The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East/Volume 1/Introduction
SACKED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE
OF
BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA
INTRODUCTION
THE REMARKABLE REDISCOVERY OF EARTH'S EARLY
CIVILZATION AND OF THE GROWTH OF
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN MAN
THE ancient Asiatic land of Babylonia, the fertile valley of the great Euphrates river, has a double interest, sufficient to arouse the eager attention of every modern reader. In the first place this valley was the home of the oldest civilization that has survived in any intelligible form, and in its literature we may study the earliest upward steps of the thought and intelligence of our human race. In the second place, the Hebrew people were Babylonians, who left the land some two thousand years before Christ, under the guidance of their patriarch Abraham. Hence much as the Hebrew religion was afterward uplifted by the teachings of Moses, of Jesus, and of many a lesser spiritual leader, yet the human beginnings of both Jewish and Christian faiths are founded on Babylonian thought and knowledge. Our religious beliefs of to-day are still interwoven with many a strand that can be traced back to its Babylonian source. Still a third, though lighter, cause for interest in the old Babylonian texts lies in the newness and oddity and curiosity of their recent rediscovery after they had lain buried for many ages, and were apparently lost to the world forever.
The antiquity of Babylonia is so great, the destruction of its many powerful cities was so complete, that even in the far distant days of Greece and Rome men were beginning to forget Babylon and to make the mistake of referring to Egypt as the earliest home of civilization. So complete became the oblivion of the older land that, a century ago, our modern world knew nothing of Babylonia or of its later rival Assyria, except for the chance references to them in the Hebrew Scriptures and a few comments preserved in old Greek authors. The pictures of Babylonia in the Bible were of the original paradise, the flood, and then of a great power under a savage king Nimrod, or under later tyrants, such as Sennacherib and Nebuchadrezzar. The Greek comments were all based on one source a history by a Babylonian priest, Berosus, written about the time of Alexander the Great. These surviving fragments from Berosus are given here at the opening of our volume, that the reader may combine them with the well-known Bible story and so begin by seeing Babylonia as all the world saw it a century ago, a land of somber mystery, of desolation incurred as a direct curse for sin, of darkness lightened only by the fantastic legends of Berosus.
The reopening to our vision of the strange, true world of this most ancient land began about seventy years ago. Scientific explorers unearthed the ruins of some of its forgotten cities, and found wall-carvings and tablets inscribed in the old Assyrian language. At first no man could read the unknown script, and it is one of the proudest triumphs of scientific ingenuity that by patient labor our scholars managed at last to interpret the ancient signs, and reread the language which had been obliterated for over two thousand years.
Spurred on by this remarkable success, our scientists have explored the whole Euphrates valley and delved into many a buried city. Briefly outlined, the knowledge we have gained is this. Five thousand years ago there stood in the Babylonian valley many strong cities encircled by mighty defensive walls of brick, and inhabited by men of considerable intellectual power. These people wrote, and meditated, and invented arts, and had priests and kings and carpenters, and lived in that mutual dependence and division of the labors of life which we call civilization. Moreover, these grim and ancient city walls were some of them built high upon the ruins of yet older fortified towns, dating back into centuries that we can not count. At the very bottom of one of these huge mounds of ruin, overlaid by the debris of city upon city, our explorers have come at last upon the remnants of a mere simple fishermen's village. How long is it since those fisher folk spread their crude nets against the still unceasing flow of the great Euphrates river? No man can say, but the explorers reckon that the village may perhaps date back twelve thousand years.
Despite this doubling and doubling again of the length of our modern vision into the past, no scientist would to-day say positively that these strange, brick-built cities of Babylonia represent man's original civilization, his first rise above the savage state. They represent only the first of which we have clear trace. Searchers have caught vague glimpses of other civilizations perhaps even older, in central Asia. And in the seaport city of Eridu, one of the very oldest of Babylonian centers of culture, the chief religious legend was of the god, Ea, who had in long past years come from the sea, and taught the people all they knew. This may well imply the arrival of a chance wanderer from some far land wherein the dawn of knowledge had begun yet earlier.
