This myth, splendid as an epic invention, is too rude to contain the least philosophical principle. The Hebrew thinker, while retaining the general outline, has eliminated the whole crowd of monstrous or ugly divinities unworthy to receive the homage of the human race. The picture has lost nothing in extent; but a single, all-powerful god first creates chaotic matter, and then organises it, step by step, for the sole benefit of the human race. The cycle of the ten antediluvian patriarchs, which includes millions of years, is reduced to sixteen hundred years, and thus brought within the range of actual humanity. Finally, the deluge, in the primitive legend the result of the mad arrogance of the god Bel, is justified by the extraordinary corruption of the men of that epoch.
Like a true reformer the prophetic narrator has raised upon the Babylonian basis a new system whose rational and moral side need not fear comparison with any other religious doctrine of humanity. Among the Greeks, no religious or social reform could be developed and preserved that took for a basis their castes of irresponsible gods. Egypt perished without having attempted to rise from its coarse animal-worship. Babylonianism alone, by its hymns and its epics, still lives to-day as an important factor in universal religion, although under a form idealised by genius. Materially, Babylon is but a memory, but a delicate part of its atoms passed into the vigorous constitution of its spiritual heir, the sacred book of Hebrew monotheism, to become the common property of humanity.
MESOPOTAMIAN HISTORY IN OUTLINE
A PRELIMINARY SURVEY COMPRISING A CURSORY VIEW OF THE SOURCES OF MESOPOTAMIAN HISTORY AND OF THE SWEEP OF EVENTS, AND A TABLE OF CHRONOLOGY
The Babylonians and Assyrians were two very important peoples of remote antiquity, inhabiting the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southwestern Asia. The Greeks regarded these peoples as constituting one nation and called their country Mesopotamia, a name that could properly be applied to only a part of their territory. The Babylonians and Assyrians, themselves, on the other hand, regarded each other as alien peoples, though both belonged to the same Semitic stock. The Babylonians were the more ancient, and their territory lay to the south, where, many scholars believe, they had been preceded by a people of a different race.
Though the seat of this early civilisation is geographically small in extent, yet the peoples who entered into it were by no means homogeneous, nor was their history a continuous record of unbroken political succession. On the contrary, at least two different races of people were involved,—a Turanian stock in the early Babylonian history, a Semitic stock in all the later periods,—and at least three successive kingdoms or empires, not to speak of mere changes of dynasty. The earliest period known to us—that which left records at Nippur and Shirpurla, in old Babylonia—had its seat in the southern portion of the territory bordering on the sea; thence, seemingly, civilisation spread northward. Assyriologists are not fully agreed as to the share which the non-Semitic race had in this early civilisation. It has even been questioned whether these so-called Sumerians really existed at all.[15] In any event the Semitic Babylonians acquired full control at a very early period.
The Assyrian kingdom—which came to be a veritable world-empire—had its seat at Calah and afterwards at Nineveh. It conquered and absorbed the old Babylonian kingdom, and then reached out for domination to the east and to the west, finally overrunning even Egypt.