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- Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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A HISTORY OF BABYLON
Leonard W. King
SKYROS PUBLISHING
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Copyright © 2015 by Leonard W. King
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
A History of Babylon
PREFACE
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY BABYLON’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF ANTIQUITY
CHAPTER II. THE CITY OF BABYLON AND ITS REMAINS :A DISCUSSION OF THE RECENT EXCAVATIONS
CHAPTER III. THE DYNASTIES OF BABYLON : THE CHRONOLOGICAL SCHEME IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERIES
CHAPTER IV. THE WESTERN SEMITES AND THE FIRST DYNASTY OF BABYLON
CHAPTER V. THE AGE OF HAMMURABI AND ITS INFLUENCE ON LATER PERIODS
CHAPTER VI. THE CLOSE OF THE FIRST DYNASTY OF BABYLON AND THE KINGS FROM THE COUNTRY OF THE SEA
CHAPTER VII. THE KASSITE DYNASTY AND RELATIONS WITH EGYPT AND THE HITTITE EMPIRE
CHAPTER VIII. THE LATER DYNASTIES AND THE ASSYRIAN DOMINATION
CHAPTER X.GREECE, PALESTINE AND BABYLON AN ESTIMATE OF CULTURAL INFLUENCE
A HISTORY OF BABYLON
PREFACE
IN THE FIRST VOLUME OF this work (A HISTORY OF SUMER AND AKKAD) an account was given of the early races of Babylonia from prehistoric times to the foundation of the monarchy. It closed at the point when the city of Babylon was about to secure the permanent leadership under her dynasty of West-Semitic kings. The present volume describes the fortunes of Babylonia during the whole of the dynastic period, and it completes the history of the southern kingdom. Last autumn, in consequence of the war, it was decided to postpone its publication; but, at the request of the publishers, I have now finished it and seen it through the press. At a time when British troops are in occupation of Southern Mesopotamia, the appearance of a work upon its earlier history may perhaps not be considered altogether inopportune.
Thanks to recent excavation Babylon has ceased to be an abstraction, and we are now able to reconstitute the main features of one of the most famous cities of the ancient world. Unlike Ashur and Nineveh, the great capitals of Assyria, Babylon survived with but little change under the Achaemenian kings of Persia, and from the time of Herodotus onward we possess accounts of her magnificence, which recent research has in great part substantiated. It is true that we must modify the description Herodotus has left us of her size, but on all other points the accuracy of his information is confirmed. The Lion Frieze of the Citadel and the enamelled beasts of the Ishtar Gate enable us to understand something of the spell she cast. It is claimed that the site has been identified of her most famous building, the Hanging Gardens of the royal palace; and, if that should prove to be the case, they can hardly be said to have justified their reputation. Far more impressive is the Tower of Babel with its huge Peribolos, enclosing what has been aptly described as the Vatican of Babylon.
The majority of the buildings uncovered date from the Neo-Babylonian period, but they may be regarded as typical of Babylonian civilization as a whole. For temples were rebuilt again and again on the old lines, and religious conservatism retained the mud-brick walls and primitive decoration of earlier periods. Even Nabopolassar’s royal palace must have borne a close resemblance to that of Hammurabi; and the street network of the city appears to have descended without much change from the time of the First Dynasty. The system which Hammurabi introduced into the legislation of his country may perhaps have been reflected in the earliest attempt at town-planning on a scientific basis. The most striking fact about Babylon’s history is the continuity of her culture during the whole of the dynastic period. The principal modification which took place was in the system of land-tenure, the primitive custom of tribal or collective proprietorship giving place to private ownership under the policy of purchase and annexation deliberately pursued by the West-Semitic and Kassite conquerors. A parallel to the earlier system and its long survival may be seen in the village communities of India at the present day.
In contrast to that of Assyria, the history of Babylon is more concerned with the development and spread of a civilization than with the military achievements of a race. Her greatest period of power was under her first line of kings; and in after ages her foreign policy was dictated solely by her commercial needs. The letters from Boghaz Iveui, like those from Tell el-Amarna, suggest that, in keeping her trade connections open, she relied upon diplomacy in preference to force. That she could fight at need is proved by her long struggle with the northern kingdom, but in the later period her troops were never a match for the trained legions of Assyria. It is possible that Nabopolassar and his son owed their empire in great measure to the protecting arm of Media; and Nebuchadnezzar’s success at Carchemish does not prove that the Babylonian character had suddenly changed. A recently recovered letter throws light on the unsatisfactory state of at least one section of the army during Nebuchadnezzar’s later years, and incidentally it suggests that Gobryas, who facilitated the Persian occupation, may be identified with a Babylonian general of that name. With the fall of Media, he may perhaps have despaired of any successful opposition on his country’s part.
Babylon’s great wealth, due to her soil and semi-tropical climate, enabled her to survive successive foreign dominations and to impose her civilization on her conquerors. Her caravans carried that civilization far afield, and one of the most fascinating problems of her history is to trace the effect of such intercourse in the literary remains of other nations. Much recent research has been devoted to this subject, and the great value of its results has given rise in some quarters to the view that the religious development of Western Asia, and in a minor degree of Europe, was dominated by the influence of Babylon. The theory which underlies such speculation assumes a reading of the country’s history which cannot be ignored. In the concluding chapter an estimate has been attempted of the extent to which the assumption is in harmony with historical research.
