Is the difference in the calculations the fault of the scribes, who, in mechanically copying and recopying, ended by fatally altering the figures? Or is it to be explained by some circumstance of which we are ignorant—an association on the throne, of which the duration is at one time neglected with regard to one of the co-regents, and at another time with regard to the other; or was it owing to a question of legitimacy, by which, according to the decision arrived at, a reign was prolonged or abbreviated? Cotemporaneous monuments will some day, perhaps, enable us to solve the problem which the later Chaldæans did not succeed in clearing up. While awaiting the means to restore a rigorously exact chronology, we must be content with the approximate information furnished by the tablets as to the succession of the Babylonian kings.
Actual history occupied but a small space in the lists—barely twenty centuries out of a whole of three hundred and sixty: beyond the historic period the imagination was given a free rein, and the few facts which were known disappeared almost completely under the accumulation of mythical narratives and popular stories. It was not that the documents were entirely wanting, for the Chaldæans took a great interest in their past history, and made a diligent search for any memorials of it. Each time they succeeded in disinterring an inscription from the ruins of a town, they were accustomed to make-several copies of it, and to deposit them among the archives, where they would be open to the examination of their archaeologists.* When a prince undertook the rebuilding of a temple, he always made excavations under the first courses of the ancient structure in order to recover the documents which preserved the memory of its foundation: if he discovered them, he recorded on the new cylinders, in which he boasted of his own work, the name of the first builder, and sometimes the number of years which had elapsed since its erection.**
* We have a considerable number of examples of copies of
ancient texts made in this manner. For instance, the
dedication of a temple at Uruk by King Singashid, copied by
the scribe Nabubalatsuikbi, son of Miziraî (“the Egyptian
“), for the temple of Ezida; the legendary history of King
Sargon of Agadê, copied from the inscription on the base of
his statue, of which there will be further mention (pp. 91-
93 of this History); a dedication of the King Khammurabi;
the inscription of Agumkakrimi, which came from the library
of Assurbanipal.
** Nabonidos, for instance, the last king of Babylon before
the Persian conquest, has left us a memorial of his
excavations. He found in this manner the cylinders of
Shagashaltiburiash at Sippara, those of Khammurabi, and
those of Naramsin.
We act in a similar way to-day, and our excavations, like those of the Chaldaeans, end in singularly disconnected results: the materials which the earth yields for the reconstruction of the first centuries consist almost entirely of mutilated records of local dynasties, isolated names of sovereigns, dedications of temples to gods, on sites no longer identifiable, of whose nature we know nothing, and too brief allusions to conquests or victories over vaguely designated nations.* The population was dense and life active in the plains of the Lower Euphrates. The cities in this region formed at their origin so many individual and, for the most part, petty states, whose kings and patron gods claimed to be independent of all the neighbouring kings and gods: one city, one god, one lord—this was the rule here as in the ancient feudal districts from which the nomes of Egypt arose. The strongest of these principalities imposed its laws upon the weakest: formed into unions of two or three under a single ruler, they came to constitute a dozen kingdoms of almost equal strength on the banks of the Euphrates. On the north we are acquainted with those of Agadê, Babylon, Kuta, Kharsag-Kalama, and that of Kishu, which comprised a part of Mesopotamia and possibly the distant fortress of Harran: petty as these States were, their rulers attempted to conceal their weakness by assuming such titles as “Kings of the Four Houses of the World,” “Kings of the Universe,” “Kings of Shumir and Akkad.” Northern Babylonia seems to have possessed a supremacy amongst them. We are probably wise in not giving too much credit to the fragmentary tablet which assigns to it a dynasty of kings, of which we have no confirmatory information from other sources—Amilgula, Shamashnazir, Amilsin, and several others: this list, however, places among these phantom rulers one individual at least, Shargina-Sharrukin, who has left us material evidences of his existence. This Sargon the Elder, whose complete name is Shargani-shar-ali, was the son of a certain Ittibel, who does not appear to have been king. At first his possessions were confined to the city of Agadê and some undetermined portions of the environs of Babylon, but he soon succeeded in annexing Babylon itself, Sippara, Kîshu, Uruk, Kuta, and Nipur: the contemporary records attest his conquest of Elam, Guti, and even of the far-off land of Syria, which was already known to him under the name of Amuru. His activity as a builder was in no way behind his warlike zeal. He built Ekur, the sanctuary of Bel in Nipur, and the great temple Eulbar in Agadê, in honour of Anunit, the goddess presiding over the morning star. He erected in Babylon a palace which afterwards became a royal burying-place. He founded a new capital, a city which he peopled with families brought from Kishu and Babylon: for a long time after his day it bore the name which he bestowed upon it, Dur-Sharrukîn. This sums up all the positive knowledge we have about him, and the later Chaldseans seem not to have been much better informed than ourselves.
