History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 — 02 - Ch. 1: Ancient Chaldaea, pt. 2

**** The word here translated by “disk” is literally the royal cap, decorated with horns, “Agu,” which Sin, the moon- god, wears on his head.

The heavens having been put in order,* he set about peopling the earth, and the gods, who had so far passively and perhaps powerlessly watched him at his work, at length made up their minds to assist him.

They covered the soil with verdure, and all collectively “made living beings of many kinds.

The cattle of the fields, the wild beasts of the fields, the reptiles of the fields, they fashioned them and made of them creatures of life.

” ** According to one legend, these first animals had hardly left the hands of their creators, when, not being able to withstand the glare of the light, they fell dead one after the other.

Then Merodach, seeing that the earth was again becoming desolate, and that its fertility was of no use to any one, begged his father Ea to cut off his head and mix clay with the blood which welled from the trunk, then from this clay to fashion new beasts and men, to whom the virtues of this divine blood would give the necessary strength to enable them to resist the air and light.

At first they led a somewhat wretched existence, and “lived without rule after the manner of beasts.

But, in the first year, appeared a monster endowed with human reason named Oannes, who rose from out of the Erythraean sea, at the point where it borders Babylonia.

He had the whole body of a fish, but above his fish’s head he had another head which was that of a man, and human feet emerged from beneath his fish’s tail; he had a human voice, and his image is preserved to this day.

He passed the day in the midst of men without taking any food; he taught them the use of letters, sciences and arts of all kinds, the rules for the founding of cities, and the construction of temples, the principles of law and of surveying; he showed them how to sow and reap; he gave them all that contributes to the comforts of life.

Since that time nothing excellent has been invented.

At sunset this monster Oannes plunged back into the sea, and remained all night beneath the waves, for he was amphibious.

He wrote a book on the origin of things and of civilization, which he gave to men.

” These are a few of the fables which were current among the races of the Lower Euphrates with regard to the first beginnings of the universe.

That they possessed many other legends of which we now know nothing is certain, but either they have perished for ever, or the works in which they were recorded still await discovery, it may be under the ruins of a palace or in the cupboards of some museum.

* The arrangement of the heavens by Merodach is described at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth tablets.

The text, originally somewhat obscure, is so mutilated in places that it is not always possible to make out the sense with certainty.

** The creation of the animals and then of man is related on the seventh tablet, and on a tablet the place of which, in the series, is still undetermined.

I have been obliged to translate the text rather freely, so as to make the meaning clear to the modern reader.

[Illustration: 017. jpg A GOD-FISH] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief from Nimrud.

They do not seem to have conceived the possibility of an absolute creation, by means of which the gods, or one of them, should have evolved out of nothing all that exists: the creation was for them merely the setting in motion of pre-existing elements, and the creator only an organizer of the various materials floating in chaos.

Popular fancy in different towns varied the names of the creators and the methods employed by them; as centuries passed on, a pile of vague, confused, and contradictory traditions were amassed, no one of which was held to be quite satisfactory, though all found partisans to support them.

Just as in Egypt, the theologians of local priesthoods endeavoured to classify them and bring them into a kind of harmony: many they rejected and others they recast in order to better reconcile their statements: they arranged them in systems, from which they undertook to unravel, under inspiration from on high, the true history of the universe.

That which I have tried to set forth above is very ancient, if, as is said to be the case, it was in existence two or even three thousand years before our era; but the versions of it which we possess were drawn up much later, perhaps not till about the VIIth century B. C.

* It had been accepted by the inhabitants of Babylon because it flattered their religious vanity by attributing the credit of having evolved order out of chaos to Merodach, the protector of their city.

** He it was whom the Assyrian scribes had raised to a position of honour at the court of the last kings of Nineveh:*** it was Merodach’s name which Berossus inscribed at the beginning of his book, when he set about relating to the Greeks the origin of the world according to the Chaldeans, and the dawn of Babylonian civilization.

* The question as to whether the text was originally written in Sumerian or in the Semitic tongue has frequently been discussed; the form in which we have it at present is not very old, and does not date much further back than the reign of Assurbanipal, if it is not even contemporary with that monarch.

According to Sayce, the first version would date back beyond the XXth century, to the reign of Khammurabi;

according to Jensen, beyond the XXXth century before our era.

** Sayce thinks that the myth originated at Eridu, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and afterwards received its present form at Babylon, where the local schools of theology adapted it to the god Merodach.

*** The tablets in which it is preserved for us come partly from the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, partly from that of the temple of Nebo at Borsippa; these latter are more recent than the others, and seem to have been written during the period of the Persian supremacy.

Like the Egyptian civilization, it had had its birth between the sea and the dry land on a low, marshy, alluvial soil, flooded annually by the rivers which traverse it, devastated at long intervals by tidal waves of extraordinary violence.

