Read Ebook: The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions by Sayce A H Archibald Henry

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The first analysis of Sumerian grammar was made by myself in 1870, when the general outlines of the language were fixed and the verbal forms read and explained. Three years later Lenormant threw the materials I had collected into a connected and systematic form, one result of which was a controversy started by the Orientalist, Joseph Hal?vy, who maintained that Sumerian was not a language at all, but a cryptograph or secret writing. The answers made by the Assyriologists to this curious theory obliged its author constantly to shift his ground, but at the same time it also obliged them to examine their materials more carefully and to revise conclusions which had been arrived at on insufficient evidence. An important discovery was now made by Haupt, who had already given the first scientific translation of a Sumerian text; he demonstrated the existence of two dialects, one of which is marked by all the phenomena of phonetic decay. This was naturally supposed to indicate a difference of age in the two dialects, the one being the older and the other the later form of the language. Subsequent research, however, has gone to show that the two dialects were really used contemporaneously, the decayed state of that which was called "the woman's language" by the Babylonians being due to the fact that it was spoken in Akkad or Northern Babylonia, where the Semitic element became predominant at a much earlier period than in Sumer or Southern Babylonia.

Up to this time the study of Sumerian had been almost entirely confined to the bilingual texts, of which a very large number existed in the library of Nineveh, and in which a Semitic translation was attached to the Sumerian original. Now, however, the French excavations at Tello in Southern Babylonia began to furnish European scholars with monuments of the pre-Semitic period, and to these the decipherers, among whom Amiaud and Thureau Dangin hold the first place, accordingly turned their attention. Texts composed in days when Sumerian princes still governed the country, and written by scribes who were unacquainted with a Semitic language, were successfully attacked with the assistance of the bilingual tablets of Nineveh. But it was soon found that between these genuine examples of Sumerian composition and the Sumerian which was written and explained by Semitic scribes there was a good deal of difference. The Semites had derived their culture from their Sumerian predecessors, and a considerable part of the religious and legal literature that had been handed on to them was in the older language. This older language long continued to be that of both religion and law, the two conservative forces in society, Sumerian becoming to the Semitic Babylonians what Latin was to mediaeval Europe. The inevitable result followed: Semitic idioms and modes of thought were clothed in a Sumerian dress, and the ignorance of the scribe produced not infrequently the equivalent of the dog-Latin of a modern school-boy. The gradual changes that took place in the cuneiform system of writing, and the adaptation of it to the requirements of Semitic speech, contributed to the creation of an artificial and quite unclassical Sumerian, and the lexical tablets became filled with uses and combinations of characters which were professedly Sumerian but really Semitic in origin. All this renders the decipherment of a Sumerian text even now a difficult affair, and many years must elapse before we can say that the stage of decipherment is definitely passed and that the scholar may content himself with a purely philological treatment of the language.

Here Vannic decipherment rested for many years. There was no difficulty in reading the inscriptions phonetically, for they were written in a very simplified form of the Assyrian syllabary; but the language which was thus revealed stood isolated and alone, without linguistic kindred either ancient or modern. The various attempts made to decipher it were all failures.

Other scholars soon appeared to pursue and extend my work, more especially Drs. Belck and Lehmann, whose expedition to Armenia in 1898 has placed at our disposal a large store of fresh material. Amongst this fresh material are two long bilingual inscriptions, in Vannic and Assyrian, one of which had been discovered by de Morgan in 1890. These have verified my system of decipherment, have increased our knowledge of the Vannic vocabulary, have corrected a few errors, and, I am bound to add, have in one or two cases justified renderings of mine to which exception had been taken. A historical Vannic text can now be read with almost as much certainty as an Assyrian one.

With the discovery of the language spoken in Armenia before the arrival of the modern Armenians the list of lost languages and dialects brought to light by the decipherment of the cuneiform script is by no means exhausted. Among the tablets found in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt was a long letter from the king of Mitanni or Northern Mesopotamia in the native language of his country, which has been partially deciphered by Messerschmidt, Jensen and myself. The language turns out to be distantly related to the Vannic, but is of a much more complicated description. Two of the other letters in the same collection were in yet another previously unknown language, which the contents of one of them showed to be that of a kingdom in Asia Minor called Arzawa. Since then tablets have been found at Boghaz Keui in Cappadocia, on the site of the ancient capital of the Hittites, which are in the same dialect and form of cuneiform writing, and prove that in them we have discovered at last actual relics of the Hittite tongue. Thanks to the light thrown upon them by a tablet from the same locality, which I obtained last year, it is now possible to raise the veil which has hitherto concealed the Hittite language, and in a Paper which will shortly be printed I have succeeded in partially translating the texts and sketching the outlines of their grammar. But any detailed account of these discoveries must be reserved for a future chapter; at present I can do no more than refer briefly to these latest problems in cuneiform decipherment.

That other problems still await us cannot be doubted. The number of different languages which the decipherment of the cuneiform script has thus far revealed to us is an assurance that, as excavation and research proceed, fresh languages will come to light which have employed the cuneiform syllabary as a means of expression. Indeed, we already know that it was used by the Kossaeans, wild mountaineers who skirted the eastern frontiers of Babylonia, and a list of whose words has been preserved in a cuneiform tablet, and also that there was a time, before the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, when "the language of Canaan"--better known as Hebrew--was written in cuneiform characters. Canaanite glosses are found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, and two Sidonian seals exist in which the cuneiform syllabary is employed to represent the sounds of Canaanitish speech.

