The sun disappeared at evening tide, and during the night contended with the spirits of darkness. Some other protection was needed for man while darkness reigned. So fire was brought into existence, and was also regarded as worthy of worship:
"Thou who drivest away the evil Maskim, who furtherest the well-being of life, who strikest the breast of the wicked with terror,--Fire, the destroyer of foes, dread weapon which drivest away Pestilence."
Certain wandering Turanian tribes today cling to a religion much like the one so briefly described. Like their remote ancestors, they have conjurers instead of priests.
When they had reached this stage of development, the Chaldeans were overpowered by a vast barbaric horde.
THE STORY OF GENESIS RELATIVE TO THE FIRST SETTLEMENT IN SHUMIR.
"And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pa.s.s, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of _Shinar_; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another"s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel;[2] because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
"And Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord; wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calnch, in the land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth a.s.shur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah. And Resen between Nineveh and Calah; the same is a great city.
"And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son"s son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram"s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there."--_Genesis 10 and 11._
The first great Semitic invasion took place probably about the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C., and it seems impossible to a.s.sign to it a more definite date. The later Babylonians, like the Chinese, gave great antiquity to their nation, reckoning back into hundreds of thousands of years. Their beginnings belonged to so remote a time that adding years inconceivably was but another way of saying that certain events happened very long ago, so long, indeed, that no record or monument remained to give evidence of events which had survived only in stories handed down, from father to son, for thousands of generations.
Like the Hebrews and Arabs, these people belonged to the Semitic race, and from whence they came has long been a matter of conjecture. Scholars are now agreed that Arabia had been their home and that there they had lived as shepherds and herdsmen. They poured in overwhelming forces into the land of Chaldea, killing some of the inhabitants, driving others out of the country, and a.s.similating the rest.
The Chaldeans had reached a much higher degree of culture than their conquerors, who rapidly took on the civilization of their adopted country. As in England the Saxon and Norman for some generations after the conquest pursued each his native life and customs, little influenced by the other, so in Chaldea at first the Semitic herdsman followed his pastoral life outside the brick-walled cities of the Chaldeans.
Some have thought that an invasion of Cus.h.i.tes, or Ethiopians, had preceded the invasion of the Semites in Chaldea, and have claimed that the language, customs and culture in the land when conquered by the Semites was the result of a blending of Turanian and Ethiopian. The theory has been vigorously opposed by other authorities who contend that the invading Semites found only pure Turanian stock. However that may be, the civilization and culture of Chaldea, whether simply Turanian, or Turanian-Cus.h.i.te, was soon taken on by the newcomers. Adopting the Chaldean language, they used it for all their inscriptions, writings and literature. Even after the speech of the people had become quite a different tongue, as a result of its a.s.similation with the Semitic, still in all written records the early Chaldean language--or Sumerian, as it is generally called--was alone used. a.s.syriologists have often noted that "while the language was Sumerian, the spirit of the writings was Semitic."
Because the land of Chaldea was so accessible, and offered advantages so superior to surrounding countries--plentiful water and a fertile soil,--it became a veritable bee-hive of humanity. When the Semites first came thither, they were a fierce, warlike people; but soon, under new conditions, they became peace-loving, as the Turanians before them had been. Shortly they were unable to hold the valley against new tribes that unceasingly swarmed into the country.
Prior to 2000 B.C. Ashur had been settled probably in part at least, by emigrants from the south who may have united with other Semites from North Mesopotamia and in time they founded the state of a.s.syria.
Somewhat later, the ancestors of the Hebrews, according to one of the O.
T. traditions, departed from the land of Chaldea for Harran in Mesopotamia, and later entered Canaan, on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Each of these little bands founded states which developed such peculiar characteristics, that after the lapse of a few ages, it would scarcely have occurred to an observer that the ancestry, early environment, and traditions of all had been the same.
It was not strange, then, that the Hebrews of later time, trying to account for the diversity of languages and nations, made this swarming valley the site of the scattering of the tribes and the confusion of tongues.
Those who remained in Chaldea became a peaceful farming people, caring not at all for war. The a.s.syrians, while of the same stock, developed very differently. There were several reasons for this. First, their country was less accessible than Chaldea, whose sh.o.r.e was washed by the Persian Gulf, and so it suffered less from invasions, and was allowed to keep a more purely Semitic civilization. Again, having gone out from Chaldea before they became devoted to peaceful pursuits, the a.s.syrians retained and fostered their original warlike dispositions. The more temperate climate of a.s.syria was more invigorating and produced men of greater endurance than did the kingdom to the south.
Both Chaldea and a.s.syria alike, developed small states, each led by a city in which had been built a temple sacred to some local deity. Each community was presided over by one who combined the duties of king and priest.
Such was the condition of affairs when the first written records, more or less complete, bring some degree of certainty and less conjecture into the development of these nations. And here we arrive at the beginning of Mesopotamian history, properly so-called.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A JAR-SHAPED COFFIN OF CLAY.]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ragozin: Chaldea.
[2] This is a late popular etymology. Babel means "the gate of G.o.d," and has no connection with the Hebrew verb _balal_ "to confound."
CHAPTER IV.
CITY-STATES BEFORE THE RISE OF BABYLON.
