The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

REVERSE of A TABLET IN THE HITTITK LANGUAGE FROM
HOGHAZ KEUI.

Frontispiece. \

[Sec Preface, p. vi.

The Archaeology of the
Cuneiform Inscriptions

BY THE

Rev. A. H. SAYCE

PKOFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY, OXFORD

PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE GENERAL
LITERATURE COMMITTEE

SECOND EDITION— REVISED

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5

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE .V

I. THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM IN-
SCRIPTIONS 7

II. THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS ; THE EX-
CAVATIONS AT SUSA AND THE ORIGIN OF

BRONZE 36

III. THE SUMERIANS 67

IV. THE RELATION OF BABYLONIAN TO EGYPTIAN

CIVILIZATION IOI

V. BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE .... 135

VI. ASIA MINOR 160

VII. CANAAN IN THE CENTURY BEFORE THE EXODUS 1 87

INDEX 215

809986

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing fagt

REVERSE OF A TABLET IN THE HITTITE LANGUAGE

from boghaz keui {Frontispiece)

MAP — THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE SEVENTH

CENTURY B.C 7

THE TOMB OF DARIUS 1 6

BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II . . .21

CHALDjEAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN TERRA-COTTA . 21

the tell of jerabis (probably the ancient

carchemish) . 40

the tumulus of susa, as it appeared towards the

middle of last century . . .46

head of one of the statues from tello . . 58
vase of silver, dedicated to ningirsu by entena

patesi of lagas 58

the tell of borsippa, the present birs-nimrud 78
the seal of shargani-shar-ali (sargon of akkad) \

gilgames waters the celestial ox .88

bas-relief of naram-sin 88

sitting statue of gudea 122

map — the first assyrian empire . . . . 1 35
view of the temple of ur in its present state,

according to loftus 141

the gardens and hill of dhuspas or van . 1 63
the ruins of a palace of urartu at toprak-

KALEH 166

THE RUINS AT BOGHAZ KEUI 1 74

ONE OF THE PROCESSIONS IN THE RAVINE OF BOGHAZ . 1 76

PREFACE

The first six chapters which follow, embody the Rhind
Lectures in Archaeology which I delivered at Edinburgh in
October 1906. The seventh chapter appeared as an article
in the Contemporary Review for August 1905, and is here
reprinted by the courtesy of the Editor to whom I render
my thanks. The book is the first attempt to deal with
what I would call the archaeology of cuneiform decipher-
ment, and like all pioneering work consequently claims the
indulgence of the reader. For the sake of clearness I have
been forced to repeat myself in a few instances, more
especially in the sixth chapter, but what has thereby been
lost in literary finish will, I hope, be compensated by an
increase of clearness in the argument.

If what I have written serves no other purpose, I shall
be content if it draws attention to the miserably defective
state of our archaeological knowledge of Babylonia and
Assyria, and to the necessity of scientific excavations being
carried on there similar to those inaugurated by Mr. Rhind
in Egypt. We have abundance of epigraphic material; it
is the more purely archaeological material that is still
wanting.

The need of it is every year becoming more urgent with
the ever-growing revelation of the important and far-reaching
part played by Babylonian culture in the ancient East.
Excavation is just commencing in Asia Minor, and there
are many indications that it has startling discoveries
and surprises in store for us. Even while my manuscript
was in the printer's hands, Professor Winckler has been

VI PREFACE

examining the cuneiform tablets found by him last spring
at Boghaz Keui, on the site of the old Hittite capital in
Cappadocia, and reading in them the records of the Hittite
kings, Khattu-sil, Sapaluliuma, Mur-sila and Muttallu. Most
of the tablets, though written in cuneiform characters, are
in the native language of the country, but among them is
a version in the Babylonian language of the treaty between
the "great king of the Hittites" and Riya-masesa Mai
or Ramses II., the Egyptian copy of which has long been
known to us. The two Arzawan letters in the Tel el-
Amarna collection no longer stand alone; the Boghaz
Keui tablets show that an active correspondence was
carried on between Egypt and Cappadocia. We must
revise our old ideas about an absence of intercourse between
different parts of the ancient Oriental world : there was
quite as much intercommunication as there is to-day.
Elam and Babylonia, Assyria and Asia Minor, Palestine
and Egypt, all were linked together by the ties of a common
culture; there were no exclusive religions to raise barriers
between nation and nation, and the pottery of the Hittites
was not only carried to the south of Canaan, but the
civilization of Babylonia made its way through Hittite
lands to the shores and islands of Greece. On the south,
the iEgean became a highway from Asia Minor to Europe,
while northward the Troad formed a bridge which carried
the culture of Cappadocia to the Balkans and the Danube.

A. H. Sayce.
November 1906.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE
CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

CHAPTER I

THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM
INSCRIPTIONS

The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was
the archaeological romance of the nineteenth century.
There was no Rosetta stone to offer a clue to their
meaning; the very names of the Assyrian kings and
of the gods they worshipped had been lost and for-
gotten ; and the characters themselves were but con-
ventional groups of wedges, not pictures of objects
and ideas like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The de-
cipherment started with the guess of a classical scholar
who knew no Oriental languages and had never
travelled in the East. And yet it is upon this guess
that the vast superstructure of cuneiform decipher-
ment has been slowly reared, with its ever-increasing
mass of literature in numerous languages, the very
existence of some of which had been previously un-
known, and with its revelation of a civilized world that
had faded out of sight before Greek history began.
The ancient East has risen, as it were, from the dead,
with its politics and its wars, its law and its trade, its
art, its industries and its science. And this revelation

7

8 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

of a new world, this resurrection of a dead past, has
started from a successful guess. But the guess had
been made in accordance with scientific method and
had scientific reasons behind it, and it has proved to
be the fruitful seed of an overspreading tree.

Seventy years ago a single small case was suffi-
cient to hold all the Assyrian and Babylonian
antiquities possessed by the British Museum. They
had been collected by Rich, to whom we owe the
first accurate plans of the sites of Babylon and
Nineveh. But the cuneiform characters found on
the seals and clay cylinders of Babylonia were not
the only characters of the kind that were known.
Similar characters had been noticed by travellers
on the walls of the ruined palaces of Persepolis in
Persia. As far back as 1621 the Italian traveller
Pietro della Valle had copied two or three of these,
which he reproduced in the account of his travels
• - some thirty years later. One of the first acts of the
newly-founded Royal Society of Great Britain was
to ask in their Philosophical Transactions (p. 420)
whether some draughtsman could not be found to
copy the bas-reliefs and inscriptions which had thus
been observed at Persepolis, though the only result of
the inquiry was that a few years afterwards (in June
1693) two lines of cuneiform were published in the
Transactions from the papers of a Mr. Samuel
Flower, who had been the agent of the East India
Company in Persia. The editor of the Transactions
.correctly concluded that the inscriptions were to be
read from left to right. The cuneiform characters
which were printed in the Transactions were, how-
ever, not the first specimens of cuneiform script that

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 9

had been published in England. Thomas Herbert, in
the fourth edition of his Travels, which appeared
in 1677, had already given three lines of characters
taken indifferently from the three classes of inscriptions
engraved on the Persian monuments ; these were
afterwards annexed by an Italian named Careri, who
published them as his own. But the earliest inscrip-
tion to be reproduced in full was a short one inscribed
by Darius I. over the windows of his palace, which
had been copied by Sir John Chardin during one
of his two visits to Persepolis (in 1665 and 1673).
Chardin was the son of a Huguenot jeweller in Paris,
and after returning from his travels settled in London,
where he became a great favourite of Charles II., and
was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. The in-
scription he had copied, however, was not printed in
the earlier edition of his Travels, and had to wait
until 1735 before it saw the light.1

The existence of the cuneiform script thus became
known in Europe, and that was all. It was not until
Carsten Niebuhr, the father of the better-known his-
torian, had been sent by the Danish Government on
an exploring mission to the East that fairly complete
and accurate copies of the inscriptions of Persepolis
were at last put into the hands of European scholars.
Niebuhr, who sacrificed his sight to the work, returned
to Denmark in 1767, and seven years later the first of
the three volumes in which the scientific results of his

1 In this year an elaborate edition of his work was brought
out under the title of Voyages du Chevalier Chardin en Perse,
et autres Lieux de P Orient, Enrichis de Figures en Tailledouce,
qui reprhentent les Antiquit/s et les Choses re)narquables du
Pais (Amsterdam), two pages (167-8) in vol. ii. being devoted
to the inscriptions, the cuneiform being printed on plate lxix.

10 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

travels were embodied was published at Copenhagen.
With the publication of the second volume, which
contained his description of the Persepolitan monu-
ments, the attempt to decipher the cuneiform char-
acters began. He himself had noticed that in the first
of the three classes or systems of cuneiform writing
of which every inscription consisted, only forty-two
characters were employed, and he therefore concluded
that the system was alphabetic. Another Dane,
Bishop Munter, discovered that the words in it were
divided from one another by an oblique wedge,1 and
further showed that the monuments must belong to
the age of Cyrus and his successors.2 One word,
which occurs without any variation towards the be-
ginning of each inscription, he correctly inferred to
signify "king"; but beyond this he was unable to
advance.

Meanwhile, Anquetil-Duperron, with self-sacrificing
enthusiasm, had rediscovered the Zend of the later
Zoroastrian faith, and de Sacy, with the help of it, had
deciphered the Pehlevi inscriptions of the Sassanid
kings. It was only the older Persian of the Achae-
menian cuneiform inscriptions that still awaited inter-
pretation ; and a bridge had been built between it and
modern Persian by means of the Zendic texts. In
1802 the guess was made which opened the way to
the decipherment of the mysterious wedge-shaped
signs. The inspired genius was Grotefend, an accom-

1 The discovery has sometimes been claimed for Tychsen
{De cuneatis hiscriptionibus Perscpolitanis Lucubratio, 1798,
p. 24), but Tychsen supposed that the wedge was used to divide
sentences, not words.

2 Undersogelser om de Persepolilanske Inscriptioner (1800),
translated into German in 1802.

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS II

plished Latinist and a school-master at Frankfort-on-
the-Main. He knew no Oriental languages, but his
mother-wit and common-sense more than made up for
the deficiency. It was clear to him that the three
systems of cuneiform represented three different lan-
guages, the Persian kings being like a Turkish pasha
of to-day, who. when he wishes an edict to be under-
stood, writes it in Turkish and Arabic. It was also
clear to him that the first system must be the script
of the Persian kings themselves, of which the other
two were translations. The preparatory work for
reading this had already been done by Mlinter ; what
Grotefend now had to do was to identify and read the
names to which the word for "king " was attached.

On comparing the inscriptions together he found
that while the word for " king " remained unchanged,
the word which accompanied it at the beginning of
an inscription varied on different monuments. There
were, in fact, two wholly different words, one of which
was peculiar to one set of monuments, the other to
another set. But he also found that the first of these
words followed the other on the second set of monu-
ments, though with a different termination from that
which belonged to it when it took the place of the first
word. Hence he conjectured that the two words
represented the names of two Persian kings, one of
whom was the son of the other, the termination of the
second name when it followed the first being that of
the genitive. It was now necessary to discover who
the kings were whose names had thus been found.
Fortunately the Achsemenian dynasty was not a long
one, and the number of royal names in it was not
large. And of these names, Cyrus was too short and

12 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Artaxerxes too long for either of the two names which
Grotefend had detected. There only remained Darius
and Xerxes, and as Xerxes was the son of Darius, the
name which characterized the first set of monuments
must be Darius.

Grotefend's next task was to ascertain the old
Persian pronunciation of the name of Darius. This
had been given by Strabo, while the Persian pronun-
ciation of Xerxes was indicated in the Old Testa-
ment. With this assistance Grotefend was able to
assign alphabetic values to the cuneiform characters
which composed the two names, and a corner of the
veil which had so long covered the cuneiform records
was lifted at last. A comparison of the names which
he had thus read gave the needful verification of the
correctness of his method. In the names of Darius
and Xerxes the same letters occur, but in different
places ; a and r in Darius occupy the second and
third places, in Xerxes the fourth and fifth, while sk>
which is the last letter in Darius, would be the second
and sixth in Xerxes. And such was actually the case.
Grotefend was therefore justified in concluding that
his guesses were correct, and that the right values
had been assigned to the cuneiform characters. A
beginning had been made in cuneiform decipher-
ment, and in this instance the beginning was half the
whole.

Grotefend's Memoir was presented to the Gottingen
Academy on September 4, 1802. By a curious acci-
dent it was at the same meeting that Heyne de-
scribed the first attempts that had been made
towards deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. But
the learned world looked askance at the discoveries of

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 1 3

the young Latinist. The science of archaeology was
still unborn, and Oriental philologists were unable
even to understand the inductive method of the
decipherer. The Academy of Gottingen refused to
print his communications, and it was not until 1815
that they appeared in the first volume of the History
of his friend Heeren, who, being untrammelled by the
prejudices of Oriental learning, had been one of the
earliest to accept his conclusions.1 For a whole
generation the work of decipherment was allowed to
sleep.

It is unfortunately true that after his initial success
Grotefend's ignorance of Oriental languages really did
stand in his way. He assumed that the language of
the inscriptions and that of the Zend-Avesta were one
and the same, and accordingly went to the newly-
found Zend dictionary for the readings of the cunei-
form names and words. Vishtaspa, the name of the
father of Darius, was thus read Goshtasp, the word
for " king " became khsheh instead of khshayathiya,
and that which Grotefend had correctly divined to
signify " great," eghre instead of vazraka. It is not
wonderful, therefore, that he was never able to follow
up the beginning he had made.

1 Ideen iiber die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der
vornehmsten Volker der alien Welt, vol. i. pp. 563 sqq. ; trans-
lated into English in 1833. The revival of interest in Grote-
fend's work was due to the fact that Champollion, after the
decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, found the name of
Xerxes on an alabaster vase at Paris on which, according to
Grotefend's system, the same name was written in Persian
cuneiform. This led the Abbe Saint-Martin, who was a recog-
nized Orientalist, to adopt and follow up Grotefend's discovery
in a Memoir which he read before the French Academy in 1822,
and Saint-Martin's work attracted the attention of Rask and
Burnouf.

14 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

To do this was reserved for the Zendic scholars of
a later generation. Rask the Dane in 1826 deter-
mined the true form of the genitive plural, and thereby
identified the character for m which gave him the
names of the supreme god Auramazda and of Achae-
menes the forefather of Cyrus.1 But the great step
forward was made by the eminent French scholar,
Emile Burnouf, in 1836.2 The first of the inscriptions
published by Niebuhr he discovered to contain a list
of the satrapies of Darius. With this clue in his hand
the reading of the names and the subsequent iden-
tification of the letters which composed them could
be a question only of patience and time. For this
Burnouf was well equipped by his philological
knowledge and training, and the result was an
alphabet of thirty letters, the greater part of which
had been correctly deciphered.

Burnouf's Memoir on the subject was published in
June 1836. In the preceding month his friend and
pupil, Professor Lassen of Bonn, had also published a
work on " The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of
Persepolis." 3 He and Burnouf had been in frequent
correspondence, and his claim to have independently
detected the names of the satrapies, and thereby to
have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was in
consequence fiercely attacked. To the attacks made
upon him, however, Lassen never vouchsafed a reply.
Whatever his obligations to Burnouf may have been,

1 " Om Zendsprogets," in the Skandinaviske Literaturselskabs
Skrifter, xxi., translated into German in 1826.

2 Menwire sur deux Inscriptions cuneiformes trouve'es prfc
(THamadan (Paris, 1836).

3 Die Altpersischen Keil-Inschriften von Persepolis (Bonn,
1836).

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 1 5

his own contributions to the decipherment of the
inscriptions were numerous and important. He suc-
ceeded in fixing the true values of nearly all the
letters in the Persian alphabet, in translating the texts,
and in proving that the language of them was not
Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the
relation of a sister.

Meanwhile another scholar, armed with fresh and
important material, had entered the field. A young
English officer in the East India Company's service,
Major Rawlinson by name, was attached to the British
Mission in Persia. A happy inspiration led him to
attempt the decipherment of the cuneiform inscrip-
tions. It was in 1835, when he was twenty-five years
old, that he first began his work. All that he knew
was that Grotefend had discovered in the texts of
Persepolis the names of Darius, of Xerxes and of
Hystaspes, but cut off as he was in his official position
at Kirmanshah on the western frontier of Persia from
European libraries, he was unable to procure either
the Memoir of the German scholar or the articles to
which it had given rise. Like Burnouf, he set himself
to decipher the two inscriptions of Hamadan, which
he had himself copied with great care. He soon
recognized in them the names that had been read by
Grotefend, and thus obtained a working alphabet.
But his position in Persia soon gave him an advantage
which was denied to his fellow-workers in Europe.
It was not long before he found an opportunity of
copying the great inscription on the sacred rock of
Behistun, which had never been copied before. It
was by far the longest cuneiform inscription yet dis-
covered, and was filled with proper names, including

l6 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

those of the Persian satrapies. The copying of it,
however, cost much time and labour, and was accom-
plished at actual risk of life, as Major Rawlinson,
better known by his later title of Sir Henry Rawlin-
son, had to be lowered in a basket from the top of the
cliff in order to ascertain the exact forms of certain
characters.

In the following year (1836) Rawlinson moved to
Teheran, and there received from Edwin Norris, the
Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Memoirs
of Grotefend and Saint-Martin. In 1837 he finished
his copy of the Behistun inscription, and sent a trans-
lation of its opening paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic
Society. Before, however, his Paper could be pub-
lished, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him,
necessitating a revision of his Paper and the postpone-
ment of its publication. Then came other causes of
delay. He was called away to Afghanistan to perform
the onerous and responsible duties of British Agent
at Kandahar, and it was not until 1843 that he was
once more free to resume his cuneiform studies. A
year later he was visited by the Danish Professor,
Westergaard, who placed at his disposal the copies
he had just made of the inscription on the tomb of
Darius at Naksh-i-Rustam and of some shorter in-
scriptions from Persepolis, and Rawlinson's Memoir
was accordingly finished at last and sent to England.
Here Norris subjected it to a careful revision, and at
his suggestion Rawlinson once more visited Behistun,
where he took squeezes and re-examined doubtful char-
acters. In 1847 the first part of the Memoir was
published, though the second part, containing the
analysis and commentary on the text, did not appear

■

THE TOMB OF DARIDS.

[To face p. 16.

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 1 7

till 1849.1 The work, however, was well worthy of
the time and care that had been bestowed upon it.
The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform texts
was virtually accomplished, and the guesses of Grote-
fend had developed into the discovery of a new
alphabet and a new language. The capstone was
put to the work by the discovery of Hincks, an Irish
clergyman, that the alphabet was not a true one in
the modern sense of the word, a vowel-sound being
attached in pronunciation to each of the consonants
represented in it.

The mystery of the Persian cuneiform texts was
thus solved after nearly fifty years of endeavour. A
harder task still remained. The Persian texts were
accompanied by two other cuneiform transcripts,
which, as Grotefend had perceived, must have repre-
sented the other two principal languages that were
spoken in the Persian Empire. That the third tran-
script was Babylonian seemed evident from the re-
semblance of the characters contained in it to those
on the bricks and seal-cylinders of Babylonia. Grote-
fend had already written upon the subject, and had
even divined the name of Nebuchadrezzar on certain
Babylonian bricks.

But this third species of writing, which we must
henceforth term Babylonian or Assyrian, presented
extraordinary difficulties. Instead of an alphabet of
forty-two letters, the decipherer was confronted by
an enormous number of different characters, while
no indication was given of the separation of one word
from another. Moreover the forms of the characters
as found on the Persepolitan monuments differed
1 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, x.

B

1 8 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

considerably from those found on the Babylonian
monuments, which again differed greatly from each
other. On the seal-cylinders, more especially, they
assumed the most complicated shapes, between which
and the Persepolitan forms it was often impossible to
trace any likeness whatever.

Suddenly a discovery was made which furnished
an abundance of new material and incited the de-
cipherer to fresh efforts. In 1842 Botta was sent to
Mossul as French Consul, and at Mohl's instigation
began to excavate on the site of Nineveh. His first
essays there not proving very successful, he transferred
his workmen further north, to the mound of Khor-
sabad, and there laid bare the ruins of a large and
splendid palace which subsequently turned out to be
that of Sargon. In the autumn of 1845 the excava-
tions of Botta were succeeded by those of Layard,
first at Nimrud (the ancient Calah), and then at
Kuyunjik or Nineveh, the result being to fill the
British Museum with bas-reliefs covered with cunei-
form writing and with other relics of Assyrian
civilization.

The inscriptions brought to light by Botta were
copied and published by him in 1846-50.1 The sump-
tuous work which was dedicated to them was followed
by a smaller and cheaper edition, and the author
gave further help to the student by classifying
the characters, which amounted to as many as 642.2
His work proved conclusively the identity of the
script used at Nineveh with that of the third tran-

1 Monument de Ninive, with plates drawn by Flandin.

2 See his Memoir, " Sur lecriture assyrienne," in the Journal
asiatique, 1847-8, ix.-xu

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 19

scripts on the Persian monuments, as well as the
substantial agreement of the groups of characters
occurring in each.

The Irish scholar Dr. Hincks — one of the most
remarkable and acute decipherers that have ever lived
— was already at work on the newly-found texts. In
1847 he published a long article on " The Three Kinds
of Persepolitan Writing," 1 and, two years later, another
"On the Khorsabad Inscriptions."2 In 1850 he read
a Paper before the British Association,3 summing up
his conclusions and announcing the important dis-
covery that the Assyrian characters were syllabic and
not alphabetic, as had hitherto been supposed. With
this discovery the scientific decipherment of the
Assyrian inscriptions actually begins.

The proper names contained in the Persian texts
furnished the clue to the reading of the Babylonian
transcripts. The values thus obtained for the Baby-
lonian characters made it possible to read many of
the words, the meaning of which was fixed by a com-
parison with the Persian original. It then became
clear that Assyrian was a Semitic language, standing
in much the same relation to Hebrew that the Old
Persian stood to Zend.

Its Semitic origin was proved to demonstration
by the French scholar de Saulcy in 1849. Another
French scholar, de Longperier, had already discovered
the name of Sargon in the Khorsabad inscriptions 4 —
the first royal Assyrian name that had yet been read.

1 Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, xxi. pp. 240 sqq
See also pp. 114 sqq.

2 Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, xxii. pp. 3 sqq.

3 Edinburgh Meeting, p. 140.

4 Revue archeologique, 1847, pp. 501 sqq.

20 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

De Saulcy himself subjected the Babylonian tran-
script of the trilingual inscription of Elwend to a
minute analysis, and so carefully was the work per-
formed, and so secure were the foundations upon
which it rested, that the translation needs but little
revision even to-day.1 The old belief in the alphabetic
nature of the characters, however, still possessed the
mind of the decipherer, although in one passage he
goes so far as to say, "I am tempted to believe"
that the signs are syllabic. But he did not go beyond
the temptation to believe, and the discovery was
reserved for Hincks.

Rawlinson was now at Bagdad. De Saulcy sent
him his Memoirs, and the British scholar had the
immense advantage of having in his hands the
Babylonian version of the great Behistun inscription,
of knowing the country in which the monuments were
found, and of possessing copies of inscriptions which
had not yet made their way to Europe.

Nevertheless, it is amazing with what rapidity and
perspicacity he forced his way through the thick
jungle of cuneiform script. In his Memoir on the
Persian texts, published in 1847, he already maps out
with marvellous fulness and exactitude the different
varieties of cuneiform writing. It is his second Memoir,
however, which excites in the Assyriologist of to-day
the profoundest feelings of surprise and admiration.
This consists of notes on the inscriptions of Assyria
and Babylonia, and was communicated to the Royal
Asiatic Society at the beginning of the year 1850.2

1 Recherches sur P/criture cundiforme assyrienne (1849).

2 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, xii. pp. 401 sqq. The
translation of the Black Obelisk inscription is given on pp.431-48.

CHALDEAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN
TERKA-COTTA.

[Sec p. 52.

BLACK OBELISK OK BB \L
M INESEB EC.

[Seep. 21.

[To /ace p 21.

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 21

One of the inscriptions he has translated in full —
the annals of Shalmaneser II., on an obelisk of black
marble discovered at Nimrud and now in the British
Museum. The text is a long one, and for the first
time the European reader had placed before him a
contemporaneous account of the campaigns of an
Assyrian monarch in the ninth century before our era.
The translation is substantially correct ; it is only in the
proper names that Rawlinson has gone much astray.
The values of many of the characters were still uncer-
tain or unknown, and he was under the domination of
the belief that they represented alphabetic letters.

He was, moreover, mistaken as to the age of the
monument itself, which he assigned to too early an
epoch. It was Dr. Hincks who again settled the
question, by reading upon it the names of Hazael
of Damascus and Jehu of Israel.1 This was one of the
first-fruits of his discovery of the syllabic character of
the Assyrian signs. Another was the discovery of the
name of Sennacherib,2 as well as those of Hezekiah
and Jerusalem.8

Shortly before this Hincks had made another
discovery of importance. He had deciphered the
names of Nebuchadrezzar and his father on the bricks
of Babylon,4 and had further shown that a cylinder of
Nebuchadrezzar brought from Babylon by Sir Robert
Ker-Porter, and written in the cuneiform characters
met with on the Persian monuments, contained the

1 Athenceam, December 27, 185 1.

2 In the Paper read by Hincks before the Royal Irish Academy
in June 1849, and published the following year.

3 For Hincks's translation of the annals of Sennacherib, see
Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 139 sqq.

* Literary Gazette^ July 5, 1846.

22 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

same text as another cylinder obtained by Sir Harford
Jones, and inscribed with characters of the most
complex kind. A comparison of the two texts gave
him the values of the latter characters, which we now
know to represent the archaic Babylonian forms of
the cuneiform signs.

But the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian
script was not yet complete. In 185 1 Rawlinson's
long-promised Memoir on the Babylonian version
of the inscription of Behistun was given to the world,1
and consisted of the cuneiform text, with translation,
grammar and commentary, besides a list of 242 char-
acters. It announced, moreover, two facts about these
characters, one of which had already been recognized,
while the second was received by the Orientalists
with shouts of incredulity. The first fact was that the
characters, besides having phonetic values, could also
be used ideographically to denote objects and ideas.
The second fact was that they were polyphonous, each
character possessing more than one phonetic value.

For once the sceptics seemed to have common-
sense upon their side. How, it was asked, could a
system of writing be read the symbols of which might
be pronounced sometimes in one way, sometimes in
another ? Anything could be made out of anything
upon such principles, and a method of interpretation
which ended in such a result was pronounced to be
self-condemned. Hincks, however, once more entered
the field and demonstrated that Rawlinson was right.2

1 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, xiv.

2 A List of Assyro-Babylonian Characters (1852) ; also the
Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, xxii. (1855), and more
especially The Polyphony of the Assyro-Babylonian Cuneiform
Writing (1863).

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 23

Hincks was an Egyptologist, and consequently the
polyphony of the cuneiform characters was not to
him a new and startling phenomenon. It merely
showed that they must once have been pictorial — as,
indeed, their ideographic use also indicated — and in
a picture-writing each picture could necessarily be
represented by more than one word, and therefore
by more than one phonetic value, when the pro-
nunciation of the word came to be employed
phonetically. The picture of a foot, for instance,
would denote not only a " foot," but also such
ideas as "go," "run," "walk," each of which would
become one of its phonetic values with the develop-
ment of the picture into a conventional syllabic
sign.

Excavation was still proceeding on the site of
Nineveh. Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, himself a native
of Mossul and the active assistant of Layard, was sent
in 1852 by the British Museum to complete the work
from which Layard had now been called away by
diplomatic duties.1 In 1853 he made a discovery
which proved to be of momentous importance for
Assyrian decipherment, and without which, in fact, it
could never have advanced very far. He discovered
the library of Nineveh with its multitudes of closely-
written clay tablets, many of them containing long
lists of characters, dictionaries and grammars, which
have served at once to verify and to extend the
knowledge of the script and language that the early
decipherers had obtained. Meanwhile a careful survey
of the whole country was made at the expense of the

1 See his Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (1898).

24 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

East India Company,1 and the French Government
sent out an exploring and excavating expedition to
Babylonia under a young and brilliant scholar, Jules
Oppert. The results of the mission, which lasted from
185 1 to 1854, were embodied in two learned volumes,
the first of which appeared in 1863.2 In these Oppert
showed, what Hincks and Rawlinson had already
pointed out, that the peculiarities of the Assyrian
syllabary were due not only to its pictorial origin but
also to the fact that it had been invented by a
non-Semitic people. This primitive population of
Babylonia, called Akkadian by Hincks, Sumerian
by Oppert, had spoken an agglutinative language
similar to that of the Turks or Finns, and had been
the founders of Babylonian civilization. For these
views Oppert found support in the tablets of the
library of Nineveh, a large part of which consists of
translations from the older language into Semitic
Assyrian, as well as of comparative grammars,
vocabularies and reading-books in the two languages.
Once more the Semitic scholars protested. There
was no end to the extravagant fantasies of the
Assyriologists ! The learned world was comfortably
convinced that none but a Semitic or Aryan people
could have been the originators of civilization, and to
assert that the Semites had borrowed their culture
from a race which seemed to have affinities with
Mongols or Tatars was an outrage upon established
prejudices. The Semitic philologist was more certain

1 F. Jones, Vestiges of Assyria (1855) ; Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society, xv. pp. 297 sqq. ; and more especially Memoirs,
edited by R. H. Thomas, 1857.

3 Expedition scientifique en Me'sopotamie.

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 25

than ever that Assyrian decipherment was the folly
of a few "untrained " amateurs, and could safely be
disregarded.

But the little band of Assyriologists pursued their
labours undisturbed. In 1855-6 Hincks published
a most remarkable series of articles in the Journal
of Sacred Literature, in which the various forms of the
Assyrian verb were analyzed and given once for all.
The work has never had to be repeated, and the
foundations of Assyrian grammar were solidly laid.
A few years later (in i860) a complete grammar of
the language was published by Oppert. The initial
stage of Assyrian decipherment was thus at an end.

We must now turn back to the second transcript
of the Persian inscriptions, which, thanks to its greater
simplicity, had been deciphered before the Assyro-
Babylonian. The way was opened in 1844 by the
Danish scholar Westergaard.1 With the help of the
proper names he fixed the values of many of the
characters and made a tentative endeavour to read
the texts. But the language he brought to light was
of so strange a nature as to throw doubt on the
correctness of his method. Turkish, Arabic, Indian
and even Keltic elements seemed alike to be mingled
in it. It was not, therefore, till his readings had been
subjected to revision by Hincks in 1846 2 and de Saulcy
in 1850 3 that any confidence was reposed in it, and
the results made available for the decipherment of

1 In the Zeitschrift fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vi.
PP- 337 sqq.

2 Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, xxi. pp. 114 sqq.
and 233 sqq.

3 Journal asiatique, xiv. pp. 93 sqq. ; xv. pp. 398 sqq.

26 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

the Babylonian transcripts, the characters of which
frequently had the same forms. It must be remem-
bered, however, that Westergaard worked from
defective materials. Rawlinson had not yet pub-
lished his copy of the Behistun inscription, which he
eventually placed in the hands of Edwin Norris,
who, in 1853, edited the text along with a syllabary,
grammar and vocabulary, as well as translations and
commentary.1 This edition was a splendid piece
of work, and with it the decipherment of the second
transcript of the Persian inscriptions may be said
to have been accomplished. Oppert's Peuple et
Langage des MMes, which appeared in 1879, did
but revise, supplement and systematize the work
of Norris.

The new language which had thus been brought
to light was agglutinative. Westergaard had seen in
it the language of the Medes, and, like Rawlinson, had
connected it with a hypothetical " Scythian " family
of speech. The term " Scythian " was retained by
Norris, who, however, attempted to show that it was
really related to the Finnish dialects. But the ex-
cavations made at Susa by Loftus in 185 1 put
another face on the matter. In 1874, and again more
fully in 1883,2 I pointed out that the inscriptions
found at Susa and other ancient Elamite sites were
in an older form of the same language as that of the
second Achaemenian transcripts, and furthermore
that certain inscriptions discovered by Layard in the

1 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, xv.

2 Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, iii. pp.
465 sqq. ; Actes du Vlieme Congres International des Orient-
alistes en 1883, ii. pp. 637 sqq. (1885).

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 27

plain of Mai-Amir eastward of Susa were in practi-
cally the same script and dialect. At the same time
I fixed the values of the characters in the Mai-Amir
texts and gave provisional translations of them, with
a vocabulary and commentary. Oppert and myself
had already been working at the reading of the older
Susian inscriptions, a task in which we were followed
by Weissbach with a greater measure of success.
But the same cause which had retarded the decipher-
ment of the second transcript of the Persian inscrip-
tions— a want of materials — militated against any
great advance being made in the decipherment of the
older Susian, and it is only since 1897, when the
excavations of M. de Morgan at Susa were begun,
that the student has been at last provided with the
necessary means. Thanks to the brilliant penetration
of the French Assyriologist, Dr. Scheil, the outlines
of the language of the ancient kingdom of Elam
can now be sketched with a fair amount of complete-
ness and accuracy.1 The name of Neo-Susian has
by common consent been conferred upon the language
of the second Achaemenian transcripts ; perhaps
Neo-Elamite would be better. At all events it
represents the language of the second capital of the
Persian Empire as it was spoken in the age of Darius
and his successors, and is a lineal descendant of the
old agglutinative language of Elam.

The three systems of cuneiform script, which a
hundred years ago seemed so impenetrable in their
mystery, have thus, one by one, been forced to

1 Mhnoires de la Delegation en Perse; the volumes by Dr.
Scheil on the inscriptions that have thus far appeared are ii.,
iii., iv., v. and vi.

28 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

yield their secrets. But as each in turn has been
deciphered, fresh forms of cuneiform writing and new
languages expressed in cuneiform characters have
come to light. The first to emerge was that agglu-
tinative language of primitive Chaldaea which so
scandalized the philological world and excited such
strong distrust of the Assyriologists. The question of
the name by which it should be called has been set at
rest by the discovery of tablets in which its native
designation is made known to us. Some years ago
Bezold published a bilingual text in which it is
termed " the language of Sumer," 1 and more recently
Messerschmidt has edited a bilingual inscription of
the Babylonian king Samsu-ditana in which the
Semitic "translation" is described as " Akkadfen." 2
Oppert is thus shown to have been right in the name
which he proposed to give to the language of the
inventors of the cuneiform script.