The delay in the publication of this volume has rendered it possible to incorporate recent discoveries, some of which have not as yet appeared in print. Professor A. T. Clay has been fortunate enough to acquire for the Yale University Collection a complete list of the early kings of Larsa, in addition to other documents with an important bearing on the history of Babylon. He is at present preparing the texts for publication, and has meanwhile very kindly sent me transcripts of the pertinent material with full permission to make use of them. The information afforded as to the overlapping of additional dynasties with the First Dynasty of Babylon has thrown new light on the circumstances which led to the rise of Babylon to power. But these and other recent discoveries, in their general effects do not involve any drastic changes in the chronological scheme as a whole. They lead rather to local rearrangements, which to a great extent counterbalance one another. Under Babylon’s later dynasties her history and that of Assyria are so closely interrelated that it is difficult to isolate the southern kingdom. An attempt has been made to indicate broadly the chief phases of the conflict, and the manner in which Babylonian interests alone were affected. In order to avoid needless repetition, a fuller treatment of the period is postponed to the third volume of this work. A combined account will then also be given of the literature and civilization of both countries.
I take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to Monsieur F. Thureau-Dangin, Conservateur-adjoint of the Museums of the Louvre, for allowing me last spring to study unpublished historical material in his charge. The information he placed at my disposal I found most useful during subsequent work in the Ottoman Museum at Constantinople shortly before the war. Reference has already been made to my indebtedness to Professor Clay, who has furnished me from time to time with other unpublished material, for which detailed acknowledgment is made in the course of this work. With Professor C. F. Burney I have discussed many of the problems connected with the influence of Babylon upon Hebrew literature ; and I am indebted to Professor A. C. Headlam for permission to reprint portions of an article on that subject, which I contributed in 1912 to the Church Quarterly Review.
To Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge my thanks are due, as he suggested that I should write these histories, and he has given me the benefit of his advice. To him, as to Sir Frederic Kenyon and Mr. D. G. Hogarth, I am indebted for permission to make use of illustrations, which have appeared in official publications of the British Museum. My thanks are also due to Monsieur Ernest Leroux of Paris for allowing me to reproduce some of the plates from the “ Memoires de la Delegation en Perse,” published by him under the editorship of Monsieur J. de Morgan; and to the Council and Secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology for the loan of a block employed to illustrate a paper I contributed to their Proceedings. The greater number of the plates illustrating the excavations are from photographs taken on the spot; and the plans and drawings figured in the text are the work of Mr. E. J. Lambert and Mr. C. O. Waterhouse, who have spared no pains to ensure their accuracy. The designs upon the cover of this volume represent the two most prominent figures in Babylonian tradition. In the panel on the face of the cover the national hero Gilgamesh is portrayed, whose epic reflects the Babylonian heroic ideal. The panel on the back of the binding contains a figure of Marduk, the city-god of Babylon, grasping in his right hand the flaming sword with which he severed the dragon of chaos.
L. W. KING.
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY BABYLON’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF ANTIQUITY
THE NAME OF BABYLON SUGGESTS one of the great centres from which civilization radiated to other peoples of the ancient world. And it is true that from the second millennium onwards we have evidence of the gradual spread of Babylonian culture throughout the greater part of Western Asia. Before the close of the fifteenth century, to cite a single example of such influence, we find that Babylonian had .become the language of Eastern diplomacy. It is not surprising perhaps that the Egyptian king should have adopted the Babylonian tongue and method of writing for his correspondence with rulers of Babylon itself or of Assyria. But it is remarkable that he should employ this foreign script and language for sending orders to the governors of his Syrian and Palestinian dependencies, and that such Canaanite officials should use the same medium for the reports they despatched to their Egyptian master. In the same period we find the Aryan rulers of Mitanni, in Northern Mesopotamia, writing in cuneiform the language of their adopted country. A few decades later the Hittites of Anatolia, discarding their old and clumsy system of hieroglyphs except for monumental purposes, borrow the same character for their own speech, while their treaties with Egypt are drawn up in Babylonian. In the ninth century the powerful race of the Urartians, settled in the mountains of Armenia around the shores of Lake Van, adopt as their national script the writing of Assyria, which in turn had been derived from Babylon. Elam, Babylon’s nearest foreign neighbour, at a very early period had, like the Hittites of a later age, substituted for their rude hieroglyphs the language and older characters of Babylon, and later on they evolved from the same writing a character of their own. Finally, coming down to the sixth century, we find the Achremenian kings inventing a cuneiform sign-list to express the Old Persian language, in order that their own speech might be represented in royal proclamations and memorials beside those of their subject provinces of Babylon and Susiania.
