10. Our imagination longs to reconstruct those gigantic piles as they must have struck the beholder in their towering hugeness, approached from the plain probably by several stairways and by at least one ascent of a slope gentle enough to offer a convenient access to horses and chariots. What an imposing object must have been, for instance, the palace of Sennacherib, on the edge of its battlemented platform (mound of Koyunjik), rising directly above the waters of the Tigris,—named in the ancient language "the Arrow" from the swiftness of its current—into the golden and crimson glory of an Eastern sunset! Although the sameness and unwieldy nature of the material used must have put architectural beauty of outline out of the question, the general effect must have been one of massive grandeur and majesty, aided as it was by the elaborate ornamentation lavished on every portion of the building. Unfortunately the work of reconstruction is left almost entirely to imagination, which derives but little help from the shapeless heaps into which time has converted those ancient, mighty halls.



11. Fergusson, an English explorer and scholar whose works on subjects connected with art and especially architecture hold a high place, has attempted to restore the palace of Sennacherib such as he imagines it to have been, from the hints furnished by the excavations. He has produced a striking and most effective picture, of which, however, an entire half is simply guesswork. The whole nether part—the stone-cased, battlemented platform wall, the broad stairs, the esplanade handsomely paved with patterned slabs, and the lower part of the palace with its casing of sculptured slabs and portals guarded by winged bulls—is strictly according to the positive facts supplied by the excavations. For the rest, there is no authority whatever. We do not even positively know whether there was any second story to Assyrian palaces at all. At all events, no traces of inside staircases have been found, and the upper part of the walls of even the ground-floor has regularly been either demolished or destroyed by fire. As to columns, it is impossible to ascertain how far they may have been used and in what way. Such as were used could have been, as a rule, only of wood—trunks of great trees hewn and smoothed—and consequently every vestige of them has disappeared, though some round column bases in stone have been found.[M] The same remarks apply to the restoration of an Assyrian palace court, also after Fergusson, while that of a palace hall, after Layard, is not open to the same reproach and gives simply the result of actual discoveries. Without, therefore, stopping long to consider conjectures more or less unsupported, let us rather try to reproduce in our minds a clear perception of what the audience hall of an Assyrian king looked like from what we may term positive knowledge. We shall find that our materials will go far towards creating for us a vivid and authentic picture.



12. On entering such a hall the first thing to strike us would probably be the pavement, either of large alabaster slabs delicately carved in graceful patterns, as also the arched doorways leading into the adjacent rooms (see Figs. 24 and 25, pp. 69 and 71), or else covered with rows of inscriptions, the characters being deeply engraven and afterwards filled with a molten metallic substance, like brass or bronze, which would give the entire floor the appearance of being covered with inscriptions in gilt characters, the strange forms of cuneiform writing making the whole look like an intricate and fanciful design.



13. Our gaze would next be fascinated by the colossal human-headed winged bulls and lions keeping their silent watch in pairs at each of the portals, and we should notice with astonishment that the artists had allowed them each an extra leg, making the entire number five instead of four. This was not done at random, but with a very well-calculated artistic object—that of giving the monster the right number of legs, whether the spectator beheld it in front or in profile, as in both cases one of the three front legs is concealed by the others. The front view shows the animal standing, while it appears to be striding when viewed from the side. (See Figures 18 and 27, pp. 59 and 75.) The walls were worthy of these majestic door-keepers. The crude brick masonry disappeared up to a height of twelve to fifteen feet from the ground under the sculptured slabs of soft grayish alabaster which were solidly applied to the wall, and held together by strong iron cramps. Sometimes one subject or one gigantic figure of king or deity was represented on one slab; often the same subject occupied several slabs, and not unfrequently was carried on along an entire wall. In this case the lines begun on one slab were continued on the next with such perfect smoothness, so absolutely without a break, as to warrant the conclusion that the slabs were sculptured after they had been put in their places, not before. Traces of paint show that color was to a certain extent employed to enliven these representations, probably not over plentifully and with some discrimination. Thus color is found in many places on the eyes, brows, hair, sandals, the draperies, the mitre or high headdress of the kings, on the harness of horses and portions of the chariots, on the flowers carried by attendants, and sometimes on trees. Where a siege is portrayed, the flames which issue out of windows and roofs seem always to have been painted red. There is reason to believe, however, that color was but sparingly bestowed on the sculptures, and therefore they must have presented a pleasing contrast with the richness of the ornamentation which ran along the walls immediately above, and which consisted of hard baked bricks of large size, painted and glazed in the fire, forming a continuous frieze from three to five feet wide. Sometimes the painting represented human figures and various scenes, sometimes also winged figures of deities or fantastic animals,—in which case it was usually confined above and below by a simple but graceful running pattern; or it would consist wholly of a more or less elaborate continuous pattern like Fig. 22, 23, or 25, these last symbolical compositions with a religious signification. (See also Fig. 21, "Interior view," etc.) Curiously enough the remains—mostly very trifling fragments—which have been discovered in various ruins, show that these handsomely finished glazed tiles exhibited the very same colors which are nowadays in such high favor with ourselves for all sorts of decorative purposes: those used most frequently were a dark and a pale yellow, white and cream-color, a delicate pale green, occasionally orange and a pale lilac, very little blue and red; olive-green and brown are favorite colors for grounds. "Now and then an intense blue and a bright red occur, generally together; but these positive hues are rare, and the taste of the Assyrians seems to have led them to prefer, for their patterned walls, pale and dull hues.... The general tone of their coloring is quiet, not to say sombre. There is no striving after brilliant effects. The Assyrian artist seeks to please by the elegance of his forms and the harmony of his hues, not to startle by a display of bright and strongly contrasted colors.[N]"



14. It has been asked: how were those halls roofed and how were they lighted? questions which have given rise to much discussion and which can scarcely ever be answered in a positive way, since in no single instance has the upper part of the walls or any part whatever of the roofing been preserved. Still, the peculiar shape and dimensions of the principal palace halls goes far towards establishing a sort of circumstantial evidence in the case. They are invariably long and narrow, the proportions in some being so striking as to have made them more like corridors than apartments—a feature, by the by, which must have greatly impaired their architectural beauty: they were three or four times as long as they were wide, and even more. The great hall of the palace of Asshur-nazir-pal on the platform of the Nimrud mound (excavated by Layard, who calls it, from its position, "the North-West palace") is 160 feet long by not quite 40 wide. Of the five halls in the Khorsabad palace the largest measures 116 ft. by 33, the smallest 87 by 25, while the most imposing in size of all yet laid open, the great hall of Sennacherib at Koyunjik, shows a length of fully 180 ft. with a width of 40. It is scarcely probable that the old builders, who in other points have shown so much artistic taste, should have selected this uniform and unsatisfactory shape for their state apartments, unless they were forcibly held to it by some insuperable imperfection in the means at their disposal. That they knew how to use proportions more pleasing in their general effect, we see from the inner open courts, of which there were several in every palace, and which, in shape and dimensions are very much like those in our own castles and palaces,—nearly square, (about 180 ft. or 120 ft. each way) or slightly oblong: 93 ft. by 84, 124 ft. by 90, 150 ft. by 125. Only two courts have been found to lean towards the long-and-narrow shape, one being 250 ft. by 150, and the other 220 by 100. But even this is very different from those passage-like galleries. The only thing which entirely explains this awkward feature of all the royal halls, is the difficulty of providing them with a roof. It is impossible to make a flat roof of nothing but bricks, and although the Assyrians knew how to construct arches, they used them only for very narrow vaults or over gateways and doors, and could not have carried out the principle on any very extensive scale. The only obvious expedient consisted in simply spanning the width of the hall with wooden beams or rafters. Now no tree, not even the lofty cedar of Lebanon or the tall cypress of the East, will give a rafter, of equal thickness from end to end, more than 40 ft. in length, few even that. There was no getting over or around this necessity, and so the matter was settled for the artists quite aside from their own wishes. This also explains the great value which was attached by all the Assyrian conquerors to fine timber. It was often demanded as tribute, nothing could be more acceptable as a gift, and expeditions were frequently undertaken into the distant mountainous regions of the Lebanon on purpose to cut some. The difficulty about roofing would naturally fall away in the smaller rooms, used probably as sleeping and dwelling apartments, and accordingly they vary freely from oblong to square; the latter being generally about 25 ft. each way, sometimes less, but never more. There were a great many such chambers in a palace; as many as sixty-eight have been discovered in Sennacherib's palace at Koyunjik, and a large portion of the building, be it remembered, is not yet fully explored. Some were as highly decorated as the great halls, some faced with plain slabs or plastered, and some had no ornaments at all and showed the crude brick. These differences probably indicate the difference of rank in the royal household of the persons to whom the apartments were assigned.



