Ancient Mesopotamia

Henry Williams

• Publisher: Ozymandias Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781531262921
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

The Assyrian Empire is in some respects unique in history. Despite the proverbial tendency of history to repeat itself, there has been no duplication of the tragic history of this wonderful body politic. It rose to be the most powerful of nations; it reached out and gained the widest empire that had hitherto been seen; its capital, Nineveh, was for a few centuries the metropolis of the world. But in the very fulness of its imperial flight it was struck down and utterly destroyed. Other empires have been subjugated; Nineveh was annihilated. The very name "Assyrian" became only a memory and a tradition. Late in the seventh century BC, Nineveh was the boasted mistress of the world; two centuries later the mounds that covered her ruins were noted by the Greek historian Xenophon, who marched past them with the ill-fated Ten Thousand, merely as the relics of some ancient city of unknown name. So brief may be the highest fame! Yet the sequel is stranger still. As we have seen, these forgotten mounds treasured secrets of history which they have since given up to the explorer, and our own generation has seen Assyria restored to its place in history. The details of its career are more fully known to us than those of almost any other nation of antiquity. Such a phoenix-like regeneration is a fitting sequel to the fantastic career with its tragic denouement, which is about to claim our attention...

CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE

~

Cities have been, and vanished; fanes have sunk,

Heaped into shapeless ruin; sands o’erspread

Fields that were Edens; millions too have shrunk

To a few starving hundreds, or have fled

From off the page of being. Now the dead

Are the sole habitants of Babylon;

Kings, at whose bidding nations toiled and bled,

Heroes, who many a field of carnage won,

Their names—their boasted names to utter death are done.—James Gates Percival.

It should be explained here at the very beginning that in speaking of the Mesopotamian civilisation as a unit, we are adopting for the sake of convenience a form of expression that is not historically accurate. Even the word “Mesopotamia” cannot be justified on strict analysis. The word is from the Greek, and means, literally, “between the rivers,” an obvious reference to the fact that the important portion of the territory in question lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The word was used by the Greeks in indiscriminate application to Babylonia and Assyria, and its extreme convenience as a generic term has led to its retention in lieu of a better one; yet, as has been said, it cannot be applied with strict accuracy unless its etymological significance be quite overlooked; for, curiously enough, neither Babylon nor Nineveh was wholly situated in the territory which the Greek word describes. Babylon lay partly on the western shore of the Euphrates river, and Nineveh was situated on the eastern shore of the Tigris. But in common usage, as so often happens, the exact implication of the word “Mesopotamia” has been overlooked, and the word itself has come to be applied to the entire region of Babylonia and Assyria. In this sense, rather than in the more restricted one, we shall find it convenient as a substitute for the more cumbersome appellation, Babylonia-Assyria.

It has already been pointed out that we have to do with different races of people in dealing with Mesopotamian history. After a long dispute, carried on chiefly by philologists, it is now generally conceded that the earliest civilisation of southern Babylonia was due to a non-Semitic people, the Sumerians. To this people, it would seem, must be ascribed the honour of developing the chief features of Mesopotamian civilisation, including the invention of the cuneiform system of writing. It is not at all clear at precisely what time the Semitic people, destined ultimately to become predominant in this region, made their appearance. Nor is the place of Semitic origin agreed upon among students of the subject. Some authors, as Von Kremer, Guidi, and Hommel, hold that Babylonia was itself originally the cradle of the race. Others, including Sprenger, Sayce, Schrader, De Goeje, Wright, and Barton, contend that the Semites invaded Babylonia from Arabia. Yet others, including Palgrave, Gerland, Bertin, Brinton, Nöldeke, Jastrow, Keane, and Schmidt, hold to the African origin; while a modification of these views advocated by Wiedemann, De Morgan, and Erman supposes that both the Semites and Hamites rose in Arabia, and had their common civilisation before the Hamites went to Africa. Confronted with such conflict of opinions, the historian must be content to regard the exact antecedents of the Semites, previous to their appearance in Babylonia, as quite unknown.