These illustrations of Babylonian influence on foreign races are confined to one department of culture only, the language and the system of writing. But they have a very much wider implication. For when a foreign language is used and written, a certain knowledge of its literature must be presupposed. And since all early literatures were largely religious in character, the study of the language carries with it some acquaintance with the legends, mythology and religious beliefs of the race from whom it was borrowed. Thus, even if we leave out of account the obvious effects of commercial intercourse, the single group of examples quoted necessarily implies a strong cultural influence on contemporary races.
It may thus appear a paradox to assert that the civilization, with which the name of Babylon is associated, was not Babylonian. But it is a fact that for more than a thousand years before the appearance of that city as a great centre of culture, the civilization it handed on to others had acquired in all essentials its later type. In artistic excellence, indeed, a standard had been already reached, which, so far from being surpassed, was never afterwards attained in Mesopotamia. And although the Babylonian may justly be credited with greater system in his legislation, with an extended literature, and perhaps also with an increased luxury of ritual, his efforts were entirely controlled by earlier models. If we except the spheres of poetry and ethics, the Semite in Babylon, as elsewhere, proved himself a clever adapter, not a creator. He was the prophet of Sumerian culture and merely perpetuated the achievements of the race whom he displaced politically and absorbed. It is therefore the more remarkable that his particular city should have seen but little of the process by which that culture had been gradually evolved. During those eventful centuries Babylon had been but little more than a provincial town. Yet it was reserved for this obscure and unimportant city to absorb within herself the results of that long process, and to appear to later ages as the original source of the culture she enjoyed. Before tracing her political fortunes in detail it will be well to consider briefly the causes which contributed to her retention of the place she so suddenly secured for herself.
The fact that under her West-Semitic kings Babylon should have taken rank as the capital city does not in itself account for her permanent enjoyment of that position. The earlier history of the lands of Sumer and Akkad abounds with similar examples of the sudden rise of cities, followed, after an interval of power, by their equally sudden relapse into comparative obscurity. The political centre of gravity was continually shifting from one town to another, and the problem we have to solve is why, having come to rest in Babylon, it should have remained there. To the Western Semites themselves, after a political existence of three centuries, it must have seemed that their city was about to share the fate of her numerous predecessors. When the Hittite raiders captured and sacked Babylon and carried off her patron deities, events must have appeared to be taking their normal course. After the country, with her abounding fertility, had been given time to recover from her temporary depression, she might have been expected to emerge once more, according to precedent, under the regis of some other city. Yet it was within the ancient walls of Babylon that the Ivassite conquerors established their headquarters; and it was to Babylon, long rebuilt and once more powerful, that the Pharaohs of the eighteenth Dynasty and the Hittite kings of Cappadocia addressed their diplomatic correspondence. During Assyria’s long struggle with the southern kingdom Babylon was always the protagonist, and no raid by Aramaean or Chaldean tribes ever succeeded in ousting her from that position. At the height of Assyrian power she continued to be the chief check upon that empire’s expansion, and the vacillating policy of the Sargonids in their treatment of the city sufficiently testifies to the dominant rôle she continued to play in politics. And when Nineveh had fallen, it was Babylon that took her place in a great part of Western Asia.
This continued pre-eminence of a single city is in striking contrast to the ephemeral authority of earlier capitals, and it can only be explained by some radical change in the general conditions of the country. One fact stands out clearly: Babylon’s geographical position must have endowed her during this period with a strategical and commercial importance which enabled her to survive the rudest shocks to her material prosperity. A glance at the map will show that the city lay in the north of Babylonia, just below the confluence of the two great rivers in their lower course. Built originally on the left bank of the Euphrates, she was protected by its stream from any sudden incursion of the desert tribes. At the same time she was in immediate contact with the broad expanse of alluvial plain to the south-east, intersected by its network of canals.
But the real strength of her position lay in her near neighbourhood to the transcontinental routes of traffic. When approaching Baghdad from the north the Mesopotamian plain contracts to a width of some thirty-five miles, and, although it has already begun to expand again in the latitude of Babylon, that city was well within touch of both rivers. She consequently lay at the meeting-point of two great avenues of commerce. The Euphrates route linked Babylonia with Northern Syria and the Mediterranean, and was her natural line of contact with Egypt; it also connected her with Cappadocia, by way of the Cilician Gates through the Taurus, along the track of the later Royal Road. Farther north the trunk-route through Anatolia from the west, reinforced by tributary routes from the Black Sea, turns at Sivas on the Upper Halys, and after crossing the Euphrates in the mountains, first strikes the Tigris at Diarbekr; then leaving that river for the easier plain, it rejoins the stream in the neighbourhood of Nineveh and so advances southward to Susa or to Babylon. A third great route that Babylon controlled was that to the east through the Gates of Zagros, the easiest point of penetration to the Iranian plateau and the natural outlet of commerce from Northern Elam. Babylon thus lay across the stream of the nations’ traffic, and in the direct path of any invader advancing upon the southern plains.
