Assyria, Its Princes, Priests and People

rature, a

mples of Babylonia, although stone was plentiful in Assyria, and there was no marshy plain where inundations might be feared. It was only the walls that were l

ssyria. The city was laid out in the form of a square, and surrounded by walls forty-six feet thick and over a mile in length each way, th

oms, in which the French excavators saw the barracks of the palace-guard. Above this terrace rose a second, at a height of about ten feet, upon which was built the royal palace itself. This was entered through a gateway, on either side of which stood the stone figure of a 'cherub,' while within it was a court 350 feet long and 170 feet wide. Beyond thi

n, in fact, had been a Babylonian invention, and originated in the necessity of supporting buildings on wooden pillars in a country where there was no stone. From Babylo

es of the house preferred to sit in the open air, either in the airy courts upon which its chambers opened, or under the shady trees of the paradeisos or park attached to the dwell

nct periods in the history of this form of art. The first period is that which begins, so far as we know at present, with the age of Assur-natsir-pal. It is characterised by boldness and vigour, by an absence of background or landscape, and by an almost total want of perspective. With very few exceptions, faces and figures are drawn i

y. The foreground is now filled in with vegetable and other forms, all drawn with a pre-Raffaellite exactitude. The relief consequently becomes exceedingly rich, and produces the eff

and we meet with several examples of successful foreshortening. Up to the last, however, the Assyrian artist succeeded but badly in human portraiture. Nothing can surpass some of his pictures of animals; when he came to deal with the human figure he expended his strength on embroidered robes and the muscles of the legs and arms. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. Unlike the Egyptian, who excelled in the delineation of

rn neighbours contented themselves with much more sober hues. It was no doubt from the populations of Mesopotamia that the Greeks first learnt to paint and tint their sculptured stone. Unfortunately it is difficult, if not impossib

aves, urged to their work by the rod and sword of their task-masters. On the colossus itself stood an overseer holding to his mouth what looks on the monument like a modern speaking-trumpet. Over a sculpture representing the transport of one of these colossi Sennacherib has engraved the words: 'Sennacherib, [Pg 91] [Pg 92] [Pg 93] king of legions, king of Assyria, has caused the

showing primitive Hieroglyphics and

or forgotten; more frequently it was re-edited from time to time with interlinear or parallel translations in Assyro-Babylonian. This was more especially the case with the sacre

s de luxe.' The writing instrument had originally been the edge of a stone or a piece of stick, but these were soon superseded by a metal stylus with a square head. Under the combined influence of the clay tablet and the metal stylus, the old picture-writing began to degenerate into the cuneiform or 'wedge-shaped' characters with which the monuments of Assyria have made us familiar. It was difficult, if not impossible, any longer to draw circles and curves, and accordingly angles took the place of circles, and straight lines the place of curves. Continuous lines were equally difficult to form; it was easier to represent them by a series of indentations, each of which took a wedge-like appearance from the square head of the stylus. As soon as the exact forms of the old pictures began to be obliterated, other alterations became inevitable. The forms began to be simplified by the omission of lines or wedges which were no longer necessary, now that the character had become a mere symbol instead of a picture; and this process of simplification went on from one century to another, until in many instances the later form of a character is hardly more than a shadow of what it originally was. Education was widely spread i

ained practically unchanged down to the fall of Nineveh. This form of script was one of the many simplified forms of handwriting that were used in Babylonia, and it was fortunately a very clear and well-defined one. Now and then, it is true, contact with Babylonia made an Assyrian king desirous of imitating the archaic writing of Babylonia, and inscriptions were consequently engraved in flori

er than those of Babylonia, since there was always a danger of a large tablet being [Pg 97] [Pg 98] [Pg 99] broken in the fire. In consequence of the small size of the tablets, and the amount of text with which it was often necessary to cover them, the characters impressed upon them are freque

syria

inal in the Br

library of Assyria that, in fact, from which most of the Assyrian literature we possess has come, was the great library of Nineveh (Kouyunjik). This owed its magnitude and reputation to Assur-bani-pal, who filled it with copies of the plundered books of Babylonia. A whole army of scribes was employed in it, busily engaged in writing and editing old texts. Assur-bani-pal is never weary of telling us, in the colophon at the end of the last

requently the phonetic value attached to it by the Assyrians, these syllabaries, as they have been termed-in consequence of the fact that the cuneiform characters denoted syllables and not letters-have been of the greatest possible assistance in the decipherment of the inscriptions. Besides the syllabaries, the Semitic scribes compiled tables of

rning the old dead language of Chaldea. In addition to these helps whole texts were provided with Assyrian translations, sometimes interlinear, sometimes placed in a parallel column on the right-hand side; s

c language and alphabet used side by side with the Assyrian cuneiform. This common use of Aramaic explains how it was that the Jews after the Babylonish captivity gave up their own language in favour not of the Assyro-Babylonian, but of the Aramaic of Northern Syria and Arabia. An educated Assyrian was thus expected to be able to read and write a dead language, Accadian, and to read, write, and speak a foreign l

f generals in the field, or the copies of royal correspondence found a place in the public library. The chronology of Assyria, and therewith of the Old Testament also, has been restored by means of the lists o

led for the same king, and both remained to the last days of the Assyrian Empire the standard treatises on the subjects with which they dealt. To the same period we should probably refer a treatise on agriculture, extracts from which have been preserved in a reading-book in Accadian and Assyrian. Here the songs are quoted with which the Accadian ox-drivers beguiled their labours in th

n Cylinder contain

inal in the Br

ordinary Assyrian Characters of the last t

specimen of Babylonian w

Writing from an Inscr

teration and translation of

] Kha-za-ki-ya-

u-su nak-ris of the Jews th

?ir-su dungeon

rrani mat Their heart feare

-ri of

ani D.P. narkabaté the m

Me-lukh-khi the horses

ru-nim-ma a force without n

and they

na ta-mir-ti their aid.

