History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 — 31 - Ch. 3: Chaldaean Civilization, pt. 4

All these various officials closely attached to the person of the sovereign--heads of the wardrobe, chamberlains, cupbearers, bearers of the royal sword or of the flabella, commanders of the eunuchs or of the guards--had, by the nature of their duties, daily opportunities of gaining a direct influence over their master and his government, and from among them he often chose the generals of his army or the administrators of his domains.

Here, again, as far as the few monuments and the obscurity of the texts permit of our judging, we find indications of a civil and military organization analogous to that of Egypt: the divergencies which contemporaries may have been able to detect in the two national systems are effaced by the distance of time, and we are struck merely by the resemblances.

As all business transactions were carried on by barter or by the exchange of merchandise for weighed quantities of the precious metals, the taxes were consequently paid in kind: the principal media being corn and other cereals, dates, fruits, stuffs, live animals and slaves, as well as gold, silver, lead, and copper, either in its native state or melted into bars fashioned into implements or ornamented vases.

Hence we continually come across fiscal storehouses, both in town and country, which demanded the services of a whole troop of functionaries and workmen: administrators of corn, cattle, precious metals, wine and oil;

in fine, as many administrators as there were cultures or industries in the country presided over the gathering of the products into the central depots and regulated their redistribution.

A certain portion was reserved for the salaries of the employes and the pay of the workmen engaged in executing public works: the surplus accumulated in the treasury and formed a reserve, which was not drawn upon except in cases of extreme necessity.

Every palace, in addition to its living-rooms, contained within its walls large store-chambers filled with provisions and weapons, which made it more or less a fortress, furnished with indispensable requisites for sustaining a prolonged siege either against an enemy’s troops or the king’s own subjects in revolt.

The king always kept about him bodies of soldiers who perhaps were foreign mercenaries, like the Mazaiu of the armies of the Pharaohs, and who formed his permanent body-guard in times of peace.

When a war was imminent, a military levy was made upon his domains, but we are unable to find out whether the recruits thus raised were drawn indiscriminately from the population in general, or merely from a special class, analogous to that of the warriors which we find in Egypt, who were paid in the same way by grants of land.

The equipment of these soldiers was of the rudest kind: they had no cuirass, but carried a rectangular shield, and, in the case of those of higher rank at all events, a conical metal helmet, probably of beaten copper, provided with a piece to protect the back of the neck;

the heavy infantry were armed with a pike tipped with bronze ox-copper, an axe or sharp adze, a stone-headed mace, and a dagger; the light troops were provided only with the bow and sling.

As early as the third millennium b. c.

, the king went to battle in a chariot drawn by onagers, or perhaps horses; he had his own peculiar weapon, which was a curved baton probably terminating in a metal point, and resembling the sceptre of the Pharaohs.

Considerable quantities of all these arms were stored in the arsenals, which contained depots for bows, maces, and pikes, and even the stones needed for the slings had their special department for storage.

At the beginning of each campaign, a distribution of weapons to the newly levied troops took place; but as soon as the war was at an end, the men brought back their accoutrements, which were stored till they were again required.

The valour of the soldiers and their chiefs was then rewarded; the share of the spoil for some consisted of cattle, gold, corn, a female slave, and vessels of value; for others, lands or towns in the conquered country, regulated by the rank of the recipients or the extent of the services they had rendered.

[Illustration: 266. jpg A SOLDIER BRINGING PRISONERS AND SPOIL.

] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the Chaldaean intaglio in the British.

Museum.

Property thus given was hereditary, and privileges were often added to it which raised the holder to the rank of a petty prince: for instance, no royal official was permitted to impose a tax upon such lands, or take the cattle off them, or levy provisions upon them; no troop of soldiers might enter them, not even for the purpose of arresting a fugitive.

Most of the noble families possessed domains of this kind, and constituted in each kingdom a powerful and wealthy feudal aristocracy, whose relations to their sovereign were probably much the same as those which bound the nomarchs to the Pharaoh.

The position of these nobles was not more stable than that of the dynasties under which they lived: while some among them gained power by marriages or by continued acquisitions of land, others fell into disgrace and were ruined.

As the soil belonged to the gods, it is possible that these nobles were supposed, in theory, ‘to depend upon the gods; but as the kings were the vicegerents of the gods upon earth, it was to the king, as a matter of fact, that they owed their elevation.

Every state, therefore, comprised two parts, each subject to a distinct regime: one being the personal domain of the suzerain, which he managed himself, and from which he drew the revenues;

the other was composed of fiefs, whose lords paid tribute and owed certain obligations to the king, the nature of which we are as yet unable to define.

The Chaldaean, like the Egyptian scribe, was the pivot on which the machinery of this double royal and seignorial administration turned.

He does not appear to have enjoyed as much consideration as his fellow-official in the Nile Valley: the Chaldaean princes, nobles, priests, soldiers, and temple or royal officials, did not covet the title of scribe, or pride themselves upon holding that office side by side with their other dignities, as we see was the case with their Egyptian contemporaries.

