The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

THE TELL OF BORSIPPA, THE PRESENT BIRS-NIMRUD.

Of Eridu I have already spoken. Some six or eight thousand years ago it was the seaport of primitive Babylonia.[72] Ur, which stood close to it, seems to have been a colony of Nippur, and therefore of comparatively late origin.[73] Borsippa was a small and unimportant town, which eventually became a suburb of Babylon, and Babylon, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, was itself a colony of Eridu.[74] Hence of the cities which stood outside the Edin of Babylonia, and may therefore belong to an age when Babylonian civilization was still in its infancy, Eridu alone is of account. And the priority even of Eridu was contested. Traditionally Sippara, which is expressly stated to have been in “the Edin,” claimed to be the oldest of Babylonian cities; one quarter of it bore the name of “Sippara that is from everlasting,” and like Eridu, it believed itself to have been the abode of the first man.[75] Thus far, however, the monuments have given us nothing to substantiate the claim; the culture-god of Babylonia was Ea of Eridu, not the Sun-god of Sippara, and for the present, therefore, we must look to the shore of the Persian Gulf, rather than to the “land of Eden” for the cradle of Babylonian civilization.

At any rate, both Sippara and Eridu were of Sumerian foundation, as indeed were nearly all the great cities of Babylonia. Eridu was a later form of the older Eri-dugga, “the good city,” a name which seems to have been the starting-point of more than one legend. The growth of the coast to the south of it gives us some idea as to the age to which its foundation must reach back.

It was, as I have said, the primitive seaport of Babylonia, and its legend of the first man Adamu made him a fisherman in the Persian Gulf. Its site is now rather more than a hundred miles distant from the present line of coast. The progress of alluvial deposit brought down by the Euphrates and Tigris can be estimated by the fact that forty-seven miles of it have been formed since Spasinus Charax, the modern Mohammerah, was built in the age of Alexander the Great, and was for a time the port of Chaldæa. During the last 2000 years, accordingly, the rate of deposit would seem to have been about 115 feet a year. This, however, does not agree with the observations of Loftus, who made the rate not more than a mile in every seventy years,[76] while on the other hand Sir Henry Rawlinson adduced reasons for believing it to have been more rapid in the past than it is to-day, and that consequently the rate must once have been as much as a mile in thirty years.[77] It is desirable that some competent geologist should study the question on the spot. Taking, however, as a basis of calculation, the one known fact of the rate of growth since the foundation of Spasinus Charax, and bearing in mind that before the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates the rate of advance must have been comparatively slow, we should have to go back to about B.C. 5000 as the latest date at which Eridu could still have been the seaport of the country.

Was it here that the system of writing which was so closely entwined with the origin of Babylonian civilization was first invented? Babylonian tradition in later days certainly believed that such was the case, and the fact that Ea of Eridu was the culture-god of Babylonia is strongly in its favour. But there are difficulties in the way. Eridu was the home of the “white witchcraft” of early Chaldæa; it was here that the charms and incantations were composed which gave the priesthood of Eridu its influence, and made the god they worshipped the impersonation of wisdom. The belief that he was the originator of Babylonian culture may have had its source in the system of magic which was associated with his name. Eridu was built on the Semitic side of the Euphrates, and the Semitic tribes who received their letters and their civilization from the Sumerians of Eridu would naturally have looked upon the city of their teachers as the primeval home of Sumerian culture. The traditions that made Eridu the starting-point of Sumerian civilization could thus be explained away, and we should be left free to settle the question of its origin upon purely archæological evidence.