The Library of Ashur-banipal
Most of our knowledge of the literature and religion of Babylonia has come to us from our discovery of the library of the Assyrian king, Ashur-banipal. This monarch reigned at a comparatively recent date, about 650 B.C.; but he was himself an interested student of the past, that past which he could trace as far behind him as we, a century ago, could trace our past. So King Ashur-banipal set his learned men to transcribing all the literature of the older days, writing it down in his capital city of Nineveh, on the little tablets, or bricks of clay, which were his books. Into these clay tablets the scribes stamped the queer little wedge-shaped figures, which we now call the "cuneiform" (cone-shaped) language. This peculiar-looking library, in which the books themselves were bricks, was afterward destroyed with the destruction of the city; but we have found some twenty thousand of the tablets which, despite fire and flood and time, can still be read wholly or in part. There have been other writings found in other places, many books of brick; but no others have given us such value as the great library of Ashur-banipal.
The Four Successive Civilizations of Babylonia
From all these garnered writings we have learned that there were at least four, if not more, successive and very different civilizations built up in the Babylonian valley. The first clearly visible civilization, which flourished long before the mighty city of Babylon arose, was that of the Sumerian people. They lived at the southern end of the valley, near the mouth of the Euphrates river, or along the sea-coast of the Persian Gulf. These Sumerians seem to have been of different stock from either of the two races of men that have since dominated the world the Aryan ancestors of Europe and America, and the great Semitic stock from which sprang the Arabs, Babylonians, and Hebrews. The Sumerians were more like the smooth-faced, round-headed men of central Asia, the Chinese or Tartars. So, perchance, both Aryans and Semites have been but the bearers of a borrowed torch of culture. The first light of thought, of progress, may have been set aflame among the Sumerians, or even, as the tale of Ea suggests, in some still earlier race of men.
North of Sumer, higher up the Euphrates, there began, in an age perhaps five thousand years before Christ, the growth of other cities. These were built by a more barbaric people, of different language and race, who at first looked up to the Sumerians and borrowed much from them. This rougher northern land was called Akkad; and its people, the Akkadians, were chiefly of Semitic stock, wanderers probably from Syria or from the nearby desert of Arabia.
Gradually the fiercer, more numerous men of Akkad came to dominate those of Sumer. And then, not later than twenty-five hundred years before Christ — for we come now to days and events upon which we can set a date, though scholars are not yet positive within narrow limits — there swept over Akkad a new Semitic invasion. With this the rule of the city of Babylon began, a new city speaking a new language, though similar to the Akkadian.
Babylon first became powerful under a famous conqueror, King Sargon, whom later ages adopted as the founder of the great city. Then, several centuries later (about 2000 B.C.), a second soldier and great ruler in the ways of peace, Hammurapi, raised the city to such a height of power and splendor as fixed forever its name and its ascendancy over the entire Euphrates valley.[1]
It was in Hammurapi's day, if not before under Sargon, that Babylon's power and influence began to spread beyond the Euphrates valley. Her people gained their first knowledge of the rival civilization of Egypt. This was probably less ancient than that of the Sumerians; but Egypt had not been so harried by devastating war as was the easily accessible valley of the Euphrates; and we shall find in Egypt a more rapid progress in all the arts — with the exception of the one dread art of war. While Hammurapi and his Babylonians fought, the men of Egypt thought. Thus Egypt's intellectual and religious development makes her ancient literature in some ways more worthy of study than that of Babylon, though Egypt never reached the opulence nor the cosmopolitan spirit of the shrewd Babylonians. The latter became the merchant princes, the commercial travelers, of the world.
There still remains a fourth Euphrates empire to be noted. The Assyrians, who dwelt in what had been originally a sort of rough frontier colony of Babylon, gradually grew in war-like power, until they threw off the yoke of Babylon, conquered the parent city, and became in their turn the military rulers of the entire valley. Babylon, however, continued even in Assyrian days to dominate the region as its chief center of religion and culture. Sometimes Babylon fought for independence; at others it submitted and was boastfully displayed as the proudest jewel of the Assyrian crown.
