Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs - Archibald Henry Sayce (thriller books to read txt) 📗

settled in the country. So large, indeed, was the share in Assyrian trade which the Arameans absorbed that Aramaic became the lingua panca , the common medium of intercommunication, in the commercial world of the second Assyrian empire, and, as has been already stated, many of the Assyrian contract-tablets are provided with Aramaic dockets, which give a brief abstract of their contents.

A memorandum signed by "Basia, the son of Rikhi," furnishes us with the relative value of gold and silver in the age of Nebuchadnezzar. "Two shekels and a quarter of gold for twenty-five shekels and three-quarters of silver, one shekel worn and deficient in weight for seven shekels of silver, two and a quarter shekels, also worn, for twenty-two and three-quarters shekels of silver; in all five and a half shekels of gold for fifty-five and a half shekels of silver." Gold, therefore, at this time would have been worth about eleven times more than silver. A few years later, however, in the eleventh year of Nabonidos, the proportion had risen and was twelve to one. We learn this from a statement that the goldsmith Nebo-edhernapisti had received in that year, on the 10th day of Ab, 1 shekel of gold, in 5-shekel pieces, for 12 shekels of silver. The coinage, if we may use such a term, was the same in both metals, the talent being divided into 60 manehs and the maneh into 60 shekels. There seems also to have been a bronze coinage, at all events in the later age of Assyria and Babylonia, but the references to it are very scanty, and silver was the ordinary medium of exchange. One of the contract-tablets, however, which have come from Assyria and is dated in the year 676 B.C., relates to the loan of 2 talents of bronze from the treasury of Istar at Arbela, which were to be repaid two months afterward. Failing this, interest was to be charged upon them at the rate of thirty-three and a third per cent., and it is implied that the payment was to be in bronze.

The talent, maneh, and shekel were originally weights, and had been adopted by the Semites from their Sumerian predecessors. They form part of that sexagesimal system of numeration which lay at the root of Babylonian mathematics and was as old as the invention of writing. So thoroughly was sixty regarded as the unit of calculation that it was denoted by the same single wedge or upright line as that which stood for "one." Wherever the sexagesimal system of notation prevailed we may see an evidence of the influence of Babylonian culture.

It was the maneh, however, and not the talent, which was adopted as the standard. The talent, in fact, was too heavy for such a purpose; it implied too considerable an amount of precious metal and was too seldom employed in the daily business of life. The Babylonian, accordingly, counted up from the maneh to the talent and down to the shekel.

The standard weight of the maneh, which continued in use up to the latest days of Babylonian history, had been fixed by Dungi, of the dynasty of Ur, about 2700 B.C. An inscription on a large cone of dark-green stone, now in the British Museum, tells us that the cone represents "one maneh standard weight, the property of Merodach-sar-ilani, and a duplicate of the weight which Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, the son of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon, had made in exact imitation of the standard weight established by the deified Dungi, an earlier king." The stone now weighs 978.309 grammes, which, making the requisite deductions for the wear and tear of time, would give 980 grammes, or rather more than 2 pounds 2 ounces avoirdupois. The Babylonian maneh, as fixed by Dungi and Nebuchadnezzar, thus agrees in weight rather with the Hebrew maneh of gold than with the "royal" maneh, which was equivalent to 2 pounds 7½ ounces.

It was not, however, the only maneh in use in Babylonia. Besides the "heavy" or "royal" maneh there was also a "light" maneh, like the Hebrew silver maneh of 1 pound 11 ounces, while the Assyrian contract-tablets make mention of "the maneh of Carchemish," which was introduced into Assyria after the conquest of the Hittite capital in 717 B.C. Mr. Barclay V. Head has pointed out that this latter maneh was known in Asia Minor as far as the shores of the Ægean, and that the "tongues" or bars of silver found by Dr. Schliemann on the site of Troy are shekels made in accordance with it.(8)

A similar "tongue" of gold "of fifty shekels weight" is referred to in Josh. vii. 21, in connection with that "goodly Babylonish garment" which was carried away by Achan from among the spoils of Jericho. It is probable that the shekels and manehs of Babylonia were originally cast in the same tongue-like form. In Egypt they were in the shape of rings and spirals, but there is no evidence that the use of the latter extended beyond the valley of the Nile. In Western Asia it was rather bars of metal that were employed.