15. The question of light has been discussed by eminent explorers—Layard, Botta, Fergusson—at even greater length and with a greater display of ingenuity than that of roofing. The results of the learned discussion may be shortly summed up as follows: We may take it for granted that the halls were sufficiently lighted, for the builders would not have bestowed on them such lavish artistic labor had they not meant their work to be seen in all its details and to the best advantage. This could be effected only in one of three ways, or in two combined: either by means of numerous small windows pierced at regular intervals above the frieze of enamelled bricks, between that and the roof,—or by means of one large opening in the roof of woodwork, as proposed by Layard in his own restoration, or by smaller openings placed at more frequent intervals. This latter contrivance is in general use now in Armenian houses, and Botta, who calls it a louvre, gives a drawing of it.[O] It is very ingenious, and would have the advantage of not admitting too great a mass of sunlight and heat, and of being easily covered with carpets or thick felt rugs to exclude the rain. The second method, though much the grandest in point of effect, would present none of these advantages and would be objectionable chiefly on account of the rain, which, pouring down in torrents—as it does, for weeks at a time, in those countries—must very soon damage the flooring where it is of brick, and eventually convert it into mud, not to speak of the inconvenience of making the state apartments unfit for use for an indefinite period. The small side windows just below the roof would scarcely give sufficient light by themselves. Who knows but they may have been combined with the louvre system, and thus something very satisfactory finally obtained.



16. The kings of Chaldea, Babylonia and Assyria seem to have been absolutely possessed with a mania for building. Scarcely one of them but left inscriptions telling how he raised this or that palace, this or that temple in one or other city, often in many cities. Few contented themselves with repairing the buildings left by their predecessors. This is easy to be ascertained, for they always mention all they did in that line. Vanity, which seems to have been, together with the love of booty, almost their ruling passion, of course accounts for this in a great measure. But there are also other causes, of which the principal one was the very perishable nature of the constructions, all their heavy massiveness notwithstanding. Being made of comparatively soft and yielding material, their very weight would cause the mounds to settle and bulge out at the sides in some places, producing crevices in others, and of course disturbing the balance of the thick but loose masonry of the walls constructed on top of them. These accidents could not be guarded against by the outer casing of stone or burnt brick, or even by the strong buttresses which were used from a very early period to prop up the unwieldy piles: the pressure from within was too great to be resisted.



17. An outer agent, too, was at work, surely and steadily destructive: the long, heavy winter rains. Crude brick, when exposed to moisture, easily dissolves into its original element—mud; even burned brick is not proof against very long exposure to violent wettings; and we know that the mounds were half composed of loose rubbish. Once thoroughly permeated with moisture, nothing could keep these huge masses from dissolution. The builders were well aware of the danger and struggled against it to the best of their ability by a very artfully contrived and admirably executed system of drainage, carried through the mounds in all directions and pouring the accumulated waters into the plain out of mouths beautifully constructed in the shape of arched vaults.[P] Under the flooring of most of the halls have been found drains, running along the centre, then bending off towards a conduit in one of the corners, which carried the contents down into one of the principal channels.



18. But all these precautions were, in the long run, of little avail, so that it was frequently a simpler and less expensive proceeding for a king to build a new palace, than to keep repairing and propping up an old one which crumbled to pieces, so to speak, under the workmen's hands. It is not astonishing that sometimes, when they had to give up an old mansion as hopeless, they proceeded to demolish it, in order to carry away the stone and use it in structures of their own, probably not so much as a matter of thrift, as with a view to quickening the work, stone-cutting in the quarries and transport down the river always being a lengthy operation. This explains why, in some later palaces, slabs were found with their sculptured face turned to the crude brick wall, and the other smoothed and prepared for the artist, or with the sculptures half erased, or piled up against the wall, ready to be put in place. The nature of the injuries which caused the ancient buildings to decay and lose all shape, is very faithfully described in an inscription of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, in which he relates how he constructed the Ziggurat of Borsip on the site of an ancient construction, which he repaired, as far as it went. This is what he says: "The temple of the Seven Spheres, the Tower of Borsip which a former king had built ... but had not finished its upper part, from remote days had fallen into decay. The channels for drawing off the water had not been properly provided; rain and tempest had washed away its bricks; the bricks of the roof were cracked; the bricks of the building were washed away into heaps of rubbish." All this sufficiently accounts for the peculiar aspect offered by the Mesopotamian ruins. Whatever process of destruction the buildings underwent, whether natural or violent, by conquerors' hands, whether through exposure to fire or to stress of weather, the upper part would be the first to suffer, but it would not disappear, from the nature of the material, which is not combustible. The crude bricks all through the enormous thickness of the walls, once thoroughly loosened, dislodged, dried up or soaked through, would lose their consistency and tumble down into the courts and halls, choking them up with the soft rubbish into which they crumbled, the surplus rolling down the sides and forming those even slopes which, from a distance, so deceivingly imitate natural hills. Time, accumulating the drift-sand from the desert and particles of fertile earth, does the rest, and clothes the mounds with the verdant and flowery garment which is the delight of the Arab's eyes.



19. It is to this mode of destruction the Assyrian kings allude in their annals by the continually recurring phrase: "I destroyed their cities, I overwhelmed them, I burned them in the fire, I made heaps of them." However difficult it is to get at the treasures imbedded in these "heaps," we ought not to repine at the labor, since they owe their preservation entirely to the soft masses of earth, sand and loose rubbish which have protected them on all sides from the contact with air, rain and ignorant plunderers, keeping them as safely—if not as transparently—housed as a walnut in its lump of candied sugar. The explorers know this so well, that when they leave the ruins, after completing their work for the time, they make it a point to fill all the excavated spaces with the very rubbish that has been taken out of them at the cost of so much labor and time. There is something impressive and reverent in thus re-burying the relics of those dead ages and nations, whom the mysterious gloom of their self-erected tombs becomes better than the glare of the broad, curious daylight. When Layard, before his departure, after once more wandering with some friends through all the trenches, tunnels and passages of the Nimrud mound, to gaze for the last time on the wonders on which no man had looked before him, found himself once more on the naked platform and ordered the workmen to cover them up again, he was strongly moved by the contrast: "We look around in vain," says he, "for any traces of the wonderful remains we have just seen, and are half inclined to believe that we have dreamed a dream, or have been listening to some tale of Eastern romance. Some, who may hereafter tread on the spot when the grass again grows over the Assyrian palaces, may indeed suspect that I have been relating a vision."



20. It is a curious fact that in Assyria the ruins speak to us only of the living, and that of the dead there are no traces whatever. One might think people never died there at all. Yet it is well known that all nations have bestowed as much care on the interment of their dead and the adornment of their last resting-place as on the construction of their dwellings—nay, some even more, for instance, the Egyptians. To this loving veneration for the dead history owes half its discoveries; indeed we should have almost no reliable information at all on the very oldest races, who lived before the invention of writing, were it not for their tombs and the things we find in them. It is very strange, therefore, that nothing of the kind should be found in Assyria, a country which stood so high in culture. For the sepulchres which are found in such numbers in some mounds down to a certain depth, belong, as is shown by their very position, to later races, mostly even to the modern Turks and Arabs. This peculiarity is so puzzling that scholars almost incline to suppose that the Assyrians either made away with their dead in some manner unknown to us, or else took them somewhere to bury. The latter conjecture, though not entirely devoid of foundation, as we shall see, is unsupported by any positive facts, and therefore was never seriously discussed. The question is simply left open, until something happens to shed light on it.



21. It is just the contrary in Babylonia. It can boast few handsome ruins or sculptures. The platforms and main walls of many palaces and temples have been known from the names stamped on the bricks and the cylinders found in the foundations, but they present only shapeless masses, from which all traces of artistic work have disappeared. In compensation, there is no country in the world where so many and such vast cemeteries have been discovered. It appears that the land of Chaldea,—perhaps because it was the cradle of nations which afterwards grew to greatness, as the Assyrians and the Hebrews—was regarded as a place of peculiar holiness by its own inhabitants, and probably also by neighboring countries, which would explain the mania that seems to have prevailed through so many ages, for burying the dead there in unheard of numbers. Strangely enough, some portions of it even now are held sacred in the same sense. There are shrines in Kerbela and Nedjif (somewhat to the west of Babylon) where every caravan of pilgrims brings from Persia hundreds of dead bodies in their felt-covered coffins, for burial. They are brought on camels and horses. On each side of the animal swings a coffin, unceremoniously thumped by the rider's bare heels. These coffins are, like merchandise, unladen for the night—and sometimes for days too—in the khans or caravanseries (the enclosed halting-places), where men and beasts take their rest together. Under that tropical clime, it is easy to imagine the results. It is in part to this disgusting custom that the great mortality in the caravans is to be attributed, one fifth of which leave their bones in the desert in healthy seasons. However that may be, the gigantic proportions of the Chaldean burying-grounds struck even the ancient Greek travellers with astonishment, and some of them positively asserted that the Assyrian kings used to be buried in Chaldea. If the kings, why not the nobler and wealthier of their subjects? The transport down the rivers presented no difficulties. Still, as already remarked, all this is mere conjecture.



22. Among the Chaldeans cities ERECH (now WARKA) was considered from very old times one of the holiest. It had many extremely ancient temples and a college of learned priests, and around it gradually formed an immense "city of the dead" or Necropolis. The English explorer, Loftus, in 1854-5, specially turned his attention to it and his account is astounding. First of all, he was struck by the majestic desolation of the place. Warka and a few other mounds are raised on a slightly elevated tract of the desert, above the level of the yearly inundations, and accessible only from November to March, as all the rest of the time the surrounding plain is either a lake or a swamp. "The desolation and solitude of Warka," says Loftus, "are even more striking than the scene which is presented at Babylon itself. There is no life for miles around. No river glides in grandeur at the base of its mounds; no green date groves flourish near its ruins. The jackal and the hyaena appear to shun the dull aspect of its tombs. The king of birds never hovers over the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what a cemetery! "It is difficult," again says Loftus, "to convey anything like a correct idea of the piles upon piles of human remains which there utterly astound the beholder. Excepting only the triangular space between the three principal ruins, the whole remainder of the platform, the whole space between the walls and an unknown extent of desert beyond them, are everywhere filled with the bones and sepulchres of the dead. There is probably no other site in the world which can compare with Warka in this respect." It must be added that the coffins do not simply lie one next to the other, but in layers, down to a depth of 30-60 feet. Different epochs show different modes of burial, among which the following four are the most remarkable.



