Buried Cities and Bible Countries

by George St. Clair

It is supposed that the “Amraphel, king of Shinar,” who marched with Khudur-Lagamar as his ally, was no other than a king of Babylon, one of whose names has been read Amarpal, while “Ariokh of Ellassar” was an Elamite, Eriaku, brother or cousin of Khudur-Lagamar and king of Larsam. At Larsam the Elamite conquerors had established a powerful dynasty, closely allied by blood to the principal one, which had made the venerable Ur its headquarters.

Babylon was a very ancient city of Babylonia, and is first mentioned in the inscriptions of Izdhubar,[53] a mythical hero, whose name is connected with the Chaldean story of the Flood. It remained for some centuries of secondary importance, but became at length the capital of the country. The native name, Bab-ilu, signifies the Gate-of-God, corresponding to Beth-el, the House of God, in the land of Palestine. According to Herodotus, the city stood in a broad plain, and was an exact square, measuring 15 miles each way. It was surrounded, he says, by a broad and deep moat, full of water, behind which rose a wall 50 royal cubits in breadth and 200 in height. In digging the moat the alluvial clay was at once made into bricks and baked in kilns; and with these the walls were built, the cement being hot bitumen. “On the top, along the edges of the wall, they constructed buildings of a single chamber, facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to turn. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates of brass, with brazen lintels and side-posts.”

The broad stream of the Euphrates passed through the city, dividing it into two parts, and the centre of each division was occupied by a fortress. In the one stood the palace of the kings, surrounded by a wall of great strength and size; in the other was the sacred precinct of Jupiter Belus, a square enclosure, 2 furlongs each way, with gates of solid brass. “In the middle of the precinct,” says Herodotus, “there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers.... On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned, with a golden table by its side. Below, in the same precinct, there is a second temple, in which is a sitting figure of Jupiter, all of gold.” Other historians make the circuit of the city from 45 to 48 miles, instead of 60; and it is hardly necessary to say that modern writers question both its extent and the height of its walls.

The god whom Herodotus calls Jupiter-Belus was Bel-Merodach. Babylon was called “the dwelling-place of Bel” and the “town of Marduk.” The temple of Bel is represented by the ruin of Babil, a mound on the eastern side of the stream. Some writers believe this to be the site of the Tower of Babel. Others, including Sir Henry Rawlinson, have identified the Babel tower with the ruin of Birs Nimroud, the ancient Borsippa, on the western side of the river. Birs Nimroud is one of the most imposing ruins in the country, standing in the midst of a vast plain, with nothing to break the view. Sir H. Rawlinson excavated at the site, and discovered that the tower was built in seven stages, the material being brickwork on an earthen platform. The first stage was an exact square, 272 feet each way, and 26 feet high, the bricks blackened with bitumen. The higher stages were of course successively smaller, but they were not placed in the centre of those on which they rested, but considerably nearer to the south-western end which constituted the back of the building. The bricks of the lowest stage being blackened, those of the second stage were orange-coloured, of the third red, the fourth it is supposed were plated with gold. Seven colours were used, emblematic of the planets, and the building was called the Temple of the Seven Spheres. On the seventh stage there was probably placed the ark or tabernacle, which seems to have been again 15 feet high, and must have nearly covered the top of the seventh story. This temple was sacred to Nebo, the Babylonian Mercury, the inventor of the alphabet, “the writer,” “the prophet,” “the author of the oracle.” Assurbanipal is never weary of telling us, at the end of the documents which his scribes had copied from Babylonian originals, that Nebo and Tasmit had given him broad ears, and endowed him with seeing eyes, so that he had written and bound together and published the store of tablets, a work which none of the kings who had gone before him had undertaken, even the secrets of Nebo!

From receptacles at the corners of the stages above described, Sir H. Rawlinson obtained inscribed cylinders, stating that the building was the Temple of the Seven Planets, which had been partially built by a former king of Babylon, and having fallen into decay, was restored and completed by Nebuchadnezzar. It was at Birs Nimroud that Mr Hormuzd Rassam found a leaf of metal with some writing on it, which proved to be a dedication by Nebuchadnezzar to the god Nebo for his restoration to health. If this relates to Nebuchadnezzar’s recovery from his madness, it is an interesting confirmation of the story in the Book of Daniel.

“The secrets of Nebo” referred to by Assurbanipal, were astronomical records and other writings stored up in Nebo’s temple. The religion of the Babylonians was based on a study of the heavenly bodies, and was so intimately connected with astronomy that it was necessary for the priests to be astronomers. There were observatories at the principal temples; observations of the heavens were regularly made, and naturally the records were preserved in the temple chambers, and became the nucleus of large libraries. It was the good fortune of Mr Rassam to discover one of the most important of these libraries, at Abu Hubba—about 30 miles south-east from Bagdad—on one of the canals branching eastward from the Euphrates. Abu Hubba proves to be the ancient Sippara, the Biblical Sepharvaim, whence some of the people were taken, to re-people Samaria after the ten tribes of Israel were carried away. The Hebrew name being in the dual form, and signifying the two Sippars, we look for duality in the ruins, and we find them actually on the two sides of the stream. Sippara, we knew from Berosus, was a great seat of sun-worship; the temple of the god Shamas was here, and it was here that Xisuthrus, the Chaldean Noah, was said to have buried the records of the antediluvian world. The explorations of Mr Rassam have restored to us the remains of the Sun-god’s temple.

