Cuneiform Letters.—North of the Persian Gulf, and drained by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, lay Chalde’a, or Babylonia, the “Land of Shi’nar” (country of the two rivers). Here arose the earliest cities, amid a population principally Turanian and Semitic, with a limited intermixture of the Aryan element. A Semitic dialect prevailed among the people at large; but the Turanian (Non-Semitic or Ural-Altaic) Chaldees, to whom Babylonia was indebted for its aboriginal civilization, through the centuries of their ascendency, political and intellectual, not only kept alive their native tongue in conversation with each other, but, inscribing it on imperishable monuments, caused it to endure through all time.

To these Turanians the honor of having invented cuneiform letters must be conceded; an honor, indeed, when we remember that theirs was possibly the most ancient device for embodying human thought. The characters, called wedge-formed or arrow-headed, they appear to have brought with them into the Euphrates valley from the more northerly country which they previously occupied; and their Semitic co-residents in Babylonia were not slow in adopting the ingenious system which they had elaborated. (Consult Budge’s “Babylonian Life,” By-Paths of Bible Knowledge Series, p. 100.)

The cuneiform characters, like the hieroglyphics, were at first rude representations of objects, but in most cases the resemblance to the original was soon lost. In some archaic forms, however, it may be readily detected; as in the character for fish, symbol. The common signs eventually acquired phonetic values. The Assyrian writing is made up of ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives.

When by the victory of Alexander at Arbe’la (331 B.C.) the great Persian Empire fell, cuneiform writing ceased to be practised, and cuneiform literature was buried in the mounds of Assyria and Babylonia for two thousand years. During the present century it has been disinterred by inquisitive scholars, whose labors have resulted in the restoration of a forgotten history, through the wonderful literature of a people long known only in name. (See Sayce’s “Hibbert Lectures.”)

ASSYRIO-BABYLONIAN LITERATURE.

Writing Materials.—The cuneiform letters heretofore spoken of as in use among the Persians at a later date (p. 66) were doubtless originally intended to be cut on rocks with chisels, and hence were angular instead of round. But the ancient Babylonians preferred bricks and tablets of clay, on which, when moist and soft, they traced their legends, annals, and scientific items, with an ivory or bronze stylus, hardening the surface thus inscribed by drying in the sun. The tablets, from one inch in length upward, are pillow-shaped and covered with characters so minute as to be almost illegible without a glass. After drying, to insure their preservation, they were often enclosed in cases of clay, and on these the inscriptions were duplicated. Such are known as “case-tablets.”

The Assyrians used similar kiln-baked tablets, and, besides, carved their records exquisitely on the stone panels of their palaces, and on colossal human-headed bulls. The tablets above described, together with terra-cotta cylinders, formed the books of this inventive nation, who also engraved with wonderful delicacy glass, metals, the amethyst, jasper, and onyx.

Stone slabs were generally reserved for royal inscriptions; the literary classes of Assyria preferred the cheaper clay, on which they could write more rapidly and quite as legibly with their triangular instruments. Something like paper or parchment seems to have been used to a very limited extent; but if so, it has entirely disappeared. It is also thought that the Chaldeans may have practised a simple method of printing, as wedge-like types of stone have been found among the ruins of their cities.

Golden Age of Babylonian Literature (2000-1550 B.C.).—Not a little of the Assyrio-Babylonian literature has been recovered; but a mine of literary wealth in the valley of the Euphrates still awaits the persevering student, for before 2000 B.C. important works were written in Chaldea. In the twentieth century, a golden age dawned on this ancient land; its great cities became centres of literary refinement, as well as of commerce and art, and a lofty poetical style characterized the writings of the time. Standard texts on religion, science, and history were then and shortly thereafter produced, the copying of which appears to have satisfied the ambition of subsequent generations.

In 1887, numerous Babylonian tablets, dating from the 15th century B.C., were found at Tell-Amarna, Egypt. They contain letters addressed by Asiatic kings to the third and fourth Amenophis (a portion of the correspondence relating to the marriage of an Egyptian monarch with the princess of Mitanni), and imply that the cuneiform writing of Babylonia was in that day the vehicle of correspondence, as was the Aramaic in the time of Persian supremacy.

Among early specimens of Chaldean writing is a set of bricks, discovered near the site of E’rech. They are thought to have been made about 2008 B.C. As these bricks illustrate the most ancient cuneiform character, two of them are here presented, accompanied with a translation.

