Among the first results of the decipherment of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions was one which was so unexpected and revolutionary, that it was received with incredulity and employed to pour discredit on the fact of the decipherment itself. European scholars had long been nursing the comfortable belief that the white race primarily, and the natives of Europe secondarily, were ipso facto superior to the rest of mankind, and that to them belonged of right the origin and development of civilization. The discovery of the common parentage of the Indo-European languages had come to strengthen the belief; the notion grew up that in Sanskrit we had found, if not the primeval language, at all events a language that was very near to it, and idyllic pictures were painted of the primitive Aryan community living in its Asiatic home and already possessed of the elements of its later culture. Outside and beyond it were the barbarians, races yellow and brown and black, with oblique eyes and narrow foreheads, whose intelligence was not much above that of the brute beasts. Such culture as some of them may have had was derived from the white race, and perhaps spoilt in the borrowing. The idea of the rise of a civilization outside the limits of the white race was regarded as a paradox.

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.[66] Both names, Akkadian and Sumerian, are correct as applied to the primitive language of Chaldæa, 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 archæological 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,[67] 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 (according to Quatrefages and Hamy) 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.[68] 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.[69]

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[70] 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.[71]

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.

The Babylonian plain was called by its Sumerian inhabitants the Edin, or “Plain,” a name which was borrowed by the Semites and has been made familiar to us by the book of Genesis. Originally it had meant all the uncultivated flats on either side of the Euphrates, but it soon acquired the sense of the country as opposed to the city, and so of the cultivated plain itself. Most of the important Babylonian cities were built in it between the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris on the east. A few only lay beyond it on the western bank of the Euphrates. One of these was Eridu, another was Ur, a third was Borsippa.

Of Eridu I have already spoken. Some six or eight thousand years ago it was the seaport of primitive Babylonia.[72] Ur, which stood close to it, seems to have been a colony of Nippur, and therefore of comparatively late origin.[73] Borsippa was a small and unimportant town, which eventually became a suburb of Babylon, and Babylon, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, was itself a colony of Eridu.[74] Hence of the cities which stood outside the Edin of Babylonia, and may therefore belong to an age when Babylonian civilization was still in its infancy, Eridu alone is of account. And the priority even of Eridu was contested. Traditionally Sippara, which is expressly stated to have been in “the Edin,” claimed to be the oldest of Babylonian cities; one quarter of it bore the name of “Sippara that is from everlasting,” and like Eridu, it believed itself to have been the abode of the first man.[75] Thus far, however, the monuments have given us nothing to substantiate the claim; the culture-god of Babylonia was Ea of Eridu, not the Sun-god of Sippara, and for the present, therefore, we must look to the shore of the Persian Gulf, rather than to the “land of Eden” for the cradle of Babylonian civilization.

At any rate, both Sippara and Eridu were of Sumerian foundation, as indeed were nearly all the great cities of Babylonia. Eridu was a later form of the older Eri-dugga, “the good city,” a name which seems to have been the starting-point of more than one legend. The growth of the coast to the south of it gives us some idea as to the age to which its foundation must reach back.

It was, as I have said, the primitive seaport of Babylonia, and its legend of the first man Adamu made him a fisherman in the Persian Gulf. Its site is now rather more than a hundred miles distant from the present line of coast. The progress of alluvial deposit brought down by the Euphrates and Tigris can be estimated by the fact that forty-seven miles of it have been formed since Spasinus Charax, the modern Mohammerah, was built in the age of Alexander the Great, and was for a time the port of Chaldæa. During the last 2000 years, accordingly, the rate of deposit would seem to have been about 115 feet a year. This, however, does not agree with the observations of Loftus, who made the rate not more than a mile in every seventy years,[76] while on the other hand Sir Henry Rawlinson adduced reasons for believing it to have been more rapid in the past than it is to-day, and that consequently the rate must once have been as much as a mile in thirty years.[77] It is desirable that some competent geologist should study the question on the spot. Taking, however, as a basis of calculation, the one known fact of the rate of growth since the foundation of Spasinus Charax, and bearing in mind that before the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates the rate of advance must have been comparatively slow, we should have to go back to about B.C. 5000 as the latest date at which Eridu could still have been the seaport of the country.

