Part 1 (1/2)

Chaldea.

by Zenade A. Ragozin.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

MESOPOTAMIA.--THE MOUNDS.--THE FIRST SEARCHERS.

1. In or about the year before Christ 606, Nineveh, the great city, was destroyed. For many hundred years had she stood in arrogant splendor, her palaces towering above the Tigris and mirrored in its swift waters; army after army had gone forth from her gates and returned laden with the spoils of conquered countries; her monarchs had ridden to the high place of sacrifice in chariots drawn by captive kings. But her time came at last. The nations a.s.sembled and encompa.s.sed her around. Popular tradition tells how over two years lasted the siege; how the very river rose and battered her walls; till one day a vast flame rose up to heaven; how the last of a mighty line of kings, too proud to surrender, thus saved himself, his treasures and his capital from the shame of bondage. Never was city to rise again where Nineveh had been.

2. Two hundred years went by. Great changes had pa.s.sed over the land.

The Persian kings now held the rule of Asia. But their greatness also was leaning towards its decline and family discords undermined their power. A young prince had rebelled against his elder brother and resolved to tear the crown from him by main force. To accomplish this, he had raised an army and called in the help of Grecian hirelings. They came, 13,000 in number, led by brave and renowned generals, and did their duty by him; but their valor could not save him from defeat and death. Their own leader fell into an ambush, and they commenced their retreat under the most disastrous circ.u.mstances and with little hope of escape.

3. Yet they accomplished it. Surrounded by open enemies and false friends, tracked and pursued, through sandy wastes and pathless mountains, now parched with heat, now numbed with cold, they at last reached the sunny and friendly h.e.l.lespont. It was a long and weary march from Babylon on the Euphrates, near which city the great battle had been fought. They might not have succeeded had they not chosen a great and brave commander, Xenophon, a n.o.ble Athenian, whose fame as scholar and writer equals his renown as soldier and general. Few books are more interesting than the lively relation he has left of his and his companions' toils and sufferings in this expedition, known in history as ”The Retreat of the Ten Thousand”--for to that number had the original 13,000 been reduced by battles, privations and disease. So cultivated a man could not fail, even in the midst of danger and weighed down by care, to observe whatever was noteworthy in the strange lands which he traversed. So he tells us how one day his little army, after a forced march in the early morning hours and an engagement with some light troops of pursuers, having repelled the attack and thereby secured a short interval of safety, travelled on till they came to the banks of the Tigris. On that spot, he goes on, there was a vast desert city. Its wall was twenty-five feet wide, one hundred feet high and nearly seven miles in circuit. It was built of brick with a bas.e.m.e.nt, twenty feet high, of stone. Close by the city there stood a stone pyramid, one hundred feet in width, and two hundred in height. Xenophon adds that this city's name was Larissa and that it had anciently been inhabited by Medes; that the king of Persia, when he took the sovereignty away from the Medes, besieged it, but could not in any way get possession of it, until, a cloud having obscured the sun, the inhabitants forsook the city and thus it was taken.

4. Some eighteen miles further on (a day's march) the Greeks came to another great deserted city, which Xenophon calls Mespila. It had a similar but still higher wall. This city, he tells us, had also been inhabited by Medes, and taken by the king of Persia. Now these curious ruins were all that was left of Kalah and Nineveh, the two a.s.syrian capitals. In the short s.p.a.ce of two hundred years, men had surely not yet lost the memory of Nineveh's existence and rule, yet they trod the very site where it had stood and knew it not, and called its ruins by a meaningless Greek name, handing down concerning it a tradition absurdly made up of true and fict.i.tious details, jumbled into inextricable confusion. For Nineveh had been the capital of the a.s.syrian Empire, while the Medes were one of the nations who attacked and destroyed it.

And though an eclipse of the sun--(the obscuring cloud could mean nothing else)--did occur, created great confusion and produced important results, it was at a later period and on an entirely different occasion.

As to ”the king of Persia,” no such personage had anything whatever to do with the catastrophe of Nineveh, since the Persians had not yet been heard of at that time as a powerful people, and their country was only a small and insignificant princ.i.p.ality, tributary to Media. So effectually had the haughty city been swept from the face of the earth!

