Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

by A. H. Sayce

One of the letters which has found a resting-place in the Museum of Constantinople refers to another of the [pg 211] actors in the campaign against the cities of the cunei-plain. This was the King of Elam, Chedor-laomer, whose name is written Kudur-Loghghamar in the form. The Elamites had invaded Babylonia and made it subject and tributary. Sin-idinnam, the King of Larsa, called Ellasar in the book of Genesis, had been compelled to fly from his ancestral kingdom in the south of Chaldea, and take refuge in Babylon at the court of Khammurabi. Eri-Aku, or Arioch, the son of an Elamite prince, was placed on the throne of Larsa, while Khammurabi also had to acknowledge himself a vassal of the Elamite King. But a time came when Khammurabi believed himself strong enough to shake off the Elamite yoke, and though the war at first seemed to go against him, he ultimately succeeded in making himself independent. Arioch and his Elamite allies were driven from Larsa, and Babylon became the capital of a united monarchy. It was after the overthrow of the Elamites that the letter was written in which mention is made of Chedor-laomer. Its discoverer, Père Scheil, gives the following translation of it: “To Sin-idinnam, Khammurabi says: I send you as a present (the images of) the goddesses of the land of Emutalum as a reward for your valor on the day of (the defeat of) Chedor-laomer. If (the enemy) annoy you, destroy their forces with the troops at your disposal, and let the images be restored in safety to their old habitations.”[10]

The letter was found at Senkereh, the ancient Larsa, where, doubtless, it had been treasured in the archive-chamber of the palace. Two other letters of Khammurabi, which are now at Constantinople, have also been translated by Dr. Scheil. One of them is as follows: “To Sin-idinnam, Khammurabi says: When you have seen this letter you will understand in regard to Amil-Samas and Nur-Nintu, the sons of Gis-dubba, that if they are in Larsa, or in the territory of Larsa, you will order them to be sent away, and that one of your servants, on whom you can depend, shall take them and bring them to Babylon.” The second letter relates to some officials about whom, it would seem, the King of Larsa had complained to his suzerain lord: “To Sin-idinnam, Khammurabi says: As to the officials who have resisted you in the accomplishment of their work, do not impose upon them any additional task, but oblige them to do what they ought to have performed, and then remove them from the influence of him who has brought them.”

Long before the age of Khammurabi a royal post had been established in Babylon for the conveyance of letters. Fragments of clay had been found at Tello, bearing the impressions of seals belonging to the officials of Sargon of Akkad and his successor, and addressed to the viceroy of Lagas, to King Naram-Sin and other personages. They were, in fact, the envelopes of letters and despatches which passed between Lagas and Agadê, or Akkad, the capital of the dynasty.

Sometimes, however, the clay fragment has the form of a ball, and must then have been attached by a string to the missive like the seals of mediæval deeds. In either case the seal of the functionary from whom the missive came was imprinted upon it as well as the address of the person for whom it was intended. Thousands of letters seem to have passed to and fro in this manner, making it clear that the postal service of Babylonia was already well organized in the time of Sargon and Naram-Sin. The Tel-el-Amarna letters show that in the fifteenth century before our era a similar postal service was established throughout the Eastern world, from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. To what an antiquity it reached back it is at present impossible to say.

At all events, when Khammurabi was King, letters were frequent and common among the educated classes of the population. Most of those which have been preserved are from private individuals to one another, and consequently, though they tell us nothing about the political events of the time, they illustrate the social life of the period and prove how like it was to our own. One of them, for instance, describes the writer's journey to Elam and Arrapakhitis, while another relates to a ferry-boat and the boat-house in which it was kept. The boat-house, we are told, had fallen into decay in the reign of Khammurabi, and was sadly in want of repair, while the chief duty of the writer, who seems to have been the captain of the boat, was to convey the merchants who brought various commodities to Babylon. If the merchant, the letter states, was furnished with a royal passport, “we carried him across” [pg 214] the river; if he had no passport, he was not allowed to go to Babylon. Among other purposes for which the vessel had been used was the conveyance of lead, and it was capable of taking as much as 10 talents of the metal. We further gather from the letter that it was the custom to employ Bedâwin as messengers.