At first the value of the bar had to be determined by its being weighed each time that it changed hands. But it soon came to be stamped with an official indication of its weight and value. A Cappadocian tablet found near Kaisariyeh, which is at least as early as the age of the Exodus and may go back to that of Abraham, speaks of "three shekels of sealed" or "stamped silver." In that distant colony of Babylonian civilization, therefore, an official seal was already put upon some of the money in circulation. In the time of Nebuchadnezzar the coinage was still more advanced. There were "single shekel" pieces, pieces of "five shekels" and the like, all implying that coins were issued representing different fractions of the maneh. The maneh itself was divided into pieces of five-sixths, two-thirds, one-third, one-half, one-quarter, and three-quarters. It is often specified whether a sum of money is to be paid in single shekel pieces or in 5-shekel pieces, and the word "stamped" is sometimes added. The invention of a regular coinage is generally ascribed to the Lydians; but it was more probably due to the Babylonians, from whom both Lydians and Greeks derived their system of weights as well as the term mina or maneh.

The Egibi firm was not the only great banking or trading establishment of which we know in ancient Babylonia. The American excavators at Niffer have brought to light the records of another firm, that of Murasu, which, although established in a provincial town and not in the capital, rose to a position of great wealth and influence under the Persian kings Artaxerxes I. (464-424 B.C.) and Darius II. (424-405 B.C.). The tablets found at Tello also indicate the existence of similarly important trading firms in the Babylonia of 2700 B.C., though at this period trade was chiefly confined to home products, cattle and sheep, wool and grain, dates and bitumen.

The learned professions were well represented. The scribes were a large and powerful body, and in Assyria, where education was less widely diffused than in Babylonia, they formed a considerable part of the governing bureaucracy. In Babylonia they acted as librarians, authors, and publishers, multiplying copies of older books and adding to them new works of their own. They served also as clerks and secretaries; they drew up documents of state as well as legal contracts and deeds. They were accordingly responsible for the forms of legal procedure, and so to some extent occupied the place of the barristers and attorneys of to-day. The Babylonian seems usually, if not always, to have pleaded his own case; but his statement of it was thrown into shape by the scribe or clerk like the final decision of the judges themselves. Under Nebuchadnezzar and his successors such clerks were called "the scribes of the king," and were probably paid out of the public revenues. Thus in the second year of Evil-Merodach it is said of the claimants to an inheritance that "they shall speak to the scribes of the king and seal the deed," and the seller of some land has to take the deed of quittance "to the scribes of the king," who "shall supervise and seal it in the city." Many of the scribes were priests; and it is not uncommon to find the clerk who draws up a contract and appears as a witness to be described as "the priest" of some deity.

The physician is mentioned at a very early date. Thus we hear of "Ilu-bani, the physician of Gudea," the High-priest of Lagas (2700 B.C.), and a treatise on medicine, of which fragments exist in the British Museum, was compiled long before the days of Abraham. It continued to be regarded as a standard work on the subject even in the time of the second Assyrian empire, though its prescriptions are mixed up with charms and incantations. But an attempt was made in it to classify and describe various diseases, and to enumerate the remedies that had been proposed for them. The remedies are often a compound of the most heterogeneous drugs, some of which are of a very unsavory nature. However, the patient, or his doctor, is generally given a choice of the remedies he might adopt. Thus for an attack of spleen he was told either to "slice the seed of a reed and dates in palm-wine," or to "mix calves' milk and bitters in palm-wine," or to "drink garlic and bitters in palm-wine." "For an aching tooth," it is laid down, "the plant of human destiny (perhaps the mandrake) is the remedy; it must be placed upon the tooth. The fruit of the yellow snakewort is another remedy for an aching tooth; it must be placed upon the tooth.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} The roots of a thorn which does not see the sun when growing is another remedy for an aching tooth; it must be placed upon the tooth." Unfortunately it is still impossible to assign a precise signification to most of the drugs that are named, or to identify the various herbs contained in the Babylonian pharmacopoeia.

As time passed on, the charms and other superstitious practices which had at first played so large a part in Babylonian medicine fell into the background and were abandoned to the more uneducated classes of society. The conquest of Western Asia by the Egyptian Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty brought Babylonia into contact with Egypt, where the art of medicine was already far advanced. It is probable that from this time forward Babylonian medicine also became more strictly scientific. We have indeed evidence that the medical system and practice of Egypt had been introduced into Asia. When the great Egyptian treatise on medicine, known as the Papyrus Ebers, was written in the sixteenth century B.C., one of the most fashionable oculists of the day was a "Syrian" of Gebal, and as the study of the disease of the eye was peculiarly Egyptian, we must assume that his science had been derived from the valley of the Nile. It must not be supposed, however, that the superstitious beliefs and practices of the past were altogether abandoned, even by the most distinguished practitioners, any more than they were by the physicians of Europe in the early part of the last century. But they were invoked only when the ordinary remedies had failed, and when no resource seemed left except the aid of spiritual powers. Otherwise the doctor depended upon his diagnosis of the disease and the prescriptions which had been accumulated by the experience of past generations.

At the head of the profession stood the court-physician, the Rab-mugi or Rab-mag as he was called in Babylonia. In Assyria there was more than one doctor attached