Part 9 (1/2)
14. One would think that so very perfect a system of religion, based too on so high and n.o.ble an order of ideas, should have entirely superseded the coa.r.s.e materialism and conjuring practices of the goblin-creed of the primitive Turanian settlers. Such, however, was far from being the case. We saw that the new religion made room, somewhat contemptuously perhaps, for the spirits of the old creed, carelessly ma.s.sing them wholesale into a sort of regiment, composed of the three hundred IGIGI, or spirits of heaven, and the six hundred ANUNNAKI, or spirits of earth.
The conjurers and sorcerers of old were even admitted into the priesthood in an inferior capacity, as a sort of lower order, probably more tolerated than encouraged--tolerated from necessity, because the people clung to their ancient beliefs and practices. But if their official position as a priestly cla.s.s were subordinate, their real power was not the less great, for the public favor and credulity were on their side, and they were a.s.suredly more generally popular than the learned and solemn priests, the counsellors and almost the equals of the kings, whose thoughts dwelt among the stars, who reverently searched the heavens for revelations of the divine will and wisdom, and who, by pursuing accurate observation and mathematical calculation together with the wildest dreams, made astronomy and astrology the inextricable tangle of scientific truth and fantastic speculation that we see it in the great work (in seventy tablets) prepared for the library of Sargon II.
at Agade. That the ancient system of conjuring and incantations remained in full force and general use, is sufficiently proved by the contents of the first two parts of the great collection in two hundred tablets compiled in the reign of the same king, and from the care with which the work was copied and recopied, commented on and translated in later ages, as we see from the copy made for the Royal Library at Nineveh, the one which has reached us.
15. There was still a third branch of so-called ”science,” which greatly occupied the minds of the Chaldeo-Babylonians from their earliest times down to the latest days of their existence: it was the art of Divination, i.e., of divining and foretelling future events from signs and omens, a superst.i.tion born of the old belief in every object of inanimate nature being possessed or inhabited by a spirit, and the later belief in a higher power ruling the world and human affairs to the smallest detail, and constantly manifesting itself through all things in nature as through secondary agents, so that nothing whatever could occur without some deeper significance, which might be discovered and expounded by specially trained and favored individuals. In the case of atmospheric prophecies concerning weather and crops, as connected with the appearance of clouds, sky and moon, the force and direction of winds, etc., there may have been some real observation to found them on.
But it is very clear that such a conception, if carried out consistently to extreme lengths and applied indiscriminately to _everything_, must result in arrant folly. Such was a.s.suredly the case with the Chaldeo-Babylonians, who not only carefully noted and explained dreams, drew lots in doubtful cases by means of inscribed arrows, interpreted the rustle of trees, the plas.h.i.+ng of fountains and murmur of streams, the direction and form of lightnings, not only fancied that they could see things in bowls of water and in the s.h.i.+fting forms a.s.sumed by the flame which consumed sacrifices, and the smoke which rose therefrom, and that they could raise and question the spirits of the dead, but drew presages and omens, for good or evil, from the flight of birds, the appearance of the liver, lungs, heart and bowels of the animals offered in sacrifice and opened for inspection, from the natural defects or monstrosities of babies or the young of animals--in short, from any and everything that they could possibly subject to observation.