23. Perhaps the queerest coffin shape of all is that composed of two earthen jars (a and b), which accurately fit together, or one slightly fits into the other, the juncture being made air-tight by a coating of bitumen (d, d). The body can be placed in such a coffin only with slightly bent knees. At one end (c) there is an air-hole, left for the escape of the gases which form during the decomposition of the body and which might otherwise burst the jars—a precaution probably suggested by experience (fig. 36). Sometimes there is only one jar of much larger size, but of the same shape, with a similar cover, also made fast with bitumen, or else the mouth is closed with bricks. This is an essentially national mode of burial, perhaps the most ancient of all, yet it remained in use to a very late period. It is to be noted that this is the exact shape of the water jars now carried about the streets of Baghdad and familiar to every traveller.



24. Not much less original is the so-called "dish-cover coffin," also very ancient and national. The illustrations sufficiently show its shape and arrangement.[Q] In these coffins two skeletons are sometimes found, showing that when a widow or widower died, it was opened, to lay the newly dead by the side of the one who had gone before. The cover is all of one piece—a very respectable achievement of the potter's art. In Mugheir (ancient Ur), a mound was found, entirely filled with this kind of coffins.



25. Much more elaborate, and consequently, probably reserved for the noble and wealthy, is the sepulchral vault in brick, of nearly a man's height.[R] In these sepulchres, as in the preceding ones, the skeleton is always found lying in the same position, evidently dictated by some religious ideas. The head is pillowed on a large brick, commonly covered with a piece of stuff or a rug. In the tattered rags which sometimes still exist, costly embroideries and fringed golden tissue have more than once been recognized, while some female skeletons still showed handsome heads of hair gathered into fine nets. The body lies on a reed mat, on its left side, the right hand stretched out so as to reach with the tips of the fingers a bowl, generally of copper or bronze, and sometimes of fine workmanship, usually placed on the palm of the left hand. Around are placed various articles—dishes, in some of which remnants of food are found, such as date stones,—jars for water, lamps, etc. Some skeletons wear gold and silver bangles on their wrists and ankles. These vaults were evidently family sepulchres, for several skeletons are generally found in them; in one there were no less than eleven. (Fig. 39, p. 89.)



26. All these modes of burial are very old and peculiarly Chaldean. But there is still another, which belongs to more recent times, even as late as the first centuries after Christ, and was used by a different and foreign race, the Parthians, one of those who came in turns and conquered the country, stayed there awhile, then disappeared. These coffins are, from their curious form, known under the name of "slipper-shaped." They are glazed, green on the outside and blue on the inside, but of very inferior make: poor clay, mixed with straw, and only half baked, therefore very brittle. It is thought that they were put in their place empty, then the body was laid in, the lid put down, and the care of covering them with sand left to the winds. The lid is fastened with the same mortar which is used in the brick masonry surrounding the coffin, where such a receptacle has been made for it; but they more usually lie pell-mell, separated only by thin layers of loose sand. There are mounds which are, as one may say, larded with them: wherever you begin to dig a trench, the narrow ends stick out from both sides. In these coffins also various articles were buried with the dead, sometimes valuable ones. The Arabs know this; they dig in the sand with their hands, break the coffins open with their spears, and grope in them for booty. The consequence is that it is extremely difficult to procure an entire coffin. Loftus succeeded, however, in sending some to the British Museum, having first pasted around them several layers of thick paper, without which precaution they could not have borne the transport.



27. On the whole, the ancient Chaldean sepulchres of the three first kinds are distinguished by greater care and tidiness. They are not only separated by brick partitions on the sides, and also above and below by a thin layer of brick masonry, but the greatest care was taken to protect them against dampness. The sepulchral mounds are pierced through and through, from top to bottom, by drainage pipes or shafts, consisting of a series of rings, solidly joined together with bitumen, about one foot in diameter. These rings are made of baked clay. The top one is shaped somewhat like a funnel, of which the end is inserted in perforated bricks, and which is provided with small holes, to receive any infiltration of moisture. Besides all this the shafts, which are sunk in pairs, are surrounded with broken pottery. How ingenious and practical this system was, we see from the fact that both the coffins and their contents are found in a state of perfect dryness and preservation. (Fig. 41, p. 90.)



28. In fact the Chaldeans, if they could not reach such perfection as the Assyrians in slab-sculpture, on account of not having stone either at home or within easy reach, seem to have derived a greater variety of architectural ornaments from that inexhaustible material of theirs—baked clay or terra-cotta. We see an instance of it in remnants—unfortunately very small ones, of some walls belonging to that same city of Erech. On one of the mounds Loftus was puzzled by the large quantity of small terra-cotta cones, whole and in fragments, lying about on the ground. The thick flat end of them was painted red, black or white. What was his amazement when he stumbled on a piece of wall (some seven feet in height and not more than thirty in length), which showed him what their use had been. They were grouped into a variety of patterns to decorate the entire wall, being stuck with their thin end into a layer of soft clay with which it was coated for the purpose. Still more original and even rather incomprehensible is a wall decoration consisting of several bands, composed each of three rows of small pots or cups—about four inches in diameter—stuck into the soft clay coating in the same manner, with the mouth turned outward of course! Loftus found such a wall, but unfortunately has given no design of it. (Figures 43 and 44.)



29. As to the ancient Babylonian, or rather Chaldean, art in sculpture, the last word has by no means been said on that subject. Discoveries crowd in every year, constantly leading to the most unexpected conclusions. Thus, it was long an accepted fact that Assyria had very few statues and Babylonia none at all, when a few years ago (1881), what should a French explorer, Mr. E. De Sarzec, French consul in Basra, bring home but nine magnificent statues made of a dark, nearly black stone as hard as granite, called diorite.[S] Unfortunately they are all headless; but, as though to make up for this mutilation, one head was found separate,—a shaved and turbaned head beautifully preserved and of remarkable workmanship, the very pattern of the turban being plain enough to be reproduced by any modern loom.[T] These large prizes were accompanied by a quantity of small works of art representing both men and animals, of a highly artistic design and some of them of exquisite finish of execution. This astounding find, the result of several years' indefatigable work, now gracing the Assyrian rooms of the Louvre in Paris, comes from one of the Babylonian mounds which had not been opened before, the ruins of a mighty temple at a place now called TELL-LOH, and supposed to be the site of SIR-BURLA, or SIR-GULLA, one of the most ancient cities of Chaldea. This "Sarzec-collection," as it has come to be generally called, not only entirely upsets the ideas which had been formed on Old-Chaldean art, but is of immense historical importance from the inscriptions which cover the back of every statue, (not to speak of the cylinders and other small objects,) and which, in connection with the monuments of other ruins, enable scholars to fix, at least approximately, the date at which flourished the city and rulers who have left such extraordinary memorials of their artistic gifts. Some place them at about 4500 B.C., others about 4000. However overwhelming such a valuation may be at first sight, it is not an unsupported fancy, but proofs concur from many sides to show that the builders and sculptors of Sir-gulla could in no case have lived and worked much later than 4000 B.C. It is impossible to indicate in a few lines all the points, the conjectures, the vexed questions, on which this discovery sheds light more or less directly, more or less decisively; they come up continually as the study of those remote ages proceeds, and it will be years before the materials supplied by the Sarzec-Collection are exhausted in all their bearings.



FOOTNOTES:

[G] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., p. 46.

[H] Ur of the Chaldees, from which Abraham went forth.

[I] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., p. 349.

[J] Figure 10.

[K] Figure 71, p. 281.

[L] Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., pp. 317 and 318.

[M] See Fig. 20, p. 63. There is but one exception, in the case of a recent exploration, during which one solitary broken column-shaft was discovered.

[N] G. Rawlinson's "Five Monarchies," Vol. I., pp. 467, 468.

[O] See Fig. 33, p. 83.

[P] Figures 34 and 35, p. 84.

[Q] Figs. 37 and 38, p. 87.

[R] Fig. 39, p. 89.

[S] See Fig. 59, p. 217.

[T] See Figs. 44 and 45, p. 101.



IV.

THE BOOK OF THE PAST.—THE LIBRARY OF NINEVEH.

1. When we wish to learn the great deeds of past ages, and of mighty men long dead, we open a book and read. When we wish to leave to the generations who will come long after us a record of the things that were done by ourselves or in our own times, we take pen, ink and paper, and write a book. What we have written is then printed, published in several hundreds—or thousands—of copies, as the case may be, and quickly finds its way to all the countries of the world inhabited by people who are trained from childhood to thought and study. So that we have the satisfaction of knowing that the information which we have labored to preserve will be obtainable any number of years or centuries after we shall have ceased to exist, at no greater trouble than procuring the book from the shelves of a bookstore, a public or a private library. It is all very simple. And there is not a small child who does not perfectly know a book by its looks, and even has not a pretty correct idea of how a book is made and what it is good for.