The Euphrates and the Tigris cannot be regarded as mysterious streams like the Nile, whose source so long defied exploration that people were tempted to place it beyond the regions inhabited by man.

The former rise in Armenia, on the slopes of the Niphates, one of the chains of mountains which lie between the Black Sea and Mesopotamia, and the only range which at certain points reaches the line of eternal snow.

At first they flow parallel to one another, the Euphrates from east to west as far as Malatiyeh, the Tigris from the west towards the east in the direction of Assyria.

Beyond Malatiyeh, the Euphrates bends abruptly to the south-west, and makes its way across the Taurus as though desirous of reaching the Mediterranean by the shortest route, but it soon alters its intention, and makes for the south-east in search of the Persian Gulf.

The Tigris runs in an oblique direction towards the south from the point where the mountains open out, and gradually approaches the Euphrates.

Near Bagdad the two rivers are only a few leagues apart.

However, they do not yet blend their waters; after proceeding side by side for some twenty or thirty miles, they again separate and only finally; unite at a point some eighty leagues lower down.

At the beginning of our geological period their course was not such a long one.

The sea then penetrated as far as lat.

33 deg.

, and was only arrested by the last undulations of the great plateau of secondary formation, which descend from the mountain group of Armenia: the two rivers entered the sea at a distance of about twenty leagues apart, falling into a gulf bounded on the east by the last spurs of the mountains of Iran, on the west by the sandy heights which border the margin of the Arabian Desert.

* They filled up this gulf with their alluvial deposit, aided by the Adhem, the Diyaleh, the Kerkha, the Karun, and other rivers, which at the end of long independent courses became tributaries of the Tigris.

The present beds of the two rivers, connected by numerous canals, at length meet near the village of Kornah and form one single river, the Shatt-el-Arab, which carries their waters to the sea.

The mud with which they are charged is deposited when it reaches their mouth, and accumulates rapidly; it is said that the coast advances about a mile every seventy years.

** In its upper reaches the Euphrates collects a number of small affluents, the most important of which, the Kara-Su, has often been confounded with it.

Near the middle of its course, the Sadjur on the right bank carries into it the waters of the Taurus and the Amanus, on the left bank the Balikh and the Khabur contribute those of the Karadja-Dagh; from the mouth of the Khabur to the sea the Euphrates receives no further affluent.

The Tigris is fed on the left by the Bitlis-Khai, the two Zabs, the Adhem, and the Diyaleh.

The Euphrates is navigable from Sumeisat, the Tigris from Mossul, both of them almost as soon as they leave the mountains.

They are subject to annual floods, which occur when the winter snow melts on the higher ranges of Armenia.

The Tigris, which rises from the southern slope of the Niphates and has the more direct course, is the first to overflow its banks, which it does at the beginning of March, and reaches its greatest height about the 10th or 12th of May.

The Euphrates rises in the middle of March, and does not attain its highest level till the close of May.

From June onwards it falls with increasing rapidity; by September all the water which has not been absorbed by the soil has returned to the river-bed.

The inundation does not possess the same importance for the regions covered by it, that the rise of the Nile does for Egypt.

In fact, it does more harm than good, and the river-side population have always worked hard to protect themselves from it and to keep it away from their lands rather than facilitate its access to them; they regard it as a sort of necessary evil to which they resign themselves, while trying to minimize its effects.

*** * This fact has been established by Ross and Lynch in two articles in the _Journal of the Royal Geographical Society_, vol. ix.

pp. 446, 472. The Chaldaeans and Assyrians called the gulf into which the two rivers debouched, Nar Marratum, or “salt river,” a name which they extended to the Chaldaean Sea, i. e. to the whole Persian Gulf.

** Loftus estimated, about the middle of the last century, the progress of alluvial deposit at about one English mile in every seventy years; H. Rawlinson considers that the progress must have been more considerable in ancient times, and estimates it at an English mile in thirty years.

Kiepert thinks, taking the above estimate as a basis, that in the sixth century before our era the fore-shore came from about ten to twelve German miles (47 to 56 English) higher up than the present fore-shore.

G.

Rawlinson estimates on his part that between the thirtieth and twentieth centuries B. C.

, a period in which he places the establishment of the first Chaldaean Empire, the fore-shore was more than 120 miles above the mouth of Shatt-el-Arab, to the north of the present village of Kornah.

*** Fr.

Lenormant has energetically defended this hypothesis in the majority of his works: it is set forth at some length in his work on _La Langue primitive de la Chaldee_.

Hommel, on the other hand, maintains and strives to demonstrate scientifically the relationship of the non-Semitic tongue with Turkish.

The traveller Olivier noticed this, and writes as follows: “The land there is rather less fertile [than in Egypt], because it does not receive the alluvial deposits of the rivers with the same regularity as that of the Delta.

It is necessary to irrigate it in order to render it productive, and to protect it sedulously from the inundations which are too destructive in their action and too irregular.

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