The modern science of archæology has been derisively called “the study of pots.” As a matter of fact, the study of ancient pottery occupies a prominent place in it, and we cannot turn over the pages of a standard archæological work without constantly coming across photographs and illustrations of the ceramic art or reading descriptions of vases and bowls, of coloured ware and fragmentary sherds. Questions of date and origin are made to turn on the presence or absence of some particular form of pottery on a given site, and fierce controversies have arisen over a single fragment of a vessel of clay. A knowledge of ancient pottery is a primary requisite in the scientific excavator and archæologist of to-day.

The reason of this is obvious. Archæology 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 archæological science, for the questions with which archæology 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 archæologist 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 palæolithic 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 archæology as in other sciences, and the absence of palæolithic 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 mediæval 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 archæological 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 archæological 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 Dêr el-Bâharî 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 archæological 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 archæological 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 “Mykenæan” age, it is impossible to put much faith in their descriptions of archæological 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 Shirqât, where Assur, the primitive capital of Assyria, formerly stood, and here we may expect that archæological 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.”[41] 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 archæologist has to turn to the inscriptions and written literature of which such vast quantities have survived, and hence, besides being an archæologist 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 archæologist 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 archæologist 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 archæologist as well. The clues he follows will be largely archæological, and he has to appeal to archæology at every step. The method he must pursue is the method of archæology and of other inductive sciences, and the materials he uses are in part the materials of archæology 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 archæology 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 archæological side of his study as any one else who is ignorant of archæology, and the materials he provides must be dealt with by the archæologist 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 archæological 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 archæology or history to its aid. Assyriology is thus primarily an archæological study, using the methods of archæological science and demanding the help of the archæologist, even though there are Assyriologists who are not archæologists themselves.

But for the present our archæological 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 archæology 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 archæological 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.[42]

At Susa the line of division between the prehistoric or neolithic age and the historical epoch is very clearly marked. The prehistoric stratum lies twenty-five metres below the surface of the mounds, and is divided by M. de Morgan and his fellow-workers into two periods. The first is distinguished by a fine thin pottery, with yellow paste, which is already made upon a wheel. It does not exceed from two to seven millimetres in thickness; it is polished, and decorated with black bands and various patterns in a brown colour produced by oxide of iron. The designs are not only geometric, but also represent animal and vegetable forms. Among them are rows of ostriches identical with those found on the painted prehistoric pottery of Egypt. Indeed, the explorers were especially struck by the resemblance of the pottery as a whole to that of Egypt in the prehistoric age, though it is difficult to see what connection there can have been between the two countries at so remote a date, and the curious similarity between the rows of birds depicted on the vases must remain for the present an archæological puzzle. There is also a certain amount of resemblance between the geometric pottery and that disinterred by M. Chantre at the early Assyrian colony at Kara Eyuk in Cappadocia, which will be discussed more fully in a later chapter.[43] Among the geometrical patterns of the Susian ware spherical forms are common; the herring-bone pattern is also met with, as well as a pattern like the Greek sigma. The under-part of the vases is often decorated, so also is the inside. A form of vase frequently found is the water-jar with a rounded foot; the goblet is another common shape. Sometimes the vases are supplied with four handles for suspension.

This fine yellow pottery occurs not only at Susa, but also throughout Elam, but practically none of it has hitherto been discovered in Babylonia.[44] 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.

The archæological evidence obtained at Susa has been supplemented by excavations made some ninety miles to the west of it, at a place called Mussian, on the eastern bank of the river Tib. Here there are graves, as well as the remains of a temple and houses with vaults, columns and walls of burnt brick. Where the strata have allowed a section to be cut down to the virgin soil the results are found to agree with those revealed by the excavations at Susa. The earliest layer belongs to the neolithic age, flint and obsidian, as at Susa, being the materials employed for tools and weapons. The pottery is thick and hand-made, the paste being either yellow or red in colour, and the surface is often polished, while many of the vases are furnished with holes for suspension. This layer seems older than anything discovered at Susa. It is followed by a second layer, in which the pottery is wheel-made, and is decorated with animal and vegetable figures in black or red, like the first prehistoric ware of the Susa mounds. Among the animal figures are those of men, and one fragment of yellow ware is ornamented with the so-called swastika. In the upper part of the layer a few fragments of copper have been met with, indicating that the neolithic age was beginning to pass into that of copper.

Above this layer is a third, characterized by a fine ware, usually yellow but sometimes greenish in colour, and decorated with designs in lustrous black. In the fine specimens the decoration has been laid on before firing, in other cases after firing. The pottery as a whole has a general resemblance 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.[45] 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 (B.C. 2700). 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.[46] 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[47] that the so-called figure of Niobê 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 (prehistoric) city at Troy.[48] At Troy, however, the type was more usually modified in the Hittite direction, as it was also in the islands of the Ægean, where marble figures of the goddess are plentiful.[49] 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 Talîsh in Gîlân, on the south-western shore of the Caspian.[50]

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.[51] 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.[52] At Niffer, moreover, the ancient Nippur, American excavation has the same tale to tell. According to Dr. Peters,[53] 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[54] that in the very lowest strata of the temple mound, far below the pavements of Sargon and Naram-Sin (B.C. 3750), “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.