And the key to all this varied literature, this medley of languages, the very names of which had perished, was a simple guess! But it was a scientific guess, made in accordance with scientific method, and based upon sound scientific reasoning. It is true that it needed the slow and patient work of generations of scholars before the guess could ripen into maturity; the discovery of the value of a single letter in the Old Persian alphabet was sometimes the labour of a lifetime; but, like the seed of the mustard tree, the guess contained within itself all the promise of its future growth. On the day when Grotefend identified the names of Darius and Xerxes, the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, and therewith of the history, the theology and the civilization of the ancient Oriental world, was potentially accomplished.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS; THE EXCAVATIONS AT SUSA AND THE ORIGIN OF BRONZE

The reason of this is obvious. Archaeology is an inductive science; its conclusions, therefore, are drawn from the comparison and co-ordination of objects which can be seen and handled, as well as tested by all competent observers. It is built upon what our German friends would call objective facts, and the method it employs is that carefully-disciplined and experimentally-guarded application of the ordinary logic of life which can alone give us scientific results. The method is one which the purely literary mind seems often curiously incapable of comprehending; the literary student is accustomed to deal so exclusively with matters of merely individual taste and theory that he is as little able to understand what is meant by scientific evidence and probability as the scholar who is not a mathematician is able to follow the reasoning of Lord Kelvin. This is a fact which has to be borne in mind more especially in archaeological science, for the questions with which archaeology is concerned so frequently invade the domain of literature or appear so closely connected with questions that are more or less literary, that the purely literary scholar is apt to think himself just as well qualified to discuss them as "the man in the street" is apt to think himself qualified to discuss the etymology of a word. To all such the archaeologist would say, "Go and study your pots."

For pottery is practically indestructible. Like the fossils on which the geologist has built up the past history of life upon the earth, it is an enduring evidence, when rightly interpreted, of the past history of man. Like the fossils, moreover, it exhibits a multitudinous variety of types and forms. But in all these types and forms there is an underlying unity. The primitive needs of man are everywhere the same, and the powers of mind called in to supply them are the same also. The dish and bowl, the vase and its handles, meet us again and again wherever we go; and the same materials for making them meet us also. The hands of man, guided by the brain of man, found clay wherewith to manufacture the vessels that he needed, and to harden it afterwards in the sun or fire. Where or how the first pottery was made we do not know, we probably shall never know. When palaeolithic man first makes his appearance in Europe he seems not yet to have been acquainted with it; but it is difficult to prove a negative in archaeology as in other sciences, and the absence of palaeolithic pottery may be due only to the imperfection of the record. At any rate, as we descend the ladder of chronology the existence of man is marked more and more by the fragments of pottery he has left behind him; at Rome a whole mountain of it grew up in the space of a few centuries, and the huge mounds that encircled Cairo a hundred years ago were mainly formed of mediaeval sherds. When excavating on an Egyptian site I have sometimes been tempted to think that the people who once lived there must have spent their whole time in breaking their household ware.

Now not only are the primitive needs of man much the same throughout the world and at all periods of time, the nature of man is much the same also; and a distinguishing feature in his nature is love of variety. The same variety which we see in the forms of life and in the outward appearance and mental aptitudes of man himself is reflected in the products of his skill. Yet along with this love of variety goes a strong conservative or imitative instinct--an instinct which finds, too, its counterpart in nature, "so careful of the type." On the one hand, fashions change; on the other, a fashion once introduced spreads rapidly and maintains itself to the exclusion of all others for a determinate period of time throughout a determinate area. And to nothing does this apply with more truth than to pottery. Observation has shown that not only are different tribes or countries distinguished by a difference in their pottery, but that in each tribe or country similar differences distinguish successive periods of time. When to this is added the practical indestructibility of the potsherd, it will easily be seen what a criterion is afforded by it for fixing the age and character of ancient remains, and their relation to other monuments of the past. It is not surprising that a study of pottery has become the sheet-anchor of archaeological chronology, and that the first object of the scientific excavator is to determine the relative succession of the ceramic remains he discovers and their connection with similar remains found elsewhere. Scientific excavation means, before all things else, careful observation and record of every piece of pottery, however apparently worthless, which the excavator disinters.

But now, unfortunately, I have to make an admission. We have, as yet, no ceramic record in either Babylonia or Assyria. Until very recently there has been no attempt in either country at scientific excavation. The pioneers, Layard and Botta and Loftus, lived and worked before it was known or thought of, and we cannot, therefore, be too thankful to Layard for having nevertheless given us so full and accurate an account of what he found, and the conditions under which he found it. The excavations controlled by the British Museum have, I am sorry to say, been for the most part destructive rather than scientific; such objects as were wanted by the Museum were alone sought after; little or no record has been kept of their discovery, and they have been mixed with objects bought from natives, of whose origin nothing was known. At one spot, Carchemish, the old Hittite capital, which, though not strictly in Assyria, formed part of the Assyrian Empire, and was the seat of an Assyrian governor, the so-called excavations conducted by the Museum in 1880 were simply a scandal, which Dr. Hayes Ward, who visited the spot shortly afterwards, has characterized as "wicked." The archaeological evidence there, which would have thrown so much light on the Hittite problem, has been irretrievably lost.

Matters are better now, and if I may judge from the work done by Mr. H. R. Hall at D?r el-B?har? in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund, his colleague, Mr. L. W. King, who has recently been excavating for the British Museum in Assyria, will have done something to retrieve the archaeological good name of our British excavators in the East. M. de Sarzec's excavations at Tello in Southern Babylonia were also conducted with some consideration for archaeological method, at all events on the architectural side, and in the capable hands of M. Heuzey the works of art found there have been made to yield valuable results. Moreover, the history of Tello may be said to be comprised in a single epoch of archaic Babylonia, and all objects discovered on the site may consequently be regarded as belonging to one age and phase of Babylonian civilization. Of the American excavations at Niffer it is difficult to speak at present. The work there has been careful and patient, and has extended over a long series of years. The architectural facts have been accurately recorded, at all events in the case of the great temple of Bel, and about the sequence of the inscribed monuments there is little room for doubt. But accusations of carelessness have lately been brought by the excavators one against the other, and when we find the sharpest critic among them unable to substantiate his own account of the discovery of a library and implicitly endorsing the assignment of a Parthian palace to the "Mykenaean" age, it is impossible to put much faith in their descriptions of archaeological details. Some years ago the Germans explored a cemetery at El-Hibba with considerable care and thoroughness, and thus revealed to us pretty much all we know at present about Babylonian funereal customs; yet here again too little attention was paid to the pottery, and the actual date of the cemetery is still uncertain. It may belong to the Babylonian period, but it may also not be older than the Persian or even Parthian age.