* The earliest Assyriologists, H. Rawlinson, Oppert,
considered the local kings as having been, for the most
part, kings of all Chaldæa, and placed them in succession
one after the other in the framework of the most ancient
dynasties of Berossus. The merit of having established the
existence of series of local dynasties, and of having given
to Chaldæan history its modern form, belongs to G. Smith.
Smith’s idea was adopted by Menant, by Delitzsch-Murdter, by
Tiele, by Winckler, and by all Assyriologists, with
modifications suggested by the progress of decipherment.
They filled up the lacunae of his history with legends. As he seemed to them to have appeared suddenly on the scene, without any apparent connection with the king who preceded him, they assumed that he was a usurper of unknown origin, irregularly introduced by the favour of the gods into the lawful series of kings. An inscription engraved, it was said, on one of his statues, and afterwards, about the VIIth century B.C., copied and deposited in the library of Nineveh, related at length the circumstances of his mysterious birth. “Sharrukîn, the mighty king, the king of Agadê, am I. My mother was a princess; my father, I did not know him; the brother of my father lived in the mountains. My town was Azupirâni, which is situated on the bank of the Euphrates. My mother, the princess, conceived me, and secretly gave birth to me: she placed me in a basket of reeds, she shut up the mouth of it with bitumen, she abandoned me to the river, which did not overwhelm me. The river bore me; it brought me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, received me in the goodness of his heart; Akki, the drawer of water, made me a gardener. As gardener, the goddess Ishtar loved me, and during forty-four years I held royal sway; I commanded the Black Heads,* and ruled them.” This is no unusual origin for the founders of empires and dynasties; witness the cases of Cyrus and Bomulus.* Sargon, like Moses, and many other heroes of history or fable, is exposed to the waters: he owes his safety to a poor fellah who works his shadouf on the banks of the Euphrates to water the fields, and he passes his infancy in obscurity, if not in misery. Having reached the age of manhood, Ishtar falls in love with him as she did with his fellow-craftsman, the gardener Ishullanu, and he becomes king, we know not by what means.
* The phrase “Black Heads,” nishi salmat hahhadi, has been
taken in an ethnological sense as designating one of the
races of Chaldæa, the Semitic; other Assyriologists consider
it as denoting mankind in general. The latter meaning seems
the more probable.
** Smith had already compared the infancy of Sargon with
that of Moses; the comparison with Cyrus, Bacchus, and
Romulus was made by Talbot. Traditions of the same kind are
frequent in history or folk-tales.
The same inscription which reveals the romance of his youth, recounts the successes of his manhood, and boasts of the uniformly victorious issue of his warlike exploits. Owing to lacunae, the end of the account is in the main wanting, and we are thus prevented from following the development of his career, but other documents come to the rescue and claim to furnish its most important vicissitudes. He had reduced the cities of the Lower Euphrates, the island of Dilmun, Durîlu, Elam, the country of Kazalla: he had invaded Syria, conquered Phoenicia, crossed the arm of the sea which separates Cyprus from the coast, and only returned to his palace after an absence of three years, and after having erected his statues on the Syrian coast. He had hardly settled down to rest when a rebellion broke out suddenly; the chiefs of Chaldæa formed a league against him, and blockaded him in Agadê: Ishtar, exceptionally faithful to the end, obtains for him the victory, and he comes out of a crisis, in which he might have been utterly ruined, with a more secure position than ever. All these events are regarded as having occurred sometime about 3800 B.C., at a period when the VIth dynasty was flourishing in Egypt. Some of them have been proved to be true by recent discoveries, and the rest are not at all improbable in themselves, though the work in which they are recorded is a later astrological treatise. The writer was anxious to prove, by examples drawn from the chronicles, the use of portents of victory or defeat, of civic peace or rebellion—portents which he deduced from the configuration of the heavens on the various days of the month: by going back as far as Sargon of Agadê for his instances, he must have at once increased the respect for himself on account of his knowledge of antiquity, and the difficulty which the common herd must have felt in verifying his assertions. His zeal in collecting examples was probably stimulated by the fact that some of the exploits which he attributes to the ancient Sargon had been recently accomplished by a king of the same name: the brilliant career of Sargon of Agadê would seem to have been in his estimation something like an anticipation of the still more glorious life of the Sargon of Nineveh.* What better proof of the high veneration in which the learned men of Assyria held the memory of the ancient Chaldæan conqueror? Naramsin, who succeeded Sargon about 3750 B.C.** inherited his authority, and to some extent his renown.
* Hommel (Gescamede, p. 307) believes that the life of our
Sargon was modelled, not on the Assyrian Sargon, but on a
second Sargon, whom he places about 2000 B.C. Tiele refuses
to accept the hypothesis, but his objections are not
weighty, in my opinion; Hilprecht and Sayce accepted the
authenticity of the facts in their details, and the recent
discoveries have shown that they were right in so doing.
There is a distant resemblance between the life of the
legendary Sargon and the account of the victories of Ramses
II. ending in a conspiracy on his return.