The citadel occupies the southern portion of the enceinte, and its highest point on the south-west face was once on the banks of a stream, either the Euphrates itself or a broad canal communicating with the river. The trenches excavated in the mound soon struck the walls of a building, and by following the line of this wall the outer face of a large square edifice was uncovered. Trenches and shafts sunk in the interior showed that within the outer rampart there were more than one hundred chambers ranged round a central court. In the central portion of the mound an important pair of chambers were found, and in the centre of one of them a large brick altar platform, about 30 feet square, upon which it was evident that the altar of burnt-offering had stood, for there were charred fragments about. The axis of this chamber was north-east and south-west, and at the north-east end a doorway was found, leading into a smaller chamber, the floor of which was paved with a material resembling asphalt. Under this floor Mr Rassam discovered a terra cotta box containing three inscribed records, namely, a stone tablet with a sculptured panel, representing the worship of the Sun-god, and two cylinders. The cylinders were found to bear inscriptions of Nabonidos, king of Babylon, B.C. 555, recording the restoration of this temple in the year B.C. 550; and the stone tablet bore a long and important record of the restoration of the temple by Nabu-abla-iddina, king of Babylon, whose date may be given as about B.C. 852. Above the figure of the Sun-god on this tablet were the words—“The statue of the Sun-god—the great lord—dwelling in the House of Light, which is within the city of Sippara.” But the statue and other objects of value had been removed. From the cylinder of Nabonidos, as previously stated, we learn that the temple had been restored by Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon I., in the year 3750 B.C. It was of very great interest to find in the lower strata of the temple area a small ovoid of pink and white marble, bearing an inscription of Sargon I., of such archaic character as to appear to confirm this date.

The temple was called by many titles—as, “Palace of the God,” “High Place,” “Dwelling of the God,” “Resting-Place of the God,”—and, among others, the “House of God,” in Akkadian, E-Din-gira, in Semitic Babylonian, Bit-ilu, in Hebrew, Bethel.

The city of Akkad or Agadé, built by Sargon I., seems to have been a part of the double Sippara, and here Sargon founded the celebrated library which contained among its treasures a great work on astronomy and astrology, in seventy books. Around this nucleus other writings aggregated, and the temple of Shamas became the great record office of the state. Mr Rassam found at Abu Hubba some thousands of tablets relating to fiscal, legal, and commercial transactions; and it would thus appear that all documents of this character were preserved by the priests. A remarkable example of the careful preservation of the writings committed to their charge was furnished in the course of the excavations. On the south-east side of the large quadrangle was a smaller square, in which were a series of chambers, evidently offices of the temple. In one of these over 30,000 tablets were found stored. They were packed by Mr Rassam as he found them, and removed to England without any disturbance of their order; and when the cases came to be examined it was found that the majority of the tablets were arranged chronologically. Ranging as these tablets did from B.C. 625 to B.C. 200, they must have lain for nearly 2000 years quite undisturbed in the ruins.

A Babylonian temple was also the court of justice, and as the Jewish Sanhedrim met in the temple at Jerusalem, so did the council of the grey-haired ones meet in the courts of Chaldean temples to answer judgment. Dr Oppert has translated some contracts and legal decisions relating indubitably to captive Jews who had been carried to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem. One of the most interesting of them is a law-suit commenced by a Jewish slave named Barachiel in order to recover his freedom. The case was as follows:—Barachiel—who bears the same name as the father of Elihu in the Book of Job (xxxii. 2–6),—had been the property of a wealthy person named Akhi-nuri, who had sold him to a widow of the name of Gaga, about 570 B.C. He remained in the house of this lady as a slave, with the power of liberating himself by paying a sum equal to his peculium or private property, which he had been allowed to acquire, like a slave in ancient Rome; but it seems that he was never fortunate enough to be able to afford the sum of money required. He remained with Gaga twenty-one years, and was considered the res or property of the house, and as such was handed over in pledge, was restored, and finally became the dowry of Nubti, the daughter of Gaga. Nubti gave him to her son and husband in exchange for a house and some slaves. After the death of the two ladies he was sold to the wealthy publican, Itti-Marduk-baladh, from whose house he escaped twice. Taken the second time, he instituted an action in order that he might be recognised as a free-born citizen, of the family of Belrimanni; and to prove that he was of noble origin he pretended that he had performed the matrimonial solemnities at the marriage of his master’s daughter, Qudasa, with a certain Samas-mudammiq. Such a performance, doubtless, implied that the officiating priest was of free birth, and no slave or freed-man was qualified to take part in it.