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

"take the hands of Bel." Tiglath-pileser III., Shalmaneser IV., and Sargon were all alike usurpers, who governed by right of the sword. It was only when they had made themselves masters of Babylon and been recognized by Bel and his priesthood that their title to govern became legitimate and unchallenged.

Cyrus and Cambyses continued the tradition of the native kings. They, too, claimed to be the successors of those who had ruled over Western Asia, and Bel, of his own free choice, it was alleged, had rejected the unworthy Nabonidos and put Cyrus in his place. Cyrus ruled, not by right of conquest, but because he had been called to the crown by the god of Babylon. It was not until the Zoroastrean Darius and Xerxes had taken Babylon by storm and destroyed the temple of Bel that the old tradition was finally thrust aside. The new rulers of Persia had no belief in the god of Babylon; his priesthood was hostile to them, and Babylon was deposed from the position it had so long occupied as the capital of the world.

In Assyria, in contrast to Babylonia, the government rested on a military basis. It is true that the kings of Assyria had once been the high-priests of the city of Assur, and that they carried with them some part of their priestly functions when they were invested with royal power. But it is no less true that they were never looked upon as incarnations of the deity or even as his representative upon earth. The rise of the Assyrian kingdom seems to have been due to a military revolt; at any rate, its history is that of a succession of rebellious generals, some of whom succeeded in founding dynasties, while others failed to hand down their power to their posterity. There was no religious ceremony at their coronation like that of "taking the hands of Bel." When Esar-haddon was made King he was simply acclaimed sovereign by the army. It was the army and not the priesthood to whom he owed his title to reign.

The conception of the supreme god himself differed in Assyria and Babylonia. In Babylonia, Bel-Merodach was "lord" of the city; in Assyria, Assur was the deified city itself. In the one case, therefore, the King was appointed vicegerent of the god over the city which he governed and preserved; in the other case the god represented the state, and, in so far as the King was a servant of the god, he was a servant also of the state.

In both countries there was an aristocracy of birth based originally on the possession of land. But in Babylonia it tended at an early period to be absorbed by the mercantile and priestly classes, and in later days it is difficult to find traces even of its existence. The nobles of the age of Nebuchadnezzar were either wealthy trading families or officers of the Crown. The temples, and the priests who lived upon their revenues, had swallowed up a considerable part of the landed and other property of the country, which had thus become what in modern Turkey would be called
wakf . In Assyria many of the great princes of the realm still belonged to the old feudal aristocracy, but here again the tendency was to replace them by a bureaucracy which owed its position and authority to the direct favor of the King. Under Tiglath-pileser III. this tendency became part of the policy of the government; the older aristocracy disappeared, and instead of it we find military officers and civil officials, all of whom were appointed by the Crown.

While, accordingly, Babylonia became an industrial and priestly state, Assyria developed into a great military and bureaucratic organization. It taught the world how to organize and administer an empire. Tiglath-pileser III. inaugurated a course of policy which his successors did their best to carry out. He aimed at reviving the ancient empire of Sargon of Akkad, of uniting the civilized world of Western Asia under one head, but upon new principles and in a more permanent way. The campaigns which his predecessors had carried on for the sake of booty and military fame were now conducted with a set purpose and method. The raid was replaced by a carefully planned scheme of conquest. The vanquished territories were organized into provinces under governors appointed by the Assyrian King and responsible to him alone. By the side of the civil governor was a military commander, who kept watch upon the other's actions, while under them was a large army of administrators. Assyrian colonies were planted in the newly acquired districts, where they served as a garrison, and the native inhabitants were transported to other parts of the Assyrian empire. In this way an attempt was made to break the old ties of patriotism and local feeling, and to substitute for them fidelity to the Assyrian government and the god Assur, in whose name its conquests were made.

The taxes of the empire were carefully regulated. A cadastral survey was an institution which had long been in existence; it had been borrowed from Babylonia, where, as we have seen, it was already known at a very early epoch. The amount to be paid into the treasury by each town and province was fixed, and the governor was called upon to transmit it each year to Nineveh. Thus in the time of Sennacherib the annual tribute of Carchemish was 100 talents, that of Arpad 30, and that of Megiddo 15, while, at home, Nineveh was assessed at 30 talents, and the district of Assur at 20, which were expended on the maintenance of the fleet, the whole amount of revenue raised from Assyria being 274 talents. Besides this direct taxation, there was also indirect taxation, as well as municipal rates. Thus a tax was laid upon the brick-fields, which in Babylonia were economically of considerable importance, and there was an octroi duty upon all goods, cattle, and country produce which entered a town. Similar tolls were exacted from the ships which moored at the quays, as well as from those who made use of the pontoon-bridges which spanned the Euphrates or passed under them in boats.