5. Another hundred years brought on other and even greater changes. The Persian monarchy had followed in the wake of the empires that had gone before it and fallen before Alexander, the youthful hero of Macedon. As the conqueror's fleet of light-built Grecian s.h.i.+ps descended the Euphrates towards Babylon, they were often hindered in their progress by huge dams of stone built across the river. The Greeks, with great labor, removed several, to make navigation more easy. They did the same on several other rivers,--nor knew that they were destroying the last remaining vestige of a great people's civilization,--for these dams had been used to save the water and distribute it into the numerous ca.n.a.ls, which covered the arid country with their fertilizing network. They may have been told what travellers are told in our own days by the Arabs--that these dams had been constructed once upon a time by Nimrod, the Hunter-King. For some of them remain even still, showing their huge, square stones, strongly united by iron cramps, above the water before the river is swollen with the winter rains.

6. More than one-and-twenty centuries have rolled since then over the immense valley so well named Mesopotamia--”the Land between the Rivers,”--and each brought to it more changes, more wars, more disasters, with rare intervals of rest and prosperity. Its position between the East and the West, on the very high-road of marching armies and wandering tribes, has always made it one of the great battle grounds of the world. About one thousand years after Alexander's rapid invasion and short-lived conquest, the Arabs overran the country, and settled there, bringing with them a new civilization and the new religion given them by their prophet Mohammed, which they thought it their mission to carry, by force of word or sword, to the bounds of the earth. They even founded there one of the princ.i.p.al seats of their sovereignty, and Baghdad yielded not greatly in magnificence and power to Babylon of old.

7. Order, laws, and learning now flourished for a few hundred years, when new hordes of barbarous people came pouring in from the East, and one of them, the Turks, at last established itself in the land and stayed. They rule there now. The valley of the Tigris and Euphrates is a province of the Ottoman or Turkish Empire, which has its capital in Constantinople; it is governed by pashas, officials sent by the Turkish government, or the ”Sublime Porte,” as it is usually called, and the ignorant, oppressive, grinding treatment to which it has now been subjected for several hundred years has reduced it to the lowest depth of desolation. Its wealth is exhausted, its industry destroyed, its prosperous cities have disappeared or dwindled into insignificance. Even Mossul, built by the Arabs on the right bank of the Tigris, opposite the spot where Nineveh once stood, one of their finest cities, famous for the manufacturing of the delicate cotton tissue to which it gave its name--(_muslin_, _mousseline_)--would have lost all importance, had it not the honor to be the chief town of a Turkish district and to harbor a pasha. And Baghdad, although still the capital of the whole province, is scarcely more than the shadow of her former glorious self; and her looms no longer supply the markets of the world with wonderful shawls and carpets, and gold and silver tissues of marvellous designs.

8. Mesopotamia is a region which must suffer under neglect and misgovernment even more than others; for, though richly endowed by nature, it is of a peculiar formation, requiring constant care and intelligent management to yield all the return of which it is capable.

That care must chiefly consist in distributing the waters of the two great rivers and their affluents over all the land by means of an intricate system of ca.n.a.ls, regulated by a complete and well-kept set of dams and sluices, with other simpler arrangements for the remoter and smaller branches. The yearly inundations caused by the Tigris and Euphrates, which overflow their banks in spring, are not sufficient; only a narrow strip of land on each side is benefited by them. In the lowlands towards the Persian Gulf there is another inconvenience: the country there being perfectly flat, the waters acc.u.mulate and stagnate, forming vast pestilential swamps where rich pastures and wheat-fields should be--and have been in ancient times. In short, if left to itself, Upper Mesopotamia, (ancient a.s.syria), is unproductive from the barrenness of its soil, and Lower Mesopotamia, (ancient Chaldea and Babylonia), runs to waste, notwithstanding its extraordinary fertility, from want of drainage.

9. Such is actually the condition of the once populous and flouris.h.i.+ng valley, owing to the principles on which the Turkish rulers carry on their government. They look on their remoter provinces as mere sources of revenue for the state and its officials. But even admitting this as their avowed and chief object, they pursue it in an altogether wrong-headed and short-sighted way. The people are simply and openly plundered, and no portion of what is taken from them is applied to any uses of local public utility, as roads, irrigation, encouragement of commerce and industry and the like; what is not sent home to the Sultan goes into the private pouches of the pasha and his many subaltern officials. This is like taking the milk and omitting to feed the cow.