That she owed her importance to her strategic position, and not to any particular virtue on the part of her inhabitants, will be apparent from the later history of the country. It has indeed been pointed out that the geographical conditions render necessary the existence of a great urban centre near the confluence of the Mesopotamian rivers. And this fact is amply attested by the relative positions of the capital cities, which succeeded one another in that region after the supremacy had passed from Babylon. Seleucia, Ctesiphon and Baghdad are all clustered in the narrow neck of the Mesopotamian plain, and for only one short period, when normal conditions were suspended, lias the centre of government been transferred to any southern city. The sole change has consisted in the permanent selection of the Tigris for the site of each new capital, with a decided tendency to remove it to the left or eastern bank. That the Euphrates should have given place in this way to her sister river was natural enough in view of the latter’s deeper channel and better water way, which gained in significance as soon as the possibility of maritime communication was contemplated.
Throughout the whole period of Babylon’s supremacy the Persian Gulf, so far from being a channel of international commerce, was as great a barrier as any mountain range. Doubtless a certain amount of local coasting traffic was always carried on, and the heavy blocks of diorite which were brought to Babylonia from Magan by the early Akkadian king Naram-Sin, and at a rather later period by Gudea of Lagash, must have been transported by water rather than over land. Tradition, too, ascribed the conquest of the island of Dilmun, the modern Bahrein, to Sargon of Akkad; but that marked the extreme limit of Babylonian penetration southwards, and the conquest must have been little more than a temporary occupation following a series of raids down the Arabian coast. The fact that two thousand years later Sargon of Assyria, when recording his receipt of tribute from Uperi of Dilmun, should have been so far out in his estimate of its distance from the Babylonian coastline, is an indication of the continued disuse of the waters of the gulf as a means of communication. On this supposition we may readily understand the difficulties encountered by Sennacherib when transporting his army across the head of the gulf against certain coast-towns of Elam, and the necessity, to which he was put, of building special ships for the purpose.
There is evidence that in the Neo-Babylonian period the possibilities of transport by way of the gulf had already begun to attract attention, and Nebuchadnezzar II is said to have attempted to build harbours in the swamp of the mouths of the delta. But his object must have been confined to encouraging coastal trade, for the sea-route between the Persian Gulf and India was certainly not in use before the fifth century, and in all probability was inaugurated by Alexander. According to Herodotus it had been opened by Darius after the return of the Greek Scylax of Caryanda from his journey to India, undertaken as one of the surveying expeditions on the basis of which Darius founded the assessment of his new satrapies. But, although there is no need to doubt the historical character of that voyage, there is little to suggest that Scylax coasted round, or even entered, the Persian Gulf. Moreover, it is clear that, while Babylon’s international trade received a great impetus under the efficient organization of the Persian Empire, it was the overland routes which benefited. The outcrops of rock, or cataracts, which blocked the Tigris for vessels of deeper draft, were not removed until Alexander levelled them; and the problem of Babylon’s sea-traffic, to which he devoted the closing months of his life, was undoubtedly one of the factors which, having now come into prominence for the first time, influenced Seleucus in selecting a site on the Tigris for his new capital.
But that was not the only cause of Babylon’s deposition. For after her capture by Cyrus, new forces came into play which favoured a transference of the capital eastward. During the earlier periods of her history Babylon’s chief rival and most persistent enemy had lain upon her eastern frontier. To the early Sumerian rulers of city-states Elam had been “the mountain that strikes terror”, and during subsequent periods the cities of Sumer and Akkad could never be sure of immunity from invasion in that quarter. We shall see that in Elam the Western Semites of Babylon found the chief obstacle to the southward extension of their authority, and that in later periods any symptom of internal weakness or dissension was the signal for renewed attack. It is true that the Assyrian danger drew these ancient foes together for a time, but even the sack of Susa by Ashurbanipal did not put an end to their commercial rivalry.
During all this period there was small temptation to transfer the capital to any point within easier striking distance of so powerful a neighbour; and with the principal passes for eastward traffic under foreign control, it was natural that the Euphrates route to Northern Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean coast should continue to be the chief outlet for Babylonian commerce. But on the incorporation of the country within the Persian empire all danger of interference with her eastern trade was removed; and it is a testimony to the part Babylon had already played in history that she continued to be the capital city of Asia for more than two centuries. Cyrus, like Alexander, entered the city as a conqueror, but each was welcomed by the people and their priests as the restorer of ancient rights and privileges. Policy would thus have been against any attempt to introduce radical innovations. The prestige the city enjoyed and the grandeur of its temples and palaces doubtless also weighed with the Achaemenian kings in their choice of Babylon for their official residence, except during the summer months. Then they withdrew to the cooler climate of Persepolis or Ecbatana, and during the early spring, too, they might transfer the court to Susa; but they continued to recognize Babylon as their true capital. In fact, the city only lost its importance when the centre of government was removed to Seleucia in its own immediate neighbourhood. Then, at first possibly under compulsion, and afterwards of their own free will, the commercial classes followed their rulers to the west bank of the Tigris; and Babylon suffered in proportion. In the swift rise of Seleucia in response to official orders, we may see clear proof that the older city’s influence had been founded upon natural conditions, which were shared in an equal, and now in even a greater degree, by the site of the new capital.