Was it here that the system of writing which was so closely entwined with the origin of Babylonian civilization was first invented? Babylonian tradition in later days certainly believed that such was the case, and the fact that Ea of Eridu was the culture-god of Babylonia is strongly in its favour. But there are difficulties in the way. Eridu was the home of the “white witchcraft” of early Chaldæa; it was here that the charms and incantations were composed which gave the priesthood of Eridu its influence, and made the god they worshipped the impersonation of wisdom. The belief that he was the originator of Babylonian culture may have had its source in the system of magic which was associated with his name. Eridu was built on the Semitic side of the Euphrates, and the Semitic tribes who received their letters and their civilization from the Sumerians of Eridu would naturally have looked upon the city of their teachers as the primeval home of Sumerian culture. The traditions that made Eridu the starting-point of Sumerian civilization could thus be explained away, and we should be left free to settle the question of its origin upon purely archæological evidence.

Unfortunately the site of Eridu has not yet been systematically excavated. Once again the archæological materials for settling an archæological question are not at hand, and we are thrown back upon an examination of the picture-writing from which the cuneiform characters are derived. Here the evidence on the whole may be said to be in favour of tradition. It is true that there is no special ideograph for “river,” but there is one for “the deep,” and “the spirit of the deep” must have been a chief object of worship at the time when the primitive hieroglyphs were first formed. The “ship,” too, played a prominent part in the life of their inventors, and the picture of it represented it as moved not by oars but by a sail.[78] The flowering reed was equally prominent, and was even used to symbolize what stood firm and established.[79] Houses, fortresses, temples, and cities were built of brick, and vases were moulded out of clay.[80] The tablet, rectangular or square, was already employed for the purpose of writing, but as it was provided with a handle or a couple of rings at the top, I think it was more probably of wood than of clay. The sheep, goat and ox were domesticated,[81] and so also probably was the ass,[82] and corn was cultivated in the fields. The symbol of the “earth” appears to have been the picture of an island of circular or elliptical form. Among trees the cedar was well known.

All this points to the sea-coast of Babylonia as the district in which its civilization first arose. But on the other hand, there is the fact that “country” and “mountain” are alike represented by the picture of a mountainous land. There is also the fact that the land in which the inventors of the hieroglyphs lived was one in which copper, gold and silver were procurable—perhaps also meteoric iron; and the further fact that hard wood was sufficiently plentiful for tools or weapons to have been made of it before the employment of metal. That they should have been made of wood, however, and not of stone, is a strong argument in favour of the Babylonian coast.

It is on wood, moreover, that the first hieroglyphs must have been painted or cut. Many of them represented round objects or were formed of curved lines, which were transformed into a series of wedge-like indentations when imprinted by a stylus upon clay. We know, therefore, that clay was not the original writing material; its use as such, in fact, is coeval with the rise of that cursive script which, in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, is called hieratic, but in Assyro-Babylonian is known as cuneiform. It was the attempt to reproduce the old pictures upon clay that created the cuneiform characters. As metal is not likely to have been employed by the primitive scribes of Chaldæa, and there is no trace of stone having been used—even the stone cylinder of later days being called a dup-sar or “written tablet”—we are left to choose between wood and papyrus. In favour of papyrus is the fact that the circular forms of so many of the pictures suggest that they were originally painted rather than engraved; on the other hand, it is doubtful whether the papyrus grows in the Babylonian rivers, or at any rate did so in the prehistoric age. And the pictograph of a “written document” is not a strip or roll of papyrus, as in Egypt, but a tablet with a handle or loop. It is true that the primeval picture which denoted “copper” has much the same form, but as even cutting instruments had the determinative of “wood” attached to them in the early picture writing, it is clear that the original tablet could not have been of metal, whatever might have been the case with its later successors. The picture, moreover, of the “tablet” is distinguished from that of a “plate of bronze” by the addition of a string which is tied to the handle.