The Germans are once more working in the lands of the Euphrates and Tigris, but in Babylonia their labours have been mainly confined to the Babylon of Nebuchadrezzar, where comparatively little has been discovered. Since 1904, however, the chief strength of the expedition has been directed upon Qal'at Shirq?t, where Assur, the primitive capital of Assyria, formerly stood, and here we may expect that archaeological results of first-class importance will at last be obtained. But the work there has not yet advanced far enough for more to be done than the mapping out of the old city, the ascertainment of certain architectural facts, and the recovery of inscriptions of great historical value.

It will be seen, therefore, that the reproach brought against excavations in Egypt by Mr. Rhind in 1862 still holds good of excavations in Babylonia and Assyria. The first stage in their history is only just passing away. The idea that excavation is a trade which any one can take up without previous training, and that all the excavator need think about is the discovery of objects for a museum, is only beginning to disappear. In 1862 Rhind could write of Egyptian tombs: "I am not aware that there can be found the contents of a single sepulchre duly authenticated with satisfactory precision as to what objects were present, and as to the relative positions all these occupied when deposited by contemporary hands. Indeed, for many of the Egyptian sepulchral antiquities scattered over Europe there exists no record to determine even the part of the country where they were exhumed.... There have thus been swept away unrecorded into the past illustrative facts of very great interest, which cannot now, according to any reasonable probability, be replaced, at all events in the degree which there are grounds to believe were then possible." Happily, Mr. Rhind's words are no longer true of Egypt, where he himself set the first example of showing how scientific exploration ought to be carried on, and the result is that the ancient civilization and culture of Egypt are now known to us even better than those of classical Greece or Rome.

But what was true in 1862 of Egypt is still very largely true of Assyria and Babylonia. We are beginning to know something about the history of Assyro-Babylonian architecture; we know a little about the early work of the Babylonians in metal and stone; but the history of Assyro-Babylonian pottery is still, speaking broadly, a blank. For most of his knowledge of the ancient Euphratean civilizations the archaeologist has to turn to the inscriptions and written literature of which such vast quantities have survived, and hence, besides being an archaeologist in the strict sense, he must be also a decipherer and a philologist. He is still precluded from appealing to the evidence which can be handled and felt.

From the point of view of the archaeologist written evidence is usually unsatisfactory because it admits of more than one interpretation. A translation which seems certain to one scholar may be questioned by another; an inference drawn from the words of a text by one student may be denied by another. The statements in the texts themselves may be contradictory, or their imperfection may lead to wrong conclusions. Above all, the evidence may come to the archaeologist from a philologist whose bent of mind is literary rather than scientific, and who will therefore be unable either to appreciate or to understand scientific testimony. Nothing is more common than to come across literary critics who cannot be made to understand the nature of inductive proof.

On the other hand, the decipherer of a lost language must necessarily be an archaeologist as well. The clues he follows will be largely archaeological, and he has to appeal to archaeology at every step. The method he must pursue is the method of archaeology and of other inductive sciences, and the materials he uses are in part the materials of archaeology also. The philologist who knows nothing of history and geography, who is unable to follow a scientific argument and appreciate scientific reasoning, can never decipher; he may take the materials given him by the decipherer and work them into philological shape, but that is all. We must listen to him on questions of grammar and vocabulary; on questions of archaeology his opinions are worth no more than those of the ordinary man.

I have insisted on this point because it is a very important one in a study like Assyriology. The public naturally thinks that in all Assyriological matters the opinion of one Assyriologist is as good as that of another. We might just as well suppose that in all matters which come under the head of astronomy the opinions of every class of astronomer are equally authoritative. But in astronomy there are questions which are purely mathematical, and there are other questions which are more or less chemical, and the astronomer who has devoted his attention to the spectrum analysis is contented to leave to his mathematical colleague abstruse calculations in advanced mathematics. The Assyriologist who is a grammarian pure and simple is just as little an authority on the archaeological side of his study as any one else who is ignorant of archaeology, and the materials he provides must be dealt with by the archaeologist like the literary materials provided for him by the classical philologist; the materials in both cases stand on the same footing.

At the same time, there is a difference between them. In the first place, the literary materials with which the Assyriologist deals are in a very large number of instances autographs. They are the actual documents of the writers whose names they bear or to whose age they belong. And there is all the difference in the world between the letters of a Plato or a Cicero which have come down to us through numerous copyists and the letters of Khammu-rabi of Babylon, the originals of which are now in our hands. The inscriptions in which Nebuchadrezzar describes his building operations or the contemporaneous annals of the Assyrian kings are, from the historical point of view, of far more value than the books written about them at a later date, however admirable the latter may be as works of literature; in other words, they are first-hand sources, and, as such, objective facts of much the same character as ancient pottery or stone implements. Then, in the second place, the documents have to be deciphered before they can be treated philologically; and, as I have already said, the task of decipherment is in itself an archaeological pursuit. If carried out on correct lines it is itself an instance of the application of the inductive method, and it is, moreover, constantly compelled to call archaeology or history to its aid. Assyriology is thus primarily an archaeological study, using the methods of archaeological science and demanding the help of the archaeologist, even though there are Assyriologists who are not archaeologists themselves.

