in strict harmony with that of the Old Testament. Before concluding this Preface, I have to thank Mr. W. G. Hird for his kindness in undertaking the task of compiling an Index to the volume. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE KINGS OF ASSYRIA. B.C. Bel-kapkapi i7oo(?) Adasi ... Bel-bani, his son ... i65o(?^ Assur-sum-esir i6oo(?) Adar-tiglath-Assuri 1600 (?) Irba-Rimmon ... i55o(?) Assur-nadin-akhi, his son , • •• Assur-bel-nisi-su dr. 1450 Buyur-Assur 1420 Assur-yuballidh 1400 Bel-nirari, his son 1380 Pudil (Pedael), his son 1350 Rimmon-nirari I, his son 1320 Shalmaneser I, his son 1300 Tiglath-Adar I, his son 1280 Bel-kudur-utsur (Belchadrezzar), his soi 1 ... ... 1260 Assur-narara and Nebo-dan 1240 Adar-pal-esar (Adar-pileser) 1220 Assur-dan I, his son 1200 Mutaggil-Nebo, his son 1180 Assur-ris-ilim, his son... 1 1 60 Tiglath-pileser I, his son 1140 Assur-bel-kala, his son TIIC L 1 8 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. B.C. Samas-Rimmon I, his brother ... ... ... 1090 Assur-rab buri... Assur-zahnati ... Assur-dan II ... ... ... ... ... ... 930 Rimmon-nirari II, his son ... ... ... ... 911 Tiglath-Adar II, his son ... 889 Assur-natsir-pal, his son ... ... ... ... 883 Shahnaneser II, his son ... ... ... ... 858 Samas-Rimmon II, his son ... ... ... ... 823 Rimmon-nirari III, his son ... ... ... ... 810 Shahnaneser III ... ... ... , ... ... 781 Assur-dan III ... ... ... ... ... 771 Assur-nirari ... ... ... ... ... ... 753 Pulu (Pul) usm-ps the throne and founds the 2nd Empire under the name of Tiglath-Pileser II 12 th of lyyar 745 Ulula (Elula^os) of Tinu, usurper, takes the name of Shalmaneser IV ... ... ... ... ... 727 Sargon, usurper ... ... ... ... ... 722 Sennacherib of Khabigal, his son ... 12th of Ab 705 Esar-haddon, his son... ... ... ... ... 681 Assur-bani-pal (Sardanapalos), his son ... ... 668 Assur-etil-ili-yukinni, his son ... ... cir. 640 (Bel)-sum-iskun ... ... Esar-haddon II (Sarakos) ... Fall of Nineveh 6o6(?) TABLE OF BIBLICAL DATES ACCORDING TO THE ASSYRIAN MONUMENTS. B.C. Battle of Karkar ; Ahab ally of Damascus against Shal- maneser of Assyria 853 Death of Ahab 851 Campaign of Shalmaneser against Hadadezer (Ben- hadad II) of Damascus ... ... ... ... 850 Second campaign against Hadadezer ... ... ... 845 Murder of Hadadezer by Hazael ... ... ... S43 Campaign of Shalmaneser against Hazael ; tribute paid by Jehu of Samaria ... ... ... ... ... 841 Damascus captured by the Assyrians ; tribute paid by Samaria... ... ... ... ... ... ... 804 Campaign of the Assyrians against Damascus ... ... 773 Tiglath-Pileser II attacks Hamath; submission of Uzziah ; fallofArpad ... ... ... ... ... 743-40 Tribute paid to Tiglath-Pileser by Menahem of Samaria and Rezon of Damascus ... ... ... ... 738 Damascus besieged by the Assyrians ; the tribes beyond the Jordan carried away ; Jehoahaz (Ahaz) of Judah becomes a vassal of Tiglath-Pileser ... ... ... 734 Damascus taken and Rezon slain ; Ahaz at Damascus... 732 Samaria besieged by Shalmaneser V ... ... ... 723 Accession of Sargon ... ... ... ... ... 722 Merodach-baladan conquers Babylonia ... ... ... 721 C 2 20 TABLE OF BIBLICAL DATES. Capture of Samaria by Sargon ... ... ... ... 720 Hamath conquered by Sargon ; Sabako (So) of Egypt defeated at Raphia 719 Embassy of Merodach-baladan to Hezekiali ... ... 712 Capture of Jerusalem and Ashdod by Sargon 711 Merodach-baladan driven from Babylonia : 710 Merodach-baladan recovers Babylonia for six months ... 703 Sennacherib's campaign against Judah ; battle of Eltekeh ; overthrow of the Assyrian army at Jerusalem... ... 701 Murder of Sennacherib by his two sons... 681 Manasseh appears among the Assyrian tributaries ; Egypt conquered by Esar-haddon ... ... ... ... 676 Destruction of Thebes (No-Amun) by the Assyrians ... 665 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. CHAPTER I. The Country and People. Assyria was the name given to the district which had been called ' the land of Assur ' by its own inhabitants. Assur, however, had originally been the name, not of a country, but of a city founded in remote times on the western bank of the Tigris, midway between the Greater and the Lesser Zab. It was the primitive capital of the district in which it stood, and to which, accordingly, it lent its name. It seems to have been built by a people who spoke an agglutinative language, like the languages of the modern Fins and Turks, and who were afterwards supplanted by the Semitic Assyrians. The name in their language probably signified ' water-boundary/ When the country was occupied by the Semitic As- syrians the name was slightly changed, so as to assume the form of a word which in Assyrian meant * gracious.' It so happened that Assyrian mythology knew of a deity who represented the firmament, and was addressed 22 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. as San The name of Sar came in time to be confused with that of Assur, the divine patron of the Assyrian capital, the result being that Assur signified not only a city and country, but also the supreme deity worshipped by their inhabitants. Assur, in fact, became the divine impersonation of the power and constitution of Assyria ; at the same time he was also * the gracious ' god and the primaeval firmament of heaven. Assur, whose ruins are now called Kalah Sherghat, did not always remain the capital of Assyria. Its place was taken by a group of cities some 60 miles to the north, above the Greater Zab, and on the eastern side of the Tigris, namely, Nineveh, Calah, and Dur-Sargon. The foundation of Nineveh, the modern Kouyunjik, probably goes back to as early an age as that of Assur, but it was not until a much later period that it became ;in important city, and supplanted the older capital of che kingdom. Calah, now called Nimrud, though built some four centuries before, was not made the seat of royalty until the reigns of Assur-natsir-pai and Shal- maneser II, in the 9th century B.C., and Dur-Sargon (the modern Khorsabad), as its name implies, was the creation of Sargon. Instead of Dur-Sargon the Book of Genesis (x. 11) mentions Resen * between Nineveh and Calah.' The site of Resen has not been identified, chough its name has been met with in the Assyrian inscriptions under the form of Res-eni, * the head of the spring.' The passage of Genesis in which Resen is referred to THE COUNTRY AND PEOPLE. 23 unfortunately admits of a double translation. If we adopt the rendering of the margin, and translate * out of that land he went forth into Assyria and buildcd Nineveh/ we might infer that Nineveh and its neigh- bouring towns had no existence before the days when Babylonian emigrants settled in the territory of the city of Assur, and superseded its older inhabitants. How- ever this may be, we know from the cuneiform monu- ments that the rise of Assyria did not take place until the Babylonian monarchy was already growing old. The country afterwards known as Assyria had been comprised in Gutium or Kurdistan, a name which has been identified, with great probability, by Sir H. Raw- linson, with the Goyyim or ^ nations ' of Genesis xiv. over which Tidal was king. There seems to have been a time when the rulers of Assur were mere governors appointed by the Babylonian monarchs ; at all events, the earliest of whom we know do not give themselves the title of king, but use a word which signifies * viceroy ' in the Chaldean inscriptions. These viceroys, however, managed eventually to shake off the yoke of their Babylonian masters, and one of them, Bel-kapkapi by name, established an independent kingdom at Assur in the 17th or i6th century before our era. His kingdom extended on both sides of the Tigris, and doubtless included the country north of the Greater Zab, where Nineveh was situated. The exact frontiers of Assyria, however, were never accurately fixed. They varied with the military power and con- 24 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. quests of its monarchs. Sometimes portions of the plateau of Mesopotamia on the west were comprehended within it, as well as the country through which the Tigris flowed, as far south as the borders of Babylonia, and as far north as the Kurdish mountains. At other times Assyria was confined to the narrow space within which its great cities stood. The inhabitants of Assyria belonged to the Semitic stock, that is to say, they were allied in blood and language to the Hebrews, the Aramaeans, and the Arabs. The older population had been either expelled or destroyed. The Assyrians thus differed from the Babylonians, who were a mixed race, partly Semitic and partly non-Semitic. The non-Semitic element is generally termed Accadian ; it spoke agglutinative •dialects, and was the original possessor of the plain of Chaldsea. The Accadians invented the cuneiform system of writing, founded the chief cities and civilisa- tion of Babylonia, and erected the earliest Babylonian monuments with which we are acquainted. It was only gradually that they yielded to the advance of the Semites ; in fact, the final triumph of the Semites in Babylonia was only effected by their amalgamation with the old population of the country, and their com- plete acceptance of Accadian culture. The Accadian language lingered long, and when it died out was pre- served as a learned language, like Latin in our own day, which every educated Babylonian was expected to know. It was natural, therefore, that the pure-blooded THE COUNTRY AND PEOPLE. . 2$ Semites of Assyria and the mixed population of Baby- lonia should differ from one another in many respects. The Babylonians were agriculturists, fond of literature and peaceful pursuits. The Assyrians, on the contrary^ have been appropriately termed the Romans of the East : they were a military people, caring for little else save war and trade. Their literature, like their culture and art, was borrowed from Babylonia, and they never took kindly to it. Even under the magnificent patron- age of Assur-bani-pal, Assyrian literature was an exotic. It was cultivated only by the few ; whereas in Babylonia the greater part of the population seems to have been able to read and write. If the Assyrian was less luxurious than his Babylonian neighbour, he was also less humane. Indeed, the Assyrian annals glory in the record of a ferocity at which we stand aghast. On the other hand, the Assyrian was not so superstitious as the Babylonian, though he ascribed his successes to the favour of Assur, and impaled the inhabitants of con- quered towns or burnt them alive because they did not believe in his national deity. He was, as Nahum declared, the lion which ' did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his holes with prey, and his dens with ravin.' Assyria v/as so wholly a military power, that the destruction of Nineveh not only destroyed the Assyrian Empire but blotted out the Assyrian nation itself. \Vhen ' the gates of the rivers ' of Nineveh — the Tigris and Khusur — were opened, and * the palace dissolved/ 26 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. Assyria ceased to exist. In the Sassanian period the mounds which covered the ruins of the old city were for a short time occupied by the houses of a village, but these, too, disappeared after a while, and the very site of Nineveh remained for centuries unknown. Rich, in 1818, conjectured that the mounds of Kouyunjik, oppo- site the modern town of Mosul, concealed its ruins beneath them, but it was not until the excavations of the Frenchman Botta, in 1842, and the Englishman Layard, in 1845, that the remains first of Dur-Sargon, and then of Nineveh itself, were revealed to the eyes of a wondering world. The capital of the Assyrian Empire was recovered, and with it the sculptured monuments of its kings, and the relics of its clay-inscribed library. The discovery came at an opportune moment. The cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had at last yielded up their secrets to the patient sagacity of European scholars, and had furnished the key to other inscriptions, — also in cuneiform characters, but of a wholly different kind, and expressing a wholly different language — which now proved to be the long-lost records of the Assyrian people. Little by little the records were deciphered ; fresh expeditions to the buried cities of Assyria and Babylonia returned to Europe with fresh spoils, and it is now possible to describe the history and even the daily life and thoughts of a people who but half a century ago were but a mere name. The following pages are intended to give a picture of that history and life. 27 CHAPTER 11. Assyrian History. Assyrian history, as we have seen, begins with the patesis or viceroys of the city of Assur. We know httle about them except their names; contemporaneous annals do not commence until Assyria has ceased to be the dependency of a foreign power, and has become an independent kingdom. It was in the 17th or i6th cen- tury before the Christian era that Bel-kapkapi first gave himself the title of king. For two or three centuries afterwards our chief information about the monarchy he founded is derived from the relations, sometimes hostile and sometimes peaceable, which his successors had with Babylonia. One of them, however, Rimmon-nirari I by name (about B.C. 1320), has left us an inscription in which he recounts the wars he waged against the Baby- lonians, the Kurds, the Aramaeans, and the Shuites, nomad tribes who extended along the western bank of the Euphrates. It was his son, Shalmaneser I, to whom the foundation of Calah is ascribed. For six generations his descendants followed one another on the throne ; then came Tiglath-Pileser I, who may be regarded as 28 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. the founder of the first Assyrian Empire. He carried his arms as far as Cilicia and Malatlyeh on the west, and the wild tribes of Kurdistan on the east ; he overthrew the Moschi or Meshech, defeated the Hittites and their Colchian aUies, and erected a memorial of his conquests at the sources of the Tigris. The Hittite city of Pethor, at the junction of the Euphrates and Sajur, was gar- risoned with Assyrian soldiers, and at Arvad the As- syrian monarch symbolised his subjection of the Medi- terranean by embarking in a ship and killing a dolphin in the sea. In Nineveh he established a botanical garden, which he filled with the strange trees he had brought back with him from his campaigns. In B.C. 1 130 he marched into Babylonia, and, after a momentary repulse at the hands of the Babylonian king, defeated his antagonists on the banks of the Lower Zab. Baby- lonia was ravaged, and Babylon itself was captured. With the death of Tiglath-Pileser I, Assyrian history becomes for awhile obscure. The sceptre fell into feeble hands, and the distant conquests of the empire were iost. It was during this period of abeyance that the kingdom of David and Solomon arose in the west. The Assyrian power did not revive until the reign of Assur- dan II, whose son, Rimmon-nirari II (B.C. 911 — 889), and great-grandson, Assur-natsir-pal (B.C. 883 — 858), led their desolating armies through Western Asia, and made the name of Assyria once more terrible to the nations around them. Assur-natsir-pal was at once one of the most ferocious and most energetic of the ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 29 Assyrian kings. His track was marked by impalements, by pyramids of human heads, and by other barbarities too horrible to be described. But his campaigns reached further than those of Tiglath-Pileser had done. Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Kurdistan, were overrun again and again ; the Babylonians were forced to sue for peace ; Sangara, the Hittite king of Carchemish, paid tribute, and the rich cities of Phoenicia poured their offerings into the treasury of Nineveh. The armies of Assyria penetrated even to Nizir, where the ark of the Chaldaean "Noah was believed to have rested on the peak of Rowandiz. In Assyria itself the cities were embellished with the spoils of foreign conquest ; splendid palaces were erected, and Calah, which had fallen into decay,, was restored. A library was erected there, and it became the favourite residence of Assur-natsir-pal. He was succeeded by his son Shalmaneser H, so named, perhaps, after the original founder of Calah. Shalmaneser's military successes exceeded even those of his father, and his long reign of thirty-five years marks the climax of the first Assyrian Empire. His annals are chiefly to be found engraved on three monuments now in the British Museum. One of these is a monolith from Kurkh, a place about twenty miles from Diarbekr. The full-length figure of Shalmaneser is sculptured upon it, and the surface of the stone is covered with the inscription. Another monument is a small ' obelisk ' of polished black stone, the upper part of which is shaped like three ascending steps. Inscriptions run 30 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. round its four sides, as well as small bas-reliefs repre- senting the tribute offered to 'the great king' by foreign states. Among the tribute-bearers are the Israelitish subjects of ' Jehu, son of Omri.' The third monument is one which was discovered in 1878 at Balawat, about nine miles from Nimrud or Calah. It consists of the bronze framework of two colossal doors, of rectangular shape, twenty-two feet high and twenty- six feet broad. The doors opened into a temple, and were made of wood, to which the bronze was fastened by means of nails. The bronze was cut into bands, which ran in a horizontal direction across the doors, and were each divided into two lines of embossed reliefs. These reliefs were hammered out, and not cast, and the rudeness of their execution proves that they were the work of native artists, and not of the Phoenician settlers in Nineveh, of whose skill in such work we have several specimens. Short texts are added to explain the reliefs, so that the various campaigns and cities represented in them can all be identified. Among the cities is the Hittite capital Carchemish, and the warriors of Armenia are depicted in a costume strikingly similar to that of the ancient Greeks. Shalmaneser* s first campaign was against the restless tribes of Kurdistan. He then turned northward, and fell upon the Armenian king of Van and the Manna or Minni (see Jer. li. 27), who inhabited the country between the mountains of Kotur and Lake Urumiyeh. The Hittites of Carchemish, with their allies from Cilicia and ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 3 1 other neighbouring districts, were next compelled to sue for peace, and the acquisition of Pethor, which had been lost after Tiglath-Pileser's death, again gave the Assy- rians the command of the ford over the Euphrates. The result of this was, that in B.C. 854 Shalmaneser came into conflict with the kingdom of Hamath. The common danger had roused Hadadezer of Damascus, called Benhaded II in the Bible, to make common cause with Hamath, and a confederacy was formed to resist the Assyrian advance. Among the confederates * Ahab of Israel' is mentioned as furnishing the allies with 2,000 chariots and 10,000 infantry. But the confederacy was shattered at Karkar or Aroer, although Shalmaneser had himself suffered too severely to be able to follow up his victory. For a time, therefore, Syria remained un- molested, and the Assyrian king turned his attention to Babylonia, which he reduced to a state of vassalage, under the pretext of assisting the Babylonian sovereign against his rebel brother. Twelve years, however, after the battle of Karkar, Shalmaneser was once more in the west. Hadadezer had been succeeded by Hazael on the throne of Damas- cus, and it was against him that the full flood of Assyrian power was turned. For some time he managed to stem it, but in B.C. 841 he suffered a crushing defeat on the heights of Shenir (see Deut. iii. 9), and his camp, along with 1,121 chariots and 470 carriages, fell into the hands of the Assyrians, who proceeded to besiege him in his capital, Damascus. The siege, however, was soon raised, 32 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. and Shalmaneser contented himself with ravaging the Hauran and marching to Beyrout, where his image was carved on the rocky promontory of Baal-rosh, at the mouth of the Nahr el-Kelb. It was while he was in this neighbourhood that the ambassadors of Jehu arrived with offers of tribute and submission. The tribute, we are told, consisted of * silver, gold, a golden bowl, vessels of gold, goblets of gold, pitchers of gold, a sceptre for the king's hand and spear-handles,' and Jehu is errone- ously entitled 'the son of Omri.' After the defeat of Hazael Shalpaneser's expeditions were only to distant regions like Phoenicia, Kappadokia, and Armenia, for the sake of exacting tribute. No further attempt was made at permanent conquest, and after B.C. 834 the old king ceased to lead his armies in person, the tartan or commander-in-chief taking his place. Not long afterwards a revolt broke out headed by his eldest son, who seems to have thought that he would have little difficulty in wresting the sceptre from the hands of the enfeebled king. Twenty-seven cities, including Nineveh and Assur, joined the revolt, which was, however, finally put down by the energy and military capacity of Shalmaneser's second son Samas- Rimmon, who succeeded him soon afterwards (P..C. 823 — 810). On his death he was followed by his son Rimmon-nirari III (810 — 781), who compelled Mariha of Damascus to pay him tribute, as well as the Phoenicians, Israelites, Edomites, and Philistines. But the vigour of the dynasty was beginning to fail. A few ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 33 short reigns followed that of Rimmon-nirari, during which the first Assyrian Empire melted away. A formidable power arose in Armenia, the Assyrian armies were driven to the frontiers of their own country, and disaffection began to prevail in Assyria itself. At length, on the isth of June, B.C. ^6^, an eclipse of the sun took place, and the city of Assur rose in revolt. The revolt lasted three years, and before it could be crushed the outlying provinces were lost. When Assur-nirari, the last of his line, ascended the throne in B.C. 753, the empire was already gone, and the Assyrian cities themselves were surging with discontent. Ten years later the final blow was struck ; the army ieclared itself against their monarch, and he and his dynasty fell together. On the 30th of lyyar of the year B.C. 745, a military adventurer, Pul, seized the vacant crown, and assumed the venerable name of Tiglath- Pileser. If we may believe Greek tradition, Tiglath-Pileser II began life as a gardener. Whatever might have been his origin, however, he proved to be a capable ruler, a good general, and a far-sighted administrator. He was the founder of the second Assyrian Empire, which differed essentially from the first. The first empire was at best a loosely-connected military organization ; campaigns were made into distant countries for the sake of plunder and tribute, but little efibrt was made to retain the districts that had been conquered. Almost as soon as the Assyrian armies C 34 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. were out of sight, the conquered nations shook off the Assyrian yoke, and it was only in regions bordering on Assyria that garrisons were left by the Assyrian king. And whenever the Assyrian throne was occupied by a weak or unwarlike prince, even these were soon destroyed or forced to retreat homewards. Tiglath- Pileser II, however, consolidated and organised the conquests he made ; turbulent populations were deported from their old homes, and the empire was divided into satrapies or provinces, each of which paid a fixed annual tribute to the imperial exchequer. For the first time in history the principle of centralisation was carried out on a large scale, and a bureaucracy began to take the place of the old feudal nobility of Assyria. But the second Assyrian Empire, was not only an organised and bureaucratic one, it was also commercial. In carrying out his schemes of conquest Tiglath- Pileser II was influenced by considerations of trade. His chief object was to divert the commerce of Western Asia into Assyrian hands. For this purpose every effort was made to unite Babylonia with Assyria, to overthrow the Hittites of Carchemish, who held the trade of Asia Minor, as well as the high road to the west, and to render Syria and the Phoenician cities tributary. The policy inaugurated by Tiglath-Pileser was successfully followed up by his successors. Babylonia w^as the first to feel the results of the change of dynasty at Nineveh. The northern part of it was annexed to Assyria, and secured by a chain of ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 35 fortresses. Tiglath-Pileser now attacked the Kurdish tribes, who were constantly harassing the eastern frontier of the kingdom, and chastised them severely, the Assyrian army forcing its way through the fastnesses of the Kurdish mountains Into the very heart of Media. But Ararat, or Armenia, was still a dangerous neighbour, and accordingly Tiglath-Pileser's next campaign was against a confederacy of the nations of the north headed by Sardurls of Van. The confederacy was utterly defeated in Kommagene, 72,950 prisoners falling into the hands of the Assyrians, and the way was opened into Syria. In B.C. 742 the siege of Arpad (now Tel Erfad) began, and lasted two years. Its fall brought with it the submission of Northern Syria, and it was next the turn of Hamath to be attacked. Hamath was in alliance with Uzziah of Judah, and its king Eniel may have been of Jewish extraction. But the alliance availed nothing. Hamath was taken by storm, part of its population transported to Armenia, and their places taken by colonists from distant provinces of the empire, while nineteen of the districts belonging to it were annexed to Assyria. The kings of Syria now flocked to render homage and offer tribute to the Assyrian conqueror. Among them we read the names of Menahem of Samaria, Rezon of Syria, Hiram of Tyre, and Pisiris of Carchemish. This was the occasion when, as we learn from 2 Kings xv. 19, Menahem gave a thousand talents of silver to the Assyrian king Pul, the name under which Tiglath-Pileser continued to be C 2 36 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. known in Babylonia, and, as the Old Testament informs us, in Palestine also. Three years later Ararat was again invaded. Van, the capital, was blockaded, and though it successfully resisted the Assyrians, the country was devastated far and near for a space of 450 miles. It was long before the Armenians recovered from the blow, and for the next century they ceased to be formidable to Assyria. Tiglath-Pileser's northern frontier was now secure, and he therefore gladly seized the opportunity of interfering in the affairs of the west which was offered him by Ahaz, the Jewish king. Ahaz, whom the Assyrian inscriptions call Jehoahaz, had been hard pressed by Rezon of Damascus and Pekah of Israel, who had combined to overthrow the Davidic dynasty and place a vassal prince, * the son of Tabeal,' on the throne of Jerusalem. Ahaz in his extremity called in the aid of Tiglath-Pileser, offering him a heavy bribe and acknow- ledging his supremacy. Tiglath-Pileser accordingly marched into Syria; Rezon was utterly defeated in battle and then besieged in Dam.ascus, to which he had escaped. Damascus was closely invested ; the trees in its neighbourhood were cut down ; the districts depen- dent on it were ravaged, and forces were despatched to punish the Israelites, Ammonites, Moabites, and Philistines, who had been the allies of Rezon, Gilead and Abel-beth-maachah being burnt, and the tribes beyond the Jordan carried into captivity. The Philistine cities were compelled to open their gates; the king of ASSVRIAN HISTORY. 37 Ashkelon committed suicide in order not to fall into the hands of the enemy, and Khanun of Gaza fled to Egypt. At last in B.C. 732, after a siege of two years, Damascus was forced by famine to surrender. Rezon was slain, Damascus given over to plunder and ruin, and its inhabitants transported to Kir. Syria became an Assyrian province, and all its princes were summoned to do homage to the conqueror, vs^hile Tyre was fined 150 talents of gold, or about ^400,000. Among the princes who attended the levee or 'durbar' was Ahaz, and it was while he was attending it that he saw the altar of which he sent a pattern to Urijah the priest (2 Kings xvi. 10). All that now remained for Tiglath-Pileser to do was to reduce Babylonia as he had reduced Syria. In B.C. 731, accordingly, he marched again into Chaldsea. Ukin-ziru, the Babylonian king, was slain, Babylon and other great cities were taken, and in B.C. 729, under his original name of Pul, Tiglath-Pileser assumed the title of * king of Sumer (Shinar) and Accad.' He lived only two years after this, and died in B.C. *j2'j, when the crown was seized by Elulaeos of Tinu, who took the name of Shalmaneser IV. Shalmaneser's short reign was signalised by an unsuccessful attempt to capture Tyre, and by the beginning of a war against the kingdom of Israel. But the siege of Samaria w^as hardly commenced when Shalmaneser died, or was murdered, in B.C. 722, and was succeeded by another usurper who assumed the name of Sargon, one of tlve most famous of 38 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. the early Babylonian kings. Sargon in his inscriptions claims royal descent, but the claim was probably without foundation. He proved to be an able general, though his inscriptions show that he continued to the last to be a rough but energetic soldier who had perhaps risen from the ranks. Two years after his accession (B.C. 720) Samaria was taken and placed under an Assyrian governor, 27,280 of its leading inhabitants being carried captive to Gozan and Media. But Sargon soon found that the task of cementing and completing the empire founded by Tiglath-Pileser was by no means an easy one. Baby- lonia had broken away from Assyria on the news of Shalmaneser's death, and had submitted itself to Merodach-Baladan the hereditary chieftain of Beth- Yagina in the marshes on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The southern portion of Sargon's dominions was threatened by the ancient and powerful kingdom of Elam ; the Kurdish tribes on the east renewed their depredations ; while the Hittite kingdom of Carchemish still remained unsubdued, and the Syrian conquests could with difficulty be retained. In fact, a new enemy appeared in this part of the empire in the shape of Egypt. Sargon's first act, therefore, was to drive the Elamites back to their own country with considerable loss. He was then recalled to the west by the revolt of Hamath, where Yahu-bihdi, or Ilu-bihdi, whose name perhaps indicates his Jewish parentage, had proclaimed himself ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 39 king, and persuaded Arpad, Damascus, Samaria, and other cities to follow his standard. But the revolt was of short duration. Hamath was burnt, 4,300 Assyrians being sent to occupy its ruins, and Yahu-bihdi was flayed alive. Sargon next marched along the sea-coast to the cities of the Philistines. There the Egyptian army was routed at Raphia, and its ally, Khanun of Gaza, taken captive. In B.C. 717 all was ready for dealing the final blow at the Hittite power in Northern Syria. The rich trading city of Carchemish was stormed, its last king, Pisiris, fell into the hands of the