The secret of Babylon’s greatness is further illustrated by still later events in the valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The rise of Ctesiphon on the left bank of the river was a further result of the eastward trend of commerce. But it lay immediately opposite Seleucia, and marked no fresh shifting of the centre of gravity. Of little importance under the Seleucid rulers, it became the chief city of the Arsacidae, and, after the Parthian Empire had been conquered by Ardashir I, it continued to be the principal city of the province and became the winter residence of the Sassanian kings. When in 636 AD the Moslem invaders defeated the Persians near the ruins of Babylon and in the following year captured Ctesiphon, they found that city and Seleucia, to which they gave the joint name of Al-Madain, or “ the cities,” still retaining the importance their site had acquired in the third century BC. Then follows a period of a hundred and twenty-five years which is peculiarly instructive for comparison with the earlier epochs of Babylonian history.
The last of the great Semitic migrations from Arabia had resulted in the conquests of Islam, when, after the death of Mohammed, the Arab armies poured into Western Asia in their efforts to convert the world to their faith. The course of the movement, and its effect upon established civilizations which were overthrown, may be traced in the full light of history ; and we find in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates a resultant economic condition which forms a close parallel to that of the age before the rise of Babylon. The military occupation of Mesopotamia by the Arabs closed for a time the great avenues of transcontinental commerce ; and, as a result, the political control of the country ceased to be exercised from the capital of the Sassanian kings and was distributed over more than one area. New towns sprang into being around the permanent camps of the Arab armies. Following on the conquest of Mesopotamia, the city of Basra was built on the Shatt el-’Arab in the extreme south of the country, while in the same year, 638 A.D., IKufa was founded more to the north-west on the desert side of the Euphrates. A third great town, Wasit, was added sixty-five years later, and this arose in the centre of the country on both banks of the Tigris, whose waters were then passing along the present bed of the Shatt el-Hai. It is true that Mad ft in retained a measure of local importance, but during the Omayyad Caliphate Kufa and Basra were the twin capitals of Irak
Thus the slackening of international connections led at once to a distribution of authority between a north and a south Babylonian site. It is true that both capitals were under the same political control, but from the economic standpoint we are forcibly reminded of the era of city-states in Sumer and Akkad. Then, too, there was 110 external factor to retain the centre of gravity in the north; and Erech more than once secured the hegemony, while the most stable of the shifting dynasties was the latest of the southern city of Ur. The rise of Babylon as the sole and permanent capital of Sumer and Akkad may be traced, as we shall note, to increased relations with Northern Syria, which followed the establishment of her dynasty of West-Semitic kings. And again we may see history repeating herself, when Moslem authority is removed to Baghdad at the close of the first phase in the Arab occupation of Mesopotamia. For on the fall of the Omayyad dynasty and the transference of the Abbasid capital from Damascus to the east, commercial intercourse with Syria and the west was restored to its old footing. Basra and Kufa at once failed to respond to the changed conditions, and a new administrative centre was required. It is significant that Baghdad should have been built a few miles above Ctesiphon, within the small circle of the older capitals; and that, with the exception of a single short period, she should have remained the capital city of Irak. Thus the history of Mesopotamia under the Caliphate is instructive for the study of the closely parallel conditions which enabled Babylon at a far earlier period to secure the hegemony in Babylonia and afterwards to retain it.
From this brief survey of events it will have been noted that Babylon’s supremacy falls in the middle period of her country’s history, during which she distributed a civilization in the origin of which she played no part. When she passed, the culture she had handed on passed with her, though on Mesopotamian soil its decay was gradual. But she had already delivered her message, and it has left its mark on the remains of other races of antiquity which have come down to us. We shall see that it was in three main periods that her influence made itself felt in any marked degree beyond the limits of the homeland. The earliest of these periods of external contact was that of her First Dynasty of West-Semitic rulers, though the most striking evidence of its effect is only forthcoming after some centuries had passed. In the second period the process was indirect, her culture being carried north and west by the expansion of Assyria. The last of the three epochs coincides with the rule of the Neo-Babylonian kings, when, thanks to her natural resources, the country not only regained her independence, but for a short time established an empire which far eclipsed her earlier effort. And in spite of her speedy return, under Persian rule, to the position of a subject province, her foreign influence may be regarded as operative, it is true in diminishing intensity, well into the Hellenic period.
The concluding chapter will deal in some detail with certain features of Babylonian civilization, and with the extent to which it may have moulded the cultural development of other races. In the latter connection a series of claims has been put forward which cannot be ignored in any treatment of the nation’s history. Some of the most interesting contributions that have recently been made to Assyriological study undoubtedly concern the influence of ideas, which earlier research had already shown to be of Babylonian origin. Within recent years a school has arisen in Germany which emphasizes the part played by Babylon in the religious development of Western Asia, and, in a minor degree, of Europe. The evidence on which reliance has been placed to prove the spread of Babylonian thought throughout the ancient world has been furnished mainly by Israel and Greece; and it is claimed that many features both in Hebrew religion and in Greek mythology can only be rightly studied in the light thrown upon them by Babylonian parallels from which they were ultimately derived. It will therefore be necessary to examine briefly the theory which underlies most recent speculation on this subject, and to ascertain, if possible, how far it may be relied on to furnish results of permanent value.
