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

are reproduced, the orthography is usually faultless, in spite of the phonetic spelling. All this shows how carefully the writers must have been instructed at school. The correctness of the spelling in the Assyrian letters is really marvellous, especially when we consider all the difficulties of the cuneiform script, and what a tax it must have been to the memory to remember the multitudinous characters of the syllabary with their still more multitudinous phonetic and ideographic values. It gives us a high idea of the perfection to which the teachers' art had already been brought.

In Assyria, however, the writers usually belonged to the special class of scribes who employed the same conventional hand and devoted their lives to the acquisition of learning. It is probable that they acted as private secretaries as well as public clerks, and that consequently many of the letters which purport to come from other members of the community were really written by the professional scribes. But in Babylonia it is difficult to find any traces of the public or private letter-writer who is still so conspicuous a figure in the East. It is seldom if ever that the Babylonian, whoever he may be, betrays any ignorance of the art of reading and writing, and the endless variety of handwritings and the execrable character of many of them indicate pretty plainly that the aid of the professional letter-writer was rarely invoked. In a commercial community like that of Babylonia an ability to write was of necessity a matter of primary importance.


CHAPTER XI. RELIGION


As in other countries, so too in Babylonia, the official and the popular religion were not in all respects the same. In the popular faith older superstitions and beliefs still lingered which had disappeared from the religion of the state or appeared in it in another form. The place of the priest was in large measure taken by the sorcerer and the magician, the ceremonies of the public cult were superseded by charms and incantations, and the deities of the official creed were overshadowed by a crowd of subordinate spirits whose very existence was hardly recognized among the more cultured classes. The Babylonian was inordinately superstitious, and superstition naturally flourished most where education was least.

The official creed itself was an artificial amalgamation of two different currents of belief. The Babylonian race was mixed; Sumerian and Semite had gone to form it in days before history began. Its religion, therefore, was equally mixed; the religious conceptions of the Sumerian and the Semite differed widely, and it was the absorption of the Sumerian element by the Semitic which created the religion of later days. It is Semitic in its general character, but in its general character alone. In details it resembles the religions of the other Semitic nations of Western Asia only in so far as they have been influenced by it.

The Sumerian had no conception of what we mean by a god. The supernatural powers he worshipped or feared were spirits of a material nature. Every object had its zi , or "spirit," which accompanied it like a shadow, but unlike a shadow could act independently of the object to which it belonged. The forces and phenomena of nature were themselves "spirits;" the lightning which struck the temple, or the heat which parched up the vegetation of spring, were as much "spirits" as the zi , or "spirit," which enabled the arrow to reach its mark and to slay its victim. When contact with the Semites had introduced the idea of a god among the Sumerians, it was still under the form of a spirit that their powers and attributes were conceived. The Sumerian who had been unaffected by Semitic teaching spoke of the "spirit of heaven" rather than of the god or goddess of the sky, of the "spirit of Ea" rather than of Ea himself, the god of the deep. Man, too, had a zi , or "spirit," attached to him; it was the life which gave him movement and feeling, the principle of vitality which constituted his individual existence. In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the
zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or the bird to fly.

The zi of the Sumerians was thus a counterpart of the ka , or "double," of Egyptian belief. The description given by Egyptian students of the ka would apply equally to the zi of Sumerian belief. They both belong to the same level of religious thought; indeed, so closely do they resemble one another that the question arises whether the Egyptian belief was not derived from that of ancient Sumer.

Wholly different was the idea which underlay the Semitic conception of a spiritual world. He believed in a god in whose image man had been made. It was a god whose attributes were human, but intensified in power and action. The human family on earth had its counterpart in the divine family in heaven. By the side of the god stood the goddess, a colorless reflection of the god, like the woman by the side of the man. The divine pair were accompanied by a son, the heir to his father's power and his representative and interpreter. As man stood at the head of created things in this world, so, too, the god stood at the head of all creation. He had called all things into existence, and could destroy them if he chose.

