The History of Antiquity (Vol. 1-6). Duncker Max

mercenaries—the treasures on which no enemy before me had laid a hand, I brought forth to Assyria. I destroyed the tower of Shushan. The god of their oracles, who dwelt in the groves, whose image no man had seen, and the images of the gods Sumudu, Lagamar and the others (nineteen are mentioned), which the kings of Elam worshipped, I conveyed with their priests to Assyria. Thirty-two statues of the kings in silver, brass, and alabaster, I took from Shushan. Madaktu and Huradi, and the statues of Ummanigas, of Istar-Nanchundi, Halludus, and Tammaritu the younger, I carried to Assyria. I broke the winged lions and bulls which guarded the temple, and removed the winged bulls which stood at the gates of the temples of Elam. Their gods and goddesses I sent into captivity."[337] More than a hundred years after this time the Elamites had not forgotten their independence, and they attempted to recover it by repeated rebellions against the Persians.

The inscriptions in which the kings of Persia spoke to the nations of their wide empire are of a triple character. Three different kinds of cuneiform writing repeat the same matter in three different languages. The first gives the inscription in the Persian language, the language of the king and dominant people, the third repeats it in the Babylonian-Assyrian language. The second, we may suppose, gives the inscription in the language of Elam, for the Persian kings resided in Susa, and in the enumeration of the subject territories, Susiana and Babylonia as a rule come after Persia. The forms of the language in cuneiform inscriptions on bricks and tiles discovered in the ruins of Susa are closely related to the language of the cuneiform inscriptions of the second kind in the inscriptions of the Achæmenids.[338] So far as these have been deciphered the language contained in them seems for the most part to be closely related to the Turkish-Tatar languages,[339] while the names of the Elamite gods preserved in Assyrian inscriptions, although different from those of Babylonia and Assyria, and also the names of the kings of Elam, have more of a Semitic than a Turkish-Tatar sound.

On Assyrian tablets, beside the Assyrian and Babylonian names of the month, which are also the Hebrew names, we find names in another language unknown to us;[340] and the symbols of the Assyrian cuneiform writing are not only explained by the addition of the phonetic value and actual meaning, but before the substantives, verb-forms, and declensions of the Babylonian-Assyrian language are placed the corresponding words and inflections of another language, which is decidedly of a non-Semitic character, and also seems to belong to the Turkish-Tatar branch of language.[341] If it was considered necessary in Babylonia and Assyria to place another language before or beside their own, the relation of this language to that spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians must have been very close. The most probable supposition is that it was the language of the ancient population of the land about the lower course of the two streams, which afterwards became subjected to Semitic immigrants. Whatever be the value of this supposition, we may in any case assume that the Semitic races found older inhabitants and an older civilisation on the lower Euphrates and Tigris. This older population was even then in possession of a system of writing, and this civilisation and writing was adopted by the Semitic races, just as at a later time the Armenians, Medes, and Persians borrowed their cuneiform writing from the inhabitants of Babylonia, Assyria, and Susiana.

The precedence of Elam in Hebrew tradition, the statement of Berosus that civilisation came from the Persian Gulf, the ancient supremacy of Elam over Babylonia, which we can discover from the Hebrew tradition, and more plainly from the inscriptions, are so many proofs that the oldest seats of culture in the lower lands of the Euphrates and Tigris lay at the mouths of the two rivers. And this conclusion receives further support from the fact that the oldest centres of the Babylonian state were nearer the mouth of the Euphrates. Perhaps we may even go a step further. The Hebrews ascribe the foundation of the Babylonian kingdom to a son of the south. The language and religious conceptions of the Babylonians and Assyrians show a close relationship with the language and religion of the tribes of South Arabia; some of these tribes are in Genesis variously enrolled among the descendants of Shem and of Cush. Hence we may perhaps assume that Arabian tribes on the sea-shore forced their way eastward, to the land at the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris, and then, passing up the stream, settled in the valley of the two rivers, as far as the southern offshoots of the Armenian mountains.[342] Of these Semitic tribes those which remained on the lower Tigris and subjected the old population of Susiana, could not absorb the conquered Kissians (p. 249). The old language retained the upper hand, and developed; and the ruling tribe, the Semitic Elamites, were amalgamated with the ancient population. It was otherwise on the lower Euphrates, where the Semitic immigrants succeeded—probably in a long process of time, since it was late and by slow degrees that they gained the upper hand—in absorbing the old Turanian population, and formed a separate Semitic community, when they had borrowed from their predecessors the basis of civilisation and the system of cuneiform writing which was invented for another language.

In the fragments of Berosus the inhabitants of Babylonia are called Chaldees, a name which Western writers give especially to the priests of Babylon, though even to them a district on the lower Euphrates is known as Chaldæa.[343] The inscriptions of the Assyrian kings name the whole land Kaldi, and the inhabitants Kaldiai.[344] To the Hebrews, as has been observed (p. 248), Erech, Accad, and Calneh were the beginning of the kingdom of Nimrod. In the fragments of Berosus, Babylon, the Bab-Ilu of the inscriptions, i.e. "Gate of Il (El)," Sippara and Larancha are supposed to be in existence before the flood. Erech, the Orchoe of the Greeks, and Arku of the inscriptions, is the modern Warka, to the south of Babylon on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, where vast heaps of ruins remain to testify to the former importance of the city. The site of Calneh and of the Larancha mentioned in the fragments cannot be ascertained, unless the latter city is the same as the Larsam mentioned in the inscriptions. In these the name Accad occurs very frequently. The kings of Babylon, and after them the kings of Assyria, who ruled over Babylon, called themselves kings of Babel, of Sumir, and Accad, names which are used to denote the districts (perhaps Upper and Lower Babylonia) and their inhabitants. Sippara, the city of the sacred books and mystic lore of the Chaldæans (p. 246), is called by the Hebrews, Sepharvaim, i.e. "the two Sepher." Sepher means "writing." It was therefore the Babylonian City of Scriptures. The Hebrews were aware that this city worshipped the gods Adar and Anu, Adrammelech and Anammelech. The inscriptions also mention two cities of the name of Sippara, or as they give the word, Shipar; they distinguish the Shipar of the god Anu from the Shipar of Samas, the sun-god. The cuneiform symbol for Sippara means "City of the sun of the four quarters of the earth," and the Euphrates is denoted by a symbol which means "River of Sippara."[345] From this it is clear what position this city once took in Babylonia. The Ur Kasdim, i.e. "Ur of the Chaldæans" in the Hebrew Scriptures, is the modern Mugheir, south-east of Babylon; on clay-tablets discovered in the ruins of this place we find cuneiform symbols, which are to be read as "Uru."[346] The Kutha and Telassar of the Hebrews also recur in the Kuthi and Tel Assur of the inscriptions. In his inscriptions Sennacherib boasts that in the year 704 B.C. he took eighty-nine fortified cities and 820 places in Babylonia, beside Babylon itself.[347]

The tumuli covering the ruins of these cities and the Assyrian inscriptions have preserved for us the names of more than fifty of the kings who once ruled over Babylon. The fragments of Berosus limit the period of the independence of Babylon to the 458 years from 1976 B.C., to 1518 B.C. (p. 248), and after the Chaldæan kings of this period they place Arabian kings down to 1273 B.C., who in turn are followed by the Assyrian kings. These statements are flatly contradicted by the inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria. We have already seen that in the period from about the year 2300 B.C. to 2000 B.C., Elam had the