But for the present our archaeological facts have to be taken mainly from the results of the decipherment of the inscriptions. They are for the most part epigraphical; the excavator has not yet supplemented them, as in Egypt or prehistoric Greece, on what I would term the ceramic side. This, at least, is the case in Babylonia and Assyria. It is no longer the case, however, throughout the ancient Assyro-Babylonian world. There is one exception to the charge brought by modern archaeology against the excavators in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. M. de Morgan has been working for the last ten years on the site of Susa, the capital of Elam, and he has brought to his labours the knowledge and experience of an excavator who has been trained in modern methods and is fully awake to the requirements of modern science. At last, at Susa, we have an archaeological record of the history of culture, based not only on written monuments, but also on the more tangible evidence of scientifically-observed strata of human remains. It is true that Elam is not Babylonia; but one of the surprises of M. de Morgan's discoveries is that in the early days of Babylonian history Elam was a Babylonian province, and Susa the seat of a Babylonian governor. The same culture extended from Sippara on the Euphrates to Susa in Elam, and this culture was Babylonian. Hence, in default of materials from Babylonia itself, we may see in the history of cultural development at Susa a counterpart of that in Babylonia, at any rate during the period when Elam and Babylonia were alike under Semitic rule.

This fine yellow pottery occurs not only at Susa, but also throughout Elam, but practically none of it has hitherto been discovered in Babylonia. One cause of this is doubtless that in the alluvial plain of Babylonia a purely neolithic stratum, if it existed at all, would lie below the water-level. Maritime shells are met with as far north as the site of Babylon, showing that the Persian Gulf once extended thus far, and the water of the Euphrates still infiltrates through the soil.

The period of the fine thin pottery in Elam comes suddenly to an end, and the people of the second prehistoric period seem to have been intruders who were less civilized than their predecessors and unacquainted with the art of making the older ware. Their pottery is coarse and porous, and the geometric designs upon it are traced with the pen, not freely painted as in the case of the earlier ceramic. The animal and vegetable designs of the older ware have disappeared, and the zones, triangles and other geometric figures which take their place are traced in black or maroon-red upon a yellow clay. The resemblance between this pottery and that of Kara Eyuk is even greater than in the case of the pottery of the first period. Thick cylindrical vases are common, as well as bowls with a flat bottom and broad sides. Some of the vases resemble the bulbous vases of the Egyptian Twelfth dynasty; there are others with flat bottoms and angular sides which are also like Egyptian water-jars of the same Twelfth-dynasty period. Along with these more characteristic forms of pottery many small, unpainted cups have been found, as well as a few finer wheel-made vases of ovoid shape and yellow or reddish colour. It should be added that coarse, red, hand-made pottery abounds in both the prehistoric periods, as indeed it does also in the later historic epoch.

As the second prehistoric epoch drew to a close at Susa, many indications of an advance in culture began to show themselves. Vases and flat-bottomed cups of soft stone were introduced, among them being a few of alabaster; the bricks began to be burnt in a kiln, and even seals with a species of writing upon them made their appearance. Nevertheless, the neolithic age does not pass into the age of metal through any transitional stages.

The earliest stratum which marks the historic age yields for the first time clay tablets with inscriptions, the characters of which are already developing out of pictures into the cursive cuneiform. The inscribed cylinder-seals of Babylonia naturally appear along with them; alabaster vases, cups and bowls become common, and some of them are cut into the forms of animals. Comparatively little pottery has been found in this stratum; but this is probably an accident.

The next stratum brings us to the period of Babylonian supremacy, when the viceroys of the Babylonian king ruled at Susa, and Semitic influence was already predominant in the Babylonian plain. It is the age of Sargon of Akkad, and its commencement may approximately be placed about B.C. 4000. The pottery still consists of a yellow paste, though there are also many specimens of a coarse black clay decorated with incrustations in white. The yellow ware is occasionally ornamented with mouldings of trees and other natural objects. A typical vase of the period is one of globular shape and small rim, and with a moulded or incised rope-pattern running round the centre and lower part of the rim. Another type is one which looks like an inverted vase, with a series of rope-patterns encircling it, while another seems to have been copied from the pile of cylindrical vases into which, as into a drain, the body of the dead Babylonian was inserted. These types of vase appear to have lasted, with little variation, down to the end of the Persian period, though, unfortunately, the disturbance of the ground and the consequent mixture of objects under the temple of In-Susinak, where the excavations were carried on, makes certainty on the point unattainable. Immense quantities of bronze votive offerings, of all kinds and sorts, were, however, found here, along with fragments of glass, and, as inscriptions show that they must all have been buried on the spot before the tenth century B.C., we have a time-limit for dating the forms of the bronze weapons and tools.

Pourtant, je ne suis pas bien s?r encore que ce soit l? un infaillible signe des temps. Et je reviens ? mes premiers doutes. Ce n'est que sage. La v?rit? est que la nature est toujours plus diverse que nous ne le soup?onnons. Il y a encore aujourd'hui des filles simples qui pensent fortement et ne r?vent gu?re. Il y eut de tout temps des n?vros?es. Seulement, on leur donnait un autre nom et on y prenait moins garde. Si les moeurs changent, il y a dans la femme un naturel qui ne change gu?re. Elle blance to that of prehistoric Egypt. The culture represented by this layer was still neolithic, but objects of copper were making their appearance, and the flint instruments of the past were beginning to be superseded by metal, a knowledge of which appears to have come from abroad. With the introduction of copper the Elamite or historical epoch may be said to have begun. It was now that the temple was first built of crude bricks, reeds taking the place of wood, and so pointing to the influence of Babylonia, where reeds were plentiful and wood was scarce.

