History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 — 09 - Ch. 1: Ancient Chaldaea, pt. 9

** G.

Smith, identifying Gilgames with Nimrod, believes, on the other hand, that Nimrod was a real king, who reigned in Mesopotamia about 2250 B. C.

; the poem contains, according to him, episodes, more or less embellished, in the life of the sovereign.

Similar monsters, it was believed, appeared from time to time in the marshes of Chaldaea, and gave proof of their existence to the inhabitants of neighbouring villages by such ravages as real lions and tigers commit in India or the Sahara.

It was the duty of chiefs on the border lands of the Euphrates, as on the banks of the Nile, as among all peoples still sunk in semi-barbarism, to go forth to the attack of these beasts single-handed, and to sacrifice themselves one after the other, until one of them more fortunate or stronger than the rest should triumph over these mischievous brutes.

The kings of Babylon and Nineveh in later times converted into a pleasure that which had been an official duty of their early predecessors: Gilgames had not yet arrived at that stage, and the seriousness, not to speak of the fear, with which he entered on the fight with such beasts, is an evidence of the early date of the portions of his history which are concerned with his hunting exploits.

The scenes are represented on the seals of princes who reigned prior to the year 3000 B. C.

, and the work of the ancient engraver harmonizes so perfectly with the description of the comparatively modern scribe that it seems like an anticipated illustration of the latter; the engravings represent so persistently and with so little variation the images of the monsters, and those of Gilgames and his faithful Eabani, that the corresponding episodes in the poem must have already existed as we know them, if not in form, at least in their main drift.

Other portions of the poem are more recent, and it would seem that the expedition against Khumbaba contains allusions to the Elamite* invasions from which Chaldaea had suffered so much towards the XXth century before our era.

The traditions which we possess of the times following the Deluge, embody, like the adventures of Gilganes, very ancient elements, which the scribes or narrators wove together in a more or less skilful manner around the name of some king or divinity.

* Smith thought he could restore from the poem a part of Chaldaean history: he supposed Izdubar-Nimrod to have been, about 2250, the liberator of Babylon, oppressed by Elam, and the date of the foundation of a great Babylonian empire to have coincided with his victory over the Elamites.

The annals of Assurbanipal show us, in fact, that an Elamite king, Kudurnankhundi, had pillaged Uruk about 2280 B. C.

, and had transported to Susa a statue of the goddess Ishtar.

[Illustration: 082. jpg GILGAMES STRUGGLES WITH A LION] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a Chaldaean intaglio in the British Museum.

The original measures about 1 2/5 inch in height.

The fabulous chronicle of the cities of the Euphrates existed, therefore, in a piecemeal condition--in the memory of the people or in the books of the priests--before even their primitive history began;

the learned who collected it later on had only to select some of the materials with which it furnished them, in order to form out of them a connected narrative, in which the earliest ages were distinguished from the most recent only in the assumption of more frequent and more direct interpositions of the powers of heaven in the affairs of men.

Every city had naturally its own version, in which its own protecting deities, its heroes and princes, played the most important parts.

That of Babylon threw all the rest into the shade; not that it was superior to them, but because this city had speedily become strong enough to assert its political supremacy over the whole region of the Euphrates.

Its scribes were accustomed to see their master treat the lords of other towns as subjects or vassals.

They fancied that this must have always been the case, and that from its origin Babylon had been recognized as the queen-city to which its contemporaries rendered homage.

They made its individual annals the framework for the history of the entire country, and from the succession of its princely families on the throne, diverse as they were in origin, they constructed a complete canon of the kings of Chaldaea.

But the manner of grouping the names and of dividing the dynasties varied according to the period in which the lists were drawn up, and at the present time we are in possession of at least two systems which the Babylonian historians attempted to construct.

Berossus, who communicated one of them to the Greeks about the beginning of the IInd century B. C.

, would not admit more than eight dynasties in the period of thirty-six thousand years between the Deluge and the Persian invasion.

The lists, which he had copied from originals in the cuneiform character, have suffered severely at the hands of his abbreviators, who omitted the majority of the names which seemed to them very barbarous in form, while those who copied these abbreviated lists have made such further havoc with them that they are now for the most part unintelligible.

