Assyria: Its Princes, Priests and People / By-Paths of Bible Knowledge VII

by A. H. Sayce

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 confined 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 a 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 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 confirmed 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 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 astronomical lists, besides long lists of Assyrian synonyms and the titles of military and civil officers.

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 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 renderings of lists of words from the barbarous dialects of the Kossæans 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 correspondence 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 Bêrôssos. 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 ox-drivers beguiled their labours in the field: 'An heifer am I: to the cow thou art yoked: the plough's handle is strong: lift it up lift it up;' or again: 'The knees are marching, the feet are not resting; with no wealth of thy own grain thou begettest for me.' Some of the most curious specimens of this department of literature are the fables, riddles, and proverbs, which embody the homely wisdom of the unofficial classes.