The civilization of Babylonia and Assyria

Its remains, language, history, religion, commerce, law, art, and literature

by Morris Jastrow | 1915 | 168,585 words

This work attempts to present a study of the unprecedented civilizations that flourished in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley many thousands of years ago. Spreading northward into present-day Turkey and Iran, the land known by the Greeks as Mesopotamia flourished until just before the Christian era....

For about twenty years after Rawlinson's departure from Baghdad, no excavations were carried on either in the north or the south, and it was perhaps just as well that a period elapsed before excavations were resumed so as to afford the scholars of Europe, devoting themselves to cuneiform research, opportunity to study the material which had been gathered and which both the British Museum and the Louvre, with commendable zeal, were planning to make accessible to scholars. [1]

By the year 1870 a large amount of the material had been published, besides many detailed studies on the language of the inscriptions to which the name Assyrian was currently given. The decipherment was thus placed on a securer basis, and translations of some of the more important historical and dedicatory texts on cylinders and on inscribed slabs and monuments were made, which, however deficient in details, left no doubt in the minds of impartial judges that the main facts had been correctly determined.

Interest in continuing the excavations was aroused anew through the discoveries made among the tablets of Ashurbanapal's library, by George Smith, first engaged as an engraver in the British Museum, and then as an Assistant in the Department of Assyrian Antiquities. In the fall of 1872 he came across a large fragment on which, as he found by patient study, there was related the story of a great Deluge. Upon proceeding further he ascertained that the cuneiform record bore striking points of resemblance with the Biblical account.

At a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, held on December third of that year, he presented the results of his studies which showed that the Assyrian account of the Deluge formed part of a large composition recounting the adventures of a hero whose name was provisionally read Izdubar, but who, as we now know, was called Gilgamesh. The resemblance between the Biblical and the cuneiform tale of a great catastrophe which destroyed all mankind was the ehief reason for the profound sensation aroused by Smith's discoveries.

The London "Daily Telegraph" at once came forward with an offer to defray the cost of an expedition to Kouyunjik to search for further portions of the royal library. The offer was accepted by the trustees of the British Museum, and early in 1873 George Smith left for the mounds of Assyria and Babylonia, which he was to visit again in 1874 and 1876, only to meet his death at Aleppo on the occasion of his third trip, stricken down with a malarial fever that was sweeping through the region.

His death, on the nineteenth of August, 1876, at the early age of fortyseven years, was a severe loss to science, for his past work had given promise of still greater usefulness in the future. As a result of his two sojourns at Kouyunjik several hundred fragments of the library tablets were added to the collections of the British Museum, besides numerous inscribed cylinders, slabs and other objects which he obtained as a result of further search in the mounds at Nimrud, Kaleh-Shergat and elsewhere.

Previous to this Rassam, during his excavations at Kouyunjik after Layard's departure, had also found many hundreds of fragments and a last gleaning was secured many years afterwards through a further search of the ruins of the palace made by E. A. Wallis Budge and by L. W. King of the British Museum.

George Smith's sojourn at the mounds was too brief to allow him to undertake systematic or even extensive excavations. All that he could do was to rummage through the ruins uncovered by his predecessors, chiefly at Kouyunjik, Nimrud and Kaleh-Shergat, to open some further trenches and hunt in a more or less desultory manner for further inscriptions and monuments. The same general remark holds good for the labors of Hormuzd Rassam at mounds both in the north and the south during the years following upon Smith's death. For a period of five years, 1878-1882, he spent several months each year at the mounds. His energy was indefatigable, and with added experience he was able frequently to achieve remarkable success in a comparatively short time.

He gathered, during his prolonged sojourn, a large number of most important antiquities, and definitely identified many mounds as covering ancient remains. Among his discoveries perhaps the most remarkable was the finding of a large number of strips of bronze embossed with ornaments, figures and inscriptions that proved to be parts of huge bronze plates covering the cedar gates of a palace of Shal-maneser III. [2] This discovery was made at a site, Balawat, about fifteen miles to the east of Mosul, the ancient name of which was Imgur-Enlil. The scenes represented on the bronze panels were illustrative of the campaigns of Shalmaneser III.

With attention to details, the camp scenes, the marching Assyrian armies, the attacks on the enemy, the capture of forts, the taking of booty and captives, as well as sacrificial rites in connection with the campaigns were depicted. Through such illustrations the costumes of the various divisions of the army, the trappings of the horses, the arrangement of the camps, the utensils and customs of daily life and many details of the ritual were revealed. These data were supplemented and further illustrated by the inscriptions accompanying the designs. Still greater success awaited Rassam in his excavations at a number of the southern mounds, which were also more systematically conducted.

Attacking several of the mounds that cover the site of Babylon, he was far more successful than his predecessors in securing rich returns in epigraphical material. Significant among the historical records was a clay cylinder giving the account by Cyrus himself of his conquest of Babylonia in 539 B.C. [3] that event of worldwide import which was destined to bring to an end the history of Babylonia and Assyria.

A large collection of business documents covering the Neo-Babylonian period (625-539 B.C.) [4] was also found which, together with several thousand similar tablets from the mounds at Babylon secured by George Smith shortly before his death, greatly increased the material for studying the legal procedure and the many-sided business activity of Babylonia.