Unfortunately the site of Eridu has not yet been systematically excavated. Once again the archæological materials for settling an archæological question are not at hand, and we are thrown back upon an examination of the picture-writing from which the cuneiform characters are derived. Here the evidence on the whole may be said to be in favour of tradition. It is true that there is no special ideograph for “river,” but there is one for “the deep,” and “the spirit of the deep” must have been a chief object of worship at the time when the primitive hieroglyphs were first formed. The “ship,” too, played a prominent part in the life of their inventors, and the picture of it represented it as moved not by oars but by a sail.[78] The flowering reed was equally prominent, and was even used to symbolize what stood firm and established.[79] Houses, fortresses, temples, and cities were built of brick, and vases were moulded out of clay.[80] The tablet, rectangular or square, was already employed for the purpose of writing, but as it was provided with a handle or a couple of rings at the top, I think it was more probably of wood than of clay. The sheep, goat and ox were domesticated,[81] and so also probably was the ass,[82] and corn was cultivated in the fields. The symbol of the “earth” appears to have been the picture of an island of circular or elliptical form. Among trees the cedar was well known.

All this points to the sea-coast of Babylonia as the district in which its civilization first arose. But on the other hand, there is the fact that “country” and “mountain” are alike represented by the picture of a mountainous land. There is also the fact that the land in which the inventors of the hieroglyphs lived was one in which copper, gold and silver were procurable—perhaps also meteoric iron; and the further fact that hard wood was sufficiently plentiful for tools or weapons to have been made of it before the employment of metal. That they should have been made of wood, however, and not of stone, is a strong argument in favour of the Babylonian coast.

It is on wood, moreover, that the first hieroglyphs must have been painted or cut. Many of them represented round objects or were formed of curved lines, which were transformed into a series of wedge-like indentations when imprinted by a stylus upon clay. We know, therefore, that clay was not the original writing material; its use as such, in fact, is coeval with the rise of that cursive script which, in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, is called hieratic, but in Assyro-Babylonian is known as cuneiform. It was the attempt to reproduce the old pictures upon clay that created the cuneiform characters. As metal is not likely to have been employed by the primitive scribes of Chaldæa, and there is no trace of stone having been used—even the stone cylinder of later days being called a dup-sar or “written tablet”—we are left to choose between wood and papyrus. In favour of papyrus is the fact that the circular forms of so many of the pictures suggest that they were originally painted rather than engraved; on the other hand, it is doubtful whether the papyrus grows in the Babylonian rivers, or at any rate did so in the prehistoric age. And the pictograph of a “written document” is not a strip or roll of papyrus, as in Egypt, but a tablet with a handle or loop. It is true that the primeval picture which denoted “copper” has much the same form, but as even cutting instruments had the determinative of “wood” attached to them in the early picture writing, it is clear that the original tablet could not have been of metal, whatever might have been the case with its later successors. The picture, moreover, of the “tablet” is distinguished from that of a “plate of bronze” by the addition of a string which is tied to the handle.

On the whole, therefore, the only archæological evidence available at present is on the side of the tradition which made Babylonian culture move northward from the coast. The only fact against it of which I know is that, as I have already stated, the word for land was symbolized by the picture of a triple mountain. But this fact is not insuperable. Before the silting up of the shore, the old coast-line of Babylonia would have stretched away north-eastward of Eridu towards the mountains of Elam. Whether the mountains that fringed what would then have been the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf are visible from the site of Eridu, I do not know; if the clear light of Upper Egypt exists there they would be so. Nor do I know whether on the western side there are mountain ranges visible in Arabia; these are points which can be cleared up only when the country has been thoroughly explored.

Eridu lay five miles southward of Ur,[83] that “Ur of the Chaldees” from which Hebrew history affirmed the ancestor of the nation had come. Ur was never a maritime port like Eridu; it stood on the Arabian plateau and looked towards the west. Its face was turned to the Semitic rather than to the Sumerian world. From the first, therefore, it must have been in touch with Semitic tribes. And a curious reminiscence of the fact survived in the western Semitic languages, Ur or Uru signifies “the city”; it was a Sumerian word, another form of which was eri. The word was borrowed by the Semites, and in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, accordingly, the idea of “city” is expressed by ’îr. The Assyrians of the north, whose vocabulary was otherwise so full of Sumerian loan-words, preferred the native âlu, “a tent,” to which the meaning of “city” was assigned when Sumerian culture had been passed on to the Semitic race and the tent had been exchanged for the city. The history of the word is a history of early culture as well.