Long lists of officials have been preserved. Certain of the governors or satraps were allowed to share with the King the privilege of giving a name to the year. It was an ingenious system of reckoning time which had been in use in Assyria from an early period and was introduced into Cappadocia by Assyrian colonists. From Asia Minor it probably spread to Greece; at all events, the eponymous archons at Athens, after whom the several years were named, corresponded exactly with the Assyrian limmi or eponyms. Each year in succession received its name from the eponym or officer who held office during the course of it, and as lists of these officers were carefully handed down it was easy to determine the date of an event which had taken place in the year of office of a given eponym. The system was of Assyrian invention and never prevailed in Babylonia. There time was dated by the chief occurrences of a king's reign, and at the end of the reign a list of them was drawn up beginning with his accession to the throne and ending with his death and the name of his successor. These lists went back to an early period of Babylonian history and provided the future historian with an accurate chronology.

Immediately attached to the person of the Assyrian monarch was the Rab-saki, "the chief of the princes," or vizier. He is called the Rab-shakeh in the Old Testament, by the side of whom stood the Rab-saris, the Assyrian Rab-sa-risi, or "chief of the heads" of departments. They were both civil officers. The army was under the command of the Tartannu, or "Commander-in-Chief," the Biblical Tartan, who, in the absence of the King, led the troops to battle and conducted a campaign. When Shalmaneser II., for example, became too old to take the field himself, his armies were led by the Tartan Daian-Assur, and under the second Assyrian empire the Tartan appears frequently, sometimes in command of a portion of the forces, while the King is employing the rest elsewhere, sometimes in place of the King, who prefers to remain at home. In earlier days there had been two Tartans, one of whom stood on the right hand side of the King and the other on his left. In order of precedence both of them were regarded as of higher rank than the Rab-shakeh.

The army was divided into companies of a thousand, a hundred, fifty, and ten, and we hear of captains of fifty and captains of ten. Under Tiglath-pileser III. and his successors it became an irresistible engine of attack. No pains were spared to make it as effective as possible; its discipline was raised to the highest pitch of perfection, and its arms and accoutrements constantly underwent improvements. As long as a supply of men lasted, no enemy could stand against it, and the great military empire of Nineveh was safe.

It contained cavalry as well as foot-soldiers. The cavalry had grown out of a corps of chariot-drivers, which was retained, though shrunken in size and importance, long after the more serviceable horsemen had taken its place. The chariot held a driver and a warrior. When the latter was the King he was accompanied by one or two armed attendants. They all rode standing and carried bows and spears. The chariot itself ran upon two wheels, a pair of horses being harnessed to its pole. Another horse was often attached to it in case of accidents.

The chariots were of little good when the fighting had to be done in a mountainous country. In the level parts of Western Asia, where good roads had existed for untold centuries, they were a powerful arm of offence, but the Assyrians were constantly called upon to attack the tribes of the Kurdish and Armenian mountains who harassed their positions, and in such trackless districts the chariots were an incumbrance and not a help. Trees had to be cut down and rocks removed in order to make roads along which they might pass. The Assyrian engineers indeed were skilled in the construction of roads of the kind, and the inscriptions not infrequently boast of their success in carrying them through the most inaccessible regions, but the necessity for making them suitable for the passage of chariots was a serious drawback, and we hear at times how the wheels of the cars had to be taken off and the chariots conveyed on the backs of mules or horses. It was not wonderful, therefore, that the Assyrian kings, who were practical military men, soon saw the advantage of imitating the custom of the northern and eastern mountaineers, who used the horse for riding purposes rather than for drawing a chariot. The chariot continued to be employed in the Assyrian army, but rather as a luxury than as an effective instrument of war.

At first the cavalry were little more than mounted horsemen. Their only weapons were the bow and arrow, and they rode without saddles and with bare legs. At a later period part of the cavalry was armed with spears, saddles were introduced, and the groom who had run by the side of the horse disappeared. At the same time, under Tiglath-pileser III., the rider's legs were protected by leathern drawers over which high boots were drawn, laced in front. This was an importation from the north, and it is possible that many of the horsemen were brought from the same quarter. Sennacherib still further improved the dress by adding to it a closely fitting coat of mail.

The infantry outnumbered the cavalry by about ten to one, and were divided