The first analysis of Sumerian grammar was made
by myself in 1870, when the general outlines of the
language were fixed and the verbal forms read and
explained.3 Three years later Lenormant threw the
materials I had collected into a connected and
systematic form, one result of which was a contro-
versy started by the Orientalist, Joseph HaleVy, who
maintained that Sumerian was not a language at all,
but a cryptograph or secret writing. The answers
made by the Assyriologists to this curious theory
obliged its author constantly to shift his ground, but

1 Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie, 1889, p. 434.

2 Ak-ka-du; Orientalische Literatur-Zeitung, 1905, p. 268.

3 Journal of Philology, iii. pp. 1 sqq. I endeavoured to settle
the nature of Sumerian phonology in a Memoir on "Accadian
Phonology," published by the Philological Society, 1877-8.

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 20,

at the same time it also obliged them to examine
their materials more carefully and to revise con-
clusions which had been arrived at on insufficient
evidence. An important discovery was now made
by Haupt, who had already given the first scientific
translation of a Sumerian text ; x he demonstrated
the existenre of two dialects, one of which is marked
by all tuc phenomena of phonetic decay.2 This was
naturally supposed to indicate a difference of age in
the two dialects, the one being the older and the
other the later form of the language. Subsequent
research, however, has gone to show that the two
dialects were really used contemporaneously, the
decayed state of that which was called " the woman's
language " by the Babylonians being due to the fact
that it was spoken in Akkad or Northern Babylonia,
where the Semitic element became predominant at
a much earlier period than in Sumer or Southern
Babylonia.

Up to this time the study of Sumerian had been
almost entirely confined to the bilingual texts, of
which a very large number existed in the library of
Nineveh, and in which a Semitic translation was
attached to the Sumerian original. Now, however,
the French excavations at Tello in Southern Baby-
lonia began to furnish European scholars with
monuments of the pre-Semitic period, and to these
the decipherers, among whom Amiaud and Thureau
Dangin hold the first place, accordingly turned their
attention. Texts composed in days when Sumerian

1 Die Sumerischen Familiengesetze (1879).

2 Gottingen Nachric/Uen, 17 (1880) ; Die Akkadische Sprache
(1883).

30 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

princes still governed the country, and written by
scribes who were unacquainted with a Semitic
language, were successfully attacked with the assist-
ance of the bilingual tablets of Nineveh. But it was
soon found that between these genuine examples of
Sumerian composition and the Sumerian which was
written and explained by Semitic scribes there was
a good deal of difference. The Semites had derived
their culture from their Sumerian predecessors, and
a considerable part of the religious and legal litera-
ture that had been handed on to them was in the
older language. This older language long continued
to be that of both religion and law, the two con-
servative forces in society, Sumerian becoming to the
Semitic Babylonians what Latin was to mediaeval
Europe. The inevitable result followed : Semitic
idioms and modes of thought were clothed in a
Sumerian dress, and the ignorance of the scribe
produced not infrequently the equivalent of the
dog-Latin of a modern school-boy. The gradual
changes that took place in the cuneiform system of
writing, and the adaptation of it to the requirements
of Semitic speech, contributed to the creation of an
artificial and quite unclassical Sumerian, and the
lexical tablets became filled with uses and combina-
tions of characters which were professedly Sumerian
but really Semitic in origin. All this renders the
decipherment of a Sumerian text even now a
difficult affair, and many years must elapse before
we can say that the stage of decipherment is defin-
itely passed and that the scholar may content himself
with a purely philological treatment of the language.
But Sumerian was not the only new language

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 3 1

outside the circle recognized by the Persian monarchs
which the decipherment of the cuneiform characters
has revealed to us. Even before the discovery of
Sumerian, cuneiform inscriptions had been copied
on the rocks and quarried stones of Armenia, which,
when the characters composing them came to be
read, proved to belong to a language as novel and
as apparently unrelated to any other as Sumerian
itself. As far back as 1826 a young scholar of the
name of Schulz had been sent by the French
Government to Van in Armenia, where, according to
Armenian writers, Semiramis, the fabled queen of
Assyria, had once left her monuments. Here Schulz
actually found that the cliff on which the ancient
fortress of the city stood was covered with lines of
cuneiform characters, and similar inscriptions soon
came to light in other parts of the country. Before
Schulz, however, could return to Europe he was
murdered (in 1829) by a Kurdish chief, whose guest
he had been. But his papers were recovered, and the
copies of the inscriptions he had made were published
in 1840 in the Journal Asiatique. The first to attempt
to read them was Dr. Hincks, whom no problem
in decipherment ever seemed to baffle.1 The char-
acters, he showed, were practically identical with
those found in the Assyrian texts, the values of
many of which had now been ascertained ; but
Hincks, with his usual acuteness, went on to use the
Armenian or Vannic inscriptions for settling the
values of other Assyrian characters which had not
as yet been determined. In 1848 he was already
able to read the names of the Vannic kings and fix
1 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1848, ix. pp. 387 sqq.

32 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

their succession, to make out the sense of several
passages in the texts, and to indicate the nominative
and accusative suffixes of the noun.

Here Vannic decipherment rested for many years.
There was no difficulty in reading the inscriptions
phonetically, for they were written in a very simplified
form of the Assyrian syllabary ; but the language
which was thus revealed stood isolated and alone,
without linguistic kindred either ancient or modern.
The various attempts made to decipher it were all
failures.

So things remained until 1882-3, when I published
my Memoir on "The Decipherment of the Vannic
Inscriptions " in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society. Here for the first time translations were
given of the inscriptions, together with a commentary,
grammar and vocabulary. At the same time I settled
the chronological place of the Vannic kings, which
had hitherto been uncertain, as well as the geography
of the country over which they ruled, and analyzed
the ancient religion of the people as made known to
us by the decipherment of the texts. In revising and
supplementing Schulz's copies of the inscriptions I
had obtained the help of squeezes taken by Layard
and Rassam. The task of decipherment was, after
all, not so hard a matter as the absence of a bilingual
text might make it appear. The want of a bilingual
was compensated by the numerous ideographs and
"determinatives" scattered through the inscriptions,
which indicated their general meaning, pointed out
to the decipherer the names of countries, cities,
individuals and the like, and gave him the significa-
tion of the phonetically- written words which in parallel

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 33

passages often replaced them. Moreover, the French
Assyriologist, Stanislas Guyard, and myself had inde-
pendently made the discovery that a clause which
frequently comes at the end of a Vannic inscription
corresponds with the imprecatory formula of the
Assyrians, while the decipherment of the inscriptions
led to the further discovery that not only had the
characters employed in them been borrowed from the
Assyrians in the time of the Assyrian conqueror,
Assur-natsir-pal, but that many of the phrases used
in Assur-natsir-pal's texts had been borrowed at the
same time.

Other scholars soon appeared to pursue and extend
my work, more especially Drs. Belck and Lehmann,
whose expedition to Armenia in 1898 has placed at
our disposal a large store of fresh material. Amongst
this fresh material are two long bilingual inscriptions,
in Vannic and Assyrian, one of which had been dis-
covered by de Morgan in 1890. These have verified
my system of decipherment, have increased our know-
ledge of the Vannic vocabulary, have corrected a few
errors, and, I am bound to add, have in one or two
cases justified renderings of mine to which exception
had been taken. A historical Vannic text can now be
read with almost as much certainty as an Assyrian one.

With the discovery of the language spoken in
Armenia before the arrival of the modern Armenians
the list of lost languages and dialects brought to
light by the decipherment of the cuneiform script is
by no means exhausted. Among the tablets found
in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt was a
long letter from the king of Mitanni or Northern
Mesopotamia in the native language of his country,

c

34 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

which has been partially deciphered by Messer-
schmidt, Jensen and myself.1 The language turns
out to be distantly related to the Vannic, but is of
a much more complicated description. Two of the
other letters in the same collection were in yet
another previously unknown language, which the
contents of one of them showed to be that of a
kingdom in Asia Minor called Arzawa. Since then
tablets have been found at Boghaz Keui in Cappa-
docia, on the site of the ancient capital of the Hittites,
which are in the same dialect and form of cuneiform
writing, and prove that in them we have discovered
at last actual relics of the Hittite tongue. Thanks
to the light thrown upon them by a tablet from the
same locality, which I obtained last year, it is now
possible to raise the veil which has hitherto concealed
the Hittite language, and in a Paper which will
shortly be printed I have succeeded in partially
translating the texts and sketching the outlines of
their grammar. But any detailed account of these
discoveries must be reserved for a future chapter ; at
present I can do no more than refer briefly to these
latest problems in cuneiform decipherment.

That other problems still await us cannot be
doubted. The number of different languages which
the decipherment of the cuneiform script has thus far
revealed to us is an assurance that, as excavation and
research proceed, fresh languages will come to light
which have employed the cuneiform syllabary as a

1 See my article, " On the Language of Mitanni," in the
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, 1900, pp. 171
sqq. ; and Leopold Messerschmidt in the Mitteilungen der
Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1899, part iv. pp. 175 sqq.

DECIPHERMENT OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 35

means of expression. Indeed, we already know that
it was used by the Kossaeans, wild mountaineers who
skirted the eastern frontiers of Babylonia, and a list
of whose words has been preserved in a cuneiform
tablet,1 and also that there was a time, before the
introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, when "the
language of Canaan " — better known as Hebrew — was
written in cuneiform characters. Canaanite glosses
are found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, and two
Sidonian seals exist in which the cuneiform syllabary
is employed to represent the sounds of Canaanitish
speech.2

And the key to all this varied literature, this
medley of languages, the very names of which had
perished, was a simple guess ! But it was a scientific
guess, made in accordance with scientific method,
and based upon sound scientific reasoning. It is true
that it needed the slow and patient work of genera-
tions of scholars before the guess could ripen into
maturity ; the discovery of the value of a single letter
in the Old Persian alphabet was sometimes the labour
of a lifetime ; but, like the seed of the mustard tree,
the guess contained within itself all the promise of
its future growth. On the day when Grotefend
identified the names of Darius and Xerxes, the
decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, and
therewith of the history, the theology and the civiliz-
ation of the ancient Oriental world, was potentially
accomplished.

1 Fr. Delitzsch, Die Sprache der Kossder (1884).

2 They are now in the possession of M. de Clercq. For a
translation of the inscriptions upon them, see my Patriarchal
Palestine, p. 250.

CHAPTER II

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS ; THE EXCAVA-
TIONS AT SUSA AND THE ORIGIN OF BRONZE

The modern science of archaeology has been
derisively called " the study of pots." As a matter of
fact, the study of ancient pottery occupies a prominent
place in it, and we cannot turn over the pages of
a standard archaeological work without constantly
coming across photographs and illustrations of the
ceramic art or reading descriptions of vases and
bowls, of coloured ware and fragmentary sherds.
Questions of date and origin are made to turn on the
presence or absence of some particular form of pottery
on a given site, and fierce controversies have arisen
over a single fragment of a vessel of clay. A know-
ledge of ancient pottery is a primary requisite in the
scientific excavator and archaeologist of to-day.

The reason of this is obvious. Archaeology is an
inductive science; its conclusions, therefore, are drawn
from the comparison and co-ordination of objects
which can be seen and handled, as well as tested by
all competent observers. It is built upon what our
German friends would call objective facts, and the
method it employs is that carefully-disciplined and
experimentally-guarded application of the ordinary
logic of life which can alone give us scientific results.

36

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 37

The method is one which the purely literary mind
seems often curiously incapable of comprehending ;
the literary student is accustomed to deal so ex-
clusively with matters of merely individual taste and
theory that he is as little able to understand what is
meant by scientific evidence and probability as the
scholar who is not a mathematician is able to follow
the reasoning of Lord Kelvin. This is a fact which
has to be borne in mind more especially in archaeo-
logical science, for the questions with which archaeology
is concerned so frequently invade the domain of litera-
ture or appear so closely connected with questions
that are more or less literary, that the purely literary
scholar is apt to think himself just as well qualified
to discuss them as " the man in the street " is apt to
think himself qualified to discuss the etymology of a
word. To all such the archaeologist would say, " Go
and study your pots."

For pottery is practically indestructible. Like the
fossils on which the geologist has built up the past
history of life upon the earth, it is an enduring evidence,
when rightly interpreted, of the past history of man.
Like the fossils, moreover, it exhibits a multitudinous
variety of types and forms. But in all these types and
forms there is an underlying unity. The primitive
needs of man are everywhere the same, and the powers
of mind called in to supply them are the same also.
The dish and bowl, the vase and its handles, meet us
again and again wherever we go; and the same
materials for making them meet us also. The hands
of man, guided by the brain of man, found clay
wherewith to manufacture the vessels that he needed,
and to harden it afterwards in the sun or fire.

38 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Where or how the first pottery was made we do not
know, we probably shall never know. When palaeo-
lithic man first makes his appearance in Europe he
seems not yet to have been acquainted with it ; but it
is difficult to prove a negative in archaeology as in other
sciences, and the absence of palaeolithic pottery may
be due only to the imperfection of the record. At
any rate, as we descend the ladder of chronology the
existence of man is marked more and more by the
fragments of pottery he has left behind him; at Rome
a whole mountain of it grew up in the space of a few
centuries, and the huge mounds that encircled Cairo a
hundred years ago were mainly formed of mediaeval
sherds. When excavating on an Egyptian site I have
sometimes been tempted to think that the people who
once lived there must have spent their whole time in
breaking their household ware.

Now not only are the primitive needs of man much
the same throughout the world and at all periods of
time, the nature of man is much the same also ; and
a distinguishing feature in his nature is love of variety.
The same variety which we see in the forms of life
and in the outward appearance and mental aptitudes of
man himself is reflected in the products of his skill.
Yet along with this love of variety goes a strong con-
servative or imitative instinct — an instinct which finds,
too, its counterpart in nature, '* so careful of the type."
On the one hand, fashions change ; on the other, a
fashion once introduced spreads rapidly and maintains
itself to the exclusion of all others for a determinate
period of time throughout a determinate area. And
to nothing does this apply with more truth than to
pottery. Observation has shown that not only are

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 39

different tribes or countries distinguished by a differ-
ence in their pottery, but that in each tribe or country
similar differences distinguish successive periods of
time. When to this is added the practical indestructi-
bility of the potsherd, it will easily be seen what a
criterion is afforded by it for fixing the age and
character of ancient remains, and their relation to
other monuments of the past. It is not surprising that
a study of pottery has become the sheet-anchor of
archaeological chronology, and that the first object of
the scientific excavator is to determine the relative
succession of the ceramic remains he discovers and
their connection with similar remains found elsewhere.
Scientific excavation means, before all things else,
careful observation and record of every piece of
pottery, however apparently worthless, which the
excavator disinters.

But now, unfortunately, I have to make an admis-
sion. We have, as yet, no ceramic record in either
Babylonia or Assyria. Until very recently there has
been no attempt in either country at scientific excava-
tion. The pioneers, Layard and Botta and Loftus,
lived and worked before it was known or thought of,
and we cannot, therefore, be too thankful to Layard for
having nevertheless given us so full and accurate an
account of what he found, and the conditions under
which he found it. The excavations controlled by
the British Museum have, I am sorry to say, been for
the most part destructive rather than scientific ; such
objects as were wanted by the Museum were alone
sought after ; little or no record has been kept of their
discovery, and they have been mixed with objects
bought from natives, of whose origin nothing was

40 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

known. At one spot, Carchemish, the old Hittite
capital, which, though not strictly in Assyria, formed
part of the Assyrian Empire, and was the seat of an
Assyrian governor, the so-called excavations con-
ducted by the Museum in 1880 were simply a scandal,
which Dr. Hayes Ward, who visited the spot shortly
afterwards, has characterized as "wicked." The
archaeological evidence there, which would have
thrown so much light on the Hittite problem, has
been irretrievably lost.

Matters are better now, and if I may judge from the
work done by Mr. H. R. Hall at Der el-Bahari in
Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund, his colleague,
Mr. L. W. King, who has recently been excavating
for the British Museum in Assyria, will have done
something to retrieve the archaeological good name of
our British excavators in the East. M. de Sarzec's
excavations at Tello in Southern Babylonia were also
conducted with some consideration for archaeological
method, at all events on the architectural side, and in
the capable hands of M. Heuzey the works of art found
there have been made to yield valuable results.
Moreover, the history of Tello may be said to be com-
prised in a single epoch of archaic Babylonia, and all
objects discovered on the site may consequently be
regarded as belonging to one age and phase of Baby-
lonian civilization. Of the American excavations at
Niffer it is difficult to speak at present. The work
there has been careful and patient, and has extended
over a long series of years. The architectural facts
have been accurately recorded, at all events in the
case of the great temple of Bel, and about the sequence
of the inscribed monuments there is little room for

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 4 1

doubt. But accusations of carelessness have lately
been brought by the excavators one against the other,
and when we find the sharpest critic among them
unable to substantiate his own account of the dis-
covery of a library and implicitly endorsing the
assignment of a Parthian palace to the " Mykenaean "
age, it is impossible to put much faith in their descrip-
tions of archaeological details. Some years ago the
Germans explored a cemetery at El-Hibba with con-
siderable care and thoroughness, and thus revealed to
us pretty much all we know at present about Baby-
lonian funereal customs ; yet here again too little
attention was paid to the pottery, and the actual date
of the cemetery is still uncertain. It may belong to
the Babylonian period, but it may also not be older
than the Persian or even Parthian age.

The Germans are once more working in the lands
of the Euphrates and Tigris, but in Babylonia their
labours have been mainly confined to the Babylon of
Nebuchadrezzar, where comparatively little has been
discovered. Since 1904, however, the chief strength
of the expedition has been directed upon Qal'at
Shiiqat, where Assur, the primitive capital of Assyria,
formerly stood, and here we may expect that archaeo-
logical results of first-class importance will at last be
obtained. But the work there has not yet advanced far
enough for more to be done than the mapping out of
the old city, the ascertainment of certain architectural
facts, and the recovery of inscriptions of great historical
value.

It will be seen, therefore, that the reproach brought
against excavations in Egypt by Mr. Rhind in 1862
still holds good of excavations in Babylonia and

42 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Assyria. The first stage in their history is only just
passing away. The idea that excavation is a trade
which any one can take up without previous training,
and that all the excavator need think about is the
discovery of objects for a museum, is only beginning
to disappear. In 1862 Rhind could write of Egyptian
tombs : " I am not aware that there can be found
the contents of a single sepulchre duly authenticated
with satisfactory precision as to what objects were
present, and as to the relative positions all these
occupied when deposited by contemporary hands.
Indeed, for many of the Egyptian sepulchral antiquities
scattered over Europe there exists no record to
determine even the part of the country where they
were exhumed. . . . There have thus been swept
away unrecorded into the past illustrative facts of
very great interest, which cannot now, according to
any reasonable probability, be replaced, at all events
in the degree which there are grounds to believe were
then possible."1 Happily, Mr. Rhind's words are no
longer true of Egypt, where he himself set the first
example of showing how scientific exploration ought
to be carried on, and the result is that the ancient
civilization and culture of Egypt are now known to us
even better than those of classical Greece or Rome.

But what was true in 1862 of Egypt is still very
largely true of Assyria and Babylonia. We are begin-
ning to know something about the history of Assyro-
Babylonian architecture ; we know a little about the
early work of the Babylonians in metal and stone ;
but the history of A ssyro-Baby Ionian pottery is still,
speaking broadly, a blank. For most of his know-
1 Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants, pp. 62, 66.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 43

ledge of the ancient Euphratean civilizations the
archaeologist has to turn to the inscriptions and
written literature of which such vast quantities have
survived, and hence, besides being an archaeologist in
the strict sense, he must be also a decipherer and a
philologist. He is still precluded from appealing to
the evidence which can be handled and felt.

From the point of view of the archaeologist written
evidence is usually unsatisfactory because it admits
of more than one interpretation. A translation
which seems certain to one scholar may be questioned
by another; an inference drawn from the words of
a text by one student may be denied by another.
The statements in the texts themselves may be
contradictory, or their imperfection may lead to
wrong conclusions. Above all, the evidence may
come to the archaeologist from a philologist whose
bent of mind is literary rather than scientific, and who
will therefore be unable either to appreciate or to
understand scientific testimony. Nothing is more
common than to come across literary critics who
cannot be made to understand the nature of inductive
proof.

On the other hand, the decipherer of a lost language
must necessarily be an archaeologist as well. The
clues he follows will be largely archaeological, and
he has to appeal to archaeology at every step. The
method he must pursue is the method of archaeology
and of other inductive sciences, and the materials he
uses are in part the materials of archaeology also.
The philologist who knows nothing of history and
geography, who is unable to follow a scientific argu-
ment and appreciate scientific reasoning, can never

44 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

decipher ; he may take the materials given him by
the decipherer and work them into philological shape,
but that is all. We must listen to him on questions
of grammar and vocabulary ; on questions of archae-
ology his opinions are worth no more than those of
the ordinary man.

I have insisted on this point because it is a very
important one in a study like Assyriology. The
public naturally thinks that in all Assyriological
matters the opinion of one Assyriologist is as good as
that of another. We might just as well suppose that
in all matters which come under the head of astronomy
the opinions of every class of astronomer are equally
authoritative. But in astronomy there are questions
which are purely mathematical, and there are other
questions which are more or less chemical, and the
astronomer who has devoted his attention to the
spectrum analysis is contented to leave to his mathe-
matical colleague abstruse calculations in advanced
mathematics. The Assyriologist who is a gram-
marian pure and simple is just as little an authority
on the archaeological side of his study as any one
else who is ignorant of archaeology, and the materials
he provides must be dealt with by the archaeologist
like the literary materials provided for him by the
classical philologist ; the materials in both cases
stand on the same footing.

At the same time, there is a difference between
them. In the first place, the literary materials with
which the Assyriologist deals are in a very large
number of instances autographs. They are the
actual documents of the writers whose names they
bear or to whose age they belong. And there is all

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 45

the difference in the world between the letters of
a Plato or a Cicero which have come down to
us through numerous copyists and the letters of
Khammu-rabi of Babylon, the originals of which
are now in our hands. The inscriptions in which
Nebuchadrezzar describes his building operations or
the contemporaneous annals of the Assyrian kings
are, from the historical point of view, of far more
value than the books written about them at a later date,
however admirable the latter may be as works of
literature ; in other words, they are first-hand sources,
and, as such, objective facts of much the same
character as ancient pottery or stone implements.
Then, in the second place, the documents have to be
deciphered before they can be treated philologically ;
and, as I have already said, the task of decipherment
is in itself an archaeological pursuit. If carried out
on correct lines it is itself an instance of the appli-
cation of the inductive method, and it is, moreover,
constantly compelled to call archaeology or history
to its aid. Assyriology is thus primarily an archaeo-
logical study, using the methods of archaeological
science and demanding the help of the archaeologist,
even though there are Assyriologists who are not
archaeologists themselves.

But for the present our archaeological facts have
to be taken mainly from the results of the decipher-
ment of the inscriptions. They are for the most
part epigraphical ; the excavator has not yet supple-
mented them, as in Egypt or prehistoric Greece,
on what I would term the ceramic side. This,
at least, is the case in Babylonia and Assyria. It
is no longer the case, however, throughout the ancient

46 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Assyro-Babylonian world. There is one exception
to the charge brought by modern archaeology
against the excavators in the lands of the Tigris
and Euphrates. M. de Morgan has been working
for the last ten years on the site of Susa, the capital
of Elam, and he has brought to his labours the
knowledge and experience of an excavator who has
been trained in modern methods and is fully awake
to the requirements of modern science. At last, at
Susa, we have an archaeological record of the history
of culture, based not only on written monuments, but
also on the more tangible evidence of scientifically-
observed strata of human remains. It is true that
Elam is not Babylonia ; but one of the surprises
of M. de Morgan's discoveries is that in the early
days of Babylonian history Elam was a Babylonian
province, and Susa the seat of a Babylonian governor.
The same culture extended from Sippara on the
Euphrates to Susa in Elam, and this culture was
Babylonian. Hence, in default of materials from
Babylonia itself, we may see in the history of cultural
development at Susa a counterpart of that in Baby-
lonia, at any rate during the period when Elam and
Babylonia were alike under Semitic rule.1

At Susa the line of division between the prehistoric
or neolithic age and the historical epoch is very
clearly marked. The prehistoric stratum lies twenty-
five metres below the surface of the mounds, and is
divided by M. de Morgan and his fellow-workers into

1 For the archaeological results of M. de Morgan's work, see
his Me" moires de la Delegation en Perse, vols. i. and vii. The
eighth volume, which will also be devoted to archaeology, is
in preparation.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 47

two periods. The first is distinguished by a fine
thin pottery, with yellow paste, which is already made
upon a wheel. It does not exceed from two to seven
millimetres in thickness ; it is polished, and decorated
with black bands and various patterns in a brown
colour produced by oxide of iron. The designs are
not only geometric, but also represent animal and
vegetable forms. Among them are rows of ostriches
identical with those found on the painted prehistoric
pottery of Egypt. Indeed, the explorers were es-
pecially struck by the resemblance of the pottery as
a whole to that of Egypt in the prehistoric age,
though it is difficult to see what connection there can
have been between the two countries at so remote a
date, and the curious similarity between the rows of
birds depicted on the vases must remain for the
present an archaeological puzzle. There is also a
certain amount of resemblance between the geometric
pottery and that disinterred by M. Chantre at the
early Assyrian colony at Kara Eyuk in Cappadocia,
which will be discussed more fully in a later chapter.1
Among the geometrical patterns of the Susian ware
spherical forms are common ; the herring-bone
pattern is also met with, as well as a pattern like
the Greek sigma. The under-part of the vases is
often decorated, so also is the inside. A form of
vase frequently found is the water-jar with a rounded
foot ; the goblet is another common shape. Some-
times the vases are supplied with four handles for
suspension.

This fine yellow pottery occurs not only at Susa,
but also throughout Elam, but practically none of it
1 Chantre, Mission en Cappadoce^ plates x.-xii.

48 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

has hitherto been discovered in Babylonia.1 One
cause of this is doubtless that in the alluvial plain of
Babylonia a purely neolithic stratum, if it existed at
all, would lie below the water-level. Maritime shells
are met with as far north as the site of Babylon,
showing that the Persian Gulf once extended thus
far, and the water of the Euphrates still infiltrates
through the soil.

The period of the fine thin pottery in Elam comes
suddenly to an end, and the people of the second
prehistoric period seem to have been intruders who
were less civilized than their predecessors and un-
acquainted with the art of making the older ware.
Their pottery is coarse and porous, and the geometric
designs upon it are traced with the pen, not freely
painted as in the case of the earlier ceramic. The
animal and vegetable designs of the older ware have
disappeared, and the zones, triangles and other
geometric figures which take their place are traced
in black or maroon-red upon a yellow clay. The
resemblance between this pottery and that of Kara
Eyuk is even greater than in the case of the pottery
of the first period. Thick cylindrical vases are com-
mon, as well as bowls with a flat bottom and broad
sides. Some of the vases resemble the bulbous vases
of the Egyptian Twelfth dynasty ; there are others

1 The yellow and red wheel-made ware, some of it inscribed
with characters of the age of Gudea, which has been disinterred
at Tello, is quite different. This class of pottery, by the way,
seems to have been preceded by a grey coarse ware, made
with the hand. One fragment of fine polished yellow ware with
traces of black ornamentation has recently been reported from
Tello by Captain Cros {Revue cPAssyriologie, 1905, p. 59), but the
isolated character of the discovery makes it probable that it was
an importation from Elam.

THE ARCH/EOLOGICAL MATERIALS 49

with flat bottoms and angular sides which are also
like Egyptian water-jars of the same Twelfth-dynasty
period. Along with these more characteristic forms
of pottery many small, unpainted cups have been
found, as well as a few finer wheel-made vases of
ovoid shape and yellow or reddish colour. It should
be added that coarse, red, hand-made pottery abounds
in both the prehistoric periods, as indeed it does also
in the later historic epoch.

As the second prehistoric epoch drew to a close at
Susa, many indications of an advance in culture began
to show themselves. Vases and flat-bottomed cups
of soft stone were introduced, among them being a
few of alabaster ; the bricks began to be burnt in a
kiln, and even seals with a species of writing upon
them made their appearance. Nevertheless, the neo-
lithic age does not pass into the age of metal through
any transitional stages.

The earliest stratum which marks the historic age
yields for the first time clay tablets with inscriptions,
the characters of which are already developing out of
pictures into the cursive cuneiform. The inscribed
cylinder-seals of Babylonia naturally appear along
with them ; alabaster vases, cups and bowls become
common, and some of them are cut into the forms of
animals. Comparatively little pottery has been found
in this stratum ; but this is probably an accident.

The next stratum brings us to the period of
Babylonian supremacy, when the viceroys of the
Babylonian king ruled at Susa, and Semitic influence
was already predominant in the Babylonian plain. It
is the age of Sargon of Akkad, and its commence-
ment may approximately be placed about B.C. 4000.

D

50 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

The pottery still consists of a yellow paste, though
there are also many specimens of a coarse black clay
decorated with incrustations in white. The yellow
ware is occasionally ornamented with mouldings of
trees and other natural objects. A typical vase of
the period is one of globular shape and small rim, and
with a moulded or incised rope-pattern running round
the centre and lower part of the rim. Another type
is one which looks like an inverted vase, with a series
of rope-patterns encircling it, while another seems to
have been copied from the pile of cylindrical vases
into which, as into a drain, the body of the dead
Babylonian was inserted. These types of vase appear
to have lasted, with little variation, down to the end
of the Persian period, though, unfortunately, the dis-
turbance of the ground and the consequent mixture
of objects under the temple of In-Susinak, where the
excavations were carried on, makes certainty on the
point unattainable. Immense quantities of bronze
votive offerings, of all kinds and sorts, were, however,
found here, along with fragments of glass, and, as
inscriptions show that they must all have been buried
on the spot before the tenth century B.C., we have a
time-limit for dating the forms of the bronze weapons
and tools.

The archaeological evidence obtained at Susa has
been supplemented by excavations made some ninety
miles to the west of it, at a place called Mussian, on
the eastern bank of the river Tib. Here there are
graves, as well as the remains of a temple and houses
with vaults, columns and walls of burnt brick. Where
the strata have allowed a section to be cut down to
the virgin soil the results are found to agree with

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 5 1

those revealed by the excavations at Susa. The
earliest layer belongs to the neolithic age, flint and
obsidian, as at Susa, being the materials employed
for tools and weapons. The pottery is thick and
hand-made, the paste being either yellow or red in
colour, and the surface is often polished, while many
of the vases are furnished with holes for suspension.
This layer seems older than anything discovered at
Susa. It is followed by a second layer, in which the
pottery is wheel-made, and is decorated with animal
and vegetable figures in black or red, like the first
prehistoric ware of the Susa mounds. Among the
animal figures are those of men, and one fragment of
yellow ware is ornamented with the so-called swastika.
In the upper part of the layer a few fragments of
copper have been met with, indicating that the
neolithic age was beginning to pass into that of
copper.

Above this layer is a third, characterized by a fine
ware, usually yellow but sometimes greenish in colour,
and decorated with designs in lustrous black. In the
fine specimens the decoration has been laid on before
firing, in other cases after firing. The pottery as a
whole has a general resemblance to that of prehistoric
Egypt. The culture represented by this layer was
still neolithic, but objects of copper were making their
appearance, and the flint instruments of the past were
beginning to be superseded by metal, a knowledge of
which appears to have come from abroad. With the
introduction of copper the Elamite or historical epoch
may be said to have begun. It was now that the
temple was first built of crude bricks, reeds taking
the place of wood, and so pointing to the influence of

52 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Babylonia, where reeds were plentiful and wood was
scarce.

Another proof of Babylonian influence must be
seen not only in ware of Babylonian origin, but also
in the figures of a nude goddess with the hands placed
upon the breasts, which originally represented the
divinity called Istar by the Semitic Babylonians.
Indeed, from the fact that the goddess was repre-
sented in human form we may infer that the figures,
though first met with in the Sumerian age, were of
Semitic derivation, and show that Sumerian culture
was already being affected by the influence of Semitic
religious ideas.1 The pottery found along with the
figures is of a very varied description, including coarse
red and fine yellow ware. Among the fine yellow
ware are goblets with a tall cup supported on a foot.
A typical form of the yellow ware is the vase with
angular sides ; this, together with vases of more
bulbous shape and terra-cotta stands, is remarkably
like some of the Egyptian Twelfth-dynasty pottery in
form. The stands, more especially, remind us of
Twelfth-dynasty Egypt. There is also a black ware
decorated with incised lines which are filled in with
white. This black ware is also found in Egypt, where
Professor Petrie is now inclined to associate it with the
Hyksos. At all events it is absent there during the
interval that elapsed between the prehistoric period
and the epoch of the Twelfth dynasty, and it
characterizes the Hyksos sites of the Delta, while its

1 Copper figurines of the goddess, with hands pressed under
the breasts, found in one of the earliest substructures of Tello
{circa B.C. 4000), are published by M. Heuzey in the Revue
d'Assyriologie, 1899, p. 44.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 53

foreign and non-Egyptian character has been recog-
nized from the first. A few fragments of the same
class of pottery have been brought to light at Tello
in Babylonia, where they would appear to belong to
the age of Gudea (B.C. 2700). One of these formed
part of a cylindrical vase or pyxis, identical in shape
with the black incised pyxides found at Susa at a
depth of from five to ten metres below the surface.
On another fragment are spirited drawings of a water-
bird, a fish seized by a gull, a four-footed animal, and
a boat with reeds growing behind it, each in a separ-
ate panel.1 Similar ware has been discovered in
Southern Palestine, on the eastern coast of Cyprus,
in Spain and in the Greek islands. At Syros, for
instance, where it goes back to the neolithic age, it is
associated with alabaster vases, just as it is at Mussian.
Here the bowls and vases of alabaster are strikingly
Egyptian in form.