Among the early Babylonian documents found at Sippara, and now in the Museum at Constantinople, which have been published by Dr. Scheil, are two private letters of the same age and similar character. The first is as follows: “To my father, thus says Zimri-eram: May the Sun-god and Merodach grant thee everlasting life! May your health be good! I write to ask you how you are; send me back news of your health. I am at present at Dur-Sin on the canal of Bit-Sikir. In the place where I am living there is nothing to be had for food. So I am sealing up and sending you three-quarters of a silver shekel. In return for the money, send some good fish and other provisions for me to eat.” The second letter was despatched from Babylon, and runs thus: “To the lady Kasbeya thus says Gimil-Merodach: May the Sun-god and Merodach for my sake grant thee everlasting life! I am writing to enquire after your health; please send me news of it. I am living at Babylon, but have not seen you, which troubles me greatly. Send me news of your coming to me, so that I may be happy. Come in the month of Marchesvan (October). May you live for ever for my sake!”

It is plain that the writer was in love with his correspondent, and had grown impatient to see her again. Both belonged to what we should call the professional [pg 215] classes, and nothing can better illustrate how like in the matter of correspondence the age of Abraham was to our own. The old Babylonian's letter might easily have been written to-day, apart from the references to Merodach and the Sun-god. It must be noticed, moreover, that the lady to whom the letter is addressed is expected to reply to it. It is taken for granted that the ladies of Babylon could read and write as well as the men. This, however, is only what might have been concluded from the other facts of Babylonian social life, and the footing of equality with the man upon which the woman was placed in all matters of business. The fact that she could hold and bequeath property, and trade with it independently, implies that she was expected to know how to read and write. Even among the Tel-el-Amarna we find one or two from a lady who seems to have taken an active part in the politics of the day. “To the king my lord,” she writes in one of them, “my gods, my Sun-god, thus says Nin, thy handmaid, the dust of thy feet. At the feet of the king my lord, my gods, my Sun-god, seven times seven I prostrate myself. Let the king my lord wrest his country from the hand of the Bedâwin, in order that they may not rob it. The city of Zaphon has been captured. This is for the information of the king my lord.”

The letters of Tel-el-Amarna bridge over the gulf that separates the early Babylonia of Khammurabi from the later Assyria of Tiglath-pileser III. and his successors. The inner life of the intervening period is still known to us but imperfectly. No library or large collection of tablets belonging to it has as yet [pg 216] been discovered, and until this is the case we must remain less intimately acquainted with it than we are with the age of Khammurabi on the one hand, or that of the second Assyrian empire on the other.

It is true that the library of Nineveh, of which Assur-bani-pal was such a munificent patron, has preserved copies of some of the earlier epistolary literature of the country. Thus we have from it a fragment of a letter written by a King of Babylonia to two kings of Assyria, at a time when Assyria still acknowledged the supremacy of Babylon. But such documents are very rare, and apart from the Tel-el-Amarna tablets we have to descend to the days of the second Assyrian empire before we find again a collection of letters.

These are the letters addressed to the Assyrian government, or more generally to the King, in the reigns of Tiglath-pileser III., Shalmaneser IV., Sargon, Sennacherib, Esar-haddon, and Assur-bani-pal. They were preserved in the royal library of Nineveh, principally on account of their political and diplomatic importance, and are now in the British Museum. As might have been expected from their character, they throw more light on the politics of the day than on the social condition of the people. A few of them, however, are private communications to the King on other than political matters, and we also find among them reports in the form of letters from the royal astronomers, as well as upon such subjects as the importation of horses from Asia Minor for the royal stud. The letters have been copied by Professor R. F. Harper, who is now publishing them in a series of [pg 217] volumes. How numerous the letters are may be gathered from the fact that no less than 1,575 of them (including fragments) have come from that part of the library alone which was excavated by Sir A. H. Layard, and was the first to be brought to England.