History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 — 39 - Ch. 3: Chaldaean Civilization, pt. 12

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the terra-cotta plaques discovered by Loftus.

Sometimes a quarrel breaks out among the comrades, and leads to a stand-up fight with the fists; or a lion, perhaps, in quest of a meal, surprises and kills one of the bulls: the shepherd runs up, his axe in his hand, to contend bravely with the marauder for the possession of his beast.

The shepherd was accustomed to provide himself with assistance in the shape of enormous dogs, who had no more hesitation in attacking beasts of prey than they had in pursuing game.

In these combats the natural courage of the shepherd was stimulated by interest: for he was personally responsible for the safety of his flock, and if a lion should find an entrance into one of the enclosures.

[Illustration: 329b.

jpg SCENES OF PASTORAL LIFE IN CHALDAEA.

] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a Chaldaean intaglio from Layard.

Another cylinder of the same kind is reproduced at p. 233 of the present work; it represents Etana arising to heaven by the aid of his friend the eagle, while the pastoral scene below resembles in nearly all particulars that given above.

[Illustration: 330. jpg FIGHT WITH A LION] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the terra-cotta tablets discovered by Loftus.

Fishing was not so much a pastime as a source of livelihood; for fish occupied a high place in the bill of fare of the common folk.

Caught by the line, net, or trap, it was dried,in the sun, smoked, or salted.

The chase was essentially the pastime of the great noble--the pursuit of the lion and the bear in the wooded covers or the marshy thickets of the river-bank; the pursuit of the gazelle, the ostrich, and bustard on the elevated plains or rocky tablelands of the desert.

The onager of Mesopotamia is a very beautiful animal, with its grey glossy coat, and its lively and rapid action.

[Illustration: 331. jpg THE DOG IN TUB LEASH] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a terra-cotta tablet discovered by Sir H. Rawlinson in the ruins of Babylon, and now in the British Museum If it is disturbed, it gives forth a cry, kicks up its heels, and dashes off: when at a safe distance, it stops, turns round, and faces its pursuer: as soon as he approaches, it starts off again, stops, and takes to its heels again, continuing this procedure as long as it is followed.

The Chaldaeans found it difficult to catch by the aid of dogs, but they could bring it down by arrows, or perhaps catch it alive by stratagem.

A running noose was thrown round its neck, and two men held the ends of the ropes.

The animal struggled, made a rush, and attempted to bite, but its efforts tended only to tighten the noose still more firmly, and it at length gave in, half strangled; after alternating struggles and suffocating paroxysms, it became somewhat calmer, and allowed itself to be led.

It was finally tamed, if not to the extent of becoming useful in agriculture, at least for the purposes of war: before the horse was known in Chaldaea, it was used to draw the chariot.

The original habitat of the horse was the great table-lands of Central Asia: it is doubtful whether it was brought suddenly into the region of the Tigrus and Euphrates by some barbaric invasion, or whether it was passed on from tribe to tribe, and thus gradually reached that country.

It soon became acclimatized, and its cross-breeding with the ass led for centuries to the production of magnificent mules.

The horse was known to the kings of Lagash, who used it in harness.

The sovereigns of neighbouring cities were also acquainted with it, but it seems to have been employed solely by the upper classes of society, and never to have been generally used in the war-chariot or as a charger in cavalry operations.

[Illustration: 332. jpg CHALDAEAN CARRYING A FISH.

(left)] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the terra-cotta tablets discovered by Loftus.

The Chaldaeans carried agriculture to a high degree of perfection, and succeeded in obtaining from the soil everything it could be made to yield.

[Illustration: 333. jpg THE ONAGER TAKEN WITH THE LASSO.

] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the Assyrian bas-relief of Nimrud.

See p. 35 of the present work for an illustration of onagers pierced by arrows in the chase.

Their methods, transmitted in the first place to the Greeks, and afterwards to the Arabs, were perpetuated long after their civilization had disappeared, and were even practised by the people of Iraq under the Abbasside Caliphs.

Agricultural treatises on clay, which contained an account of these matters, were deposited in one or other of the sacred libraries in which the priests of each city were long accustomed to collect together documents from every source on which they could lay their hands.