Another proof of Babylonian influence must be seen not only in ware of Babylonian origin, but also in the figures of a nude goddess with the hands placed upon the breasts, which originally represented the divinity called Istar by the Semitic Babylonians. Indeed, from the fact that the goddess was represented in human form we may infer that the figures, though first met with in the Sumerian age, were of Semitic derivation, and show that Sumerian culture was already being affected by the influence of Semitic religious ideas. The pottery found along with the figures is of a very varied description, including coarse red and fine yellow ware. Among the fine yellow ware are goblets with a tall cup supported on a foot. A typical form of the yellow ware is the vase with angular sides; this, together with vases of more bulbous shape and terra-cotta stands, is remarkably like some of the Egyptian Twelfth-dynasty pottery in form. The stands, more especially, remind us of Twelfth-dynasty Egypt. There is also a black ware decorated with incised lines which are filled in with white. This black ware is also found in Egypt, where Professor Petrie is now inclined to associate it with the Hyksos. At all events it is absent there during the interval that elapsed between the prehistoric period and the epoch of the Twelfth dynasty, and it characterizes the Hyksos sites of the Delta, while its foreign and non-Egyptian character has been recognized from the first. A few fragments of the same class of pottery have been brought to light at Tello in Babylonia, where they would appear to belong to the age of Gudea . One of these formed part of a cylindrical vase or pyxis, identical in shape with the black incised pyxides found at Susa at a depth of from five to ten metres below the surface. On another fragment are spirited drawings of a water-bird, a fish seized by a gull, a four-footed animal, and a boat with reeds growing behind it, each in a separate panel. Similar ware has been discovered in Southern Palestine, on the eastern coast of Cyprus, in Spain and in the Greek islands. At Syros, for instance, where it goes back to the neolithic age, it is associated with alabaster vases, just as it is at Mussian. Here the bowls and vases of alabaster are strikingly Egyptian in form.

The clay figures of the Babylonian goddess testify to the same extension of culture in the copper age of Western Asia as do the black incised vases with their white fillings. M. Chantre has found them at Kara Eyuk in Cappadocia, on the borders of the Hittite region, though in these the arms are no longer folded across the breast. Further west I have lately shown that the so-called figure of Niob? on Mount Sipylus in Lydia is a Hittite modification of them, and Dr. Schliemann discovered one of them, of lead, in the ruins of the Second city at Troy. At Troy, however, the type was more usually modified in the Hittite direction, as it was also in the islands of the AEgean, where marble figures of the goddess are plentiful. In Egypt clay figures closely resembling those of Babylonia and Elam, but with the arms outstretched, have been met with from time to time at Karnak, and supposed to be dolls of the Roman period; but since the discovery by M. Legrain of remains which prove that the history of Karnak reaches back to the prehistoric or early dynastic period, there is no longer any reason for not connecting them with their analogues elsewhere. And the discoveries recently made by Professor Pumpelly in the tumuli near Askabad, west of Khiva and Herat, go far towards supporting the identification. Here the explorers have brought to light two periods of neolithic culture, in the earlier of which no animals were as yet domesticated, and the pottery was of the rudest description. During the second period the domesticated animals were introduced, including the horse and camel. Then came an age of copper, accompanied by figurines representing the Babylonian goddess, sometimes with the arms outstretched, sometimes with them lying against the sides, as in Cappadocia. The figurines are evidence that the art of working copper was derived from Babylonia, a conclusion which is confirmed by M. Henri de Morgan's excavations in the tumuli of Tal?sh in G?l?n, on the south-western shore of the Caspian.

As far back as our knowledge of Babylonian history extends the inhabitants of the country were acquainted with copper, and its use lasted century after century into quite recent times. Of a stone age, as I have already said, there is no clear trace. It is true that Captain Cros has sunk shafts at Tello, and reached the virgin soil at a depth of seventeen metres, finding there mace-heads of alabaster and hard stone similar to those of primitive Egypt, as well as other stone objects; but no flint flakes were met with, and the pottery was similar to that of the higher strata. On the other hand, objects of copper, great and small, including helmets and a colossal spear dedicated by a king of Kis, have been disinterred, though nothing of bronze has been discovered among the earlier remains, It was the same at Muqayyar, the ancient Ur, as well as on the site of Eridu, where Taylor found only copper bowls and the like in the graves, even in those of so late a date as to contain objects of iron and an Egyptian scarab. At Niffer, moreover, the ancient Nippur, American excavation has the same tale to tell. According to Dr. Peters, though iron knives, hatchets, spear-heads and arrow-heads have been exhumed, the date of which is said to be between 2000 and 1000 B.C., there is no trace of bronze, the multitudinous objects, which further west would have been of bronze, being here of copper. As at Ur, the copper age lasts down to the very end of the Babylonian kingdom. Hilprecht, on the authority of Haynes, does indeed say that in the very lowest strata of the temple mound, far below the pavements of Sargon and Naram-Sin , "fragments of copper, bronze and terra-cotta vessels" were disinterred. But no attempt seems to have been made to analyze the so-called "bronze," which may have been a natural alloy of copper with a small percentage of lead or antimony, and the age ascribed to the fragments is rendered doubtful by the accompanying statement, that "fragments of red and black lacquered pottery" were discovered in the same place which were indistinguishable from the red and black pottery of classical Greece. As yet, therefore, excavation in Babylonian lands has failed to tell us when the art of mixing tin with the copper was discovered and copper was superseded by bronze.

In default of archaeological evidence, the only possibility there is of discovering an answer to this question lies in an examination of the primitive pictures out of which the cuneiform characters eventually developed. Here we are at once struck by a curious fact. The "determinative" attached to ideographs signifying "knife," "weapon" and the like is not an ideograph which expresses the name of a metal; nor is it an ideograph denoting "stone," but one which means "wood." That is to say, the material of which cutting instruments were made at the time when the picture-writing of Babylonia came into existence was neither metal nor stone, but wood. That it should not have been stone is explained by the geology of the Babylonian plain, which consists of alluvial soil devoid of stones. That it should not have been of metal can only mean that the inventors of the pictorial script were not yet acquainted with the use of copper, bronze or iron. In default of metal and stone they had to content themselves with hard wood.