2. But books are not always of the shape and material so familiar to us. Metal, stone, brick, walls and pillars, nay, the very rocks of nature's own making, can be books, conveying information as plainly as our volumes of paper sheets covered with written or printed lines. It only needs to know how to read them, and the necessary knowledge and skill may be acquired by processes as simple as the art of ordinary reading and writing, though at the cost of a somewhat greater amount of time and pains.

3. There are two natural cravings, which assert themselves strongly in every mind not entirely absorbed by the daily work for bread and by the anxious care how to procure that work: these are the wish, on the one hand, to learn how the people who came before us lived and what they did, on the other—to transmit our own names and the memory of our deeds to those who will come after us. We are not content with our present life; we want to stretch it both backward and forward—to live both in the past and the future, as it were. This curiosity and this ambition are but parts of the longing for immortality which was never absent from any human soul. In our own age they are satisfied mainly by books; indeed they were originally the principal causes why books began to be made at all. And how easy to satisfy these cravings in our time, when writing materials have become as common as food and far cheaper, and reading may be had for nothing or next to nothing! For, a very few dollars will supply a writer with as much paper as he can possibly use up in a year, while the public libraries, the circulating and college libraries and the reading-rooms make study a matter more of love and perseverance than of money.

4. Yet if the papermill and the printing press were the only material aid to our researches into the past, these researches would stop short very soon, seeing that printing was invented in Europe scarce four hundred years ago, and paper has not been manufactured for more than six hundred years at the outside. True, other materials have been used to write on before paper: bark of trees, skins of animals—(parchment)—cunningly worked fibres of plants—(papyrus, byblos)—even wooden tablets covered with a thin layer of wax, on which characters were engraved with a pointed instrument or "style,"—and these contrivances have preserved for us records which reach back many hundreds of years beyond the introduction of paper. But our curiosity, when once aroused, is insatiable, and an area of some twenty, or thirty, or forty centuries seems to it but a narrow field. Looking back as far as that—and no kind of manuscript information takes us much further—we behold the world wondrously like what it is now. With some differences in garb, in manners, and a much greater one in the range of knowledge, we find men living very nearly as we do and enacting very nearly the same scenes: nations live in families clustered within cities, are governed by laws, or ruled by monarchs, carry on commerce and wars, extend their limits by conquest, excel in all sorts of useful and ornamental arts. Only we notice that larger regions are unknown, vaster portions of the earth, with their populations, are unexplored, than in our days. The conclusion is clearly forced on us, that so complicated and perfect an organization of public and private life, a condition of society implying so many discoveries and so long a practice in thought and handicraft, could not have been an early stage of existence. Long vistas are dimly visible into a past far vaster than the span as yet laid open to our view, and we long to pierce the tantalizing gloom. There, in that gloom, lurk the beginnings of the races whose high achievements we admire, emulate, and in many ways surpass; there, if we could but send a ray of light into the darkness of ages, we must find the solution of numberless questions which suggest themselves as we go: Whence come those races? What was the earlier history of other races with which we find them contending, treating, trading? When did they learn their arts, their songs, their forms of worship? But here our faithful guide, manuscript literature, forsakes us; we enter on a period when none of the ancient substitutes for paper were yet invented. But then, there were the stones. They did not need to be invented—only hewn and smoothed for the chisel.

5. Fortunately for us, men, twenty-five, and forty, and fifty centuries ago, were actuated by the same feelings, the same aspirations as they are now, and of these aspirations, the passionate wish of perpetuating their names and the memory of their deeds has always been one of the most powerful. This wish they connected with and made subservient to the two things which were great and holy in their eyes: their religion and the power of their kings. So they built, in brick and stone, at an almost incalculable expense of time, human labor and human life, palaces and temples. On these huge piles they lavished treasures untold, as also all the resources of their invention and their skill in art and ornament; they looked on them with exulting pride, not only because they thought them, by their vastness and gorgeousness, fit places for public worship and dwellings worthy of their kings, but because these constructions, in their towering grandeur, their massive solidity, bid fair to defy time and outlast the nations which raised them, and which thus felt assured of leaving behind them traces of their existence, memorials of their greatness. That a few defaced, dismantled, moss-grown or sand-choked fragments of these mighty buildings would one day be the only trace, the sole memorial of a rule and of nations that would then have past away forever, even into nothingness and oblivion, scarcely was anticipated by the haughty conquerors who filled those halls with their despotic presence, and entered those consecrated gates in the pomp of triumph to render thanks for bloody victories and warlike exploits which elated their souls in pride till they felt themselves half divine. Nothing doubting but that those walls, those pillars, those gateways would stand down to the latest ages, they confided to them that which was most precious to their ambition, the record of their deeds, the praises of their names, thus using those stony surfaces as so many blank pages, which they covered with row after row of wondrous characters, carefully engraved or chiselled, and even with painted or sculptured representations of their own persons and of the scenes, in war or peace, in which they had been leaders and actors.

6. Thus it is that on all the points of the globe where sometime great and flourishing nations have held their place, then yielded to other nations or to absolute devastation—in Egypt, in India, in Persia, in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, in the sandy, now desert plains of Syria, in the once more populous haunts of ancient Rome and Greece—the traveller meets clusters of great ruins, lofty still in their utter abandonment, with a strange, stern beauty hovering around their weather-beaten, gigantic shafts and cornices, wrapt in the pathetic silence of desolation, and yet not dumb—for their pictured faces eloquently proclaim the tale of buoyant life and action entrusted to them many thousands of years ago. Sometimes, it is a natural rock, cut and smoothed down at a height sufficient to protect it from the wantonly destructive hand of scoffing invaders, on which a king of a deeper turn of thought, more mindful than others of the law which dooms all the works of men to decay, has caused a relation of the principal events of his reign to be engraved in those curious characters which have for centuries been a puzzle and an enigma. Many tombs also, besides the remains of the renowned or wealthy dead, for whom they have been erected at a cost as extravagant and with art as elaborate as the abodes of the living, contain the full description of their inmate's lineage, his life, his habits and pursuits, with prayers and invocations to the divinities of his race and descriptions or portrayed representations of religious ceremonies. Or, the walls of caves, either natural, or cut in the rock for purposes of shelter or concealment, yield to the explorer some more chapters out of the old, old story, in which our interest never slackens. This story man has himself been writing, patiently, laboriously, on every surface on which he could trace words and lines, ever since he has been familiar with the art of expressing his thoughts in visible signs,—and so each such surviving memorial may truly be called a stray leaf, half miraculously preserved to us, out of the great Book of the Past, which it has been the task of scholars through ages, and especially during the last eighty years, to decipher and teach others how to read.



7. Of this venerable book the walls of the Assyrian palaces, with their endless rows of inscriptions, telling year for year through centuries the history of the kings who built them, are so many invaluable pages, while the sculptures which accompany these annals are the illustrations, lending life and reality to what would otherwise be a string of dry and unattractive records. But a greater wonder has been brought to light from amidst the rubbish and dust of twenty-five centuries: a collection of literary and scientific works, of religious treatises, of private and public documents, deposited in rooms constructed on purpose to contain them, arranged in admirable order, in short—a LIBRARY. Truly and literally a library, in the sense in which we use the word. Not the only one either, nor the first by many hundred years, although the volumes are of singular make and little like those we are used to.

8. When Layard was at work for the second time amidst the ruins along the Tigris, he devoted much of his labor to the great mound of Koyunjik, in which the remains of two sumptuous palaces were distinctly discerned, one of them the royal residence of Sennacherib, the other that of his grandson Asshurbanipal, who lived some 650 years before Christ—two of the mightiest conquerors and most magnificent sovereigns of the Eastern world. In the latter palace he came upon two comparatively small chambers, the floor of which was entirely littered with fragments—some of considerable size, some very small—of bricks, or rather baked-clay tablets, covered on both sides with cuneiform writing. It was a layer more than a foot in height which must have been formed by the falling in of the upper part of the edifice. The tablets, piled in good order along the walls, perhaps in an upper story—if, as many think, there was one—must have been precipitated promiscuously into the apartment and shattered by the fall. Yet, incredible as it may appear, several were found entire. Layard filled many cases with the fragments and sent them off to the British Museum, fully aware of their probable historical value.

9. There they lay for years, heaped up at random, a mine of treasures which made the mouths of scholars water, but appalled them by the amount of labor, nay, actual drudgery, needful only to sift and sort them, even before any study of their contents could be begun. At length a young and ambitious archaeologist, attached to the British Museum, George Smith, undertook the long and wearisome task. He was not originally a scholar, but an engraver, and was employed to engrave on wood cuneiform texts for the magnificent atlas edited by the British Museum under the title of "Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia." Being endowed with a quick and enquiring mind, Smith did not content himself, like most of his colleagues, with a conscientious and artistic, but merely technical reproduction; he wished to know what he was doing and he learned the language of the inscriptions. When he took on himself the sorting of the fragments, it was in the hope of distinguishing himself in this new field, and of rendering a substantial service to the science which had fascinated him. Nor was he deceived in this hope. He succeeded in finding and uniting a large quantity of fragments belonging together, and thus restoring pages of writing, with here and there a damaged line, a word effaced, a broken corner, often a larger portion missing, but still enough left to form continuous and readable texts. In some cases it was found that there was more than one copy of this or that work or document, and then sometimes the parts which were hopelessly injured in one copy, would be found whole or nearly so in another.