On the whole, therefore, the only archæological evidence available at present is on the side of the tradition which made Babylonian culture move northward from the coast. The only fact against it of which I know is that, as I have already stated, the word for land was symbolized by the picture of a triple mountain. But this fact is not insuperable. Before the silting up of the shore, the old coast-line of Babylonia would have stretched away north-eastward of Eridu towards the mountains of Elam. Whether the mountains that fringed what would then have been the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf are visible from the site of Eridu, I do not know; if the clear light of Upper Egypt exists there they would be so. Nor do I know whether on the western side there are mountain ranges visible in Arabia; these are points which can be cleared up only when the country has been thoroughly explored.

Eridu lay five miles southward of Ur,[83] that “Ur of the Chaldees” from which Hebrew history affirmed the ancestor of the nation had come. Ur was never a maritime port like Eridu; it stood on the Arabian plateau and looked towards the west. Its face was turned to the Semitic rather than to the Sumerian world. From the first, therefore, it must have been in touch with Semitic tribes. And a curious reminiscence of the fact survived in the western Semitic languages, Ur or Uru signifies “the city”; it was a Sumerian word, another form of which was eri. The word was borrowed by the Semites, and in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, accordingly, the idea of “city” is expressed by ’îr. The Assyrians of the north, whose vocabulary was otherwise so full of Sumerian loan-words, preferred the native âlu, “a tent,” to which the meaning of “city” was assigned when Sumerian culture had been passed on to the Semitic race and the tent had been exchanged for the city. The history of the word is a history of early culture as well.

But I am far from saying that it was through Ur that the civilization of Sumer came to be handed on to its Semitic neighbours. On the contrary, such facts as there are point in a different direction. Western Semites, whom linguistically we may call Arabs or Aramæans, or Canaanites or Hebrews, doubtless mingled with the Sumerian population of Ur, and adopted more or less of its manners and civilization, but it was further north, in the Babylonian Eden itself, that the Semite first came under the influence of the higher culture, and soon outstripped his masters in the arts of life.

The entrance of the Semitic element into Babylonia is at present one of the most obscure of problems. All we can be sure of are certain main facts. First of all, as we have seen, the early culture of Babylonia, including so integral a part of it as the script, was of Sumerian origin. So, too, were the great cities and sanctuaries of the country, as well as the system of irrigation engineering which first made it habitable. Sumerian long continued to be the language of theology and law; indeed a large part of the Babylonian pantheon of later days was frankly non-Semitic. As was inevitable under such conditions, the Assyrian language contained an immense number of words—many of them compound—which were borrowed from the older language, and its idioms and grammar equally showed signs of Sumerian influence. I have sometimes been tempted, from a scientific point of view, to speak of Semitic Babylonian as a mixed language.

On the other hand, if the elements of Babylonian civilization were Sumerian, the superstructure was Semitic. When the Semites entered into the heritage of Sumerian culture, the cuneiform script must have still been in a very inchoate and immature state. Its pictorial ancestry must still have been clear, and no scruples were felt about altering or adding to the characters. The phonetic application of the characters, which was still in its initial stage in the Sumerian period, was developed and carried to perfection by the Semitic scribes, and a very considerable proportion of their values and ideographic meanings is of Semitic derivation. The theological system was transformed, and a new literature and a new art came into existence. As Sumerian words had been borrowed by the Semites, so, too, Semitic words were borrowed by the Sumerians, and it is possible that examples of them may occur in some of the oldest Sumerian texts known to us.[84] The Babylonians of history, in short, were a mixed people; and their culture and language were mixed like our own.