The possibility remains that tin might have been the metal originally denoted by the compound ideograph. If so, both the ideograph and the words expressed by it had lost all reference to tin before the beginning of the Assyrian period, and neither the Assyrian word for "tin" nor the Sumerian word, if any existed, is now known. Tin, moreover, was archaeologically late in making its appearance. The earliest examples of pure tin of which I know are of the time of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. On the other hand, bronze first appears in Egypt in the age of the Twelfth dynasty, though it does not become common until the Hyksos predecessors of the Eighteenth dynasty had made themselves masters of the valley of the Nile. From about B.C. 1600 onwards, enormous quantities of it were employed in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean and the adjoining lands, necessitating an equally large supply of tin. What the source of this tin may have been it is not my present purpose to inquire. But the persistence of the copper age in Babylonia, as well as in the tumuli of Askabad, east of the Caspian, indicates that the manufacture of bronze must have migrated from the north-west to the Babylonian plain. We find it first in Assyria, not in Babylonia, and it may well be that the Assyrians derived it from Armenia and the population of Cappadocia, where, as I shall show in a subsequent chapter, they had established colonies at an early period. At all events, the earliest examples of bronze yet met with were discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the Second prehistoric city at Troy.

It was to this region that classical tradition referred the origin of working in iron. An analysis of the gold of the first six Egyptian dynasties submitted to Dr. Gladstone by Professor Petrie proved that it was mixed with silver, and hence must have been derived from Asia Minor. Egyptian legend made "the followers of Horus," who founded dynastic Egypt, metallurgists and smiths whose metal weapons enabled them to subdue the older neolithic population. The story as it has come down to us declares the smiths to have been workers in iron; iron, however, must be the substitute of the later version of the story for some other metal, since, though Vyse claims to have discovered an iron clamp in the great pyramid of Giza, and Petrie has found a mass of iron in a Sixth-dynasty deposit in the temple of Osiris at Abydos, ironsmiths can hardly have existed in the pre-dynastic age. It is probable, therefore, that copper was the metal which the dynastic Egyptians introduced into their new home, and which was already in use in Babylonia. But the intercourse with Asia Minor, which the gold of the First dynasty indicates must even then have been going on, makes it possible that it was from this quarter of the world that the earliest knowledge of the manufacture of bronze was brought to the valley of the Nile. Even in the time of the Twelfth dynasty, however, the tools found by Professor Petrie in the workmen's huts at Kah?n are of copper rather than of bronze. The colossal statue of King Pepi of the Sixth dynasty, discovered at Hierakonpolis, is of hammered copper, and we have to wait for the advent of the Eighteenth dynasty before bronze becomes the predominant metal.

That such was the case points to the Hyksos period as that in which bronze succeeded in superseding the older copper. It may be that the Hyksos brought the extended use of it with them from Syria. In Southern Palestine, Mr. Macalister's excavations at Gezer have shown that bronze rather than copper was largely employed throughout the so-called Amorite period, which went back to an earlier age than that of the Twelfth dynasty, and it is just here that in the time of the Eighteenth dynasty bronze itself began to make way for iron. Mr. J. L. Myres has recently traced the polychrome pottery of Southern Canaan to the Hittite lands of Cappadocia, where the red ochre was found by which it was characterized, and a knowledge of bronze may have travelled along the same road.

But these are speculations which may or may not be verified by future research. For the present we must be content with the fact that, in spite of the philological evidence to the contrary, copper, and not bronze, was the metal which preceded the use of iron in Babylonia, whereas in the northern kingdom of Assyria bronze was already known at a comparatively early date. So far as the existing evidence can carry us, it seems to indicate that Babylonia was the primitive home of the copper industry, while bronze, on the other hand, made its way eastward from Asia Minor and the north of Syria. Where bronze was first invented is still unknown to us; all that seems certain is that it must have been in a land where copper and tin are found together.

NOTE

According to the mineralogists, in the western part of the northern hemisphere tin is found only in Britain, Spain and the neighbourhood of Askabad, the scanty surface-tin of Saxony, France and Tuscany being too poor and insignificant to have attracted attention in antiquity . The American excavations at Askabad under Professor Pumpelly appear to have made it clear that bronze was not invented in that part of the world, or indeed used in early days, and we are thus thrown back on Britain and Spain. It is quite certain, however, that bronze made its way to the west of Europe from the east, and the Hon. John Abercromby has proved that the bronze culture came to this country from the valley of the central Rhine where it cuts the river at Mayence. On the other hand, the bronze-age civilization of the Danube valley, the Balkan peninsula and Italy forms a whole with that of the south-eastern basin of the Mediterranean, which again is closely connected with the bronze-age culture of the AEgean, Asia Minor and Egypt, while the civilization of the Danube valley leads on to that of Central Europe and, to a less extent, of Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Montelius has pointed out that the early bronze culture of Northern Italy was carried to Scandinavia along the route of the amber trade as far back as the close of the neolithic age in Sweden, and the numerous objects of Irish gold found in Scandinavia--though, it is true, of somewhat later date--show that commercial relations must have existed between the British Islands and the Scandinavian peninsula. Tin might have followed the gold route until it met the amber route, by which it would have been carried southward to Central Europe and the Adriatic.

In Western Europe the sword, like the socketed celt, is first met with in the third and last period into which the bronze age has been divided. The earliest examples of the sword, in fact, are those discovered at Mykenae, which belong to the age of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Schliemann found only the dirk at Troy, and, so far as our present evidence goes, the dirk alone was used by the Hittites and Proto-Armenians down to the seventh century B.C. The scimitar, however, was known in Assyria and at Gezer at least as early as the fourteenth century B.C. , and in Cyprus the sword makes its appearance along with the knife and fibula in the later bronze age after the close of the age of copper. Similarly in Krete it was only in tombs of the Late Mykenaean period that the cemetery of Knossos yielded swords of bronze . The dirk of the copper age was stanged as at Troy and in the Danube valley, the Cyprian and Hungarian forms being practically identical. From the Danube valley the stanged spear-head passed to Western Europe during the second period of the bronze age. The fibula is not found at Troy, where the early bronze age will have corresponded with the copper age of Cyprus.