10. The results accomplished by this patient mechanical process were something astonishing. And when he at length restored in this manner a series of twelve tablets containing an entire poem of the greatest antiquity and highest interest, the occasion seemed important enough to warrant the enterprising owners of the London Daily Telegraph in sending the young student to resume excavations and try to complete some missing links. For of some of the tablets restored by him only portions could be found among the fragments of the British Museum. Of course he made his way straight to the Archive Chambers at Koyunjik, had them opened again and cleared them of another large instalment of their valuable contents, among which he had the inconceivable good fortune to find some of the very pieces which were missing in his collection. Joyfully he returned to England twice with his treasures, and hopefully set out on a third expedition of the same kind. He had reason to feel buoyant; he had already made his name famous by several works which greatly enriched the science he loved, and had he not half a lifetime before him to continue the work which few could do as well? Alas, he little knew that his career was to be cut short suddenly by a loathsome and brutal foe: he died of the plague in Syria, in 1876—just thirty-six years old. He was faithful to the end. His diary, in which he made some entries even within a very few days before his death, shows that at the last, when he knew his danger and was fast losing hope, his mind was equally divided between thoughts of his family and of his work. The following lines, almost the last intelligible ones he wrote, are deeply touching in their simple, single-minded earnestness:—"Not so well. If Doctor present, I should recover, but he has not come, very doubtful case; if fatal farewell to ... My work has been entirely for the science I study.... There is a large field of study in my collection. I intended to work it out, but desire now that my antiquities and notes may be thrown open to all students. I have done my duty thoroughly. I do not fear the change but desire to live for my family. Perhaps all may be well yet."—George Smith's death was a great loss, which his brother-scholars of all countries have not ceased to deplore. But the work now proceeds vigorously and skilfully. The precious texts are sorted, pieced, and classified, and a collection of them, carefully selected, is reproduced by the aid of the photographer and the engraver, so that, should the originals ever be lost or destroyed, (not a very probable event), the Museum indeed would lose one of its most precious rarities, but science would lose nothing.

11. An eminent French scholar and assyriologist, Joachim Menant, has the following picturesque lines in his charming little book "La Bibliotheque du Palais de Ninive": "When we reflect that these records have been traced on a substance which neither fire nor water could destroy, we can easily comprehend how those who wrote them thus thirty or forty centuries ago, believed the monuments of their history to be safe for all future times,—much safer than the frail sheets which printing scatters with such prodigious fertility.... Of all the nations who have bequeathed to us written records of their past life, we may assert that none has left monuments more imperishable than Assyria and Chaldea. Their number is already considerable; it is daily increased by new discoveries. It is not possible to foresee what the future has in store for us in this respect; but we can even now make a valuation of the entire material which we possess.... The number of the tablets from the Nineveh Library alone passes ten thousand.... If we compare these texts with those left us by other nations, we can easily become convinced that the history of the Assyro-Chaldean civilization will soon be one of the best known of antiquity. It has a powerful attraction for us, for we know that the life of the Jewish people is mixed up with the history of Nineveh and Babylon...."



12. It will be seen from this that throughout the following pages we shall continually have to refer to the contents of Asshurbanipal's royal library. We must therefore dispense in this place with any details concerning the books, more than a general survey of the subjects they treated. Of these, religion and science were the chief. Under "science" we must understand principally mathematics and astronomy, two branches in which the old Chaldeans reached great perfection and left us many of our own most fundamental notions and practices, as we shall see later on. Among the scientific works must also be counted those on astrology, i.e., on the influence which the heavenly bodies were supposed to exert on the fate of men, according to their positions and combinations, for astrology was considered a real science, not only by the Chaldeans, but by much later nations too; also hand-books of geography, really only lists of the seas, mountains and rivers, nations and cities then known, lastly lists of plants and animals with a very rude and defective attempt at some sort of classification. History is but scantily represented; it appears to have been mostly confined to the great wall inscriptions and some other objects, of which more hereafter. But—what we should least expect—grammars, dictionaries, school reading-books, occupy a prominent place. The reason is that, when this library was founded, the language in which the venerable books of ancient sages were written not only was not spoken any longer, but had for centuries been forgotten by all but the priests and those who made scholarship their chief pursuit, so that it had to be taught in the same way that the so-called "dead languages," Latin and Greek, are taught at our colleges. This was the more necessary as the prayers had to be recited in the old language called the Accadian, that being considered more holy—just as, in Catholic countries, the common people are even now made to learn and say their prayers in Latin, though they understand not a word of the language. The ancient Accadian texts were mostly copied with a modern Assyrian translation, either interlinear or facing it, which has been of immense service to those who now decipher the tablets.



13. So much for what may be called the classical and reference department of the library. Important as it is, it is scarcely more so than the documentary department or Archive proper, where documents and deeds of all kinds, both public and private, were deposited for safe keeping. Here by the side of treatises, royal decrees and despatches, lists of tribute, reports from generals and governors, also those daily sent in by the superintendents of the royal observatories,—we find innumerable private documents: deeds of sale duly signed, witnessed and sealed, for land, houses, slaves—any kind of property,—of money lent, of mortgages, with the rate of interest, contracts of all sorts. The most remarkable of private documents is one which has been called the "will of King Sennacherib," by which he entrusts some valuable personal property to the priests of the temple of Nebo, to be kept for his favorite son,—whether to be delivered after his (the king's) death or at another time is not stated.



14. It requires some effort to bear in mind the nature and looks of the things which we must represent to ourselves when we talk of Assyrian "books." The above (Fig. 47) is the portrait of a "volume" in perfect condition. But it is seldom indeed that one such is found. Layard, in his first description of his startling "find," says: "They (the tablets) were of different sizes; the largest were flat, and measured nine inches by six and a half; the smaller were slightly convex, and some were not more than an inch long, with but one or two lines of writing. The cuneiform characters on most of them were singularly sharp and well-defined, but so minute in some instances as to be illegible without a magnifying glass." Most curiously, glass lenses have been found among the ruins; which may have been used for the purpose. Specimens have also been found of the very instruments which were employed to trace the cuneiform characters, and their form sufficiently accounts for the peculiar shape of these characters which was imitated by the engravers on stone. It is a little iron rod—(or style, as the ancients used to call such implements)—not sharp, but triangular at the end: [open triangle]. By slightly pressing this end on the cake of soft moist clay held in the left hand no other shape of sign could be obtained than a wedge, [closed triangle], the direction being determined by a turn of the wrist, presenting the instrument in different positions. When one side of the tablet was full, the other was to be filled. If it was small, it was sufficient to turn it over, continuing to hold the edges between the thumb and third finger of the left hand. But if the tablet was large and had to be laid on a table to be written on, the face that was finished would be pressed to the hard surface, and the clay being soft, the writing would be effaced. This was guarded against by a contrivance as ingenious as it was simple. Empty places were left here and there in the lines, in which were stuck small pegs, like matches. On these the tablet was supported when turned over, and also while baking in the oven. On many of the tablets that have been preserved are to be seen little holes or dints, where the pegs have been stuck. Still, it should be mentioned that these holes are not confined to the large tablets and not found on all large tablets. When the tablet was full, it was allowed to dry, then generally, but not always, baked. Within the last few years several thousands unbaked tablets have been found in Babylonia; they crumbled into dust under the finders' fingers. It was then proposed to bake such of them as could at all bear handling. The experiment was successful, and numbers of valuable documents were thus preserved and transported to the great repository of the British Museum. The tablets are covered with writing on both sides and most accurately classed and numbered, when they form part of a series, in which case they are all of the same shape and size. The poem discovered by George Smith is written out on twelve tablets, each of which is a separate book or chapter of the whole. There is an astronomical work in over seventy tablets. The first of them begins with the words: "When the gods Anu and ..." These words are taken as the title of the entire series. Each tablet bears the notice: First, second, third tablet of "When the gods Anu and ..." To guard against all chance of confusion, the last line of one tablet is repeated as the first line of the following one—a fashion which we still see in old books, where the last word or two at the bottom of a page is repeated at the top of the next.



