The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

With these two inferences we have to be content. Upon the first home of the Semitic race or its affinities with other branches of the white race, Babylonia can naturally throw no light. The earliest glimpses we catch of the Semites of Babylonia are those of a people who have already come under the influences of Sumerian civilization, who are mingling with their teachers and helping with them to build up the stately edifice of historical Babylonia. There were ruder Semitic tribes, it is true, who continued to live their own nomad life on the western bank of the Euphrates or in the marshes that bordered the Persian Gulf. But like the Bedâwîn of to-day on the outskirts of Egypt they were little, if at all, affected by the civilization at their sides. They remained the same wild savages of the desert as their descendants who encamp in the swamps of modern Babylonia; they neither traded nor tilled the ground, and the language they spoke was not the same as that of their Babylonian kindred. They served, however, as the herdsmen and shepherds of their Babylonian neighbours, and the vast flocks whose wool was so important an article of Babylonian trade, were entrusted to their care. But Bedâwîn they were born, and Bedâwîn they continued to be.

Even the Aramæan tribes of the coast-land kept apart from the Babylonians, whether Sumerian or Semitic, until the day when one of their tribes, the Kaldâ or Chaldæans, made themselves masters of Babylon under their prince Merodach-baladan, and from henceforward became an integral factor in the Babylonian population. They must have settled on the borders of Babylonia at a comparatively late date, when Semitic Babylonian had definitely marked itself off from its sister-tongues and the Babylonian Semite had acquired distinctive characteristics of his own. The West-Semitic elements in the population of Babylonia could have entered the country only long after the mixture of Sumerian and Semite had produced the Babylonian of history.

The Babylonian of history came to forget that he had ever had another fatherland than the Babylonian plain, the Eden of the Old Testament, the land whose southern border was formed by “the salt river” or Persian Gulf of early Sumerian geography, with its four branches which were themselves “heads.” Here the first man Adamu[87] had been created in Eridu, “the good city,” and here therefore the Babylonian Semite placed the home of the first ancestor of his race. But it was a borrowed belief, borrowed along with the other elements of Babylonian culture, and no argument can be drawn from it as to the actual cradle of the Semitic race. Like the story of the deluge, it was part of the Sumerian heritage into which the Semite had entered.

The Semitic tradition which made the first man a tiller of the ground may also have been borrowed from the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia. At all events it is significant that the garden in which he was placed was in the land of Eden, and that the picture of a garden or plantation is one of the primitive hieroglyphs of Sumer. The beginnings of Babylonian civilization were bound up with the cultivation of the Babylonian soil; the reclamation of the great alluvial plain was at once the effect and the cause of Sumerian culture. Sumerian culture, in fact, was at the outset essentially that of an agricultural people.

Trade would have come later, when Eridu had become a seaport, and ships ventured on the waters of the Persian Gulf. It grew up under the shelter of the great sanctuaries. Supported at first by the labour of their serfs, the priests in time came to exchange their surplus revenues—the wool of their sheep, the wheat and sesame of their fields, or the wine yielded by their palms—for other commodities, and the temples themselves formed safe and capacious store-houses in which such goods could be kept. In the historical period Babylonia is already a great trading community, and as the centuries passed trade absorbed more and more the energies of its population, agriculture fell into the background, and the Babylonia conquered by Cyrus could be described with truth as “a nation of shopkeepers.” Even the crown prince was a merchant who dealt in wool.[88]

The increasing preponderance of trade goes along with the increasing preponderance of the Semitic element in the country, and it is tempting to suppose that there was a connection between the two. At present, however, there is no positive evidence that such was the case. Nor is there any positive evidence that the Semites who settled in Babylonia were not already agriculturists. The circumstances in which a people lives are mainly responsible for its being agricultural or pastoral, and the fact that the Bedâwîn neighbours of the Babylonians on the western side of the Euphrates remained a pastoral race does not exclude the possibility that there were other branches of the Semitic family who had already passed out of the pastoral into the agricultural stage before coming into contact with the Sumerians. On the other hand, it is at least noticeable that in Semitic Babylonian the usual word for “city” continued to be one which properly meant a “tent”—the home of the pastoral nomad—and that no Semitic traditions have come down to us of the beginnings of agricultural life outside the limits of the Babylonian “Plain.” The title of “Shepherd,” moreover, was at times given to the Babylonian kings in days subsequent to the Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to judge, city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive Semitic nomad.[89]

To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown in my Lectures on Babylonian religion,[90] we must ascribe an important theological conception. In historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods themselves were men. But the conception cannot be traced back further than the age when the Sumerians and Semites came into contact with one another. In pre-Semitic Sumer there are no anthropomorphic gods. We hear, instead, of the zi or “spirit,” a word properly signifying “life” which manifested itself in the power of motion. All things that moved were possessed of life, and there was accordingly a “life” or “spirit” of the water as well as of man or beast. In place of the divine “lord of heaven” whom the Semites adored there was “a spirit of heaven”; in place of Ea, the later Babylonian god of the deep, there was “a spirit of the abyss.” Sumerian theology, in fact, was still on the level of animism, and the inventors of the script represented the idea of “god” by the picture of a star. Vestiges of the old animism can still be detected even in the later cult: by the side of the human gods an Assyrian prayer invokes the mountains, the rivers and the winds, and from time to time we come across a worship of deified towns. It was the town itself that was divine, not the deity to whom its chief temple was dedicated. So, again, the god or goddess continued to be symbolized by some sacred animal or object whose figure appears upon seals and boundary-stones, and in some cases we learn that the Sumerian prototypes of the later Babylonian divinities bore such names as “the gazelle,” “the antelope” or “the bull.”

With the advent of the Semite all is changed. The gods have become men and women with intensified powers and the gift of immortality, but in all other respects they live and act like the men and women of this nether world. Like them, too, they are born and married, and the court of the early prince finds its counterpart in the divine court of the supreme Bel, or “Lord.” The Semitic god of Babylon was “lord of gods” and men, of heaven and earth; Assur of Assyria was “king of the gods” and lord of “the heavenly hosts.”

It was natural that, corresponding with this lord of the heavenly hosts, there should be a lord of the hosts of earth, and that as the divine king was clothed in the attributes of man, the human king should take upon him the divine nature. Like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the emperors of Rome, the early kings of Semitic Babylonia were deified. And the deification took place during their lifetime,—in fact, so far as we can judge, upon their accession to the throne. In the eyes of their subjects they were incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions they give themselves the title of god. One of them is even called “the god” of Akkad, his capital.[91]

Here, then, in the conception of the divine, we have a clear dividing line between the Semite and his non-Semitic predecessor. So far back as the cuneiform monuments allow us to carry his history, the Semite is anthropomorphic. As a consequence, the gods he worships conform to the social conditions under which he lives. In the desert the sacred stone becomes “the temple of the god”; in the organized monarchy of Babylonia each deity takes his appointed place in an imperial court. Under the one supreme ruler there are princes and sub-princes, vice-regents and generals, while angel-messengers carry the commands of Bel to his subjects on earth, like the messengers who carried the letters of the Babylonian king along the high-roads of the empire. On the other hand, the earthly king receives his power and attributes from the god whose adopted son and representative he claims to be. Nowhere has “the divine right of kings” been more fully insisted on than in ancient Babylonia. The laws of the monarch had to be obeyed, foreign nations had to become his vassals, because he was a god on earth as the supreme Bel was god in heaven.