This, however, had taken place before the commencement of the Assyrian age. The bronze scimitar of Hadad-nirari I. (B.C. 1330)[55] finds an exact copy in a scimitar discovered by Mr. Macalister at Gezer in Palestine,[56] and the tools and weapons exhumed at Nineveh are of bronze and not copper. Analysis shows that the bronze usually consisted of about one part of tin to ten of copper, though for special objects like bells the amount of tin was considerably increased.[57] When was it that the tin was first imported and intentionally mixed with the copper in order to harden the metal?

In default of archæological 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.

On the other hand, copper, as well as gold and silver, had become known to them when the primitive pictographs were still in process of formation, and long before they had passed into cursive cuneiform. Copper was represented by the picture of an ingot or square plate of the metal with a handle attached to it, showing that it was already in a fused and worked state when it was imported into Babylonia. Gold seems to have originally been denoted by the picture of a collar or necklace, which signified “shining,” and was afterwards employed before the names of the precious metals. I have, however, never found this collar actually used to signify “gold”; in the earliest texts yet discovered the phonetic syllable gi is attached to it when “gold” is denoted, the Sumerian word for “gold” being azag-gi. “Silver” was “the white precious metal,” the symbol for “white” being attached to the picture of the collar, and so forming a compound ideograph. This implies that silver became known to the inventors of the hieroglyphs at a later period than gold, though still before what I will call the cuneiform age. Even iron was known to them at the same early epoch, and was expressed by ideographs which literally mean “stone of heaven,”[58] an indication that meteoric iron must be referred to.

But now comes a fact which is difficult to explain, so contrary is it to the archæological evidence. As we have seen, no traces of bronze have been found in the Assyro-Babylonian region before the beginning of the Assyrian age—let us say about B.C. 2000. Nevertheless, by the side of the simple ideograph which denotes the Sumerian urudu, “copper”—erû in Semitic Babylonian—we find a compound ideograph signifying “bronze,” called zabar in Sumerian, from which the Semites borrowed their ’siparru. It is true that it is a compound ideograph, but it occurs in the cuneiform texts, not only in the era of Gudea (B.C. 2700), but even before the age of Sargon of Akkad (B.C. 3800). And an analysis of its earliest form seems to indicate that it really must have meant bronze from the first, and that consequently there was no transference of signification in later days. Literally it means “white copper,” the word for “copper” being phonetically-written ka-mas, with which the Semitic Babylonian kemassu is closely connected. Lead cannot be intended, as that was denoted by a different word and different ideographs, and I do not see what else “white copper” can be in contradistinction to red copper except bronze. Polished copper could be termed “bright,” but hardly “white.”[59]

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 archæologically 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,[60] 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.[61] 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,[62] and Petrie has found a mass of iron in a Sixth-dynasty deposit in the temple of Osiris at Abydos,[63] 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 Kahûn are of copper rather than of bronze.[64] 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,[65] 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 (see de Morgan, Mission Scientifique au Caucase, ii. pp. 16–28). 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 (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxxii. pp. 375–94, and Proceedings of Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1903–4, pp. 323–410) 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 Ægean, 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 (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1900, pp. 89 sqq.) 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 Mykenæ, 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. (see p. 57 above), 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 Mykenæan (or Late Minoan) period that the cemetery of Knossos yielded swords of bronze (Annual of the British School at Athens, x. p. 4). 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.

All this goes to show (1) that the scimitar—the harpê of the Perseus myth—was a Semitic invention, while the long sword was of European origin; (2) that at Troy, and possibly also in Southern Palestine, to which Hittite polychrome pottery was carried at an early date, bronze was known at a time when only copper was used in Cyprus and Egypt; and (3) that the characteristic weapon of this primitive bronze age was the dirk, which continued to characterize Asia Minor long after the sword and scimitar had been invented elsewhere. Taken in connection with the fact that the pottery and decorative designs of Asia Minor can be linked with those of the Balkan peninsula and the valley of the Danube, we may provisionally conclude that Northern Asia Minor was the home of the invention of bronze. Against this is the fact that no tin has hitherto been found there, and we should accordingly have to explain the origin of bronze by the theory that after the discovery of various processes for hardening copper, further experiments were made with imported tin. Unfortunately, neither the south of Cornwall nor Asia Minor, with the exception of the Troad, has as yet been scientifically explored from an archæological point of view. But it deserves mention that the curious needles with a double head of twisted wire, which are met with among the remains of the bronze age in Britain, are characteristic of the copper age in Cyprus and of the early bronze age at Troy.