Buried Cities and Bible Countries

by George St. Clair

Assurbanipal, when he made raids into Babylonia and captured a city, would carry off the sacred writings to enrich the royal library at Nineveh. When they were brought to Nineveh they were copied by the priests, and they were sometimes translated into the Assyrian tongue, although Assyrians who professed to be well educated used to learn the Akkadian language, much as English boys learn Latin, or theological students study Hebrew and read the writings in the original. It is very interesting to find that these old Assyrians and these ancient Chaldeans had their own version of the Creation, the Deluge, the Building of Babel, &c., which they venerated as being ancient even then, and regarded as most sacred.

The Chaldean narratives differed in minor particulars from those in the Bible. The Chaldean Deluge, for instance, lasted only seven days, instead of the greater part of a year; the vessel was not an ark, but a ship, of proper ship shape, with a pilot on board to navigate it, and other people on board besides the family of Noah. The Chaldean Noah, when the waters were subsiding, sent out not only a raven and a dove, but a swallow as well; and in the end of the event he was translated that he should not see death; and this in the Bible does not occur to Noah, but to Enoch. Nevertheless, with these and other differences, we have the grand fact that the cycle of narratives preserved in the early chapters of Genesis are not mere ingenious inventions on the part of Hebrew writers, but had their parallel in early Chaldea. The key to their exact meaning is for the present lost; but we may hope that it will be recovered, and then there will be an end to the controversy between Geology and Genesis.

2. Babylonia.

Babylonia comprehended the country from near the Lower Zab to the Persian Gulf, about 400 miles long; and from Elam, east of the Tigris, to the Arabian Desert, west of the Euphrates, an average breadth of 150 miles.

Its history begins very early, for one of its kings—Sargon of Accad—is believed to have reigned in 3800 B.C. The circumstance to which we owe the discovery of this remarkable fact is thus related in Dr Sayce’s “Hibbert Lectures”: “The last king of Babylonia, Nabonidos, had antiquarian tastes, and busied himself not only with the restoration of the old temples of his country, but also with the disinterment of the memorial cylinders which their builders and restorers had buried beneath their foundations. It was known that the great temple of the Sun-god at Sippara, where the mounds of Abu-Hubba now mark its remains, had been originally erected by Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon, and attempts had been already made to find the records which, it was assumed, he had entombed under its angles. With true antiquarian zeal Nabonidos continued the search, and did not desist until, like the dean and chapter of some modern cathedral, he had lighted upon ‘the foundation stone’ of Naram-Sin himself. This foundation-stone, he tells us, had been seen by none of his predecessors for 3200 years. In the opinion, accordingly, of Nabonidos, a king who was curious about the past history of his country, and whose royal position gave him the best possible opportunities for learning all that could be known about it, Naram-Sin and his father, Sargon I., lived 3200 years before his own time, or 3750 B.C.”

The date is so remote and so contrary to all our preconceived ideas regarding the antiquity of the Babylonian monarchy, that it was not received without hesitation; but it appears to be supported by other evidence, and is now generally accepted. It is believed, indeed, that the monuments found at Tell-lo, including statues of diorite, a material foreign to Babylonia, are earlier still, and must be regarded as pre-Semitic.

It may be asked, what interest can we have in people and things so remote? the Babylonians and their religion have long since perished, and have no influence upon the world of to-day. To this it is replied that through the providential circumstances of the Captivity the Jews were brought into contact with the Babylonians; the Jewish religion in its turn influenced Christianity, and all Christians should be concerned to know what the Jews learned in their exile. In the view of Hebrew prophets the Jews were “sent into foreign countries” to receive education and discipline; the Assyrian conqueror was the rod of God’s anger (Isaiah x. 5), and the Babylonish exile was the punishment meted out to Judah for its sins. The captives who returned again to their own land came back with changed hearts and purified minds, intent upon re-establishing Jerusalem as the home of a righteous people. And they had done something more than learn to abominate idolatry, they had been led to weigh the value of the religious beliefs and practices of the nations they had lived with during seventy years.

But it was not only through the Babylonian exile that the religious ideas of the Babylonian and the Jew came into contact with each other. “It was then, indeed” (says Dr Sayce), “that the ideas of the conquering race were likely to make their deepest and most enduring impression; it was then, too, that the Jew for the first time found the libraries and ancient literature of Chaldea open to his study and use.” But old tradition had already pointed to the valley of the Euphrates as the primeval cradle of his race. We all remember how Abraham, it is said, was born in Ur of the Chaldees, and how the earlier chapters of Genesis make the Euphrates and Tigris two of the rivers of Paradise, and describe the building of the tower of Babylon as the cause of the dispersion of mankind. Now the Hebrew language was the language not only of the Israelites, but also of those earlier inhabitants of the country whom the Jews called Canaanites and the Greeks Phœnicians. Like the Israelites, the Phœnicians held that their ancestors had come from the Persian Gulf and the alluvial Plain of Babylonia. The tradition is confirmed by the researches of comparative philology. Their first home appears to have been in the low-lying desert which stretches eastward to Chaldea—in the very region, in fact, in which stood the great city of Ur, the modern Mugheir.

The earliest known kings of Shumir resided in Ur, and besides that, it was the principal commercial mart of the country. For, strange as it may appear, when we look on a modern map, and observe the ruins 150 miles from the sea, Ur was then a maritime city, with harbour and docks. Through the accumulation of alluvium brought down by the two great rivers, the Babylonian territory has steadily increased from age to age, and the waters of the Gulf have been pushed back. There was, in early times, a distance of many miles between the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Ur lay very near the mouth of the latter river. The platform of the principal mound which marks the site is faced with a wall 10 feet thick, of red kiln-dried bricks, cemented with bitumen. The mound has something of the shape of a pear, and measures about 2 miles in circumference. This mound representing the town, the suburban district is full of graves of all ages, showing the long period through which the city flourished.