The Oldest Literature and the Growth of Thought
Turn now to the literary remains of these four successive ages. Many of the tablets of the Assyrian Ashur-banipal are written in two parallel columns. They give the text in his own tongue and also in the ancient Akkadian, or Sumerian. Sometimes a third column gives the same record in the later Akkadian, or Babylonian language. Hence we learn that the old Akkadian tongue had been retained for thousands of years, much as Latin has been in our own day, as a sort of religious language. Later, Babylonian and Assyrian resembled it, were born from it, as our Italian and French are born from Latin. The priests of Babylon sang their religious chants in the ancient Akkadian. We might even compare our day and theirs yet further; for just as we find our ultimate religious sources not in the Latin, but in the still more ancient Hebrew, so Babylon looked back beyond Akkad and found its first religious source in the Sumerian tongue.
In the present volume, therefore, you will find, first of all, the surviving fragments of the pre-Babylonian days. First come the Sumerian texts, the oldest and most valuable survivals of that earliest human tongue, a language that had been dead for centuries before Hebrew or Greek or Latin was first born.
Next comes the old Akkadian section. The religious chants and hymns in Akkadian are quite numerous among the later libraries; but we can not be sure whether they preserve genuine early Akkadian thought or were composed in the old tongue by Babylonian priests, much as the poet Milton and many another modern scholar wrote Latin hymns, long after Latin had disappeared from common use. In addition to this book Akkadian, however, our explorers have found numerous carved inscriptions of old Akkadian and even Sumerian date. Moreover, when we deal with late Assyrian transcripts we must remember that Assyrian legend and religious faith always look back to the older originals. Neither Assyria nor Babylon seems to have added much to the stock of thought which each inherited. The progress of ideas, through all those many centuries that we can trace, was almost inconceivably slow. An Assyrian would have told you, like many a modern pessimist, that there was nothing new under the sun, that every possible thing had been thought and said, and said again, thousands of years before his time.
We have lived to know that the Assyrian was wrong. We can see now how even his own civilization bore within it the seeds of a tremendously expanding tree of knowledge and divine inspiration. To realize this, to see how from Babylonian sources were to burst forth the great Hebrew religious thought, and also the great Greek scientific thought, one need only follow earnestly the literature presented in this and the succeeding volumes.
Let the reader begin by noting here the faith and the degree of intelligence, as well as the social and religious customs, that find expression in our Sumerian and Akkadian texts, those immeasurably old and oldest treasure-houses of human ideas. There are proverbs, some of them closely paralleling our modern sayings. There are spells to ward off evil, such as our age has almost, but not quite, outgrown. There are pompous boasts of conquests by forgotten kings, whose very names are now unreadable. There are laws also, to protect property and life, savage retaliatory laws such as we should expect at the beginning; and there are other laws such as we should not have expected, arranging small details of business. Instead of a single patriarch or ruler deciding all matters off-hand by a rough personal sense of justice, there was already a complex social code, seeking to fix broad impersonal relationships of equal standing for all men. As for the religious chants, they speak of good powers and evil powers, gods and demons; but these show no large religious thought. Their imagined deities were little more than men. Each city had at first its own god, and sometimes he could not even protect his special city, so his people did not think of him as very powerful. It was quite natural that some other city, having a god a little stronger, should fight against him.
The Great Age of Babylonia
Hammurapi's Code; The Creation Epic
From these early Sumerian and Akkadian days arose at last the great empire and rich civilization of the city of Babylon. Its monarchs conquered all the world they knew; and its literature incorporated all the old legends and gave them a newer and more lasting life, by which they have survived until now. Among the kings of Babylon, we look first and chiefly to Hammurapi. Modern scholars have chosen this ancient monarch as the crowning genius of his country and his race. If Babylon had been famed before his day, he extended both its fame and its power until they seemed illimitable. He gathered the older laws of his land and framed them all into a single code, which still survives. He wrote personal letters which we can read to-day. His name means more to us than that of any other Babylonian before Nebuchadrezzar.