The consequence is, the people lose their interest in work of any kind, leave off striving for an increase of property which they will not be permitted to enjoy, and resign themselves to utter dest.i.tution with a stolid apathy most painful to witness. The land has been brought to such a degree of impoverishment that it is actually no longer capable of producing crops sufficient for a settled population. It is cultivated only in patches along the rivers, where the soil is rendered so fertile by the yearly inundations as to yield moderate returns almost unasked, and that mostly by wandering tribes of Arabs or of Kurds from the mountains to the north, who raise their tents and leave the spot the moment they have gathered in their little harvest--if it has not been appropriated first by some of the pasha's tax-collectors or by roving parties of Bedouins--robber-tribes from the adjoining Syrian and Arabian deserts, who, mounted on their own matchless horses, are carried across the open border with as much facility as the drifts of desert sand so much dreaded by travellers. The rest of the country is left to nature's own devices and, wherever it is not cut up by mountains or rocky ranges, offers the well-known twofold character of steppe-land: luxuriant gra.s.sy vegetation during one-third of the year and a parched, arid waste the rest of the time, except during the winter rains and spring floods.

10. A wild and desolate scene! Imposing too in its sorrowful grandeur, and well suited to a land which may be called a graveyard of empires and nations. The monotony of the landscape would be unbroken, but for certain elevations and hillocks of strange and varied shapes, which spring up, as it were, from the plain in every direction; some are high and conical or pyramidal in form, others are quite extensive and rather flat on the summit, others again long and low, and all curiously unconnected with each other or any ridge of hills or mountains. This is doubly striking in Lower Mesopotamia or Babylonia, proverbial for its excessive flatness. The few permanent villages, composed of mud-huts or plaited reed-cabins, are generally built on these eminences, others are used as burying-grounds, and a mosque, the Mohammedan house of prayer, sometimes rises on one or the other. They are pleasing objects in the beautiful spring season, when corn-fields wave on their summits, and their slopes, as well as all the surrounding plains, are clothed with the densest and greenest of herbage, enlivened with countless flowers of every hue, till the surface of the earth looks, from a distance or from a height, as gorgeous as the richest Persian carpet. But, on approaching nearer to these hillocks or mounds, an unprepared traveller would be struck by some peculiar features. Their substance being rather soft and yielding, and the winter rains pouring down with exceeding violence, their sides are furrowed in many places with ravines, dug by the rus.h.i.+ng streams of rain-water. These streams of course wash down much of the substance itself and carry it far into the plain, where it lies scattered on the surface quite distinct from the soil. These was.h.i.+ngs are found to consist not of earth or sand, but of rubbish, something like that which lies in heaps wherever a house is being built or demolished, and to contain innumerable fragments of bricks, pottery, stone evidently worked by the hand and chisel; many of these fragments moreover bearing inscriptions in complicated characters composed of one curious figure shaped like the head of an arrow, and used in every possible position and combination,--like this:

[Ill.u.s.tration: 1.--CUNEIFORM CHARACTERS.]

11. In the crevices or ravines themselves, the waters having cleared away ma.s.ses of this loose rubbish, have laid bare whole sides of walls of solid brick-work, sometimes even a piece of a human head or limb, or a corner of sculptured stone-slab, always of colossal size and bold, striking execution. All this tells its own tale and the conclusion is self-apparent: that these elevations are not natural hillocks or knolls, but artificial mounds, heaps of earth and building materials which have been at some time placed there by men, then, collapsing and crumbling to rubbish from neglect, have concealed within their ample sides all that remains of those ancient structures and works of art, clothed themselves in verdure, and deceitfully a.s.sumed all the outward signs of natural hills.