As to the date of the beginnings of Semitic civilisation in Mesopotamia, Dr. John P. Peters, making use of Ainsworth’s estimates as to the amount and rate of alluvial deposit at the head of the Persian Gulf, computes that the seacoast must have been established this side of the site of the city of Ur about 6600 b.c., which date must, therefore, represent the earliest possible period for the foundation of that city. Ur was apparently the most southerly city of old Babylonia, and Nippur apparently the most northerly. Dr. Peters’ excavations at Nippur lead him to base its foundation at some period previous to 6000 b.c., and possibly previous to 7000 b.c. He sums up his theory as follows:

“My suggestion, from the various facts here marshalled, would be that the original home of civilisation in Babylonia was the strip of land from Nippur southward to the neighbourhood of Ur, and not, as has sometimes been argued, the region about Babylonia and northward to Sippara; while the latter region is in itself older, it does not seem to have been older as the home of civilised man.

“The ancestors of the civilisation of Babylonia seem to have come from the region between Nippur and what was then the coast of the Persian Gulf. This would accord also with the tradition preserved to us in later sources that civilisation came to Babylonia out of the Persian Gulf. Possibly Eridu, on the Arabian plateau near the western shore and not far from the head of what was then the Persian Gulf, may represent the oldest seat of that civilisation. However that may be, at a very early period Nippur became the centre of civilisation and religion, being founded at a time when everything below Ur probably was still under water. As early as the close, if not the beginning, of the seventh millennium b.c., this strip of land at the head of the then Persian Gulf seems to have been the home of the civilised men, and from here civilisation spread northward.”

THE LAND

The land of the Euphrates and Tigris lies between the Iranian country on the east and the Syrio-Arabian district on the west, from the chain of mountains of the Zagros to the rocky heights of the Lebanon and the Syrian desert. From the mountains of Armenia, in which both rivers have their source, the land gradually declines to the plain, extending from the point of their union to where they fall into the Persian Gulf.

The upper-river beds, winding through a high-lying, sometimes fertile steppe country, are surrounded by heights, where plane and cypress groves alternate with green meads and a rich growth of many-coloured flowers and plants.

As the land grows flatter, these valleys widen to fertile pastures on the river-banks, whilst the wide central plain grows more and more bare and treeless, until it ends at last in a desert trodden only by a few wandering shepherds with their flocks, and full of ostriches, bustards, and wild game. This is known as the between-river (Mesopotamia) district, which extends into a wide plain of rich brown soil, about a hundred miles above the mouth, where the two rivers approach most nearly, and the banks touch the so-called Median wall.

This plain, famous for its uncommon fertility as well as for its historic importance, the “Shinar” Land of the Semites, and the Babylonia of the Greeks, is as rainless as Egypt, and would have dried up into a sandy desert, had not nature and human artifice contrived means of irrigation.

For in the spring, when the snow melts on the Armenian mountains, both rivers overflow their banks and water the thirsty land. This overflowing of the gently moving Euphrates is as regular as that of the Nile; the wide tract of water is unopposed in its inundation of the plain and, like the Nile, it deposits a rich mud soil, and man’s resources are called into play to aid nature by the artificial conduct of water and by means of dams to give the neighbouring district a share in the fertilising irrigation.

But the bed of the Tigris growing decidedly more narrow as it nears the sea, receives the devastating stream from the eastern and northern mountains, and the force of the waters transports the fertile soil from the fields and transforms the plains into a wide swampy land, covered with reeds and rushes.

The inhabitants, therefore, had the double task of stemming the force of the stream to prevent destructive inundations, and of securing a course for the fertilising waters by canals and lakes. So the Babylonian plains were sown with such a number of small and great canals, dams and ditches, that the waterworks and means of irrigation were a source of wonder and astonishment to the whole of antiquity. These canals, cut in every direction and decreasing in size until they were almost rivulets, were furnished with countless machines and pump-works. Many of these canals, which should have been kept free by continuous clearing from the stoppage of mud, were lost in the sand; others, emptying into the Tigris, increased its size, the nearer it approached the sea, while the waters of the Euphrates were decreased through the drain of the canals.