The clay figures of the Babylonian goddess testify
to the same extension of culture in the copper age of
Western Asia as do the black incised vases with their
white fillings. M. Chantre has found them at Kara
Eyuk in Cappadocia, on the borders of the Hittite
region, though in these the arms are no longer folded
across the breast. Further west I have lately shown 2

1 Heuzey, in the Revue d'Assyriologie, 1905, pp. 59 sqq. and
plate iii. Von Lichtenberg (Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen
Gesellschaft, 1906, 2) has lately pointed out that the black incised
pottery with white fillings is identical in Cyprus, Troy, the Laibach
bog and the Mondsee, and that the ornamentation which charac-
terizes it is found in the valley of the Danube and the pile-dwellings
of Switzerland. His attempt to derive it from Cyprus, however,
cannot be sustained in view of its occurrence in Elam.

2 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archczology, 1905,
p. 28.

54 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

that the so-called figure of Niobe on Mount Sipylus
in Lydia is a Hittite modification of them, and Dr.
Schliemann discovered one of them, of lead, in the
ruins of the Second (prehistoric) city at Troy.1 At
Troy, however, the type was more usually modified
in the Hittite direction, as it was also in the islands
of the ^gean, where marble figures of the goddess
are plentiful.2 In Egypt clay figures closely re-
sembling those of Babylonia and Elam, but with
the arms outstretched, have been met with from time
to time at Karnak, and supposed to be dolls of the
Roman period ; but since the discovery by M. Legrain
of remains which prove that the history of Karnak
reaches back to the prehistoric or early dynastic
period, there is no longer any reason for not connect-
ing them with their analogues elsewhere. And the
discoveries recently made by Professor Pumpelly in the
tumuli near Askabad, west of Khiva and Herat, go
far towards supporting the identification. Here the
explorers have brought to light two periods of neo-
lithic culture, in the earlier of which no animals were
as yet domesticated, and the pottery was of the
rudest description. During the second period the
domesticated animals were introduced, including the
horse and camel. Then came an age of copper,
accompanied by figurines representing the Babylonian

1 Ih'os, p. 337. Schliemann called it the Third city. Dorp-
feld's subsequent excavations, however, have shown that it
really was the Second city, whose history fell into three
periods.

2 Some of these represent the goddess with the arms folded,
and not pressed against the breasts. See, for example, the
photograph of one found at Naxos in the Comfites rendus du
Congrh i?iter?iational d Archc'ologie, 1905, p. 221. For Trojan
examples, see Ilios, pp. 331-6.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 55

goddess, sometimes with the arms outstretched,
sometimes with them lying against the sides, as
in Cappadocia. The figurines are evidence that
the art of working copper was derived from Baby-
lonia, a conclusion which is confirmed by M.
Henri de Morgan's excavations in the tumuli of
Talish in Gilan, on the south-western shore of the
Caspian.1

As far back as our knowledge of Babylonian
history extends the inhabitants of the country were
acquainted with copper, and its use lasted century
after century into quite recent times. Of a stone age,
as I have already said, there is no clear trace. It is
true that Captain Cros has sunk shafts at Tello, and
reached the virgin soil at a depth of seventeen metres,
finding there mace-heads of alabaster and hard stone
similar to those of primitive Egypt, as well as other
stone objects ; but no flint flakes were met with, and
the pottery was similar to that of the higher strata.2
On the other hand, objects of copper, great and small,
including helmets and a colossal spear dedicated by
a king of Kis, have been disinterred, though nothing
of bronze has been discovered among the earlier
remains. It was the same at Muqayyar, the ancient
Ur, as well as on the site of Eridu, where Taylor
found only copper bowls and the like in the graves,
even in those of so late a date as to contain objects

1 See M/moires de la Delegation en Perse, viii. pp. 336-7. A
report of some of the results of the Pumpelly expedition is
given by Dr. Hubert Schmidt in the Zeitsclirift fur Etlinologie
1906, Pt. iii. p. 385.

2 Flint implements, however, were discovered by Taylor in
his excavations at Abu Shahrein, the site of Eridu {Journal
of tJie Royal Asiatic Society, xv. p. 410 and plate ii.).

56 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

of iron and an Egyptian scarab.1 At Nififer, more-
over, the ancient Nippur, American excavation has
the same tale to tell. According to Dr. Peters,2
though iron knives, hatchets, spear-heads and arrow-
heads have been exhumed, the date of which is said
to be between 2000 and 1000 B.C., there is no trace
of bronze, the multitudinous objects, which further
west would have been of bronze, being here of copper.
As at Ur, the copper age lasts down to the very
end of the Babylonian kingdom. Hilprecht, on the
authority of Haynes, does indeed say3 that in the
very lowest strata of the temple mound, far below the
pavements of Sargon and Naram-Sin (B.C. 3750),
" fragments of copper, bronze and terra-cotta vessels"
were disinterred. But no attempt seems to have
been made to analyze the so-called "bronze," which
may have been a natural alloy of copper with a small
percentage of lead or antimony, and the age ascribed
to the fragments is rendered doubtful by the accom-
panying statement, that " fragments of red and black
lacquered pottery " were discovered in the same
place which were indistinguishable from the red and
black pottery of classical Greece. As yet, therefore,
excavation in Babylonian lands has failed to tell
us when the art of mixing tin with the copper
was discovered and copper was superseded by
bronze.

This, however, had taken place before the com-

1 See Taylor's "Notes on the Ruins of Muqeyer," in the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, xv. pp. 271-3 and

415.

2 Nippur, vol. ii. pp. 381-6.

3 The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsyl-
vania, i. 2, pp. 26-7.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 57

mencement of the Assyrian age. The bronze scimitar
of Hadad-nirari I. (B.C. 1330) x finds an exact copy
in a scimitar discovered by Mr. Macalister at Gezer
in Palestine,2 and the tools and weapons exhumed at
Nineveh are of bronze and not copper. Analysis
shows that the bronze usually consisted of about one
part of tin to ten of copper, though for special objects
like bells the amount of tin was considerably in-
creased.3 When was it that the tin was first imported
and intentionally mixed with the copper in order to
harden the metal ?

In default of archaeological evidence, the only
possibility there is of discovering an answer to this
question lies in an examination of the primitive
pictures out of which the cuneiform characters eventu-
ally developed. Here we are at once struck by a
curious fact. The "determinative" attached to ideo-
graphs signifying " knife," " weapon " and the like
is not an ideograph which expresses the name of a
metal ; nor is it an ideograph denoting " stone," but
one which means " wood." That is to say, the material
of which cutting instruments were made at the time
when the picture-writing of Babylonia came into
existence was neither metal nor stone, but wood.
That it should not have been stone is explained by
the geology of the Babylonian plain, which consists
of alluvial soil devoid of stones. That it should not
have been of metal can only mean that the inventors
of the pictorial script were not yet acquainted with

1 Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archeology, 1876,
pp. 347-8.

2 Figured in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, October 1904, p. 335.

3 Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 571-3.

58 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

the use of copper, bronze or iron. In default of
metal and stone they had to content themselves with
hard wood.

On the other hand, copper, as well as gold and
silver, had become known to them when the primitive
pictographs were still in process of formation, and
long before they had passed into cursive cuneiform.
Copper was represented by the picture of an ingot
or square plate of the metal with a handle attached
to it, showing that it was already in a fused and
worked state when it was imported into Babylonia.
Gold seems to have originally been denoted by the
picture of a collar or necklace, which signified
"shining," and was afterwards employed before the
names of the precious metals. I have, however, never
found this collar actually used to signify " gold " ; in
the earliest texts yet discovered the phonetic syllable
gi is attached to it when " gold " is denoted, the
Sumerian word for " gold " being azag-gi. " Silver "
was "the white precious metal," the symbol for
"white" being attached to the picture of the collar,
and so forming a compound ideograph. This implies
that silver became known to the inventors of the
hieroglyphs at a later period than gold, though still
before what I will call the cuneiform age. Even iron
was known to them at the same early epoch, and was
expressed by ideographs which literally mean " stone
of heaven," l an indication that meteoric iron must be
referred to.

1 ANA-BAR. Bar is given as the Sumerian pronunciation
of the word for "stone" {Syllabary 5, iv. 11, in Delitzsch's
Assyrische Lesestiicke, 3rd edition). In Old Egyptian " iron " was
similarly ba-n-pet, "stone of heaven," while "silver" was "white
gold," " gold " being symbolized by a collar. We may compare

HEAD OP ONE OF THE STATUES FROM
TELLO.

[See p. 73.

VASE OF SILVER, DEDICATED
TO NINGIRSU, BY ENTENA
PATESI OF LAGAS.

[Seep. 58.

[To face p. 58.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 59

But now comes a fact which is difficult to explain,
so contrary is it to the archaeological evidence. As
we have seen, no traces of bronze have been found in
the Assyro-Babylonian region before the beginning
of the Assyrian age — let us say about B.C. 2000.
Nevertheless, by the side of the simple ideograph
which denotes the Sumerian tirudu, " copper " — er& in
Semitic Babylonian — we find a compound ideograph
signifying " bronze," called zabar in Sumerian, from
which the Semites borrowed their 'siparrn. It is true
that it is a compound ideograph, but it occurs in the
cuneiform texts, not only in the era of Gudea (B.C.
2700), but even before the age of Sargon of Akkad
(B.C. 3800). And an analysis of its earliest form seems
to indicate that it really must have meant bronze
from the first, and that consequently there was no
transference of signification in later days. Literally
it means " white copper," the word for " copper " being
phonetically written ka-mas, with which the Semitic
Babylonian kemassu is closely connected. Lead
cannot be intended, as that was denoted by a
different word and different ideographs, and I do not
see what else " white copper " can be in contradis-
tinction to red copper except bronze. Polished

the Indo-European " white " metal as a name of " silver." The
Sumerian azaggi, "gold," was a form of azagga^ "precious,''
more especially " precious metal " ; the more specific word for
" gold n was guskin, with which the Armenian oski must be
connected. "Silver" was bdbara, the "bright " metal, nagga being
"lead," the Armenian anag. The identity of the Armenian and
Sumerian words for "gold" and "lead," coupled with the
Armenian origin of the vine, and the fact that the mountain on
which the ark of the Babylonian Noah rested was Jebel Judi,
south of Lake Van, raises an interesting question as to the
origin of Sumerian civilization.

60 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

copper could be termed "bright," but hardly
"white."1

The possibility remains that tin might have been
the metal originally denoted by the compound ideo-
graph. If so, both the ideograph and the words
expressed by it had lost all reference to tin before the
beginning of the Assyrian period, and neither the
Assyrian word for " tin " nor the Sumerian word, if
any existed, is now known. Tin, moreover, was
archaeologically late in making its appearance. The
earliest examples of pure tin of which I know are of
the time of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. On
the other hand, bronze first appears in Egypt in the
age of the Twelfth dynasty,2 though it does not

1 It must be remembered, however, that, according to Aristotle,
the copper of the Mossynceci in Northern Asia Minor was
brilliant and white, owing to its mixture with a species of earth,
the exact nature of which was kept a secret. The Babylonian
ideograph for " bronze," therefore, may have been a similar
kind of hardened copper, which was transferred to denote
"bronze" when the alloy of copper and tin became known.

2 See Garstang, El-Ardbah, p. 10. Dr. Gladstone, however,
after giving the results of his analysis of the Sixth-dynasty
copper discovered by Professor Petrie at Dendera, suggests that
the small amount of tin observable in it (about one per cent.)
may have been added to it artificially (Dendereh, p. 61). Bronze
was " the normal metal " of the Amorite period at Gezer (Mac-
alister, Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund,
April 1904, p. 1 19), and the three cities which represent this period
go back beyond the age of the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty, to at
least B.C. 2900 (see Quarterly Statement, January 1905, pp. 28-9).
At Troy also Schliemann found numerous bronze weapons in
the Second (prehistoric) city (Ilios, pp. 475-9). In Krete
bronze daggers of the Early Minoan period (coeval with the
Middle Empire of Egypt) have been found at Patema and Agia
Triada (Annual of the British School at Athens, x. p. 198), and
the pottery of the Middle Minoan period (B.C. 2000-1500) was
associated at Palaikastro with a bronze button, two miniature
bronze sickles, and a pair of bronze tweezers {ibid, p . 202). As for
the Caucasus, bronze was not known there till a late date. Wilke

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 6l

become common until the Hyksos predecessors of the
Eighteenth dynasty had made themselves masters of
the valley of the Nile. From about B.C. 1600 onwards,
enormous quantities of it were employed in the eastern
basin of the Mediterranean and the adjoining lands,
necessitating an equally large supply of tin. What
the source of this tin may have been it is not my
present purpose to inquire. But the persistence of
the copper age in Babylonia, as well as in the tumuli
of Askabad, east of the Caspian, indicates that the
manufacture of bronze must have migrated from the
north-west to the Babylonian plain. We find it first
in Assyria, not in Babylonia, and it may well be that
the Assyrians derived it from Armenia and the popu-
lation of Cappadocia, where, as I shall show in a
subsequent chapter, they had established colonies at
an early period. At all events, the earliest examples
of bronze yet met with were discovered by Dr.
Schliemann in the Second prehistoric city at Troy.
It was to this region that classical tradition referred
the origin of working in iron. An analysis of the
gold of the first six Egyptian dynasties submitted to
Dr. Gladstone by Professor Petrie proved that it was
mixed with silver, and hence must have been derived
from Asia Minor.1 Egyptian legend made "the
followers of Horus," who founded dynastic Egypt,

{Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, 1904, pp. 39-104) has shown that
the bronze culture of the Caucasus was derived from the valley
of the Danube, and made its way eastward along the northern
coast of Pontus ; see also Rossler, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie,
1905, p. 118.

1 Dendereh (Egypt Exploration Fund), p. 62, for the gold of
the Sixth dynasty ; The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties,
PP« 39-4°> for that of the First dynasty.

62 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

metallurgists and smiths whose metal weapons
enabled them to subdue the older neolithic popula-
tion. The story as it has come down to us declares
the smiths to have been workers in iron ; iron, how-
ever, must be the substitute of the later version of the
story for some other metal, since, though Vyse claims
to have discovered an iron clamp in the great pyramid
of Giza,1 and Petrie has found a mass of iron in a
Sixth-dynasty deposit in the temple of Osiris at
Abydos,2 ironsmiths can hardly have existed in the
pre-dynastic age. It is probable, therefore, that
copper was the metal which the dynastic Egyptians
introduced into their new home, and which was
already in use in Babylonia. But the intercourse
with Asia Minor, which the gold of the First dynasty
indicates must even then have been going on, makes
it possible that it was from this quarter of the world
that the earliest knowledge of the manufacture of
bronze was brought to the valley of the Nile. Even
in the time of the Twelfth dynasty, however, the
tools found by Professor Petrie in the workmen's
huts at Kahun are of copper rather than of bronze.3
The colossal statue of King Pepi of the Sixth dynasty,
discovered at Hierakonpolis, is of hammered copper,

1 Vyse, Pyramids of Gizeh, i. p. 276. The clamp was actually
found by his assistant Hill, after blasting away the two outer
stones behind which it had been placed.

2 Abydos, part ii. p. 33. An iron pin of the age of the
Eighteenth dynasty was found by Garstang at Abydos (El-
Arabah, p. 30).

3 Illahun, Kahun and Curob, p. 12. Dr. Gladstone's
analyses give only about 2 parts of tin to 96*35 of copper. The
bronze of the Eighteenth dynasty found at Gurob yielded a
less proportion of tin (about 7 parts to 90 of copper) than the
bronze of the Second Assyrian Empire. A ring of pure tin,
however, was also discovered at Gurob.

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 63

and we have to wait for the advent of the Eighteenth
dynasty before bronze becomes the predominant
metal.

That such was the case points to the Hyksos
period as that in which bronze succeeded in super-
seding the older copper. It may be that the Hyksos
brought the extended use of it with them from Syria.
In Southern Palestine, Mr. Macalister's excavations at
Gezer have shown that bronze rather than copper was
largely employed throughout the so-called Amorite
period, which went back to an earlier age than that
of the Twelfth dynasty, and it is just here that in the
time of the Eighteenth dynasty bronze itself began
to make way for iron. Mr. J. L. Myres has recently
traced the polychrome pottery of Southern Canaan
to the Hittite lands of Cappadocia,1 where the red
ochre was found by which it was characterized, and a
knowledge of bronze may have travelled along the
same road.

But these are speculations which may or may not
be verified by future research. For the present we
must be content with the fact that, in spite of the
philological evidence to the contrary, copper, and
not bronze, was the metal which preceded the use of
iron in Babylonia, whereas in the northern kingdom
of Assyria bronze was already known at a com-
paratively early date. So far as the existing
evidence can carry us, it seems to indicate that
Babylonia was the primitive home of the copper
industry, while bronze, on the other hand, made its
way eastward from Asia Minor and the north of
Syria. Where bronze was first invented is still un-
1 Journal of tJie Anthropological Institute^ xxxiii. pp. 367 sqq.

64 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

known to us ; all that seems certain is that it must
have been in a land where copper and tin are found
together.

NOTE

According to the mineralogists, in the western part
of the northern hemisphere tin is found only in Britain,
Spain and the neighbourhood of Askabad, the scanty
surface-tin of Saxony, France and Tuscany being too
poor and insignificant to have attracted attention in
antiquity (see de Morgan, Mission Scientifique au
Caucase, ii. pp. 16-28). The American excavations at
Askabad under Professor Pumpelly appear to have
made it clear that bronze was not invented in that
part of the world, or indeed used in early days, and
we are thus thrown back on Britain and Spain. It is
quite certain, however, that bronze made its way to
the west of Europe from the east, and the Hon. John
Abercromby has proved {Journal of the Anthropological
Institute, xxxii. pp. 375-94, and Proceedings of Society
of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1903-4, pp. 323-410) that
the bronze culture came to this country from the
valley of the central Rhine where it cuts the river at
Mayence. On the other hand, the bronze-age civiliza-
tion of the Danube valley, the Balkan peninsula and
Italy forms a whole with that of the south-eastern
basin of the Mediterranean, which again is closely
connected with the bronze-age culture of the ^Egean,
Asia Minor and Egypt, while the civilization of the
Danube valley leads on to that of Central Europe
and, to a less extent, of Scandinavia and Northern
Germany. Montelius {Journal of the AntJiropological

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS 65

Institute, 1900, pp. 89 sgq.) has pointed out that the
early bronze culture of Northern Italy was carried to
Scandinavia along the route of the amber trade as
far back as the close of the neolithic age in Sweden,
and the numerous objects of Irish gold found in
Scandinavia — though, it is true, of somewhat later
date — show that commercial relations must have
existed between the British Islands and the Scandi-
navian peninsula. Tin might have followed the gold
route until it met the amber route, by which it would
have been carried southward to Central Europe and
the Adriatic.

In Western Europe the sword, like the socketed celt,
is first met with in the third and last period into
which the bronze age has been divided. The earliest
examples of the sword, in fact, are those discovered
at Mykenae, which belong to the age of the Eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty. Schliemann found only the dirk
at Troy, and, so far as our present evidence goes,
the dirk alone was used by the Hittites and Proto-
Armenians down to the seventh century B.C. The
scimitar, however, was known in Assyria and at Gezer
at least as early as the fourteenth century B.C. (see
p. 57 above), and in Cyprus the sword makes its ap-
pearance along with the knife and fibula in the later
bronze age after the close of the age of copper.
Similarly in Krete it was only in tombs of the Late
Mykensean (or Late Minoan) period that the cemetery
of Knossos yielded swords of bronze {Annual of the
British School at Athens, x. p. 4). The dirk of the
copper age was stanged as at Troy and in the Danube
valley, the Cyprian and Hungarian forms being prac-
tically identical. From the Danube valley the stanged

66 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

spear-head passed to Western Europe during the
second period of the bronze age. The fibula is not
found at Troy, where the early bronze age will have
corresponded with the copper age of Cyprus.

All this goes to show (i) that the scimitar — the
harpe of the Perseus myth — was a Semitic invention,
while the long sword was of European origin ; (2)
that at Troy, and possibly also in Southern Palestine,
to which Hittite polychrome pottery was carried
at an early date, bronze was known at a time when
only copper was used in Cyprus and Egypt ; and (3)
that the characteristic weapon of this primitive bronze
age was the dirk, which continued to characterize
Asia Minor long after the sword and scimitar had
been invented elsewhere. Taken in connection with
the fact that the pottery and decorative designs of
Asia Minor can be linked with those of the Balkan
peninsula and the valley of the Danube, we may pro-
visionally conclude that Northern Asia Minor was
the home of the invention of bronze. Against this is
the fact that no tin has hitherto been found there,
and we should accordingly have to explain the origin
of bronze by the theory that after the discovery of
various processes for hardening copper, further ex-
periments were made with imported tin. Unfortun-
ately, neither the south of Cornwall nor Asia Minor,
with the exception of the Troad, has as yet been
scientifically explored from an archaeological point of
view. But it deserves mention that the curious
needles with a double head of twisted wire, which are
met with among the remains of the bronze age in
Britain, are characteristic of the copper age in Cyprus
and of the early bronze age at Troy.

CHAPTER III

THE SUMERIANS

Among the first results of the decipherment of the
Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions was one which was so
unexpected and revolutionary, that it was received
with incredulity and employed to pour discredit on
the fact of the decipherment itself. European scholars
had long been nursing the comfortable belief that the
white race primarily, and the natives of Europe second-
arily, were ipso facto superior to the rest of mankind,
and that to them belonged of right the origin and
development of civilization. The discovery of the
common parentage of the Indo-European languages
had come to strengthen the belief; the notion grew
up that in Sanskrit we had found, if not the primeval
language, at all events a language that was very near
to it, and idyllic pictures were painted of the primi-
tive Aryan community living in its Asiatic home
and already possessed of the elements of its later
culture. Outside and beyond it were the barbarians,
races yellow and brown and black, with oblique eyes
and narrow foreheads, whose intelligence was not
much above that of the brute beasts. Such culture
as some of them may have had was derived from the
white race, and perhaps spoilt in the borrowing. The

67

68 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

idea of the rise of a civilization outside the limits of
the white race was regarded as a paradox.

It was just this paradox to which the first
decipherers of Assyrian cuneiform found themselves
forced. And another paradox was added to it.
Not only had the civilization of the Euphrates and
Tigris originated amongst a race that spoke an
agglutinative language, and therefore was neither
Aryan nor Semitic, the civilization of the Semitic
Babylonians and Assyrians was borrowed from this
older civilization along with the cuneiform system of
writing. It seemed impossible that so revolutionary
a doctrine could be true, and Semitic philologists
naturally denounced it. For centuries Hebrew had
been supposed to have been the language of Paradise,
and the old belief which made the Semitic Adam the
first civilized man still unconsciously affected the
Semitic scholars of the nineteenth century. It was
hard to part with the prejudices of early education,
especially when they were called upon to do so by a
small group of men whose method of decipherment
was an enigma to the ordinary grammarian, and who
were introducing new and dangerous principles into
the study of the extinct Semitic tongues.

The method of decipherment was nevertheless a
sound one, and the result, which seemed so incredible
and impossible when first announced, is now one
of the assured facts of science. The first civilized
occupants of the alluvial plain of Babylonia were
neither Semites nor Aryans, but the speakers of an
agglutinative language, and to them were due all the
elements of the Babylonian culture of later days.
It was they who first drained the marshes, and

THE SUMERIANS 69

regulated the course of the rivers by canals, thereby
transforming what had been a pestiferous swamp into
the most fertile of lands ; it was they who founded
the great cities of the country, and invented the
pictorial characters, the cursive forms of which became
what we term cuneiform. The theology and law of later
Babylonia went back to them, and long after Semitic
Babylonian had become the language of the country,
legal judgments were still written in the old language
and the theological literature was still studied in it.
The Church and the Law were as loth to give up the
dead language of Sumer as they were in modern
Europe to give up the use of Latin.

This dead agglutinative language has been called
sometimes Akkadian, sometimes Sumerian, but
Sumerian is the name which has been finally selected.
In fact, this was the name applied to it by the Semitic
Babylonians themselves, who included in the term the
two dialects — or rather the two forms of the language
at different periods of its development — which have
been preserved to us in the cuneiform tablets. Strictly
speaking, the dialect which had been most affected by
contact with the Semites, and had in consequence
suffered most from phonetic decay, was known as the
language of Akkad, but this was because Akkad
represented Northern Babylonia, which had become
Semitic at an earlier date than the south and had been
the seat of the first great Semitic Empire.1 Both

1 The two dialects were called eme-K.XJ (i.e. enie-lakhkha,
W.A.I, iii. 4,31, 32), "the language of the enchanter," and eme-SAL,
"the woman's language," which are rendered in Semitic Baby-
lonian, lisan Sumeri and (lisa?i)Akkadi, "the language of Sumer "
and "the language of Akkad.'' In a tablet (81, 7-27, 130, 6, 7)
they are said to be "like" one another. Other dialects were

JO ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

names, Akkadian and Sumerian, are correct as applied
to the primitive language of Chaldaea, but of the
two Sumerian is preferable, not only because it was
used by the Babylonian scribes themselves, but also
because it denoted the oldest and purest form of the
language before it had passed under foreign influence.
This, then, was the great archaeological fact which
resulted from the decipherment of the Assyro-Baby-
lonian texts. The earliest civilized inhabitants of
Babylonia did not speak a Semitic language, and
therefore presumably they were not Semites. It is
perfectly true that language and race are not synony-
mous terms, and that we are seldom justified in
arguing from the one to the other. But the Sumerian
language is one of the exceptions which proves the
rule. Those who spoke it were the first civilizers of
Western Asia, the inventors and perfecters of a
system of writing which was destined to be one of
the chief humanizing agents of the ancient world, the
authors of the irrigation engineering of the Babylonian
plain, and the builders of its many cities. The
language they spoke, accordingly, could not have been
forced upon them by conquerors who have otherwise
left no trace behind them, and they certainly would
not have exchanged it of their own accord for their
native tongue. The Semitic languages have always
been conspicuous for the tenacity with which they

termed "the language of the sacrificer" and "the language of
the anointer," as being used by these two classes of priests.
They differed, perhaps, from the standard dialects in intonation
or the use of technical words. We hear also of "a carter's
language" in which anbarri — which, it is noticeable, is a
Sumerian word — meant "yoke and reins,'' i.e. "harness"
{Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie, ix. p. 164).

THE SUMERIANS 71

have held their own, and the conservatism with which
they have resisted change. We may still hear in the
Egyptian Arabic of to-day the very words which were
written by Semitic Babylonian scribes upon their
tablets some four or five thousand years ago. A
Semitic people would have been the last to borrow
the language of its less-civilized neighbours without
any assignable reason. The fact, consequently, that
the pioneers of Babylonian culture spoke an aggluti-
native language fully justifies us in concluding that
they belonged to a race that was not Semitic.

Sumerian, however, was not the only language in
the neighbourhood of the Babylonian plain which was
agglutinative. Further to the east, in the highlands
of Elam, other agglutinative languages were spoken,
monuments of one or more of which have been pre-
served to us. Whether or not the agglutinative
languages of Elam were related to the Sumerian of
Babylonia, I cannot tell ; so far as our materials go
at present they do not warrant us in saying more
than that, like Sumerian, they were of the aggluti-
native type. It is only rarely that the scientific
philologist is able to separate some of the multitudinous
languages of the globe into genealogically related
groups ; for the most part they stand isolated and
apart from one another, and, however much we may
wish to group them together, it is seldom that we find
such proofs of a common descent as will satisfy the
requirements of science. Families of speech — or at
all events such as can be scientifically proved to be
so — are the exception and not the rule.

Eastward of Sumer the type of language was thus
agglutinative, as it was in Sumer itself. And in the

72 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

days when civilization first grew up there, there is no
sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional.
The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in
classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western
India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the
Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since
been given up by the anthropologist and comparative
philologist,1 and it is recognized that if we are to look
for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The
Semitic languages are equally absent ; the tide of
Semitic speech which eventually overflowed Baby-
lonia, surged northward and eastward into Assyria and
Elam, but never succeeded in passing Susiana, and
was finally driven again from the ground it had once
gained there. The home of the Semite lay to the
west and not to the east of the Babylonian plain.
Babylonian culture owed its origin to a race whose
type of language was that of the Finn, of the Magyar
or the Japanese.

The physical characteristics of this race cannot
as yet be fully determined. The oldest sculptures
yielded by Babylonian excavation belong to a time
when the Semite was already in the land. It might
be supposed that the early monuments of Tello, which
were erected by Sumerian princes and go back to
Sumerian times, would give us the necessary materials ;
but not only are they too rude and infantile to be of
scientific use, they also indicate the existence of two
ethnological types, one heavily bearded, the other
beardless, with oblique eyes and negrito-like face. It
is not until we come to the age of Semitic domina-

1 Fick, however, is an exception (Beitrdge zur Ku?ide der
indogermanischen Sprachen, xxix. pp. 229-247.

THE SUMERIANS 73

tion that sculpture is sufficiently realistic for exact
anthropological purposes. At the same time, there
was to the last a marked contrast of both form and
feature in the artistic representation of the Babylonian
and his more purely Semitic Assyrian neighbour. The
squat, thick figure, the full, well-shaven cheeks, the
large, almond-shaped eyes and round head of King
Merodach-nadin-akhi in the twelfth century B.C. still
reproduce the characteristic form and features of the
statues found in the palace of Gudea, the Sumerian
high-priest of Lagas, who lived more than a thousand
years before. The aquiline or hooked nose, the thick
lips and muscular limbs which distinguished the
Assyrian are generally wanting in Babylonia. And,
on the other hand, there is a likeness between the
Babylonian as he is portrayed on the monuments
and the Elamite adversaries of Assur-bani-pal, some
of whom, it is noticeable, are depicted with beards,
though the excavations of Dieulafoy and de Morgan
at Susa have shown (according to Quatrefages and
Hamy) that a beardless and short-nosed negrito type
with round heads was aboriginal in Elam. The same
type is reproduced in one of the heads found at Tello,
and M. de Morgan has pointed out that similar
brachycephalic and beardless negritos are represented
on the monuments of Naram-Sin as serving in the
army of Akkad.1 We may conclude, therefore, that
they still formed a part of the population of Northern
Babylonia even in the age when it had passed com-

1 Mi moires de la Delegation en Perse, i. pp. 152-3. Photo-
graphs of the two types — Sumerian and Semitic — represented
on the early monuments of Babylonia are given by Dr. Pinches
in an interesting Paper in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society ; January 1900, pp. 87-93.

74 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

pletely under Semitic rule. Indeed, Dr. Pinches has
shown that the pure Semitic type is not depicted in
Babylonian art, outside the kingdom of Akkad,
"before the time of the First dynasty of Babylon,
which began to reign about B.C. 2300."

It has often been maintained that the Sumerians
themselves were an immigrant people, who had
descended from the mountains of Elam. There is
nothing unreasonable in the supposition ; it was
always difficult to prevent the mountaineers of Elam
from making raids in Babylonia, and one of their
tribes succeeded in settling in the country and
establishing at Babylon one of the longest-lived of
its dynasties. But the supposition mainly rests upon
two facts. The pictorial hieroglyphs out of which
the cuneiform characters have developed had no
special sign for " river," while the same character re-
presented both "mountain" and "country." It would
seem, therefore, that the land in which the cuneiform
system of writing was first invented was just the
converse of the Babylonian plain, being at once
mountainous and riverless. That the same character
means both " mountain " and " country " is no doubt
a strong argument in favour of the Elamite origin
of Babylonian civilization. That the use of the
primitive hieroglyphs should have survived in Elam
while it was lost in Babylonia, as M. de Morgan's
discoveries have shown to be the case, is also another
fact which may perhaps be claimed on the same
side ; at any rate it indicates that they were known
to the Elamites before the cursive cuneiform had
developed out of them. But the want of a special
character for " river" is not so decisive as it appears at

THE SUMERIANS 75

first sight to be. The word "river" is represented by
two ideographic signs which literally signify "the
watery deep," and so point to the fact that those who
originally invented them lived not in the highlands
of the East, but on the shores of that Persian Gulf
which the Babylonians of the historic period still
called " the deep." As it was also known as " the
salt river," it is not difficult to understand how, to
those whose experience of navigable water had
been confined to the Persian Gulf, the Tigris and
Euphrates would have seemed but repetitions of the
Gulf on a smaller scale.1

The rise of Sumerian culture on the shores of
the Persian Gulf is in accordance with Babylonian
tradition. Babylonian myths told how Oannes or Ea,
the god of culture, had risen each morning out of his
palace in "the deep," bringing with him the elements
of civilization which he communicated to mankind.
Letters, science and art had all been his gifts. He
had instructed the wild tribes of the coast to build
houses and erect temples ; he had compiled for
them the first law-book, and had instructed them in
the mysteries of agriculture. Babylonian civilization
was sea-born. The system of cosmology which
finally won its way to acceptance with the priesthood
and philosophers of Babylonia was one which had
been first conceived at Eridu, the site of which is
now more than a hundred miles distant from the

1 It is noticeable that the script of the other people whose
civilization grew up on the banks of a river, the Egyptians
namely, contains no special ideograph for "river." The word
is expressed by the phonetically-written atur, with the determin-
ative of "water'' or "irrigation basin." As in the primitive
hieroglyphs of Babylonia, " the sea " was a " circle."

y6 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

sea, but in the early days of Babylonian history,
before the silting up of the shore, had been its sea-
port. Here the first man Adam1 was supposed to
have lived, and to have spent his time fishing in
the waters of the Gulf. The whole earth was believed
to have grown out of a primeval deep like the mud-
flats which the inhabitants of Eridu saw slowly
emerging from the retreating sea. Philosophy and
cosmology, with the theology with which they were
associated, looked back upon Eridu and the Baby-
lonian coast as their primeval home.2

In fact the physical conditions of the Babylonian
plain rendered it impossible for the first culture of
the country to have sprung up in it. Before it was
reclaimed by engineering skill and labour the larger
part of it had been a pestiferous marsh. The science
needed for making it habitable, at least by civilized
man, must have arisen outside its boundaries. Only
when he was already armed with a civilization which
enabled him to dig canals, to mould bricks, and pile
his houses and temples on artificial foundations could
the Sumerian have settled in the Babylonian plain
and there developed it still further. The cities of the
plain grew up each round its sanctuary, which became
a centre of civilization and progress, of agriculture
and trade. But the builders of the sanctuaries must
have brought their culture with them from elsewhere.

Of these sanctuaries the most venerable was that of
Bel the Elder at Nippur. It has been systematically
excavated by the Americans down to its founda-

1 For proof of this reading see Expository Times, xvii. p. 416
and note infra, p. 91.
2 See my Religions oj Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp. 373-84.