Assyrians, and his Moschian allies were forced to retreat to the north. The plunder of Carchemish brought eleven talents and thirty manehs of gold and 2,100 talents of silver into the treasury of Calah. It was henceforth placed under an Assyrian satrap, who thus held in his hands the key of the high road and the caravan trade between Eastern and Western Asia. But Sargon was not allowed to retain possession of Carchemish without a struggle. Its Hittite inhabitants found avengers in the allied populations of the north, in Meshech and Tubal, in Ararat and Minni. The struggle lasted for six years, but in the end Sargon prevailed. Van submitted, its king Ursa, the leader of the coalition against Assyria, committed suicide, Cilicia and the Tibareni or Tubal were placed under an Assyrian governor, and the city of Malatiyeh was razed to the ground. In B.C. 711, Sargon was at length free to 40 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. turn his attention to the west. Here affairs wore a threatening aspect. Mcrodach-Baladan, foreseeing that his own turn would come as soon as Sargon had firmly- established his power in Northern Syria, had despatched ambassadors to the Mediterranean states, urging them to combine with him against the common foe. We read in the Bible of the arrival of the Babylonian embassy in Jerusalem, and of the rebuke received by Hezekiah for his vainglory in displaying to the strangers the resources of his kingdom. In spite of Isaiah's warning, Hezekiah listened to the persuasions of the Babylonian envoys, and encouraged by the promise of Egyptian support along with Phoenicia, M.oab, Edom, and the Philistines, determined to defy the Assyrian king. But before the confederates were ready to act in concert Sargon descended upon Palestine. Phoenicia and Judah were overrun, Jerusalem was captured, and Ashdod burnt, while the Egyptians made no attempt to help their friends. This siege of Ashdod is the only occasion on which the name of Sargon occurs in the Bible (Isaiah xx. i). As soon as all source of danger was removed in the west Sargon hurled his forces against Babylonia. Merodach-Baladan had made every preparation to meet the coming attack, and the Elamite king had engaged to help him. But the Elamites were again compelled to fly before the warriors of Assyria, and Sargon entered Babylon in triumph (B.C. 710). The following year he pursued Merodach-Baladan to his ancestral stronghold in the marshes ; Beth-Yagina ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 4 1 A^as taken by storm, and its unfortunate defenders were sent in chains to Nineveh. Sargon was now at the height of his power. His empire w^as a compact and consolidated whole, reaching from the Mediterranean on the west to the mountains of Elam on the east, and his solemn coronation at Babylon gave a title to his claim to be the legitimate successor of the ancient Sargon of Accad. The old kingdoms of Elam and Egypt alone remained to threaten the newly-founded empire, which received the voluntary homage of the smaller states that lay immediately beyond it. Thus the sacred island of Dilvun in the Persian Gulf submitted itself to the terrible conqueror, and the Phoenicians of Kition or Chittim in Cyprus erected a monumental record of his supre- macy. Sargon's end was consonant with his whole career. He was murdered by his soldiers in his new city of Dur-Sargon or Khorsabad, on the I2th of Ab or July, B.C. 70s, and was succeeded by his son Sennacherib. If we may judge from Sennacherib's name, which means * the Moon-god has increased the brothers,' he would not have been Sargon's eldest son. In any case he had been brought up in the purple, and displayed none of the rugged virtues of his father. He was weak, boastful, and cruel, and preser\^ed his empire only by the help of the veterans and generals whom Sargon had trained. Merodach-Baladan had escaped from captivity, and two years after the death of Sargon had once more possessed himself of Babylon. But a battle at Kis 42 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. drove him from the country nhie months subsequently, and Sennacherib was able to turn his attention to affairs in the west. In B.C. 701, he marched into Phoenicia and Palestine, where Hezekiah of Judah and some of the neighbouring kings had refused their tribute. Tirhakah, the Ethiopian king of Egypt, had promised support to the rebellious states, and Padi, the king of Ekron, who remained faithful to the Assyrians, was carried in chains to Jerusalem. The Assyrian army fell first upon Phoenicia. Great and Little Sidon, Sarepta, Acre, and other towns, surrendered, Elulaeos, the Sidonian monarch, fled to Cyprus, and the kings of Arvad and Gebal offered homage. Metinti of Ashdod, Pedael of Ammon, Chemosh-nadab of Moab, and Melech-ram of Edom, also submitted. Then, says Sennacherib : * Zedekiah, king of Ashkelon, who had not submitted to my yoke, himself, the gods of the house of his fathers, his wife, his sons, his daughters, and his brothers, the seed of the house of his fathers, I removed, and I sent him to Syria. I set over the men of Ashkelon Sarludari, the son of Rukipti, their former king, and I imposed upon him the payment of tribute, and the homage due to my majesty, and he became a vassal. In the course of my campaign I approached and captured Beth-* Dagon, Joppa, Bene-berak, and Azur, the cities of Zedekiah, which did not submit at once to my yoke, and I carried away their spoil. 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 ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 43 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. In sight of the town of Eltekeh was their order of battle drawn up ; they called their troops (to the battle). Trusting in Assur, my lord, I fought with them and overthrew them. My hands took the captains of the chariots, and the sons of the king of Egypt, as well as the captains of the chariots of the king of Ethiopia, alive in the midst of the battle. I approached and captured the towns of Eltekeh and Timnath, and I carried away their spoil. I marched against the city of Ekron, and put to death the priests and the chief men who had committed the sin (of rebellion), and I hung up their bodies on stakes all round the city. The citizens who had done wrong and wickedness I counted as a spoil ; as for the rest of them, who had done no sin or crime, in whom no fault was found, I proclaimed a free pardon. I had Padi, their king, brought out from the midst of Jerusalem, and 1 seated him on the throne of royalty over them, and I laid upon him the tribute due to my majesty. But as for Hezekiah of Judah, who had not submitted to my yoke, forty-six of his strong cities, together with innumerable fortresses and small towns which depended on them, by overthrowing the walls and open attack, by battle engines and battering-rams, I besieged, I captured, 44 ASSYRIA : ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. I brought out from the midst of them and counted as a spoil 200,150 persons, great and small, male and female, horses, mules, asses, camels, oxen and sheep without number. Hezekiah himself I shut up like a bird in a cage in Jerusalem, his royal city. I built a line of forts against him, and I kept back his heel from going forth out of the great gate of his city. I cut off his cities that I had spoiled from the midst of his land, and gave them to Metinti, king of Ashdod, Padi, king of Ekron, and Zil-baal, kingof Gaza, and I made his country small. In addition to their former tribute and yearly gifts, I added other tribute, and the homage due to my majesty, and I laid it upon them. The fear of the greatness of my majesty overwhelmed him, even Hezekiah, and he sent after me to Nineveh, my royal city, by way of gift and tribute, the Arabs and his body-guard whom he had brought for the defence of Jerusalem, his royal city, and had furnished with pay, along with thirty talents of gold, 800 talents of pure silver, carbuncles and other precious stones, a couch of ivory, thrones of ivory, an elephant's hide, an elephant's tusk, rare woods of various names, a vast treasure, as well as the eunuchs of his palace, dancing-men and dancing-women ; and he sent his ambassador to offer homage.'/ In this account of his campaign Sennacherib discreetly says nothing about the disaster which befell his army in front of Jerusalem, and which obliged him to return ignominiously to Assyria without attempting to capture Jerusalem, and to deal with Hezekiah as it was his ASSYRIAN HISTORV. 45 custom to deal with other rebellious kings. The tribute offered by Hezekiah at Lachish, when he vainly tried to buy off the threatened Assyrian attack, is represented as having been the final result of a successful campaign. There is, however, no exaggeration in the amount of silver Sennacherib claims to have received, since 800 talents of silver are equivalent to the 500 talents stated by the Bible to have been given, when reckoned according to the standard of value in use at the time in Nineveh. Sennacherib never recovered from the blow he had suffered in Judah. He made no more expeditions against Palestine, and during the rest of his reign Judah remained unmolested. Babylonia, moreover, gave him constant trouble. In the year after his campaign in the west (B.C. 700) a Chaldean, named Nergal-yusezib, stirred up a revolt which Sennacherib had some difficulty in suppressing. Two years later he appointed his eldest son, Assur-nadin-sumi, viceroy of Babylon. In B.C. 694, he determined to attack the followers of Merodach-Baladan in their last retreat at the mouth of the Eulaeus, where land had been given to them by the Elamite king after their expulsion from Babylonia. Ships were built and manned by Phoenicians in the Persian Gulf, by means of which the settlements of the Chaldean refugees were burnt and destroyed. Meanwhile, however. Babylonia itself was invaded by the Elamites ; the Assyrian viceroy was carried into captivity, and Nergal-yusezib placed on the throne of the country. He defeated the Assyrian forces in a 46 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. battle near Nipur, but died soon afterwards, and was followed by Musezib-Merodach, w^ho like his pre- decessor IS called Suzub in Sennacherib's inscriptions. He defied the Assyrian power for nearly four years. But in B.C. 690 the combined Babylonian and Elamite army was overthrown in the decisive battle of Khalule, and before another year was past Sennacherib had captured Babylon, and given it up to fire and sword. Its inhabitants were sold into slavery, and the waters of the A raxes canal allowed to flow over its ruins. Sennacherib now assumed the title of king of Babylonia, but with the exception of a campaign into the Cilician mountains he seems to have undertaken no more military expeditions. The latter years of his life were passed in constructing canals and aqueducts, in embanking the Tigris, and in rebuilding the palace of Nineveh on a new and sumptuous scale. On the 20th of Tebet, or December, B.C. 681, he was murdered by his two elder sons, Adrammelech and Nergal-sharezer, who were jealous of the favour shown to their younger brother, Esar-haddon. Esar-haddon was at the time conducting a campaign against Erimenas, king of Armenia, to whom his insurgent brothers naturally fled. Between seven and eight weeks after the murder of the old king, a battle was fought near Malatiyeh, in Kappadokia, between the veterans of Esar-haddon and the forces under his brothers and Erimenas, which ended in the complete defeat of the latter. Esar-haddon was proclaimed king, ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 47 and the event proved that a wiser choice could not have been made. His military genius was of the first order, but it was equalled by his political tact. He was the only king of Assyria who endeavoured to conciliate the nations he had conquered. Under him the fabric of the Second Empire was completed by the conquest of Egypt. In the first year of his reign he rebuilt Babylon, giving it back its captured deities, its plunder, and its people. Henceforth Babylon became the second capital of the empire, the court residing alternately there and at Nineveh. It w^as while Esar-haddon was holding his winter court at Babylon that Manasseh, of Judah, was brought to him as prisoner.^ The trade of Phoenicia was diverted into Assyrian hands by the destruction of Sidon. The caravan-road from east to west was at the same time rendered secure by an expedition into the heart of Northern Arabia. Here Esar-haddon penetrated as far as the lands of Huz and Buz, 280 miles of the march being through a waterless desert. The feat has never been excelled, and the terror it inspired among the Bedouin tribes was not forgotten for many years. The northern frontiers of the kingdom were also made safe by the defeat of Teispes, the Kimmerian, who was driven westward with his hordes into Asia Minor. In the east the Assyrian monarch was bold enough to occupy and work the copper-mines on the distant borders of Media, the very *2 Chr. xxxiii. 11. 48 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. name of which had scarcely been heard of before. Westward, the kings of Cyprus paid homage to the great conqueror, and among the princes who sent materials for his palace at Nineveh were Cyprian rulers with Greek names. But the principal achievement of Esar-haddon*s reign was his conquest of the ancient monarchy of Egypt. In B.C. 675 the Assyrian army started for the banks of the Nile. Four years later Memphis was taken on the 22nd of Tammuz, or June, and Tirhakah, the Egyptian king, compelled to fly first to Thebes, and then into Ethiopia. Egypt was divided into twenty satrapies, governed partly by Assyrians, partly by native princes, whose conduct was watched by Assyrian garrisons. On his return to Assyria Esar-haddon associated Assur- bani-pal, the eldest of his four sons, in the government on the 1 2th of lyyar, or April, B.C. 669, and died two years afterwards (on the 12th of Marchesvan, or October), when again on his way to Egypt. Assur- bani-pal, the Sardanapalos of the Greeks, succeeded to the empire, his brother, Samas-sum-yukin, being entrusted with the government of Babylonia. Assur-bani-pal is probably the 'great and noble' Asnapper of Ezra iv. 10. He was luxurious, ambitious, and cruel, but a munificent patron of literature. The libraries of Babylonia were ransacked for ancient texts, and scribes were kept busily employed at Nineveh in inscribing new editions of older works. But unlike his fathers, Assur-bani-pal refused to face the hardships of a ASSYRIAN HISTORY. $1 a campaign. His armies were led by generals, who were required to send despatches from time to time to the king. It was evident that a purely military empire, like that of Assyria, could not last long, when its ruler had himself ceased to take an active part in military affairs. At first the veterans of his father preserved and even extended the empire of Assur-bani-pal ; but before his death it was shattered irretrievably. It is characteristic of Assur-bani-pal that his lion-hunts were mere battues^ in which tame animals were released from cages and lashed to make them run ; in curious contrast to the lion-hunts in the open field in which his warlike prede- cessors had delighted. His first occupation w^as to crush a revolt in Egypt. Tirhakah was once more driven out of the country, and Thebes, called Ni in the Assyrian texts, and No-Amon, or * No of the god Amun ' in Scripture, was plundered and destroyed. Its temples were hewed in pieces, and two of its obelisks, weighing 70 tons in all, were carried as trophies to Nineveh. It is to this destruction of the old capital of the Pharaohs that Nahum refers in his prophecy (iii. 8). Meanwhile Tyre had been besieged and forced to surrender, and Cilicia had paid homage to the Assyrian king. Gog, or Gyges, of Lydia, too, voluntarily sent him tribute, including two Kimmerian chieftains whom the Lydian sovereign had captured in battle. When the Lydian ambassadors arrived in Nineveh they found no one who could understand their language ; in fact, D 2 52 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. the very name of Lydia had been unknown to the Assyrians before. The Assyrian Empire had now reached its widest limits. Elam had fallen after a long and arduous struggle. Shushan, its capital, was razed to the ground, and the three last Elamite kings were bound to the yoke of Assur-bani-pal's chariot, and made to drag their con- queror through the streets of Nineveh. The Kedarites and other nomad tribes of Northern Arabia were also chastised, the land of the Minni was overrun, and the Armenians of Van begged for an alliance with the Assyrian king. But while at the very height of his prosperity, the empire was fast slipping away from under Assur-bani- pal's feet. In B.C. 652 a rebellion broke out headed by his brother, the Babylonian viceroy, which shook it to the foundations. Babylonia, Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia made common cause against the oppressor. Lydia sent Karian and Ionic mercenaries to Psam- metikhos of Sais, with whose help he succeeded in over- throwing his brother satraps, and in delivering Egypt from the Assyrian yoke. The revolt in Babylonia took long to quell, and for a time the safety of Assur-bani-pal himself was imperilled. At last in 647 Babylon and Cuthah were reduced by famine, and Samas-sum-yukin burnt himself to death in his palace. Fire and sword were carried through Elam, and the last of its monarchs became an outlawed fug^itive. ASSYRIAN HISTORY. 