The pottery of the Babylonians was of excellent quality, and is scarcely to be distinguished from the Assyrian, which it resembles alike in form and in material. The bricks of the best period were on the whole better than any used in the sister country, and may compare for hardness and fineness with the best Roman. The earthenware is of a fine terra-cotta, generally of a light red color, and slightly baked, but occasionally of a yellow hue, with a tinge of green. It consists of cups, jars, vases, and other vessels. They appear to have been made upon the wheel, and are in general unornamented. From representations upon the cylinders, it appears that the shapes were often elegant. Long and narrow vases with thin necks seem to have been used for water vessels; these had rounded or pointed bases, and required therefore the support of a stand. Thin jugs were also in use, with slight elegant handles. It is conjectured that sometimes modelled figures may have been introduced at the sides as handles to the vases; but neither the cylinders nor the extant remains confirm this supposition. The only ornamentation hitherto observed consists in a double band which seems to have been carried round some of the vases in an incomplete spiral. The vases sometimes have two handles; but they are plain and small, adding nothing to the beauty of the vessels. Occasionally the whole vessel is glazed with a rich blue color. [PLATE XX., Fig. 3.]
The Babylonians certainly employed glass for vessels for a small size. They appear not to have been very skilful blowers, since their bottles are not unfrequently misshappen. [PLATE XX., Fig. 3.] They generally stained their glass with, some coloring matter, and occasionally ornamented it with a ribbing. Whether they were able to form masses of glass of any considerable size, whether they used it, like the Egyptians, for beads and bugles, or for mosaics, is uncertain. If we suppose a foundation in fact for Pliny’s story of the great emerald (?) presented by a king of Babylon to an Egyptian Pharaoh, we must conclude that very considerable masses of glass were produced by the Babylonians, at least occasionally; for the said emerald, which can scarcely have been of any other material, was four cubits (or six feet) long and three cubits (or four and a half feet) broad.
Of all the productions of the Babylonians none obtained such, high repute in ancient times as their textile fabrics. Their carpets especially were of great celebrity, and were largely exported to foreign countries. They were dyed of various colors, and represented objects similar to those found on the gems, as griffins and such like monsters. Their position in the ancient world may be compared to that which is now borne by the fabrics of Turkey and Persia, which are deservedly preferred to those of all other countries.
Next to their carpets, the highest, character was borne by their muslins. Formed of the finest cotton, and dyed of the most brilliant colors, they seemed to the Oriental the very best possible material for dress. The Persian kings preferred them for their own wear; and they had an early fame in foreign countries at a considerable distance from Babylonia. It is probable that they were sometimes embroidered with delicate patterns, such as those which may be seen on the garments of the early Babylonian kings.
Besides woollen and cotton fabrics, the Babylonians also manufactured a good deal of linen cloth, the principal seat of the manufacture being Borsippa. This material was produced, it is probable, chiefly for home consumption, long linen robes being generally worn by the people.
From the arts of the Babylonians we may now pass to their science—an obscure subject, but one which possesses more than common interest. If the classical writers were correct in their belief that Chaldaea was the birthplace of Astronomy, and that their own astronomical science was derived mainly from this quarter, it must be well worth inquiry what the amount of knowledge was which the Babylonians attained on the subject, and what were the means whereby they made their discoveries.
On the broad flat plains of Chaldsea, where the entire celestial hemisphere is continually visible to every eye, and the clear transparent atmosphere shows night after night the heavens gemmed with countless stars, each shining with a brilliancy unknown in our moist northern climes, the attention of man was naturally turned earlier than elsewhere to these luminous bodies, and attempts were made to grasp, and reduce to scientific form, the array of facts which nature presented to the eye in a confused and tangled mass. It required no very long course of observation to acquaint men with a truth, which at first sight none would have suspected—namely, that the luminous points whereof the sky was full were of two kinds, some always maintaining the same position relatively to one another, while others were constantly changing their places, and as it were wandering about the sky. It is certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the “planets,” and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering luminary, changing her place among the fixed stars with remarkable rapidity. Ultimately, it came to be perceived that the Sun too rose and set at different parts of the year in the neighborhood of different constellations, and that consequently the great luminary was itself also a wanderer, having a path in the sky which it was possible, by means of careful observation, to mark out.
But to do this, to mark out with accuracy the courses of the Sun and Moon among the fixed stars, it was necessary, or at least convenient, to arrange the stars themselves into groups. Thus, too, and thus only, was it possible to give form and order to the chaotic confusion in which the stars seem at first sight to lie, owing to the irregularity of their intervals, the difference in their magnitude, and their apparent countlessness. The most uneducated eye, when raised to the starry heavens on a clear night, fixes here and there upon groups of stars: in the north, Cassiopeia, the Great Bear, the Pleiades—below the Equator, the Southern Cross—must at all times have impressed those who beheld them with a certain sense of unity. Thus the idea of a “constellation” is formed; and this once done, the mind naturally progresses in the same direction, and little by little the whole sky is mapped out into certain portions or districts to which names are given—names taken from some resemblance, real or fancied, between the shapes of the several groups and objects familiar to the early observers. This branch of practical astronomy is termed “uranography” by moderns; its utility is very considerable; thus and thus only can we particularize the individual stars of which we wish to speak; thus and thus only can we retain in our memory the general arrangement of the stars and their positions relatively to each other.
There is reason to believe that in the early Babylonian astronomy the subject of uranography occupied a prominent place. The Chaldaean astronomers not only seized on and named those natural groups which force themselves upon the eye, but artificially arranged the whole heavens into a certain number of constellations or asterisms. The very system of uranography which maintains itself to the present day on our celestial globes and maps, and which is still acknowledged—albeit under protest—in the nomenclature of scientific astronomers, came in all probability from this source, reaching us from the Arabians, who took it from the Greeks who derived it from the Babylonians. The Zodiacal constellations at any rate, or those through which the sun’s course lies would seem to have had this origin; and many of them may be distinctly recognized on Babylonian monuments which are plainly of a stellar character. The accompanying representation, taken from a conical black stone in the British Museum [PLATE XX., Fig. 2.], and belonging to the twelfth century before our era, is not perhaps, strictly speaking, a zodiac, but it is almost certainly an arrangement of constellations according to the forms assigned them in Babylonian uranography. [PLATE XXI.] The Ram, the Bull, the Scorpion, the Serpent, the Dog, the Arrow, the Eagle or Vulture may all be detected on the stone in question, as may similar forms variously arranged on other similar monuments.