There was another bit-karê, which had a very different meaning and was used for a very different purpose. This was “the House of Cereals,” the storehouse or barn in which were stored such tithes of the temples as were paid in grain. The name is also sometimes applied to the sutumme, or royal storehouses, where the grain and dates collected by the tax-gatherers were deposited, and from which the army and the civil servants were provided with food. The superintendent of these storehouses was an important personage; he was the paymaster of the state officials, in so far as they received their salaries in kind, and the loyalty of the standing army could be trusted only so long as it could be fed. Similar storehouses existed in Egypt, from the age of the eighteenth dynasty downward, and it is probable that the adoption of them was due to Babylonian influence. They gave the King a powerful hold upon his subjects, by enabling him to supply them with grain in the years of scarcity, or to withhold it except upon such terms as he chose to make with them.
The exportation of the grain, moreover, was a yearly source of wealth and revenue which flowed into the royal exchequer. In Babylonia, as in Egypt, the controller of the granaries was master of the destinies of the people.
Chapter X. Letter-Writing
We are apt to look upon letter-writing as a modern invention, some of us, perhaps, as a modern plague. But as a matter of fact it is an invention almost as old as civilization itself. As soon as man began to invent characters by means of which he could communicate his thoughts to others, he began to use them for holding intercourse with his absent friends. They took the place of the oral message, which was neither so confidential nor so safe. Classical scholars have long been familiar with the fact that letter-writing was one of the accomplishments of an educated Greek and Roman. The letters of Cicero and Pliny are famous, and the letters of Plato and Aristotle have been studied by a select few. Even Homer, who seems to avoid all reference to the art of writing as if it were an unclean thing, tells us of “the baleful characters” written on folded tablets, and sent by Prœtos to the King of Lycia. Criticism, it is true, not so long ago doubted the facts of the story and tried to resolve the characters and the tablets into a child's drawings on the slate. But archæology has come to the rescue of Prœtos, and while we now know that letters passed freely backward and forward [pg 209] in the world in which he is supposed to have moved, Mr. Arthur Evans has discovered the very symbols which he is likely to have used. Even the Lycians, to whom the letter was sent, have been found, not only on the Egyptian monuments, but also in the tablets of Tel-el-Amarna.
Letter-writing in the East goes back to a remote antiquity. In the book of Chronicles it is stated that the messages that passed between Hiram and Solomon were in writing, but the age of Solomon was modern when compared with that to which some of the letters we now possess actually belong. Centuries earlier the words “message” and “letter” had become synonymous terms, and in Hebrew the word which had originally signified a “message” had come to mean a “book.” Not only is a message conceived of as always written, but even the idea of a book is taken from that of a letter. Nothing can show more plainly the important place occupied by literary correspondence in the ancient Oriental world or the antiquity to which the art of the letter-writer reaches back.
While in Egypt the letter was usually written upon papyrus, in Western Asia the ordinary writing material was clay. Babylonia had been the nurse and mother of its culture, and the writing material of Babylonia was clay. Originally pictorial hieroglyphics had been drawn upon the clay, but just as in Egypt the hieratic or running-hand of the scribe developed out of the primitive pictographs, so too in Babylonia the pictures degenerated into cuneiform characters which corresponded with the hieratic [pg 210] characters of the Egyptian script. What we call cuneiform is essentially a cursive hand.
As for books, so also for letters the clay tablet was employed. It may seem to us indeed a somewhat cumbrous mode of sending a letter; but it had the advantage of being solid and less likely to be injured or destroyed than other writing materials. The characters upon it could not be obliterated by a shower of rain, and there was no danger of its being torn. Moreover, it must be remembered that the tablet was usually of small size. The cuneiform system of writing allows a large number of words to be compressed into a small space, and the writing is generally so minute as to try the eyes of the modern decipherer.
Some of the letters which have been discovered during the last few years go back to the early days of the Babylonian monarchy. Many of them are dated in the reign of Khammurabi, or Amraphel, among them being several that were written by the King himself. That we should possess the autograph letters of a contemporary of Abraham is one of the romances of historical science, for it must be remembered that the letters are not copies, but the original documents themselves. What would not classical scholars give for the autograph originals of the letters of Cicero, or theologians for the actual manuscripts that were written by the Evangelists? And yet here we have the private correspondence of a prince who took part in the campaign against Sodom and Gomorrah!