CHAPTER II. OLD BABYLONIAN HISTORY
We have here the mere dust of history, rather than history itself; here an isolated individual makes his appearance in the record of his name, to vanish when we attempt to lay hold of him; there the stem of a dynasty which breaks abruptly off, pompous preambles, devout formulas, dedications of objects or buildings; here and there the account of some battle, or the indication of some foreign country with which relations of friendship or commerce were maintained—these are the scanty materials out of which to construct a connected narrative.—Maspero.
Recent researches in old Babylonia have brought to light a very large quantity of historical documents which tell a most important story, inasmuch as they have to do with the very remotest periods of antiquity. At Telloh, the site of the ancient city of Shirpurla, the French explorers have found an abundance of interesting material, while the Americans have exhumed, and are still exhuming, at Nippur, a mass of documents which bids fair to rival in quantity the voluminous records from the libraries of the Assyrian kings. In a single season’s excavating, Mr. Haynes has very recently brought to light thousands of inscribed tablets, some of which date from a period as long anterior to the time of the great Assyrian kings as that time is to our own.
The historian is to be particularly congratulated in that many of these ancient documents have the most direct bearing upon his studies. It has already been pointed out that the Babylonians were much more amply endowed with historical sense than were the Egyptians. They had a tolerably full appreciation of the importance of chronology, and though, like the Egyptians, they lacked a fixed era from which to reckon, they, to some extent, compensated for this defect by the ample series of king lists and “synchronisms” which various monarchs caused to be written. Several of these chronological documents have been restored to us by the various excavators, and, thanks to these, the outlines of considerable periods of early Babylonian history are now more accurately known than many much more recent epochs of occidental history.
Unfortunately, these ancient lists consist, for the most part, of tables of names having strange and unfamiliar sounds. To the average reader these names are necessarily repellant. Such words as E-anna-tum, Urumush or Alusharshid, Samsu-iluna, Kadashman-Kharbe cannot well be otherwise than mystifying when unconnected with any vivid sequence of tangible events. And for the most part the names of these earliest rulers of Babylonia stand, in the present state of our knowledge, as mere names, with only here and there a suggestion of tangibility. Now and then we hear that a bas-relief of a certain king has been preserved, as in the case of one Ur-Nina, “builder of an edifice attached to the temple of Nina at Lagash,”[19] and in such a case the mind conjures a curious world of associations at thought of an actual likeness, real or alleged, being preserved for a period of more than six thousand years. The king whose image is thus tangibly brought to view after all these centuries of oblivion must seem a very real personage, however little else is known of him or of his achievements.
Again, in the case of certain other monarchs, there are brief records of campaigns and conquests against neighbouring peoples whose very names, perhaps, have been preserved to us only through this incidental mention. In such cases the mind is stimulated to the formation of vague pictures of unknown peoples of that remote era, and the least imaginative person must feel a bewildered sense of wonderment as to what these peoples were like, whence they came, and whither they vanished. But for that matter the Babylonian kings themselves, and the peoples over whom they ruled, seem shadowy and mysterious enough, to say nothing of their neighbours. The present knowledge does not by any means suffice to give us a full list of the names of these early monarchs.