But it will be obvious that, if the theory is to be accepted in whole or in part, it must be shown to rest upon a firm historical basis, and that any inquiry into its credibility should be more fitly postponed until the history of the nation itself has been passed in review. After the evidence of actual contact with other races has been established in detail, it will be possible to form a more confident judgment upon questions which depend for their solution solely on a balancing of probabilities. The estimate of Babylon’s foreign influence has therefore been postponed to the closing chapter of the volume. But before considering the historical sequence of her dynasties, and the periods to which they may be assigned, it will be well to inquire what recent excavation has to tell us of the actual remains of the city which became the permanent capital of Babylonia.
CHAPTER II. THE CITY OF BABYLON AND ITS REMAINS :A DISCUSSION OF THE RECENT EXCAVATIONS
THE ACTUAL SITE OF BABYLON was never lost in popular tradition. In spite of the total disappearance of the city, which followed its gradual decay under Seleucid and Parthian rule, its ancient fame sufficed to keep it in continual remembrance. The old Semitic name Babili, “the Gate of the Gods,” lingered on about the site, and under the form Babil is still the local designation for the most northerly of the city-mounds. Tradition, too, never ceased to connect the exposed brickwork of Nebuchadnezzar’s main citadel and palace with his name. Kasr, the Arab name for the chief palace-mound and citadel of Babylon, means “ palace” or “castle,” and when in the twelfth century Benjamin of Tudela visited Baghdad, the Jews of that city told him that in the neighbouring ruins, near Hilla, the traveller might still behold Nebuchadnezzar’s palace beside the fiery furnace into which Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah had been thrown. It does not seem that this adventurous rabbi actually visited the site, though it is unlikely that he was deterred by fear of the serpents and scorpions with which, his informants said, the ruins were infested.
In the sixteenth century an English merchant traveller, John Eldred, made three voyages to “ New Babylon,” as he calls Baghdad, journeying from Aleppo down the Euphrates. On the last occasion, after describing his landing at Faluja, and how he secured a hundred Jeses for lack of camels to carry his^oods to Baghdad, he tells us that “in this place which we crossed over stood the olde mightie citie of Babylon, many olde ruines whereof are easily to be scene by daylight, which I, John Eldred, have often behelde at my goode leisure having made three voyages between the New Citie of Babylon and Aleppo over this desert.” But it would seem probable from his further description that “ the olde tower of Babell,” which he visited “sundry times,” was really the ruin of ‘Akarkuf, which he would have passed 011 his way to Baghdad. Benjamin of Tudela, on the other hand, had taken Birs-Nimrud for the Tower of Babel, and had noted how the ruins of the streets of Babylon still extend for thirty miles. In fact, it was natural that several of the early travellers should have regarded the whole complex of ruins, which they saw still standing along their road to Baghdad, as parts of the ancient city; and it is not surprising that some of the earlier excavators should have fallen under a similar illusion so far as the area between Babil and El-Birs is concerned.The famous description of Herodotus, and the accounts other classical writers have left us of the city’s size, tended to foster this conviction; and, although the centre of Babylon was identified correctly enough, the size of the city’s area was greatly exaggerated. Babylon had cast her spell upon mankind, and it has taken sixteen years of patient and continuous excavation to undermine that stubborn belief. But in the process of shrinkage, and as accurate knowledge has gradually given place to conjecture, the old spell has reappeared unchanged. It may be worth while to examine in some detail the results of recent work upon the site, and note to what extent the city’s remains have thrown light upon its history while leaving some problems still unsolved.
In view of the revolution in our knowledge of Babylonian topography, which has been one of the most striking results of recent work, no practical purpose would be served by tracing out the earlier but very partial examinations of the site which were undertaken successively by Rich in 1811, by Layard in 1850, by Oppert as the head of a French expedition in the years 1852-54, and by Hormuzd Rassam, between 1878 and 1889, when he was employed on excavations for the British Museum. During the last of these periods the British Museum obtained a valuable series of tablets from Babylon, some of the texts proving of great literary and scientific interest. In 1887, and again after a lapse of ten years, Dr. Robert Koldewey visited the site of Babylon and picked up fragments of enamelled bricks on the east side of the Kasr. On the latter occasion he sent some of them to Berlin, and Dr. Richard Schone, at that time Director of the Royal Museums, recognized their artistic and archaeological interest. Thus it was with the hope of making speedy and startling discoveries that the German Oriental Society began work upon the site at the end of March in the year 1899; and it is the more to the credit of the excavators that they haft not allowed any difficulties or disappointments to curtail and bring to a premature close the steady progress of their research.