THE SUMERIANS yj

tions, and the successive strata of its history laid bare.
Inscribed objects have been found in all the strata,
carrying the history of the cuneiform system of writing
back to the days when the temple was originally built.
But it is still the cuneiform system of writing as far
back as we can go, that is to say the characters are
the cursive forms of earlier hieroglyphic pictures, the
features of which are in most cases scarcely traceable.
Here and there, it is true, the primitive pictorial form
has been preserved, but this is the exception and not
the rule. As a rule the earliest writing found at
Nippur, and coeval with the foundation of its temple,
is already the degenerated and cursive hand which
we call cuneiform.

The fact is very noteworthy. The cuneiform char-
acters have assumed the shapes which give them their
name owing to their having been inscribed on clay by
a stylus of wood or metal, which obliged the writer
to substitute a series of wedge-like indentations for
curves and straight lines. As time went on, the
number of the wedges was reduced, the forms of the
characters were simplified, and the resemblance to the
pictures they were once intended to represent became
more and more indistinct. The cuneiform script is,
in short, a running hand, like the hieratic of Egypt.
But whereas in Egypt the hieratic running hand
does not come into common use until long after
the beginning of the monumental period, while the
pictorial hieroglyphs continued to be employed to
the last, in Babylonia the cuneiform running hand
has superseded the primeval pictures as far back as
our records carry us. When the temple of Nippur
was built — and it was probably one of the first, if not

J% ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

the first, to be built in the Babylonian plain — the clay
tablet was already in use for writing purposes, and the
cursive cuneiform had taken the place of the older
hieroglyphs.

The Babylonian plain was called by its Sumerian
inhabitants the Edin, or " Plain," a name which was
borrowed by the Semites and has been made familiar
to us by the book of Genesis. Originally it had
meant all the uncultivated flats on either side of the
Euphrates, but it soon acquired the sense of the
country as opposed to the city, and so of the cultivated
plain itself. Most of the important Babylonian cities
were built in it between the Euphrates on the west
and the Tigris on the east. A few only lay beyond it
on the western bank of the Euphrates. One of these
was Eridu, another was Ur, a third was Borsippa.

Of Eridu I have already spoken. Some six or
eight thousand years ago it was the sea-port of
primitive Babylonia.1 Ur, which stood close to it,
seems to have been a colony of Nippur, and therefore
of comparatively late origin.2 Borsippa was a small
and unimportant town, which eventually became a
suburb of Babylon, and Babylon, on the eastern bank
of the Euphrates, was itself a colony of Eridu.3
Hence of the cities which stood outside the Edin of
Babylonia, and may therefore belong to an age when

1 Taylor found quantities of sea-shells in its ruins {Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society, xv. p. 412). At the time of its found-
ation an arm of the sea probably ran up to it from the south-east,
though the myth of Adamu describes him as fishing each day in
the waters of the actual Gulf, rather than in an arm of it.

2 The Moon-god of Ur was a " son " of El-lil, the god of
Nippur.

3 For proof of this see my Religion ojthe Ancient Babylonians^
p. 105.

______

THE SUMERIANS 79

Babylonian civilization was still in its infancy, Eridu
alone is of account. And the priority even of Eridu
was contested. Traditionally Sippara, which is ex-
pressly stated to have been in "the Edin," claimed
to be the oldest of Babylonian cities ; one quarter of it
bore the name of " Sippara that is from everlasting,"
and like Eridu, it believed itself to have been the abode
of the first man.1 Thus far, however, the monuments
have given us nothing to substantiate the claim; the
culture-god of Babylonia was Ea of Eridu, not the
Sun-god of Sippara, and for the present, therefore,
we must look to the shore of the Persian Gulf,
rather than to the " land of Eden " for the cradle of
Babylonian civilization.

At any rate, both Sippara and Eridu were of
Sumerian foundation, as indeed were nearly all the
great cities of Babylonia. Eridu was a later form of
the older Eri-dugga, "the good city," a name which
seems to have been the starting-point of more than
one legend. The growth of the coast to the south of
it gives us some idea as to the age to which its
foundation must reach back.

1 A tablet obtained by Dr. Hayes Ward divides Sippara into
four quarters, "Sippara of Eden," " Sippara that is from ever-
lasting," " Sippara of the Sun-god," and " Sippara," which may
be the " Sippara of Anunit" or "Sippara of Aruru," the creatress
of man, of other inscriptions. Amelon or Amelu, "man," who
corresponds with the Enos of Scripture, is said in the fragments
of Berossus to have belonged to Pantibibla, or " Book-town," and
since Euedoranchus of Pantibibla, the counterpart of the Biblical
Enoch, is the monumental Enme-dhur-anki of Sippara, it is
clear that Pantibibla is a play on the supposed signification of
Sippara (from sipru, " a writing " or " book "). The claim to
immemorial antiquity made on behalf of Sippara may be due
to the fact that Akkad, the seat of the first Semitic empire, was
either in the immediate neighbourhood of Sippara or another
name of one of the four quarters of Sippara itself.

80 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

It was, as I have said, the primitive sea-port of
Babylonia, and its legend of the first man Adamu
made him a fisherman in the Persian Gulf. Its site is
now rather more than a hundred miles distant from
the present line of coast. The progress of alluvial
deposit brought down by the Euphrates and Tigris can
be estimated by the fact that forty-seven miles of it
have been formed since Spasinus Charax, the modern
Mohammerah, was built in the age of Alexander
the Great, and was for a time the port of Chaldsea.
During the last 2000 years, accordingly, the rate of
deposit would seem to have been about 115 feet a
year. This, however, does not agree with the observa-
tions of Loftus, who made the rate not more than a
mile in every seventy years,1 while on the other hand
Sir Henry Rawlinson adduced reasons for believing it
to have been more rapid in the past than it is to-day,
and that consequently the rate must once have been
as much as a mile in thirty years.2 It is desirable

1 Chaldcea and Susiana, p. 282.

2 Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xxvii. p. 1 86.
Rawlinson calculated the rate of advance from that made by the
Babylonian Delta between 1793 and 1833. In the age of Strabo
and Arrian the Tigris and Euphrates were not yet united, while
in the time of Nearchus (B.C. 335) the mouth of the Euphrates
was 345 miles from Babylon. De Morgan calculates that
between the age of Nearchus and that of Sennacherib, when the
Euphrates had not yet joined the more rapid Tigris, the rate of
increase must have been much slower than it is to-day and have
not exceeded eighty metres a year. In the age of Sennacherib
Eridu was already seventy miles distant from the coast (de
Morgan, Metnoires de la Delegation en Perse, i. pp. 5-23).
The distance from the Shatt el-Arab (the united stream of the
Tigris and Euphrates) to the end of the alluvium in the Persian
Gulf is 277 kilometres, or 172 miles. Some idea of the appear-
ance of the coast in the Abrahamic age may be gained from the
map of the world drawn by a Babylonian tourist in the time of

THE SUMERIANS 8 1

that some competent geologist should study the
question on the spot. Taking, however, as a basis of
calculation, the one known fact of the rate of growth
since the foundation of Spasinus Charax, and bearing
in mind that before the junction of the Tigris and
Euphrates the rate of advance must have been
comparatively slow, we should have to go back to
about B.C. 5000 as the latest date at which Eridu
could still have been the sea-port of the country.

Was it here that the system of writing which was
so closely entwined with the origin of Babylonian
civilization was first invented ? Babylonian tradition
in later days certainly believed that such was the case,
and the fact that Ea of Eridu was the culture-god of
Babylonia is strongly in its favour. But there are
difficulties in the way. Eridu was the home of the
" white witchcraft " of early Chaldaea ; it was here
that the charms and incantations were composed
which gave the priesthood of Eridu its influence, and
made the god they worshipped the impersonation of
wisdom. The belief that he was the originator of
Babylonian culture may have had its source in the
system of magic which was associated with his name.
Eridu was built on the Semitic side of the Euphrates,
and the Semitic tribes who received their letters and
their civilization from the Sumerians of Eridu would
naturally have looked upon the city of their teachers
as the primeval home of Sumerian culture. The
traditions that made Eridu the starting-point of
Sumerian civilization could thus be explained away,

Khammu-rabi which I have published in the Expository Times,
November 1906.

F

82 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

and we should be left free to settle the question of its
origin upon purely archaeological evidence.

Unfortunately the site of Eridu has not yet been
systematically excavated. Once again the archaeo-
logical materials for settling an archaeological ques-
tion are not at hand, and we are thrown back upon an
examination of the picture-writing from which the
cuneiform characters are derived. Here the evidence
on the whole may be said to be in favour of tradition.
It is true that there is no special ideograph for " river,"
but there is one for " the deep," and " the spirit of the
deep " must have been a chief object of worship at the
time when the primitive hieroglyphs were first formed.
The " ship," too, played a prominent part in the life of
their inventors, and the picture of it represented it as
moved not by oars but by a sail.1 The flowering
reed was equally prominent, and was even used to
symbolize what stood firm and established.2 Houses,
fortresses, temples, and cities were built of brick,
and vases were moulded out of clay.3 The tablet,
rectangular or square, was already employed for the
purpose of writing, but as it was provided with a

1 There is a striking resemblance between the primitive
Babylonian picture of a boat and the sailing boat depicted on
the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, for which last see Capart, Les
Debuts de FArt en Egypte, p. 1 16.

2 Perhaps, however, this was really due to the accidental
similarity of sound between gz, "a reed," and gin, "to be
firm."

3 The various forms of vases represented in the early
pictography are given by de Morgan in a very instructive
article, " Sur les procedes techniques en usage chez les scribes
babyloniens," in the Recueil des Travaux relatifs a la Philologie
et a FArche'ologie e'gyptiennes et assyrie tines, xxvii. 3, 4 (1905).
Among special vases were those for oil, wine and honey. The
butter or oil jar was closed with a clay sealing exactly like those
of early Egypt. Vases with spouts were also used.

THE SUMERIANS 83

handle or a couple of rings at the top, 1 think it was
more probably of wood than of clay. The sheep,
goat and ox were domesticated,1 and so also probably
was the ass,2 and corn was cultivated in the fields.
The symbol of the " earth " appears to have been the
picture of an island of circular or elliptical form.
Among trees the cedar was well known.

All this points to the sea-coast of Babylonia as the
district in which its civilization first arose. But on
the other hand, there is the fact that "country" and
" mountain " are alike represented by the picture of a
mountainous land. There is also the fact that the
land in which the inventors of the hieroglyphs lived
was one in which copper, gold and silver were pro-
curable— perhaps also meteoric iron ; and the further
fact that hard wood was sufficiently plentiful for tools
or weapons to have been made of it before the employ-
ment of metal. That they should have been made of
wood, however, and not of stone, is a strong argument
in favour of the Babylonian coast.

It is on wood, moreover, that the first hieroglyphs
must have been painted or cut. Many of them repre-
sented round objects or were formed of curved lines,
which were transformed into a series of wedge-like
indentations when imprinted by a stylus upon clay.
We know, therefore, that clay was not the original
writing material ; its use as such, in fact, is coeval
with the rise of that cursive script which, in the case

1 The American excavations at Askabad have shown that the
domestication of animals, including the camel, took place during
the neolithic age, the goat being one of the last to be tamed.

2 This, however, is not absolutely certain, since the ideograph
which denotes an "ass" originally signified merely "a yoked
beast."

84 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, is called hieratic, but
in Assyro-Babylonian is known as cuneiform. It
was the attempt to reproduce the old pictures upon
clay that created the cuneiform characters. As metal
is not likely to have been employed by the primitive
scribes of Chaldaea, and there is no trace of stone
having been used — even the stone cylinder of later
days being called a dup-sar or " written tablet " — we
are left to choose between wood and papyrus. In
favour of papyrus is the fact that the circular forms of
so many of the pictures suggest that they were
originally painted rather than engraved ; on the other
hand, it is doubtful whether the papyrus grows in the
Babylonian rivers, or at any rate did so in the
prehistoric age. And the pictograph of a "written
document " is not a strip or roll of papyrus, as in
Egypt, but a tablet with a handle or loop. It is true
that the primeval picture which denoted "copper"
has much the same form, but as even cutting instru-
ments had the determinative of " wood " attached to
them in the early picture writing, it is clear that the
original tablet could not have been of metal, whatever
might have been the case with its later successors.
The picture, moreover, of the " tablet " is distinguished
from that of a " plate of bronze " by the addition of a
string which is tied to the handle.

On the whole, therefore, the only archaeological
evidence available at present is on the side of the
tradition which made Babylonian culture move north-
ward from the coast. The only fact against it of
which I know is that, as I have already stated, the
word for land was symbolized by the picture of a
triple mountain. But this fact is not insuperable.

THE SUMERIANS 85

Before the silting up of the shore, the old coast-line of
Babylonia would have stretched away north-eastward
of Eridu towards the mountains of Elam. Whether
the mountains that fringed what would then have
been the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf are visible
from the site of Eridu, I do not know ; if the clear
light of Upper Egypt exists there they would be so.
Nor do I know whether on the western side there are
mountain ranges visible in Arabia ; these are points
which can be cleared up only when the country has
been thoroughly explored.

Eridu lay five miles southward of Ur,1 that " Ur of
the Chaldees " from which Hebrew history affirmed
the ancestor of the nation had come. Ur was never a
maritime port like Eridu ; it stood on the Arabian
plateau and looked towards the west. Its face was
turned to the Semitic rather than to the Sumerian
world. From the first, therefore, it must have been in
touch with Semitic tribes. And a curious reminiscence
of the fact survived in the western Semitic languages.
Ur or Uru signifies " the city " ; it was a Sumerian
word, another form of which was eri. The word was
borrowed by the Semites, and in the Hebrew of the
Old Testament, accordingly, the idea of "city" is
expressed by lir. The Assyrians of the north, whose
vocabulary was otherwise so full of Sumerian loan-
words, preferred the native dlu, " a tent," to which the
meaning of "city" was assigned when Sumerian
culture had been passed on to the Semitic race and
the tent had been exchanged for the city. The history
of the word is a history of early culture as well.

But I am far from saying that it was through Ur that
1 Peters, Nippur, ii. p. 299.

86 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

the civilization of Sumer came to be handed on to its
Semitic neighbours. On the contrary, such facts as
there are point in a different direction. Western
Semites, whom linguistically we may call Arabs or
Aramaeans, or Canaanites or Hebrews, doubtless
mingled with the Sumerian population of Ur, and
adopted more or less of its manners and civilization,
but it was further north, in the Babylonian Eden
itself, that the Semite first came under the influence
of the higher culture, and soon outstripped his masters
in the arts of life.

The entrance of the Semitic element into Babylonia
is at present one of the most obscure of problems.
All we can be sure of are certain main facts. First
of all, as we have seen, the early culture of Babylonia,
including so integral a part of it as the script, was of
Sumerian origin. So, too, were the great cities and
sanctuaries of the country, as well as the system of
irrigation engineering which first made it habitable.
Sumerian long continued to be the language of
theology and law ; indeed a large part of the Baby-
lonian pantheon of later days was frankly non-Semitic.
As was inevitable under such conditions, the Assyrian
language contained an immense number of words —
many of them compound — which were borrowed from
the older language, and its idioms and grammar
equally showed signs of Sumerian influence. I have
sometimes been tempted, from a scientific point of
view, to speak of Semitic Babylonian as a mixed
language.

On the other hand, if the elements of Babylonian
civilization were Sumerian, the superstructure was
Semitic. When the Semites entered into the heritage

THE SUMERIANS 87

of Sumerian culture, the cuneiform script must have
still been in a very inchoate and immature state. Its
pictorial ancestry must still have been clear, and no
scruples were felt about altering or adding to the
characters. The phonetic application of the characters,
which was still in its initial stage in the Sumerian
period, was developed and carried to perfection by
the Semitic scribes, and a very considerable propor-
tion of their values and ideographic meanings is of
Semitic derivation. The theological system was
transformed, and a new literature and a new art
came into existence. As Sumerian words had been
borrowed by the Semites, so, too, Semitic words were
borrowed by the Sumerians, and it is possible that
examples of them may occur in some of the
oldest Sumerian texts known to us.1 The Baby-
lonians of history, in short, were a mixed people;
and their culture and language were mixed like
our own.

This, then, is one main fact. A second is that the
Semitic element first comes to the front in the
northern part of Babylonia. It is in Akkad, and not
in Sumer, that the first Semitic Empire — that of
Sargon the Elder, B.C. 3800 — had its seat, and old as
that empire is, it presupposes a long preceding period
of Semitic settlement and advance in power and
civilization. The cuneiform system of writing is
already complete and has ceased to be Sumerian,

1 Thus in the great historical inscription of Entemena, King
of Lagas (B.C. 4000), M. Thureau Dangin is probably right
in seeing in datn-kha-ra (col. i. 26) a Semitic word. In fact
where a word is written syllabically, that is to say phonetically,
in a Sumerian text there is an a priori probability that it is a
loan-word.

88 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

archive-chambers of Semitic literature are founded,
and Semitic authority is firmly established from Susa
in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. Art is
no longer Sumerian, and in the hands of the Semitic
subjects of Saigon and his son Naram-Sin has reached
a perfection which in certain directions was never
afterwards surpassed. The engraved seal-cylinders
of the period are the finest that we possess. Naturally
the Semitic language has superseded the Sumerian in
official documents, and the physical type as repre-
sented on the monuments is also distinctly Semitic.
At the beginning of the fourth millennium before our
era, the civilization and culture of Northern Babylonia
have thus ceased to be Sumerian, and the sceptre has
fallen into the hands of a Semitic race.

But there is a third fact. The displacement of the
Sumerian by the Semite was the case only in Northern
Babylonia. In the south, in the land of Sumer, the
older population continued to be dominant. Sumerian
dynasties continued to rule there from time to time,
and the old agglutinative language continued to be
spoken. When a West-Semitic dynasty governed
the country about B.C. 2200, state proclamations and
similar official documents had still to be drawn up in
the two languages, Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian.
Sumerian did not become extinct till a later day.
Indeed, after the fall of the empire of Sargon of Akkad
there seems to have been a Sumerian reaction. While
Susa was lost to the Semites and became the capital
of a non-Semitic people who spoke an agglutinative
language, the power of the Sumerian princes in
Southern Babylonia appears to have revived. At all
events even the dynasty which followed that of the

THE SEAL OP SHARGANI-SHAR-AL] (SARGOM OE \KK\1>): GILGAMES WATERS
I Hi: CELESTIAL OX.

^OspToIa,!

v-

BAS-RELIEF OF X ARAM-SIN.

[To face p. 88.

THE SUMERIANS 89

West-Semites bore Sumerian names.1 It was only
under the foreign domination of the Kassites,
apparently, who governed Babylonia for nearly 600
years, that the Sumerian element finally became
merged in the Semitic and the Babylonian of later
history was born.

The last fact is that while what we call Assyrian
is Semitic Babylonian with a few dialectal variations,
it stands apart from the other Semitic languages. A
scientific comparison of its grammar with those of the
sister-tongues leads us to believe that it represents
one of the two primeval dialects of the Semitic
family of speech, the other dialect being that which
subsequently split up into the varying dialects of
Canaanite or Hebrew, Arabic, South-Arabic and
Aramaean — or, adopting the genealogical form of
linguistic relationship, Assyro-Babylonian would have
been one daughter of the primitive parent-speech,
while the other daughter comprised the remaining
Semitic languages.2 There are two conclusions to be
drawn from this; one is that the Babylonian Semites
must have separated from their kinsfolk and come
under Sumerian influence at a very early period, the
other that they moved northward, along the banks of
the Tigris into Assyria.

With these two inferences we have to be content.
Upon the first home of the Semitic race or its
affinities with other branches of the white race,

1 This may of course have been only a literary archaism.
But if the kings were really of Semitic origin, it is difficult to
understand why they should have been ashamed of being called
by their native Semitic names.

2 See Hommel, Grundriss der Geographic und Geschichte
des Alien Orients, i. pp. 79-82.

90 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Babylonia can naturally throw no light. The earliest
glimpses we catch of the Semites of Babylonia are
those of a people who have already come under the
influences of Sumerian civilization, who are mingling
with their teachers and helping with them to build
up the stately edifice of historical Babylonia. There
were ruder Semitic tribes, it is true, who continued
to live their own nomad life on the western bank of
the Euphrates or in the marshes that bordered the
Persian Gulf. But like the Bedawin of to-day on the
outskirts of Egypt they were little, if at all, affected
by the civilization at their sides. They remained the
same wild savages of the desert as their descendants
who encamp in the swamps of modern Babylonia;
they neither traded nor tilled the ground, and the
language they spoke was not the same as that of their
Babylonian kindred. They served, however, as the
herdsmen and shepherds of their Babylonian neigh-
bours, and the vast flocks whose wool was so
important an article of Babylonian trade, were en-
trusted to their care. But Bedawin they were born,
and Bedawin they continued to be.

Even the Aramaean tribes of the coast-land kept
apart from the Babylonians, whether Sumerian or
Semitic, until the day when one of their tribes, the
Kalda or Chaldeans, made themselves masters of
Babylon under their prince Merodach-baladan, and
from henceforward became an integral factor in the
Babylonian population. They must have settled on
the borders of Babylonia at a comparatively late date,
when Semitic Babylonian had definitely marked
itself off from its sister-tongues and the Babylonian
Semite had acquired distinctive characteristics of his

THE SUMERIANS 9 1

own. The West-Semitic elements in the population
of Babylonia could have entered the country only
long after the mixture of Sumerian and Semite had
produced the Babylonian of history.

The Babylonian of history came to forget that he
had ever had another fatherland than the Babylonian
plain, the Eden of the Old Testament, the land whose
southern border was formed by " the salt river " or
Persian Gulf of early Sumerian geography, with its
four branches which were themselves " heads." Here
the first man Adamu x had been created in Eridu,
" the good city," and here therefore the Babylonian
Semite placed the home of the first ancestor of his
race. But it was a borrowed belief, borrowed along
with the other elements of Babylonian culture, and no
argument can be drawn from it as to the actual
cradle of the Semitic race. Like the story of the
deluge, it was part of the Sumerian heritage into
which the Semite had entered.

1 Hitherto read A-da-pa. But the character PA had the
value of mu when it signified "man," according to a tablet
quoted by Fossey, Contribution au Dictionnaire Sumirien-
assyrienne, No. 2656, and in writing early Babylonian names or
words the characters with the requisite phonetic values were
selected which harmonized ideographically with the sense of
the words. Thus out of the various characters which had the
phonetic value of mu that was chosen which denoted " man "
when the name of the first man was needed to be written. The
Semitic Adamu, which M. Thureau Dangin has found used as
a proper name in tablets from Tello of the age of Sargon of
Akkad, was borrowed from the Sumerian adatn, which signified
"animal," and then, more specifically "man." Thus in the
bilingual story of the creation we have (1. 9) uru nu-dim adam
nu-mun-ya, " a city was not built, a man was not made to stand
upright," and a list of slaves published by Dr. Scheil {Recueil
de Travaux, etc., xx. p. 65) is dated in "the year when Rim-
Anum the king (conquered) the land of . . . bi and its inhabitants"
(adam-bi). See above, p. 76.

92 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

The Semitic tradition which made the first man a
tiller of the ground may also have been borrowed
from the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia. At all
events it is significant that the garden in which he
was placed was in the land of Eden, and that the
picture of a garden or plantation is one of the
primitive hieroglyphs of Sumer. The beginnings of
Babylonian civilization were bound up with the
cultivation of the Babylonian soil ; the reclamation
of the great alluvial plain was at once the effect
and the cause of Sumerian culture. Sumerian cul-
ture, in fact, was at the outset essentially that of
an agricultural people.

Trade would have come later, when Eridu had
become a seaport, and ships ventured on the waters
of the Persian Gulf. It grew up under the shelter
of the great sanctuaries. Supported at first by the
labour of their serfs, the priests in time came to
exchange their surplus revenues — the wool of their
sheep, the wheat and sesame of their fields, or the
wine yielded by their palms — for other commodities,
and the temples themselves formed safe and capacious
store-houses in which such goods could be kept. In
the historical period Babylonia is already a great
trading community, and as the centuries passed trade
absorbed more and more the energies of its popula-
tion, agriculture fell into the background, and the
Babylonia conquered by Cyrus could be described
with truth as "a nation of shopkeepers." Even the
crown prince was a merchant who dealt in wool.1

The increasing preponderance of trade goes along
with the increasing preponderance of the Semitic
1 Records of the Fast, New Series, iii. pp. 124-7.

THE SUMERIANS 93

element in the country, and it is tempting to sup-
pose that there was a connection between the two.
At present, however, there is no positive evidence
that such was the case. Nor is there any positive
evidence that the Semites who settled in Babylonia
were not already agriculturists. The circumstances
in which a people lives are mainly responsible
for its being agricultural or pastoral, and the fact
that the Bedawin neighbours of the Babylonians on
the western side of the Euphrates remained a pastoral
race does not exclude the possibility that there were
other branches of the Semitic family who had already
passed out of the pastoral into the agricultural stage
before coming into contact with the Sumerians. On
the other hand, it is at least noticeable that in Semitic
Babylonian the usual word for " city " continued to
be one which properly meant a " tent " — the home of
the pastoral nomad — and that no Semitic traditions
have come down to us of the beginnings of agri-
cultural life outside the limits of the Babylonian
" Plain." The title of " Shepherd," moreover, was
at times given to the Babylonian kings in days
subsequent to the Semitic Empire of Sargon of
Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to judge,
city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive
Semitic nomad.1

To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown
in my Lectures on Babylonian religion,2 we must
ascribe an important theological conception. In

1 Erech was one of the earliest of the Semitic settlements in
the Babylonian plain, and Erech was known later as 'supuru,
" the sheepfold," as is shown by its ideographic equivalent.

2 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp. 276-
80.

94 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in
the form of man. Man was created in the image
of God because the gods themselves were men. But
the conception cannot be traced back further than
the age when the Sumerians and Semites came into
contact with one another. In pre-Semitic Sumer there
are no anthropomorphic gods. We hear, instead, of
the zi or " spirit," a word properly signifying " life "
which manifested itself in the power of motion. All
things that moved were possessed of life, and there
was accordingly a " life " or " spirit " of the water
as well as of man or beast. In place of the divine
" lord of heaven " whom the Semites adored there
was " a spirit of heaven " ; in place of Ea, the later
Babylonian god of the deep, there was "a spirit of
the abyss." Sumerian theology, in fact, was still on
the level of animism, and the inventors of the script
represented the idea of " god " by the picture of
a star. Vestiges of the old animism can still be
detected even in the later cult : by the side of the
human gods an Assyrian prayer invokes the moun-
tains, the rivers and the winds, and from time to
time we come across a worship of deified towns. It
was the town itself that was divine, not the deity
to whom its chief temple was dedicated. So, again,
the god or goddess continued to be symbolized by
some sacred animal or object whose figure appears
upon seals and boundary-stones, and in some cases
we learn that the Sumerian prototypes of the later
Babylonian divinities bore such names as "the
gazelle," "the antelope" or "the bull."

With the advent of the Semite all is changed.
The gods have become men and women with in-

THE SUMERIANS 95

tensified powers and the gift of immortality, but in
all other respects they live and act like the men and
women of this nether world. Like them, too, they
are born and married, and the court of the early
prince finds its counterpart in the divine court of
the supreme Bel, or " Lord." The Semitic god of
Babylon was " lord of gods " and men, of heaven
and earth ; Assur of Assyria was " king of the
gods " and lord of " the heavenly hosts."

It was natural that, corresponding with this lord
of the heavenly hosts, there should be a lord of the
hosts of earth, and that as the divine king was clothed
in the attributes of man, the human king should take
upon him the divine nature. Like the Pharaohs of
Egypt or the emperors of Rome, the early kings
of Semitic Babylonia were deified. And the deifi-
cation took place during their life-time, — in fact, so
far as we can judge, upon their accession to the
throne. In the eyes of their subjects they were
incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions they give
themselves the title of god. One of them is even
called " the god " of Akkad, his capital.1

Here, then, in the conception of the divine, we
have a clear dividing line between the Semite and
his non-Semitic predecessor. So far back as the
cuneiform monuments allow us to carry his history,
the Semite is anthropomorphic. As a consequence,
the gods he worships conform to the social conditions
under which he lives. In the desert the sacred stone
becomes " the temple of the god " ; in the organized
monarchy of Babylonia each deity takes his appointed

1 See my Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp.
276-89, 348-61.

96 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

place in an imperial court. Under the one supreme
ruler there are princes and sub-princes, vice-regents
and generals, while angel-messengers carry the com-
mands of Bel to his subjects on earth, like the
messengers who carried the letters of the Babylonian
king along the high-roads of the empire. On the
other hand, the earthly king receives his power and
attributes from the god whose adopted son and repre-
sentative he claims to be. Nowhere has " the divine
right of kings" been more fully insisted on than in
ancient Babylonia. The laws of the monarch had
to be obeyed, foreign nations had to become his
vassals, because he was a god on earth as the supreme
Bel was god in heaven.

But the reflection of the divine upon the human
brought with it not only the exaltation of sovereignty,
but also the rise of a priesthood. There were priests
of a sort in Sumer of whom many different classes are
enumerated. But when we examine the signification
of the names attached to them we find that they were
not priests in the true sense of the word. They were
rather magicians, sorcerers, wizards, masters of charms.
They do not develop into priests until after the Semite
has entered upon the scene. The god and the priest
make their appearance together.

I do not think, however, that we are justified in
concluding that the elaborate hierarchy of Babylonia
was of purely Semitic origin. On the contrary, like
the theological system with which it was associated, it
was a composite product. Behind the gods and god-
desses of Semitic Babylonia lay the primitive " spirits "
and fetishes of Sumer ; its mythology and cosmo-
logical theories rested on Sumerian foundations ; and

THE SUMERIANS 97

in the same way the priestly hierarchy was the result
of a racial amalgamation in which the Semitic element
had adopted and adapted the ideas and institutions of
the older people. We do not find the theology and
priesthood of Babylonia among other Semitic popula-
tions, except where they had been borrowed from the
Babylonians (as in Assyria) ; in the form in which
we know them they were peculiarly and distinctively
Babylonian. Like the language of Semitic Babylonia,
which is permeated with Sumerian elements, or the
script, which is a Semitic adaptation of the Sumerian
system of writing, they presuppose a mixture of race.
The priesthood eventually proved irreconcilable
with "the divine right" of the monarch, though both
alike had the same origin. The priests prevailed over
the king, and as in England the doctrine of divine
right was unable to survive the accession of a German
line of princes, so in Babylonia the accession of a
foreign, non-Semitic dynasty (that of the Kassites)
dealt a death-blow to the belief in a deified king.
The king became merely the representative and
deputy of the divine " Lord " of heaven, deriving his
right to rule from his adoption by the god as a son ;
Bel-Merodach came to be regarded as the true ruler of
Babylonia, lord of the earth as well as of the heavens,
and a theocratic state affords but little room for a
secular king. The priests of Bel decided whom their
god should recognize or not, and little by little the
controlling power of the state passed into their hands
It was in a sense a triumph for the non-Semitic
element in the population. While the deification of
the sovereign may be said to have been purely Semitic
in its origin, the necessary corollary of an anthro-

G

98 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

pomorphic conception of the deity, the supernatural
powers supposed to be inherent in the priesthood went
back to Sumerian times. It was because he had once
been a master of spells that the priest of the anthro-
pomorphic god could influence the spiritual world.
The final triumph of the theocratic principle in Baby-
lonia, where the Semite had been so long dominant,
showed that the old racial element was still strong,
and ready to reassert itself when the favourable
moment arrived. Such, indeed, is generally the history
of a mixed people : the conquering or immigrant race
may seem to have suppressed or absorbed the earlier
population of the country, but as generations pass the
foreign element becomes weaker, and the nation in
greater or less degree reverts to the older type.

NOTE

So far as the primitive culture of Sumer may be
recovered from such of the primitive pictographs as can
be at present identified, it may be described as follows.
The inventors of them lived on the sea-coast within
sight of mountains, but in a marshy district where reeds
abounded. Trees also grew there, and the cedar was
known. Stone was scarce, but was already cut into
blocks and seals. Tablets were used for writing pur-
poses, and copper, gold and silver were worked by the
smith. Daggers with metal blades and wooden handles
were worn, and copper was hammered into plates, while
necklaces or collars were made of gold. Brick was
the ordinary building material, and with it cities, forts,
temples and houses were constructed. The city was
provided with towers and stood on an artificial plat-

THE SUMERIANS 99

form ; the house also had a tower-like appearance. It
was provided with a door which turned on a hinge,
and could be opened with a sort of key ; the city gate
was on a larger scale, and seems to have been double.
By the side of the house was an enclosed garden planted
with trees and other plants ; wheat and probably
other cereals were sown in the fields, and the shaduf
was already employed for the purpose of irrigation.
Plants were also grown in pots or vases. That floods
took place is evident from the existence of a picto-
graph denoting "inundation," and representing a fish
left stranded above the foliage of a tree. Canals or
aqueducts had already been dug. The sheep, goat,
ox and probably ass had been domesticated, the ox
being used for draught, and woollen clothing as well as
rugs were made from the wool or hair of the two first.
A feathered head-dress was worn on the head. Beds,
stools and chairs were used, with carved legs resembling
those of an ox. There were fire-places and fire-altars,
and apparently chimneys also. Pottery was very
plentiful, and the forms of the vases, bowls and dishes
were manifold ; there were special jars for honey,
butter, oil and wine, which was probably made from
dates, and one form of vase had a spout protruding
from its side. Some of the vases had pointed feet,
and stood on stands with crossed legs ; others were
flat-bottomed, and were set on square or rectangular
frames of wood. The oil-jars — and probably others
also — were sealed with clay, precisely as in early
Egypt. Vases and dishes of stone were made in
imitation of those of clay, and baskets were woven of
reeds or formed of leather. Knives, drills, wedges and
an instrument which looks like a saw were all known,

100 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

while bows, arrows and daggers (but not swords nor,
probably, spears) were employed in war. Time was
reckoned in lunar months. Sacred cakes were offered
to the gods, whose images were symbolized some-
times by a bearded human head with a feather crown,
sometimes by a two-legged table of offerings on which
stand two vases (of incense ?). Demons were feared
who had wings like a bird, and the foundation stones
— or rather bricks — of a house were consecrated by
certain objects that were deposited under them. A
"year" was denoted by the branch of a tree, as in
Egypt, and a " name " by a bird placed over the
sacred table of offerings. The country was full of
snakes and other creeping things, and wild beasts
lurked in the jungle. The pictographs were read
from left to right, and various expedients were devised
for making them express ideas. Thus mud, "to
beget," was denoted by the picture of a bird dropping
an egg. At other times the pictograph was used to
express an idea, the pronunciation of which was the
same as that of the object which it represented. The
bent knee, for example, was used to express dug or
tuk, " to have," since it represented a " knee," which
was called dug in Sumerian.