12. The Arabs never thought of exploring these curious heaps. Mohammedan nations, as a rule, take little interest in relics of antiquity; moreover they are very superst.i.tious, and, as their religious law strictly forbids them to represent the human form either in painting or sculpture lest such reproduction might lead ignorant and misguided people back to the abominations of idolatry, so they look on relics of ancient statuary with suspicion amounting to fear and connect them with magic and witchcraft. It is, therefore, with awe not devoid of horror that they tell travellers that the mounds contain underground pa.s.sages which are haunted not only by wild beasts, but by evil spirits--for have not sometimes strange figures carved in stone been dimly perceived in the crevices? Better instructed foreigners have long ago a.s.sumed that within these mounds must be entombed whatever ruins may be preserved of the great cities of yore. Their number formed no objection, for it was well known how populous the valley had been in the days of its splendor, and that, besides several famous cities, it could boast no end of smaller ones, often separated from each other by a distance of only a few miles. The long low mounds were rightly supposed to represent the ancient walls, and the higher and vaster ones to have been the site of the palaces and temples. The Arabs, though utterly ignorant of history of any kind, have preserved in their religion some traditions from the Bible, and so it happens that out of these wrecks of ages some biblical names still survive. Almost everything of which they do not know the origin, they ascribe to Nimrod; and the smaller of the two mounds opposite Mosul, which mark the spot where Nineveh itself once stood, they call ”Jonah's Mound,” and stoutly believe the mosque which crowns it, surrounded by a comparatively prosperous village, to contain the tomb of Jonah himself, the prophet who was sent to rebuke and warn the wicked city. As the Mohammedans honor the Hebrew prophets, the whole mound is sacred in their eyes in consequence.

13. If travellers had for some time been aware of these general facts concerning the Mounds, it was many years before their curiosity and interest were so far aroused as to make them go to the trouble and expense of digging into them, in order to find out what they really contained. Until within the last hundred years or so, not only the general public, but even highly cultivated men and distinguished scholars, under the words ”study of antiquity,” understood no more than the study of so-called ”_Cla.s.sical_ Antiquity,” i.e., of the language, history and literature of the Greeks and Romans, together with the ruins, works of art, and remains of all sorts left by these two nations.

Their knowledge of other empires and people they took from the Greek and Roman historians and writers, without doubting or questioning their statements, or--as we say now--without subjecting their statements to any criticism. Moreover, European students in their absorption in and devotion to cla.s.sical studies, were too apt to follow the example of their favorite authors and to cla.s.s the entire rest of the world, as far as it was known in ancient times, under the sweeping and somewhat contemptuous by-name of ”Barbarians,” thus allowing them but a secondary importance and an inferior claim to attention.

14. Things began greatly to change towards the end of the last century.

Yet the mounds of a.s.syria and Babylonia were still suffered to keep their secret unrevealed. This want of interest may be in part explained by their peculiar nature. They are so different from other ruins. A row of ma.s.sive pillars or of stately columns cut out on the clear blue sky, with the desert around or the sea at their feet,--a broken arch or battered tombstone clothed with ivy and hanging creepers, with the blue and purple mountains for a background, are striking objects which first take the eye by their beauty, then invite inspection by the easy approach they offer. But these huge, shapeless heaps! What labor to remove even a small portion of them! And when that is done, who knows whether their contents will at all repay the effort and expense?

15. The first European whose love of learning was strong enough to make him disregard all such doubts and difficulties, was Mr. Rich, an Englishman. He was not particularly successful, nor were his researches very extensive, being carried on entirely with his private means; yet his name will always be honorably remembered, for he was _the first_ who went to work with pickaxe and shovel, who hired men to dig, who measured and described some of the princ.i.p.al mounds on the Euphrates, thus laying down the groundwork of all later and more fruitful explorations in that region. It was in 1820 and Mr. Rich was then political resident or representative of the East India Company at Baghdad. He also tried the larger of the two mounds opposite Mosul, encouraged by the report that, a short time before he arrived there, a sculpture representing men and animals had been disclosed to view. Unfortunately he could not procure even a fragment of this treasure, for the people of Mosul, influenced by their _ulema_--(doctor of the law)--who had declared these sculptures to be ”idols of the infidels,” had walked across the river from the city in a body and piously shattered them to atoms. Mr. Rich had not the good luck to come across any such find himself, and after some further efforts, left the place rather disheartened. He carried home to England the few relics he had been able to obtain. In the absence of more important ones, they were very interesting, consisting in fragments of inscriptions, of pottery, in engraved stone, bricks and pieces of bricks. After his death all these articles were placed in the British Museum, where they formed the foundation of the present n.o.ble Chaldea-a.s.syrian collection of that great inst.i.tution. Nothing more was undertaken for years, so that it could be said with literal truth that, up to 1842, ”a case three feet square inclosed all that remained, not only of the great city Nineveh, but of Babylon itself!”[A]