5 3 When Assyria finally emerged from the deadly struggle, Egypt was lost to it for ever, and Babylonia was but half subdued. The latter province was placed under the government of Kandalanu, who ruled over it for twenty-two years, more like an independent sovereign than a viceroy. His successor, Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, threw off all semblance of submis- sion to Nineveh, and prepared the way for the empire of his son. But meanwhile the once proud kingdom of Assyria had been contending for bare existence. Assur-bani-pal's son, Assur-etil-ilani, rebuilt with dimi- nished splendour the palace of Calah, which seems to have been burnt by some victorious enemy ; and when the last Assyrian king, Esar-haddon II, called Sarakos by the Greeks, mounted the throne, he found himself surrounded on all sides by threatening foes. Kaztarit or Kyaxares, Mamitarsu the Median, the Kimmerians, the Minni, and the people of Sepharad leagued themselves together against the devoted city of Nineveh. The frontier towns fell first, and though Esar-haddon in his despair proclaimed public fasts and prayers to the gods, nothing could ward off the doom pronounced by God's prophets against Nineveh so long before. Nineveh was besieged, captured, and utterly destroyed ; and the second Assyrian Empire perished more hope- lessly and completely than the first. All that survived was the old capital of the country, Assur, whose former inhabitants were allowed to return to it by Cyrus at the 54 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. time when the Jewish exiles also were released from their captivity in Babylon."^ ^ The following are the significations of the different Assyrian royal names meniioned in this chapter : — Rimmon-nirari, * Rimmon (the Air-god) is my help.' Shalmaneser (Sallimanu-esir), * Sallimanu (Solomon, * the god of peace) directs.' The Babylonians changed the name to Sulman-asarid, *' Solomon is supreme.' Tiglath-Pileser (Tukulti-pal-E-Sara), *The servant of (the god Adar) the son of E-'Sara (the temple of legions).' Assur-dan, * Assur is strong. ' Assur-natsir-pal, * Assur is protector of the son.' Samas-Rimmon, *The Sun-god is also Rimmon (the Air-god).' Sargon (Sarru-kunu) , 'the constituted king.' Sennacherib (Sinu-akhi-erba), * The Moon-god increased the brethren.* . Esar-haddon (Assur-akh-iddina), * Assur gave a brother.' Assur -bani-pal, * Assur is creator of the son.' Assur-etil-ilani, * Assur is prince of the gods. ' 55 CHAPTER III. Assyrian Religion. The Assyrians derived the greater part of their deities and rehgious beliefs, Hke their literature and culture generally, from Babylonia. The Babylonian gods were the gods of Assyria also. Most of them were of Accadian or prae-Semitic origin, but the Semitic Baby- lonians, when they appropriated the civilisation of the Accadians, modified them in accordance with their own conceptions. The Accadians believed that every object and phenomenon of nature had its Zi or * spirit,' some of them beneficent, others hostile to man, like the objects and phenomena they represented. Naturally, however, there were more malevolent than beneficent spirits in the universe, and there was scarcely an action which did not risk demoniac possession. Diseases were due to the malevolence of these spirits, and could be cured only by the use of certain charms and exorcisms. Exorcisms, in fact, gave those who employed them power over the spirits ; they could by means of them compel the evil spirit to retire, and the beneficent spirit to approach. The knowledge of such exorcisms was in the hands of the priests, so that priest and magician were almost synonymous terms. S6 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. Among the multitude of spirits feared by the Accadians, there were some which had been raised above the rest into the position of gods. Of these, Anu, •the sky;' Mul-ge, 'the earth;' and Ea, 'the deep/ were the most conspicuous. At their side stood the * spirits ' of the heavenly bodies — the Moon-god, the Sun-god, the evening star, and the other planets. The Moon-god ranked before the Sun-god, as might indeed have been expected to be the case among a nation of astronomers like the Chaldeans. When the Semitic Babylonians adopted the deities of their predecessors and teachers, Anu and his compeers lost much of their elemental nature, while the Sun-god Samas came to assume an important place. The religion of the Babylonian Semites, in fact, was essentially solar ; the Sun-god was addressed as Bel or Baal, the supreme * lord,' and adored under various forms. He appeared to them, moreover, under two aspects, sometimes as the kindly deity who gives life and light to all things, sometimes as the scorching sun of summer who demanded the sacrifice of the first-born to appease his wrath. Sometimes, again, he was worshipped as the young and beautiful Tammuz, slain by the boar's tusk of winter ; whose death was lamented at the autumnal equinox, and who was invoked as adoni {Adonis) or * master.' U/ilike the Accadians, who did not distinguish gender, the Semites divided all nouns into masculines and feminines. By the side of the god, consequently. ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 57 stood the goddess. She was, however, but a pale reflection of her male consort, created, so to speak, by the necessities of grammar. She had no independent attributes of her own ; Beltis, or Bilat, the wife of Bel, was nothing more than the feminine complement of the god. The Accadians had known of one great goddess, Istar, the evening star ; but Istar was an independent deity, with attributes as strongly and individually marked as those of the gods. Among the Semites, Istar became Ashtoreth, with the feminine suffix th, and though in Babylonia the old legends and traditions prevented her from losing altogether her primitive character, she tended more and more to pass into the mere reflection of some male deity. Just as the gods could be collectively spoken of as Baalim or ' lords,' all being regarded as so many different forms of the Sun- god, the goddesses also were termed Ashtaroth or ' Ashtoreths.' We see, therefore, that in adopting the pantheon of Accad, the Semites made three important changes. The Sun-god was assigned a leading place in worship and belief; female deities were introduced, who were, how- ever, mere reflections of the gods ; while the inferior deities of the Accadians were classed among* the 300 spirits of heaven ' and * the 600 spirits of earth,' only a few of the more prominent ones retaining their old position. These latter may be grouped as follows : — At the head of the divine hierarchy still stood the old triad of Anu, Mul-ge, and Ea. Mul-ge's name, however. S8 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. was changed to Bel, but since Merodach was also known as Bel, he fell more and more into the background, especially after the rise of Babylon, of which city Merodach was the patron deity. At Nipur, now Niffer, alone, he continued to be worshipped down into late times. His consort was Bilat, or Beltis, 'the great lady,' who eventually came to be regarded as the wife of Merodach rather than of 'the other Bel/ Like Anu and Ea, Bel was the offspring of Sar and Kisar, the upper and lower firmaments. Anu was the visible sky, but he also represented the invisible heaven, which was supposed to extend above the visible one, and to be the abode of the gods. The chief seat of his worship was Erech, where he was regarded as the oldest of the gods, and the original creator of the universe. But elsewhere, also, he was looked upon as the creator of the visible world, and the father of the gods. By his side, in the Semitic period, stood the goddess Anat, whose attributes were derived from his. The worship of Anat spread from Babylonia to the Canaanites, as is shown by the geographical names Beth Anath, 'the temple of Anat' (Josh. xix. 38 ; XV. 59), and Anathoth, the city of ' the goddesses Anat.' It was even introduced into Egypt after the Asiatic wars of the eighteenth dynasty. In the prae-Semitic days of Chaldea, a monotheistic school had flourished, which resolved the various deities of the Accadian belief into manifestations of the one supreme god, Anu ; and old hymns exist in which reference is made to 'the one ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 59 god/ But this school never seems to have numbered many adherents, and it eventually died out. Its exist- ence, however, reminds us of the fact that Abraham was born in ' Ur of the Chaldees/ Ea originally represented the ocean-stream or ' great deep,' which was supposed to surround the earth like a serpent, and by which all rivers and springs were fed. He was symbolised by the snake, and was held to be the creator and benefactor of mankind. One of his most frequent titles is * lord of wisdom,' and the chief seat of his worship was at Eridu, ' the holy city,' near which was the sacred grove or * garden,' the centre of the world, where the tree of life and knowledge had its roots. It was Ea who had given to mankind not only life, but all the arts and appliances of culture also, and it was his help that the Babylonian invoked when in trouble. He was emphatically the god of healing, who had revealed medicines to mankind. As god of the great deep, he was often figured as a man with the tail of a fish, and in this form was known to the Greeks under the name of Oannes or * Ea the fish.' Sometimes the skin of a fish was suspended behind his back. Oannes, it was said, had in early days ascended out of the Persian Gulf, and taught the first inhabitants of Babylonia letters, science, and art, besides writing a history of the origin of man- kind and their different ways of life. His wife was Dav-kina, 'the lady of the earth,' who presided over the lower world. Among the numerous offspring of Ea and Dav-kina, 60 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. Merodach held the foremost place. He was originally a form of the Sun-god, regarded under his beneficent aspect, and was believed to be ever engaged in combating the powers of evil, and in performing services for man- kind. Hence he is addressed as * the redeemer of mankind,' ^ the restorer to life,' and the ' raiser from the dead,' and a considerable number of the religious hymns are dedicated to him. He was believed to be continually passing backwards and forwards between the earth and the heaven where Ea dwelt, informing Ea of the suffer- ings of men, and returning with Ea's directions how to relieve them. One of the bas-reliefs from Nineveh, now in the British Museum, represents him as pursuing with his curved sword or thunderbolt the demon Tiamat, the personification of chaos and anarchy, who is depicted with claws, tail, and horns. As we have already seen, he was commonly addressed as Bel or Mord,' and so came gradually to supplant the older Bel or Mul-ge. Among the planets his star was Jupiter. His wife was Zarpanit or Zirat-panitu, in whom some scholars have seen the Succoth-benoth of 2 Kings xvii. 30. The children of Merodach and Zarpanit were Nebo. * the prophet,' and his wife Tasmit, * the hearer.' Nebo was the god of oratory and literature ; it was he who * enlightened the eyes ' to understand written characters, while his wife * enlarged the ears,' so that they could comprehend what was read. The origin of the cuneiform system of writing was ascribed to Nebo. To him was dedicated 'the temple of the Seven Lights of Heaven ASSYRIAN KELIGION. 6l and Earth/ at Borsippa, the suburb of Babylon, which is now known to the Arabs as the Birs-i-Nimrud, and his worship was carried as far as Canaan, as we may gather from such names as the city of Nebo, in Judaea (Ezra ii. 29), and Mount Nebo, in Moab (Deut. xxxii. 