15. The clay tablets of the ancient Chaldeans are distinguished from the Assyrian ones by a curious peculiarity: they are sometimes enclosed in a case of the same material, with exactly the same inscription and seals as on the inner tablet, even more carefully executed.[U] It is evidently a sort of duplicate document, made in the prevision that the outer one might be injured, when the inner record would remain. Rows of figures across the tablet are impressed on it with seals called from their shape cylinders, which were rolled over the soft moist clay. These cylinders were generally of some valuable, hard stone—jasper, amethyst, cornelian, onyx, agate, etc.,—and were used as signet rings were later and are still. They are found in great numbers, being from their hardness well-nigh indestructible. They were generally bored through, and through the hole was passed either a string to wear them on, or a metal axis, to roll them more easily.[V] There is a large and most valuable collection of seal cylinders at the British Museum. Their size ranges from a quarter of an inch to two inches or a little more. But cylinders were also made of baked clay and larger size, and then served a different purpose, that of historical documents. These are found in the foundations of palaces and temples, mostly in the four corners, in small niches or chambers, generally produced by leaving out one or more bricks. These tiny monuments range from a couple of inches to half a foot in height, seldom more; they are sometimes shaped like a prism with several faces (mostly six), sometimes like a barrel, and covered with that compact and minute writing which it often requires a magnifying glass to make out. Owing to their sheltered position, these singular records are generally very well preserved. Although their original destination is only to tell by whom and for what purpose the building has been erected, they frequently proceed to give a full though condensed account of the respective kings' reigns, so that, should the upper structure with its engraved annals be destroyed by the vicissitudes of war or in the course of natural decay, some memorial of their deeds should still be preserved—a prevision which, in several cases, has been literally fulfilled. Sometimes the manner and material of these records were still more fanciful. At Khorsabad, at the very interior part of the construction, was found a large stone chest, which enclosed several inscribed plates in various materials. "... In this only extant specimen of an Assyrian foundation stone were found one little golden tablet, one of silver, others of copper, lead and tin; a sixth text was engraved on alabaster, and the seventh document was written on the chest itself."[W] Unfortunately the heavier portion of this remarkable find was sent with a collection which foundered on the Tigris and was lost. Only the small plates,—gold, silver, copper and tin (antimonium scholars now think it to be)—survived, and the inscriptions on them have been read and translated. They all commemorate, in very nearly the same terms, the foundation and erection of a new city and palace by a very famous king and conqueror, generally (though not correctly) called Sargon, and three of them end with a request to the kings his successors to keep the building in good repair, with a prayer for their welfare if they do and a heavy curse if they fail in this duty: "Whoever alters the works of my hand, destroys my constructions, pulls down the walls which I have raised,—may Asshur, Nineb, Raman and the great gods who dwell there, pluck his name and seed from the land and let him sit bound at the feet of his foe." Most inscriptions end with invocations of the same kind, for, in the words of Menant: "it was not mere whim which impelled the kings of Assyria to build so assiduously. Palaces had in those times a destination which they have no longer in ours. Not only was the palace indeed the dwelling of royalty, as the inscriptions have it,—it was also the BOOK, which each sovereign began at his accession to the throne and in which he was to record the history of his reign."[X]



And each such book of brick and stone we can with perfect truth call a chapter—or a volume—of the great Book of the Past whose leaves are scattered over the face of the earth.

FOOTNOTES:

[U] See Fig. 48, p. 111.

[V] See above, Figs. 49 and 50.

[W] Dr. Julius Oppert, "Records of the Past," Vol. XI., p. 31.

[X] "Les Ecritures Cuneiformes," of Joachim Menant: page 198 (2d edition, 1864).



THE STORY OF CHALDEA.

I.

NOMADS AND SETTLERS.—THE FOUR STAGES OF CULTURE.

1. Men, whatever their pursuit or business, can live only in one of two ways: they can stay where they are, or they can go from one place to another. In the present state of the world, we generally do a little of both. There is some place—city, village, or farm—where we have our home and our work. But from time to time we go to other places, on visits or on business, or travel for a certain length of time to great distances and many places, for instruction and pleasure. Still, there is usually some place which we think of as home and to which we return. Wandering or roving is not our natural or permanent condition. But there are races for whom it is. The Bedouin Arabs are the principal and best known of such races. Who has not read with delight accounts of their wild life in the deserts of Arabia and Northern Africa, so full of adventure and romance,—of their wonderful, priceless horses who are to them as their own children,—of their noble qualities, bravery, hospitality, generosity, so strangely blended with love of booty and a passion for robbing expeditions? They are indeed a noble race, and it is not their choice, but their country which has made them robbers and rovers—Nomads, as such wandering races are called in history and geography. They cannot build cities on the sand of the desert, and the small patches of pasture and palm groves, kept fresh and green by solitary springs and called "oases," are too far apart, too distant from permanently peopled regions to admit of comfortable settlement. In the south of Arabia and along the sea-shore, where the land is fertile and inviting, they live much as other nations do, and when, a thousand years ago, Arabs conquered vast and wealthy countries both in Europe and Asia, and in Africa too, they not only became model husbandmen, but built some of the finest cities in the world, had wise and strictly enforced laws and took the lead in literature and science. Very different are the scattered nomadic tribes which still roam the steppes of Eastern Russia, of Siberia and Central Asia. They are not as gifted by far as the Arabs, yet would probably quickly settle down to farming, were it not that their wealth consists in flocks of sheep and studs of horses, which require the pasture yielded so abundantly by the grassy steppes, and with which they have to move from one place, when it is browsed bare, to another, and still another, carrying their felt-tents and simple utensils with them, living on the milk of their mares and the meat of their sheep. The Red Indian tribes of the far West present still another aspect of nomadic life—that of the hunter, fierce and entirely untamed, the simplest and wildest of all.

2. On the whole, however, nomadic life is at the present day the exception. Most of the nations that are not savages live in houses, not in portable tents, in cities, not encampments, and form compact, solidly bound communities, not loose sets of tribes, now friendly, now hostile to one another. But it has not always been so. There have been times when settled life was the exception and nomadic life the rule. And the older the times, the fewer were the permanent communities, the more numerous the roving tribes. For wandering in search of better places must have been among the first impulses of intelligent humanity. Even when men had no shelter but caves, no pursuit but hunting the animals, whose flesh was their food and in whose skins they clothed themselves, they must frequently have gone forth, in families or detachments, either to escape from a neighborhood too much infested with the gigantic wild beasts which at one time peopled the earth more thickly than men, or simply because the numbers of the original cave-dwellers had become too great for the cave to hold them. The latter must have been a very usual occurrence: families stayed together until they had no longer room enough, or quarrelled, when they separated. Those who went never saw again the place and kindred they left, although they carried with them memories of both, the few simple arts they had learned there and the customs in which they had been trained. They would stop at some congenial halting-place, when, after a time, the same process would be repeated—and so again and again.

3. How was the first horse conquered, the first wild-dog tamed and conciliated? How were cattle first enticed to give man their milk, to depend on his care and follow his movements? Who shall tell? However that may have happened, it is certain that the transition from a hunter's wild, irregular and almost necessarily lawless existence to the gentler pursuits of pastoral life must have been attended by a great change in manners and character. The feeling of ownership too, one of the principal promoters of a well-regulated state of society, must have quickly developed with the possession of rapidly increasing wealth in sheep and horses,—the principal property of nomadic races. But it was not a kind of property which encouraged to settling, or uniting in close communities; quite the contrary. Large flocks need vast pasture-grounds. Besides, it is desirable to keep them apart in order to avoid confusion and disputes about wells and springs, those rare treasures of the steppes, which are liable to exhaustion or drying up, and which, therefore, one flock-owner is not likely to share with another, though that other were of his own race and kin. The Book of Genesis, which gives us so faithful and lively a picture of this nomadic pastoral life of ancient nations, in the account of the wanderings of Abraham and the other Hebrew patriarchs, has preserved such an incident in the quarrel between the herdsmen of Abraham and his nephew Lot, which led to their separation. This is what Abraham said to Lot: "Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left."[Y] So also it is said of Esau that he "went into the country from the face of his brother Jacob: for their riches were more than they might dwell together, and the land wherein they were strangers could not bear them because of their cattle."[Z] This was a facility offered by those immense plains, unclaimed as yet by any one people in particular, and which must oft-times have averted strife and bloodshed, but which ceased from the moment that some one tribe, tired of wandering or tempted by some more than usually engaging spot, settled down on it, marking that and the country around it, as far as its power reached, for its own. There is even now in the East something very similar to this mode of occupation. In the Turkish Empire, which is, in many places, thinly peopled, there are large tracts of waste land, sometimes very fertile, accounted as nobody's property, and acknowledged to belong, legally and forever, to the first man who takes possession of them, provided he cultivates them. The government asks no purchase price for the land, but demands taxes from it as soon as it has found an owner and begins to yield crops.

4. The pastoral nomad's life is, like the hunter's, a singularly free one,—free both from restraint, and, comparatively, from toil. For watching and tending flocks is not a laborious occupation, and no authority can always reach or weigh very heavily on people who are here to-day and elsewhere to-morrow. Therefore, it is only with the third stage of human existence, the agricultural one, that civilization, which cannot subsist without permanent homes and authority, really commences. The farmer's homestead is the beginning of the State, as the hearth or fireplace was the beginning of the family. The different labors of the fields, the house, and the dairy require a great number of hands and a well-regulated distribution of the work, and so keep several generations of the settler's family together, on the same farm. Life in common makes it absolutely necessary to have a set of simple rules for home government, to prevent disputes, keep up order and harmony, and settle questions of mutual rights and duties. Who should set down and enforce these rules but the head of the family, the founder of the race—the patriarch? And when the family has become too numerous for the original homestead to hold it, and part of it has to leave it, to found a new home for itself, it does not, as in the primitive nomadic times, wander off at random and break all ties, but settles close by on a portion of the family land, or takes possession of a new piece of ground somewhat further off, but still within easy reach. In the first case the land which had been common property gets broken up into lots, which, though belonging more particularly to the members who separate from the old stock, are not for that withdrawn from the authority of the patriarch. There are several homesteads now, which form a village, and, later on, several villages; but the bond of kindred, of tradition and custom is religiously preserved, as well as subordination to the common head of the race, whose power keeps increasing as the community grows in numbers and extent of land, as the greater complications of relationships, property, inheritance, demand more laws and a stricter rule,—until he becomes not so much Father as King. Then naturally come collisions with neighboring similar settlements, friendly or hostile, which result in alliances or quarrels, trade or war, and herewith we have the State complete, with inner organization and foreign policy.