The Tigris and the Euphrates have both flood seasons and carry their waters over a wide extent of country, exactly as the Nile. This fact is so perfectly clear that there can be no doubt concerning it, though Herodotus directly asserts the contrary, saying, “The river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the corn lands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the help of engines.” The rise is indeed not so prolonged as the rise of the Nile, but its influence is, nevertheless, distinctly to be seen. Furthermore, the water was retained in sufficient quantity to supply an irrigation system far back from the river for the grain harvest, after the fall of the river. This entire system is now a vast ruin. The river rises and falls as it wills, and sweeping far over the western bank, turns the country into a morass. The harm of this is both negative and positive. It makes impossible any such great ingathering of grain as existed when this great valley was the world’s granary, and it fills the land with a dangerous miasma, which produces fevers and leaves the inhabitants weak and sickly. There are few instances in the world of a sadder waste of a beautiful and fertile country.

Old writers give the most brilliant descriptions of the wonders of the district. Xenophon praises the quality and quantity of the dates, of the groves of palms which line the banks of the lower course of the two rivers and break the uniformity of the landscape, and are still very productive where the cruel Turkish rule has not changed the garden into a desert.

Herodotus lays particular stress upon the natural fertility of the country, for he writes: “Babylon is, as we know, famed for the best tillage of all lands, producing always two hundredfold of fruit and, in very good years, three hundredfold. The leaves of the wheat and barley are all four fingers wide, and I very well know, but I would rather not say, to what size the millet and seed grow; for I am certain that those who have not been in Babylon, will not believe it. There are few trees, no fig trees, no vine, no olive. They have no oil but what they make from sesame. But palm trees grow all over the country, and the fruit is eaten and honey and wine made from it.”

This country is now almost a desert, without buildings and vegetation, a world of tower-like ruins, which vary the monotony of the vast plains.

“From these heights,” says Ritter in his Geography, “one sees in the solemn stillness of this ruined world the far-reaching wide mirror of the Euphrates, winding majestically through that solitude like a royal pilgrim among the silent ruins of his departed kingdom. The palaces and temples, and the magnificent buildings, have all dropped into dust and ruin; hanging gardens and blooming paradises have fallen into gray, rush-grown, swampy marshes; and even there, where once the captive Israelites hung up their harps in the royal capital, and sang their songs of mourning over fallen Jerusalem, only a few imperishable willows remain, and the silence is unbroken by a voice of joy or mourning.”

Assyria, a mountainous district between the Tigris and the mountainous western boundary of Iran, is not so fertile as Babylonia, but its high position gives it a bracing climate.

Like the southern plains, it has little rain, but it is partially watered by the numerous rivers which flow eastward and westward to the Tigris, and partially by the canals and water conduits, and is rendered tolerably fertile by careful cultivation.

In the south only a few palm trees and cypresses break the monotony of the wide tilled fields, as in the Babylonian plain, but in the centre of the country are Aturia and Arbelitis (Adiabene) where the Upper Zab, the Zabatus or Lycus of classical writers, pours its blue waters into the Tigris, and there are fruitful hills, with protected valleys, full of corn, wine, sesame, figs, olives, and oranges; naphtha streams give forth their precious oil, and farther northward on the borders of Armenia and Media there are mountainous districts, the heights of which are crowned with woods of oak and pine. The eastern district at the foot of the Zagros (Chalonitis) is particularly prized for its wealth of palms, fruit trees, and olives, and the country of Arpakha (Arrapachitis) in the Chaldean mountains is considered the home of Abraham. From hence he descended into the river district of the centre and settled in the land around Kharran.