The position of a scribe, nevertheless, was an important one.

We continually meet with it in all grades of society--in the palace, in the temples, in the storehouses, in private dwellings; in fine, the scribe was ubiquitous, at court, in the town, in the country, in the army, managing affairs both small and great, and seeing that they were carried on regularly.

His education differed but little from that given to the Egyptian scribe; he learned the routine of administrative or judicial affairs, the formularies for correspondence either with nobles or with ordinary people, the art of writing, of calculating quickly, and of making out bills correctly.

We may well ask whether he ever employed papyrus or prepared skins for these purposes.

It would, indeed, seem strange that, after centuries of intercourse, no caravan should have brought into Chaldaean any of those materials which were in such constant use for literary purposes in Africa;* yet the same clay which furnished the architect with such an abundant building material appears to have been the only medium for transmitting the language which the scribes possessed.

They were always provided with slabs of a fine plastic clay, carefully mixed and kept sufficiently moist to take easily the impression of an object, but at the same time sufficiently firm to prevent the marks once made from becoming either blurred or effaced.

When a scribe had a text to copy or a document to draw up, he chose out one of his slabs, which he placed flat upon his left palm, and taking in the right hand a triangular stylus of flint, copper, bronze, or bone,** he at once set to work.

The instrument, in early times, terminated in a fine point, and the marks made by it when it was gently pressed upon the clay were slender and of uniform thickness; in later times, the extremity of the stylus was cut with a bevel, and the impression then took the shape of a metal nail or a wedge.

* On the Assyrian monuments we frequently see scribes taking a list of the spoil, or writing letters on tablets and some other soft material, either papyrus or prepared skin.

Sayce has given good reasons for believing that the Chaldaeanns of the early dynasties knew of the papyrus, and either made it themselves, or had it brought from Egypt.

** See the triangular stylus of copper or bronze reproduced by the side of the measuring-rule, and the plan on the tablet of Gudea, p. 248 of this volume.

The Assyrian Museum in the Louvre possesses several large, flat styli of bone, cut to a point at one end, which appear to have belonged to the Assyrian scribes.

Taylor discovered in a tomb at Eridu a flint tool, which may have served for the same purpose as the metal or bone styli.

[Illustration: 268. jpg MANUSCRIPT ON PAPYRUS IN HEIROGLYPHICS] They wrote from left to right along the upper part of the tablet, and covered both sides of it with closely written lines, which sometimes ran over on to the edges.

When the writing was finished, the scribe sent his work to the potter, who put it in the kiln and baked it, or the writer may have had a small oven at his own disposition, as a clerk with us would have his table or desk.

The shape of these documents varied, and sometimes strikes us as being peculiar: besides the tablets and the bricks, we find small solid cones, or hollow cylinders of considerable size, on which the kings related their exploits or recorded the history of their wars or the dedication of their buildings.

This method had a few inconveniences, but many advantages.

These clay books were heavy to hold and clumsy to handle, while the characters did not stand out well from the brown, yellow, and whitish background of the material; but, on the other hand, a poem, baked and incorporated into the page itself, ran less danger of destruction than if scribbled in ink on sheets of papyrus.

Fire could make no impression on it; it could withstand water for a considerable length of time; even if broken, the pieces were still of use: as long as it was not pulverized, the entire document could be restored, with the exception, perhaps, of a few signs, or ‘some scraps of a sentence.

The inscriptions which have been saved from the foundations of the most ancient temples, several of which date back forty or fifty centuries, are for the most part as clear and legible as when they left the hands of the writer who engraved them or of the workmen who baked them.

It is owing to the material to which they were committed that we possess the principal works of Chaldaean literature which have come down to us--poems, annals, hymns, magical incantations;

how few fragments of these would ever have reached us had their authors confided them to parchment or paper, after the manner of the Egyptian scribes!

The greatest danger that they ran was that of being left forgotten in the corner of the chamber in which they had been kept, or buried under the rubbish of a building after a fire or some violent catastrophe; even then the _debris_ were the means of preserving them, by falling over them and covering them up.

Protected under the ruins, they would lie there for centuries, till the fortunate explorer should bring them to light and deliver them over to the patient study of the learned.

The cuneiform character in itself is neither picturesque nor decorative.

It does not offer that delightful assemblage of birds and snakes, of men and quadrupeds, of heads and limbs, of tools, weapons, stars, trees, and boats, which succeed each other in perplexing order on the Egyptian monuments, to give permanence to the glory of Pharaoh and the greatness of his gods.

Cuneiform writing is essentially composed of thin short lines, placed in juxtaposition or crossing each other in a somewhat clumsy fashion; it has the appearance of numbers of nails scattered about at haphazard, and its angular configuration, and its stiff and spiny appearance, gives the inscriptions a dull and forbidding aspect which no artifice of the engraver can overcome.

[Illustration: 271. jpg Page image]