There were to be found in each of these collections a certain number of works which were unique, either because the authors were natives of the city, or because all copies of them had been destroyed in the course of centuries--the Epic of Grilgames, for instance, at Uruk; a history of the Creation, and of the battles of the gods with the monsters at Kutha: all of them had their special collections of hymns or psalms, religious and magical formulas, their lists of words and grammatical phraseology, their glossaries and syllabaries, which enabled them to understand and translate texts drawn up in Sumerian, or to decipher those whose writing presented more than ordinary difficulty.

In these libraries there was, we find, as in the inscriptions of Egypt, a complete literature, of which only some shattered fragments have come down to us.

The little we are able to examine has produced upon our modern investigators a complex impression, in which astonishment rather than admiration contends with a sense of tedious-ness.

There may be recognized here and there, among the wearisome successions of phrases, with their rugged proper names, episodes which seem something like a Chaldaean “Genesis” or “Veda;” now and then a bold flight of fancy, a sudden exaltation of thought, or a felicitous expression, arrests the attention and holds it captive for a time.

In the narrative of the adventures of Grilgames, for instance, there is a certain nobility of character, and the sequence of events, in their natural and marvellous development, are handled with gravity and freedom: if we sometimes encounter episodes which provoke a smile or excite our repugnance, we must take into account the rudeness of the age with which they deal, and remember that the men and gods of the later Homeric epic are not a whit behind the heroes of Babylonian story in coarseness.

The recognition of divine omnipotence, and the keenly felt afflictions of the soul, awakened in the Chaldaean psalmist feelings of adoration and penitence which still find, in spite of the differences of religion, an echo in our own hearts; and the unknown scribe, who related the story of the descent of Ishtar to the infernal regions, was able to express with a certain gloomy energy the miseries of the “Land without return.

“These instances are to be regarded, however, as exceptional: the bulk of Chaldaean literature seems nothing more than a heap of pretentious trash, in which even the best-equipped reader can see no meaning, or, if he can, it is of such a character as to seem unworthy of record.

His judgment is natural in the circumstances, for the ancient East is not, like Greece and Italy, the dead of yesterday whose soul still hovers around us, and whose legacies constitute more than the half of our patrimony: on the contrary, it was buried soul and body, gods and cities, men and circumstances, ages ago, and even its heirs, in the lapse of years, have become extinct.

In proportion as we are able to bring its civilization to light, we become more and more conscious that we have little or nothing in common with it.

Its laws and customs, its methods of action and its modes of thought, are so far apart from those of the present day, that they seem to us to belong to a humanity utterly different from our own.

The names of its deities do not appeal to our imagination like those of the Olympian cycle, and no traditional respect serves to do away with the sense of uncouthness which we experience from the jingle of syllables which enter into them.

Its artists did not regard the world from the same point of view as we do, and its writers, drawing their inspiration from an entirely different source, made use of obsolete methods to express their feelings and co-ordinate their ideas.

It thus happens that while we understand to a shade the classical language of the Greeks and Romans, and can read their works almost without effort, the great primitive literatures of the world, the Egyptian and Chaldaean, have nothing to offer us for the most part but a sequence of problems to solve or of enigmas to unriddle with patience.

How many phrases, how many words at which we stumble, require a painstaking analysis before we can make ourselves master of their meaning!

And even when we have determined to our satisfaction their literal signification, what a number of excursions we must make in the domain of religious, ethical, and political history before we can compel them to render up to us their full import, or make them as intelligible to others as they are to ourselves!

When so many commentaries are required to interpret the thought of an individual or a people, some difficulty must be experienced in estimating the value of the expression which they have given to it.

Elements of beauty were certainly, and perhaps are still, within it; but in proportion as we clear away the rubbish which encumbers it, the mass of glossaries necessary to interpret it fall in and bury it so as to stifle it afresh.

While the obstacles to our appreciation of Chaldaeann literature are of such a serious character, we are much more at home in our efforts to estimate the extent and depth of their scientific knowledge.