16. This idlest of all kinds of speculation was reduced to a most minute and apparently scientific system quite as early as astrology and incantation, and forms the subject of a third collection, in about one hundred tablets, and probably compiled by those same indefatigable priests of Agade for Sargon, who was evidently of a most methodical turn of mind, and determined to have all the traditions and the results of centuries of observation and practical experiences connected with any branch of religious science fixed forever in the shape of thoroughly cla.s.sified rules, for the guidance of priests for all coming ages. This collection has come to us in an even more incomplete and mutilated condition than the others; but enough has been preserved to show us that a right-thinking and religiously-given Chaldeo-Babylonian must have spent his life taking notes of the absurdest trifles, and questioning the diviners and priests about them, in order not to get into sc.r.a.pes by misinterpreting the signs and taking that to be a favorable omen which boded dire calamity--or the other way, and thus doing things or leaving them undone at the wrong moment and in the wrong way. What excites, perhaps, even greater wonder, is the utter absurdity of some of the incidents gravely set down as affecting the welfare, not only of individuals, but of the whole country. What shall we say, for instance, of the importance attached to the proceedings of stray dogs? Here are some of the items as given by Mr. Fr. Lenormant in his most valuable and entertaining book on Chaldean Divination:--
”If a gray dog enter the palace, the latter will be consumed by flames.--If a yellow dog enter the palace, the latter will perish in a violent catastrophe.--If a tawny dog enter the palace, peace will be concluded with the enemies.--If a dog enter the palace and be not killed, the peace of the palace will be disturbed.--If a dog enter the temple, the G.o.ds will have no mercy on the land.--If a white dog enter the temple, its foundations will subsist.--If a black dog enter the temple, its foundations will be shaken.--If a gray dog enter the temple, the latter will lose its possessions.... If dogs a.s.semble in troops and enter the temple, no one will remain in authority.... If a dog vomits in a house, the master of that house will die.”
17. The chapter on monstrous births is extensive. Not only is every possible anomaly registered, from an extra finger or toe to an ear smaller than the other, with its corresponding presage of good or evil to the country, the king, the army, but the most impossible monstrosities are seriously enumerated, with the political conditions of which they are supposed to be the signs. For instance:--”If a woman give birth to a child with lion's ears, a mighty king will rule the land ...
with a bird's beak, there will be peace in the land.... If a queen give birth to a child with a lion's face, the king will have no rival ... if to a snake, the king will be mighty.... If a mare give birth to a foal with a lion's mane, the lord of the land will annihilate his enemies ...
with a dog's paws, the land will be diminished ... with a lion's paws, the land will be increased.... If a sheep give birth to a lion, there will be war, the king will have no rival.... If a mare give birth to a dog, there will be disaster and famine.”
18. The three great branches of religious science--astrology, incantation and divination--were represented by three corresponding cla.s.ses of ”wise men,” all belonging, in different degrees, to the priesthood: the star-gazers or astrologers, the magicians or sorcerers, and the soothsayers or fortune-tellers. The latter, again, were divided into many smaller cla.s.ses according to the particular kind of divination which they practised. Some specially devoted themselves to the interpretation of dreams, others to that of the flight of birds, or of the signs of the atmosphere, or of casual signs and omens generally. All were in continual demand, consulted alike by kings and private persons, and all proceeded in strict accordance with the rules and principles laid down in the three great works of King Sargon's time. When the Babylonian empire ceased to exist and the Chaldeans were no longer a nation, these secret arts continued to be practised by them, and the name ”Chaldean” became a by-word, a synonym for ”a wise man of the East,”--astrologer, magician or soothsayer. They dispersed all over the world, carrying their delusive science with them, practising and teaching it, welcomed everywhere by the credulous and superst.i.tious, often highly honored and always richly paid. Thus it is from the Chaldeans and their predecessors the Shumiro-Accads that the belief in astrology, witchcraft and every kind of fortune-telling has been handed down to the nations of Europe, together with the practices belonging thereto, many of which we find lingering even to our day among the less educated cla.s.ses. The very words ”magic” and ”magician” are probably an inheritance of that remotest of antiquities. One of the words for ”priest” in the old Turanian tongue of Shumir was _imga_, which, in the later Semitic language, became _mag_. The _Rab-mag_--”great priest,” or perhaps ”chief conjurer,” was a high functionary at the court of the a.s.syrian kings. Hence ”magus,” ”magic,” ”magician,” in all the European languages, from Latin downward.