5. This stage of culture, in its higher development, combines with the fourth and last—city-building, and city-life, when men of the same race, and conscious of a common origin, but practically strangers to each other, form settlements on a large scale, which, being enclosed in walls, become places of refuge and defence, centres of commerce, industry and government. For, when a community has become very numerous, with wants multiplied by continual improvements and increasing culture, each family can no longer make all the things it needs, and a portion of the population devotes itself to manufacture and arts, occupations best pursued in cities, while the other goes on cultivating the land and raising cattle, the two sets of produces—those of nature and those of the cunning hand and brain—being bartered one for the other, or, when coin is invented, exchanged through that more convenient medium. In the same manner, the task of government having become too manifold and complicated for one man, the former Patriarch, now King, is obliged to surround himself with assistants—either the elders of the race, or persons of his own choice,—and send others to different places, to rule in his name and under his authority. The city in which the King and his immediate ministers and officers reside, naturally becomes the most important one—the Capital of the State.

6. It does not follow by any means that a people, once settled, never stirred from its adopted country. The migratory or wandering instinct never quite died out—our own love of travelling sufficiently proves that—and it was no unfrequent occurrence in very ancient times for large tribes, even portions of nations, to start off again in search of new homes and to found new cities, compelled thereto either by the gradual overcrowding of the old country, or by intestine discords, or by the invasion of new nomadic tribes of a different race who drove the old settlers before them to take possession of their settlements, massacred them if they resisted and reduced those who remained to an irksome subjection. Such invasions, of course, might also be perpetrated with the same results by regular armies, led by kings and generals from some other settled and organized country. The alternative between bondage and emigration must have been frequently offered, and the choice in favor of the latter was helped not a little by the spirit of adventure inborn in man, tempted by so many unexplored regions as there were in those remote ages.

7. Such have been the beginnings of all nations. There can be no other. And there is one more observation which will scarcely ever prove wrong. It is that, however far we may go back into the past, the people whom we find inhabiting any country at the very dawn of tradition, can always be shown to have come from somewhere else, and not to have been the first either. Every swarm of nomads or adventurers who either pass through a country or stop and settle there, always find it occupied already. Now the older population was hardly ever entirely destroyed or dislodged by the newcomers. A portion at least remained, as an inferior or subject race, but in time came to mix with them, mostly in the way of intermarriage. Then again, if the newcomers were peaceable and there was room enough—which there generally was in very early times—they would frequently be suffered to form separate settlements, and dwell in the land; when they would either remain in a subordinate condition, or, if they were the finer and better gifted race, they would quickly take the upper hand, teach the old settlers their own arts and ideas, their manners and their laws. If the new settlement was effected by conquest, the arrangement was short and simple: the conquerors, though less numerous, at once established themselves as masters and formed a ruling nobility, an aristocracy, while the old owners of the land, those at least that did not choose to emigrate, became what may be called "the common people," bound to do service and pay tribute or taxes to their self-instituted masters. Every country has generally experienced, at various times, all these modes of invasion, so that each nation may be said to have been formed gradually, in successive layers, as it were, and often of very different elements, which either finally amalgamated or kept apart, according to circumstances.

The early history of Chaldea is a particularly good illustration of all that has just been said.

FOOTNOTES:

[Y] Genesis, xiii. 7-11.

[Z] Genesis, xxxvi. 6-7.



II.

THE GREAT RACES.—CHAPTER X. OF GENESIS.

1. The Bible says (Genesis xi. 2): "And it came to pass, as they journeyed in the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there."

Shinar—or, more correctly, Shinear—is what may be called Babylonia proper, that part of Mesopotamia where Babylon was, and south of it, almost to the Gulf. "They" are descendants of Noah, long after the Flood. They found the plain and dwelt there, but they did not find the whole land desert; it had been occupied long before them. How long? For such remote ages an exact valuation of time in years is not to be thought of.

2. What people were those whom the descendants of Noah found in the land to which they came from the East? It seems a simple question, yet no answer could have been given to it even as lately as fifteen or sixteen years ago, and when the answer was first suggested by unexpected discoveries made in the Royal Library at Nineveh, it startled the discoverers extremely. The only indication on the subject then known was this, from a Chaldean writer of a late period: "There was originally at Babylon" (i.e., in the land of Babylon, not the city alone) "a multitude of men of foreign race who had settled in Chaldea." This is told by Berosus, a learned priest of Babylon, who lived immediately after Alexander the Great had conquered the country, and when the Greeks ruled it (somewhat after 300 B.C.). He wrote a history of it from the most ancient times, in which he gave an account of the oldest traditions concerning its beginnings. As he wrote his book in Greek, it is probable that his object was to acquaint the new masters with the history and religion of the land and people whom they had come to rule. Unfortunately the work was lost—as so many valuable works have been, as long as there was no printing, and books existed only in a few manuscript copies—and we know of it only some short fragments, quoted by later writers, in whose time Berosus' history was still accessible. The above lines are contained in one such fragment, and naturally led to the question: who were these men of foreign race who came from somewhere else and settled in Chaldea in immemorial times?

3. One thing appears clear: they belonged to none of the races classed in the Bible as descended from Noah, but probably to one far older, which had not been included in the Flood.

4. For it begins to be pretty generally understood nowadays that the Flood may not have been absolutely universal, but have extended over the countries which the Hebrews knew, which made their world, and that not literally all living beings except those who are reported to have been in the Ark may have perished in it. From a negligent habit of reading Chap. VI.-IX. of Genesis without reference to the texts of other chapters of the same Book, it has become a general habit to understand it in this literal manner. Yet the evidence is by no means so positive. The question was considered an open one by profounder students even in antiquity, and freely discussed both among the Jews themselves and the Fathers of the early Christian Church. The following are the statements given in the Book of Genesis; we have only to take them out of their several places and connect them.

5. When Cain had killed his brother Abel, God banished him from the earth which had received his brother's blood and laid a curse on him: "a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth"—using another word than the first time, one which means earth in general (erec), in opposition to the earth (adamah), or fruitful land to the east of Eden, in which Adam and Eve dwelt after their expulsion. Then Cain went forth, still further East, and dwelt in a land which was called "the land of Nod," i.e., "of wandering" or "exile." He had a son, Enoch, after whom he named the city which he built,—the first city,—and descendants. Of these the fifth, Lamech, a fierce and lawless man, had three sons, two of whom, Jabal and Jubal, led a pastoral and nomadic life; but the third, Tubalcain, invented the use of metals: he was "the forger of every cutting instrument of brass and iron." This is what the Chap. IV. of Genesis tells of Cain, his crime, his exile and immediate posterity. After that they are heard of no more. Adam, meanwhile, has a third son, born after he had lost the first two and whom he calls Seth (more correctly Sheth). The descendants of this son are enumerated in Chap. V.; the list ends with Noah. These are the parallel races: the accursed and the blest, the proscribed of God and the loved of God, the one that "goes out of the presence of the Lord" and the one that "calls on the name of the Lord," and "walks with God." Of the latter race the last-named, Noah, is "a just man, perfect in his generation," and "finds grace in the eyes of the Lord."

6. Then comes the narrative of the Flood (Chap. VI.-VIII.), the covenant of God with Noah and re-peopling of the earth by his posterity (Chap. IX.). Lastly Chap. X. gives us the list of the generations of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet;—"of these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood."

7. Now this tenth chapter of Genesis is the oldest and most important document in existence concerning the origins of races and nations, and comprises all those with whom the Jews, in the course of their early history, have had any dealings, at least all those who belonged to the great white division of mankind. But in order properly to understand it and appreciate its value and bearing, it must not be forgotten that EACH NAME IN THE LIST IS THAT OF A RACE, A PEOPLE OR A TRIBE, NOT THAT OF A MAN. It was a common fashion among the Orientals—a fashion adopted also by ancient European nations—to express in this manner the kindred connections of nations among themselves and their differences. Both for brevity and clearness, such historical genealogies are very convenient. They must have been suggested by a proceeding most natural in ages of ignorance, and which consists in a tribe's explaining its own name by taking it for granted that it was that of its founder. Thus the name of the Assyrians is really Asshur. Why? Clearly, they would answer, if asked the question, because their kingdom was founded by one whose name was Asshur. Another famous nation, the Aramaeans, are supposed to be so called because the name of their founder was Aram; the Hebrews name themselves from a similarly supposed ancestor, Heber. These three nations,—and several more, the Arabs among others—spoke languages so much alike that they could easily understand each other, and had generally many common features in looks and character. How account for that? By making their founders, Asshur, and Aram, and Heber, etc., sons or descendants of one great head or progenitor, Shem, a son of Noah. It is a kind of parable which is extremely clear once one has the key to it, when nothing is easier than to translate it into our own sober, positive forms of speech. The above bit of genealogy would read thus: A large portion of humanity is distinguished by certain features more or less peculiar to itself; it is one of several great races, and has been called for more than a hundred years the Semitic, (better Shemitic) race, the race of Shem. This race is composed of many different tribes and nations, who have gone each its own way, have each its own name and history, speak dialects of the same original language, and have preserved many common ideas, customs and traits of character,—which all shows that the race was once united and dwelt together, then, as it increased in numbers, broke up into fractions, of which some rose to be great and famous nations and some remained comparatively insignificant tribes. The same applies to the subdivisions of the great white race (the whitest of all) to which nearly all the European nations belong, and which is personified in the Bible under the name of Japhet, third son of Noah,—and to those of a third great race, also originally white, which is broken up into very many fractions, both great nations and scattered tribes, all exhibiting a decided likeness to each other. The Bible gives the names of all these most carefully, and sums up the whole of them under the name of the second son of Noah, Ham, whom it calls their common progenitor.