The extent of ground covered by the remains of the ancient city, and the great accumulation of debris over some of the principal buildings rendered the work more arduous than was anticipated, and consequently the publication of results has been delayed. It is true that, from the very beginning of operations, the expert has been kept informed of the general progress of the digging by means of letters and reports distributed to its subscribers every few months by the society. But it was only in 1911, after twelve years of uninterrupted digging, that the first instalment was issued of the scientific publication. This was confined to the temples of the city, and for the first time placed the study of Babylonian religious architecture upon a scientific basis. In the following year Dr. Koldewey, the director of the excavations, supplemented his first volume with a second, in which, under pressure from the society, he forestalled to some extent the future issues of the detailed account by summarizing the results obtained to date upon all sections of the site.It has thus been rendered possible to form a connected idea of the remains of the ancient city, so far as they have been recovered.
In their work at Babylon the excavators have, of course, employed modern methods, which differ considerably from those of the age when Layard and Botta brought the winged bulls of Assyria to the British Museum and to the Louvre. The extraordinary success which attended those earlier excavators has, indeed, never been surpassed. But it is now realized that only by minuteness of search and by careful classification of strata can the remains of the past be made to reveal in full their secrets. The fine museum specimen retains its importance; but it gains immensely in significance when it ceases to be an isolated product and takes its place in a detailed history of its period.
In order to grasp the character of the new evidence, and the methods by which it has been obtained at Babylon, it is advisable to bear in mind some of the general characteristics of Babylonian architecture and the manner in which the art of building was influenced by the natural conditions of the country. One important point to realize is that the builders of all periods were on the defensive, and not solely against human foes, for in that aspect they resembled other builders of antiquity. The foe they most dreaded was flood. Security against flood conditioned the architect’s ideal: he aimed solely at height and mass. When a king built a palace for himself or a temple for his god, he did not consciously aim at making it graceful or beautiful. What he always boasts of having done is that he has made it “like a mountain.” He delighted to raise the level of his artificial mound or building- platform, and the modern excavator owes much to this continual filling in of the remains of earlier structures. The material at his disposal was also not without its influence in the production of buildings “like mountains,” designed to escape the floods of the plain.
The alluvial origin of the Babylonian soil deprived the inhabitants of an important factor in the development of the builder’s art: it produced for them no stone. But it supplied a very effective building-material in its place, a strongly adhesive clay. Throughout their whole history the Babylonian architects built in crude and in kilnburnt brick. In the Neo-Babylonian period we find them making interesting technical experiments in this material, here a first attempt to roof in a wide area with vaulting, elsewhere counteracting the effects of settlement by a sort of expansion-joint. We shall see, too, that it was in this same medium that they attained to real beauty of design.
Brick continued to be the main building-material in Assyria too, for that country derived its culture from the lower Euphrates valley. But in the north soft limestone quarries were accessible. So in Assyria they lined their mud-brick walls with slabs of limestone, carved in low relief and brightly coloured; and they set up huge stone colossi to flank their palace entrances. This use of stone, both as a wall-lining and in wall- foundations, constitutes the main difference between Babylonian and Assyrian architectural design. Incidentally it explains how the earlier excavators were so much more successful in Assyria than in Babylonia; for in both countries they drove their tunnels and trenches into most of the larger mounds. They could tunnel with perfect certainty when they had these stone linings of the walls to guide them. But to follow out the ground-plan of a building constructed only of unburnt brick, with mud or clay for mortar, necessitates a slower and more systematic process of examination. For unburnt brick becomes welded into a solid mass, scarcely to be distinguished from the surrounding soil, and the lines of a building in this material can only be recovered by complete excavation.
An idea of the labour this sometimes entails may be gained from the work which preceded the identification of E-sagila, the great temple of Marduk, the city-god of Babylon. The temple lies at a depth of no less than twenty-one metres below the upper level of the hill of debris ; and portions of two of its massive mud-brick walls, together with the neighbouring pavements, were uncovered by bodily removing the great depth of soil truck by truck. But here even German patience and thoroughness have been beaten, and tunnelling was eventually adopted to establish the outer limits of the ground-plan, much of the interior of which still remains unexplored.
The Babylon which has now been partially cleared, though in its central portion it reaches back to the First Dynasty and to the period of Hammurabi, is mainly that of the Neo-Babylonian empire, when Nebuchadnezzar II, and Nabonidus, the last native Babylonian king, raised their capital to a condition of magnificence it had not known before. This city survived, with but little change, during the domination of the Achaemenian kings of Persia, and from the time of Herodotus onward Babylon was made famous throughout the ancient world. At that time Ashur and Nineveh, the great capitals of Assyria, had ceased to exist; but Babylon was still in her glory, and descriptions of the city have come down to us in the works of classical writers. To fit this literary tradition to the actual remains of the city has furnished a number of fascinating problems. How, for example, are we to explain the puzzling discrepancy between the present position of the outer walls and the enormous estimate of the city’s area given by Herodotus, or even that of Ctesias? For Herodotus himself appears to have visited Babylon; and Ctesias was the physician of Artaxerxes II Mnemon, who has left a memorial of his presence in a marble building on the Kasr.