49). In Accadian he had been called Dimsar, ' the tablet-writer,' and a temple was erected to him in the island of Bahrein, in the Persian Gulf, where he was worshipped under the name of Enzak. As a planetary deity, he was identified with Mercury. He was often adored under the name of Nusku, although Nusku had originally been a separate divinity, and the same, perhaps, as the Nisroch of the Bible (2 Kings xix. 37). The companion of Merodach was Rimmon, or rather Ramman, * the thunderer.' He represented the atmo- sphere, and was accordingly the god of rain and storm, who was armed with the lightning and the thunderbolt. Sometimes he was dreaded as * the destroyer of crops,' * the scatterer of the harvest ;' at other times prayers were made to him as *the lord of fecundity.' His worship extended into Syria, where Rimmon appears to have been the supreme deity of Damascus, and where he was also known under the name of Hadad or Dadda. Two other elemental gods were Samas, the Sun-god, and Sin, the Moon-god. Samas was the son of Sin, in accordance with the astronomical view of the old Babylonians, which made the moon the measurer of time, and regarded the day as the offspring of night. Samas, however, like Saul or Savul, another deity of 62 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. whom mention is made in the inscriptions, was really but a form of Merodach, though in historical times the two divinities were separated from one another, and received different cults. Samas, again, was originally identical with Tammuz ; but when Tammuz came to denote only the sun of spring and summer, while the myth that associated him with Istar laid firm hold of men's minds, Tammuz assumed separate attributes, and an individual existence apart from Samas. Sin, the Moon-god, was termed Agu or Acu by the Accadians, and if the name of Mount Sinai was derived from him, as is sometimes supposed, we should have evidence that he was known and worshipped in Northern Arabia. At all events he was one of the deities of Southern Arabia. Sin was the patron-god of the city of Ur, and it was to him that the Assyrian kings traced the formation of their kingdom. One of the most famous of his temples was in the ancient city of Harran, where he was symbolised by an upright cone of stone. As the emblem of the Sun-god was the solar orb, the emblem of Sin was the crescent moon. According to some of the legends of Babylonia, the daughter of the Moon-god was the goddess Istar. Other legends, however, placed Istar among the older gods, and made her the daughter of Anu, the sky. In either case she was at the outset the goddess of the evening star, and when it was discovered that the evening and morning stars were the same, of the morning star also. As the evening star, she was known as Istar of Erech, as ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 63 the morning star, she was identified with Anunit or Anat, the goddess of Accad. At times she was also regarded as androgynous, both male and female. Istar was the chief of the Accadian goddesses, and she retained her rank even among the Semites, who, as we have seen, looked upon the goddess as the mere consort and shadow of the god. But Istar continued to the last a separate and independent divinity. She presided over love and war, as well as over the chase. She was invoked as ' the queen of heaven,' 'the queen of all the gods,' and there was often a tendency to merge in her the other goddesses of the pantheon. Her principal temples were at Erech, Nineveh, and Arbela, but altars were erected to her in almost every place, and she was adored under as many forms and titles as she possessed shrines. Her name and worship spread through the Semitic world, in Southern Arabia, in Syria, in Moab, where she was identified with the Sun-god, Chemosh, and in Canaan, w^here she was called Ashtoreth, the Astarte of the Greeks. But the Greeks also knew her as Aphrodite, the goddess whom they had borrowed from the Phoenicians of Canaan, and we may discover her again in the Ephesian Artemis. The rites performed in her temples made Istar or Ashtoreth the darkest blot in Assyrian and Canaanitish religion, and excited the utmost horror and indignation of the prophets of God. When the moon came to be conceived as a female divinity, the pale reflection, as it were, of the sun, Istar, the evening star, became also the goddess of the moon. 64 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. Hence it is that * the queen of heaven' (Jer. xliv. 17) passed into Astarte ' with crescent horns.' One of the most popular of old Babylonian myths told how Istar had wedded the young and beautiful Sun-god, Tammuz, *the only-begotten,' and had descended into Hades in search of him when he had been slain by the boar's tusk of winter. A portion of a Babylonian poem has been preserved to us, which describes her passage through the seven gates of the underworld, where she left with the warden of each some one of her adornments, until at last she reached the seat of the infernal goddess AUat, stripped and bare. There she remained imprisoned until the gods, wearied of the long absence of the goddess of love, created a hound called * the renewal of light,' who restored her to the upper world. The myth clearly refers to the waning and waxing of the monthly moon, and must therefore have originated when Istar had already become the goddess of the moon. The myth entered deeply into the religious belief of the worshippers of Istar. The Accadians called the month of August 'the month of the errand of Istar,' while June was termed ' the month of Tammuz ' by the Semites. It was then that, as Milton writes, his 'annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer's day ; While smooth Adonis from his native rock Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood Of Tammuz yearly wounded.' ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 65 But it was not only in Assyria and Phoenicia that the death of Tammuz was lamented by the women year by year. The infection spread to Judah also, and even in Jerusalem, within the precincts of the temple itself, Ezekiel saw 'women weeping for Tammuz' (Ezek. viii, 14). Nergal. {From the original in tJie British Museum^ There are only two other Assyro-Babylonian deities who need be mentioned, Nergal and Adar. Nergal was the presiding deity of Cuthah and its vast necropolis.^ He shared with Anu the privilege of superintending the regions of the dead, and he was also a god of hunting and war. His name, like those of Anu, Ea, and Istar, * Confer 2 Kings xvii. 30. 66 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. was of Accadian origin. Adar, the son of Beltis, was one of those solar deities who w^ere formed by worshipping the Sun-god under some particular attribute. The reading of his name is, unfortunately, not certain, and Adar is only its most probable pronunciation. If it is correct, Adar will be the deity meant in 2 Kings xvii. 31, where it is stated that the people of Sepharvaim, or the two Sipparas, burnt their children in fire to Adram- melech and Anammelech, that is to say, to ' King Adar ' and ' King Anu.' Such were the principal divinities of Babylonia and Assyria. But the Assyrians had another also, whom they exalted above all the rest. This was Assur, the divine impersonation of the state and empire. It was Assur who, according to the Assyrian kings, led them to victory, and the cruelties they practised on the conquered were, they held, judgments exercised against those who would not believe in him. Assur, in the form of an archer, is sometimes represented on the monuments in the midst of the winged solar disk, and above the head of the monarch, whom he protects from his enemies. The Assyrian, however, was not so pious or super- stitious as his Babylonian neighbour. The Babylonian lived in perpetual dread of the evil spirits which thronged about him ; almost every moment had its religious ceremony, almost every action its religious complement. Not only had the State ritual to be attended to ; the unceasing attacks of the demons could be warded off only by magical incantations and the intervention of the ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 6/ sorcerer-priest. But the Assyrians were too much occupied with wars • and fighting to give all this heed to the requirements of religion. It is significant that, whereas in Babylonia we find the remains of scarcely any great buildings except temples, the great buildings of Assyria were the royal palaces. The libraries, which in Babylonia were stored in the temples, were deposited in Assyria in the palace of the king. Nevertheless, the greater part of the religious system of Babylonia had been transported into Assyria. Along with the Babylonian deities had come the Babylonian scriptures. These were divided into two great collections or volumes. The first, and oldest, was a collection of exorcisms and magical texts, by the use of which, it was believed, the spirits of evil could be driven away, and the spirits of good induced to visit the reciter. When, however, certain independent deities began to emerge from among the multitudinous ' spirits ' of the primitive Accadian creed, hymns were composed in their honour, and these hymns were eventually collected together, and, like the Rig- Veda of India, became a second sacred book. After the Accadians had been supplanted by the Semites, the Accadian language, in which the hymns were originally written, was provided with a Semitic translation ; but it was still considered necessary to recite the exact words of the original, since the words them- selves were sacred, and any mistake in their pronunciation would invalidate the religious service in which they were employed. Some of the incantations embodied in the E 2 6S ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. collection of exorcisms must have been introduced into it subsequently to the compilation of the sacred hymns, since the latter are found inserted in them. From this it would appear that the older collection continued to receive additions for a long while after the younger collection — that of the sacred hymns — had been put together and invested with a sacred character. This could not have been till after the beginning of the Semitic period, since there are a few hymns which do not seem to have had any Accadian originals. If we may compare the two collections with our own religious literature, we may say that the collection of hymns corresponded more to our Bible, that of exorcisms to our Prayer Book. The Babylonians and Assyrians, however, possessed a liturgy which answered far better to our conception of what a Prayer Book should be. This contained services for particular days and hours, together with rubrics for the direction of the priest. Thus we are told that ' in the month Nisan, on the second day, two hours after nightfall, the priest [of Bel at Babylon] must come and take of the waters of the river, must enter into the presence of Bel, and change his dress ; must put on a robe in the presence of Bel, and say this prayer : '' O my lord who in his strength has no equal, O my lord, blessed sovereign, lord of the world, speeding the peace of the great gods, the lord who in his might destroys the strong, lord of kings, light of mankind, establisher of trust, O Bel, thy sceptre is Babylon, thy crown is ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 69 Borsippa, the wide heaven is the dwelling-place of thy liver. . . . O lord of the world, light of the spirits of heaven, utterer of blessings, who is there whose mouth murmurs not of thy righteousness, or speaks not of thy glory, and celebrates not thy dominion ? O lord of the world, who dwellest in the temple of the sun, reject not the hands that are raised to thee ; be merciful to thy city Babylon, to Beth-Saggil thy temple incline thy face, grant the prayers of thy people the sons of Babylon." ' Part of the liturgy consisted of prayers addressed to the various deities, and suited to various occasions. Here are examples of them : * At dawn and in the night prayer should be made to the throne-bearer, and thus should it be said : " O throne-bearer, giver of prosperity, a prayer ! " After that, let prayer be made to Nusku, and thus let it be said : " O Nusku, prince and king of the secrets of the great gods, a prayer ! " After that, let prayer be made to Adar, and thus let it be said : " O Adar, mighty lord of the deep places of the springs, a prayer ! " After that let prayer be made to Gula (Beltis), and thus let it be said : " O Gula, mother, begetter of the black-headed race (of Accadians), a prayer ! " After that, let prayer be made to Nin-lil, and thus let it be said: "O Nin-lil, great goddess, wife of the divine prince of sovereignty, a prayer ! " After that, let prayer be made to Bel, and thus let it be said : *' O lord supreme, establisher of law, a prayer ! " The prayer (must be repeated) during the day at dawn, and in the night, 70 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. with face and mouth uplifted, during the middle watch. Water must be poured out in libation day by day . . . at dawn, on the beams of the palace/ One of the most curious of these petitions is a prayer after a bad dream, of which a fragment only has been found. This reads as follows : * May the lord set my prayer at rest, (may he remove) my leavy (sin). May the lord (grant) a return of favour. By day direct unto death all that disquiets me. O my goddess, be gracious unto me ; when (wilt thou hear) my prayer ? May they pardon my sin, my wickedness, (and) my transgression. May the exalted one deliver, may the holy one love. May the seven winds carry away my groaning. May the worm lay it low, may the bird bear it upwards to heaven. May a shoal of fish carry it away ; may the river bear it along. May the creeping thing of the field come unto me ; may the waters of the river as they flow cleanse me. Enlighten me like a mask of gold. Food and drink before thee perpetually may I get. Heap up the" worm, take away his life. The steps of thy altar, thy many ones, may I ascend. With the worm make me pass, and may I be kept with thee. Make me to be fed, and may a favourable dream come. 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 unto prospering hands. ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 7 1 May thy entering (O Merodach) be exalted, may^ thy divinity be glorious ; may the men of thy city extol thy mighty deeds.' Along with these prayers, the Assyrians possessed a collection of penitential psalms, which were composed at a very remote period in Southern Babylonia. The most perfect of those of which we have copies is the following : — My Lord is wroth in his heart : may he be appeased again. May God be appeased again, for I knew not that I sinned. May Istar, my mother, be appeased again, for I knew not that I sinned, God knoweth that I knew not : may he be appeased. Istar, my mother, knoweth that I knew not : may she be appeased. May the heart of my God be appeased. May God and Istar, my mother, be appeased. May God cease from his anger. May Istar, my mother, cease from her anger. The transgression (I committed my God) knew. [The next few lines are obliterated.] The transgression (I committed, Istar, my mother, knew). (My tears) I drink like the waters of the sea. That which was forbidden by my God I ate without knowing. That which was forbidden by Istar, my mother, I trampled on without knowing. O my Lord, my transgression is great, many are my sins O my God, my transgression is great, many are my sins ^2 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. O Istar, my mother, my transgression is great, many are my sins. O my God, who knowest that I knew not, my transgression is great, many are my sins. Istar, my mother, who knowest that I knew not, my transgression is great, many are my sins. The transgression that I committed I knew not The sin that I sinned I knew not. The forbidden thing did I eat. The forbidden thing did I trample on. My Lord, in the anger of his heart, has punished me. God, in the strength of his heart, has taken me. Istar, my mother, has seized upon me, and put me to grief. God, who knoweth that I knew not, has afflicted me. Istar, my mother, who knoweth that I knew not, has caused darkness. 1 prayed, and none takes my hand. I wept, and none held my palm. I cry aloud, but there is none that will hear me. I am in darkness and hiding, I dare not look up. To God I refer my distress, I utter my prayer. The feet of Istar, my mother, I embrace. To God, who knoweth that I knew not, my prayer I utter. To Istar, my mother, who knoweth that I knew not, my prayer I address. [The next four lines are destroyed.] How long, O God (shall I suffer) ? How long, O Istar, my mother (shall I be afflicted) ? How long, O God, who knoweth that I knew not (shall I feel thy) strength ? ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 73 How long, O Istar, my mother, who knoweth that I knew not, shall thy heart (be angry) ? Thou writest the number (?) of mankind, and none knoweth it Thou callest man by his name, and what does he know ? Whether he shall be afflicted, or whether he shall be prosperous, there is no man that knoweth. O my God, thou givest not rest to thy servant. In the waters of the raging flood take his hand. The sin he has sinned turn into good. Let the wind carry away the transgression I have committed. Destroy my manifold wickednesses like a garment. O my God, seven times seven are my transgressions, my transgressions are (ever) before me. A rubric is attached to this verse, stating that it is to be repeated ten times, and at the end of the whole psalm is the further rubric : ' For the tearful supplica- tion of the heart let the glorious name of every god be invoked sixty-five times, and then the heart shall have peace.' Reference is made in the psalm to the eating of for- bidden foods, and we have other indications that certain kinds of food, among which swine's flesh may be men- tioned, were not allowed to be consumed. On particular days also fasts were observed, and special days of fasting and humiliation were prescribed in times of public calamity. In the calendar of the Egibi banking firm, the 2nd of Tammuz or June is entered as a day of ' weeping.' The institution of the Sabbath, moreover, 74 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. was known to the Babylonians and Assyrians, though it was confounded with the feast of the new moon, since it was kept, not every seven days, but on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the lunar month. On these days, we read in a sort of Saints' calendar for the intercalary Elul : ' Flesh cooked on the fire may not be eaten, the clothing of the body may not be changed, white garments may not be put on, a sacrifice may not be offered, the king may not ride in his chariot, nor speak in public, the augur may not mutter in a secret place, medicine of the body may not be applied, nor may any curse be uttered.' The very name of Sabattu or Sabbath was employed by the Assyrians, and is defined as * a day of rest for the heart,' while the Accadian equivalent is explained to mean * a day of completion of labour.' So far as we are at present acquainted with the peculiarities, of the Assyro-Babylonian temple, it offers many points of similarity to the, temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. Thus there were an outer and an inner court and a shrine, to which the priests alone had access. In this was an altar approached by steps, as well as an ark or coffer containing two inscribed tablets of stone, such as were discovered by Mr. Rassam in the temple of Balawat. In the outer court was a large basin, filled with water, and called ' a sea,' which ' was used for ablutions and religious ceremonies. At the entrance stood colossal figures of winged bulls, termed * cherubs,' which were imagined to prevent the ingress of evil ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 75 Spirits. Similar figures guarded the approach to the royal palace, and possibly to other houses as well. Some of them may now be seen in the British Museum. Within, the temples were filled with images of gods, great and small, which not only represented the deities whose names they bore, but were believed to confer of themselves a special sanctity on the place wherein they were placed. As among the Israelites, offerings were of two kinds, sacrifices and meal offerings. The sacrifice consisted of an animal, more usually a bullock, part of whose flesh was burnt upon the altar, while the rest was handed over to the priests or retained by the offerer. There is no trace of human sacrifices among the Assy- rians, which is the more singular, since we learn that human sacrifice had been an Accadian institution. A passage in an old astrological work indicates that the victims were burnt to death, like the victims of Moloch ; and an early Accadian fragment expressly states that they were to be the children of those for whose sins they were offered to the gods. The fragment is as follows : ' The son who lifts his head among men, the son for his own life must (the father) give ; the head of the child for the head of the man must he give ; the neck of the child for the neck of the man must he give ; the breast of the child for the breast of the man must he give.' The idea of vicarious punishment is here clearly indicated. The future life to which the Babylonian had looked forward was dreary enough. Hades, the land of the y6 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. dead, was beneath the earth, a place of darkness and gloom, from which * none might return,' where the spirits of the dead flitted like bats, with dust alone for their food. Here the shadowy phantoms of the heroes of old time sat crowned, each upon his throne, a belief to which allusion is made by the Hebrew prophet in his pro- phecy of the coming overthrow of Babylon (Is. xiv. 9). In the midst stood the palace of Allat, the queen of the underworld, where the waters of life bubbled forth beside the golden throne of the spirits of earth, restoring those who might drink of them to life and the upper air. The entrance to this dreary abode of the departed lay beyond Datilla, the river of death, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and it was here that the hero Gisdhubar saw Xisuthros, the Chaldean Noah, after his translation to the fields of the blessed. In later times, when the horizon of geographical knowledge was widened, the entrance to the gloomy world of Hades, and the earthly paradise that was above it, were alike removed to other and more unknown regions. The conception of the after-life, moreover, was made brighter, at all events, for the favoured few. An Assyrian court-poet prays thus on behalf of his king : * The land of the silver sky, oil unceasing, the benefits of blessedness may he obtain among the feasts of the gods, and a happy cycle among their light, even life everlasting, and bliss ; such is my prayer to the gods who dwell in the land of Assur.* Even at a far earlier time we find the great Chaldean epic of Gisdhubar concluding with a description of the bliss- ASSYRIAN RELIGION. ^^ ful lot of the spirit of Ea-bani : * On a couch he reclines and pure water he drinks. Him who is slain in battle thou seest and I see. His father and his mother (sup- port) his head, his wife addresses the corpse. His friends in the fields are standing ; thou seest (them) and I see. His spoil on the ground is uncovered ; of his spoil he hath no oversight, (as) thou seest and I see. His tender orphans beg for bread ; the food that was stored in (his) tent is eaten.' Here the spirit of Ea-bani is supposed to behold from his couch in heaven the deeds that take place on the earth below. Heaven itself had not always been * the land of the silver sky ' of later Assyrian belief. The Babylonians once believed that the gods inhabited the snow-clad peak of Rowandiz, * the mountain of the world ' and * the mountain of the East,' as it was also termed, which supported the starry vault of heaven. It is to this old Babylonian belief that allusion is made in Isaiah xiv. 13, 14, where the Babylonian monarch is represented as saying in his heart : ' I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God : I will sit also on the mount of the assembly (of the gods)^ in the extremities^ of the north : I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.' As in all old forms of heathen faith, religion and mythology were inextricably mixed together. Myths were told of most of the gods. Reference has already been made to the myth of Istar and Tammuz, the pro- ^ A. V 'congregation.* 2 a. V. * sides.' 7S ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. totype of the Greek legend of Aphrodite and Adonis. So, too, the Greek story of the theft of fire by Prome- theus has its parallel in the Babylonian story of the god Zu, * the divine storm-bird,' who stole the lightning of Bel, the tablet whereon the knowledge of futurity is written, and who was punished for his crime by the father of the gods. In reading the legend of the plague-demon Lubara, whom Anu sends to smite the evildoers in Babylon, Erech, and other places, we are reminded of the avenging angel of God whom David saw standing with a drawn sword over Jerusalem. One of the most curious of the Babylonian myths was that which told how the seven evil-spirits or storm- demons had once warred against the moon and threat ened to devour it. Samas and Istar fled from the lower sky, and the Moon-god would have been blotted cut from heaven had not Bel and Ea sent Merodach in his * glistening armour ' to rescue him. The myth is really a primitive attempt to explain a lunar eclipse, and finds its illustration in the dragon of the Chinese, who is still popularly believed by them to devour the sun or moon when an eclipse takes place. The primaeval victory of light and order over dark- ness and chaos, which seems to be repeated whenever the sun bursts through a storm-cloud, was similarly expressed in a mythical form. It was the victory of Merodach over Tiamat, * the deep,' the personification of chaos and elemental anarchy. The myth was embodied in a poem, the greater part of which has been preserved ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 79 to US. We are told how Merodach was armed by the gods with bow and scimetar, how alone he faced and fought the dragon Tiamat, driving the winds into her throat w^hen she opened her mouth to swallow him, and how, finally, he cut open her body, scattering in flight ' the rebellious deities ' who had stood at her side. Tiamat, or the watery chaos, is usually represented with wings, claws, tail, and horns, but she is also identified with ' the wicked serpent ' of ' night and darkness/ * the monstrous serpent of seven heads,' ' which beats the sea.' The most interesting of the old myths and traditions of Babylonia are those in which w^e can trace, more or less clearly, the lineaments of the accounts of the creation of the world and the early history of man, given us in the early chapters of Genesis. There was more than one legend of the creation. In a text which came from the library of Cuthah, it was described as taking place on evolutionary principles, the first created beings being the brood of chaos, men with ' the bodies of birds ' and * the faces of ravens,' who were succeeded by the more perfect forms of the existing world. But the library of Assur-bani-pal also contained an account of the creation, which bears a remarkable resemblance to that in the first chapter of Genesis. Unfortunately, however, it seems to have been of Assyrian and not Babylonian origin, and, therefore, not to have been of early date. In this account the creation appears to be described as having been accomplished in six days. It begins in these words : 80 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. ' At that time the heavens above named not a name, nor did the earth below record one ; yea, the ocean was their first creator, the flood of the deep (Tiamat) was she who bore them all. Their waters were embosomed in one place, and the clouds (?) were not collected, the plant was still ungrown. At that time the gods had not issued forth, any one of them ; by no name were they recorded, no destiny (had they fixed). Then the (great) gods were made ; Lakhmu and Lakhamu issued forth the first. They grew up. . . . Next were made the host of heaven and earth. The time was long, (and then) the gods Anu, (Bel, and Ea were born of) the host of heaven and earth.' The rest of the account is lost, and it is not until we come to the fifth tablet of the series, which describes the appointment of the heavenly bodies, that the narrative is again preserved. Here we are told that the creator, who seems to have been Ea, *made the stations of the great gods, even the stars, fixing the places of the principal stars like .... He ordered the year, setting over it the decans ; yea, he established three stars for each of the twelve months.' It will be remembered that, according to Genesis, the appointment of the heavenly bodies to guide and govern the seasons was the work of the fourth day, and since the work is described in the fifth tablet or book of the Assyrian account, while the first tablet describes the condition of the universe before the creation was begun, it becomes probable that the Assyrians also knew that the work was performed on the fourth day. The next ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 8 1 tablet states that * at that time the gods in their assembly created (the living creatures). They made the mighty (animals). They caused the living beings to come forth, the cattle of the field, the beast of the field, and the creeping thing.' Unfortunately the rest of the narrative is in too mutilated a condition for a trans- lation to be possible, and the part which describes the creation of man has not yet been recovered among the ruins of the library of Nineveh. The Chaldean account of the Deluge was discovered by Mr. George Smith, and its close resemblance to the account in Genesis is well known. Those who wish to see a translation of it, according to the latest researches, will find one in the pages of 'Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments.' The account was introduced as an episode into the eleventh book of the great Baby- lonian epic of Gisdhubar, and appears to be the amalga- mation of two older poems on the subject. The story of the Deluge, in fact, was a favourite theme among the Babylonians, and we have fragments of at least two other versions of it, neither of which, however, agree so remarkably with the Biblical narrative as does the version discovered by Mr. Smith. Apart from the pro- found difference caused by the polytheistic character of the Chaldean account, and the monotheism of the Scriptural narrative, it is only in details that the two accounts vary from one another. Thus, the vessel in which Xisuthros, the Chaldean Noah, sails, is a ship, guided by a steersman, and not an ark, and others 82 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. besides his own family are described as being admitted into it. So, too, the period of time during which the flood was at its height is said to have been seven days only, while, beside the raven and the dove, Xisuthros is stated to have sent out a third bird, the swallow, in order to determine how far the waters had subsided. The Chaldean ark rested, moreover, on Rowandiz, the highest of the mountains of Eastern Kurdistan, and the peak whereon Accadian mythology imagined the heavens to be supported, and not on the northern or Armenian continuation of the range. Babylonian tradi- tion, too, had fused into one Noah and Enoch, Xisuthros being represented as translated to the land of immor- tality immediately after his descent from the ark and his sacrifice to the gods. It is noticeable that the Chaldean account agrees with that of the Bible in one remarkable respect, in which it differs from almost all the other traditions of the Deluge found throughout the world. This is in its ascribing the cause of the Deluge to the wickedness of mankind. It was sent as a punish- ment for sin. As might have been expected, the Babylonians and Assyrians knew of the building of the Tower of Babel, and the dispersion of mankind. Men had 'turned against the father of all the gods,' under a leader the thoughts of whose heart ' were evil.' At Babylon they began to erect ' a mound,' or hill-like tower, but the winds destroyed it in the night, and Anu 'confounded great and small on the mound,' as well as their * speech,' ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 83 and ' made strange their counsel/ All this was supposed to have taken place at the time of the autumnal equinox, and it is possible that the name of the rebel leader, which is lost, was Etana. At all events the demi-god Etana played a conspicuous part in the early historical mythology of Babylonia, like two other famous divine kings, Ner and Dun, and a fragment describes him as having built a city of brick. However this may be, Etana is the Babylonian Titan of Greek writers, who, with Prometheus and Ogygos, made war against the gods. If we sum up the character of Assyrian religion, we shall find it characterised by curious contrasts. On the one hand we shall find it grossly polytheistic, believing in * lords many and gods many,' and admitting not only gods and demi-gods, and even deified men, but the multitudinous spirits, 'the host of heaven and earth,' who were classed together as the ' 300 spirits of heaven and the 600 spirits of earth.' Some of these were beneficent, others hostile, to man. In addition to this vast army of divine powers, the Assyrian offered worship also to the heavenly bodies, and to the spirits of rivers and mountains. He even set up stones or * Beth-els,' so called because they were imagined to be veritable * houses of god,' wherein the godhead dwelt, and over these he poured out libations of oil and wine. Yet, on the other hand, with all this gross polytheism, there was a strong tendency to monotheism. The supreme god, Assur, is often spoken of in language which at first sight F 2 84 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. seems monotheistic : to him the Assyrian monarchs ascribe their victories, and in his name they make war against the unbeliever. A similar inconsistency prevailed in the character of Assyrian worship itself. There was much in it which commands our admiration : the Assyrian confessed his sins to his gods, he begged for their pardon and help, he allowed nothing to interfere with what he conceived to be his religious duties. With all this, his worship of Istar was stained with the foulest excesses — excesses, too, indulged in, like those of the Phoenicians, in the name and for the sake of religion. Much of this inconsistency may be explained by the history of his religious ideas. As we have seen, a large part of them was derived from a non-Semitic population, the primitive inhabitants of Babylonia, under whose influence the Semitic Babylonians had come at a time when they still lacked nearly all the elements of culture. The result was a form of creed in which the old Accadian faith was bodily taken over by an alien race, but at the same time profoundly modified. It was Accadian religion interpreted by the Semitic mind and belief. Baal-worship, which saw the Sun-god everywhere under an infinite variety of manifestations, waged a constant struggle with the conceptions of the borrowed creed, but never overcame them altogether. The gods and spirits of the Accadians remained to the last, although permeated and overlaid with the worship of the Semitic Sun-god. As time went on, new religious elements were ASSYRIAN RELIGION. 