History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 — 03 - Ch. 1: Ancient Chaldaea, pt. 3

The first races to colonize this country of rivers, or at any rate the first of which we can find traces, seem to have belonged to three different types.

The most important were the Semites, who spoke a dialect akin to Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenician.

It was for a long time supposed that they came down from the north, and traces of their occupation have been pointed out in Armenia in the vicinity of Ararat, or halfway down the course of the Tigris, at the foot of the Gordysean mountains.

It has recently been suggested that we ought rather to seek for their place of origin in Southern Arabia, and this view is gaining ground among the learned.

Side by side with these Semites, the monuments give evidence of a race of ill-defined character, which some have sought, without much success, to connect with the tribes of the Urall or Altai; these people are for the present provisionally called Sumerians.

* They came, it would appear, from some northern country; they brought with them from their original home a curious system of writing, which, modified, transformed, and adopted by ten different nations, has preserved for us all that we know in regard to the majority of the empires which rose and fell in Western Asia before the Persian conquest.

Semite or Sumerian, it is still doubtful which preceded the other at the mouths of the Euphrates.

The Sumerians, who were for a time all-powerful in the centuries before the dawn of history, had already mingled closely with the Semites when we first hear of them.

Their language gave way to the Semitic, and tended gradually to become a language of ceremony and ritual, which was at last learnt less for everyday use, than for the drawing up of certain royal inscriptions, or for the interpretation of very ancient texts of a legal or sacred character.

Their religion became assimilated to the religion, and their gods identified with the gods, of the Semites.

The process of fusion commenced at such an early date, that nothing has really come down to us from the time when the two races were strangers to each other.

We are, therefore, unable to say with certainty how much each borrowed from the other, what each gave, or relinquished of its individual instincts and customs.

We must take and judge them as they come before us, as forming one single nation, imbued with the same ideas, influenced in all their acts by the same civilization, and possessed of such strongly marked characteristics that only in the last days of their existence do we find any appreciable change.

In the course of the ages they had to submit to the invasions and domination of some dozen different races, of whom some--Assyrians and Chaldaeans--were descended from a Semitic stock, while the others--Elamites, Cossaaans, Persians, Macedonians, and Parthians--either were not connected with them by any tie of blood, or traced their origin in some distant manner to the Sumerian branch.

They got quickly rid of a portion of these superfluous elements, and absorbed or assimilated the rest; like the Egyptians, they seem to have been one of those races which, once established, were incapable of ever undergoing modification, and remained unchanged from one end of their existence to the other.

* The name _Accadian_ proposed by H. Rawlinson and by Hincks, and adopted by Sayce, seems to have given way to _Sumerian_, the title put forward by Oppert.

The existence of the Sumerian or Sumero-Accadian has been contested by Halevy in a number of noteworthy works.

M.

Halevy wishes to recognize in the so-called Sumerian documents the Semitic tongue of the ordinary inscriptions, but written in a priestly syllabic character subject to certain rules; this would be practically a _cryptogram_, or rather an _allogram_.

M.

Halevy won over Messrs. Guyard and Pognon in France, Delitzsch and a part of the Delitzsch school in Germany, to his view of the facts.

The controversy, which has been carried on on both sides with a somewhat unnecessary vehemence, still rages; it has been simplified quite recently by Delitzcsh’s return to the Sumerian theory.

Without reviewing the arguments in detail, and while doing full justice to the profound learning displayed by M. Halevy, I feel forced to declare with Tiele that his criticisms “oblige scholars to carefully reconsider all that has been taken as proved in these matters, but that they do not warrant us in rejecting as untenable the hypothesis, still a very probable one, according to which the difference in the graphic systems corresponds to a real difference in.

idiom.

” Their country must have presented at the beginning very much the same aspect of disorder and neglect which it offers to modern eyes.

It was a flat interminable moorland stretching away to the horizon, there to begin again seemingly more limitless than ever, with, no rise or fall in the ground to break the dull monotony; clumps of palm trees and slender mimosas, intersected by lines of water gleaming in the distance, then long patches of wormwood and mallow, endless vistas of burnt-up plain, more palms and more mimosas, make up the picture of the land, whose uniform soil consists of rich, stiff, heavy clay, split up by the heat of the sun into a network of deep narrow fissures, from which the shrubs and wild herbs shoot forth each year in spring-time.

By an almost imperceptible slope it falls gently away from north to south towards the Persian Gulf, from east to west towards the Arabian plateau.

The Euphrates flows through it with unstable and changing course, between shifting banks which it shapes and re-shapes from season to season.

[Illustration: 025. jpg GIGANTIC CHALDAEAN REEDS] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief of the palace of Nimrud.

The slightest impulse of its current encroaches on them, breaks through them, and makes openings for streamlets, the majority of which are clogged up and obliterated by the washing away of their margins, almost as rapidly as they are formed.

Others grow wider and longer, and, sending out branches, are transformed into permanent canals or regular rivers, navigable at certain seasons.

They meet on the left bank detached offshoots of the Tigris, and after wandering capriciously in the space between the two rivers, at last rejoin their parent stream: such are the Shatt-el-Hai and the Shatt-en-Nil.

The overflowing waters on the right bank, owing to the fall of the land, run towards the low limestone hills which shut in the basin of the Euphrates in the direction of the desert; they are arrested at the foot of these hills, and are diverted on to the low-lying ground, where they lose themselves in the morasses, or hollow out a series of lakes along its borders, the largest of which, Bahr-i-Nedjif, is shut in on three sides by steep cliffs, and rises or falls periodically with the floods.

A broad canal, which takes its origin in the direction of Hit at the beginning of the alluvial plain, bears with it the overflow, and, skirting the lowest terraces of the Arabian chain, runs almost parallel to the Euphrates.