This, then, is one main fact. A second is that the Semitic element first comes to the front in the northern part of Babylonia. It is in Akkad, and not in Sumer, that the first Semitic Empire—that of Sargon the Elder, B.C. 3800—had its seat, and old as that empire is, it presupposes a long preceding period of Semitic settlement and advance in power and civilization. The cuneiform system of writing is already complete and has ceased to be Sumerian, archive-chambers of Semitic literature are founded, and Semitic authority is firmly established from Susa in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. Art is no longer Sumerian, and in the hands of the Semitic subjects of Sargon and his son Naram-Sin has reached a perfection which in certain directions was never afterwards surpassed. The engraved seal-cylinders of the period are the finest that we possess. Naturally the Semitic language has superseded the Sumerian in official documents, and the physical type as represented on the monuments is also distinctly Semitic. At the beginning of the fourth millennium before our era, the civilization and culture of Northern Babylonia have thus ceased to be Sumerian, and the sceptre has fallen into the hands of a Semitic race.

But there is a third fact. The displacement of the Sumerian by the Semite was the case only in Northern Babylonia. In the south, in the land of Sumer, the older population continued to be dominant. Sumerian dynasties continued to rule there from time to time, and the old agglutinative language continued to be spoken. When a West-Semitic dynasty governed the country about B.C. 2200, state proclamations and similar official documents had still to be drawn up in the two languages, Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian. Sumerian did not become extinct till a later day. Indeed, after the fall of the empire of Sargon of Akkad there seems to have been a Sumerian reaction. While Susa was lost to the Semites and became the capital of a non-Semitic people who spoke an agglutinative language, the power of the Sumerian princes in Southern Babylonia appears to have revived. At all events even the dynasty which followed that of the West-Semites bore Sumerian names.[85] It was only under the foreign domination of the Kassites, apparently, who governed Babylonia for nearly 600 years, that the Sumerian element finally became merged in the Semitic and the Babylonian of later history was born.

The last fact is that while what we call Assyrian is Semitic Babylonian with a few dialectal variations, it stands apart from the other Semitic languages. A scientific comparison of its grammar with those of the sister-tongues leads us to believe that it represents one of the two primeval dialects of the Semitic family of speech, the other dialect being that which subsequently split up into the varying dialects of Canaanite or Hebrew, Arabic, South-Arabic and Aramæan—or, adopting the genealogical form of linguistic relationship, Assyro-Babylonian would have been one daughter of the primitive parent-speech, while the other daughter comprised the remaining Semitic languages.[86] There are two conclusions to be drawn from this; one is that the Babylonian Semites must have separated from their kinsfolk and come under Sumerian influence at a very early period, the other that they moved northward, along the banks of the Tigris into Assyria.

With these two inferences we have to be content. Upon the first home of the Semitic race or its affinities with other branches of the white race, Babylonia can naturally throw no light. The earliest glimpses we catch of the Semites of Babylonia are those of a people who have already come under the influences of Sumerian civilization, who are mingling with their teachers and helping with them to build up the stately edifice of historical Babylonia. There were ruder Semitic tribes, it is true, who continued to live their own nomad life on the western bank of the Euphrates or in the marshes that bordered the Persian Gulf. But like the Bedâwîn of to-day on the outskirts of Egypt they were little, if at all, affected by the civilization at their sides. They remained the same wild savages of the desert as their descendants who encamp in the swamps of modern Babylonia; they neither traded nor tilled the ground, and the language they spoke was not the same as that of their Babylonian kindred. They served, however, as the herdsmen and shepherds of their Babylonian neighbours, and the vast flocks whose wool was so important an article of Babylonian trade, were entrusted to their care. But Bedâwîn they were born, and Bedâwîn they continued to be.

Even the Aramæan tribes of the coast-land kept apart from the Babylonians, whether Sumerian or Semitic, until the day when one of their tribes, the Kaldâ or Chaldæans, made themselves masters of Babylon under their prince Merodach-baladan, and from henceforward became an integral factor in the Babylonian population. They must have settled on the borders of Babylonia at a comparatively late date, when Semitic Babylonian had definitely marked itself off from its sister-tongues and the Babylonian Semite had acquired distinctive characteristics of his own. The West-Semitic elements in the population of Babylonia could have entered the country only long after the mixture of Sumerian and Semite had produced the Babylonian of history.