We have seen that the Chaldeans were in time a.s.similated with the invading Semites, producing eventually a new nation. It is not to be supposed that this was at once accomplished, or that the dawn of authentic history found such a process completed. Rather, the Chaldeans held tenaciously to the south, the Semites kept farther to the north, and for many centuries the two races fought for dominance in the valley.
As early as 4500 B.C., a record inscribes one as "king of Kengi," but his kingdom probably included but a few cities added to his own.
Several cities had been founded at a remote time and these now grew rapidly in importance. Each was built around a temple dedicated to some particular divinity. Eridu worshipped the G.o.d EA, father of waters; Ur was sacred to Sin, the moon-G.o.d, and later kings, of the dynasty of Ur, added the name Sin to their own, as for example, Ine-Sin, Pur-Sin.
Larsam was sacred to the sun-G.o.d Shamash; Uruk to the G.o.ddess Ishtar; Nippur to En-lil, father of the G.o.ds, and so on. Each city believed that its G.o.d--Bel or Lord--was the greatest of all G.o.ds, and often its inhabitants were inspired to go out to conquer other cities and territories in order to extend the prestige of the local deity. Probably at the same time the people were stimulated to fight because certain cities had grown up in the very heart of the fertile valley, while others had been obliged to locate in poorer sections. Naturally these last looked with envious eyes upon the richer soil of their neighbors, and desired to win it for themselves. Each city watched for the first sign of weakness in her sister cities, and when it appeared, tried at once to incorporate them into her own domains.
The political history of the Euphrates valley before the dominance of Babylon is the history of these cities as they grew into little states.
Some grew strong; others weakened and became tributary to the more vigorous few.
En-s.h.a.g-kush-ana, "Lord of Kengiu," was the name of the first king to appear in the Babylonian records. Erech was probably his capital, and Nippur the religious center of his little kingdom. We have already connected Nippur with the excavations made by the University of Pennsylvania. The ruins there unearthed have enabled scholars to understand in the main sacred cities of Babylonia. En-s.h.a.g-kush-ana was priest as well as king. Although his race was not mentioned, he was probably a Chaldean, like the people over whom he ruled.
A little to the north, a Semitic kingdom with the city Kish as its head, was growing rapidly in power, and threatened to absorb even Erech itself. On this account, Chaldeans attacked it and gained the victory, whereupon their G.o.d, En-lil of Nippur was celebrated in festival and his temple received numerous trophies of the triumph, since he had enabled those of the south to overcome the cruder Semitic city.
Their defeat only led the Semitic kingdom of Kish to strengthen its forces, and about 4000 B.C., under leadership of Lugalzaggisi, the vigor of the new race overcame the nearly expended force of the Chaldeans.
This conquering Semitic king set forth his position thus: "Lugalzaggisi, king of Erech, king of the world, priest of Ana, hero of Nidaba, son of Ukush, he who is looked upon favorably by the faithful eye of En-lil.
"When En-lil, Lord of the lands, invested Lugalzaggisi with the kingdom of the world, and granted him success before the world, when he filled the land with his power, and subdued the country from the rise of the sun to the setting sun--at that time he straightened his path from the lower sea of the Tigris and Euphrates to the upper sea, and granted him the dominion of everything from the rising sun to the setting of the sun, and caused the countries to dwell in peace."[1]
For some generations the Semites now held the valley and the Chaldeans are lost sight of in surviving records. Then a southern kingdom, Shirpurla, with Sungir its chief city, became strong enough to throw off Semitic rule. This victory of the Chaldeans was widely celebrated in the annals of the waning race. Not only did they now gain the upper hand of all the cities in the valley, but they pushed into Elam, a kingdom to the east and dominated both it and its tributary lands.
While comparisons in history may sometimes be misleading, they often aid the student to better understand certain conditions. There is some similarity between these two races in this valley contending for supremacy--the stronger being sometimes held in check, the weaker gradually losing ground--in certain aspects, it calls to mind the period in English history when Saxons, Jutes and Angles struggled for leadership. The Saxons had developed the higher civilization; the Danes were the more vigorous and aggressive. Sometimes the Saxons would be able to set up their king, again the Danes would enthrone one of their number. Now the waning light of Saxon power would seem to be well-nigh spent, when suddenly it would burst out again with a flame that would illumine all England, only again to be eclipsed by the fresh strength of the other nation. Not to push the comparison further, either country offers a fair example of the usual course events take whenever two races, somewhat equal in strength, seek to gain the upper hand in a given territory.
A northern city, hitherto unmentioned, was to give the palm once more to the Semitic. Agade, the home-city of Shargani-shar-ali, or Sargon I.
Many legends cl.u.s.ter around this king, an early Semitic hero. Since our knowledge of him comes mainly through legendary sources, it is difficult to separate the grain from the chaff. A tradition which in the course of history has been related many times of men in many lands, was told first of this Semitic king.
"Sargon, the powerful king, King of Agade, am I.
"My mother was of low degree, my father I did not know.
"The brother of my father dwelt in the mountain.
"My city was Azupirani, situated on the banks of the Euphrates.
"(My) humble mother conceived me; in secret she brought me forth.
"She placed me in a bask-boat of rushes; with pitch she closed my door.