85 introduced, and Assy ro-Baby Ionian religion underwent new phases, while in Assyria itself the deified state in the person of the god Assur tended to absorb the religious cult and aspirations of the people. The higher minds of the nation struggled now and again towards the conception of one supreme God and of a purer form of faith, but the dead weight of polytheistic beliefs and practices prevented them from ever really reaching it. In the best examples of their religious literature we constantly fall across expressions and ideas which show how wide was the gulf that separated them from that kindred people of Israel to whom the oracles of God were revealed. S6 CHAPTER IV. Art, Literature, and Science. Assyrian art was, speaking generally, imported from Babylonia. Even the palace of the king was built of bricks, and raised upon a mound like the palaces and temples of Babylonia, although stone was plentiful in Assyria, and there was no marshy plain where inundations might be feared. It was only the walls that were lined with sculptured slabs of alabaster, the sculptures taking the place of the paintings in vermilion, which adorned the houses of Babylonia (Ezek. xxiii. 14). It is at Khorsabad, or Dur-Sargon, the city built by Sargon, to the north of Nineveh, that we can best study the architectural genius of Assyria. The city was laid out in the form of a square, and surrounded by walls forty-six feet thick and over a mile in length each way, the angles of which faced the four cardinal points. The outer wall was flanked with eight tall towers, and was erected on a mound of rubble. On the north-west side stood the royal palace, defended also by a wall of its own, and built on a T-shaped platform. It was approached through an outer court, the gates of which were hung under arches of enamelled brick, and guarded by colossal figures in stone. From ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. S^ the court an inclined plane led to the first terrace occupied by a number of small rooms, in which the French excavators saw the barracks of the palace-guard. Above this terrace rose a second, at a height of about ten feet, upon which was built the royal palace itself This was entered through a gateway, on either side of which stood the stone figure of a * cherub,' while within it was a court 350 feet long and 170 feet wide. Beyond this court was an inner one, which formed a square of 150 feet. On its left were the royal chambers, consisting of a suite of ten rooms, and beyond them again the private chapel of the monarch, leading to the apartments in which he commonly lived. On the west side of the palace rose a tower, built in stages, on the summit of which was the royal observatory. It is a question whether the Assyrian palace possessed any upper stories. On the whole, probability speaks against it. Columns, however, were used plentifully. The column, in fact, had been a Babylonian invention, and originated in the necessity of supporting buildings on wooden pillars in a country where there was no stone. From Babylonia columnar architecture passed into Assyria, where it assumed exaggerated forms, the column being sometimes made to rest on the backs of lions, dogs, and winged bulls. The apertures which served as windows were pro- tected by heavy folds of tapestry, that kept out the heats of summer and the cold winds of winter. In warm weather, however, the inmates of the house preferred to SS ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. sit in the open air, either in the airy courts upon which its chambers opened, or under the shady trees of the paradeisos or park attached to the dwelHngs of the rich. The leases of houses let or sold in Nineveh in the time of the Second Assyrian Empire generally make mention of the ' shrubbery,' which formed part of the property. Assyrian sculpture was for the most part in relief. The Assyrians carved badly in the round, unlike the Babylonians, some of whose sitting statues are not wanting in an air of dignity and repose. But they excelled in that kind of shallow relief of which so many examples have been brought to the British Museum. We can trace three distinct periods in the history of this form of art. The first period is that which begins, so far as we know at present, with the age of Assur-natsir-pal. It is characterised by boldness and vigour, by an absence of background or landscape, and by an almost total want of perspective. With very few exceptions, faces and figures are drawn in profile. But with all this want of skill, the work is often striking from the spirit with which it is executed, and the naturalness with which animals, more especially, are depicted. A bas-relief representing a lion-hunt of Assur-natsir-pal has been often selected as a typical, though favourable, illustration of the art of this age. The second period extends from the foundation of the Second Assyrian Empire to the reign of Esar-haddon. The artist has lost in vigour, but has compensated for it by care and accuracy. The foreground is now filled in ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 89 With vegetable and other forms, all drawn with a pre- Raffaellite exactitude. The relief consequently becomes exceedingly rich, and produces the effect of embroidery in stone. It is probable that the delicate minuteness of this period of art was in great measure due to the work in ivory that had now become fashionable at Nineveh. The third, and best period, is that of the reign of Assur-bani-pal. There is a return to the freedom of the first period, but without its accompanying rudeness and want of skill. The landscape is either left bare, or indicated in outline only, the attention of the spectator being thus directed to the principal sculpture itself. The delineation of the human figure has much im- proved ; vegetable forms have lost much of their stiff- ness, and we meet with several examples of successful foreshortening. Up to the last, however, the Assyrian artist succeeded but ^badly in human portraiture. Nothing can surpass some of his pictures of animals; when he came to deal with the human figure he ex- pended his strength on embroidered robes and the muscles of the legs and arms. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. Unlike the Egyptian, who excelled in the delineation of the human form, he did not draw from nude models. The details of the drapery were with him of more importance than the features of the face or the posture of the limbs. We cannot expect to find portraits in the sculptures of Assyria. Little, if any, attempt is made even to distinguish the natives of different foreign countries from one another, except in 90 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. the way of dress. All alike have the same features as the Assyrians themselves. The effect of the bas-reliefs was enhanced by the red, black, blue, and white colours with which they were picked out. The practice had come from Babylonia, but whereas the Babylonians delighted in brilliant colouring, their northern neighbours contented them- selves with much more sober hues. It was no doubt from the populations of Mesopotamia that the Greeks first learnt to paint and tint their sculptured stone. Unfortunately it is difficult, if not impossible, to find any trace of colouring remaining in the Assyrian bas- reliefs now in Europe. When first disinterred, however, the colours were still bright in many cases, although exposure to the air soon caused them to fade and perish. The bas-reliefs and colossi were moved from the quarries out of which they had been dug, or the workshops in which they had been carved, by the help of sledges and rollers. Hundreds of captives were employed to drag the huge mass along ; sometimes it was trans- ported by water, the boat on which it lay being pulled by men on shore ; sometimes it was drawn over the land by gangs of slaves, urged to their work by the rod and sword of their task-masters. On the colossus itself stood an overseer holding to his mouth what looks on the monument like a modern speaking-trumpet. Over a sculpture representing the transport of one of these colossi Sennacherib has engraved the words : ^ Senna- ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 93 cherib, king of legions, king of Assyria, has caused the winged bull and the colossi, the divinities which were made in the land of the city of the Baladians, to be brought with joy to the palace of his lordship, which is within Nineveh/ We may infer from this epigraph that the images themselves were believed to be in some way the abode of divinity, like the Beth-els or sacred stones to which reference has been made in the last chapter. Like Assyrian art, Assyrian literature was for the most part derived from Babylonia. A large portion of it was translated from Accadian originals. Sometimes the original was lost or forgotten ; more frequently it was re-edited from time to time with interlinear or parallel translations in Assyro-Babylonian. This was more especially the case with the sacred texts, in which the old language of Accad was itself accounted sacred, like Latin in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, or Coptic in those of the modern Egyptian Church. The Accadians had been the inventors of the hiero- glyphics or pictorial characters out of which the cuneiform characters had afterwards grown. Writing begins with pictures, and the writing of the Babylonians formed no exception to the rule. The pictures were at first painted on the papyrus leaves which grew in the marshes of the Euphrates, but as time went on a new and more plentiful writing material came to be employed in the shape of clay. Clay was literally to be found under the feet of every one. All that was needed was to impress it, while still wet, with the hieroglyphic pictures, 94 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. and then dry it in the sun. It is probable that the bricks used in the construction of the great buildings of Chaldea were first treated in this way. At all events we find that up to the last, the Babylonian kings stamped their names and titles in the middle of such bricks, and hundreds of them may be met with in the museums of Europe bearing the name of Nebuchadnezzar. When once the discovery was made that clay could be employed as a writing material, it was quickly turned to good account. All Babylonia began to write on tablets of clay, and though papyrus continued to be used, it was reserved for what we should now term ' editions de luxe.' The writing instrument had originally been the edge of a stone or a piece of stick, but these were soon superseded by a metal stylus with a square head. Under the combined influence of the clay tablet and the metal stylus, the old picture-writing began to degenerate into the cuneiform or * wedge-shaped ' characters with which the monuments of Assyria have made us familiar. It was difficult, if not impossible, any longer to draw circles and curves, and accordingly angles took the place of circles, and straight lines the place of curves. Continuous lines were equally difficult to form ; it was easier to represent them by a series of indentations, each of which took a wedge-like appearance from the square head of the stylus. As soon as the exact forms of the old pictures began to be obliterated, other alterations became inevitable. The forms began to be simplified by the omission of lines or wedges which were no longer ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 95 necessary, now that the character had become a mere symbol instead of a picture ; and this process of simpli- fication went on from one century to another, until in many instances the later form of a character is hardly more than a shadow of what it originally was. Educa- tion was widely spread in Babylonia; in spite of the cumbrousness and intricacy of the system of writing, there were few, it would appear, who could not read and write, and hence, as was natural, all kinds of handwritings were prevalent, some good and some bad. Among these various cursive or running hands were some which were selected for public documents ; but as the hands varied, not only among individuals, but also from age to age, the official script never became fixed and permanent, but changed constantly, each change, however, bringing with it increased simplicity in the shapes of the characters, and a greater departure from the primitive hieroglyphic form. The earliest con temporaneous monuments with which we are at present acquainted, are those recently excavated by the French Consul M. de Sarzec at a place called Tel-Loh ; on these we see the early pictures in the very act of passing into cuneiform characters, the pictures being sometimes preserved and sometimes already lost. A comparison of the forms found at Tel-Loh with those usually employed in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, will show at a glance what profound modifications were undergone by the cuneiform syllabary in the course of its transmission from generation to generation. g6 ASSYRIA: its princes, priests, and people. In contrast to the Babylonians, the Assyrians were a nation of warriors and huntsmen, not of students, and with them, therefore, a knowledge of writing was con- fined to a particular class, that of the scribes. At an early period, accordingly, in the history of the kingdom, a special form of script was adopted not only in official documents, but in private documents as well, and this script remained practically unchanged down to the fall of Nineveh. This form of script was one of the many simplified forms of handwriting that were used in Babylonia, and it. was fortunately ^ very clear and well- defined one. Now and then, it is true, contact with Babylonia made an Assyrian king desirous of imitating the archaic writing of Babylonia, and inscriptions were consequently engraved in florid characters, abounding in a multiplicity of needless wedges, and reminding us of our modern black-letter. Such ornamental inscriptions are not numerous, and were carved only on stone. The clay literature was all written in the ordinary Assyrian characters, except when the scribe was unable to recognise a character in a Babylonian text he was copying, and so reproduced it exactly in his copy. The clay tablets used by the Assyrians were an improvement on those of Babylonia. Instead of being merely dried in the sun, they were thoroughly baked in a kiln, holes being drilled through them here and there to allow the steam to escape. As a rule, therefore, the tablets of Assyria are smaller than those of Babylonia, since there was always a danger of a large tablet being An Assyrian Book. {From the originalin the British Museum.') ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 99 broken in the fire. In consequence of the small size of the tablets, and the amount of text with which it was often necessary to cover them, the characters impressed upon them are frequently minute, so minute, indeed, as to suggest that they must have been written with the help of a magnifying glass. This supposition is con- firmed by the existence of a magnifying lens of crystal discovered by Sir A. H. Layard on the site of the library of Nineveh, and now in the British Museum. A literary people like the Babylonians needed libraries, and libraries were accordingly established at a very early period in all the great cities of the country, and plentifully stocked with books in papyrus and clay. In imitation of these Babylonian libraries, libraries were also founded in Assyria by the Assyrian kings. There was a library at Assur, and another at Calah which seems to have been as old as the city itself. But the chief library of Assyria that, in fact, from which most of the Assyrian literature we possess has come, was the great library of Nineveh (Kouyunjik). This owed its magnitude and reputation to Assur-bani-pal, who filled it with copies of the plundered books of Babylonia. A whole army of scribes was employed in it, busily engaged in writing and editing old texts. Assur-bani-pal is never weary of telling us, in the colophon at the end of the last tablet of a series which made up a single work, that 'Nebo and Tasmit had given him broad ears and enlightened his eyes so as to see the engraved characters of the written tablets, whereof none of the kings that G 2 100 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. had gone before had seen this text, the wisdom of Nebo, all the literature of the library that exists,' so that he had 'written, engraved, and explained it on tablets, and placed it within his palace for the inspection of readers/ A good deal of the literature was of a lexical and grammatical kind, and was intended to assist the Semitic student in interpreting the old Accadian texts. Lists of characters were drawn up with their pronunciation in Accadian and the translation into Assyrian of the words represented by them. Since the Accadian pronunciation of a character was frequently the phonetic value attached to it by the Assyrians, these syllabaries, as they have been termed — in consequence of the fact that the cuneiform characters denoted syllables and not letters — have been of the greatest possible assistance in the decipherment of the inscriptions. Besides the syllabaries, the Semitic scribes compiled tables of Accadian words and grammatical forms with their Assyro-Babylonian equivalents, as well as lists of the names of animals, birds, reptiles, fish, stones, vegetables, medicines, and the like in the two languages. There are even geographical and astro- nomical lists, besides long lists of Assyrian synonyms and the titles of military and civil ofBcers. Other tablets contain phrases and sentences extracted from some particular Accadian work and explained in Assyrian, while others again are exercises or reading- books intended for boys at school, who were learning ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 10 1 the old dead language of Chaldea. In addition to these helps whole texts were provided with Assyrian translations, sometimes interlinear, sometimes placed in a parallel column on the right-hand side ; so that it is not wonderful that the Assyrians now and then attempted to write in the extinct Accadian, just as we write nowadays in Latin, though in both cases, it must be confessed, not always with success. Accadian, however, was not the only language besides his own that the Semitic Babylonian or Assyrian was required to know. Aramaic had become the common language of trade and diplomacy, so that not only was it assumed by the ministers of Hezekiah that an official like the Rab-shakeh or Vizier of Sennacherib could speak it as a matter of course (2 Kings xviii. 26), but even in trading documents we find the Aramaic language and alphabet used side by side with the Assyrian cuneiform. This common use of Aramaic explains how it was that the Jews after the Babylonish captivity gave up their own language in favour not of the Assyro-Babylonian, but of the Aramaic of Northern Syria and Arabia. An educated Assyrian was thus expected to be able to read and write a dead language, Accadian, and to read, write, and speak a foreign living language, Aramaic. In addition to these languages, moreover, he took an interest in others which were spoken by his neighbours around him. The Rab- shakeh of Sennacherib was able to speak Hebrew, and tablets have been discovered giving the Assyrian I02 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. renderings of lists of words from the barbarous dialects of the Kossaeans in the mountains of Elam and of the Semitic nomads on the western side of the Euphrates. All the branches of knowledge known at the time were treated of in Assyrian literature, though naturally history, legend, and poetry occupied a prominent place in it. But even such subjects as the despatches of generals in the field, or the copies of royal corre- spondence found a place in the public library. The chronology of Assyria, and therewith of the Old Testament also, has been restored by means of the lists of successive 'eponyms' or officers after whom the years were named, while a recent discovery has brought to light a table of Semitic Babylonian kings, arranged in dynasties, which traces them back to B.C. 2330. A flood of light has been poured on Chaldean astronomy and astrology, by the fragments of the original work called ' The Observations of Bel ' which was translated into Greek by the Babylonian priest Berossos. It consisted of seventy-two books, and was compiled for king Sargon of Accad, whose date is assigned by Nabonidos to B.C. 3800. Another work on omens, in 137 books, had been compiled for the same king, and both remained to the last days of the Assyrian Empire the standard treatises on the subjects with which they dealt. To the same period we should probably refer a treatise on agriculture, extracts from which have been preserved in a reading-book in Accadian and Assyrian. Here the songs are quoted with which the Accadian ji'*?^ aS^^H' •^<:-i^^. Part of an Assyrian Cylinder containing Hezekiah's Name. (From the oris;inalin the British Museum.) ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 105 V ^ o ci c T^^^^i^ N^ Ml n u ^ >= In lA H AU A ^^ < cS .s o O o bjo a. o a, CvJ So o A ^i YUA AU IfjS N^ St AA u" A V T ^^ ^ « A AU ^ i J AU <<* :J^ ^ .1 i ^: i u - i aSI O ° i_ — , § II iii :^ >-= AUI Jy ►- W . M>^ ^E y ^ A n N^ S O 6r A u ^-^ it AA ^ Y i \ AU AA •^€ >yi AU AA AA A^ V :^ AU ^ u p ^ * A A U >^ AU *^ U u ^ IT AU ^ V* u u ^tt i u ?r >^ U i5^ AU lii ^ ^^ ^ fl § AA A On O HH c) ro C^ CO CO CO CO CO CO 1^ 00 ON O •-• CO CO CO ^ -^ I06 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. si ^ ^ V o ^ w ^ ^ + M d A Al A i > o S V n o > ^— C/2 12; > ->- a. a o u o w i C/3 AA 11 T 5 5 if Si: ^ A ^ ^ T APs-T, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 107 o c '*-» ? s aJ cS and -one ephah of the flesh (?) of the entrails ; slice and ctit up; or mix as a mixture, after first stirring it with a reed. On the fourth day observe (the sick man's) -countenance. If it shows a white appearance Ms lieart^ is cured ; if it shows a, dark 120 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. appearance his heart is still devoured by the fire ; if it shows a yellow appearance during the day, the patient's recovery is assured ; if it shows a black appearance he will grow worse and will not live. For the swelling (?), slice (the flesh of) a cow which has entered the stall and has been slaughtered during the day. Seethe it in water and calves' milk. Drink the result in palm-wine. Drink it during the day.* Generally, however, the prescriptions are not so elaborate as this. They are more usually of this nature : * For low spirits, slice the root of the destiny tree, the root of the sicsum tree, two or three other vegetable compounds, and the tongue of a dog. Drink the mix- ture either in water or in palm-wine.' Even medical science, however, was invaded by super- stition. In place of trying the doctor's prescription, a patient often had the choice allowed him of having recourse to charms and exorcisms. Thus the medical work itself permits him to * place an incantation on the big toe of the left foot and cause it to remain ' there, the incantation being as follows : * O wind, my mother, wind, wind, the handmaid of the gods art thou ; O wind among the storm-birds ; yea, the water dost thou make stream down, and with the gods thy brothers liftest up the glory of thy wisdom.' At other times a witch or sorceress was called in, and told to *bind a cord twice seven times, binding it on the sick man's neck and on his feet like fetters, and while he lies in his bed to pour pure water over him.' Instead of the knotted cord ART, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. 121 verses from a sacred book might be employed, just as phylacteries were, and still are, among the Jews. Thus w^e read : * In the night-time let a verse from a good tablet be placed on the head of the sick man in bed.' The word translated 'verse' is masaly the Hebrew mdshal, which literally signifies a ' proverb ' or * parable.' It is curious to find the witch by the side of the wizard in Babylonia. * The wise woman,' however, was held in great repute there, and just as the witches of Europe were supposed to fly through the air on a broomstick so it was believed that the witches of Babylonia could perform the same feat with the help of a wooden staff. 122 . CHAPTER V. Manners and Customs ; Trade and Government. The monuments of Assyria do not give us the same assistance as those of Egypt in learning about the manners and customs of its inhabitants. We find there no tombs whose pictured walls set before us the daily life and doings of the people. We have to acquire our knowledge from the bas-reliefs of the royal palaces^ which represent to us rather the pomp of the court and the conquest of foreign nations than scenes taken from ordinary Assyrian life. It is only incidentally that the manners and customs of the lower classes are depicted. It is true that we can learn a good deal from the contract-tablets and other kinds of what may be called the private literature of Babylonia and Assyria. At present, however, but a small portion of these has been examined, and a literature can never paint so fully and distinctly the manners and customs of the day as the picture or sculpture on the wall. It is only in times comparatively modern that the novelist has sought to give a faithful portrait of the life of the peasant and artisan. The dress of the upper classes in Assyria did not differ essentially from that of the well-to-do Oriental of MANNERS AND CUSTOMS. 12 J to-day. In time of peace the king was dressed in a robe which reached , to the ankles, bound round the waist with a broad belt, while a mantle was thrown over his shoulders, and a tiara or fillet was worn on his head. The tiara sometimes resembled the triple tiara of the Pope, sometimes was of cone-like shape, and the fillet was furnished with two long bandelettes which fell down behind. The robe and mantle were alike richly embroidered and edged with fringes. The arms were left bare, except in so far as they could be covered by the mantle, and a heavy pair of bracelets encircled each, the workmanship of the jev/elry being similar to that of the chain which was worn round the neck. The feet were shod with sandals which had a raised part behind to protect the heels, and they were fastened to the feet by a ring through which the great toe passed, and a latchet over the instep. Sandals of precisely the same character are still used in Mesopotamia. The monarch's dress in war was similar to that used in time of peace, except that he carried a belt for daggers, while a fringed apron took the place of the mantle. Boots laced in. front were also sometimes substituted for the sandals. The upper classes, and more especially the officials about court, wore a costume similar to that of the king, only of course, less rich and costly. In all cases they were distinguished by the long fringed sleeveless robe which descended to the ankles. The dress of the soldiers and of the common people generally was quite different. It consisted only of the tunic, over which lo J 24 ASSYRIA: ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. all probability the long robe of the wealthy was worn, and which did not quite reach the knees. Sometimes a sort of jacket was put on above it, and, in a few instances, a simple kilt seems to take its place. The kilt was frequently worn under the tunic, which was fastened round the waist by a girdle or sword-belt. The arms, legs, and feet, were bare. Some of the soldiers, how- ever, wore sandals, and others, more particularly the cavalry, wore boots, which were laced in front, and came half way up the leg. The upper part of the legs was occasionally protected by drawers of leather or chain- armour, and we even find tunics made of the same materials. Helmets were also employed, but the common soldier usually covered his head with a simple skull-cap. The dress of the women consisted of a long tunic and mantle, and a fillet for confining the hair. The king and his officers rode in chariots even when on a campaign. In crossing mountains the chariots often had to be carried on the shoulders of men or animals, their wheels being sometimes first taken off for the purpose. The chariot was large enough to contain not only the king but an umbrella-bearer and a cha- rioteer as well. The latter held the reins in both hands, each rein being single and fastened to either side of a snaffle-like bit. When in the field the royal chariot was followed by a bow-bearer and a quiver-bearer, as well as by led horses, intended to assist the monarch to escape, should the fortune of battle turn against him. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS. 125 The chariot was drawn by two horses, a third horse being usually attached to it by a thong in order to Assyrian King in his Chariot. take the place of one of the other two if an accident occurred. Beside the chariots the army was accompanied by a corps of cavalry. In the time of the first Assyrian Empire the cavalry-soldier rode on the bare back of the horse, with his knees crouched up in front of him ; subsequently saddles were introduced, though not stirrups. The cavalry was divided into two corps — the heavy and the light-armed. The latter were armed only with 126 ASSYRIA:. ITS PRINCES, PRIESTS, AND PEOPLE. the bow and arrow and a guard for the wrist, and were