CHAPTER IV

THE RELATION OF BABYLONIAN TO EGYPTIAN
CIVILIZATION

In dealing with the question of origins, science is
constantly confronted with the problem of unity or
polygeneity. Has language one origin or many ; are
the various races of mankind traceable to one ancestor
or to several ? Do the older civilizations presuppose
the same primeval starting-point, or were there
independent centres of culture which grew up un-
known to one another in different parts of the world ?
Under the influences of theology the belief long
prevailed that they were all sprung from the same
source ; of late the tendency has been in an opposite
direction. While the biologist has inclined to a belief
in the unity of species, the anthropologist has seen
reason to maintain the diversity of origin in culture.

The two earliest civilizations with which we are
acquainted were those of Babylonia and Egypt. To
a certain extent the conditions under which they both
arose were similar. They grew up alike on the banks
of great rivers and in a warm, though not tropical,
climate. They rested, moreover, on organized systems
of agriculture, which again had been made possible by
irrigation engineering. In Babylonia the first settlers
had found a plain which was little more than a swamp,

IOI

IC2 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

over which the swollen streams of the Euphrates and
Tigris wandered at will during the annual period of
inundation, and which needed engineering works on a
large scale before it could be made habitable. The
rivers had to be confined within their channels by means
of embankments, and canals had to be cut in order to
draw off the surplus supply of water and regulate its
distribution to the land. While the swamp was thus
being made possible for habitation, the population
must have lived on the edge of the desert plateau
which bordered it, and have there developed a
civilization which not only produced the engineers and
their science, but also the concentrated authority
which enabled the science to be utilized.

In Egypt it was the banks and delta of the Nile
which took the place of the Babylonian plain. Recent
discoveries have shown that in the prehistoric age,
when the natives still lived in the desert and led a
pastoral life, all this was a morass, the haunt of beasts
of prey and venomous reptiles. But here again the
swamp was rendered habitable by engineering works
similar to those of primeval Babylonia. The swamp
was transformed into fertile fields, the annual flood of
the river was regulated, and an elaborate network of
canals and embankments spread over the country.
The pastoral nomads of the neolithic age became
agriculturists, or were employed in constructing and
repairing the works of irrigation, or in erecting monu-
mental buildings for their rulers. There is evidence
of the same centralized government, the same directing
brain and organizing force that there is in primitive
Babylonia.

Is it possible that two systems of engineering science,

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 103

so similar in their objects, their methods and their
results, should have been invented independently in
two different countries ? There are scholars who answer
in the negative. But the possibility cannot be denied,
since an even more elaborate system of irrigation was
invented in China without any suggestion, as far as
we know, from outside. The geographical conditions
of Babylonia and Egypt, moreover, resemble one
another, and the question of draining the swamps and
regulating the overflow of the rivers once raised, the
answer to it seems fairly obvious. By itself, therefore,
the fact that the cultures of ancient Babylonia and
Egypt alike rested on a similar system of irrigation
engineering would be no proof of their common
origin.

In some respects the problem which the Babylonian
engineers were called upon to solve was more difficult
than that which faced the Egyptians. The Nile is
fed by the rains and melting snows of Abyssinia and
Central Africa, and its annual inundation takes place
in the later summer months. The Euphrates and
Tigris flow from the north, from the highlands of
Armenia, and are at their fullest in the spring. Their
overflow accordingly comes just before the summer
heats, when agriculture is difficult or impossible, where-
as in Egypt the period of inundation ushers in the
most favourable time of the year for the growth of the
crops. What the Babylonian engineers had to do
was not only to drain off the overflow, but also to store
it for use at least six months later. With them it was
a question of storage as well as of regulation.

Those then, who believe that the engineering sciences
of the Babylonians and Egyptians were no independent

104 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

inventions are bound to see in Babylonia their original
home. It would have been here that the great
problems were solved, the practical application of
which to the needs of Egypt would have been a
comparatively simple matter. On the chronological
side there would be no difficulties in such a view. Old
as was the civilization of Egypt, the excavations in
Babylonia have made it clear that the civilization of
Babylonia was at least equally old. At Nippur the
American excavators claim to have found inscribed
remains which reach back for nearly ten thousand
years, and though the data upon which this calculation
is based may be disputable, it is certain that the
earliest monuments met with are of immense age.
And it must be remembered that they belong to a
time when the early pictorial writing had already
passed into a cursive script, and the plain of
Babylonia had been a land of cultivated fields for
unnumbered generations.

But by itself, I repeat, the practical identity of
engineering science in primeval Babylonia and Egypt
is no proof that it had been learnt by the one from
the other. If we are to fall back on the old belief
which brought the civilized population of Egypt from
the plain of Shinar, it must be for reasons which are
supported by archaeological facts. If such archaeo-
logical facts exist, the parallel systems of irrigation
engineering will be additional evidence; alone, they
prove nothing.

At the outset we are met by a fact which personally
I find it hard to explain away. The hieroglyphic
script of Egypt has little in common with the
primitive pictorial characters of Babylonia. Objects

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 105

and ideas like ''the sun," " man," "number one," will
be represented by the same pictures or symbols all
the world over, and consequently the fact that in both
Babylonian and Egyptian writing the sun is denoted
by a circle and the moon by a crescent is of no
significance whatsoever. But when we turn to less
obvious symbols there is comparatively little similarity
between the two forms of script. The ideograph of
" god," for example, is a star in Babylonia, a stone axe
and its shaft in Egypt ; " life " is represented by a
flowering reed in the one case, by a knotted girdle in
the other. It is true that Professor Hommel and
others have pointed to a few coincidences like those
between the Egyptian symbol for " foreign land " and
the Babylonian ideograph of" country," or between the
Egyptian and Babylonian signs for " city," " place,"
but such coincidences are rare.1 As a rule, as soon
as we leave the more obvious conventions of pictorial
writing little or no connection can be traced between
the pictorial characters of Egypt and those of
Babylonia. As a whole the two graphic systems stand
apart.

Nevertheless I am bound to add that it is only as a
whole that they do so. With all the general unlikeness
there is a curious similarity in a few — a very few —
instances which it is difficult to interpret as merely
the result of accident. The round circle with lines

1 If, however, the Sumerian pictograph for " city " represents a
tower on a mound, as seems to be the case, the identity in form
of the Egyptian hieroglyph cannot be an accident, since both the
tower and the artificial platform were essentially Babylonian.
In the cursive cuneiform two separate pictographs have coalesced,
one representing a seat, the other what appears to be a tower on
a mound.

106 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

inside it which denotes "a city" in Egyptian might be
explained from the circular villages which still
characterize Central Africa ; but then how is it that
the ideograph for "place" in the pictorial script of
Babylonia had precisely the same form ? That the
word for "country" should be denoted in the
Babylonian script by the picture of three mountain
peaks may be due to the fact that to the Babylonian
" country " and " mountain " were the same ; but such
an explanation fails us in the case of the Egyptian
hieroglyph of " foreign land," where the three peaks
appear again, since the hieroglyph for " mountain "
in Egyptian has but two. The picture of a seat, and
a seat, too, of peculiar shape, represents " place " in
Egyptian ; in Babylonian the same picture represents
" city," thus inverting the ideographic signification of
the picture which in Egyptian and Babylonian has
respectively the meanings of " city " and " place."
Between the primitive Babylonian picture of a "ship"
and the boats depicted in the prehistoric pottery of
Egypt, again, the resemblance is very exact, and
Professor Hommel has pointed out to me a curious
likeness between the original form of the Babylonian
ideograph for " a personal name " and the ka-sign with
the Horus-hawk above it within which the names
of the earliest Pharaohs are inscribed.1 Indeed the

1 In Egyptian, however, the bird stands over a door, while in
Babylonian it is over the two-legged stool on which two vases of
offerings are set when it is used to denote the image of a god.
The Sumerian pictograph for " (divine) lord " or " lady " (nin)
is the representation of a similar vase on a mat, and thus has
the same form as the Egyptian hotep. The Egyptian nefer,
"good," finds its exact counterpart in the Babylonian pictograph
of "ornament " (me-Te). The Babylonian " house," too, is given
the same tower-like shape as the Egyptian {aha).

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION IO7

learned and ingenious Munich Professor has made
out a list of even more striking coincidences, where
the characters agree not only in sense but also in the
phonetic values attached to them.1

Here, however, we trench on another question, the
philological position of the Egyptian language.
Egyptian scholars to-day are practically unanimous in
believing it to belong, more or less remotely, to the
Semitic family of speech. The Berlin school of
Egyptologists, who under the guidance of Professor
Erman have made Egyptian grammar a special
subject of investigation, are largely responsible for the
dominance of this belief. I ought to be the last
person in the world to protest against it, seeing that I
maintained it years ago when the patronage of the
Berlin Egyptologists had not yet made it fashionable.
At the same time I confess that I cannot • follow
the Berlin philologists to the extent to which they
would have us go. For them the old Egyptian
language is not related to the Semitic family of speech
" more or less remotely," but very closely indeed. In-
deed in their hands it becomes itself a Semitic language,
and as a logical consequence the Egyptian script is
metamorphosed into one of purely Semitic invention.
But while admitting that Egyptian grammar is Semitic
in the sense in which English grammar is Teutonic,
the comparative philologist is bound to add that it
contains much which cannot be reduced to a Semitic

1 In a short Paper entitled Lexicalische Belege zu mei'nen
Vortrag iiber die sprachliche Striking des Altccgyptischen (1895),
in which he has attempted to draw up a list of phonetic
equivalences between Egyptian and Sumerian. In this, how-
ever, I am unable to follow him, as his comparisons of Egyptian
and Sumerian words are not convincing.

108 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

pattern. The structure, moreover, is not on the whole
Semitic, neither is a large part of its vocabulary. And
among the words in the lexicon which have Semitic
affinities there are a good many which are better
explained as the result of borrowing than as belong-
ing to the original stratum of the language. In some
cases they are demonstrably words which have been
introduced into the Egyptian language at a late date ;
in other cases it seems possible to regard them as loan-
words from Semitic Babylonian which entered the
language at a "pre-dynastic " epoch. Thus, qemku,
" the wheaten loaf" which was used for offerings, is the
Hebrew qemakh, the Babylonian qimu> and may have
been brought into Eygpt along with the wheat which
was first cultivated in Babylonia and still grows wild on
the banks of the Euphrates. To what an early period
the importation of the cereal must be referred is shown
by its occurrence in the prehistoric graves of Upper
Egypt.1

When all allowances are made, however, the fact
remains that the Egyptian language as we know it
was related to the Semitic family of speech. It stood
to the latter as an elder sister, or rather as the sister
of the parent-language which the existing Semitic
dialects presuppose. It was not like the so-called
Hamitic dialects of Eastern Africa, which are African
languages Semitized, but it was itself of the same

1 See de Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de PEgyfite, pp.
94, 95. According to Schweinfurth, barley, which is also found
in the prehistoric graves of Egypt, must originally have come
from Babylonia like the wheat. Qemku is found in the Pyramid
texts (Maspero, Rccueil de Travaux relatifs d la Philologie et
d P Archdologie e"gyptiennes et assyriennes, v. p. 10). Boti,
whence the Coptic boti and the battawa or "durra cake" of
modern Egyptian Arabic, was " durra," not " wheat."

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 109

stock as Hebrew or Semitic Babylonian. It represents,
however, a form of language at an earlier stage of
development than arc any of those which we call
Semitic, and it has, moreover, been largely influenced
and modified by foreign languages, which we may
term African. So extensive has this influence been
that the Semitic element has been even more disguised
in it than the Teutonic element is disguised in modern
English. In leaving the soil of Asia the language of
Egypt took upon it an African dress.

Now though language can prove but little as regards
race, it can prove a great deal as regards history. A
mixed language means a mixed history, and indicates
an intimate contact between the populations who
spoke the languages which are represented in it.
Egyptian grammar would not have been Semitic if
those who imposed it upon the natives of the Nile
had not been of Semitic descent, or at all events had
not come from a region where the language was
Semitic. Nor would this grammar have been modified
by foreign admixture if a part of those who learned
to use it had not previously been accustomed to some
other form of speech. And since we know of no
Semitic languages in Africa which were not brought
from Asia, we are justified in concluding that the
Semitic element in the Egyptian language was of
Asiatic origin.

But we can go yet a step further. Where two
languages are brought into close contact, the general
rule is that that of the stronger race prevails. The
conqueror is less likely to learn the language of the
conquered than the conquered are to learn the language
of their masters. On the other hand, the negro slave

IIO ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

in America became English-speaking, whereas the
English emigrant wherever he goes preserves the
language of his fathers. It is only where a conquering
caste brings no women with it that it is likely to lose
its language.

When, therefore, we find that Old Egyptian is an
Africanized Semitic language, we have every right
to infer that it is because invaders brought it with
them from Asia who were Semites either by race or
by language. In other words, Egypt must have been
occupied in prehistoric days by a people who came
from the Semitic area in Asia.

The days were prehistoric, but of the invasion
itself history preserved a tradition. On the walls of
the temple of Edfu it is recounted how the followers
of Horus, the totem guide and patron deity of the
first kings of Upper Egypt, made their way across
the eastern desert to the banks of the Nile, and there,
with the help of their weapons of metal, subjugated
the older inhabitants of the valley. Battle after battle
was fought as the invaders slowly pushed their way
down the Nile to the Delta, establishing a forge and
a sanctuary of Horus on every spot where a victory
had been gained.1 The story has come down to us
under a disguise of euhemeristic mythology, but the
tradition it embodies has been strikingly confirmed by
modern discovery. The " dynastic " Egyptians, the
Egyptians, that is to say, who founded the Egyptian
monarchy and to whom we owe the great monuments
of Egypt, were immigrants from the east.

The culture of these " dynastic " Egyptians was
built up on two solid foundations, the engineering
1 See Maspero, ktudes de Mylhologie, ii. pp. 313 sqq.

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION III

skill which made Egypt a land of agriculture, and a
system of writing which made the organization of
the government possible. The culture was at once
agricultural and literary, and this alone marked it
off from the culture of neolithic (or " prehistoric ")
Egypt, which belonged to the desert rather than to
the banks and delta of the river, and which knew
nothing of writing. Now we have seen that there
was one other country in the world in which a similar
form of culture had come into existence. In Babylonia
too we have a civilization which has as its basis the
training of rivers for the purpose of irrigation and
the use of a pictorial script. The civilization of
Babylonia was, it is true, Sumerian at its outset,
but in time it became Semitic, and expressed itself
in a Semitic tongue. It is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that the Semitic-speaking people who
brought the science of irrigation and the art of
writing to the banks of the Nile came, like the wheat
they cultivated, from the Babylonian plain.

There are two archaeological facts connected with
the early culture of "dynastic" Egypt which seem to
me to prove at any rate some kind of intercourse
with Babylonia. No building-stone exists in the
Babylonian plain ; it was therefore the natural home
of the art of building in brick, and since every pebble
was of value it was also the natural birthplace of the
gem-cutter. Nowhere else could the use of clay as
a writing material have suggested itself, or that of
the inscribed stone cylinder which left its impression
behind it when rolled over the clay. Wherever we
have the clay tablet and the seal-cylinder we have
evidence of Babylonian influence.

112 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Now recent discoveries have shown that the culture
of the early dynastic period of Egypt is distinguished
from that of later times by the employment of clay
and the stone seal-cylinder. Neither the one nor the
other could have originated in the country itself, for
Upper Egypt (where all authenticated discoveries of
early seal-cylinders have been made) is a land of
stone, and the river-silt, which is mixed with sand, is
altogether unsuited for the purpose of writing. When
the Egyptians of the Eighteenth dynasty corresponded
in Babylonian cuneiform with their subjects and allies
in Asia, the clay upon which they wrote was brought
from a distance. Moreover, the stone seal-cylinder
of the early dynasties is an exact reproduction of the
early seal-cylinder of Babylonia. Substitute cuneiform
characters for the hieroglyphs and there is practically
no difference between them in many cases. It is
difficult to believe that such an identity of form is
the result of accident, more especially when we
find that, as Egyptian civilization advanced, the seal-
cylinder became less and less like its Babylonian
original, and finally disappeared from use altogether.
That is to say, as the culture of the people was
further removed from its first starting-point, and
therefore more national, an object which never had
any natural basis in the physical conditions of the
country grew more and more of an anomaly, and was
eventually superseded, first by the " button-seal " and
then by the scarab. I see no other explanation of
this than that it was originally introduced from
Babylonia, and maintained itself so long in an alien
atmosphere only because it was bound up with a
culture which had come from the same region of the

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION II3

world. The seal-cylinder of the early Egyptian
dynasties seems to me, apart from everything else, to
prove the existence of some kind of " prehistoric "
intercourse between the civilizations of the Euphrates
and the Nile. And in this intercourse the influences
came from Babylonia to Egypt, not from Egypt to
Babylonia.

The use of brick in early Egypt points in the same
direction. While Babylonia was a land of clay,
Upper Egypt was a land of stone, and it was as
unnatural to invent the art of brick-making in the
latter country as it was natural to do so in the former.
To this day the Nubians build their cottages of
stone ; so too do the Bedawin squatters on the east
bank of the Nile ; it is only where the population is
Egyptian and the influence of the old Egyptian
civilization is still dominant that brick is employed.
Under the Old Empire the Egyptian Pharaohs built
even the temples of the gods of brick ; it was but
gradually that the brick was superseded by stone.
It was the same also in Assyria ; here too, in a land
of stone, brick was at first the sole building material,
and even the great brick platforms which the marshy
soil of Babylonia had necessitated continued to be
laid. But Assyrian culture was confessedly Baby-
lonian in origin, and the brick edifice was therefore
a characteristic of it. It was only by degrees that
Assyrian architecture emancipated itself from its
early traditions, and at first timidly, then more boldly,
superseded the brick by stone. The example of
Assyria throws light on that of Egypt, and as the
Assyrian employment of brick was due to the
Babylonian origin of its civilization, it is permissible

H

114 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

to infer that the Egyptian employment of brick was
also due to the same cause. Once more we may-
repeat that there was early intercourse between
Egypt and Babylonia — the land of the brick-maker —
and that in this intercourse the prevailing influences
came from the east.

Such, then, is the conclusion to which the most
recent research leads us. The " dynastic " Egyptians,
the Egyptians of history, spoke a language which is
related to those of the Semitic family ; their first
kingdoms, so far as we know, were in Upper Egypt,
and tradition brought them across the eastern desert
to the banks of the Nile. The culture which they
possessed was characterized by Babylonian features,
and was therefore due either wholly or in part to
intercourse with Babylonia. The fact that the use
of the seal-cylinder — which, by the way, bore the
Semitic name of khetem — should have lingered in
the valley of the Nile to the very beginnings of the
Middle Empire, is an indication that the period of its
introduction could not have been very remote. The
earliest historical monuments which have been revealed
to us by modern excavation may not, after all, be
many centuries later than the time when the culture
of Babylonia found its way to the Nile.

Indeed, there is a fact which indicates that this is
the case, and that the literary culture of Babylonia
had been imported into the valley of the Nile at
a time when Egypt was divided into independent
kingdoms. At an early epoch an ingenious system
of official chronology had been invented in Baby-
lonia. The years were named there after the chief
events that had occurred in each of them, among

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 115

these the accession or death of a king being naturally
prominent. At the death of a king a list was drawn
up of his regnal years, with their characteristic events,
and such lists were from time to time combined
into longer chronicles. The Babylonians were pre-
eminently a commercial people, and for purposes of
trade it was necessary that contracts and other legal
documents should be dated accurately, and that in
case of a dispute the date should be easily ascertained.
Now an exactly similar system of dating had been
adopted in Egypt before the age of the First historical
dynasty. A pre-Menic monument dated in this way
has been discovered at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt,
and the same method of reckoning time is found on
ivory tablets that have been disinterred at Abydos.
The method lasted down to the age of the Fifth
dynasty, since the Museum of Palermo contains the
fragment of a stone from Heliopolis, on which the
chronology of the Egyptian kings is given from
Menes onward, each year being named after the
event or events from which it had received its official
title. The successive reigns are divided from one
another as in the Babylonian lists, and the height
of the Nile in each year is further added — a note
which naturally is of Egyptian origin. It is, there-
fore, interesting to observe that it is added as a note,
independent of the event which gave its name to the
year. Nothing could prove more clearly the foreign
origin of the whole system of chronology, since, had
it been of native invention, the height of the Nile, on
which the prosperity of the country depended, would
have been the first event to be recorded. After the fall
of the Old Empire this ancient Babylonian method

Il6 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

of dating seems to have passed out of use like the
Babylonian seal-cylinder ; at all events we find no
further traces of it. It was, in short, an exotic which
never took kindly to Egyptian soil.

Did the " dynastic " Egyptians bring this method
of dating with them, or did they borrow it after their
settlement in Egypt ? The second supposition is
very difficult to entertain, for intimate trade relations
between Babylonia and Upper (or Lower) l Egypt in
the pre-Menic age appear to be out of the question,
and are unsupported by any known facts. And
literary correspondence, such as was carried on in the
time of the Eighteenth dynasty, seems equally out
of the question. How, then, did the Egyptians come
to learn the peculiar Babylonian system of chronology
unless the founders of the culture of which it formed
a portion had originally brought it with them from
the east ?

The same question is raised by the existence in
early Egypt of an artistic motif which had its origin
in Babylonia. This is what is usually known as the

1 I have put " Lower " between parentheses since it is very
questionable whether this particular system of registering time
was known in the Delta until it was introduced from Upper
Egypt. On the Palermo stone a list of the early kings of Lower
Egypt is given, but without any dates, which make their appear-
ance along with the kings of the First dynasty, who belonged
to Upper Egypt. It is interesting to observe that the ideograph
for "year" is denoted in exactly the same way in both the
Babylonian and the Egyptian hieroglyphs by the branch of a
(palm) tree. Such a curious symbol for the idea can hardly have
been invented independently Professor Hommel further draws
attention to the fact that while the literal translation of a
common ideographic mode of representing " year " in Babylonian
is "name of heaven," that of the two syllables of the Egyptian
word renpet) "year," would also be "name of heaven."

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 117

heraldic position of the figures of men and animals.
An example of it is found on the famous " palette "
of Nar-Buzau discovered by Mr. Ouibell at Hiera-
konpolis,1 where the hybrid monsters whose necks
form the centre of the slate are heraldically arranged.
In this case the design is known to be Babylonian,
since M. Heuzey has pointed out a Babylonian seal-
cylinder on which the two monsters recur. Nar-
Buzau is made the immediate predecessor of Menes by
Professor Petrie on grounds to which every archae-
ologist must assent ; but an even better example of
the heraldic design is met with on a great isolated rock
of sandstone near El-Kab which was quarried in the
time of the Old Empire. Here the ownership and
opening of the quarry are denoted by an elaborate
sculpture of the Pharaoh, who is duplicated, his two
forms being figured as seated back to back, with a
column between them, while the winged solar disk of
Edfu, with the royal uraei on either side of the orb,
spreads its wings above them. Each of the royal
forms holds a sceptre, but that on the left has no
head-dress, whereas that on the right wears a skull-
cap, above which is the solar orb with the uraeus
serpent issuing from it.2 In front of the latter is an

1 Hierakonpolis, part i. plate xxix. The name of the king
is usually (but erroneously) written Nar-Mer.

2 As the royal figures wear no crowns, they can hardly depict
the king in his double office of king of Upper and Lower Egypt,
and the duplication of the Pharaoh must consequently have a
purely artistic origin. That this artistic origin is closely con-
nected with the origin of the seal-cylinders is shown by the fact
that the figures correspond with one of the most common
designs on the latter, in which the ka of the person to whom
the cylinder belonged is seated on a chair similar to that of the
El-Kab king, an altar with offerings of bread being set before
him.

Il8 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

altar consisting of a bowl on a stand, loaves of bread
and a cup and jar of wine (with the customary
handles for suspension) being engraved above the
bowl along with a series of perpendicular lines which
in this instance cannot (as has been suggested) repre-
sent the fringes of a mat. In front of the figure on
the left is another altar, of different shape, the place
of the bowl being taken by a flat top, above which
are six upright lines and a fiat cake. Precisely the
same altar with the same objects above it are engraved
on a broken seal-cylinder of ivory found by Dr.
Reisner at Naga' ed-Der, which I understand from
the discoverer to be of the age of the First dynasty.
When, therefore, was it that the heraldic design in
art was introduced into Egypt from its Babylonian
birthplace ? In any case it would seem to have been
before the foundation of the united monarchy.

In Babylonia itself, as we have seen, tradition
looked seaward, towards the Persian Gulf, for the
elements of its civilization. At any rate the seaport
of Eridu was the gateway through which the culture
of Babylonia was believed to have passed. Here on
the shores of the sea the culture-god of Sumer had
his home ; here trade sprang up, and the sailors and
merchants of Eridu came into contact with men of
other lands and other habits. Is it possible to discover
a connection between Eridu and primeval Egypt?

I believe that it is, though in making the attempt
we are of course treading upon precarious ground.
There are certain curious coincidences, one of which,
since it goes to the heart of Sumerian and Egyptian
religion, is necessarily of considerable weight. But
they are all, it must be remembered, more in the

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 119

nature of indications and possibilities than of
ascertained facts.

Eridu meant in Sumerian "the good city."
Memphis (Men-nofer), "the good place," the name
of the first capital of united Egypt, had the same
signification. In the case of Eridu the name had
something to do with the fact that the city was the
seat of Ea, the god of beneficent spells and incantations,
who had given the arts and sciences to man, and was
ever ready to heal those that were sick. The son
and vice-gerent of Ea, who carried his commands
to earth and spent his time in curing diseases and
raising "the dead to life," was Asari, "the prince,"
who was usually entitled Mulu-dugga, "the good" or
"beneficent one." The character and attributes of
Asari are thus the same as those of the Egyptian Osiris,
who was also known as Ati, " the prince," and was
commonly addressed as Un-nofer, " the good being."
Unlike most of the Egyptian deities, Osiris had
the same human form as Asari of Eridu, and the
resemblance between the names of Asari and Osiris —
Asar in Egyptian — is rendered more striking by the
remarkable fact that they are both represented by
two ideographs or hieroglyphs of precisely the same
shape and signification.1 It does not appear possible
to ascribe such a threefold identity to mere coinci-
dence. And the theory of coincidence becomes still
more improbable when we remember that while the
story of Osiris centres in his death and resurrection,
one of the chief offices of the Sumerian Asari was to

1 The eye and the ideograph of city or place. Since the eye
here has the phonetic value of eriox art, the ideograph of "city,"
which is eri in Sumerian, must have the Egyptian value of as.

120 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

" raise the dead to life." Nowhere else in Babylonian
literature, whether Sumerian or Semitic, do we find
any reference to a resurrection ; the Semitic Baby-
lonians, indeed, did not look forward to a future life
at all, or if they did, it was to a shadowy existence in
a subterranean land of darkness " where all things are
forgotten." It is only in connection with Asari that
we hear of a possibility that the dead may live again.
Other resemblances between the theologies of
Eridu and primitive Egypt have been pointed out.
Professor Hommel believes that in the Egyptian deity
Nun, the heavenly ocean, we must see a Sumerian god
Nun, who also represented the celestial abyss. How-
ever this may be, an old formula, torn from its
context, which has been introduced into the Pyramid
texts of the Pharaoh Pepi I., takes us back not only
to the cosmology of Eridu but to the literary form in
which it had been expressed. Pepi, it is said, " was
born of his father Turn. At that time the heaven was
not, the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods
were not born, there was no death." The words are
almost a repetition of those with which the Baby-
lonian epic of the creation begins : " At that time
the heaven above was not known by name, the earth
beneath was not named ... at that time the gods
had not appeared, any one of them " ; and they are
also a distant echo of the commencement of the
cosmological legend of Sumerian Eridu: "At that
time no holy house, no house of the gods in a holy
place had been built, no reed had grown, no tree had
been planted." x

The testimony of philological archaeology, if I may
1 See my Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia^ p. 238.

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 121

use such a term, is supplemented by that of archaeo-
logical discovery. Sumerian Babylonia and early
dynastic Egypt are alike characterized by vases of
hard stone, many of which have the same forms.
Examples of some of them will be found in de
Morgan's Recherches sur les Origines de PEgypte, ii.
p. 257, where J^quier observes that analogues to the
Egyptian vases have been disinterred by de Sarzec
atTello in Southern Babylonia, "the shape and execu-
tion of which are exactly like " those discovered in
Egypt, "the only difference being that the one are
ornamented with hieroglyphics, and the others with
a cuneiform inscription ; apart from this they are
identical in make." The most remarkable instance
of identity, however, is the design on the palette of
the pre-Menic Pharaoh Nar-Buzau to which attention
was first called by Professor Heuzey.1 On this we have
a representation of two lions set face to face in the
Babylonian fashion, and with long serpentine necks
which are interlaced so as to enclose a circle. Pre-
cisely the same representation is met with on an early
Babylonian seal-cylinder from Tello.

Years ago I noticed the general likeness presented
by the seated statues of Tello to those of the Third
Egyptian dynasty,2 and suggested that both belonged
to the same school of sculpture. A little earlier Pro-
fessor Flinders Petrie had demonstrated that the

1 Comptes rendus de ? Acadhnie des Inscriptions et Belles
Lettres, 4 Ser., 1899, xxvii. pp. 60-67 ! see Hierakonpolis, part ii.
plate xxviii. In the Revue cVAssyriologie, v. pp. 29-32, Heuzey
has lately drawn attention to the resemblance between the
early Egyptian and Babylonian bowls of calcite or Egyptian
alabaster.

2 Lectures on the Religion of the Aficient Babylonians, 1887,
P- 33-

122 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

standard of measurement marked upon the plan of
the city which one of the Tello figures holds in his
lap is the same as the standard of measurement of
the Egyptian pyramid-builders, the cubit, namely,
of 20*63, which is quite different from the later
Assyro-Babylonian cubit of 2i*6.1 Still more con-
vincing, perhaps, is the Babylonian division of the
year into twelve months of thirty days each,
which was already known in Egypt in the age of the
early dynasties. The Babylonian week of five and
ten days reappears in the Egyptian week of ten days,
while the division of the day into twelve " double
hours," six belonging to the day and six to the night,
has its counterpart in the Egyptian day of twenty-
four hours, twelve of which were reckoned to the day
and the other twelve to the night. Since a list of the
thirty-six decans or zodiacal stars has recently been
found on a coffin of the time of the Twelfth Dynasty2 it
is possible that this distinctively Babylonian invention
may also go back to the age of the first Egyptian
dynasties. At all events one of the chief stars in the
Pyramid texts is " the Bull of heaven," a translation
of the Sumerian Gudi-bir, or " Bull of Light," the
name given to the planet Jupiter in its relation to
the ecliptic. In primitive Babylonian astronomy the
zodiacal sign of the Bull ushered in the year.

It may be that some of these evidences of Baby-
lonian influence are referable to contact between
Babylonia and Egypt in the age that immediately
preceded the foundation of the united Egyptian

1 Nature, August 9, 1883, p. 341.

2 Daressy, " Le Cercueil d'Emsaht," in the Annates du Service
iles Antiquitds de PEgypte, 1899, i. pp. 79-90.

SITTING STATUE OF GUDEA.

[To face p. 122.

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 1 23

monarchy rather than to that still earlier age when
the "dynastic" settlers first settled in the valley of
the Nile. But at present we do not know how such a
contact could have taken place. Upper Egypt and
not the Delta was the seat of the first Pharaohs with
their Horus-hawk totem, and at the remote period
when the future civilization of the country was being
developed under their fostering care it is difficult to
believe that Babylonian soldiers or traders had made
their way to the shores of the Mediterranean, much
less to the deserts of the Sayyid. For the present, at
all events, where we have clear proof of the depend-
ence of early Egyptian culture upon that of the
Babylonians we have no alternative but to ascribe it
to the Semitic emigrants or invaders to whom the
historical civilization of Egypt was primarily due.1
This civilization, like that of Babylonia, implied a

1 I have called Upper Egypt the seat of the first Pharaohs,
not only because the earliest dynastic monuments we possess
come from thence, but also because it was of Upper Egypt and
its ruling caste that the hawk-god Horus was the guardian deity.
From Upper Egypt he was carried to Lower Egypt and its
nomes, presumably through conquest, as is monumentally attested
by the "palette" of Nar-Buzau_ discovered at Hierakonpolis
(Capart, Debuts de PAit en Egypte, p. 236). So, too, the
anthropomorphic Osiris — the duplicate of Anhur— made his
way from the south to the north. That Southern Arabia should
have been the connecting-link between Babylonia and Egypt
was the result of its being the source of the incense which was
imported for religious use into both countries alike at the very
beginning of their histories. That this foreign product should
have been considered an indispensable adjunct of the religions
of the two civilizations is one of the best proofs we have of their
connection with one another. Dr. Schweinfurth has shown that
the sacred trees of Egypt — the sycamore and the persea — which
needed artificial cultivation for their preservation there, came
from Southern Arabia, where he found them growing wild under
the names of Kkanes, Burra and Lebakh ( Verhandhmgen der
Gcsellschaft fur Erdlciinde zu Berli?i, July 1889, No. 7).

