The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 01

by Unknown

Consider even in the most casual way the mere samples that are exhibited here in the museum. This first case, the label tells us, contains tablets—sample leaves, if you will—from the famous “Creation” and “Deluge” series. That is to say, from the book which has been called the Chaldean Genesis, and which excited such a furor of attention when George Smith of the British Museum first deciphered part of its contents, because it seemed to give so striking a clew to the origin of the sacred book of the Hebrews. The Hebrew legends are very differently received to-day from what they were even fifty years ago, thanks to the advance of science; but these Chaldean stories of the creation and destruction of mankind still have absorbing interest as historical documents in the story of the mental evolution of our race, both for what they teach of the ideas of remote generations of men, and for what they taught the generation of our immediate predecessors about the true status of comparative mythology.

It will be recalled that the Assyrians were Semites closely related to the Hebrews. Indeed, tradition held that Father Abraham, in common with the ancestors of the Assyrians, came from the land of the Chaldeans. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that these sacred books of the Assyrians are replete with the same traditions and give expression to much the same cast of thought as the sacred books of the Hebrews. Thus, here we have a closely comparable account of the creation of the world out of primeval chaos and of the destruction of all but a favoured few in a universal deluge. Even the story of the sending out from the ark of first one bird and then another, until finally the raven found a place to alight, when the ark itself had stranded on a mountain top, is reproduced with such closeness of detail as practically to demonstrate a common origin of the two traditions.

Here, again, is a story of how Sargon, an early king of Agade, was cast away, Moses-like, in a basket, to be rescued from the waters of the Euphrates by a compassionate discoverer of his plight. There is even a tablet which gives intimations of the story of the building of the Tower of Babel. And with it all there is imbued the same black, dreadful view of life that actuated the authors of the Old Testament. Always we are made to feel the threat of the angry deity; always this religion is a religion of fear. Generosity, brotherly love, compassion, morality—in a broad sense these words play but little part in the terminology of the Semite. The Semitic conqueror was notorious for his cruelty. He loved to persecute his victim, to crucify him, to flay him alive. The writers of the Hebrew and of the Assyrian books alike record these deeds without a shudder. They show to the psychologist a race lacking in imagination, which is the mother of sympathy, but imbued through and through with egotism. The legends of the sacred books give further evidence of these same traits. Here before us, among the other tablets just noted, are the famous stories of the descent of Ishtar, the Goddess of Love, into the nether regions, and of the trials and perils which she encountered there, and those that fell upon the outside world because of her absence. It is recorded that when finally a messenger was sent from a superior power demanding her release, the powers of the nether world gave her up unwillingly, but retained the innocent messenger to torture in her stead; and it probably never occurred to the mind of the Assyrian soothsayer that it might have been within the power of the superior gods to release the innocent messenger as well.

Another famous set of tablets records the adventures of Gilgamish, whose heroic trials and mighty deeds suggest the Hercules of the Greeks. All in all, these religious and mythological texts give us the closest insight into the moral nature of the Assyrian, not merely during the period of Asshurbanapal, but for many generations before, since these sacred books are in the main but copies of old Babylonian ones, dating from the most remote periods of antiquity.

The tablets of the next case illustrate a different phase of Assyrian mental activity. They are virtually books of reference, and schoolbooks—that is, “Grammatical Tablets, Lists of Cuneiform Signs, Explanatory Lists of Words, etc.—drawn up for use in the Royal Library at Nineveh.” They include a tablet of “words and phrases used in legal documents, to serve as grammatical examples; one column being in the Sumero-Accadian language, the other an Assyrian translation; also lists of a verbal formation, and an explanatory list of words”—a dictionary, if you please! Even more remarkable is a tablet giving a list of picture characters with the archaic forms of cuneiform signs to which they were thought to correspond; this list being supplemented by another in which the archaic forms themselves are interpreted with the “modern” equivalent. This tablet shows that, in the belief of the ancient Assyrian, the cuneiform character had been developed, at a remote epoch, from a purely historical writing (as was doubtless the case), but that the exact line of this development had faded from the memories of men in the latter-day epoch of the seventh century B.C.

In the case beyond are tablets with lists of “Names of Birds, Plants, Bronze Objects, Articles of Clothing, etc., for reference as an aid to writing literary compositions.” Then lists of officials, and other documents relating to the history of Babylonia-Assyria, including historical inscriptions of Sennacherib. Beyond, a set of letters, public and private, mostly inscribed on oval bits of clay, three or four inches long, and sometimes provided with envelopes of the same material. Of this numerous collection of letters, the one that attracts most popular attention is that in which King Sennacherib refers to certain objects given by him to his son Esarhaddon. This is commonly known as the “will of Sennacherib.” Near this is another letter that is interesting because it is provided with a baked-clay envelope, into which the letter slipped as a kernel of a nut into its shell. The envelope bears the inscription, “To the King, my Lord, from Asshur Ritsua,” and it is authenticated by two impressions of the writer’s seal.

This use of seals, by-the-bye, is quite general, particularly in the case of official documents. Sometimes, as in the case of a contract tablet shown here, the witness, in lieu of seal, gives the stamp of his finger nail, this being equivalent, I suppose, to “John Doe, his mark.” It is hardly to be supposed that the average Assyrian could write any more than the average Greek or Roman could, or, for that matter, the average European of a century ago. The professional scribe did the writing, of course, whence the necessity for seals to assure authenticity of even ordinary letters. Doubtless the art of gem engraving, which the old Chaldeans carried to amazing perfection, followed by the Greeks and Romans, has been allowed to decline in recent generations largely because the increasing spread of education—not to mention gummed envelopes—made seals less and less a necessity. Perhaps the art may be revived in the age of the typewriter. But if one stops to speak of seals, he could hardly be restrained from rushing off to the wonderful collection in the gem department of the British Museum, where the Græco-Roman intaglios would drive all thought of other collections from his head,—though even there the Cyprian finds would lead him back irrevocably to the Babylonian model,—whereas, for the moment, our true concern is not with seals of any sort, but with the documents they are purposed to authenticate.

These documents are of the strangest assortment; and yet not strange, so precisely similar are they to the official records of modern communal existence. Thus here is one tablet, of about the year 650 B.C., recording the sale of a house. There another tells of the leasing of certain property, for a term of six years, for twelve shekels of silver. And, capping the climax, here are tablets recording the loan of money, veritable notes, with even the rate of interest—twenty per cent—carefully prescribed. One learns that the money broker did a thriving business in old Nineveh. How near to us those days are, after all!

And nearer yet they seem when we pass to the cases of the tablets of omens and forecasts based upon the position of the stars and planets, the actions of animals and reptiles, the flight of birds, and the appearance of newly born offspring. For when superstition is in question all races are kin, and all times are contemporary. The European of to-day who shudders when he sees the moon over his left shoulder, is brother in spirit to the Assyrian astrologer who used this “astrolabe” to forecast the events of his own immediate future. And these incantations, religious and magical rites, prayers, hymns, litanies—do they not make it clear that the Assyrian was indeed our elder brother? Does this lifted veil then show us a vista of three millennia, or only of as many generations? At least it serves to bring home to us—and I doubt if any other exhibit could do it as forcibly—how slow, how snail-like is the rate of human progress. Yet, after all, how vain this moralising; for who does not know that the day when Nineveh saw its prime was only the yesterday of human civilisation? If one doubted it before, he can doubt no longer, since he has wandered down the rooms in which the relics from the library of Asshurbanapal are exhibited, glancing thus casually at the accommodating English labels.