Chaldean Bricks.

FROM A TABLET OF BABYLONIAN LAWS.

Babylonian literature was rich in the departments of law, mathematics, astrology, grammar, and history. Nor was fiction wanting; fables, in which the lower animals carried on spirited dialogues, were favorites with the people. At a very early date, the inscribed tablets and cylinders were collected, and the chief cities were made the seats of libraries.

From a volume of Chaldean hymns, somewhat similar to the Rig-Veda, are taken the following verses to the Babylonian Venus:—

PRAYER OF THE HEART TO ISTAR.

The Babylonians believed in omens. They gathered auguries from dreams, inspection of the hand, the time of birth, and various phenomena, establishing a national system of divination not without its amusing features. For instance, we have the following

OMENS CONNECTED WITH DOGS.

Many charms and exorcisms appear in the ancient language of Babylonia, disease being attributed to possession by evil spirits. Specimens follow.

BABYLONIAN EXORCISMS.

A belief in a future life is expressed in the Poem on the Descent of Istar, the moon-god’s daughter, to Hades, “the land whence none return,” where “the dead outnumber the living;” and further in the so-called Nimrod-Epic, the most ancient approach to epic poetry known to exist, embodying the Babylonian story of Izdubar (identified with Nimrod)—his rejection of the suit of the goddess Istar, and his victory over the human-headed bull sent to revenge the slight. Nimrod is ferried across the waters of the dead to the shores of the regions of the blessed, where he recognizes his ancestor, Samas-napistim, and exclaims:

Chambers of Records at Nineveh.—The Semites who, as the sacred historian informs us, left the land of Shinar to found Nineveh and the neighboring cities, carried with them the civilization and literary culture of the Chaldeans. The earliest permanent seat of letters was Ca’lah (see Map, p. 105), where, during the reign of Shalmane’ser II. (860-824 B.C.) many clay tablets borrowed from the Babylonians were copied by Assyrian scribes. This same king erected at Calah an obelisk of black marble—one of the few Assyrian monuments of its kind commemorative of national triumphs.

The library thus begun at Calah was enlarged under succeeding kings. Removed at length to Nineveh, it there attained vast proportions through the efforts of that munificent patron of letters, Sardanapa’lus (Assur-bani-pal), (668-626 B.C.). The number of engraved tablets reached ten thousand.

Here were grammars[12] and lexicons, law-books and scientific treatises, histories, astronomical and arithmetical works, songs, prayers, hymns sometimes approaching the Hebrew sacred lyrics in sublimity, books of charms and omens, natural histories, botanies, and geographies—a complete encyclopædia of ancient literature. The books of this curious collection were carefully arranged according to their subjects, numbered, catalogued, and placed in charge of librarians. They were public property, intended for the instruction of the people.

Such was the library of Sardanapalus—principally copied from Babylonian texts; such, it was buried beneath the ruins of the palace when “the gates of the rivers were opened and Nineveh became a desolation;” such, it lay amid the débris for centuries, “while the cormorant and the bittern lodged in the upper lintels.”

But the mounds that so long covered the site of Nineveh have recently surrendered their treasures. Clouds that environed the history of the past have been dissipated; ancient nations, for ages wrapped in obscurity, we no longer “see through a glass, darkly;” and the narrative of the inspired writers of the Bible has been in many places confirmed by the inscriptions disentombed in the East. Among the most interesting fragments found scattered through the ruined “Chambers of Records” of the Assyrian palace are the tablets relating to the Creation, the Fall of Man, and the Deluge, copied from Babylonian records hundreds of years older than the Pentateuch.

FROM THE CHALDEAN ACCOUNT OF THE DELUGE.

(Compiled originally about 2000 B.C.)

SPECIMENS OF ASSYRIAN SACRED POETRY.

A PRAYER FOR THE KING.

Here is undoubtedly expressed a belief in the soul’s immortality, which also appears in the following prayer for the spirit of a dying man:—

A PENITENTIAL PSALM.

HITTITE INSCRIPTIONS.