19. There can be no doubt that we have little reason to be grateful for such an heirloom as this ma.s.s of superst.i.tions, which have produced so much evil in the world and still occasionally do mischief enough. But we must not forget to set off against it the many excellent things, most important discoveries in the province of astronomy and mathematics which have come to us from the same distant source. To the ancient Chaldeo-Babylonians we owe not only our division of time, but the invention of the sun-dial, and the week of seven days, dedicated in succession to the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets--an arrangement which is still maintained, the names of our days being merely translations of the Chaldean ones. And more than that; there were days set apart and kept holy, as days of rest, as far back as the time of Sargon of Agade; it was from the Semites of Babylonia--perhaps the Chaldeans of Ur--that both the name and the observance pa.s.sed to the Hebrew branch of the race, the tribe of Abraham. George Smith found an a.s.syrian calendar where the day called _Sabattu_ or _Sabattuv_ is explained to mean ”completion of work, a day of rest for the soul.” On this day, it appears it was not lawful to cook food, to change one's dress, to offer a sacrifice; the king was forbidden to speak in public, to ride in a chariot, to perform any kind of military or civil duty, even to take medicine.[AV] This, surely, is a keeping of the Sabbath as strict as the most orthodox Jew could well desire. There are, however, essential differences between the two. In the first place, the Babylonians kept _five_ Sabbath days every month, which made more than one a week; in the second place, they came round on certain dates of each month, independently of the day of the week: on the 7th, 14th, 19th, 21st and 28th. The custom appears to have pa.s.sed to the a.s.syrians, and there are indications which encourage the supposition that it was shared by other nations connected with the Jews, the Babylonians and a.s.syrians, for instance, by the Phoenicians.
FOOTNOTES:
[AR] See A. H. Sayce, ”The Ancient Empires of the East” (1883), p. 389.
[AS] Rawlinson's ”Five Monarchies,” Vol. I., p. 164.
[AT] It was the statue of this very G.o.ddess Nana which was carried away by the Elamite conqueror, Khudur-Nankhundi in 2280 B.C. and restored to its place by a.s.shurbanipal in 645 B.C.
[AU] The three circles above the G.o.d represent the Moon-G.o.d, the Sun-G.o.d, and Ishtar. So we are informed by the two lines of writing which ran above the roof.
[AV] Friedrich Delitzsch, ”Beigaben” to the German translat. of Smith's ”Chaldean Genesis” (1876), p. 300. A. H. Sayce, ”The Ancient Empires of the East” (1883), p. 402. W. Lotz, ”Quaestiones de Historia Sabbati.”
VI.
LEGENDS AND STORIES.
1. In every child's life there comes a moment when it ceases to take the world and all it holds as a matter of course, when it begins to wonder and to question. The first, the great question naturally is--”Who made it all? The sun, the stars, the sea, the rivers, the flowers, and the trees--whence come they? who made them?” And to this question we are very ready with our answer:--”G.o.d made it all. The One, the Almighty G.o.d created the world, and all that is in it, by His own sovereign will.”
When the child further asks: ”_How_ did He do it?” we read to it the story of the Creation which is the beginning of the Bible, our Sacred Book, either without any remarks upon it, or with the warning, that, for a full and proper understanding of it, years are needed and knowledge of many kinds. Now, these same questions have been asked, by children and men, in all ages. Ever since man has existed upon the earth, ever since he began, in the intervals of rest, in the hard labor and struggle for life and limb, for food and warmth, to raise his head and look abroad, and take in the wonders that surrounded him, he has thus pondered and questioned. And to this questioning, each nation, after its own lights, has framed very much the same answer; the same in substance and spirit (because the only possible one), acknowledging the agency of a Divine Power, in filling the world with life, and ordaining the laws of nature,--but often very different in form, since, almost every creed having stopped short of the higher religious conception, that of One Deity, indivisible and all-powerful, the great act was attributed to many G.o.ds--”the G.o.ds,”--not to G.o.d. This of course opened the way to innumerable, more or less ingenious, fancies and vagaries as to the part played in it by this or that particular divinity. Thus all races, nations, even tribes have worked out for themselves their own COSMOGONY, i.e., their own ideas on the Origin of the World. The greatest number, not having reached a very high stage of culture or attained literary skill, preserved the teachings of their priests in their memory, and transmitted them orally from father to son; such is the case even now with many more peoples than we think of--with all the native tribes of Africa, the islanders of Australia and the Pacific, and several others.
But the nations who advanced intellectually to the front of mankind and influenced the long series of coming races by their thoughts and teachings, recorded in books the conclusions they had arrived at on the great questions which have always stirred the heart and mind of man; these were carefully preserved and recopied from time to time, for the instruction of each rising generation. Thus many great nations of olden times have possessed Sacred Books, which, having been written in remote antiquity by their best and wisest men, were reverenced as something not only holy, but, beyond the una.s.sisted powers of the human intellect, something imparted, revealed directly by the deity itself, and therefore to be accepted, undisputed, as absolute truth. It is clear that it was in the interest of the priests, the keepers and teachers of all religious knowledge, to encourage and maintain in the people at large this unquestioning belief.