-ta-?u-

it-ku-nu before me the orde

u they ap

kulti D.P. Assur their weap

i-su-un my l

n hapikta-su-un I fought and

bli sarrani the charioteers

u-ra-a the

te sa sar together with th

hi bal-?u-?u-u

-su-da ?atā in the midst of

-?u-u The

e aks-ud and the city Tā

-?un I carried

to Nergal and the other gods by 'the wise

he lower part (of the house); what goes down by the sides of the house; what in the ditch of the house (makes) broad furrows; what roars like a bull; what brays like an ass; what flut

e songs to Assur, Bel the voice of the firmament, the Southern Sun,' and another god. The mention of songs to Assur shows that there were some which were of Assyrian origin. The epics, however, all came from Babylonia, and were partly translations from Accadian, partly indepe

ually in the Semitic period passing first into a form of the Sun-god, and then into a solar hero. His twelve labours or adventures answer to the twelve months of the year through which the sun moves, like the twelve labours of the Greek Hêraklês. The latter, indeed, were simply the twelve labours of Gisdhubar transported to the west. The Greeks received many myths and mythological conceptions from the Ph?nicians, along with their early culture, and these myths had themselves been brought by the Ph?nicians from their original home in Chaldea. It has long been recognised that Hêraklês was the borrowed Ph?nician Sun-god; we now know that his primitive prototype had been adopted by the Ph?nicians from the Accadians of Babylonia. It is not strange, therefore, that just as in the Greek myth of Aphroditê and Ad?nis we find the outlines of the old Chaldean story of

b.c. 2500. On the other hand, it is difficult to make it later than b.c. 2000, while the whole character and texture of the poem shows that it has been put together from older lays, which have been united into a single whole. The poem deservedly continued

translator frequently comes across a word or phrase which is new to him, and which he is consequently obliged to leave untranslated or to render purely conjecturally. At times there is a lacuna in the original text itself. When the Assyrian scribe was unable to read the tablet he was copying, either because the characters had been effaced by time or because their Babylonian forms were unknown to him,

to a puerile superstition, and the ever-present dread of witchcraft and magic which they contain. A good exam

en and earth, director o

thest the dead with life

ed, director

cy for him tha

offspring come forth

thy land, the S

the bewitchmen

me and there i

e and return of health ar

f the god Ner, whatever be

e with rest, and day and

eart and the sickness

I am debased and

affliction I h

ow not, the sin I have

l and he

of my god

still and h

tand still

witchment that has been

of my father, or the bew

the seven branches of

ent of my famil

of my free-born w

d the living, or the bewitchment

my father and of him

u a father, and to brother

thou a father, and to handm

ast made and thy ..

od be a father where

god Ner, whatever be their na

lord, and bid the evil

. The false assumption was made that an event was caused by another which had immediately preceded it; and hence it was laid down that whenever two events had been observed to follow one upon the other, the recurrence of

of the sun and moon, the conjunction of the sun and moon, the phases of Venus and Mars, the position of the pole-star, the changes of the weather, the appearance of comets, or, as they are called, 'stars with a tail behind and a corona in front,' and the like. The immense collection of records of eclipses indicates the length of time during which observations of the heavens had been carried on. As it is generally stated whether a solar eclipse had happened 'according to calculation' or 'contrary to calculation,' it is clear that the Babylonians were acquainted at an ear

was correspondingly divided into twelve months, each of thirty days, intercalary months being counted in by the priests when necessary. The British Museum possesses fragments of a planisphere

y, the eponymy of Bel-kharran-Sadua.' 'To the king, my lord, thy servant Abil-Istar. May there be peace to the king, my lord. May Nebo and Merodach be propitious to the king, my lord. May the great gods grant unto the king, my lord, long days, soundness of body, and joy of heart. On the twenty-seventh day (of the month) the moon disappeared. On the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth days, we kept a watch for the eclipse of the sun. But the sun did not pass into eclipse. On the first day the moon was seen during the day. During the month Tammuz (June) it was above the planet Mercury, as I have already reported to the king. During the period when the moon is called Anu (i.e., from the firs

for augural purposes presupposes a sort of Babylonian Euclid. The mathematical unit was 60, which was understood as a multiple when high numbers had to be expressed, IV, for example, standing for (4 × 60 =) 240. Similarly, 60 was the unwritte

cypress-extract, half an ephah of gamgam herbs, half an ephah of linseed, half an ephah of ..., half an ephah of imdi herbs, half an ephah of the seed of tarrati, half an ephah of calves' milk, half an ephah of senu wood, half an ephah of tik powder, half an ephah of the ... of the river-god, half an ephah of usu wood, half an ephah of mountain medicine, half an ephah of the flesh(?) of a dove, half an ephah of the seed of the ..., half an ephah of the corn of the field, ten measures of the juice of a cut herb, ten measures of the tooth of the sea (sea-weed), one ephah of putrid flesh(?), one ephah of dates, one ephah of palm-wine and insik, and .*

ure: 'For low spirits, slice the root of the destiny tree, the root of the susum tree, two or three o

eam down, and with the gods thy brothers liftest up the glory of thy wisdom.' At other times a witch or sorceress was called in, and told to 'bind a cord twice seven times, binding it on the sick man's neck and on his feet like fetters, and while he lies in his bed to pour pure water over him.' Instead of the knotted cord verses from a sacred book might be employed, just as phylacteries were, and still are, among the Jews. Thus we read: 'In the night-time let a verse from a good ta