Through these tablets we obtain an insight into the life, the occupations, the business methods and the commercial activity of the people which supplemented the view of the intellectual life obtained through the literary documents and the picture of the political and military energies and ambitions resulting from a study of the historical records.

shamash the sun godPLATE X

Shamash, the Sun-God, in His shrine at Sippar

The business documents covered every phase of every day occurrences, sale and hire of fields, rent and sale of houses, loans and receipts, contracts for work, reports of business agents, marriage and divorce, last testaments and terms of adoption, suits of all kinds and the decisions of judges, and so on through the entire gamut of the records one might find in the legal archives of any municipality of the present day. [5]

Besides the archive of Babylon, Rassam also discovered an extensive business archive in the temple area of Abu Habba, a new site which Rassam 's excavations definitely identified as the ancient city Sippar, a centre of the cult of Shamash, the sun-god, which played a most notable part in Babylonian history.

 

 

 

The mounds at Abu Habba cover an enormous extent, no less than 250 acres, according to recent calculations, [6] of which the temple area including, as in all of the large cities of Babylonia, numerous edifices, smaller temples and chapels, besides houses for the temple administration and for the housing of the priests alone covered about 40 acres.

He opened up a large number of rooms and was rewarded by finding no less than 60,000 clay tablets in the temple archives, most of them business documents, but also quite a sprinkling of literary documents, such as those in Ashurbanapal's library, hymns, reports, omen texts, grammatical exercises, mathematical lists, etc. Numerous historical documents were also found at Abu Habba by Rassam, most valuable among these being a superb stone tablet containing at the head a design representing Shamash seated in his shrine, with his two attendants, holding ropes attached to a wheel as the symbol of the sun, while into the presence of the sun-god a king is being led preceded by a priest and followed by the goddess A, the consort of Shamash, in the attitude of interceding with her divine husband on behalf of the king.

A long inscription covering both sides of the tablet recounts the history of the temple, relating how in consequence of disasters to Sippar, the cult of Shamash had been neglected, and the old image of the god had disappeared, but Nebopaliddin, the king of Babylonia (c. 888-854 B.C.), determined on restoring the grandeur of the old temple, had been fortunate in finding a terra-cotta relief of the image, from which as a model a new image was made.

The inscription, full of interesting historical details and of regulations of the cult, closes with a list of gifts and offerings ordered by Nebopaliddin to be set aside regularly on six festive occasions during the year. [7] He also found some remarkable boundary-stones, recording grants of land to royal officials and decorated with symbols of the gods, who were invoked as witnesses to the transaction and whose curses are called down upon any one defacing or destroying the monument or altering any of its specifications.

Twelve years later, in 1894, supplemental excavations were carried on at Abu Habba by Prof. Vincent Scheil, of Paris, under the auspices of the Turkish government, which resulted in adding many hundreds of literary documents from the temple archives, terra-cotta figurines and bas-reliefs, some representing Shamash and his consort, others models of animals, deposited as votive offerings, utensils and weapons in bronze, numerous seal-cylinders with various designs and used to roll over the soft clay of the business documents as signatures of the parties interested, numerous inscribed bricks and pieces of pottery. [8]

Scheil was also able, despite the shortness of his stay at Abu Habba, more accurately to determine the various divisions of the temple and something of its interior arrangement, including the site of the temple school.

 

 

 

 

 


PLATE XI

Fig. 1(left), Babylonian boundary stone
Fig. 2(right), Stone pedestal (steatite) from excavations at
Telloh

Rassam, during the five years covered by his firman, searched many other mounds in the north and south, conducting hurried excavations at some of them with varying results. Notably at Birs Nimrud [9] he laid bare no less than eighty rooms in the huge temple E-zida, "the legitimate house", dedicated to Nabu, the chief deity of Borsippa.

Among the documents found here, special mention should be made of a terra-cotta cylinder containing in cuneiform an account of the restoration of the temple by the Greek governor of Babylonia, Antiochus Soter, in the year 270 B.C., a most interesting proof of the continued sanctity which the temple continued to enjoy almost three centuries after the fall of Babylon.

The mounds at Tell Ibrahim, about fifteen miles to the north-east of Hillah, and those at Daillum, about ten miles to the south of Hillah, were among those included in his tours through the region with, however, indifferent results. In an interesting volume [10] he gives an account of his entire career as an explorer which, beginning in the days of Layard, extended to the threshold of the latest epoch in Babylonian and Assyrian excavations. With Rassam a second period in excavations on the Tigris and Euphrates closes. The third, which begins about the time that Rassam started on his last series of campaigns, is marked by systematic excavations concentrated on a single series of mounds.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

See pp. 16, 17 and 28, for Botta's, Place's and Oppert's publications. In 1861 the British Museum began, under the editorship of Sir Henry Rawlinson, the publication of the cuneiform texts in the British Museum. Five large folio volumes under the title The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, were issued (1861-1880), and this series was followed by a second, Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, etc., in the British Museum (1900 to date), of which, up to the present, 34 parts, each containing about 50 plates, have been issued.

[2]:

See the superb publication, Bronze Ornaments of the Palace Gates of Balawat, by Samuel Birch and T. G. Pinches (London, 1881), and Billerbeck and Delitzsch, die Palasttore Salmanassars II von Balawat (Beitrdge zur Assyriologie, vi, 1). See Plates LXVIII and LXIX.

[3]:

See Plate XXV, Fig. 2.

[4]:

See Chapter VI for specimens of such documents.

[5]:

See, for details, Chapter VI.

[6]:

Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands, p. 268.

[7]:

For a summary of the inscription see Harper, Assyrian and Babylonian Literature, pp. 30-33 ; it is fully treated by Johannes Jeremias, "Die Cultustafel von Sippar" (Beitrage zur Assyriologie 7, pp. 268-292).

[8]:

A full account of Scheil's excavations will be found in his volume, Une Saison de Fouilles a Sippar (Memoires de l'Institut Francois d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire, (1902) vol. i., fax. 1).

[9]:

See above, p. 31 seq.

[10]:

Aashur and the Land of Nimrod (N. T., 1897).

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