2. Of all such books that have become known to us, there are none of greater interest and importance than the sacred books of Ancient Babylonia. Not merely because they are the oldest known, having been treasured in the priestly libraries of Agade, Sippar, Cutha, etc., at an incredibly early date, but princ.i.p.ally because the ancestors of the Hebrews, during their long station in the land of s.h.i.+nar, learned the legends and stories they contained, and working them over after their own superior religious lights, remodelled them into the narrative which was written down many centuries later as part of the Book of Genesis.
3. The original sacred books were attributed to the G.o.d ea himself, the impersonation of the Divine Intelligence, and the teacher of mankind in the shape of the first Man-Fish, Oannes--(the name being only a Greek corruption of the Accadian eA-HAN, ”ea the Fish”)[AW] So Berosus informs us. After describing Oannes and his proceedings (see p. 185), he adds that ”he wrote a Book on the Origin of things and the beginnings of civilization, and gave it to men.” The ”origin of things” is the history of the Creation of the world, Cosmogony. Accordingly, this is what Berosus proceeds to expound, quoting directly from the Book, for he begins:--”There was a time, _says he_, (meaning Oannes) when all was darkness and water.” Then follows a very valuable fragment, but unfortunately only a fragment, one of the few preserved by later Greek writers who quoted the old priest of Babylon for their own purposes, while the work itself was, in some way, destroyed and lost. True, these fragments contain short sketches of several of the most important legends; still, precious as they are, they convey only second-hand information, compiled, indeed, from original sources by a learned and conscientious writer, but for the use of a foreign race, extremely compressed, and, besides, with the names all altered to suit that race's language. So long as the ”original sources” were missing, there was a gap in the study both of the Bible and the religion of Babylon, which no ingenuity could fill. Great, therefore, were the delight and excitement, both of a.s.syriologists and Bible scholars, when George Smith, while sorting the thousands of tablet-fragments which for years had littered the floor of certain remote chambers of the British Museum, accidentally stumbled on some which were evidently portions of the original sacred legends partly rendered by Berosus. To search for all available fragments of the precious doc.u.ments and piece them together became the task of Smith's life. And as nearly all that he found belonged to copies from the Royal Library at Nineveh, it was chiefly in order to enlarge the collection that he undertook his first expedition to the a.s.syrian mounds, from which he had the good fortune to bring back many missing fragments, belonging also to different copies, so that one frequently completes the other. Thus the oldest Chaldean legends were in a great measure restored to us, though unfortunately very few tablets are in a sufficiently well preserved condition to allow of making out an entirely intelligible and uninterrupted narrative. Not only are many parts still missing altogether, but of those which have been found, pieced and collected, there is not one of which one or more columns have not been injured in such a way that either the beginning or the end of all the lines are gone, or whole lines broken out or erased, with only a few words left here and there. How hopeless the task must sometimes have seemed to the patient workers may be judged from the foregoing specimen pieced together of sixteen bits, which Geo. Smith gives in his book.
This is one of the so-called ”Deluge-tablets,” i.e., of those which contain the Chaldean version of the story of the Deluge. Luckily more copies have been found of this story than of any of the others, or we should have had to be content still with the short sketch of it given by Berosus.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 61.--BACK OF TABLET WITH ACCOUNT OF FLOOD. (Smith's ”Chaldean Genesis.”)]
4. If, therefore, the ancient Babylonian legends of the beginnings of the world will be given here in a connected form, for the sake of convenience and plainness, it must be clearly understood that they were not preserved for us in such a form, but are the result of a long and patient work of research and restoration, a work which still continues; and every year, almost every month, brings to light some new materials, some addition, some correction to the old ones. Yet even as the work now stands, it justifies us in a.s.serting that our knowledge of this marvellous antiquity is fuller and more authentic than that we have of many a period and people not half so remote from us in point of place and distance.