The Babylonian of history came to forget that he had ever had another fatherland than the Babylonian plain, the Eden of the Old Testament, the land whose southern border was formed by “the salt river” or Persian Gulf of early Sumerian geography, with its four branches which were themselves “heads.” Here the first man Adamu[87] had been created in Eridu, “the good city,” and here therefore the Babylonian Semite placed the home of the first ancestor of his race. But it was a borrowed belief, borrowed along with the other elements of Babylonian culture, and no argument can be drawn from it as to the actual cradle of the Semitic race. Like the story of the deluge, it was part of the Sumerian heritage into which the Semite had entered.

The Semitic tradition which made the first man a tiller of the ground may also have been borrowed from the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia. At all events it is significant that the garden in which he was placed was in the land of Eden, and that the picture of a garden or plantation is one of the primitive hieroglyphs of Sumer. The beginnings of Babylonian civilization were bound up with the cultivation of the Babylonian soil; the reclamation of the great alluvial plain was at once the effect and the cause of Sumerian culture. Sumerian culture, in fact, was at the outset essentially that of an agricultural people.

Trade would have come later, when Eridu had become a seaport, and ships ventured on the waters of the Persian Gulf. It grew up under the shelter of the great sanctuaries. Supported at first by the labour of their serfs, the priests in time came to exchange their surplus revenues—the wool of their sheep, the wheat and sesame of their fields, or the wine yielded by their palms—for other commodities, and the temples themselves formed safe and capacious store-houses in which such goods could be kept. In the historical period Babylonia is already a great trading community, and as the centuries passed trade absorbed more and more the energies of its population, agriculture fell into the background, and the Babylonia conquered by Cyrus could be described with truth as “a nation of shopkeepers.” Even the crown prince was a merchant who dealt in wool.[88]

The increasing preponderance of trade goes along with the increasing preponderance of the Semitic element in the country, and it is tempting to suppose that there was a connection between the two. At present, however, there is no positive evidence that such was the case. Nor is there any positive evidence that the Semites who settled in Babylonia were not already agriculturists. The circumstances in which a people lives are mainly responsible for its being agricultural or pastoral, and the fact that the Bedâwîn neighbours of the Babylonians on the western side of the Euphrates remained a pastoral race does not exclude the possibility that there were other branches of the Semitic family who had already passed out of the pastoral into the agricultural stage before coming into contact with the Sumerians. On the other hand, it is at least noticeable that in Semitic Babylonian the usual word for “city” continued to be one which properly meant a “tent”—the home of the pastoral nomad—and that no Semitic traditions have come down to us of the beginnings of agricultural life outside the limits of the Babylonian “Plain.” The title of “Shepherd,” moreover, was at times given to the Babylonian kings in days subsequent to the Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to judge, city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive Semitic nomad.[89]

To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown in my Lectures on Babylonian religion,[90] we must ascribe an important theological conception. In historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods themselves were men. But the conception cannot be traced back further than the age when the Sumerians and Semites came into contact with one another. In pre-Semitic Sumer there are no anthropomorphic gods. We hear, instead, of the zi or “spirit,” a word properly signifying “life” which manifested itself in the power of motion. All things that moved were possessed of life, and there was accordingly a “life” or “spirit” of the water as well as of man or beast. In place of the divine “lord of heaven” whom the Semites adored there was “a spirit of heaven”; in place of Ea, the later Babylonian god of the deep, there was “a spirit of the abyss.” Sumerian theology, in fact, was still on the level of animism, and the inventors of the script represented the idea of “god” by the picture of a star. Vestiges of the old animism can still be detected even in the later cult: by the side of the human gods an Assyrian prayer invokes the mountains, the rivers and the winds, and from time to time we come across a worship of deified towns. It was the town itself that was divine, not the deity to whom its chief temple was dedicated. So, again, the god or goddess continued to be symbolized by some sacred animal or object whose figure appears upon seals and boundary-stones, and in some cases we learn that the Sumerian prototypes of the later Babylonian divinities bore such names as “the gazelle,” “the antelope” or “the bull.”