Somewhere about Hammurapi's time, perhaps in the peace which under his dominion extended up and down the length of the sorely suffering valley of the great river, lit-erature reached its fullest splendor. Most of the later texts now found prove to be copies of older works, dating back in one way or another to this great Babylonian period.
Then arose the Creation Epic, founded on still earlier Sumerian tales, but now assuming its final form. Indeed, several varying creation-legends have been preserved and are here given. The chief form of the epic is a noteworthy work, partly because it somewhat tallies with the Biblical narrative of the "beginnings," partly because it marks such an upward step in religious conception. The Babylonians had become wholly convinced that their chief god, Marduk, was more powerful than any other. So they thought of him, not exactly as ruling the world, but at least as being able to defeat any other deity. They enlarged their conception of him until, in the epic, he becomes a civilizing god who wars against chaos and the monsters of darkness. And he conquers. But the struggle is not an easy one; Marduk must fight his very best just as in real life Babylon must keep constant ward against all the wild and terrible barbarians sweeping down upon her valley from the unknown regions of the outer world.
The Gilgamesh Epic
To this age also belongs apparently the Gilgamesh Epic, the story of a national hero and ancient king, which includes the tale of the flood and many another old, old legend. This Gilgamesh epic has been declared by modern critics the finest flower of Babylonian literature. Modern English poems have been built upon it, yet the ancient epic itself has never been fully translated into English. For this reason Professor Jastrow has prepared for the present volume a special translation, the fullest which has yet been given in our language. As the Gilgamesh story also includes a love-tale, or something that approaches this, the epic thus becomes earth's first romance.
To this fascinating ancient epic are here added several other tales, rich with vivid glimpses into the world of the early days. Sometimes these tales resemble closely and most instructively some passages of our own Bible, but it may be well to warn the reader that in the early days of Babylonian discovery these resemblances were somewhat exaggerated. Scholars were so interested in tracing every similarity that they succeeded in finding some which did not exist. For example, one fragment of the Creation Epic was misread as describing the tempting of Eve by the serpent; and another fragment was widely heralded as relating to the building of the tower of Babel. The latter tale is now seen to be dealing with some great tumult caused by a king or god in Babylon, but without any mention whatever of a tower.
Nevertheless, the Babylonian tales have all a religious and almost a Biblical tinge. It is hard to say where, in that distant epoch, religion ceased and simple story-telling began. The narratives deal always with the mingled doings of gods and men, because these two, as we have seen, were in the dawning of Akkadian religious thought almost the same. It must, indeed, have been in such semi-religious tales that the Babylonians took their pleasure; for we have found no other stories, and no drama, no studies of the human heart, and no comic quips. Man may have learned to laugh even in those grim days, but, if so, he put no trace of laughter into his books. He kept his written records very seriously.
We might extend this comment further to say that there is little of what is commonly called "literary merit" in any of the old Babylonian writings. Their interest to-day depends wholly upon the reader, upon his power to gather from them some vision of human nature in its early childhood. In our imperfect knowledge of this lost language we can not judge whether in the original the lines had any marked music of sound, though it is quite clear that many of them were written in verse. Moreover, the religious chants offer us sad echoes of human passion, a stirring of stern heart-strings such as can be felt despite all the difficulties of time and language. And some passages of the Gilgamesh and Creation epics are large with power and vision. But, upon the whole, the Babylonian skill in self-expression was crude and slight.
Business Documents and Private Letters
There is yet another class of Babylonian records, scarcely to be called literature, yet of very curious interest and value. These are the letters, private or official, and the business documents of the time. The majority of the clay tablets that have come down to us have been of this latter character; that is to say, business records, formal agreements made in the presence of witnesses and then filed in some public or private storeroom that there might be no "breaking of the bond." In one case we have even recovered the complete set of tablets of a Babylonian business firm, continuing from generation to generation for nearly two hundred years. The name of this most ancient and long-lived firm of business magnates, forerunners of our present merchant princes, was Egibi. They were bankers, and while their own surviving records began only about 600 B.C., when they were called "the sons of Egibi" yet we find other earlier references to the house of Egibi, so that their banking career is thought to have begun as early as perhaps 900 B.C. Tablets such as theirs can have no wide interest, yet a few samples of them are given, that the reader may see for himself the methods of Babylonian traffic.
