Yet even internal evidence may be utilized. For example, when the king is said to have been the same year in two widely separated parts of the empire, warring with the natives, it is clear that in one of these the deeds of a general have been falsely ascribed to the king, and the suspicion is raised that he may have been at home in Assyria all the time. That there are many such false attributions to the king is proved by much other evidence, the letters from the generals in command to their ruler; an occasional reference to outside authorities, as when the editor of the book of Isaiah shows that the famous Ashdod expedition was actually led by the Turtanu or prime minister; or such a document as the dream of Ashur bani apal, which clearly shows that he was a frightened degenerate who had not the stamina to take his place in the field with the generals whose victories he usurped. Again, various versions differ among themselves. To what a degree this is true, only those who have made a detailed study of the documents can appreciate. Typical examples from Sargon's Annals were pointed out several years ago. [Footnote: Olmstead. Western Asia in the Reign of Sargon of Assyria, 1908.] The most striking of these, the murder of the Armenian king Rusash by—the cold blooded Assyrian scribe,—has now been clearly proved false by a contemporaneous document emanating from Sargon himself. Another good illustration is found in the cool taking by Ashur bani apal of bit after bit of the last two Egyptian campaigns of his father until in the final edition there is nothing that he has not claimed for himself.
The Assyrians, as their business documents show, could be exceedingly exact with numbers. But this exactness did not extend to their historical inscriptions. We could forgive them for giving us in round numbers the total of enemies slain or of booty carried off and even a slight exaggeration would be pardonable. But what shall we say as to the accuracy of numbers in our documents when one edition gives the total slain in a battle as 14,000, another as 20,500, the next as 25,000, and the last as 29,000! Is it surprising that we begin to wonder whether the victory was only a victory on the clay tablet of the scribe? What shall we say when we find that the reviser has transformed a booty of 1,235 sheep in his original into a booty of 100,225! This last procedure, the addition of a huge round number to the fairly small amount of the original, is a common trick of the Sargonide scribe, of which many examples may be detected by a comparison of Sargon's Display inscription with its original, the Annals. So when Sennacherib tells us that he took from little Judah no less than 200,150 prisoners, and that in spite of the fact that Jerusalem itself was not captured, we may deduct the 200,000 as a product of the exuberant fancy of the Assyrian scribe and accept the 150 as somewhere near the actual number captured and carried off.
This discussion has led to another problem, that of the relative order of the various annals editions. For that there were such various editions can be proved for nearly every reign. And in nearly every reign it has been the latest and worst edition which has regularly been taken by the modern historians as the basis for their studies. How prejudicial this may be to a correct view of the Assyrian history, the following pages will show. The procedure of the Assyrian scribe is regularly the same. As soon as the king had won his first important victory, the first edition of the annals was issued. With the next great victory, a new edition was made out. For the part covered by the earlier edition, an abbreviated form of this was incorporated. When the scribe reached the period not covered by the earlier document, he naturally wrote more fully, as it was more vividly in his mind and therefore seemed to him to have a greater importance. Now it would seem that all Assyriologists should have long ago recognized that any one of these editions is of value only when it is the most nearly contemporaneous of all those preserved. When it is not so contemporaneous, it has absolutely no value when we do have the original from which it was derived. Yet it still remains true that the most accessible editions of these annals are those which are the latest and poorest. Many of the earlier and more valuable editions have not been republished for many years, so that for our most contemporaneous sources we must often go to old books, long out of print and difficult to secure, while both translation and commentary are hopelessly behind the times. Particularly is this the case with the inscriptions of Sennacherib and Ashur bani apal. The greatest boon to the historian of Assyria would be an edition of the Assyrian historical inscriptions in which would be given, only those editions or portions of editions which may be considered as contemporaneous and of first class value. With such a collection before him, notable as much for what it excluded as for what was included, many of the most stubborn problems in Assyrian history would cease to be problems.
The historian of Assyria must test his sources before he can use them in his history. To do this, he must first of all be able to distinguish the primary sources which will reward future study from those which are secondary and are based on other and more contemporary documents which even now are actually in our possession. When these latter are cast aside as of no practical value, save perhaps as they show the peculiar mental operations of the Assyrian editor, we are then ready to test the remainder by the various methods known to the historian. The second part of this task must be worked out by the historian when he studies the actual history in detail. It is the discovery of what are the primary sources for the various reigns and of the value of the contributions which they make to Assyrian history that is to be the subject of the more detailed discussion in the following chapters.
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNINGS OF TRUE HISTORY
(Tiglath Pileser I)
We shall begin, then, our detailed study of the sources for Assyrian history with the data for the reign of Tiglath Pileser I (circa 1100 B.C.). Taking up first the Annals, we find that the annalistic documents from the reign may be divided into two general groups. One, the Annals proper, is the so called Cylinder, in reality written on a number of hexagonal prisms. [Footnote: Photographs of B and A, Budge-King, xliii; xlvii; of the Ashur fragments, of at least five prisms, Andrä, Anu-Adad Tempel, Pl. xiii ff. I R. 9 ff.; Winckler, Sammlung, I. 1 ff.; Budge-King, 27 ff., with variants and BM numbers. Lotz, Inschriften Tiglathpilesers I, 1880; Winckler, KB. I. 14 ff. Rawlinson, Hincks, Talbot, Oppert, JRAS. OS. XVIII. 150 ff.; Oppert, _Histoire des empires de Chaldée et d'Assyrie, 1865, 44f; Menant, 35 ff.; Rawlinson, Rp1, V. 7 ff. Sayce RP², I. 92 ff.; Muss-Arnolt in Harper, llff.; MDOG. 25, 21f; 28, 22; 29, 40; 47, 33; King, Supplement, 116; Andrä, Tempel, 32 ff.] First comes the praise of the gods and self praise of the ruler himself. Then follow the campaigns, not numbered as in the more developed style of later rulers, but separated into six sections, for the six years whose events are narrated, by brief glorifications of the monarch. Next we have the various hunting exploits of the king, and the document ends with an elaborate account of the building operations and with threats against the later ruler who should destroy the inscription or refuse credit to the king in whose honor it was made.