With the advent of the Semite all is changed. The gods have become men and women with intensified powers and the gift of immortality, but in all other respects they live and act like the men and women of this nether world. Like them, too, they are born and married, and the court of the early prince finds its counterpart in the divine court of the supreme Bel, or “Lord.” The Semitic god of Babylon was “lord of gods” and men, of heaven and earth; Assur of Assyria was “king of the gods” and lord of “the heavenly hosts.”

It was natural that, corresponding with this lord of the heavenly hosts, there should be a lord of the hosts of earth, and that as the divine king was clothed in the attributes of man, the human king should take upon him the divine nature. Like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the emperors of Rome, the early kings of Semitic Babylonia were deified. And the deification took place during their lifetime,—in fact, so far as we can judge, upon their accession to the throne. In the eyes of their subjects they were incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions they give themselves the title of god. One of them is even called “the god” of Akkad, his capital.[91]

Here, then, in the conception of the divine, we have a clear dividing line between the Semite and his non-Semitic predecessor. So far back as the cuneiform monuments allow us to carry his history, the Semite is anthropomorphic. As a consequence, the gods he worships conform to the social conditions under which he lives. In the desert the sacred stone becomes “the temple of the god”; in the organized monarchy of Babylonia each deity takes his appointed place in an imperial court. Under the one supreme ruler there are princes and sub-princes, vice-regents and generals, while angel-messengers carry the commands of Bel to his subjects on earth, like the messengers who carried the letters of the Babylonian king along the high-roads of the empire. On the other hand, the earthly king receives his power and attributes from the god whose adopted son and representative he claims to be. Nowhere has “the divine right of kings” been more fully insisted on than in ancient Babylonia. The laws of the monarch had to be obeyed, foreign nations had to become his vassals, because he was a god on earth as the supreme Bel was god in heaven.

But the reflection of the divine upon the human brought with it not only the exaltation of sovereignty, but also the rise of a priesthood. There were priests of a sort in Sumer of whom many different classes are enumerated. But when we examine the signification of the names attached to them we find that they were not priests in the true sense of the word. They were rather magicians, sorcerers, wizards, masters of charms. They do not develop into priests until after the Semite has entered upon the scene. The god and the priest make their appearance together.

I do not think, however, that we are justified in concluding that the elaborate hierarchy of Babylonia was of purely Semitic origin. On the contrary, like the theological system with which it was associated, it was a composite product. Behind the gods and goddesses of Semitic Babylonia lay the primitive “spirits” and fetishes of Sumer; its mythology and cosmological theories rested on Sumerian foundations; and in the same way the priestly hierarchy was the result of a racial amalgamation in which the Semitic element had adopted and adapted the ideas and institutions of the older people. We do not find the theology and priesthood of Babylonia among other Semitic populations, except where they had been borrowed from the Babylonians (as in Assyria); in the form in which we know them they were peculiarly and distinctively Babylonian. Like the language of Semitic Babylonia, which is permeated with Sumerian elements, or the script, which is a Semitic adaptation of the Sumerian system of writing, they presuppose a mixture of race.