124 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

knowledge of metal. It was a civilization of the
copper age, and thus stood in sharp contrast to the
neolithic culture, such as it was, of " prehistoric "
Egypt. Egyptian tradition, it is true, believed that
the metal weapons with which the followers of Horus
had overcome the stone-defended natives of the
country were of iron, but this was because the com-
pilers of the story in its existing form projected the
knowledge and usages of their own time back into
the past. There is incontrovertible proof that in
Egypt, as in Europe, the ages of copper and bronze
preceded that of iron. But the tradition was doubt-
less right in laying stress upon the fact that the
invaders were forgers and blacksmiths. It would
have been by reason of the superiority of their arms
that they succeeded in subduing the valley of the Nile
and reducing its inhabitants to serfdom. They were,
too, "the followers of Horus," under the leadership
of a single prince who was himself a Horus, that is
to say, an incarnate god. Here, again, we find our-
selves in the presence of a conception and doctrine
of Semitic Babylonia. There, too, as we have seen,
the kings were incarnate gods, not only the sons
of a divinity, but themselves divine. In Egypt,
apart from the Osirian circle, the gods were not
men, but animals, and so deeply rooted was this
beast-worship in the hearts of the indigenous popu-
lation that even the " dynastic " civilization, with
all its unifying and absorbing power, never succeeded
in doing more than in uniting the head of the beast
with the body of the man. Even the human Pharaoh
was forced to picture himself as a hawk. In Semitic
Babylonia on the other hand, as we have seen, the

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 125

deification of the king flowed naturally from the
anthropomorphic conception of the deity ; where man
was made in the image of God, it was easy to see in
him a god on earth. Like the use of copper, therefore,
the deification of the king which characterized dynastic
Egypt points back to Babylonia.

It must not be supposed, however, that because
certain elements and leading characteristics in the
civilization of historical Egypt indicate that the
Semitic-speaking race to whom it was mainly due
came originally from Babylonia, there are no elements
in it which can be derived from elsewhere. On the
contrary, there is much that is native to Egypt itself.
Even the script shows but comparatively few traces of
a Babylonian origin. If the " dynastic " Egyptians
came from Babylonia, they must have very consider-
ably modified and developed the seeds of culture
which they brought with them. And in Egypt they
found a neolithic culture which had already made
considerable progress. The indigenous population
possessed the same artistic sense as the palaeolithic
European of the Solutrian and Magdalenian epochs,
with whom perhaps it was contemporaneous, and
under the direction of its dynastic conquerors this
sense was trained and educated until the Egyptians
of history became one of the most artistic peoples of
the old world.

But it is noticeable that throughout the historical
period whenever the civilizations of Egypt and
Babylonia came into contact, it was Egypt that was
influenced rather than Asia. The tradition of the
earliest ages was thus carried on ; the stream of
influence flowed from the east, and Herodotus was

126 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

justified in assigning Egypt to Asia rather than to
Africa. It was, in fact, Asia with an African colouring.
In the days of the Eighteenth dynasty, when Egypt
for the first and last time possessed an Asiatic empire,
the eastern influence is very marked. The script
itself became Babylonian, the correspondence of the
Government with its own officials in Canaan was
conducted in the Babylonian language and the
Babylonian syllabary, and there are indications that
even the official memoranda of the campaigns of
Thothmes III. were drawn up in cuneiform characters.
The clay tablets of Babylonia were imitated in Upper
Egypt, where hieroglyphic and hieratic characters
were somewhat awkwardly impressed upon them, and
the language was filled with Semitic loan-words. The
fashionable author of the age of the Nineteenth
dynasty interlarded his style not only with Semitic
words, but even with Semitic phrases. It is true that
the Semitic words and phrases are Canaanite ; but
Canaan had long been a province of Babylonia, and
it was because it was permeated with Babylonian
culture and used the Babylonian script, that the
foreign words and phrases were introduced into the
literary language of Egypt.

On the other hand, so far as, we can judge, there
was no reflex action of Egypt upon Babylonia. The
seal-cylinder was never superseded there by the
scarab ; indeed the only scarabs yet found in the
Mesopotamian region are memorials of the Egyptian
conquests of the Eighteenth dynasty. Neither the
hieroglyphs nor the hieratic of Egypt made their
way eastward into Asia, a fact which is somewhat
remarkable when we remember over how wide an area

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION \2J

the more complicated cuneiform spread. It was
Europe that was affected by Egypt rather than Asia.
Before Egypt laid claim to Palestine, Babylonian
culture had already taken too firm a hold of Western
Asia to be dislodged, and in Babylonia itself Egyptian
influences are hard to find. In the age of Khammu-rabi,
we meet with a few proper names which may contain
the name of the Sun-god Ra, as well as with the
name of Anupum or Anubis on a stone cylinder, and
the hieroglyphic character nefer, " good," is affixed to
a legal document.1 But this merely proves that in a
period when the Babylonian Empire reached to the con-
fines of Egypt, there were Egyptians settled in Babylon
for the purpose of trade. A more curious example of
possible Egyptian influence is one to which I have
drawn attention in my lectures on the Religions of
Ancient Egypt and Babylonia? Thoth, the Egyptian god
of literature, was accompanied by four apes, who sang
hymns to the rising and setting sun. Travellers have
described the dancing and screaming of troops of
apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the
earth, and the origin of these companions of Thoth
has been cleared up by an inscription in a tomb at
Assuan. Here we learn that in the age of the Old
Empire, expeditions were sent by the Pharaohs into
the Sudan — the home of the apes of Thoth — in order
to bring back from " the land of the gods " Danga

1 In the possession of Lord Amherst of Hackney. On an
early Babylonian seal-cylinder, bought by Dr. Scheil at Mossul
and figured in the Recueil de Travanx relatifs d la Philologie et
d t ArchMogie igyptiennes et assyriennes, xix. I, 2, No. 7 of
the plate, we have : " Ili-su-bani son of Aminanum, servant of
the gods Bel and Anupum.'' Aminanum may be a Semitized
form of the Egyptian Ameni.

2 Pp. 133, 139 485.

128 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

dwarfs who could " dance the dances of the gods."
In the eyes of the Egyptians, it would seem, there
was little difference between the ape and the Danga
dwarf; the one was a dwarf-like ape, the other an
ape-like man. But they alone could perform correctly
the dances that were held in honour of certain gods,
and which are already depicted on the prehistoric
vases of Egypt.1 Closely allied to the Danga dwarfs
and the apes of Thoth are the Khnumu or Pataeki of
Memphis, the followers of Ptah, who were also dwarfs
with bowed legs. Now dwarfs of precisely the same
form are found on early Babylonian seal-cylinders
where they are associated sometimes with the goddess
Istar, sometimes with an ape and the god Sin.2 The
Babylonian name of the dwarf was the Sumerian
Nu-gidda, an indication that his association with the
deity went back to Sumerian times. We may conclude
that, like the Danga dwarf of Egypt, he, too, performed
dances in honour of the gods.

The extraordinary resemblance of form between
the Egyptian and Babylonian sacred dwarfs, as
represented in art, raises the question whether the
Babylonian dwarf was not an importation from
Egypt, since the ape with which he was confounded
was a native of the Sudan. This was the view to
which I was long inclined, but there are certain
considerations which make it difficult to be accepted.

1 De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de PEgy/>te, p. 65.

2 Scheil, Recueil de Travaux relatifs d la Philologie et d
PArche'ologie egyptiennes et assyrie/mes, xix. pp. 50, 54 ; Sayce,
Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylojiia, p. 485. The dwarf
is represented as dancing before the god Sin on an early
Babylonian seal-cylinder published by Scheil in the Recueil,
xix. 1, 2, No. 16 of the plate.

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 1 29

The Khnumu of Memphis were not the only dwarfs
who were represented by the Egyptian artists. Still
better known was Bes, who became a special favourite
in the Roman period, when he was made a sort of
patron of childbirth. But Bes, it was remembered,
had come to Egypt from the southern lands of Somali
and Arabia, like the goddess Hathor or the god
Horus. Hathor is, I believe, the Babylonian Istar,
who has passed to Egypt through her South Arabian
name of Athtar ; however this may be, Ptah of
Memphis, whose followers were the Khnumu dwarfs,
bears a Semitic name, and must therefore be of
Semitic derivation. He belongs, that is to say, to the
Egyptians of the dynastic stock, and is accordingly
one of the few Egyptian divinities who is depicted in
human form. On the other hand, the Sumerian dwarf
Nu-gidda is the companion of Istar.

On the Egyptian side, therefore, the dwarfs of Ptah
are associated with a god who has come from Asia,
while the dwarf Bes was confessedly of foreign
extraction. On the Babylonian side the dwarf
Nu-gidda was the associate of Istar, the counterpart
of Hathor, and of Sin, the Moon-god, who was
adopted by the people of Southern Arabia, and whose
name was carried as far as Mount Sinai on the borders
of Egypt. All this suggests that the sacred dwarf
came to the valley of the Nile from Babylonia and
Arabia like the name of Ptah, the creator of the
world. In this case it would have come with the
dynastic Egyptians before the age of history begins.

But, on the other hand, there is the ape, and the ape
is figured along with the dwarf on the Babylonian
seals. It is true that the ape is equally foreign to

1

130 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Egypt and Babylonia, but the Sudan is nearer Egypt
than Southern Arabia is to Babylonia. The actual
date and path of migration, therefore, of the sacred
dwarf must be left undecided. Whether he was
brought to Egypt at the dawn of history, or whether
he travelled to Babylonia in the historical age remains
doubtful. All we can be sure of is that the sacred
dwarfs of Babylonia and Egypt were originally one
and the same, and that they testify to an intercourse
between the two countries of which all literary record
has been lost.1

The same verdict must be given in the case of
another point, not only of resemblance, but of identity,
between ancient Egypt and Babylonia. This is the
shaduf or contrivance for drawing water from a falling
river for the sake of irrigation. The shaduf, which is
still used in Upper Egypt, can be traced back pictori-
ally to the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, but the
basin system of irrigation with which it was connected
was already of immemorial antiquity. It is a simple
yet most effective invention, and on that account
perhaps the less likely to have been independently
invented, for it is always the obvious which remains
longest unnoticed. In the modern shaduf a long pole
is laid across a beam which is supported at either end
upon other poles or on pillars of brick or mud ; it is
kept in place by thongs and is heavily weighted at one
end, while at the other end a bucket or skin is attached
to it by means of a rope. The shaduf of the

1 It is worth notice that the dwarf-god Bes, who is called " God
of Punt " in inscriptions of the Ptolemaic age, appears on Arab
coins of the Roman period (Schweinfurth, Verhandlungen der
Gesellschaftfiir Erdkande 1889, No. 7).

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 1 3 I

Eighteenth dynasty was supported sometimes, as to-
day, on a cross-beam, sometimes on a column of mud,
and the bucket was of triangular form with two
handles to which the rope was tied. Representations
of it from Theban tombs will be found in Maspero's
Dawn of Civilization, p. 764, and Sir Gardner
Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, plates 38 and 356.
Precisely the same machine is represented on a bas-
relief found by Layard in the palace of Kuyunjik at
Nineveh,1 the only difference being that the shaduf-
worker stands upon a platform of brick instead of on
the bank itself, and that the pillar upon which the
pole is supported seems to be built of bricks rather
than of mud. The machine, however, is identical in
both its Egyptian and its Assyrian form. That the
bas-relief should have been found in Assyria and not
in Babylonia is a mere accident. Like almost every-
thing else in Assyrian culture, the invention was of
Babylonian origin, and, in fact, formed part of the
system of irrigation which made the plain of Babylonia
habitable. Herodotus, who calls the machine a
K-qXcavelov, describes it as being used as in Egypt, and
for the same reason, since the river did not rise to the
actual level of the cultivated ground, which, like that
of Egypt, was divided into a number of basins.2

The palace of Kuyunjik belongs to the last age of
Assyrian history. But the shaduf in Babylonia went
back to the Sumerian period, as we know from the
references to it in the lexical tablets. It was called
duldtum in Semitic Babylonian, the pole or poles
being kakritum, and the bucket zirqu or zirqatum

1 Layard, Monuments of Nineveh^ Second Series, pi. 15.

2 Herodotus, i. 193.

132 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

(Sumerian sd),1 and an old Sumerian collection of agri-
cultural precepts describes how the irrigator " fixes up
the shaduf, hangs up the bucket and draws water." 2
The " irrigator " was naturally an important personage
in early Babylonia, and legend averred that the famous
Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic
Empire, had been rescued as a child from a watery
grave, and brought up by one. In both Babylonia
and Egypt the shaduf was closely associated with a
system of irrigation which went back to the dawn of
their several histories.

What explanation must we give of its identity in the
two countries ? There are three possibilities. In the
first place, it may have been invented independently
on the banks of both the Euphrates and the Nile.
Similar conditions tend to produce similar results.
But against this is the fact that the shaduf was not
the only kind of irrigating machine that was suggested
by the nature of the two rivers and the lands through
which they flowed. In modern Egypt, besides the
shaduf there are the saqia, or water-wheel, and an
irrigating contrivance which is in use in the Delta.
The water-wheel, we know, was a Babylonian inven-
tion which was imported into Egypt in comparatively
recent times ; the irrigating contrivance of the Delta,
which consists of a bucket suspended on a rope swung
by two men who stand facing each other, is a primitive
instrument which might have been invented anywhere.
Its survival is due to the fact that in the flat marshes
of the Delta, the shaduf, though saving labour, is not

1 The rope appears to have been makutum; see IV. A. I. v.
26, 61.
i K. 56, ii. 14.

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 1 33

necessary, and it therefore continued to be employed
there after the shaduf was known. But this implies
that the shaduf was not the oldest instrument for
raising the water of the Nile.

Then there is the second possibility that the shaduf
was borrowed by Egypt from Babylonia or by Baby-
lonia from Egypt in historical times. In Babylonia,
however, we can trace its history back to the Sumerian
epoch, and in both countries it was intimately con-
nected with a system of irrigation the origin of which
must be sought in the prehistoric age, and which was
probably carried from the valley of the Euphrates to
that of the Nile. There remains the third possibility
that it came to Egypt along with the system of
irrigation itself.

It is always easier to ask questions than to answer
them, in archaeology as in other things. There are
many details connected with the early relationship
between the civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt
which must be left to future research to discover.
But of that relationship there can now be little ques-
tion in the minds of those who are accustomed to deal
with inductive evidence. There was intercourse in the
prehistoric age between the two countries, and the
civilizing influences, like the wheat and the language,
came from the lands which bordered on the Euphrates.
Civilized man made his way from the east, and dwelt
in primeval days " in the land of Shinar." x

1 For other evidences of contact between primitive Babylonia
and early Egypt, see Heuzey in the Revue d' Assyriologze, 1899,
v. 2, pp. 53-6. He there enumerates (1) the resemblance
between the stone mace-heads of the two countries in " prehis-
toric times," as well as between the flat dishes of veined and
ribboned onyx marble, hollowed and rounded by the hand ; (2)

134 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

between the lion-heads of stone, the onyx stone of one of which
is stated in an inscription to have come from Magan ; (3) the
extraordinary likeness in the delineation of animal forms, which
extends to conventional details " like the two concentric curves
artificially arranged so as to allow the two corners of the profile
to be visible at the same time" ; (4) the use of a razor and the
custom of completely shaving the face, and even the skull ; and
(5) the ceremonial form of libation by means of a vase of
peculiar shape, with a long curved spout and without a handle.
This libation vase was practically the same in both countries, in
spite of its peculiar and somewhat complicated form. Of later
introduction into Egypt was the inscribed cone of terra-cotta,
which was of early Babylonian origin, but is not met with in
Egypt before the age of the Twelfth dynasty. At any rate, the
first specimens of it hitherto found there were discovered by
myself at Ed-Der, opposite Esna, in 1905 {Annates du Service
des Antiquites de P Egypt, 1905, pp. 164-5).

[To face p. 135.

CHAPTER V

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE

A very few years ago Palestine was still
archaeologically an unknown land. Its history subse-
quent to the Israelitish conquest could be gathered
from the Old Testament, and Egyptian papyri of the
age of the Nineteenth dynasty had told us something
about its condition immediately prior to that event.
Thanks to the Palestine Exploration Fund,the country
had been carefully surveyed, and the monuments
still existing on its surface had been noted and
registered. But the earlier history of the people, their
races and origin, their social and religious life, and
their relation to the rest of the world, were still a
blank. Of the Canaan invaded by the children of
Israel we knew nothing from an archaeological point
of view, and very little even of the Palestine that was
governed by Israelitish judges and Jewish kings.

The veil has at last been lifted which so long lay
over the face of Palestine. Cuneiform texts have come
to clear up its civil history, while the spade of the
excavator has supplemented their evidence on the
more purely archaeological side. The history of Pales-
tine can now be followed back not only into the neolithic,
but even into the palaeolithic age, and the source and

i35

136 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

character of Canaanite civilization have been in large
measure revealed to us.

First and foremost among the materials which have
made this possible are the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-
Amarna in Upper Egypt, which were discovered in
1887. Tel el-Amarna, about midway between Minia
and Assiut, is the site of a city which sprang, like a
meteor, into a brief but glorious existence under the
so-called " heretic king " Amon-hotep IV. about B.C.
1400. Amon-hotep, under the guidance of his mother,
had endeavoured to suppress the old state religion of
Egypt, and to substitute for it a pantheistic mono-
theism. In spite of persecution, however, the adherents
of the old faith proved too strong for the king ; he
was forced to leave Thebes, the capital of his fathers,
and to build a new capital further north, where he
changed his name to that of Khu-n-Aten, and called
artists from the islands of the Mediterranean to adorn
his palace. When moving from Thebes he naturally
transferred to the new seat of government both the
Foreign Office and its records in so far as they
covered the reign of his father Amon-hotep III. and
his own. For reasons unknown to us they do not
extend further back.

They were all in the cuneiform script, and for the
most part in the Babylonian language. The fact
came upon the historian with a shock of surprise, and
had far-reaching consequences, historical as well as
archaeological. In the first place, they proved what
had already been suspected, that under the Eighteenth
dynasty Egypt possessed an Asiatic empire which
stretched to the banks of the Euphrates. Then,
secondly, they showed that Western Asia was at the

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 1 37

time intersected by high-roads along which merchants
and couriers were constantly passing, and an active
literary correspondence was carried on. Thirdly —
and this was the greatest surprise of all — they made it
clear that this correspondence was in the script and
language of Babylonia, and that it was shared in by
writers of various nationalities and languages, of all
classes of society and of both sexes. The Hittite and
Cappadocian kings wrote to the Pharaoh in cuneiform
characters, just as did the kings of Babylonia and
Assyria. Arab shekhs and Hittite condottieri joined
in the correspondence, and politically-minded ladies
did the same. Even the Egyptian Government was
compelled to suppress all feelings of national vanity,
and to conduct the whole of its correspondence with
its own governors and vassals in Palestine or Syria in
the foreign language and syllabary. There is no trace
anywhere of the use of either the Egyptian language
or the Egyptian mode of writing.

From these facts other facts follow. The age of
the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty must have been
quite as literary as the age of our own eighteenth
century, and international correspondence must have
been quite as easy, if not easier. Education, more-
over, must have been very widely spread ; all the
civilized world was writingand reading; and the system
of writing was a most complicated one, demanding
years of study and memory. In spite of this it was
known not only to a professional class of scribes and
the officials of the Government, but also to the shekhs
of petty Canaanitish towns and even to Bedawin
chiefs. And along with the system of writing went
a knowledge of the foreign language of Babylonia —

138 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

the French of Western Asia — including some slight
acquaintance with the extinct language of the
Sumerians. All this presupposes libraries and archive-
chambers where books and dispatches could be stored,
as well as schools where the Babylonian script and
language could be taught and learned.

Such libraries and schools had existed in Babylonia
from a very early age. Every great city had its
library, every great temple its muniment-room. Here
the clay books were numbered and arranged on
shelves, catalogues being provided which gave their
titles. The system under which the longer literary
or semi-scientific works were arranged and catalogued
was at once ingenious and complete. By the side of
the library was naturally the school. Here every
effort was made to facilitate the progress of the
scholars, more especially in the study of the Sumerian
language and texts. The characters of the syllabary
were classified and named ; comparative grammars,
dictionaries and reading-books of Sumerian and
Semitic Babylonian were compiled, lists of Semitic
synonyms were drawn up, explanatory commentaries
were written on older works, and interlinear transla-
tions provided for the Sumerian texts. But with all
this the cuneiform system of writing must have been
hard even for the native Babylonian to learn, and
in the case of the foreigner its difficulties were
multiplied. It may be doubted whether the average
boy of to-day, who finds the spelling of his own
English almost too much for him, would have had
the memory and patience, to learn the cuneiform
characters. Even in Sumerian times the difficulty
of the task was realized, for there is a Sumerian

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 1 39

proverb that " he who would excel in the school of
the scribes must rise with the dawn." x It says much
for the educational zeal of the Oriental world in the
century before the Exodus that it was just this
difficult and complicated script which it chose as its
medium for correspondence.

The fact, however, points unmistakably to its
cause. The reason why the Babylonian language
and syllabary were thus in use throughout Western
Asia, and why even the Egyptian Government was
obliged to employ them in its communications with
its Asiatic subjects, can only have been because
Babylonian culture was too deeply rooted there to
be superseded by any other. Before Egypt appeared
upon the scene under the conquerors of the Eighteenth
dynasty, Western Asia, as far as the Mediterranean,
must have been for centuries under the direct in-
fluence and domination of Babylonia. I say domina-
tion as well as influence", for in the ancient East
military conquest was needed to enforce an alien
language and literature, theology and system of law
upon another people. And even military conquest
was not always sufficient, as witness the Assyrian
and Persian conquests of Egypt, or the Roman
conquest of Syria.

We now have monumental testimony that such
domination there actually was. As far back as B.C.
3800, Sargon of Akkad had founded a Semitic empire
which had its centre in Babylon, and which stretched
across Asia to the shores of the Mediterranean. We
learn from his annals that three campaigns were
needed to subdue " the land of the Amorites," as
1 Recueil de Travaux, etc., xvi. p. 190.

140 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Syria and Palestine were called, and that at last,
after three years of warfare, all the coast-lands of
" the sea of the setting sun " acknowledged his sway.
He set up an image of himself on the Syrian coast
in commemoration of his victories, and moulded his
conquests "into one" great empire. His son and
successor, Naram-Sin, extended his conquests into
the Sinaitic peninsula, and a seal-cylinder, on
which he is adored as a god, has been found in
Cyprus. But Sargon was a patron of literature as
well as a conqueror ; his court was filled with learned
men, and one of the standard works of Babylonian
literature is said to have been compiled during his
reign. The extension of Babylonian rule, therefore,
to Western Asia meant the extension of Babylonian
civilization, an integral part of which was its script.

Here, then, is an explanation of the archaeological
fact that the graves of the copper and early bronze
age in Cyprus, which mark the beginning of civiliza-
tion in the country, contain numerous seal-cylinders
made in imitation of those of Babylonia.1 Examples
of the seal-cylinders from which they were copied
have also been discovered there. Among them is the
cylinder on which Naram-Sin is adored as a god,
another is an extremely fine specimen of the style
that was current in the age of Sargon of Akkad.2
Along with the seal-cylinder it is probable that the

1 In the later bronze or " Mykenaean " age the seal-cylinders
are of a different type, and are engraved on a black artificial
paste resembling haematite (Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter,
Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum, p. 32).

2 Sayce, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archceology,
1877, v. part ii. ; Bczold, Zeitschrift fur Keilinschrift, 1885,
pp. 191-3.

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 141

clay tablet was also introduced to the people of the
West. Though the clay tablets found by Dr. Evans
and others in Krete may not go back to so remote a
date, the linear Kretan characters belong to the same
system of writing as the Cypriote syllabary, and an
inscription in the letters of this syllabary on a seal-
cylinder from the early copper-age cemetery of
Paraskevi near Nikosia has recently been published
by myself.1 We may infer that the prototypes of the
tablets of Knossos or Phaestos once existed in Cyprus
and Syria, though in the damp climate of the
Mediterranean the unbaked clay of which they were
made has long since returned to its original dust.

A few centuries after the age of Sargon of Akkad
we find Gudea, a Sumerian prince in Southern
Babylonia, bringing limestone from "the land of the
Amorites," blocks of alabaster from the Lebanon,
and beams of cedar from Mount Amanus, for his
buildings in the city of Lagas. Gold-dust and acacia
wood were at the same time imported from the
"salt" desert which lay between Palestine and
Egypt, and stones from the mountains of the Taurus,
to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch, were floated
down the Euphrates on rafts.2 At a later date we
hear of the kings of the Babylonian dynasty which
had its capital at Ur, conducting military expeditions
to the district of the Lebanon.

1 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archceology, Novem-
ber 1905, plate No. 11.

2 A cadastral survey, which was drawn up at this period under
Uru-malik, or Urimelech, "the governor of the land of the
Amorites," would, if perfect, have given us an interesting de-
scription of Syria and Palestine in the third millennium before
our era ; see Thureau Dangin in the Revue Se'mitique, Avril
1897.

142 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

About B.C. 2100 Northern Babylonia was occupied
by a dynasty of kings, whose names show that they
belonged to the Western division of the Semitic
family. The language of Canaan — better known to
us as Hebrew — and that of Southern and North-
eastern Arabia, were at the time substantially one
and the same, and as the same deities were wor-
shipped and the same ancestors were claimed
throughout this portion of the Semitic world, Assyri-
ologists are not agreed as to whether the dynasty in
question should be regarded as coming from Canaan
or from Southern Arabia. The Babylonians them-
selves called the names Amorite, so it is possible
that they would have pronounced the kings to have
been Amorite also. The point, however, is of little
moment ; the fact remains that Northern Babylonia
passed under the rule of sovereigns who belonged to
the Western and not to the Babylonian branch of the
Semitic race, and who made Babylon their capital.
The contract tablets and other legal documents of this
period show that Babylonia was at the time full of
Amorite, that is Canaanite, settlers, most of whom
had come there for the sake of trade. At Sippara
there was a district called " the field of the Amorites,"
over which, therefore, they must have had full legal
rights. Indeed, it would seem that in the eyes of the
law the Amorite settlers were on a complete footing
of equality with the natives of the country.

This fact, so little in harmony with our ordinary
idea of the exclusiveness of the ancient East, is
largely explained by the further fact that Canaan
and Syria were now acknowledged portions of the
Babylonian Empire. When Babylonia was conquered

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 143

by the Elamites, and the West Semitic king of
Babylon allowed to retain his crown as an Elamitc
vassal, his claim to rule over " the land of the
Amorites " passed naturally to his suzerain. Accord-
ingly we find Chedor-laomer of Elam in the Book of
Genesis marching to Canaan to put down a local
rebellion there, while Eri-Aku, or Arioch, of Larsa,
at the same date describes an Elamite prince as
"governor of the land of the Amorites." When
Khammu-rabi, or Amraphel, the king of Babylon,
at last succeeded in shaking off the Elamite yoke
and making himself monarch of a free and united
Babylonia, " the land of the Amorites " followed the
fortunes of Babylonia as a matter of course. On a
monument discovered at Diarbekir, in Northern
Mesopotamia, the only title taken by the Babylonian
sovereign is that of " king of the land of the Amor-
ites." And the same title is borne by one at least of
his successors in the dynasty.

For more than two thousand years, therefore,
Western Asia was more or less closely attached to
Babylonia. At times it was as much a part of the
dominions of the Babylonian king as the cities of
Babylonia itself, and it is consequently not surprising
that it should have become thoroughly interpenetrated
with Babylonian culture. There was an excellent
postal service connecting Canaan with Babylonia
which went back to the days of Naram-Sin, and some
of the clay bulla which served as stamps for the
official correspondence at that period are now in the
Museum of the Louvre.1 On the other hand, a clay
docket has been found in the Lebanon, dated in the

1 See Heuzey, in the Revue cPAssyriologze, 1897, pp. 1-12.

144 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

reign of the son of Khammu-rabi, which contains one
of the notices sent by the Babylonian Government to
its officials at the beginning of each year, in order
that they might know what was its official title and
date.1

When this close connection between Babylonia
and its Syrian provinces was broken off we do not as
yet know. Perhaps it did not take place until the
conquest of Babylonia by a horde of half-civilized
mountaineers from Elam about B.C. 1800. At any
rate, from this time forward, though the influence of
Babylonian culture continued, Babylonian rule in the
West was at an end. From the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence we learn that the Babylonian Govern-
ment was still inclined to intrigue in Palestine ; the
memories of its ancient empire were not altogether
obliterated, and just as the English sovereigns called
themselves kings of France long after they had
ceased to possess an inch of French ground, so the
Babylonian kings doubtless persuaded themselves
that they were still by right the rulers of Canaan.

The wild mountaineers from the Kossaean high-
lands who had conquered Babylon soon passed under
the spell of Babylonian culture, and became them-
selves Babylonian in habits, if not in name. They
founded a dynasty which lasted for five hundred and
seventy-six years and nine months. It is a curious

1 This was "the year when Samsu-iluna the king gave
Merodach a shining mace of gold and silver, the glory of the
temple ; it made E-Saggil (the temple of Bel-Merodach at
Babylon) shine like the stars of heaven." The title of the year
was derived from the chief event, or events, that characterized
it. See Dr. Pinches, in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, April and July 1900, pp. 269-73.

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 145

coincidence that Egypt also was governed about the
same time by foreign conquerors, whose primitive
wildness had been tamed by the influences of Egyp-
tian civilization, which they had adopted as the
Kossaean mountaineers adopted that of Babylonia,
and whose rule also lasted for more than five hundred
years. The Hyksos who conquered Egypt have been
convincingly shown by recent discoveries to have
been Semites, speaking a language of the West
Semitic type.1 They came from Canaan, and their
conquest of Egypt made of it a dependency of
Canaan. Hence they fixed their head-quarters in
the northern part of their Egyptian territories, where
they could easily keep up communication with Asia.

The excavations undertaken by the Palestine
Exploration Fund at Lachish, Gezer and other sites
in Southern Canaan have made it clear that throughout
the Hyksos period Egypt and that part of Palestine
were closely connected with one another. How much
further eastward the government or influence of the
Hyksos may have extended we do not know ; the
figure of a lion inscribed with the name of a Hyksos
Pharaoh has been discovered in Babylonia, but this
may have been brought from elsewhere. At any
rate, so far as Palestine is concerned, we may say

1 See my analysis of some of the Hyksos names in the
Proceedings oftlie Society oj Biblical Archceology, 1901, pp. 95-8.
Since the publication of the Paper other names of the same
type, like Rabu and Sakti, have come to light. The character-
istic names of the Hyksos princes recur among the " Amorite"
names found in the contract tablets of the Khammu-rabi period,
but not later. The abbreviated forms of the names met with on
the Egyptian scarabs are also found in the tablets. Indeed, the
contracted form of Ya'qub-el, that is to say, Yakubu, with k instead
of q, must have been transcribed from a cuneiform original.

K

146 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

that the Hyksos period in Egypt coincides with the
disappearance of Babylonian rule in Canaan. From
that time onward Canaan looks towards Egypt, and
not towards Babylonia.

But even before the beginning of the Hyksos
period Canaan — or at all events Southern Canaan — is
Egyptian rather than Babylonian. That has been
abundantly proved by Mr. Macalister's excavations at
Gezer. Objects of the age of the Twelfth dynasty
have been disinterred there, and of such a character
as to make it evident that the country was already
subject to Egyptian influence long before the appear-
ance of the Hyksos. An Egyptian of that age was
buried within the precincts of the consecrated " high
place," and a stela commemorating him erected on the
spot.

Both at Gezer and at Lachish it has been possible
to trace the archaeological chronology of the sites by
the successive cities which arose upon them. Gezer
was the older settlement of the two ; its history goes
back to the neolithic age, when it was inhabited by a
race of short stature who lived in caves and burned
their dead, and whose pottery was of the roughest
description. Some of it was ornamented with streaks
of red or black on a yellow or red wash, like coarse
pottery of the age of the Third Egyptian dynasty
which I have found in so-called " prehistoric "
graves at El-Kab. Two settlements of the neolithic
population can be made out, one resting upon the
other ; in the second there was a distinct advance in
civilization, and the place became a town surrounded
by a wall. The neolithic race was succeeded by a
taller race with Semitic characteristics, to whom the

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 147

name of Amorite has been given ; they buried the
dead in a contracted position, and were acquainted
with the use of copper and later of bronze. The city
was now defended by a solid wall of stone, intersected
with brick towers ; as Mr. Macalister observes, in a
country where stone is the natural building material
the employment of brick must be due to foreign in-
fluence. He thinks the influence was Egyptian ; this
is very possible ; but considering that building with
brick was a salient feature in Babylonian civiliza-
tion, the influence may have come rather from the
side of Babylonia.

The first " Amorite " city at Gezer was coeval with
the earliest city at Lachish — the modern Tel el-Hesy,
where the Amorite settlers had no neolithic pre-
decessors. At Gezer their sanctuary has been
discovered. It was a " high place " formed of nine
great monoliths running from north to south, and
surrounded by a platform of large stones. The
second monolith, polished with the kisses of the
worshippers, was possibly the central object of
veneration, the bcetylos or beth-el, as it was termed.1
This beth-el, or "house of God," takes us back to
Semitic Babylonia. The veneration of isolated stones
was common to all branches of the Semitic race ; it
may have come down to them from the days when
their ancestors wandered over the desert plains of
Arabia, where the solitary rocks assumed fantastic
shapes that appealed to their imagination and excited

1 Macalister, Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration
Fund, January 1903, p. 28. It is the seventh stone, however,
which alone has been brought from a distance — the neighbour-
hood of Jerusalem — all the others being of local origin {Quarterly
Statement, July 1904, pp. 194-5).

148 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

feelings of awe, while their shadows offered a welcome
retreat in the heat of noon-day. In the historical age,
however, it was not the rock itself that was adored,
but the divinity whose home it had become by con-
secration with oil. The brick-built temple was called
by the Babylonians a bit-ili, beth-el, or " house of God,"
and the name was easily transferred to the consecrated
stones, the worship of which was coeval with the
beginnings of Semitic history. But though the
worship of stones was primitive, the belief that the
stone was not a fetish, but the shrine of divinity,
belonged to an age of reflection and points to a
Babylonian source.

The first Amorite city at Gezer was succeeded by
a second, in which the high place underwent enlarge-
ment and was provided with a temenos. Under its
pavement have been found memorials of the grim
rites performed in honour of its Baal — the bones of
children and even adults who had been sacrificed and
sometimes burnt and then deposited in jars. Similar
sacrifices, it would seem, were offered when a new
building was erected, since children's bones have been
disinterred from under the foundations of houses, both
at Gezer and at Taanach and Megiddo. The bones
were placed in jars along with lamps and bowls,
which, it has been suggested, were intended to receive
the blood of the victim. The old sacred cave of the
neolithic race was now brought into connection with
the high place of the " Amorite " settlers, and the
skeleton of a child has been found in it resting on a
flat stone.