No relationship has been made out between the fragments, but the four-fairly complete prisms fall into two groups, A and C, B and D, as regards both the form of writing and the character of the text. All date seemingly from the same month of the same year, though from separate days. The most fragmentary of these, D, seems the best, as it has the smallest number of unique readings and has also the largest number of omissions, [Footnote: II. 21b-23a; III. 37b-39a; IV. 36.] all of which are clearly interpolations in the places where they are given. This is especially true of the one [Footnote: IV. 36.] which refers to the Anu-Adad and Ishtar temples, for not only is the insertion awkward, we know from the Obelisk [Footnote: II. 13.] that the Anu-Adad temple was not completed till year five, so that it must be an interpolation of that date. In spite of its general resemblance to D, especially in its omissions, B is very poorly written and has over two hundred unique readings. One of its omissions would seriously disarrange the chronology, [Footnote: IV. 40-42.] others are clearly unwarranted, [Footnote: II. 79081; V.4; VIII. 29b-33.] and one long addition [Footnote: VII. 17-27; also I. 35; different in VI. 37.] further marks its peculiar character. Our conclusion must be that it is a poor copy of a good original. C is between A and B, agreeing with the latter in a strange interpolation [Footnote: III. 2a-c.] and in the omission of the five kings of the Muski. [Footnote: I. 63b. King, Supplement, 116 follows C.] A is the latest but best preserved, while the character of the text warrants us in making this our standard as it has but few unique readings and but one improbable omission. [Footnote: VII. 105-8.] The same account, in slightly different form and seemingly later in date [Footnote: K.2815 is dated in the eponomy of Ninib nadin apal, the LAH MA GAL E official. He probably is after the rab bi lul official in whose year the hexagons are dated.] is also found in some tablet inscriptions. [Footnote: Budge-King, 125 n.3; K.2815, with different conclusion; 81-2-4, 220, where reverse different; K.12009; K.13840; 79-7-8, 280; 89-4-26, 28; Rm. 573: Winckler, AOF. III. 245.]
A second annalistic group is that postulated as the original of the so called Broken Obelisk. Of documents coming directly from Tiglath Pileser himself, the only one that can with any probability be assigned to this is the tiny fragment which refers to the capture of Babylon. [Footnote: K. 10042; Winckler, AOF. I. 387.] But that such a group did exist is proved by the extracts from it in the obelisk prepared by a descendant of Tiglath Pileser, probably one of his sons, Shamshi Adad or Ashur bel kala. [Footnote: Photograph, Budge-King, li; Paterson, Assyr. Sculptures, 63. I R. 28; III R. 4, 1; Budge-King, 128 ff. Lotz, op. cit., 196 ff.; Peiser, KB. I. 122 ff.; Talbot, JRAS. OS. XIX. 124 ff.; Houghton-Finlay, RP(1), XI. 9 ff.; Oppert, Hist., 132 ff.; Hommel, Gesch., 532 ff.; Menant, 49 ff. Proved to Tiglath Pileser, Lotz, op. cit., 193 f.; cf. Budge-King, 131 n. 4, though Streck, ZA. XVIII. 187 ff., still believes that it belongs to an earlier king. Found at Nineveh, though it deals with Ashur constructions.] Only the upper portion, probably less than half to judge by the proportions, is preserved, and even this is terribly mutilated. Fortunately, the parts best preserved are those relating to the years not dealt with in the Annals. The first half of the document is devoted to the campaigns of Tiglath Pileser, then come his hunting exploits, and only a bit at the end is reserved for the building operations of the unknown ruler under whom it was erected. Its source seems to have had the same relation to the earliest form of the Annals that the Obelisk of Shalmaneser III had to the Monolith, that is, it gave the data for the earlier part of the reign, that covered by the other source, very briefly, only expanding as it reached a period where the facts were not represented by any other document. That our earlier Annals, or perhaps rather, one of its sources, was a main source of our second type, is proved by the coincidences in language in the two, in one case no less than twenty signs the same, [Footnote: In year V we have ishtu…adi alu Kargamish sha matu Hatte…isu elippe pl mashku tahshe.] not to speak of the hunting expeditions. But this earlier Annals was not the only, or at least not the direct source for the Obelisk, nor was that source merely a fuller recension of it. Data for the first six years, not found in the earlier Annals, are given in the Obelisk, [Footnote: Obl. I. 17, reference to Marduk nadin ahe, King of Akkad; II. 1, one thousand men of land of…; II. 2, four thousand of them carried prisoner to Assyria, the position of which shows that it cannot, with Budge-King, 132 n., be referred to Ann. III. 2, the Kashi; II. 12, the Mushki (?); II. 13, temple of Ami and Adad. These all precede the Carchemish episode.] while our document also, for the first time in Assyrian historical inscriptions, dates the events by the name of the eponym for the year, and, still more unusual, by the month as well. That the Obelisk may be considered merely a resume of this original source is shown by the statement that he conquered other lands and made many wars, but these he did not record. [Footnote: Obl. IV. 37.] As they seem to have been given after the hunting feats, in the lost lower part of column IV, we may assume that all that preceded is taken from that source. Furthermore, we are given the other hunting exploits "which my [father] did not record." [Footnote: Obl. IV. 33.] The numbers of beasts killed, which the scribe intended especially to emphasize, have never, curiously enough, been inscribed in the blanks left for their insertion. [Footnote: E.g., Obl. IV. 4.]