8. That the genealogies of Chap. X. of Genesis should be understood in this sense, has long been admitted by scientists and churchmen. St. Augustine, one of the greatest among the Fathers of the early church, pointedly says that the names in it represent "nations, not men."[AA] On the other hand there is also literal truth in them, in this way, that, if all mankind is descended from one human couple, every fraction of it must necessarily have had some one particular father or ancestor, only in so remote a past that his individuality or actual name cannot possibly have been remembered, when every people, as has been remarked above, naturally gave him its own name. Of these names many show by their very nature that they could not have belonged to individuals. Some are plural, like MIZRAIM, "the Egyptians;" some have the article: "the AMORITE, the HIVITE;" one even is the name of a city: SIDON is called "the first-born of Canaan;" now Sidon was long the greatest maritime city of the Canaanites, who held an undisputed supremacy over the rest, and therefore "the first-born." The name means "fisheries"—an appropriate one for a city on the sea, which must of course have been at first a settlement of fishermen. "CANAAN" really is the name of a vast region, inhabited by a great many nations and tribes, all differing from each other in many ways, yet manifestly of one race, wherefore they are called "the sons of Canaan," Canaan being personified in a common ancestor, given as one of the four sons of Ham. Modern science has, for convenience' sake, adopted a special word for such imaginary personages, invented to account for a nation's, tribe's, or city's name, while summing up, so to speak, its individuality: they are called EPONYMS. The word is Greek, and means "one from whom or for whom somebody or something is named," a "namesake." It is not too much to say that, while popular tradition always claims that the eponymous ancestor or city-founder gave his name to his family, race, or city, the contrary is in reality invariably the case, the name of the race or city being transferred to him. Or, in other words, the eponym is really only that name, transformed into a traditional person by a bold and vivid poetical figure of speech, which, if taken for what it is, makes the beginnings of political history wonderfully plain and easy to grasp and classify.

9. Yet, complete and correct as is the list of Chap. X., within the limits which the writer has set to himself, it by no means exhausts the nations of the earth. The reason of the omissions, however, is easily seen. Among the posterity of Japhet the Greeks indeed are mentioned, (under the name of JAVAN, which should be pronounced Yawan, and some of his sons), but not a single one of the other ancient peoples of Europe,—Germans, Italians, Celts, etc.,—who also belonged to that race, as we, their descendants, do. But then, at the time Chap. X. was written, these countries, from their remoteness, were outside of the world in which the Hebrews moved, beyond their horizon, so to speak. They either did not know them at all, or, having nothing to do with them, did not take them into consideration. In neither case would they have been given a place in the great list. The same may be said of another large portion of the same race, which dwelt to the far East and South of the Hebrews—the Hindoos, (the white conquerors of India), and the Persians. There came a time indeed, when the latter not only came into contact with the Jews, but were their masters; but either that was after Chap. X. was written or the Persians were identified by the writers with a kindred nation, the Persians' near neighbor, who had flourished much earlier and reacted in many ways on the countries westward of it; this nation was the MEDES, who, under the name of MADAI, are mentioned as one of the sons of Japhet, with Javan the Greek.

10. More noticeable and more significant than these partial omissions is the determination with which the authors of Chap. X. consistently ignore all those divisions of mankind which do not belong to one of the three great white races. Neither the Black nor the Yellow races are mentioned at all; they are left without the pale of the Hebrew brotherhood of nations. Yet the Jews, who staid three or four hundred years in Egypt, surely learned there to know the real negro, for the Egyptians were continually fighting with pure-blood black tribes in the south and south-west, and bringing in thousands of black captives, who were made to work at their great buildings and in their stone-quarries. But these people were too utterly barbarous and devoid of all culture or political importance to be taken into account. Besides, the Jews could not be aware of the vast extent of the earth occupied by the black race, since the greater part of Africa was then unknown to the world, and so were the islands to the south of India, also Australia and its islands—all seats of different sections of that race.

11. The same could not be said of the Yellow Race. True, its principal representatives, the nations of the far East of Asia—the Chinese, the Mongols and the Mandchous,—could not be known to the Hebrews at any time of antiquity, but there were more than enough representatives of it who could not be unknown to them.[AB] For it was both a very old and extremely numerous race, which early spread over the greater part of the earth and at one time probably equalled in numbers the rest of mankind. It seems always to have been broken up into a great many tribes and peoples, whom it has been found convenient to gather under the general designation of TURANIANS, from a very ancient name,—TUR or TURA—which was given them by the white population of Persia and Central Asia, and which is still preserved in that of one of their principal surviving branches, the TURKS. All the different members of this great family have had very striking features in common,—the most extraordinary being an incapability of reaching the highest culture, of progressing indefinitely, improving continually. A strange law of their being seems to have condemned them to stop short, when they had attained a certain, not very advanced, stage. Thus their speech has remained extremely imperfect. They spoke, and such Turanian nations as now exist still speak, languages, which, however they may differ, all have this peculiarity, that they are composed either entirely of monosyllables, (the most rudimentary form of speech), or of monosyllables pieced into words in the stiffest, most unwieldy manner, stuck together, as it were, with nothing to join them, wherefore this kind of language has been called agglutinative. Chinese belongs to the former class of languages, the "monosyllabic," Turkish to the latter, the "agglutinative." Further, the Turanians were probably the first to invent writing, but never went in that art beyond having one particular sign for every single word—(such is Chinese writing with its forty thousand signs or thereabouts, as many as words in the language)—or at most a sign for every syllable. They had beautiful beginnings of poetry, but in that also never went beyond beginnings. They were also probably the first who built cities, but were wanting in the qualities necessary to organize a society, establish a state on solid and lasting foundations. At one time they covered the whole of Western Asia, dwelt there for ages before any other race occupied it,—fifteen hundred years, according to a very trustworthy tradition,—and were called by the ancients "the oldest of men;" but they vanish and are not heard of any more the moment that white invaders come into the land; these drive the Turanians before them, or bring them into complete subjection, or mix with them, but, by force of their own superiorly gifted nature, retain the dominant position, so that the others lose all separate existence. Thus it was everywhere. For wherever tribes of the three Biblical races came, they mostly found Turanian populations who had preceded them. There are now a great number of Turanian tribes, more or less numerous—Kirghizes, Bashkirs, Ostiaks, Tunguzes, etc., etc.—scattered over the vast expanse of Siberia and Eastern Russia, where they roam at will with their flocks and herds of horses, occasionally settling down,—fragmentary remnants of a race which, to this latest time, has preserved its original peculiarities and imperfections, whose day is done, which has long ceased to improve, unless it assimilates with the higher white race and adopts their culture, when all that it lacked is supplied by the nobler element which mixes with it, as in the case of the Hungarians, one of the most high-spirited and talented nations of Europe, originally of Turanian stock. The same may be said, in a lesser degree, of the Finns—the native inhabitants of the Russian principality of Finland.

12. All this by no means goes to show that the Yellow Race has ever been devoid of fine faculties and original genius. Quite the contrary; for, if white races everywhere stepped in, took the work of civilization out of their hands and carried it on to a perfection of which they were incapable, still they, the Turanians, had everywhere begun that work, it was their inventions which the others took up and improved: and we must remember that it is very much easier to improve than to invent. Only there is that strange limitation to their power of progress and that want of natural refinement, which are as a wall that encloses them around. Even the Chinese, who, at first sight, are a brilliant exception, are not so on a closer inspection. True, they have founded and organized a great empire which still endures; they have a vast literature, they have made most important inventions—printing, manufacturing paper out of rags, the use of the compass, gunpowder—centuries before European nations made them in their turn. Yet the latter do all those things far better; they have improved these, to them, new inventions more in a couple of hundred years than the Chinese in a thousand. In fact it is a good many centuries since the Chinese have ceased to improve anything at all. Their language and writing are childishly imperfect, though the oldest in existence. In government, in the forms of social life, in their ideas generally, they follow rules laid down for them three thousand years ago or more and from which to swerve a hair's breadth were blasphemy. As they have always stubbornly resisted foreign influences, and gone the length of trying actually to erect material walls between themselves and the rest of the world, their empire is a perfectly fair specimen of what the Yellow Race can do, if left entirely to itself, and quite as much of what it cannot do, and now they have for centuries presented that unique phenomenon—a great nation at a standstill.

13. All this obviously leads us to a very interesting and suggestive question: what is this great race which we find everywhere at the very roots of history, so that not only ancient tradition calls them "the oldest of men," but modern science more and more inclines to the same opinion? Whence came it? How is it not included in the great family of nations, of which Chap. X. of Genesis gives so clear and comprehensive a scheme? Parallel to this question arises another: what became of Cain's posterity? What, above all, of the descendants of those three sons of Lamech, whom the writer of Genesis clearly places before us as heads of nations and thinks of sufficient importance to specify what their occupations were? (See Genesis iv. 19-22.) Why do we never hear any more of this entire half of humanity, severed in the very beginning from the other half—the lineage of the accursed son from that of the blest and favored son? And may not the answer to this series of questions be the answer to the first series also?