Northward lies the pasture land of Mesopotamia, whose wide plains became the scenes of bloody battles, and where races and royal families sought to eternalise their transitory power by the foundation of cities, which have mostly vanished, leaving no trace behind them. Like the Assyrian hill country, it gradually declines into grass-grown steppes until, in the south, it becomes a desert whose waterless wastes are trodden only by wandering Arabs.

So far back as we have yet been able to penetrate, we find in the southern part of Mesopotamia a number of petty independent kingdoms, governed from their capital cities. Our present knowledge of this land and its inhabitants may be briefly summed up.

After the river Euphrates, with countless windings and sharp falls, has cleft the Syrio-Mesopotamian plain where it fertilises the districts contiguous on its banks, it approaches to within a few miles of the Tigris, and both streams water a completely flat plain, intersected by numerous rivers and canals, and, for the most part, flooded by the Euphrates in the summer.

The numerous districts on both sides of the lower Tigris and west of the Euphrates which are out of reach of the irrigation have a desert character, as rain is as rare here as in Egypt. But the irrigated land was proportionately fertile; at least it was so in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The district at the mouth of the streams was of a marshy character with numerous swamps and lakes. In olden times the confluence of both rivers, at latitude about 31° N., formed a long narrow bay which has now been filled up by their deposits. The Arabian Desert lies at the west of the Euphrates, or rather on its western arm, the Pallakopas. The country on the east of the Tigris rises gradually to the wild mountainous boundary of the Iranian highlands, which descends in terrace form to the Tigris, to which it sends numerous rivers, which in earlier times flowed direct into the sea.

At the present time the greater part of this district is a swampy desert traversed only by wandering tribes, whilst in antiquity, and again at the time of the Caliphs, it was made one of the most fertile countries in the world by dint of careful irrigation, regulation, and the construction of dams and canals.

The most ancient population of this country formed several closely related races which had no connection with the other nations of Western Asia, but in the course of historical evolution they lost their language and nationality and were submerged in the neighbouring races.

In the land of Makan, the district of the mouth of the two chief rivers, were the Sumerians (Sumer, with its chief city of Ur, on the Euphrates); and in the northern part of the river country (Melucha land) from Erech, now Warka, upwards to the borders of the Mesopotamian steppes, lived the Accadians, so called from Agade, their capital, north of Babylon. To the east of the Tigris, far into the pathless districts of the Zagros Mountains, dwelt the warlike races of the Kossæans (Assyrian Kasshu). From their home, mode of life and character, they were evidently the predecessors of the modern Kurds, who belong, by language, to the Iranians. Next came the land of Elam, or Anshan, as it was called in the language of the country, the district of the rivers Choaspes and Eulæos, called by the Greeks Kissian, with the capital Shushan, the Susa of the Greeks.

Whilst the Kossæans were always a wild mountainous people, and the inhabitants of the plains of Elam, although they had a firmly established state organization, were dependent on their western neighbours for culture, Sumer and Accad (i.e. Babylonia) possessed an ancient and a complete, independently evolved culture, which, although second to that of the Lower Nile in innate worth and exclusive evolution, perhaps exceeded it in historical influence. The surplus of water from inundations was distributed over the country by means of canals and dykes. Thus ensued a better-ordered life of the state from the closer union of the different provinces. The temples of the great gods formed the centres of the different districts from which, as with the Egyptians, the cities of Babylonia arose first everywhere.

In Ur (now El-Mugheir) there was a temple of the moon-god Sin (or Nannar). In Eridu (now Abu Shahrein) was the temple of Ea, the ancient god of the ocean, and in Larsa (now Senkereh) that of the sun-god Babbar (or Shamash), the lord of the city. The latter was worshipped in like manner in Sippar (now Abu Habba), whilst in the neighbouring Agade (Accad) the goddess Anunit was the deity of the city. On the south lay the sacred “Gate of the Gods” Ka-Dingira, the Semitic Babel (Babylon), the capital of the country. [With it was later united the city of Borsippa.] The city Erech (Orchoë, now Warka), the sanctuary of the goddess Nana (Ishtar), was held in special veneration. North of Larsa was Girsu;...