The priesthood eventually proved irreconcilable with “the divine right” of the monarch, though both alike had the same origin. The priests prevailed over the king, and as in England the doctrine of divine right was unable to survive the accession of a German line of princes, so in Babylonia the accession of a foreign, non-Semitic dynasty (that of the Kassites) dealt a death-blow to the belief in a deified king. The king became merely the representative and deputy of the divine “Lord” of heaven, deriving his right to rule from his adoption by the god as a son; Bel-Merodach came to be regarded as the true ruler of Babylonia, lord of the earth as well as of the heavens, and a theocratic state affords but little room for a secular king. The priests of Bel decided whom their god should recognize or not, and little by little the controlling power of the state passed into their hands It was in a sense a triumph for the non-Semitic element in the population. While the deification of the sovereign may be said to have been purely Semitic in its origin, the necessary corollary of an anthropomorphic conception of the deity, the supernatural powers supposed to be inherent in the priesthood went back to Sumerian times. It was because he had once been a master of spells that the priest of the anthropomorphic god could influence the spiritual world. The final triumph of the theocratic principle in Babylonia, where the Semite had been so long dominant, showed that the old racial element was still strong, and ready to reassert itself when the favourable moment arrived. Such, indeed, is generally the history of a mixed people: the conquering or immigrant race may seem to have suppressed or absorbed the earlier population of the country, but as generations pass the foreign element becomes weaker, and the nation in greater or less degree reverts to the older type.

NOTE

So far as the primitive culture of Sumer may be recovered from such of the primitive pictographs as can be at present identified, it may be described as follows. The inventors of them lived on the sea-coast within sight of mountains, but in a marshy district where reeds abounded. Trees also grew there, and the cedar was known. Stone was scarce, but was already cut into blocks and seals. Tablets were used for writing purposes, and copper, gold and silver were worked by the smith. Daggers with metal blades and wooden handles were worn, and copper was hammered into plates, while necklaces or collars were made of gold. Brick was the ordinary building material, and with it cities, forts, temples and houses were constructed. The city was provided with towers and stood on an artificial platform; the house also had a tower-like appearance. It was provided with a door which turned on a hinge, and could be opened with a sort of key; the city gate was on a larger scale, and seems to have been double. By the side of the house was an enclosed garden planted with trees and other plants; wheat and probably other cereals were sown in the fields, and the shaddûf was already employed for the purpose of irrigation. Plants were also grown in pots or vases. That floods took place is evident from the existence of a pictograph denoting “inundation,” and representing a fish left stranded above the foliage of a tree. Canals or aqueducts had already been dug. The sheep, goat, ox and probably ass had been domesticated, the ox being used for draught, and woollen clothing as well as rugs were made from the wool or hair of the two first. A feathered head-dress was worn on the head. Beds, stools and chairs were used, with carved legs resembling those of an ox. There were fire-places and fire-altars, and apparently chimneys also. Pottery was very plentiful, and the forms of the vases, bowls and dishes were manifold; there were special jars for honey, butter, oil and wine, which was probably made from dates, and one form of vase had a spout protruding from its side. Some of the vases had pointed feet, and stood on stands with crossed legs; others were flat-bottomed, and were set on square or rectangular frames of wood. The oil-jars—and probably others also—were sealed with clay, precisely as in early Egypt. Vases and dishes of stone were made in imitation of those of clay, and baskets were woven of reeds or formed of leather. Knives, drills, wedges and an instrument which looks like a saw were all known, while bows, arrows and daggers (but not swords nor, probably, spears) were employed in war. Time was reckoned in lunar months. Sacred cakes were offered to the gods, whose images were symbolized sometimes by a bearded human head with a feather crown, sometimes by a two-legged table of offerings on which stand two vases (of incense?). Demons were feared who had wings like a bird, and the foundation stones—or rather bricks—of a house were consecrated by certain objects that were deposited under them. A “year” was denoted by the branch of a tree, as in Egypt, and a “name” by a bird placed over the sacred table of offerings. The country was full of snakes and other creeping things, and wild beasts lurked in the jungle. The pictographs were read from left to right, and various expedients were devised for making them express ideas. Thus mud, “to beget,” was denoted by the picture of a bird dropping an egg. At other times the pictograph was used to express an idea, the pronunciation of which was the same as that of the object which it represented. The bent knee, for example, was used to express dug or tuk, “to have,” since it represented a “knee,” which was called dug in Sumerian.