CHAPTER X.
THE SWORD IN BABYLONIA, ASSYRIA AND PERSIA, AND ANCIENT INDIA.
Fig. 202.—Assyrian Sword.
Although Professor Lepsius maintained and proved that the earliest Babylonian civilisation was imported from Egypt, Biblical leanings, and the fatal practice of reading myths and mysteries as literal history, have led many moderns to hold the Plain of Shinar (Babylon) and the ancient head of the Persian Gulf to be the cradle of culture and the origin of ‘Semitism.’ We still read, ‘Babylonia stands prominent as highly civilised and densely populated at a period when Egypt was still in her youthful prime.’[649] Only in Genesis (x. 10), a document treating of later ethnology, we find mention of Erech,[650] Urukh being the oldest traditional king of Babylon. On the other hand, the Egyptians declared Belus and his subjects to have been an Egyptian colony which taught the rude Babylonians astrology and other arts. The monumental Babylonian or pre-Chaldæan Empire begins only in b.c. 2300, many a century—say a score—after Menes. The late Mr. George Smith warns us that some scholars would make the annals ‘stretch nearly two thousand years beyond that time’; but he expressly declares no approximate date can be fixed for any king before Kara-Indas (circ. b.c. 1475?–1450?). Also, ‘The great temples of Babylonia were founded by the kings who preceded the conquest by Hammu-rabi, King of the Kassi’ Arabs (sixteenth century b.c.).[651]
The Burbur or Accad inscriptions found in Babylonia do not date before b.c. 2000. Ninus, the builder of Nineveh (Fish-town) and the founder of the Assyrian dynasties, is usually placed between b.c. 2317 and 2116. An extract, by Alexander Polyhistor from the Armenian[652] Chronicle, gives, by adding the dynasties, an origin-date of 2,317 years. Berosus the priest, declares from official documents, that Babylon (God’s Gate) had regal annals 1,000 years before Solomon (b.c. 993–953), in whose reign dynastic Jewish history begins. Diodorus Siculus, quoting Ctesias (b.c. 395) makes the monarchy commence one thousand years before the Siege of Troy, which we may place about b.c. 1200. Æmilius Sura, quoted by Paterculus, proposes the date b.c. 2145, and Eusebius the Armenian 1340 years before the first Olympiad (b.c. 776), or b.c. 2116. The great kingdom of the Khita (Hittites)[653] was succeeded on the rich lowlands of the Tigris-Euphrates system by Babylon, which the Nilotes called ‘Har,’ and by the Assyrians, whom the Egyptians called Mat or the People, and hieroglyphs notice the ‘Great King of the Mat.’ But
Assur[654] was little known till the decline of the Pharaohs in the Twenty-first Dynasty (b.c. 1100–966) of the priest Hirhor and his successors: one of the latter—Ramessu or Ramses XVI.—married, when dethroned, a daughter of Pallasharnes, the ‘great king of the Assyrians,’ whose capital was Nineveh,[655] and thus led to the Assyrian invasions of Egypt.[656] We may, then, safely hold with Lepsius that early Babylonian civilisation was posterior to, if not imported from, Egypt.[657]
In Babylonia a third element, the so-called ‘Turanian’ (Chinese), first emerged from Egyptian and began to take its part in the drama of progress. The almost unknown quantity has assumed magnificent proportions in the eyes of certain students, and great things are still expected from Akkadian revelation. Yet the race typified by the Chinese could have had no effect upon the learning of Egypt. ‘At the time when the genealogical tables of Genesis were written (chap. x.) those regions were still so unknown and barbarous that the writer excluded them from the civilised world.’[658]
THE SWORD IN ASSYRIA.