THE SUMERIANS

It was just this paradox to which the first decipherers of Assyrian cuneiform found themselves forced. And another paradox was added to it. Not only had the civilization of the Euphrates and Tigris originated amongst a race that spoke an agglutinative language, and therefore was neither Aryan nor Semitic, the civilization of the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians was borrowed from this older civilization along with the cuneiform system of writing. It seemed impossible that so revolutionary a doctrine could be true, and Semitic philologists naturally denounced it. For centuries Hebrew had been supposed to have been the language of Paradise, and the old belief which made the Semitic Adam the first civilized man still unconsciously affected the Semitic scholars of the nineteenth century. It was hard to part with the prejudices of early education, especially when they were called upon to do so by a small group of men whose method of decipherment was an enigma to the ordinary grammarian, and who were introducing new and dangerous principles into the study of the extinct Semitic tongues.

The method of decipherment was nevertheless a sound one, and the result, which seemed so incredible and impossible when first announced, is now one of the assured facts of science. The first civilized occupants of the alluvial plain of Babylonia were neither Semites nor Aryans, but the speakers of an agglutinative language, and to them were due all the elements of the Babylonian culture of later days. It was they who first drained the marshes, and regulated the course of the rivers by canals, thereby transforming what had been a pestiferous swamp into the most fertile of lands; it was they who founded the great cities of the country, and invented the pictorial characters, the cursive forms of which became what we term cuneiform. The theology and law of later Babylonia went back to them, and long after Semitic Babylonian had become the language of the country, legal judgments were still written in the old language and the theological literature was still studied in it. The Church and the Law were as loth to give up the dead language of Sumer as they were in modern Europe to give up the use of Latin.

This dead agglutinative language has been called sometimes Akkadian, sometimes Sumerian, but Sumerian is the name which has been finally selected. In fact, this was the name applied to it by the Semitic Babylonians themselves, who included in the term the two dialects--or rather the two forms of the language at different periods of its development--which have been preserved to us in the cuneiform tablets. Strictly speaking, the dialect which had been most affected by contact with the Semites, and had in consequence suffered most from phonetic decay, was known as the language of Akkad, but this was because Akkad represented Northern Babylonia, which had become Semitic at an earlier date than the south and had been the seat of the first great Semitic Empire. Both names, Akkadian and Sumerian, are correct as applied to the primitive language of Chaldaea, but of the two Sumerian is preferable, not only because it was used by the Babylonian scribes themselves, but also because it denoted the oldest and purest form of the language before it had passed under foreign influence.

This, then, was the great archaeological fact which resulted from the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. The earliest civilized inhabitants of Babylonia did not speak a Semitic language, and therefore presumably they were not Semites. It is perfectly true that language and race are not synonymous terms, and that we are seldom justified in arguing from the one to the other. But the Sumerian language is one of the exceptions which proves the rule. Those who spoke it were the first civilizers of Western Asia, the inventors and perfecters of a system of writing which was destined to be one of the chief humanizing agents of the ancient world, the authors of the irrigation engineering of the Babylonian plain, and the builders of its many cities. The language they spoke, accordingly, could not have been forced upon them by conquerors who have otherwise left no trace behind them, and they certainly would not have exchanged it of their own accord for their native tongue. The Semitic languages have always been conspicuous for the tenacity with which they have held their own, and the conservatism with which they have resisted change. We may still hear in the Egyptian Arabic of to-day the very words which were written by Semitic Babylonian scribes upon their tablets some four or five thousand years ago. A Semitic people would have been the last to borrow the language of its less-civilized neighbours without any assignable reason. The fact, consequently, that the pioneers of Babylonian culture spoke an agglutinative language fully justifies us in concluding that they belonged to a race that was not Semitic.

Sumerian, however, was not the only language in the neighbourhood of the Babylonian plain which was agglutinative. Further to the east, in the highlands of Elam, other agglutinative languages were spoken, monuments of one or more of which have been preserved to us. Whether or not the agglutinative languages of Elam were related to the Sumerian of Babylonia, I cannot tell; so far as our materials go at present they do not warrant us in saying more than that, like Sumerian, they were of the agglutinative type. It is only rarely that the scientific philologist is able to separate some of the multitudinous languages of the globe into genealogically related groups; for the most part they stand isolated and apart from one another, and, however much we may wish to group them together, it is seldom that we find such proofs of a common descent as will satisfy the requirements of science. Families of speech--or at all events such as can be scientifically proved to be so--are the exception and not the rule.

Eastward of Sumer the type of language was thus agglutinative, as it was in Sumer itself. And in the days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional. The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist, and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent; the tide of Semitic speech which eventually overflowed Babylonia, surged northward and eastward into Assyria and Elam, but never succeeded in passing Susiana, and was finally driven again from the ground it had once gained there. The home of the Semite lay to the west and not to the east of the Babylonian plain. Babylonian culture owed its origin to a race whose type of language was that of the Finn, of the Magyar or the Japanese.