Altaic Hieroglyphs.—Inscriptions on stones and various objects, in an unknown system of hieroglyphics, have been found near Damascus and elsewhere in the East. They have been ascribed to the Hittites (the Khita of the Egyptian monuments, the Khittim of Scripture), a powerful race of northern Syria, who were constantly at war with the Babylonians, successfully opposed both Assyria and Egypt, and in the thirteenth century B.C. extended their power as far west as the Ægean Sea. It is claimed that the symbols are “the prototypes whence the cuneiform system was developed,” and that the language is an Altaic (Turanian or Accadian) dialect. The date assigned is 1400 B.C. (See opposite engraving of an inscribed stone from Jerabis.) Scholars are now engaged in an attempt to decipher these inscriptions. (The reader is referred to Sayce’s “The Hittites: the Story of a Forgotten Empire.”)

ARABIC LITERATURE.

Himyaritic Inscriptions.—The high-spirited war-loving tribes that roved over the tablelands of Arabia, as well as the more refined inhabitants of her ports on the Red Sea, doubtless cultivated letters. We may suppose the former to have given their florid fancies vent in pastorals, rude songs for the desert bivouac, or triumphal odes. More finished species of poetry would have been congenial to the courtly residents of the cities, whose knowledge of the world was extended by trading expeditions to India, and along the African coast as far as the Mozambique Channel.

Yet of this probable literature we possess little that is older than the era of Mohammed (600 A.D.), at which time the Arabians awoke to a new life, for centuries leading the van of the nations in the march of literature and science. But the little that we have is not without interest.

At least eighteen hundred years before the Christian Era, descendants of Joktan, called Sabæans and afterward Himyarites, established themselves in southwestern Arabia; but not until about 800 B.C. do they appear to have gained permanent dominion over the neighboring tribes. Inscriptions in their language, the Sabæan, a Semitic tongue closely related to the Arabic, if not sufficiently like it to be called by the same name, have been found in the lower part of the Arabian peninsula on walls, tombs, dikes, and bronze tablets.

These are the oldest known Arabic writings, and are believed by scholars to date between the 8th century B.C. and the 4th century A.D. Gems have also been discovered, inscribed with these same characters.

PHŒNICIAN LITERATURE.

Its Lost Treasures.—In the most ancient records, the narrow strip of coast between the Lib’anus Mountains and the Mediterranean was recognized as an important centre of civilization. Its cities were seats of art and commerce; Africa, Sicily, and Spain, were dotted with its colonies and trading-stations; the sails of its merchantmen sparkled on every sea; its language was known throughout the ancient world.

It cannot be that a nation so advanced in knowledge was without a literature; and if works on their philosophy and religion, on history, geography, navigation, and agriculture, didactic poems and love-songs, constitute a literature, vast indeed was that of the Phœnicians. No department of science or belles-lettres appears to have been overlooked by their authors.

The famous “Book City,” Kir´jath-Se´pher, which, during the conquest of Canaan, was taken by Othniel the future Judge, is thought to have been a Phœnician town. Its name implies that it was a repository of books, probably public records and works on law—perhaps an Athens to the nations of Canaan, whither their youth flocked to consult its libraries and receive instruction at its academies. Its valuable collection of manuscripts was doubtless committed to the flames by the Hebrew conqueror.

In like manner, the whole constellation of Phœnician hymns, and lyrics, and prose pieces, has become extinct, except a lonely star left here and there in the works of foreign authors; or a faint light glimmering on some coin or tablet, gem or tombstone.

The only important Phœnician writer known to us is Sanchoni´athon. Fragments of his History, written perhaps in the fourteenth century B.C., have survived through a Greek translation. In accounting for the origin of the universe, Sanchoniathon taught the theory of evolution, that “from certain animals not having sensation, intelligent animals were produced.”

Phœnician Carthage also developed an extensive literature. The records of the city were kept by native historians; and we know that Ma’go’s great work on agriculture, in twenty-eight parts, was highly appreciated at Rome, and there rendered into Latin. When the city of Hannibal fell before her more powerful rival, her vast library was scattered among the African allies of the Romans, and lost to history.

An interesting relic of Carthaginian literature is the Circumnavigation of Hanno, the history of a voyage undertaken in the sixth century B.C. to the coasts of Libya—the oldest history of a voyage existing. This work of Hanno, which used to hang in a temple at Carthage, describes a savage people called Gorillas, whose bodies were covered with hair and who defended themselves with stones. The narrator says: “Three women were taken, but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be prevailed on to accompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage.”

NOTES ON ASSYRIO-BABYLONIAN LITERATURE.