This fourth city at Gezer — the second since the
Semites first settled there — has yielded objects which

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 149

enable us to assign to it an approximate date. These
objects are Egyptian, and belong to the age of the
Twelfth dynasty. Many of them are scarabs, but
there is also the tombstone of the Egyptian who was
buried under the shadow of the Amorite sanctuary.
Fragments of diorite and alabaster vases also occur,
telling of trade with Egypt, and in the upper and
later part of the stratum painted pottery makes its
appearance similar to that met with in the corre-
sponding stratum at Lachish. I shall have more to
say about this painted pottery in the next chapter •
here it is sufficient to state that it is related to the
early painted pottery of the JEgean, but is itself of
Hittite origin, and can be traced back to the Hittite
centre in Cappadocia.

The fourth city had a long existence. It lasted
from the period of the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty to
the middle of the Eighteenth. Then it was ruined by
an enemy and its old wall partially destroyed — doubt-
less by Thothmes III. when he conquered Palestine
(about B.C. 1480). Upon its ruins rose another
Amorite town. A new city wall was built of larger
circumference and greater strength ; it measured
fourteen feet in thickness, and the stones of which it was
composed were large and well shaped. The houses
erected on the debris of the brick towers belonging to
the old wall were rilled with scarabs, beads, fragments
of pottery and other objects contemporary with the
reign of Amon-hotep III. (B.C. 1400). At Lachish the
ruins of the third city were full of similar objects, and
among them was a cuneiform tablet in which refer-
ence is made to the governor of Lachish mentioned in
the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. At Taanach the

150 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Austrian excavators discovered an archive-chamber,
the contents of which were of the same age. Taanach
was merely a third-rate or fourth-rate town, but its
shekh possessed a fortified residence, in a subterranean
chamber of which his official records and private
correspondence were kept in a coffer of terra-cotta.
They were all in the Babylonian language and script.
Among them is a list of the number of men each
landowner (?) was required to furnish for the local
militia, and there are also the letters which passed
between the shekh and his friends about their private
affairs. How little of an official character is to be
found in these letters may be gathered from the
following translation of one of them : " To Istar-yisur
(writes) Guli-Hadad. — Live happily ! May the gods
grant health to yourself, your house and your sons !
You have written to me about the money . . . and
behold I will give fifty pieces of silver, since this has
not (yet) been done. — Again : Why have you sent
your salutation here afresh ? All you have heard
there I have (already) learned through Bel-ram. —
Again : If the finger of the goddess Asherat appears,
let them announce (the omen) and observe (it), and
you shall describe to me both the sign and the fact.
As to your daughter, we know the one, Salmisa, who
is in the city of Rabbah, and if she grows up, you
must give her to the prince ; she is in truth fit for a
lord."1

These Taanach letters are a final proof, if any were
needed, of the completely Babylonian nature of
Canaanitish civilization in the century before the

1 See Sellin, Tell TcCa.7inek (1904) and Eine Nachlese auf
dem Tell Tdannek in P alas Una (1905).

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 151

Exodus. When we find the petty shekhs of
obscure Canaanite towns corresponding with one
another on the trivial matters of every-day life in the
foreign language and syllabary of Babylonia, it is
evident that Babylonian influence was still as strong
in Palestine as it had been in the days when "the
land of the Amorites " was a Babylonian province.
It is also evident that there must have been plenty of
schools in which the foreign language and syllabary
could be taught and studied, and that the clay
literature of Babylonia had been carried to the West.
Indeed the Tel el-Amarna collection contains proof
of this latter fact. Along with the letters are frag-
ments of Babylonian literary works, one of which has
been interpunctuated in order to facilitate its reading
by the Egyptian scholar.

On the other hand, apart from the cuneiform tablets
the more strictly archaeological evidence of Baby-
lonian influence upon Canaan is extraordinarily
scanty. Naturally we should discover no traces of
" the goodly Babylonish garments " which, as we
learn from the Book of Joshua, were imported into the
country, the climate of Palestine not being favourable
to their preservation ; but it is certainly strange that
so few seal-cylinders or similar objects have been
disinterred, either at Gezer and Lachish in the south,
or at Taanach and Megiddo in the north. What
makes it the stranger is that Mr. Macalister has
opened a long series of graves, beginning with the
neolithic race and coming down to Graeco-Roman
times, and that while the influence of Egypt is
sufficiently visible in them, that of Babylonia is
almost entirely absent. It is true that a few seal-

152 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

cylinders have been met with in the excavations on
the city sites, but with the exception of one found
at Taanach 1 I do not know of any that can be said
to be of purely Babylonian manufacture ; most of
them are of Syrian make, and represent a Syrian
modification of the Babylonian type. And yet there
are seal-cylinders from the Lebanon, now in the
Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which are purely
Babylonian in origin, and belong to the period of
Khammu-rabi.2 There are also two seal-cylinders of
later pattern in M. de Clercq's collection, on which
are representations of the Egyptian gods Set and
Horus — similar to those found on scarabs from the
Delta of the time of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
dynasties — as well as of the Canaanite god Reshef,
accompanied by cuneiform inscriptions which on
palaeographic grounds must be assigned to the age
of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. As the inscriptions
record the names of Hadad-sum and his son Anniy,
" citizens of Sidon, the crown of the gods," we know
that they have come from the Phoenician coast.3
Like the cuneiform tablets, they bear witness to
the long-continued influence of Babylonian culture
in Canaan on its literary side.

When we turn to theology and law, the same
influence is recognizable. The deities of Canaan
were to a large extent Babylonian, with Babylonian
names. The Babylonian gods Ana, Nebo, Rimmon
(Ramman), Hadad and Dagon meet us in the names

1 Tell Ta'annek, pp. 27-8. The cylinder is earlier than B.C.
2000.

2 See my Patriarchal Palestine, pp. 60, 61.

3 Collection De Clercg, Catalogue tnethodique et raisonnd, i.
p. 217.

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 1 53

of places and persons, and Ashtoreth, who shared
with Baal the devotion of the inhabitants of Palestine,
is the Babylonian Istar with the suffix of the feminine
attached to her name. Even Asherah, in whom
Semitic scholars were long inclined to see a genuinely
Canaanitish goddess, turns out to have been of
Babylonian origin, and to be the feminine counter-
part of Asir, or Asur, the national god of Assyria.
The recently-discovered legal code of Khammu-rabi
has shown that such glimpses as we have in the Book
of Genesis of the laws and legal customs of Canaan
in the patriarchal age all presuppose Babylonian
law. From time to time usages are referred to and
laws implied which have no parallel in the Mosaic
code, and are therefore presumably pre-Israelite.
But though they have no parallel in the Mosaic
code, we have now learnt that they were all provided
for in the code of Khammu-rabi. Thus Abram's
adoption of his slave and house-steward Eliezer is
in strict accordance with the provisions of the old
Babylonian law. Adoption, indeed, which was prac-
tically unknown among the Israelites, was a leading
feature in Babylonian life, and the childless man was
empowered to adopt an heir, even from among his
slaves, to whom he left his name and his property.
So, again, Sarai's conduct in regard to Hagar, or
Rachel's conduct in regard to Bilhah, is explained
by the Babylonian enactment which allowed the
wife to present her husband with a concubine ; while
we can now understand why Hagar was not sold
after her quarrel with Sarai, for the Babylonian law
laid down that " if a man has married a wife, and she
has given a concubine to her husband by whom he

154 ARCH/EOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

has had a child, should the concubine afterwards
have a dispute with her mistress because she has
borne children, her mistress cannot sell her ; she can
only lay a task upon her and make her live with the
other slaves."

In the account of Isaac's marriage with Rebekah
it is again a provision of the old Babylonian code
with which we meet. There we hear of the bride
receiving a dowry from the father of the bridegroom,
and of other presents being made to her mother in con-
formity with Babylonian usage. So, too, the infliction
of death by burning with which Judah threatened
his daughter-in-law Tamar, on the supposition that
she was a widow, has its explanation in the legislation
of Khammu-rabi, where the same punishment is
enacted against a nun who has been unfaithful to
her vows of virginity or widowhood. The story of
the purchase of the cave of Machpelah, moreover,
has long been recognized by Assyriologists as pre-
supposing an acquaintance with the legal forms of
a Babylonian sale of land in the Khammu-rabi age.

With all this heritage of Babylonian culture, there-
fore, it is curious that the excavators in Palestine
have come across so few material evidences of inter-
course with Babylonia. Mr. Macalister is inclined to
believe that it must belong to a period anterior to
the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty. But this raises a
chronological question of some difficulty. We have
seen that the earlier and inner city wall of Gezer
served as the defence of three successive settlements,
and that it was partially destroyed along with the
city it protected about B.C. 1480. Now the outer and
more massive wall which superseded it also served

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE I 55

to protect three cities, the latest of which was
deserted during the Maccabean period, about B.C.
100. Hence, Mr. Macalister argues, " if we may
assume the rate of growth to have been fairly
uniform, we are led back to B.C. 2900 as the (latest)
date" for the foundation of the first wall. During
this long period of time twenty-eight feet of debris
accumulated ; below this are as much as twelve feet
of neolithic accumulation.1

The conquests of Sargon of Akkad would accord-
ingly have fallen within the neolithic epoch. But in
this case it is strange that the use of copper, with
which Babylonia had long been acquainted, was not
communicated to its Western province, and that it
should have needed a new race and the lapse of
nearly a thousand years for its introduction. More-
over, specific evidences of Babylonian civilization are
quite as much wanting in the remains of the first
Amorite city as they are in those of the second.
And unless we adopt a date for the Twelfth Egyptian
dynasty, which on other grounds seems out of the
question, it is hard to see how the Khammu-rabi
dynasty can be placed before it. What little evi-
dence we possess at present goes to indicate that
the Khammu-rabi dynasty was contemporaneous
with the earlier Hyksos kings or their immediate
predecessors. And yet not only do we know that
the Khammu-rabi dynasty ruled in Palestine, but the
adoption of the cuneiform script, which was at least
as old as the age of that dynasty, as well as the
testimony of theology and law, proves that its rule

1 Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund,
January 1905, pp. 28, 29.

156 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

must have exercised a profound and permanent
influence upon the people of Canaan. How is it,
then, that while the excavations have brought to
light so many evidences of Egyptian domination,
there is so little in the way of material objects to
show that Palestine was once and for several centuries
a Babylonian province ? l

Perhaps the excavations which are still proceeding
at Megiddo may throw some light upon the problem.
Meanwhile, we may remember that thus far the
greater part of the objects that have been found
belong to the less wealthy and educated part of the
population. The annals of Thothmes III. prove that,
so far as the upper classes were concerned, the picture
of Canaanitish luxury presented in the Old Testament
had a foundation of fact. Among the spoils taken
from the princes of Canaan we hear of tables, chairs
and staves of cedar and ebony inlaid or gilded with
gold, of a golden plough and sceptre, of richly-
embroidered stuffs similar to those depicted on the
walls of the Egyptian monuments, of chariots chased
with silver, of iron tent-poles studded with precious
stones, and of "bowls with goats' heads on them, and
one with a lion's head, the workmanship of the land

1 The chronological difficulty, however, would be partially
solved if the date recently proposed by Professor Petrie
{Researches in Sinai, ch. xii.) for the Twelfth dynasty — B.C.
3459-3250 — be adopted. The Twelfth dynasty would in this
case have reigned a thousand years before the dynasty of
Khammu-rabi, whose domination in Palestine would have been
an interlude in the history of the Hyksos period, while the
conquest of Canaan by Sargon and Naram-Sin would have
coincided with the supersession of the neolithic population by
the "Amorites," who brought with them the copper and the
culture of Babylonia.

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 1 57

of the Zahi," that is to say, of the Canaanitish coast.
These latter were doubtless imitations of the gold
and silver cups with double handles and animals'
heads imported from Krete, which were also received
as tribute from the Canaanitish princes by the
Egyptian king. Other gifts comprised chariots plated
with gold, iron armour with gold inlay, a helmet of
gold inlaid with lapis-lazuli, the tusks of elephants,
rings of gold and silver that were used as money,
copper and lead, as well as jars of wine, oil and
balsam. Of all these articles, the copper and lead
excepted, it is needless to say next to nothing has
been discovered by the excavators. The most
valuable work of art yet met with is a bronze sword
of precisely the same shape as one found in Assyria,
which bears upon it the name of Hadad-nirari I.
(B.C. 1330).1

On the palaeographical side the forms of the
cuneiform characters used in Canaan go back to
the script of the age of Khammu-rabi and his pre-
decessors. From a purely Assyriological point of
view, no regard being had to other considerations,
I should date their introduction into Palestine about
B.C. 2300. The chronology that would best harmonize
the historical facts would thus be one which made
the dominance of Egypt in Palestine under the
Twelfth dynasty precede the Babylonian rule of
the Khammu-rabi period. Against it is the negative

1 Unless we except the gold and silver ornaments found on
the body of a woman in a deserted house at Taanach, which, as
Dr. Sellin says, are by themselves sufficient to remove ''all
grounds for doubting such accounts as those in Joshua vii. 21,
and Judges viii. 26 {Eine Nachlese anf dem Tell Tafannek,

P- 32).

158 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

evidence of archaeological discovery, so few traces of
this rule having been discovered in the course of
the excavations. But neither in archseology nor in
anything else is negative evidence of much value.

At any rate, thanks to the decipherment of the
cuneiform inscriptions, the main facts are clear.
Canaan was once a province of the Babylonian
Empire, and during the long period of time that this
was the case it became permeated with the literary
culture of Babylonia. The civilization which was
partially destroyed by the Israelitish invasion had
its roots in the valley of the Euphrates.

Gezer, it is true, was one of the cities in which no
visible break with the past was made by the irruption
of the desert tribes. It escaped capture by the in-
vaders, and it was only in the reign of Solomon, when
the Israelites had already entered into the heritage
of the old Canaanitish culture, that it was handed
over by the king of Egypt to his Jewish son-in-law.
But at Lachish the marks of the destruction of the
town by Joshua are still visible. Above the ruins of
the Amorite cities is a bed of ashes left by the
charcoal-burners who squatted on the site before it
was again rebuilt. Above the stratum of ashes all
must be Israelitish, and the objects found in the
remains of the cities that stand upon it testify
accordingly to a complete change. No more cunei-
form tablets are met with, and but few Egyptian
scarabs; the pottery is different, and the "high place"
has disappeared. The bowl and lamp, indeed, are
still buried under the walls of the newly-built house,
but the bones of sacrificed children which they once
contained are replaced by sand. As the Israelitish

BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE I 59

power increased the old Babylonian influence neces-
sarily lessened. When the cuneiform syllabary finally
made way for the so-called Phoenician alphabet is
still uncertain, but it was at all events before the
days of Solomon. Already in the Amorite period
the characters of the Kretan linear script discovered
by Dr. Evans are found scratched on fragments of
pottery, indicating that besides the cuneiform another
form of writing was known ; it may be that the
Israelitish conquest, by destroying the centres of
Canaanitish civilization and the schools of the scribes,
gave a first blow to the tradition of Babylonian
learning, and that the work of destruction was
subsequently completed by the Philistine wars.

CHAPTER VI

ASIA MINOR

If it has been a surprise to learn that Palestine was
once within the circle of Babylonian culture, it has
been equally a surprise to learn that Asia Minor was
so too. It is true that Herodotus traced the Herakleid
dynasty of Lydian kings to the gods of Nineveh and
Babylon, that Strabo knew of a " mound of Semiramis "
in Cappadocia, and that in the Book of Genesis Lud is
called the son of Shem. But historians had long
agreed that all such beliefs were creations of a later
day, and rested on no substratum of fact. The
northern limits of Babylonian or Assyrian influence, it
was held, were fixed by the Taurus and the mountains
of Kurdistan.

The discoveryof cuneiform inscriptions on the stones
and rocks of Armenia made the first breach in this
conclusion. Their existence was known even before
Botta and Layard had opened up Nineveh. In 1826
Schulz had been sent by the French Government at
the instance of M. Mohl to copy the mysterious
characters which had already excited the attention of
Oriental writers. Schulz was unexpectedly successful
in his quest. The number of inscriptions he discovered
was far larger than had been imagined, and his copies

160

ASIA MINOR l6l

of them, as we now know, were remarkably accurate.
But the explorer himself never lived to return to
Europe. He was murdered by a Kurdish chief,
Nurallah Bey, in 1829, while engaged in the work of
exploration; his papers, however, were eventually
recovered, and the inscriptions he had copied were
published in 1840 in the Journal of the Societe Asia-
tique. One of them was a trilingual inscription of
Xerxes, the Persian transcript of which was just
beginning to be deciphered ; the rest were still a closed
book.

Then came the discovery of Nineveh and the first
essays at the interpretation of the Assyro-Babylonian
texts. Layard himself made an expedition to
Armenia, and besides recopying Schulz's texts and
correcting certain inaccuracies in them, added con-
siderably to the collection. Dr. Hincks, with his usual
genius for decipherment, perceived that the syllabary
in which they were written was the same as that used
at Nineveh, and utilized them for determining the
values of some of the Assyrian characters. He
succeeded in reading most of the proper names, in
assigning the inscriptions to a group of kings whose
order he was able to fix, and in pointing out that
many of them contain an account of military
campaigns and of the amount of booty which had
been carried off. But it was also clear that the in-
scriptions were not in a Semitic language, and as the
nominative and accusative of the noun seemed to
terminate in -s and -n, while the patronymic was ex-
pressed by the suffix -khinis, the decipherer assumed
that the language was Indo-European. The most
important texts had been found in or near Van, which

h

162 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

had apparently been the capital of the kings by whose
orders they had been engraved, and the name of
Vannic, accordingly, was given to both texts and
language.

It was soon recognized that Dr. Hincks had been
in error in suggesting that the Vannic language was
Indo-European. It was, it is true, inflectional, but
with this any resemblance to the languages of the
Indo-European family ceased. Nor was there any
other language or group of languages to which it
appeared to be related, and all attempts failed to
advance the decipherment much beyond the point at
which it had been left by Hincks. Thanks to the
"determinatives," which indicate proper names and
the like, and the ideographs, which are fairly plentiful,
the general sense of many of the inscriptions could be
made out ; but beyond that it seemed impossible to
go. Lenormant, indeed, following Hincks, showed
that the suffix -bi denoted the first person singular of
the verb, and indicated Georgian as possibly a related
language ; but in the hands of other would-be
decipherers, like Robert and Mordtmann, there was
retrogression instead of advance.

So matters remained until 1882, when Stanislas
Guyard pointed out the parallelism between a formula
which occurs at the end of many Vannic inscriptions
and the imprecatory formula of the Assyrian texts.
I had already been struck by the same fact, and was
at the time preparing a Memoir on the decipherment
and translation of the inscriptions, which shortly after-
wards appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society. In this I had made use of Layard's copies,
which had never been published ; other copies also,

''Wit I

ASIA MINOR 163

including photographs, squeezes and casts, had been
placed at my disposal, and in 1882 I was able to lay
before cuneiform scholars a grammar and vocabulary
of the Vannic language, together with translations and
analyses of all the known texts.1 These have been
subsequently corrected and extended by other Assyri-
ologists — Guyard, D. H. Miiller, Nikolsky, Scheil,
Belck and Lehmann, as well as by myself. An ordin-
ary Vannic text can now be translated with nearly
as much completeness and certainty as an Assyrian
text, and the number of them known to us has been
greatly enlarged by the archaeological explorations of
Belck and Lehmann.

In the decipherment of the Vannic inscriptions the
ideographs and determinatives which are scattered
through them took the place for me of a bilingual text.
The determinatives told me what was the nature of
the words which followed or preceded them, and so
explained the general sense of the passages in which
they occurred, while from time to time a phonetically-
written word would be replaced in a parallel passage
by an ideograph the signification of which was known.
I soon found, moreover, that the cuneiform syllabary
must have been brought from Nineveh to Van in the
age of Assur-natsir-pal II. (B.C. 884-859), and that the
actual phrases met with in the inscriptions of that
monarch are sometimes reproduced in a Vannic dress.
The Vannic language, however, still remains isolated,
though the majority of those who have studied it
incline to Lenormant's view that its nearest living
representative is Georgian. Not being a Georgian

1 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, New Series, xiv. 3, 4, pp.
377-732-

164 ARCH/EOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

scholar myself, this is a point upon which I can
express no opinion.

Instead of " Vannic," it has been proposed to call
the language " Khaldian." The chief god of the people
whospoke the language was Khaldis,and in the inscrip-
tions we find the people themselves described as " the
children of Khaldis." Derivatives from the name are
found employed in a geographical sense northward of
the region to which the inscriptions belong. Thus the
Khaldi " in the neighbourhood of Colchis " are said
to have been also called Khaldaei ; * " Khaldees " are
frequently referred to by Armenian writers as living
between Trapezont and Batum, and a Turkish inscrip-
tion at Sumela shows that as late as the beginning of
the fifteenth century Lazistan was still known as
Khaldia. That the name was ever applied, however,
to the kingdom which had its chief seat at Van is not
proved, and it is therefore best to adhere to the term
" Vannic," which commits those who use it to no theory.2

The decipherment of the Vannic texts has not only
led to the discovery of a new language, it has also
thrown a flood of light on the early history, geography
and religion of the Armenian plateau. The military
campaigns of the Assyrian kings had brought it into
contact with Assyrian civilization, and in the ninth
century before our era a dynasty arose which adopted
the literary culture and art of Assyria, and founded a
powerful kingdom which extended its sway from
Urumia on the east to Malatia on the west, and from

1 Eustathius on Dion. Perieget. 767. See Lehmann in the
Zeitschrift fur A ssyriologie, 1894, pp. 90 and 358-60.

8 The Vannic kings always call themselves kings, not of the
Khaldians, but of Biainas or Bianas, the Byana of Ptolemy, the
Van of to-day.

ASIA MINOR 165

the slopes of Ararat and the shores of Lake Erivan to
the northern frontiers of Assyria.

The main fact which has thus been disclosed is that
the Armenians of history — the Aryan tribes, that is
to say, who spoke an Indo-European language — did
not enter the country and establish themselves in the
place of its older rulers before the end of the seventh
century before our era. The fall of the Vannic mon-
archy seems to have coincided with the fall of the
Assyrian Empire, with which it had once contended
on almost equal terms, and in each case the invasion
of the so-called Scythian hordes from the plains of
Eastern Europe had much to do with the result. The
founders of Armenian civilization and of the cities of
the Armenian plateau had no connection with the
Indo-European family. Their type of language corre-
sponded with that which distinguishes most of the
actual languages of the Caucasus, though no genetic
relationship is traceable between them. The break
with the past, however, occasioned by the irruption of
the Indo-European invaders, was so great that not
only did the older language become extinct and for-
gotten, but even the tradition of the older civilization
was also lost. Like the recovery of the Sumerian
language and the culture it represented, the recovery
of the Vannic language and culture is the revelation
of a new world.

At the head of the pantheon was a trinity consist-
ing of Khaldis, the supreme god of the race ; Teisbas,
the god of the air ; and the Sun-god Ardinis. Temples
were erected in their honour, and shields and spears
dedicated to their service. The vine, which grows
wild in Armenia, was the sacred tree of the people,

l66 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

and there are inscriptions which commemorate its
planting and consecration, and describe the endow-
ments that were set apart for its maintenance. Wine
was naturally offered to the gods along with the
domestic animals and prisoners of war. Dr. Belck
has discovered burial-places which go back to the
neolithic age, but the majority of the monuments
scattered over the Vannic area belong to the bronze
age, and testify to a native adaptation of Assyrian art
and culture. Iron also makes its appearance, but
scantily. The pottery of the age of the inscriptions
is related on the one side to the Assyrian pottery of
the same period, and on the other to the pottery of
Asia Minor. The polished red ware more especially
points to the west.

The existence of a language of the Caucasian type
in Armenia, and its association with a powerful king-
dom and an advanced culture, is not the only revela-
tion of the kind that we owe to cuneiform decipher-
ment. We have learned that at a much earlier epoch
Northern Mesopotamia was occupied by a people who
spoke a language of similar type but of far more com-
plicated form ; and that here, too, the language in
question was accompanied by a high civilization, a

1 See more especially Belck's comparison of the Vannic
pottery with that of the Assyrian colony of Kara Eyuk, near
Kaisariyeh, in the Verhandlufigen der Berliner anthropologisch-
en Gesellschaft, December 1901, p. 493. Besides the highly-
polished lustrous red ware, he found at Kara Eyuk fragments
of the same wheel-made wine-jars, "of gigantic size," which
characterized Toprak Kaleh, near Van. Similar jars, as well
as lustrous red pottery, were discovered by Schliemann in the
"prehistoric " strata at Troy. The animals' heads in terra-cotta
found at Kara Eyuk are stated by Dr. Belck to be similar to
those of the Digalla Tepe, near Urumiya. For further details
see infra.

ASIA MINOR 167

powerful monarchy, and the use of the cuneiform
syllabary. The monarchy was that of Mitanni, and
its culture and script had been borrowed from Baby-
lonia in the age of Khammu-rabi, instead of from
Assyria in the age of Assur-natsir-pal. But it is
interesting to observe that in borrowing the script
the people of Mitanni had adapted and simplified it
in precisely the same way as did the people of Van in
after days. Superfluous characters were discarded,
a single phonetic value only assigned to each char-
acter, and large use made of those which expressed
vowels. In fact, in both Mitannian and Vannic the
system of writing begins to approach the alphabetic.
Whether this similarity in adaptation was due to a
similarity of phonetic structure in the two languages
or to conscious imitation on the part of the Vannic
scribes it is difficult to say ; it is a point, however,
which cannot be passed over.

The name of Mitanni meets us on the Egyptian
monuments of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynas-
ties. The kingdom played a considerable part at
that period of time in the politics of Western Asia,
and the daughters of its kings were married to the
Egyptian Pharaohs. The boundaries of the Egyptian
Empire were coterminous with those of Mitanni, and
we gather from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence
that the Mitannian forces had more than once made
their way into Palestine, perhaps as far south as
Jerusalem, and that Mitannian intrigue was active in
that portion of the Pharaoh's dominions. Among the
Canaanitish governors are some who bear Mitannian
names, and testify to the continuance of a Mitannian
element in that common meeting-place of nationalities.

l68 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Several letters from the Mitannian king have been
found among the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Most of
them are written in the Babylonian language, but one
— and fortunately an exceptionally long one — though
in cuneiform characters, is in the native language of
the country. A comparison of it with its companion
letters, assisted by the determinatives and ideographs
which are employed in it from time to time, has en-
abled Jensen, Leopold Messerschmidt and myself to
decipher a very considerable part of the letter, and so
to compile a grammar and vocabulary of the Mitan-
nian language. That it is distantly related to Vannic
seems to admit of little doubt, but it comes before us
in a much more developed form ; indeed, its system of
suffixes is so elaborate and ponderous as to remind us
of the polysynthetic languages of America.

A legal document found in Babylonia and dated
in the epoch of Khammu-rabi contains a number of
proper names which are of Mitannian or allied origin,
and show that persons of that race were already
settled in Babylonia.1 As the Mitannian form of
cuneiform script must have been borrowed about the
same time, we may infer that the advanced guard of
the northern race had already made its way as far
south as Mesopotamia, and there established its
power in the midst of a Semitic population. From
that time forward a constant struggle went on be-
tween the two races, the Semitic race striving to
push back the northern intruders and planting its
own colonies in the very heart of the northern area,

1 See Pinches in the Jourtial of the Royal Asiatic Society,
1897, pp. 589-613 ; and myself in the Proceedings of the Society
of Biblical Archceology, 1897, p. 286.

ASIA MINOR 169

while the northerners pressed ever more and more to
the southward, and at one time even seemed likely to
possess themselves of the heritage of the Babylonian
Empire in Western Asia. Like Armenia, Northern
Mesopotamia was occupied by a people of Caucasian
and Asianic affinities, whose armies had crossed the
Euphrates and won territory in Syria and Palestine.

On the west, however, the Mitannians found them-
selves confronted by another northern population, the
Hittites, whose first home was in Cappadocia. The
Hittites also had passed under the spell of Babylonian
culture, and the cuneiform script had been carried to
them at an early date. Thanks to recent discoveries,
we can now trace in some measure the earlier fortunes
of a race who made a profound impression, not only
on the future history of Asia Minor and its relations
with Greece, but also on the history of Palestine.

As far back as about B.C. 2000, Babylonian or
Assyrian troops had already made their way along
the northern banks of the Tigris and Euphrates to
the borders of Cappadocia and the neighbourhood
of the Halys. I say Babylonian or Assyrian, for
Assyria was at the time a province of Babylonia,
though as the colonies which settled in the track of
the invaders were distinctively Assyrian in their muni-
cipal customs and the names of their inhabitants, the
troops were probably drafted from Assyria.1 The
mineral wealth of Cappadocia was doubtless the
attraction which led them to such distant and semi-

1 Thus we find from the Cappadocian cuneiform tablets
discovered at Kara Eyuk, north-east of Kaisariyeh, that time
was reckoned by the annual succession of officers called livuni
as in Assyria.

170 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

barbarous lands ; Dr. Gladstone's analysis of the gold
of the Sixth Egyptian dynasty, with its admixture of
silver, has shown that it was imported from the north
of Asia Minor,1 and the silver itself was probably
already worked. Further south, in the Taurus, were
mines of copper.

However this may be, the remains of one of these
early Assyro-Babylonian colonies has been partially
excavated a few miles (twenty-three kilometres) to the
north-east of Kaisariyeh.2 The site is now known as
Kara Eyuk, " the Black Mound," and numerous cunei-
form tablets have come from it. It has obtained its
present name from the marks of fire which are every-
where visible upon it, and bear eloquent testimony to its
final fate. Established as an outpost of the Assyrian
Empire in the distant west, a time came when, de-
serted by the Government at home, its strong walls
were battered down by the besieging foe and the
Assyrian settlers massacred among the ruins of their
burning town. According to M. Chantre, its ex-
cavator (who, however, believes that it was destroyed
by a volcanic eruption), the whole mound is a mass of
charred and burnt remains.

The construction of the walls, as well as the pottery
found within them, marks it off with great distinctness
from the ruins of the Hittite or native Cappadocian
cities in its neighbourhood. While in their case the
city wall is made of unmortared blocks of stone, the
walls of Kara Eyuk are built of brick, and where
stones are used they are of small size and cemented
with mortar. The pottery differs considerably from

1 Denderek, p. 62.

2 Chantre, Mission en Cappadoce, pp. 71-91.

ASIA MINOR 171

that of the Hittite capital at Boghaz Keui. Some of
it is of black ware, especially characterized by the vases
with long spouts, which are also found in Phrygia and
the Troad. Some of it, again, is of the dark-red
lustrous ware which has been met with at Toprak
Kaleh, near Van, and Boz Eyuk in Phrygia, while
the yellow ware with geometrical patterns in black
and maroon-red which has been discovered in Phrygia
occurs in large quantities. This latter ware is of the
class known as " Mykenaean." *•

The cuneiform tablets which have come from the
site are known as " Cappadocian," and were first
noticed by Dr. Pinches. The forms of the characters
resemble those of the early Babylonian script, which
was still used in Assyria in the age of Khammu-rabi.
Many of the proper names, moreover, seem to be dis-

1 See Belck, Verhandhaigen der Berliner a?ithropologischen
Gesellschaft, December 1901, p. 493 ; and the admirable plates,
iii., vii.-xiv., in Chantre, Mission en Cappadoce. As has been
already mentioned {supra, p. 166), Dr. Belck noticed at Kara
Eyuk coarse sherds of great thickness coming from wine-jars
similar to those of Toprak Kaleh. The black vases with long
spouts have been found at Yortan and Boz Eyuk in Phrygia ;
long-spouted vases of yellow ware with geometrical patterns in
maroon-red on the site of Gordium.

Chantre discovered numerous spindle-whorls in the ruins
similar to those discovered at Troy. He also found terra-
cotta figurines, among which the ram is the most plentiful, as
well as covers and handles of vases in the shape of animals'
heads, and some curious hut-urns not unlike those of Latium.
Few bronze objects were met with, but among them were five
flanged axe-heads of the incurved Egyptian Hyksos type,
totally unlike the straight bronze axe-heads from Troy and
Angora (of Egyptian I-XII dynasty form), with which M.
Chantre compares them. The obsidian implements and stone
celts were of the ordinary Asianic pattern. M. Chantre notes
that whereas at Troy the terra-cotta figurines represented the
heads of oxen or cows, at Kara Eyuk they were the heads of
sheep, horses, and perhaps dogs.

I72 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

tinctive of that period. On the other hand, a large
proportion of them contain the name of Asur — often
in its primitive form of Asir — or are otherwise char-
acteristic of Assyria. The tablets are further dated
by the archons who gave their names to the years, a
system of chronology which was peculiar to Assyria
and unknown in Babylonia, while the month was
divided into " weeks " of five days each. The
language of the tablets also, which is full of dialectic
mispronunciations and strange words, points to
Assyria rather than to the southern kingdom, and
we may therefore conclude that the colonists were
Assyrians, even though the colony may have been
founded when Assyria was still a Babylonian province.
There are indications in the Assyrian inscriptions
themselves that the road to Cappadocia was known
to the Assyrian princes at an early epoch. The
earliest Assyrian kings whose annals have come down
to us are Hadad-nirari I. and his son Shalmaneser I.
(B.C. 1300). Hadad-nirari tells us that his great-
grandfather, Assur-yuballidh, whose letters form part
of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, had subdued
" the wide-spread " province of Subari, which lay near
the sources of the Euphrates, and in which Kara
Eyuk was perhaps included, while he himself restored
the cities of the same province which had fallen into
ruin. Later, Shalmaneser I. conducted campaign after
campaign towards the same region. In his second year
he overthrew the king of Malatia, and the combined
forces of the other " Hittite " states, who had come to
his assistance : " all were conquered," from the borders
of Cappadocia to the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish.
A military colony was settled at the head waters of

ASIA MINOR 173

the Tigris which secured the high-road to Asia
Minor.

Two centuries later we learn from Tiglath-pileser I.
that Moschians and Hittites had overrun part of this
Assyrian territory, and occupied some of the Assyrian
settlements. Once more, therefore, the Assyrian troops
marched to the north-west ; the provinces which lay in
the valley of the Murad-chai were recovered, and
the old province of Subari cleared of intruders. Soon
afterwards Tiglath-pileser forced his way into Southern
Cappadocia and the valley of the Sarus, making
Comana tributary, razing to the ground the fortresses
that had resisted him, and erecting on their site
chambers of brick, with bronze tablets on which his con-
quests were recorded. Eastern Cilicia was known at the
time to the Assyrians as Muzri, or "the Marchland,"
a clear proof that it had long formed a borderland and
debatable territory between the Assyrian Empire and
the nations of Asia Minor.