The physical characteristics of this race cannot as yet be fully determined. The oldest sculptures yielded by Babylonian excavation belong to a time when the Semite was already in the land. It might be supposed that the early monuments of Tello, which were erected by Sumerian princes and go back to Sumerian times, would give us the necessary materials; but not only are they too rude and infantile to be of scientific use, they also indicate the existence of two ethnological types, one heavily bearded, the other beardless, with oblique eyes and negrito-like face. It is not until we come to the age of Semitic domination that sculpture is sufficiently realistic for exact anthropological purposes. At the same time, there was to the last a marked contrast of both form and feature in the artistic representation of the Babylonian and his more purely Semitic Assyrian neighbour. The squat, thick figure, the full, well-shaven cheeks, the large, almond-shaped eyes and round head of King Merodach-nadin-akhi in the twelfth century B.C. still reproduce the characteristic form and features of the statues found in the palace of Gudea, the Sumerian high-priest of Lagas, who lived more than a thousand years before. The aquiline or hooked nose, the thick lips and muscular limbs which distinguished the Assyrian are generally wanting in Babylonia. And, on the other hand, there is a likeness between the Babylonian as he is portrayed on the monuments and the Elamite adversaries of Assur-bani-pal, some of whom, it is noticeable, are depicted with beards, though the excavations of Dieulafoy and de Morgan at Susa have shown that a beardless and short-nosed negrito type with round heads was aboriginal in Elam. The same type is reproduced in one of the heads found at Tello, and M. de Morgan has pointed out that similar brachycephalic and beardless negritos are represented on the monuments of Naram-Sin as serving in the army of Akkad. We may conclude, therefore, that they still formed a part of the population of Northern Babylonia even in the age when it had passed completely under Semitic rule. Indeed, Dr. Pinches has shown that the pure Semitic type is not depicted in Babylonian art, outside the kingdom of Akkad, "before the time of the First dynasty of Babylon, which began to reign about B.C. 2300."

It has often been maintained that the Sumerians themselves were an immigrant people, who had descended from the mountains of Elam. There is nothing unreasonable in the supposition; it was always difficult to prevent the mountaineers of Elam from making raids in Babylonia, and one of their tribes succeeded in settling in the country and establishing at Babylon one of the longest-lived of its dynasties. But the supposition mainly rests upon two facts. The pictorial hieroglyphs out of which the cuneiform characters have developed had no special sign for "river," while the same character represented both "mountain" and "country." It would seem, therefore, that the land in which the cuneiform system of writing was first invented was just the converse of the Babylonian plain, being at once mountainous and riverless. That the same character means both "mountain" and "country" is no doubt a strong argument in favour of the Elamite origin of Babylonian civilization. That the use of the primitive hieroglyphs should have survived in Elam while it was lost in Babylonia, as M. de Morgan's discoveries have shown to be the case, is also another fact which may perhaps be claimed on the same side; at any rate it indicates that they were known to the Elamites before the cursive cuneiform had developed out of them. But the want of a special character for "river" is not so decisive as it appears at first sight to be. The word "river" is represented by two ideographic signs which literally signify "the watery deep," and so point to the fact that those who originally invented them lived not in the highlands of the East, but on the shores of that Persian Gulf which the Babylonians of the historic period still called "the deep." As it was also known as "the salt river," it is not difficult to understand how, to those whose experience of navigable water had been confined to the Persian Gulf, the Tigris and Euphrates would have seemed but repetitions of the Gulf on a smaller scale.

The rise of Sumerian culture on the shores of the Persian Gulf is in accordance with Babylonian tradition. Babylonian myths told how Oannes or Ea, the god of culture, had risen each morning out of his palace in "the deep," bringing with him the elements of civilization which he communicated to mankind. Letters, science and art had all been his gifts. He had instructed the wild tribes of the coast to build houses and erect temples; he had compiled for them the first law-book, and had instructed them in the mysteries of agriculture. Babylonian civilization was sea-born. The system of cosmology which finally won its way to acceptance with the priesthood and philosophers of Babylonia was one which had been first conceived at Eridu, the site of which is now more than a hundred miles distant from the sea, but in the early days of Babylonian history, before the silting up of the shore, had been its seaport. Here the first man Adam was supposed to have lived, and to have spent his time fishing in the waters of the Gulf. The whole earth was believed to have grown out of a primeval deep like the mud-flats which the inhabitants of Eridu saw slowly emerging from the retreating sea. Philosophy and cosmology, with the theology with which they were associated, looked back upon Eridu and the Babylonian coast as their primeval home.

In fact the physical conditions of the Babylonian plain rendered it impossible for the first culture of the country to have sprung up in it. Before it was reclaimed by engineering skill and labour the larger part of it had been a pestiferous marsh. The science needed for making it habitable, at least by civilized man, must have arisen outside its boundaries. Only when he was already armed with a civilization which enabled him to dig canals, to mould bricks, and pile his houses and temples on artificial foundations could the Sumerian have settled in the Babylonian plain and there developed it still further. The cities of the plain grew up each round its sanctuary, which became a centre of civilization and progress, of agriculture and trade. But the builders of the sanctuaries must have brought their culture with them from elsewhere.

Of these sanctuaries the most venerable was that of Bel the Elder at Nippur. It has been systematically excavated by the Americans down to its foundations, and the successive strata of its history laid bare. Inscribed objects have been found in all the strata, carrying the history of the cuneiform system of writing back to the days when the temple was originally built. But it is still the cuneiform system of writing as far back as we can go, that is to say the characters are the cursive forms of earlier hieroglyphic pictures, the features of which are in most cases scarcely traceable. Here and there, it is true, the primitive pictorial form has been preserved, but this is the exception and not the rule. As a rule the earliest writing found at Nippur, and coeval with the foundation of its temple, is already the degenerated and cursive hand which we call cuneiform.

The fact is very noteworthy. The cuneiform characters have assumed the shapes which give them their name owing to their having been inscribed on clay by a stylus of wood or metal, which obliged the writer to substitute a series of wedge-like indentations for curves and straight lines. As time went on, the number of the wedges was reduced, the forms of the characters were simplified, and the resemblance to the pictures they were once intended to represent became more and more indistinct. The cuneiform script is, in short, a running hand, like the hieratic of Egypt. But whereas in Egypt the hieratic running hand does not come into common use until long after the beginning of the monumental period, while the pictorial hieroglyphs continued to be employed to the last, in Babylonia the cuneiform running hand has superseded the primeval pictures as far back as our records carry us. When the temple of Nippur was built--and it was probably one of the first, if not the first, to be built in the Babylonian plain--the clay tablet was already in use for writing purposes, and the cursive cuneiform had taken the place of the older hieroglyphs.

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