In proportion as the canal proceeds southward the ground sinks still lower, and becomes saturated with the overflowing waters, until, the banks gradually disappearing, the whole neighbourhood is converted into a morass.

The Euphrates and its branches do not at all times succeed in reaching the sea: they are lost for the most part in vast lagoons to which the tide comes up, and in its ebb bears their waters away with it.

Reeds grow there luxuriantly in enormous beds, and reach sometimes a height of from thirteen to sixteen feet; banks of black and putrid mud emerge amidst the green growth, and give off deadly emanations.

Winter is scarcely felt here: snow is unknown, hoar-frost is rarely seen, but sometimes in the morning a thin film of ice covers the marshes, to disappear under the first rays of the sun.

* * Loftus attributes the lowering of the temperature during the winter to the wind blowing over a soil impregnated with saltpetre.

“We were,” he says, “in a kind of immense freezing chamber.

” [Illustration: 027. jpg THE MARSHES ABOUT THE CONFLUENCE OF THE KERKHA AND TIGRIS.

] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by J. Dieulafoy.

For six weeks in November and December there is much rain: after this period there are only occasional showers, occurring at longer and longer intervals until May, when they entirely cease, and the summer sets in, to last until the following November.

There are almost six continuous months of depressing and moist heat, which overcomes both men and animals and makes them incapable of any constant effort.

* Sometimes a south or east wind suddenly arises, and bearing with it across the fields and canals whirlwinds of sand, burns up in its passage the little verdure which the sun had spared.

Swarms of locusts follow in its train, and complete the work of devastation.

A sound as of distant rain is at first heard, increasing in intensity as the creatures approach.

Soon their thickly concentrated battalions fill the heavens on all sides, flying with slow and uniform motion at a great height.

They at length alight, cover everything, devour everything, and, propagating their species, die within a few days: nothing, not a blade of vegetation, remains on the region where they alighted.

* Loftus says that he himself had witnessed in the neighbourhood of Bagdad during the daytime birds perched on the palm trees in an exhausted condition, and panting with open beaks.

The inhabitants of Bagdad during the summer pass their nights on the housetops, and the hours of day in passages within, expressly constructed to protect them from the heat.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the country was not lacking in resources.

The soil was almost as fertile as the loam of Egypt, and, like the latter, rewarded a hundredfold the labour of the inhabitants.

* Among the wild herbage which spreads over the country in the spring, and clothes it for a brief season with flowers, it was found that some plants, with a little culture, could be rendered useful to men and beasts.

There were ten or twelve different species of pulse to choose from--beans, ‘lentils, chick-peas, vetches, kidney beans, onions, cucumbers, egg-plants, “gombo,” and pumpkins.

From the seed of the sesame an oil was expressed which served for food, while the castor-oil plant furnished that required for lighting.

The safflower and henna supplied the women with dyes for the stuffs which they manufactured from hemp and flax.

Aquatic plants were more numerous than on the banks of the Nile, but they did not occupy such an important place among food-stuffs.

The “lily bread” of the Pharaohs would have seemed meagre fare to people accustomed from early times to wheaten bread.

Wheat and barley are considered to be indigenous on the plains of the Euphrates;

it was supposed to be here that they were first cultivated in Western Asia, and that they spread from hence to Syria, Egypt, and the whole of Europe.

** “The soil there is so favourable to the growth of cereals, that it yields usually two hundredfold, and in places of exceptional fertility three hundredfold.

The leaves of the wheat and barley have a width of four digits.

As for the millet and sesame, which in altitude are as great as trees, I will not state their height, although I know it from experience, being convinced that those who have not lived in Babylonia would regard my statement with incredulity.

” Herodotus in his enthusiasm exaggerated the matter, or perhaps, as a general rule, he selected as examples the exceptional instances which had been mentioned to him: at present wheat and barley give a yield to the husbandman of some thirty or forty fold.

* Olivier, who was a physician and naturalist, and had visited Egypt as well as Mesopotamia, thought that Babylonia was somewhat less fertile than Egypt.

Loftus, who was neither, and had not visited Egypt, declares, on the contrary, that the banks of the Euphrates are no less productive than those of the Nile.

** Native traditions collected by Berossus confirm this, and the testimony of Olivier is usually cited as falling in with that of the Chaldaean writer.

Olivier is considered, indeed, to have discovered wild cereals in Mesopotamia.

Pie only says, however, that on the banks of the Euphrates above Anah he had met with “wheat, barley, and spelt in a kind of ravine;” from the context it clearly follows that these were plants which had reverted to a wild state--instances of which have been observed several times in Mesopotamia.

A.

de Oandolle admitted the Mesopotamian origin of the various species of wheat and barley.

[Illustration: 030. jpg THE GATHERING OF THE SPATHES OF THE MALE PALM TREE]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a cylinder in the Museum at the Hague.

The original measures almost an inch in height.

“The date palm meets all the other needs of the population; they make from it a kind of bread, wine, vinegar, honey, cakes, and numerous kinds of stuffs; the smiths use the stones of its fruit for charcoal; these same stones, broken and macerated, are given as a fattening food to cattle and sheep.

” Such a useful tree was tended with a loving care, the vicissitudes in its growth were observed, and its reproduction was facilitated by the process of shaking the flowers of the male palm over those of the female: the gods themselves had taught this artifice to men, and they were frequently represented with a bunch of flowers in their right hand, in the attitude assumed by a peasant in fertilizing a palm tree.

Fruit trees were everywhere mingled with ornamental trees--the fig, apple, almond, walnut, apricot, pistachio, vine, with the plane tree, cypress, tamarisk, and acacia; in the prosperous period of the country the plain of the Euphrates was a great orchard which extended uninterruptedly from the plateau of Mesopotamia to the shores of the Persian Gulf.