The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

THE 1^ST. ASSYRIAN EMPIRE

CHAPTER V
BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE

A very few years ago Palestine was still archæologically an unknown land. Its history subsequent to the Israelitish conquest could be gathered from the Old Testament, and Egyptian papyri of the age of the Nineteenth dynasty had told us something about its condition immediately prior to that event. Thanks to the Palestine Exploration Fund, the country had been carefully surveyed, and the monuments still existing on its surface had been noted and registered. But the earlier history of the people, their races and origin, their social and religious life, and their relation to the rest of the world, were still a blank. Of the Canaan invaded by the children of Israel we knew nothing from an archæological point of view, and very little even of the Palestine that was governed by Israelitish judges and Jewish kings.

The veil has at last been lifted which so long lay over the face of Palestine. Cuneiform texts have come to clear up its civil history, while the spade of the excavator has supplemented their evidence on the more purely archæological side. The history of Palestine can now be followed back not only into the neolithic, but even into the palæolithic age, and the source and character of Canaanite civilization have been in large measure revealed to us.

First and foremost among the materials which have made this possible are the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, which were discovered in 1887. Tel el-Amarna, about midway between Minia and Assiut, is the site of a city which sprang, like a meteor, into a brief but glorious existence under the so-called “heretic king” Amon-hotep IV. about B.C. 1400. Amon-hotep, under the guidance of his mother, had endeavoured to suppress the old state religion of Egypt, and to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism. In spite of persecution, however, the adherents of the old faith proved too strong for the king; he was forced to leave Thebes, the capital of his fathers, and to build a new capital further north, where he changed his name to that of Khu-n-Aten, and called artists from the islands of the Mediterranean to adorn his palace. When moving from Thebes he naturally transferred to the new seat of government both the Foreign Office and its records in so far as they covered the reign of his father Amon-hotep III. and his own. For reasons unknown to us they do not extend further back.

They were all in the cuneiform script, and for the most part in the Babylonian language. The fact came upon the historian with a shock of surprise, and had far-reaching consequences, historical as well as archæological. In the first place, they proved what had already been suspected, that under the Eighteenth dynasty Egypt possessed an Asiatic empire which stretched to the banks of the Euphrates. Then, secondly, they showed that Western Asia was at the time intersected by high-roads along which merchants and couriers were constantly passing, and an active literary correspondence was carried on. Thirdly—and this was the greatest surprise of all—they made it clear that this correspondence was in the script and language of Babylonia, and that it was shared in by writers of various nationalities and languages, of all classes of society and of both sexes. The Hittite and Cappadocian kings wrote to the Pharaoh in cuneiform characters, just as did the kings of Babylonia and Assyria. Arab shêkhs and Hittite condottieri joined in the correspondence, and politically-minded ladies did the same. Even the Egyptian Government was compelled to suppress all feelings of national vanity, and to conduct the whole of its correspondence with its own governors and vassals in Palestine or Syria in the foreign language and syllabary. There is no trace anywhere of the use of either the Egyptian language or the Egyptian mode of writing.

From these facts other facts follow. The age of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty must have been quite as literary as the age of our own eighteenth century, and international correspondence must have been quite as easy, if not easier. Education, moreover, must have been very widely spread; all the civilized world was writing and reading; and the system of writing was a most complicated one, demanding years of study and memory. In spite of this it was known not only to a professional class of scribes and the officials of the Government, but also to the shêkhs of petty Canaanitish towns and even to Bedâwîn chiefs. And along with the system of writing went a knowledge of the foreign language of Babylonia—the French of Western Asia—including some slight acquaintance with the extinct language of the Sumerians. All this presupposes libraries and archive-chambers where books and dispatches could be stored, as well as schools where the Babylonian script and language could be taught and learned.

Such libraries and schools had existed in Babylonia from a very early age. Every great city had its library, every great temple its muniment-room. Here the clay books were numbered and arranged on shelves, catalogues being provided which gave their titles. The system under which the longer literary or semi-scientific works were arranged and catalogued was at once ingenious and complete. By the side of the library was naturally the school. Here every effort was made to facilitate the progress of the scholars, more especially in the study of the Sumerian language and texts. The characters of the syllabary were classified and named; comparative grammars, dictionaries and reading-books of Sumerian and Semitic Babylonian were compiled, lists of Semitic synonyms were drawn up, explanatory commentaries were written on older works, and interlinear translations provided for the Sumerian texts. But with all this the cuneiform system of writing must have been hard even for the native Babylonian to learn, and in the case of the foreigner its difficulties were multiplied. It may be doubted whether the average boy of to-day, who finds the spelling of his own English almost too much for him, would have had the memory and patience to learn the cuneiform characters. Even in Sumerian times the difficulty of the task was realized, for there is a Sumerian proverb that “he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn.”[117] It says much for the educational zeal of the Oriental world in the century before the Exodus that it was just this difficult and complicated script which it chose as its medium for correspondence.

The fact, however, points unmistakably to its cause. The reason why the Babylonian language and syllabary were thus in use throughout Western Asia, and why even the Egyptian Government was obliged to employ them in its communications with its Asiatic subjects, can only have been because Babylonian culture was too deeply rooted there to be superseded by any other. Before Egypt appeared upon the scene under the conquerors of the Eighteenth dynasty, Western Asia, as far as the Mediterranean, must have been for centuries under the direct influence and domination of Babylonia. I say domination as well as influence, for in the ancient East military conquest was needed to enforce an alien language and literature, theology and system of law upon another people. And even military conquest was not always sufficient, as witness the Assyrian and Persian conquests of Egypt, or the Roman conquest of Syria.