They were as well versed as the Egyptians, but not more, in arithmetic and geometry in as far as these had an application to the affairs of everyday life: the difference between the two peoples consisted chiefly in their respective numerical systems--the Egyptians employing almost exclusively the decimal system of notation, while the Chaldaeans combined its use with the duodecimal.

[Illustration: 337. jpg Page image] To express the units, they made use of so many vertical “nails” placed one after, or above, each other, thus [symbols] etc. ; tens were represented by bent brackets [symbols], up to 60; beyond this figure they had the choice of two methods of notation: they could express the further tens by the continuous additions of brackets thus, [symbols] or they could represent 50 by a vertical “nail,” and add for every additional ten a bracket to the right of it, thus: [symbols].

The notation of a hundred was represented by the vertical “nail” with a horizontal stroke to the right thus [symbols], and the number of hundreds by the symbols placed before this sign, thus [symbols], etc. : a thousand was written [symbols] i. e. ten times one hundred, and the series of thousands by the combination of different notations which served to express units, tens, and hundreds.

They subdivided the unit, moreover, into sixty equal parts, and each of these parts into sixty further equal subdivisions, and this system of fractions was used in all kinds of quantitive measurements.

The fathom, the foot and its square, talents and bushels, the complete system of Chaldaean weights and measures, were based on the intimate alliance and parallel use of the decimal and duodecimal systems of notation.

The sixtieth was more frequently employed than the hundredth when large quantities were in question: it was called a “soss,” and ten sosses were equal to a “ner,” while sixty ners were equivalent to a “sar;” the series, sosses, ners, and sars, being employed in all estimations of values.

Years and measures of length were reckoned in sosses, while talents and bushels were measured in sosses and sars.

The fact that these subdivisions were all divisible by 10 or 12, rendered calculations by means of them easy to the merchant and workmen as well as to the mathematical expert.

The glimpses that we have been able to obtain up to the present of Chaldaean scientific methods indicate that they were on a low level, but they were sufficiently advanced to furnish practical rules for application in everyday affairs: helps to memory of different kinds, lists of figures with their names phonetically rendered in Sumerian and Semitic speech, tables of squares and cubes, and rudimentary formulas and figures for land-surveying, furnished sufficient instructions to enable any one to make complicated calculations in a ready manner, and to work out in figures, with tolerable accuracy, the superficial area of irregularly shaped plots of land.

The Chaldaeans could draw out, with a fair amount of exactness, plans of properties or of towns, and their ambition impelled them even to attempt to make maps of the world.

The latter were, it is true, but rough sketches, in which mythological beliefs vitiated the information which merchants and soldiers had collected in their journeys.

The earth was represented as a disk surrounded by the ocean stream: Chaldaea took up the greater part of it, and foreign countries did not appear in it at all, or held a position out in the cold at its extremities.

Actual knowledge was woven in an extraordinary manner with mystic considerations, in which the virtues of numbers, their connections with the gods, and the application of geometrical diagrams to the prediction of the future, played an important part.

We know what a brilliant fortune these speculations attained in after-years, and the firm hold they obtained for centuries over Western nations, as formerly over the Bast.

It was not in arithmetic and geometry alone, moreover, that the Chaldaeans were led away by such deceits: each branch of science in its turn was vitiated by them, and, indeed, it could hardly be otherwise when we come to consider the Chaldaean outlook upon the universe.

Its operations, in their eyes, were not carried on under impersonal and unswerving laws, but by voluntary and rational agents, swayed by an inexorable fate against which they dared not rebel, but still free enough and powerful enough to avert by magic the decrees of destiny, or at least to retard their execution.

From this conception of things each subordinate science was obliged to make its investigations in two perfectly distinct regions: it had at first to determine the material facts within its competence--such as the position of the stars, for instance, or the symptoms of a malady; it had then to discover the beings which revealed themselves through these material manifestations, their names and their characteristics.

When once it had obtained this information, and could lay its hands upon them, it could compel them to work on its behalf: science was thus nothing else than the application of magic to a particular class of phenomena.

The number of astronomical facts with which the Chaldaeans had made themselves acquainted was considerable.

[Illustration: 340. jpg CHALDAEAN MAP OF THE WORLD.

]