The information which the cuneiform texts have yielded concerning the moral life of the Babylonian and Assyrian peoples, though scanty, is of the greatest value to the student of comparative morals, not only because it casts light upon a moral development in some important respects like the moral evolution of the kindred Semitic people of Israel, but also because that later evolution was probably deeply influenced by it. Therefore, though nothing like a connected account of the moral evolution in the Euphratean lands can be attempted till the thousands of cuneiform tablets recovered from the ancient libraries of the Babylonian-Assyrian cities have been deciphered, and the ethical character and value of their contents determined, we shall devote a few pages to the portrayal of such manifestations of conscience as are disclosed in the religious, literary, historical, and law tablets whose contents are already known to us.

Religion filled a large place in the life of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, especially in that of the former; but religion with them had at first little or nothing to do with morality. Like the religion of savage and barbarian folk, it lacked wholly or almost wholly the ethical spirit. Throughout the early period it was in the main simply a system of incantations and magical rites. Scarcely any moral element entered into the system until the later centuries of Babylonian-Assyrian history.

This religion was in truth simply a survival from primitive savage times when religion was merely a belief in the existence of evil spirits, and in their disposition and power to do harm to men.101 In this stage of the religious evolution sickness, death, misadventure of every kind are believed to be caused by some malignant demon or by some offended and revengeful god. The evil spirits are supposed to act from pure malignancy, while the great gods are conceived to be angered especially by the nonobservance of some religious rite, by the violation of some taboo forbidding the use of certain kinds of food, or by some other like act.

To ward off the attacks of the evil demons, or to appease the offended gods, recourse was had to the recital of magical formulas and incantations. This was Shamanism in its lowest and crudest form, in which there was at work as a motive on the part of the suppliant only cringing fear or a desire to get rid of some present pain, without the least trace of moral emotions, such as remorse and repentance.

But as time passed, this earlier nonethical religion, as is evidenced by the texts recovered from the long-buried temple libraries,102 became in a measure moralized. A moral character was given to the great gods, and they became the inspirers and guardians of a true morality. This ethicalizing process was the same in character as that which went on in the religion of the ancient Hebrews, gradually moralizing the primitive conceptions and cult of Yahweh until among that people religion and morality became wholly at one. The ethical development, however, never went as far as this in Babylonia and Assyria, but the movement was such as to lift these peoples far above the low moral plane of primitive society. “In the seventh century before Christ, if not earlier, the Babylonians and Assyrians possessed a system of morality which in many respects resembled that of the descendants of Abraham.”103

The ethical movement found its truest expression in the so-called penitential hymns,104 which are in spirit altogether like the penitential psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures.105 They exhibit the same intense yearning of the penitent soul for reconciliation and union with a god conceived as just and holy and piteous.

In one hymn is found the new moral conception that disease is the work of a good spirit. This is a very lofty ethical idea, and approaches the Hebrew conception of afflictions as the visitation in disguise of love. But this idea seems never to have become a permanent part of the Babylonian moral consciousness.

In these psalms and prayers we have evidence that at times the worshipers of Marduk and Ashur attained to almost as lofty a conception of deity as that reached by the teachers and prophets of Israel. The great gods were conceived as the creators, the sustainers of man; as loving, compassionate, merciful, and forgiving. The religious-moral ideal was here verging toward the highest that man has ever been able to form, and could this standard have been steadily upheld and the lower abandoned, then Babylonia and Assyria like Judea might have made precious contributions to the moral life of humanity. But this was not done. The tablets holding magical formulas and incantations, wholly devoid of all ethical character, outnumber a thousand to one those exhaling the spiritual perfume of genuine moral feeling and aspiration.

Respecting the lot of the dead, the Babylonians held views like those of the early Hebrews. This was the continuance as opposed to the retribution theory.106 Arallu, “the land of no return,” was a vast underground region where were gathered all, without distinction, who went down to the grave. It was a sad, dolorous life that the drowsing shades lived in this dark underworld, where the bats flitted in the twilight and the dust gathered on the lintels of the doors. An undiscriminating fate allotted the same destiny to all. In so far as the moral consciousness of the Babylonians demanded that a distinction be made between the good and the bad, this demand was met by the assumption—which was also that of the Hebrews so long as they held the Babylonian view of the life after death—that the evil man is punished in this life, and the good man rewarded here on earth with numerous flocks, reputation, many children, and long life.

For four thousand years the masses in Babylonia seem to have remained satisfied with this view of the moral government of the world. In the later periods of Babylonian history, however, we find in the literature traces of a protest against this nonethical conception of life in the afterworld—a protest which shows that, in the case of the more spiritually minded at least, the moral consciousness was deepening and the ethical judgment becoming clearer and truer.