Modern criticism has frequently attempted to restore them, with varying results; the reconstruction here given, which passes for the most probable, is not equally certain in all its parts:--* [Illustration: 084. jpg CHRONOLOGIC TABLE] It was not without reason that Berossus and his authorities had put the sum total of reigns at thirty-six thousand years; this number falls in with a certain astrological period, during which the gods had granted to the Chaldaeans glory, prosperity, and independence, and whose termination coincided with the capture of Babylon by Cyrus.

** Others before them had employed the same artifice, but they reckoned ten dynasties in the place of the eight accepted by Berossus:-- * After the example of G. B.

Niebuhr, Gutschmid admitted here, as Oppert did, 45 Assyrians; he based his view on Herodotus, in which it is said that the Assyrians held sway in Asia for 520 years, until its conquest by the Medes.

Upon the improbability of this opinion, see Schrader’s demonstration.

** The existence of this astronomical or astrological scheme on which Berossus founded his chronology, was pointed out by Brandis, afterwards by Gutschmid; it is now generally accepted.

[Illustration: 085. jpg TABLE] Attempts have been made to bring the two lists* into harmony, with varying results; in my opinion, a waste of time and labour.

For even comparatively recent periods of their history, the Chaldaeans, like the Egyptians, had to depend upon a collection of certain abbreviated, incoherent, and often contradictory documents, from which they found it difficult to make a choice: they could not, therefore, always come to an agreement when they wished to determine how many dynasties had succeeded each other during these doubtful epochs, how many kings were included in each dynasty, and what length of reign was to be assigned to each king.

We do not know the motives which influenced Berossus in his preference of one tradition over others; perhaps he had no choice in the matter, and that of which he constituted himself the interpreter was the only one which was then known.

In any case, the tradition he followed forms a system which we cannot, modify without misinterpreting the intention of those who drew it up or who have handed it down to us.

We must accept or reject it just as it is, in its entirety and without alteration: to attempt to adapt it to the testimony of the monuments would be equivalent to the creation of a new system, and not to the correction simply of the old one.

The right course is to put it aside for the moment, and confine ourselves to the original lists whose fragments have come down to us: they do not furnish us, it is true, with a history of Chaldaea such as it unfolded itself from age to age, but they teach us what the later Chaldaeans knew, or thought they knew, of that history.

Still it is wise to treat them with some reserve, and not to forget that if they agree with each other in the main, they differ frequently in details.

Thus the small dynasties, which are called the VIth and VIIth, include the same number of kings on both the tablets which establish their existence, but the number of years assigned to the names of the kings and the total years of each dynasty vary a little from one another:-- * The first document having claim to the title of Royal Canon was found among the tablets of the British Museum, and was published by G. Smith.

The others were successively discovered by Pinches; some erroneous readings in them have been corrected by Fr.

Delitzsch, and an exact edition has been published by Knudtzon.

Smith’s list is the fragment of a chronicle in which the VIth, VIIth, and VIIIth dynasties only are almost complete.

One of Pinches’s lists consists merely of a number of royal names not arranged in any consistent order, and containing their non-Semitic as well as their Semitic forms.

The other two lists are actual canons, giving the names of the kings and the years of their reigns; unfortunately they are much mutilated, and the lacunae in them cannot yet be filled up.

All of them have been translated by Sayce.

[Illustration: 080. jpg TABLE] [Illustration: 081. jpg TABLE] Is the difference in the calculations the fault of the scribes, who, in mechanically copying and recopying, ended by fatally altering the figures?

Or is it to be explained by some circumstance of which we are ignorant--an association on the throne, of which the duration is at one time neglected with regard to one of the co-regents, and at another time with regard to the other; or was it owing to a question of legitimacy, by which, according to the decision arrived at, a reign was prolonged or abbreviated?

Cotemporaneous monuments will some day, perhaps, enable us to solve the problem which the later Chaldaeans did not succeed in clearing up.

While awaiting the means to restore a rigorously exact chronology, we must be content with the approximate information furnished by the tablets as to the succession of the Babylonian kings.