Herodotus reckons that the walls of Babylon extended for four hundred and eighty stades, the area they enclosed forming an exact square, a hundred and twenty stades in length each way. In other words, he would have us picture a city more than fifty-three miles in circumference. The estimate of Ctesias is not so large, his side of sixty-five stades giving a circumference of rather over forty miles. Such figures, it has been suggested, are not in themselves impossible, Koldewey, for example, comparing the Great Wall of China which extends for more than fifteen hundred miles, and is thus about twenty-nine times as long as Hero- dotus’s estimate for the wall of Babylon. But the latter was not simply a frontier-fortification. It was the enclosing wall of a city, and a more apposite comparison is that of the walls of Nanking, the largest city-site in China, and the work of an empire even greater than Babylon. The latter measure less than twenty-four miles in circuit, and the comparison does not encourage an acceptance of Herodotus’s figures on grounds of general probability. It is true that Oppert accepted them, but he only found this possible by stretching his plan of the city to include the whole area from Babil to Birs-Nimrud, and by seeing traces of the city and its walls in every sort of intervening mound of whatever period.
As a matter of fact part of the great wall, which surrounded the city from the Neo-Babylonian period onward, has survived to the present day, and may still be recognized in a low ridge of earth, or series of consecutive mounds, which cross the plain for a considerable distance to the south-east of Babil. The traveller from Baghdad, after crossing the present Nil Canal by a bridge, passes through a gap in the north-eastern wall before he sees on his right the isolated mound of Babil with the extensive complex of the Iyasr and its neighbour, Tell Amran-ibn-Ali, stretching away in front and to his left. The whole length of the city-wall, along the north-east side, may still be traced by the position of these low earthen mounds, and they prove that the city on this side measured not quite two and three-quarter miles in extent. The eastern angle of the wall is also preserved, and the south-east wall may be followed for another mile and a quarter as it doubles back towards the Euphrates. These two walls, together with the Euphrates, enclose the only portion of the ancient city on which ruins of any importance still exist. But, according to Herodotus and other writers, the city was enclosed by two similar walls upon the western bank, in which case the site it occupied musthave formed a rough quadrangle, divided diagonally by the river. No certain trace has yet been recovered of the western walls, and all remains of buildings seem to have disappeared completely on that side of the river. But for the moment it may be assumed that the city did occupy approximately an equal amount of space upon the western bank; and, even so, its complete circuit would not have extended for more than about eleven miles, a figure very far short of any of those given by Herodotus, Ctesias and other writers.
Dr. Koldewey suggests that, as the estimate of Ctesias approximates to four times the correct measurement, we may suspect that he mistook the figure which applies to the whole circumference for the measure of one side only of the square. But even if we accept that solution, it leaves the still larger figure of Herodotus unexplained. It is preferable to regard all such estimates of size, not as based on accurate measurements, but merely as representing an impression of grandeur produced on the mind of their recorder, whether by a visit to the city itself, or by reports of its magnificence at second-hand.
The excavators have not as yet devoted much attention to the city-wall, and, until more extensive digging has been carried out, it will not be possible to form a very detailed idea of the system of fortification. But enough has already been done to prove that the outer wall was a very massive structure, and consisted of two separate walls with the intermediate space filled in with rubble. The outer wall, or face, which bore the brunt of any attack and rose high above the moat encircling the city, was of burnt brick set in bitumen. It measured more than seven metres in thickness, and below ground-level was further protected from the waters of the moat by an additional wall, more than three metres in thickness, and, like it, constructed of burnt brick with bitumen as mortar. Behind the outer wall, at a distance of some twelve metres from it, was a second wall of nearly the same thickness. This faced inward towards the city, and so was constructed of crude or unburnt brick, as it would not be liable to direct assault by a besieger; and the mortar employed was clay. The crude-brick wall cannot be dated accurately, but it is certainly older than the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, and in his fathers time it probably foMiied the outer city’s sole protection.1 The burnt-brick wall and the moat-lining in front of it date, in their present form, from the age of Nebuchadnezzar, for they are built of his square bricks, impressed with his usual stamp, which are so common over the whole site of Babylon.
At intervals along the crude-brick wall were towers projecting slightly beyond each face. Only the bases of the towers have been preserved, so that any restoration of their upper structure must rest on pure conjecture. But, as rubble still fills the space between the two walls of burnt and unburnt brick, it may be presumed that the filling was continued up to the crown of the outer wall. It is possible that the inner wall of crude brick was raised to a greater height and formed a curtain between each pair of towers. But even so, the clear space in front, consisting of the rubble filling and the burnt-brick wall, formed a broad roadway nearly twenty metres in breadth, which extended right round the city along the top of the wall. On this point the excavations have fully substantiated the account given by Herodotus, who states that “ on the top, along the edges of the wall, they constructed buildings of a single chamber facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to turn.” Even if smaller towers were built upon the outer edge, there would have been fully enough space to drive a team of four horses abreast along the wall, and in the intervals between the towers two such chariots might easily have passed each other. It has been acutely noted that this design of the wall was not only of protection by reason of its size, but was also of great strategic value; for it enabled the defence to move its forces with great speed from one point to another, wherever the attack at the moment might be pressed.