The Semite addressed his god as Baal or Bel, "the lord." It was the same title as that which was given to the head of the family, by the wife to the husband, by the servant to his master. There were as many Baalim or Baals as there were groups of worshippers. Each family, each clan, and each tribe had its own Baal, and when families and clans developed into cities and states the Baalim developed along with them. The visible form of Baal was the Sun; the Sun was lord of heaven and therewith of the earth also and all that was upon it. But the Sun presented itself under two aspects. On the one side it was the source of light and life, ripening the grain and bringing the herb into blossom; on the other hand it parched all living things with the fierce heats of summer and destroyed what it had brought into being. Baal, the Sun-god, was thus at once beneficent and malevolent; at times he looked favorably upon his adorers, at other times he was full of anger and sent plague and misfortune upon them. But under both aspects he was essentially a god of nature, and the rites with which he was worshipped accordingly were sensuous and even sensual.

Such were the two utterly dissimilar conceptions of the divine out of the union of which the official religion of Babylonia was formed. The popular religion of the country also grew out of them though in a more unconscious way. The Semite gave the Sumerian his gods with their priests and temples and ceremonies. The Sumerian gave in return his belief in a multitude of spirits, his charms and necromancy, his sorcerers and their sacred books.

Unlike the gods of the Semites, the "spirits" of the Sumerian were not moved by human passions. They had, in fact, no moral nature. Like the objects and forces they represented, they surrounded mankind, upon whom they would inflict injury or confer benefits. But the injuries were more frequent than the benefits; the sum of suffering and evil exceeds that of happiness in this world, more especially in a primitive condition of society. Hence the "spirits" were feared as demons rather than worshipped as powers of good, and instead of a priest a sorcerer was needed who knew the charms and incantations which could avert their malevolence or compel them to be serviceable to men. Sumerian religion, in fact, was Shamanistic, like that of some Siberian tribes to-day, and its ministers were Shamans or medicine-men skilled in witchcraft and sorcery whose spells were potent to parry the attacks of the demon and drive him from the body of his victim, or to call him down in vengeance on the person of their enemy.

Shamanism, however, pure and simple, is incompatible with an advanced state of culture, and as time went on the Shamanistic faith of the Sumerians tended toward a rudimentary form of polytheism. Out of the multitude of spirits there were two or three who assumed a more commanding position than the rest. The spirit of the sky, the spirit of the water, and more especially the spirit of the underground world, where the ghosts of the dead and the demons of night congregated together, took precedence of the rest. Already, before contact with the Semites, they began to assume the attributes of gods. Temples were raised in their honor, and where there were temples there were also priests.

This transition of certain spirits into gods seems to have been aided by that study of the heavens and of the heavenly bodies for which the Babylonians were immemorially famous. At all events, the ideograph which denotes "a god" is an eight-rayed star, from which we may perhaps infer that, at the time of the invention of the picture-writing out of which the cuneiform characters grew, the gods and the stars were identical.

One of the oldest of the Sumerian temples was that of Nippur, the modern Niffer, built in honor of Mul-lil or El-lil, "the lord of the ghost-world." He had originally been the spirit of the earth and the underground world; when he became a god his old attributes still clung to him. To the last he was the ruler of the lil-mes , "the ghosts" and "demons" who dwelt in the air and the waste places of the earth, as well as in the abode of death and darkness that lay beneath it. His priests preserved their old Shamanistic character; the ritual they celebrated was one of spells and incantations, of magical rites and ceremonies. Nippur was the source and centre of one of the two great streams of religious thought and culture which influenced Sumerian Babylonia.

The other source and centre was Eridu on the Persian Gulf. Here the spirit of the water was worshipped, who in process of time passed into Ea, the god of the deep. But the deep was a channel for foreign culture and foreign ideas. Maritime trade brought the natives of Eridu into contact with the populations of other lands, and introduced new religious conceptions which intermingled with those of the Sumerians. Ea, the patron deity of Eridu, became the god of culture and light, who delighted in doing good to mankind and in bestowing upon them the gifts of civilization. In this he was aided by his son Asari, who was at once the interpreter of his will and the healer of men. His office was declared in the title that was given to him of the god "who benefits mankind."

Two strongly contrasted streams of religious influence thus flowed from Nippur in the north of Babylonia and from Eridu in the south. The one brought with it a belief in the powers of darkness and evil, in sorcery and magic, and a religion of fear; the other spoke of light and culture, of gods who poured blessings upon men and healed the diseases that afflicted them. Asari was addressed as "he