Since the law code of a people embraces all those duties the performance of which the state or public authority attempts to enforce, the ethical spirit of an age or people finds one of its truest embodiments in its laws. It is this fact which renders of such extraordinary interest to the student of the history of morals the recent discovery of the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi,107 the oldest known code of public and private morality. This law system exhibits in some departments of life an enlightened and advanced morality, yet one with serious limitations and defects, a morality in many respects like that of the Mosaic code of the kindred Semitic nation of Israel.

The code informs us that the Babylonian feeling as to what is right and wrong, just and unjust, in the ordinary business relations of life was much like the average conscience of to-day. In some matters the Babylonian law held ground morally in advance of that held by modern codes, as, for instance, in providing that in case of misfortune the debtor should have both his rent and the interest on his debt remitted.108

But in its provisions touching the family relations the code reveals ethical conceptions very different from our own. As in other Oriental law systems, ancient and modern, polygamy was regarded as a moral institution. A man in debt could bind his wife and children out to service or sell them as slaves, but not for a longer period than three years.

The punishments meted out to offenders were harsh and cruel, yet not much more atrociously cruel than those provided by the English laws of three hundred years ago. Impaling, burning, cutting out the tongue, gouging out the eyes, cutting off the fingers, breaking the bones of the hands were common penalties.

Sometimes the punishment was measured by the primitive principle of the Lex talionis; it was eye for eye, bone for bone, tooth for tooth.109 This law of retaliation was carried out so rigorously as to result in the punishment of the innocent for the guilty. Thus if a man caused the death of another man’s daughter, the law required that his own daughter should be put to death.110 If a builder, through the faulty construction of a house, caused the death of the son of the owner through the falling of the house, the son of the builder was to be put to death.111 It is in these provisions of the code that we find the greatest divergence between the Babylonian feeling and our own as to what is right and just. Yet this Babylonian conscience which sanctioned the visiting of the iniquity of the father upon the children is a conscience which we shall meet with in societies much more advanced than that for which the Hammurabi code was formulated.

The Babylonian conscience in regard to slavery as embodied in the code was about like our own conscience respecting negro slavery of a generation or two ago. The slave was viewed as a mere chattel, and the master possessed over him the power of life and death. Kind treatment, however, was enjoined by the law. There was a fugitive-slave law which reads curiously like our negro-slave laws of two generations ago, in which the aiding and harboring of a fugitive slave is made a crime punishable with death.112

The slave class was recruited, as in other lands of the ancient world, from prisoners of war, foundlings, debtors, criminals, and through the sale by fathers and husbands of their children and wives. The system seems to have undergone no essential changes or ameliorations, such as we shall see effected in the Hebrew system, by growth in ethical feeling during the four thousand years of Babylonian history. It is true that enfranchisement of slaves was not uncommon, the freed man becoming the dependent of his old master, but it does not appear that moral sentiment afforded the motive for manumission.113

The international ethics of the Babylonians and Assyrians was in every essential respect the international ethics of their age in the Semitic world. It was the character of the religion of these peoples which determined in large measure international relations in the Mesopotamian lands throughout the period of Semitic ascendancy. “The conception of religion as an alliance between God and man against other peoples and their gods never ceased in Mesopotamia.”114 This conception was essentially the same as that held by the Hebrews down to the time of the great prophets. “Let us go up against them, for our god is greater than their god,” is the war cry of four thousand years of history of the Semitic world.

The Assyrians far surpassed the Babylonians in their ferocious cruelty in the treatment of war captives. Notwithstanding their advanced morality in some departments of life, in this domain they stood, if we except the practice of cannibalism, on practically the same level as savages. Witness the following inscription of Assur-natsir-pal, in which he tells of his treatment of certain prisoners of war: “The nobles, as many as had revolted, I flayed; with their skins I covered the pyramid. Some [of these] I immured in the midst of the pyramid; others above the pyramid I impaled on stakes.... Three thousand of their captives I burned with fire. I left not one alive among them to become a hostage.... I cut off the hands [and] feet of some; I cut off the noses, the ears [and] the fingers of others; the eyes of the numerous soldiers I put out. In the middle [of them] I suspended their heads on vine stems in the neighborhood of their city. Their young men [and] their maidens I burned as a holocaust.”115

The significant thing here is not so much the fact that these things were done, as the fact that the king exults in having done them and thinks to immortalize himself by portraying them upon imperishable stone. The careful way in which to-day all reference to atrocities of this character, when in the fury of battle they are inflicted upon a savage enemy, are suppressed by those responsible for them, and the indignant condemnation of them by the public opinion of the civilized world, measures the moral progress humanity has made even along those lines on which progress has been so painfully slow and halting.116