Far more humanly interesting are the personal letters, carrying bad news or good, and the political ones, seeking to curry favor with a king. Of political letters, the most remarkable find of the last generation is the collection called the Tel-el-Amarna letters. These were not discovered in the Babylonian valley at all, but in Egypt at Tel-el-Amarna in 1888.
The importance of this series of letters lies mainly in the fact that they have shown us that Babylonian was the political language of their time, a sort of universal medium employed by many nations. Thus the influence of Babylonia's culture extended even farther than her arms. The letters themselves are written to the king of Egypt by governors and princes of Palestine and Syria, who were tributary to him. Yet these submissive reports to a proud conqueror are written not in Egyptian, but in Babylonian. Their subjects are of very human interest: excuses for not sending tribute, appeals for help against rebellion, vows of honesty and fidelity mingled with bitter charges of bad faith and disloyalty against their neighbors. All the methods of "diplomacy" are here revealed to us as being as old as empire itself. Falsehood and the cunning of the vanquished are shown upon the surface, with brute ferocity beneath, ready to strike heavy when it dares.
Assyrian Literature
When we turn to the Assyrian literature we find it of the same general character as that of the older races, whose thought the Assyrians inherited. The later records of boastful kings still read much like those of Sargon and Hammurapi. Only, with the rougher, fiercer Assyrians, there came into each king's boasting a crueler note, a seeming delight in savagery and torture that pictures the Semitic race at its very worst. The mailed foot of Assyria trampled upon the conquered nations with ten times the destruction that Babylon had wrought.
The Reading of the Riddle of the Texts
Our volume gives the examples of these grim historical records which are most noteworthy to-day. The first, the "Inscription of Tiglath-pileser I.," has a special interest from having been the text by which scientific scholars first convinced the world that they had really solved the riddle of these old clay tablets, and could interpret their long-forgotten writing. This happened in 1860. Scholars had before offered translations of other Assyrian writings; but critics pointed out that there was no proof that the tablets realty meant what some scholars said they did. So four noted Orientalists established a test. They selected this unknown inscription and each translated it separately. The four translations were then presented to a jury of learned men. If four men, working separately, could read the same meaning from this ancient script, the meaning must be there. There were some small differences among the translations, such as were inevitable at that early stage of our investigation of Assyrian remains; but upon the whole the agreement of the four Orientalists was so close that the whole world was convinced that the riddle of these strange "cuneiform" texts was really solved.
Neo-Babylonian Literature
The volume contains also a brief review of what little we know of the literature of that other later Babylonian kingdom, the Neo-Babylonian, which triumphed briefly over Assyria's fall. This was the kingdom of Nebuchadrezzar and Belshazzar, and we give their inscriptions and those of Cyrus, the final conqueror of Babylon, so as to complete the picture of the savage, war-ridden days of this grim childhood of the human race.
- ↑ The chronology of our most recent Babylonian scholars has been adopted throughout this volume. Babylonian chronology is soundly and fully established from about the time of Hammurapi (2000 B.C.) onward. But as to the gap of years which separates him from Sargon there is doubt. Until lately our scholars had accepted without question the positive statement of a late Babylonian king, who said that in rebuilding an ancient temple he found beneath it an inscription showing it to have been built thirty-two hundred years before, by the king who had succeeded Sargon. This would have dated Sargon's reign at about 3800 B.C., or nearly two thousand years before Hammurapi. But as recent discoveries increase our knowledge of those early days, our scientists have found reason to doubt whether more than a few hundred years intervened between these two great kings of Babylon. More probably the monarch who announced the old temple's date was mistaken, or perhaps his officials deceived him. At all events, the present inclination is to set the date of Sargon between 2600 and 2800 B.C., and so reduce all older figures by rather more than a thousand years. This most recent reckoning is the one employed through-out this volume.