Buried Cities and Bible Countries

by George St. Clair

CHAPTER V.
MESOPOTAMIA AND THE BIBLE.

1. Assyria.

Mesopotamia—“the Land between the Rivers”—is a tract of country nearly 700 miles long, and from 20 to 250 miles broad, enclosed between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and extending from the mountains of Armenia to near the Persian Gulf. It is for the most part a vast plain, but is crossed near its centre by a range of hills running almost east and west-from Hit on the Euphrates, famous for its bitumen pits, to Samarah on the Tigris. North of this line the country, though dry and bare, is undulating, and rises occasionally into mountains, while south of it the region is flat and consists of rich, moist, alluvial land, formed by the rivers themselves. This land of alluvium was Babylonia, and its capital Babylon; the country north of it was Assyria, with its capital Nineveh. But the extent of both countries varied from time to time, according to the power of various monarchs and their successes in war.

The beginnings of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires are lost in obscurity, and no records exist among the people themselves accounting for their origin. Yet the account given in the Bible agrees so well with what is known from the records that there can be no reasonable doubt that in it there is a true history of the rise of these two nations, which were in after time to wield the power of the then known world. This Biblical account, borne out and amplified as it is by the late discoveries, forms one of the most interesting and instructive links in the history of the human race and its progress in civilisation.

“Taking, then, the account as it stands in the Bible,”[49] says Mr Budge, “it appears that the descendants of Ham, the third son of Noah, were Cush, Mizraim, Phut, and Canaan. The lands of Cush and Mizraim have hitherto been identified with Ethiopia and Egypt respectively; Phut was regarded as doubtful, and Canaan was the country with which we are so well acquainted from the frequent occurrence of the name in the Bible. The identification of the first-named and most important of these districts, the land of Cush, has been regarded by many as unsatisfactory: for Nimrod, judging from the names of towns said to have been founded by him, could hardly have been an Ethiopian, though, according to the Bible story, he was a descendant of Cush.”

Amongst the treasures of the Assyrian excavations there has luckily been found a tablet, giving, in a list of the nations, &c., along the Taurus range of mountains, a country bearing the name of Kusu, the same word as is used in the inscriptions to denote the country of Ethiopia; and from this and from other sources it is clear that two countries of this name were known to the people of the ancient world, the one being Ethiopia and the other Cappadocia or its immediate neighbourhood. It seems therefore likely that Nimrod and his followers, for some reason unrecorded, left his home in the land of Cush or Cappadocia, and journeying in a south-easterly direction, came to the land of Sumer or Shinar. There meeting perhaps with the Semitic population of the country, he did not go any farther, but settled there with his followers, and built Babylon, and Birs Nimroud, the supposed Tower of Babel.

In course of time the new comers began to mingle with the original (Semitic) inhabitants of the country, and both races were obliged, for the purpose of trade and intercourse, to learn each other’s language, so that there must have been for several hundreds of years two tongues in use at the same time in Mesopotamia, and it was not until the twelfth or even perhaps the tenth century before Christ, that the Akkadian was entirely supplanted by the language of the Semitic Babylonians. The Norman invasion in England is a case parallel to the above, but with this difference, that whilst the invasion of England by the Normans was a conquest, the entry of these people (afterwards known as Akkadians and Sumerians) into Babylonia seems to have been otherwise; and the Babylonian language, therefore, while admitting very many Akkadian and Sumerian words, has not suffered, with regard to the grammatical forms, to the same extent as the English language.

The entry of the Akkadians into Babylonia was the beginning of civilisation in that country, for they brought with them, along with their religion, their legends and traditions, their laws, their art, building knowledge, agricultural skill, and that great civiliser of nations, the art of writing. From this union of the intellectual Akkadian race and the warlike Babylonians arose the two nations of whom both tradition and history have preserved the record, as having been the mightiest of the nations of the ancient world, namely, Babylonia and Assyria, of whom so many tales are told, and whose power and high civilisation amongst the barbarism of the early ages of the world made so great an impression during the time of their supremacy.

After the mingling of these two races, but long before the Akkadian language had died out, the Babylonians, as they will be henceforth called, sent out colonies northwards and founded the great cities of Assyria—Ninua (Nineveh), Resin, Kalhu (Calah), Assur, &c.