It is thus evident that even before the rise of the
Assyrian monarchy, the road that led to the mining
districts of Cappadocia, along the valleys of the Upper
Tigris, Euphrates and Tokhma Su, was not only known
to the Assyro-Babylonians, but had actually constituted
Assyrian territory, which was colonized by Assyrian
garrisons and paid tribute to Nineveh whenever Assyria
was strong enough to enforce its authority. At the
eastern extremity of the road stood the city of
unknown name, now represented by "the Burnt
Mound " of Kara Eyuk, whose existence as an Assyro-
Babylonian city probably dates back to the age of
Khammu-rabi.

It was the outpost of Babylonian culture in Asia

174 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Minor. Babylonian art, and, above all, the Babylonian
system of writing, were brought by it into the heart of
the Hittite region, and the archaeological objects found
there consequently become important for chronological
dating. Not far off, on the other side of the Halys,
rose the Hittite capital, now known as Boghaz Keui,
the centre from which, as Professor Ramsay has
shown,1 the early roads of Asia Minor radiated in
all directions.

Boghaz Keui is being excavated at the present
moment. Hundreds of clay tablets have already been
found there, inscribed with cuneiform characters, the
majority of which are in the native Hittite language,
though many are in Semitic Babylonian, including a
copy of the famous treaty between Ramses 1 1, and the
Hittite king. So far as the tablets have been examined,
they show that the Hittite empire extended from the
west of Asia Minor to the Egyptian frontier, and that
the cuneiform characters were used in ordinary life.

By one of those coincidences which sometimes
happen in archaeological research, the discovery fits
with another fact which had long been in the posses-
sion of the Assyriologist, though the full meaning of
it was unknown to him. Among the Tel el-Amarna
letters are two in a language unlike any with which we
are acquainted. One of them is from a Hittite leader
of condottieri,2 who has left us two other letters which

1 Historical Geography of Asia Minor, ch. i., ii. ; Cities and
Bishoprics of Phrygia, i. p. xiv.

2 Labawa, or Labbaya, for whom see the next chapter. A
revised transcript of his letter in Arzawan (Hittite) is given by
Knudtzon, Die zwei Arzawa-Briefe, pp. 38-40. The intro-
ductory paragraph should read : Ata-mu kit Labbaya . .
nicmis-la Uan-wa-nnas iskhani-tta-ra atari-ya ueni. — " To

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ASIA MINOR 175

are in the Assyrian language, and who came from a
town in the neighbourhood of Cilicia. The second letter
was written to the king of Arzawa by one of the foreign
secretaries of the Egyptian Government. But the
situation of Arzawa was wholly uncertain; as the
king bore the Hittite name of Tarkhundaraba, I
suggested that it lay in the Hittite territory, and
that consequently in the language of the letter we
had a fragment of the Hittite language. For many
years, however, this remained a mere conjecture,
without any definite proofs.

When the fragmentary tablets from Boghaz Keui
came to be copied, it was at once perceived that they
were in a language which resembled that of the
Arzawa letters, but it was not until the new tablet
from Constantinople had been cleaned and copied by
Dr. Pinches and myself that the actual facts became
clear. The Arzawa and Boghaz Keui texts agree in
the forms given to the characters, in grammar and in
vocabulary. Arzawa, therefore, must have been the
Hittite kingdom which had its centre at Boghaz
Keui, and already in the age of the Eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty it was employing a form of the
cuneiform script which implied a long preceding
period of use and adaptation. A new realm has
thus to be added to the domain of the cuneiform
system of writing ; in Syria the Hittite king of
Kadesh wrote to the Pharaoh in Babylonian, but in
his old home in the north, though the Babylonian

my lord says Labbaya .... thy servant of Uan (a district west
of Aleppo) ; seven times I prostrate myself." In other letters
Labbaya is called prince of Rukhizzi, the Rokhe's-na of the
treaty between Ramses II. and the Hittites.

176 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

syllabary had been adopted, the language it served to
express was that of the Hittites themselves.

A certain amount of this Hittite language of Arzawa
can be deciphered, thanks to those same determinatives
and ideographs which have assisted so materially to-
wards the decipherment of the Vannic texts, and more
especially to the recurrence in the two Tel el-Amarna
letters of phrases that are common to the whole corre-
spondence. The new tablet, however, is more than
usually helpful, since it contains Assyrian words and
grammatical forms which in parallel passages of the
same text are replaced by native equivalents. In
this way a sketch of Arzawan grammar can now
be made, as well as a list of Arzawan words. The
language which is thus disclosed is of an Asianic
type, with features that remind us of Lycian on
the one side, and of Mitannian and Vannic on
the other. But in what may be termed the funda-
mentals of grammar it agrees with Mitannian and
Vannic.

At the same time, certain of these same fundamentals
have a curious but superficial resemblance to what we
have hitherto been accustomed to regard as character-
istics of Indo-European grammar. The nominative
and accusative of the noun, for example, are dis-
tinguished by the suffixes -s and -n, the plural nomin-
ative and accusative often terminate in -s, and the
possessive pronouns of Arzawan are mis, " mine " ;
ti-s, " thine " ; and sais), " his " ; while si is " (to) her."
The third person of the present tense ends in -t ; es-tu,
is " may it be " ; es-mi, " may I be." Yet with all these
remarkable coincidences, I can assure the comparative
philologist that Arzawan is certainly not an Indo-

ONE OF THE PROCESSIONS TN THE

(See p. 174.)

KAVINE OF BOGHAZ.

[To face p. 176.

ASIA MINOR 177

European language, and I must leave him to explain
them as best he may.

We have, however, learnt a good deal more about
the Hittite populations of Asia Minor from the Tel
el-Amaraa tablets than the nature of the language
which they spoke. In the closing days of the
Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty we find them on the
southern side of the Taurus, sending forth bands of
adventurers, who hired their services to the king of
Egypt and to the rival governors and princes of
Palestine, and from time to time carved out principal-
ities of their own with the sword. We are even able
to follow the fortunes of some of the leaders of the
condottieri, who had no scruple in transferring their
allegiance from one vassal prince to another when
tempted by the prospect of better pay, or in murder-
ing their employer when the opportunity arose, and
plundering or occupying his city. They had, it is
true, a wholesome awe of Egyptian power and of the
Egyptian army, and some of the letters they wrote to
the Egyptian court are amusing examples of the
excuses they offered for their misdeeds. But they
never hesitated about seizing the Pharaoh's property
when they thought they could do so with impunity,
while they were all the time professing to be his
devoted slaves. A considerable number of the vassal
princes of Canaan kept these mercenaries in their
pay, and in many cases the Egyptian Foreign Office
thought it wisest to confirm one of their leaders in
the government of a district, however doubtful might
have been the means by which it had come into his
hands. So long as the tribute was paid, and the
imperial authority acknowledged, no further questions

M

178 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

were asked. The mercenaries were useful at times to
the imperial forces, and the mutual jealousies and
quarrels of the local governors were perhaps not
altogether displeasing to the home Government.1

In this way bands of Hittite mercenaries came to
be settled in various parts of Palestine, even in the
extreme south. The sons of Arzawaya, " the Arzawan,"
established themselves in the neighbourhood of Jeru-
salem, whose king, by the way, seems to bear a
Mitannian name. The statement in the Book of
Genesis that Heth was the son of Canaan receives
a new signification from the Tel el-Amarna tablets.

But Hittite influence in Southern Palestine goes
back to an earlier epoch than the age of the tablets.
The painted pottery found in the " Amorite" strata of
Lachish and Gezer shows remarkable affinities to the
pottery discovered by Chantre at Boghaz Keui, and
Mr. J. L. Myres has succeeded in tracing it in a
fairly continuous line to the region north of the
Halys.2 Here was found the red ochre — or sandarake,
as it was called — which was used in the decoration
of the pottery, and after the introduction of two other
colours still remained the principal feature in the
system of ornamentation. This Hittite or Cappa-
docian pottery was carried westward along the road
which led from Boghaz Keui towards the Troad, and
south-eastwards across the Taurus into Syria. It
was probably the ultimate origin of the painted
Minoan or " Kamares " pottery of Krete.

1 The facts were first stated in my article in the Contemporary
Review, August 1905, pp. 264-77, which is reprinted as chapter
vii. of the present book.

2 Journal of the Anthropological Institute ; 1903, xxxiii. pp.
367-400.

ASIA MINOR I79

The introduction of Hittite pottery into Canaan
where it tended to supersede the native ware, was
doubtless the result of trade. But in ancient Asia
the trader and the soldier were very apt to march
side by side. The soldier opened the way for the
trader and kept it for him, quite as much as the
trader opened it for the soldier. Hence it is not
surprising that the Assyrian monuments should
furnish incidental evidence of the Hittite occupation
of Palestine at an early date. In the inscriptions of
Babylonia, as we have seen, Palestine and Syria are
" the land of the Amorites " ; the name went back to
an immemorial antiquity, and indicates that at the
time it was first given the Amorites were the ruling
population in the West But in the Assyrian in-
scriptions the place of the Amorites is taken by the
Hittites. For the Assyrians, Syria is "the land of
the Hittites," and in the later historical texts even
the Israelites and Philistines are classed as " Hittite."1

Canaan, however, was already well known to the
Assyrians in the age of the Tel el-Amarna corre-
spondence, when the ambassadors of the Assyrian
king carried letters and presents through it to the
Pharaoh. It must, therefore, have been at a still
earlier period that they first became acquainted with
it, and at this period Hittite influence must have
been so predominant as to cause them to discard the
name of Amorite, consecrated though it was by the
long-continued usage of Babylonian literature, and to
employ instead of it the name of Hittite.

1 By Shalmaneser II. {Black Obelisk, 61) and Sargon. Sen-
nacherib describes his famous campaign against Phoenicia and
Judah as made " to the land of the Hittites."

180 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

But it was in the direction of the Greek seas that
Hittite influence was most powerful. Through Asia
Minor Babylonian culture penetrated to the West.
A native imitation of the Babylonian seal-cylinder was
found by Dr. Schliemann in the ruins of Hissarlik,1
and the so-called "heraldic" position of the lions
at Mykenae can be traced back through Asia Minor
to the designs of the Babylonian gem-cutters. The
winged horse, Pegasus, is found on Hittite seals,
and, like the double-headed eagle of Eyuk and other
composite figures, is derived from Babylonian proto-
types.2 They represented the first attempts of the
creative power, as conceived of by Babylonian
cosmology, and an old Babylonian legend of the
creation accordingly describes the monsters suckled
by Tiamat as "warriors with the bodies of birds, men
with the faces of ravens." 3 The fantastic monsters
of " Minoan " art, which have been brought to light
by the excavations in Krete, claim an intimate con-
nection with the similar composite beings which are
a characteristic of Hittite art.4

The early Hittite art of Asia Minor, as I pointed
out many years ago, is dependent on that of Babylonia,

1 Ih'os, p. 693. What seem to be similar characters on a
seal-cylinder found in the copper-age cemetry of Agia Paraskevi
in Cyprus have recently been published by me in the Proceedings
of the Society of Biblical Arc/iceology, June 1906, plate ii. No. xi.
See above, p. 141.

2 One of these seals, with the name of Tua-is, "the Char-
ioteer,'' in Hittite hieroglyphs, is in the possession of M.
de Clercq. Another is figured by Layard, Culte de Mithra,
xliv. 3.

3 See Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp.

377-9-

4 See Hogarth, "The Zakro Sealings," in the Journal of
Hellenic Studies, xxii. pp. 76-93, and plates vi.-x.

ASIA MINOR l8l

and has little in common with the art of Assyria.1
It is not until we come to the later Hittite monuments
of Cilicia and Syria that the influence of Assyrian art
makes itself visible. Hence was derived the partiality
of the Hittite artist for the composite animals that
adorn the seal-cylinders of Babylonia, and which
consequently became known wherever the seal-
cylinder and the literary culture it accompanied had
made their way. As I have already stated, though
Subari was an Assyrian province and Kara Eyuk an
Assyrian colony, the form of the cuneiform script
that was used in Cappadocia was of Babylonian origin.

The writing material of " Minoan " Krete, we now
know, consisted of clay tablets. The fact is a proof
that the influence of Babylonian culture had extended
thus far. But it was an indirect influence only.
Though the clay tablet was employed, the characters
impressed upon it were the native Kretan. This in
itself, however, demonstrates how strong the influence
must have been, for the Kretan characters, whether
hieroglyphic or linear, were less easy to inscribe on
clay than the cuneiform. Krete, moreover, is a land
of rock and stone rather than of clay. We may
infer, therefore, from the use of the Babylonian
material that the first impulse to write was inspired
by the civilization of Babylonia.

How it was brought to Krete we do not know. It
may have passed over from the shores of Canaan ; it
may have come from Cyprus or Asia Minor. A seal-
cylinder, which I have lately published, and which
was found in the early copper-age cemetery of Agia

1 Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1881,
vii. 2, p. 27.

1 82 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Paraskevi in Cyprus, shows that the so-called Cypriote
syllabary was already in use in the island at a remote
date,1 and this syllabary is closely connected with the
linear characters of Krete. Inscriptions in the same
form of script have been found on the site of Troy,
and the pre-Israelitish pottery of Southern Palestine
is marked with signs which seem to be derived from
it. So, too, is certain Egyptian pottery of the age of
the Eighteenth dynasty, and even of the age of the
Twelfth.2

It is possible that Krete was the birthplace of the
picture writing which developed into the linear script
of Knossos and the Cypriote syllabary ; it is possible
that it was rather Cyprus. I do not think, as I once
did, that it comes from Asia Minor, for Asia Minor
had its own pictographic system, which we see repre-
sented in the Hittite inscriptions, and an increased
knowledge of this system tends to dissociate it from
the pictographs and syllabaries of Krete and Cyprus.

Wherever it arose, however, it was associated with
the Babylonian writing material and the Babylonian
seal-cylinder. So far as our present knowledge goes,
Cyprus is more likely than any other part of the
world to have been the meeting-point of Babylonian
culture and the nascent civilization of the West.
The numerous seal-cylinders which characterize
the early copper age of the island are native
imitations of Babylonian seal-cylinders of the epoch
of Sargon of Akkad, when the boundaries of the

1 See above, p. 141.

2 Professor Petrie finds similar marks on Egyptian pottery of
the prehistoric and early dynastic age ; see his table of" signs in
The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty (Egypt Exploration
Fund), i. p. 32.

ASIA MINOR 183

Babylonian Empire were pushed to the coasts of the
Mediterranean, if not into Cyprus itself, and the great
eastern plain of Cyprus was better fitted to provide
clay for the tablet than any other Mediterranean
district with which I am acquainted.

That no written tablets have been found by the
excavators in Cyprus is not surprising. In an island
climate where heavy rains occur the unbaked tablet
soon becomes hardly distinguishable from the earth
in which it is embedded. It was almost by accident
that even the practised eye of Dr. A. J. Evans was
first led to notice the clay tablets of Knossos.

The Greek term 8eA.ro?, which was borrowed from
the language of Canaan, is evidence that the tablet
was once known to the Greeks. For the letters of
the Phoenician and Greek alphabet rolls of papyrus
or leather were needed ; the fact that the writing
material was a tablet and not a roll refers us back to
Babylonia. With the introduction of the Phoenician
letters the word SeAros necessarily changed its mean-
ing, and became synonymous with a wooden board.
But it is possible that a reminiscence of its original
signification is preserved in a famous passage of the
Iliad (vi. 169), where the later " board " has been sub-
stituted for the earlier " tablet." Here we are told
how Bellerophon carried with him to Lycia " baleful
signs" — which may have been the pictographs of
Krete or the Hittites, or even cuneiform characters —
written upon " a folded board." The expression
would have most naturally originated in the folded
clay tablet of early Babylonia, the inner tablet being
enclosed in an envelope on which the address or a
description of the contents of the document is written.

1 84 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

On the literary side, however, this is the utmost
contribution that we can claim for Babylonia to have
made to historical Greece. In the sphere of religion
it is possible that the anthropomorphism of Greece
was influenced by the anthropomorphism of Babylonia
through Asia Minor, where the rock sculptures of
Boghaz Keui show how the primitive Hittite fetishes
had become human deities like those of Chaldaea ; in
the sphere of philosophy Thales and Anaximander
clothed in a Greek dress the cosmological theories of
the Babylonians ; and in the domain of art the
heraldry and composite monsters of Babylonia made
their way to Europe, while the Ionic artists of
Ephesus carved ivories into forms so Oriental in
character that similar figures found in the palace of
Sargon have been pronounced to be the work of
Phoenicians. But the literary culture of historical
Greece did not begin until the tide of Babylonian
influence had already rolled back from Western Asia,
when the Phoenician alphabet had taken the place of
the cuneiform syllabary in Syria, and the Hittite
populations of Asia Minor had returned to their
clumsy hieroglyphs.

It is, however, remarkable how very nearly the
cuneiform script became what the Phoenician alphabet
has been called, " the mother of the alphabets of the
world." At one time it covered nearly the whole area
of the civilized globe. A seal-cylinder with a cunei-
form inscription in an unknown language has been
discovered on the hills near Herat ; x in the west its

1 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, xi. pp. 316 sqq.
The cylinder was bought by Major Pottinger, but afterwards lost.
The inscription seems to read : AN Nin(?)-zi-in Su-luM(?)-

ASIA MINOR 185

use extended as far as Cappadocia, perhaps further.
Northward it made its home in Armenia ; southward
it obliged even the Egyptian Foreign Office to employ
it for correspondence, while military scribes wrote in
it their memoranda of the Pharaoh's campaigns. In
both Mitanni and Van the syllabary was on the high-
road to becoming an alphabet ; in Persia it actually
became one.

But this final evolution came too late. A simpler
script had already entered the field, and won its way
in lands where clay was scarce and other writing
materials more easily procurable. Indeed, it is
probable that the presence or absence of clay suitable
for writing purposes had quite as much to do with
the spread of the cuneiform script as the political
events which transformed the map of Western Asia.
Canaan still continued to write in cuneiform char-
acters after the empire of Babylonia had been
exchanged for that of Egypt, while the use of the
script never penetrated far into the limestone regions
of the Mediterranean. It was probably the geological
formation of Europe more than anything else which
saved us to-day from having to learn the latest
modification of the cursive writing of the Babylonian
plain.

But it had been a potent instrument of civilization
in its day, perhaps more potent even than the Phoe-
nician alphabet, for its sway lasted for thousands of
years. It was at once the symbol and the inspiring
spirit of a culture whose roots go back to the very

me-am-el Khi-ti-sa ARAD-na — " To the god Nin(?)-zin, Sulukh-
ammel (?) son of Khiti, his servant."

1 86 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

beginnings of human civilization, and to which we still
owe part of our own heritage of civilized life. Baby-
lonia was the mother-land of astronomy and irriga-
tion ; from thence a knowledge of copper seems to
have spread through Western Asia ; it was there that
the laws and regulations of trade were first formulated,
and the earliest legal code, so far as we know, was
compiled. Babylonian theology and cosmology left
their impress upon beliefs and views of the world
which have passed through Judaea to Europe, and the
astrology and magic which played so active a part in
the mental history of the Middle Ages were Babylonian
creations. It is not a little remarkable that an
Etruscan model of the liver in bronze (discovered at
Piacenza), divided and inscribed for the purposes of
haruspicy, finds its counterpart and probably also its
prototype in the clay copy of a liver, similarly divided
and inscribed, which was found in Babylonia.1 We
are children of our fathers, and amongst our spiritual
fathers must be reckoned the Babylonians.

1 The Etruscan monument is described by Deecke, Das
Temp htm von Piacetiza (Etrusktsche Forschwigen, iv. 1880)
and Etruskische Forschungen imd Studien, part ii. (1882). For
the Babylonian prototype, see Boissier, Note sur un Monu-
ment babylonien se rapportant & Fextispicine (1899).

CHAPTER VII

CANAAN IN THE CENTURY BEFORE THE EXODUS

It is now nearly twenty years ago since the archaeo-
logical world was startled, not to say revolutionized,
by the discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-
Amarna in Upper Egypt. Nor was it the archaeological
world only which the discovery affected. The historian
and the theologian have equally had to modify and
forsake their old ideas and assumptions, and the
criticism of the Old Testament writings has entered
upon a new and altogether unexpected stage. The
archaeologist, the historian and the Biblical critic alike
can never again return to the point of view which was
dominant before 1887, or regard the ancient world of
the East with the unbelieving eyes of a Grote or a
Cornewall Lewis. A single archaeological discovery
has upset mountains of learned discussion, of ingenious
theory and sceptical demonstration.

At the risk of repeating a well-worn tale, I will
describe briefly the nature of the discovery. In the
ruins of a city and palace which, like the palace
of Aladdin, rose out of the desert sands into gorgeous
magnificence for a short thirty years and then perished
utterly, some 300 clay tablets were found, inscribed,
not with the hieroglyphics of Egypt, but with the
cuneiform characters of Babylonia. They were, in

187

188 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

fact, the contents of the Foreign Office of Amon-hotep
IV., the " Heretic King " of Egyptian history, who
endeavoured to reform the old religion of Egypt and
to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism. This
was about 1400 years before the birth of Christ, and
a full century before the Israelitish Exodus. The
attempt failed in spite of the fanatical efforts of its
royal patron to force it upon his people, and of his
introduction of religious persecution for the first time
into the world. The Eighteenth dynasty, to which he
belonged, and which had conquered Western Asia,
went down in civil and religious war ; the Asiatic
Empire of Egypt was lost, and a new dynasty sat on
the throne of Thebes.

The archives in the Foreign Office included not only
the foreign correspondence of Amon-hotep's own
reign, but the foreign correspondence also of his
father, which he had carried with him from Thebes
when he founded his new capital at Tel el-Amarna.
And the scope and character of it are astounding.
There are letters from the kings of Babylonia and
Assyria, of Mesopotamia and the Hittites, of Cilicia
and Cappadocia, besides letters and communications
of all sorts from the Egyptian governors and vassal
princes in Canaan and Syria. Most of the correspond-
ence is in the language of Babylonia ; it is only in a
few rare instances that the cuneiform characters em-
body the actual language of the people from whom
the letters were sent. It is difficult to imagine any-
thing more subversive of the ideas about the ancient
history of the East, which were current twenty years
ago, than the conclusions to be drawn from this
correspondence. It proved that, so far as literary cul-

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 1 89

ture is concerned, the civilized Oriental world in the
Mosaic age was quite as civilized as our own. There
were schools and libraries all over it, in which a foreign
language and a complicated foreign system of writing
formed an essential part of education. It proved that
this education was widely spread : there are letters
from Bedawin shekhs as well as from a lady who
was much interested in politics. It showed that this
correspondence was active and regular, that those who
took part in it wrote to each other on the trivial
topics of the day, and that the high-roads and postal
service were alike well organized. We learned that
the nations of the Orient were no isolated units cut
off from one another except when one of them made
war with the other, but that, on the contrary, their
mutual relations were as close and intimate as those
of modern Europe. The Babylonian king in his
distant capital on the Euphrates sent to condole with
the Egyptian Pharaoh on his father's death like a
modern potentate, and was every whit as anxious to
protect and encourage the trade of his country as Mr.
Chamberlain. Indeed, the privileges of the merchant
and the sacredness of his person had long been a
matter of international law.

In one respect the advocates of international har-
mony and arbitration were better off in the Mosaic
age than they are in the Europe of to-day. There
was no difficulty about diversities of language and the
danger of being misunderstood. The language of
diplomacy, of education and trade was everywhere
the same, and was understood, read and written by
all educated persons. Even the Egyptian lord of
Western Asia had to swallow his pride and^ write in

190 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

the language and script of Babylonia when he corre-
sponded with his own subjects in Canaan. Indeed,
like English officials in Egypt, who are supposed to
write to one another on official business in French, his
own Egyptian envoys and commissioners sent their
official communications in the foreign tongue. The
Oriental world in the century before the Exodus thus
anticipated the Roman Empire.

Canaan was the centre and focus of the correspond-
ence. It was the battle-ground and meeting-place of
the great powers of the Eastern world. It had long
been a province of Babylonia, and, like the rest of the
Babylonian Empire, subject to Babylonian law and
permeated by Babylonian literary culture. It was
during these centuries of Babylonian government that
it had come to adopt as its own the script and language
of its rulers ; the deities of Babylonia were worshipped
on the high places of Palestine, and Babylonian
legends and traditions were taught in its schools.

Out of Canaan had marched the Hyksos who
conquered Egypt. The names of their kings found
on the monuments that have survived to us are
distinctively Canaanite of the patriarchal period ;
among them is Jacob-el, or Jacob, whom the Alexan-
drine Jews seem to have identified with their own
ancestor. While the Hyksos Pharaohs reigned, Egypt
was but a dependency of Canaan ; the source of
Hyksos power lay in Canaan, and their Egyptian
capital was accordingly placed close to the Canaanitish
frontier.

When, after five generations of warfare, the native
princes of Thebes succeeded at last in expelling the
Hyksos conquerors from the valley of the Nile and in

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 191

founding the Eighteenth dynasty, they perceived that
their best hope of preventing a second Asiatic
conquest lay in possessing themselves of the land
which was, as it were, the key to their own. The
Hyksos conquest, in fact, had shown that Canaan was
at once a link between Asia and Africa, and the open
gate which let the invader into the fertile fields of
Egypt. The war, therefore, that had ended by driving
the Asiatic out of Egypt was now carried into his own
home. Campaign after campaign finally crushed
Canaanitish resistance, and the Egyptian standards
were planted on the banks of the Euphrates. Pales-
tine and Syria were transformed into Egyptian
provinces ; in the language of the tenth chapter of
Genesis, they became the brothers of Mizraim.

The Tel el-Amarna letters tell us how the new
provinces were organized. The most important cities
were placed under Egyptian governors, many of
whom, however, were natives. But they were care-
fully watched by Egyptian commissioners, to whom
the control of the military forces was entrusted, as
well as by special high-commissioners sent from time
to time by the imperial Government. Local jealousies
and rivalries, moreover, among the governors pre-
vented union among them against the central power,
and up to a certain point were not discouraged by the
Egyptian Foreign Office. The Tel el-Amarna letters
offer us a curious picture of the extent to which their
mutual animosities were carried in the days when
the Egyptian Empire was growing feeble. All the
governors protest their devotion to the court, and all
like are accused by their rivals of intriguing and
even fighting against it.

192 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Besides the states which were thus directly under
Egyptian rule, there were also protected states. Here
the representative of the old line of kings was allowed
to retain a titular authority, though in reality his
power was not greater than that of the governors in
other states. But, whether governor or protected
prince his duty to the imperial Government was clearly
marked out for him. He had to levy the taxes and
send a fixed amount of tribute to the Egyptian
Treasury, to provide a certain number of militia, and
to send official reports to the king. He had further to
see that the troops of the army of occupation were
duly provided with pay and maintenance.

The army of occupation in the reign of Amon-
hotep IV. does not seem to have been large. The
imperial forces were needed at home to enforce the new
faith upon the Egyptian people, and to put down the
discontent that was growing there. We hear, how-
ever, of " the household troops," who belonged to the
standing army of Egypt and formed the nucleus of
the permanent garrison. How many of them were
native Egyptians it is impossible to say ; as we hear
of Kushites or Ethiopians among them, it is probable
that the Sudanese were at least as largely employed
on foreign service as the Egyptians themselves. The
Egyptian has never been fond of military service,
whereas, we all now know, the Sudanese is essentially
a fighting animal.

Both sides of the Jordan were included in the
Egyptian administration. One of the Tel el-Amarna
letters, for example, is from a governor of " the field
of Bashan." It is characteristic of the whole series,
and shows what the relations were between the army

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 193

of occupation and the native levies. I cannot do
better than quote it in full : " To the king, my lord,
thus says Artamanya, the governor of the Field of
Bashan, thy servant : at the feet of the king, my lord,
seven times seven do I fall. Behold, thou hast written
to me to join the household troops, and how could
I be a dog (of the king) and not go ? Behold, I
and my soldiers and my chariots will join the house-
hold troops in whatever place the king my lord
orders."

The name of Artamanya is not Semitic; neither
is it Egyptian. The fact brings us to one of the most
interesting and unexpected results of the decipher-
ment of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. And
this is that the ruling caste in the Palestine of the
Mosaic age was largely of Hittite origin, or had come
from those countries of the north whose population
was related in blood and language to the Hittites of
Asia Minor.

In Northern Mesopotamia was a kingdom which
ranked with those of Egypt and Babylonia as regarded
power and influence. Its native name was Mitanni;
the Hebrews, like the Egyptians, called it the kingdom
of Aram Naharaim. It stretched from Assyria to the
Orontes, and contended with the Hittites of Carche-
mish for the possession of the fords of the Euphrates.
Its rulers had descended upon it from the highlands of
Armenia and the Caucasus, and had reduced the native
Aramaean population to servitude. There are frequent
references in the Tel el-Amarna tablets to Mitannian
intrigues in Canaan. Mitannian armies had from time
to time marched against the Canaanitish cities, and
although there was now a nominal alliance between

N

194 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

Mitanni and Egypt, and the royal families of the two
countries were united by marriage, the Mitannian
court never lost an opportunity of sending secret
support to the disaffected princes of Canaan or of
encouraging them in their revolts from the Egyptian
Government In many parts of the country the ruling
family continued to be Mitannian, and accordingly we
find more than one governor who bears a Mitannian
name. Thus one of them, as we see, was governor of
Bashan, and there was another who had his seat near
the Sea of Galilee.

Mitannian influence, however, was chiefly confined
to the northern part of Palestine. It was otherwise
with the Hittites, whose marauding bands penetrated
as far south as the frontiers of Egypt. The important
part they played in the early history of Canaan and
the substantial element they must have contributed to
the future population of the country has but lately
been disclosed to us by the advance that has been
made in the interpretation of the Tel el-Amarna texts.
We have at last obtained an explanation of the fact
that whereas in the older Babylonian period Canaan
was known as " the land of the Amorites," it was called
by the Assyrians " the land of the Hittites." The
Assyrian kings even speak of Judah and Moab as
" Hittite," and the town of Ashdod is described by
Sargon as a "Hittite" state. What this must mean
has indeed long been recognized by the Assyriologists.
When the Assyrians first became acquainted with
Palestine the Hittites must have been there the
dominant power. But how and when this came about
we have but just begun to learn, and it is the story of
the Hittite occupation of Canaan, as a better know-

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 195

ledge of the Tel el-Amarna tablets is making possible,
that I now propose to describe.

The Hittite race was of Cappadocian origin. Pro-
fessor Ramsay has pointed out that the hieroglyphic
characters which they used in their inscriptions must
have been invented on the treeless plateau of Central
Asia Minor, and that their capital, whose ruins now
strew the ground at Boghaz Keui, north of the Halys,
was the centre towards which all the early high-roads
of Asia Minor converge. But they extended on both
sides of the Taurus Mountains, and at an early date
had planted themselves in Northern Syria. I have
lately succeeded in deciphering their inscriptions,
which have so long baffled our attempts to read them,
and one result of my decipherment is the discovery of
an unexpected fact. I find that the name of Hittite
was confined to that portion of the race which lived
eastward and southward of the Taurus. In Asia
Minor itself, their first cradle and home, they called
themselves Kas or Kasians ; it was the kingdom of
Kas over which the Hittite lords of Boghaz Keui
claimed to rule, and it is still as kings of Kas that
they are entitled on the monuments of Carchemish,
though here they also acknowledge the name of
Hittite.

The name of Kas is met with in the Tel el-Amarna
tablets, where it has hitherto been misunderstood.
The kings of the Hittites, of Mitanni and of Kas are
associated together as supporting the enemies of the
Egyptian Pharaoh or attacking his cities in Syria.
Hitherto we have supposed that Kas signified
Babylonia, though the supposition had but little in its
favour, and a different name is given to Babylonia in

196 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

passages where there is no doubt as to what country
is meant. Now, however, all becomes clear : in the
age of the tablets there were still four Hittite king-
doms in the north : Kas in Asia Minor, the Hittites
proper, east and south of the Taurus, Mitanni in
Mesopotamia, and Naharaim on the Orontes. Shortly
afterwards they were all swallowed up in the empire
of the "great king" of the Hittites, whose southern
capital was at Kadesh. Some Kasians had found
their way to Jerusalem, where the king Ebed-Kheba
— whose name is compounded with that of a Mitannian
deity — writes to the Egyptian Government to excuse
his conduct in regard to them. They had been
accused of plundering the Pharaoh's territory and
murdering his servants ; he assures the court that
nothing of the sort is true. They are still in his
house, where it would seem they formed his body-
guard. But, on the other hand, there were other
Hittites in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem who were
really enemies to the king and threatened Jerusalem
itself. These he calls Khabiri, or " Confederates," a
name in which, despite history and probability, certain
writers have insisted upon seeing the Hebrews of the
Old Testament. But Dr. Knudtzon's fresh collation
of the Tel el-Amarna texts has at last dispelled the
mystery. The Khabiri turn out to have been bands
of Hittite condottieri, who sold their military
services to the highest bidder and carved out princi-
palities for themselves in the south of Canaan. The
Egyptian Government found them useful in escorting
and protecting the trading caravans to Asia Minor
and the Taurus region, and as long as their leaders
professed themselves the devoted servants of the

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 197

Pharaoh it was quite willing to overlook such little
accidents as their capture and sack of a Canaanitish
town or the murder of a Canaanitish prince.

One of these Hittite leaders, Aita-gama by name,
had possessed himself of the city of Kadesh on the
Orontes, which in the following century was to become
the capital of a Hittite empire. In a letter to the
Egyptian court he has the audacity to assert that he
was merely claiming his patrimony, the whole district
having belonged to his father. If there is any truth
in this it can only mean that his father had already
led a troop of Hittite raiders into this portion of the
Egyptian territory.

Along with Aita-gama two other Hittite chieftains
had marched, Teuwatti, whose name appears in the
native texts under the form of Tuates, and Arzawaya.
Arzawaya means "a man of Arzawa," the country
whose language has been revealed to us in one of the
Tel el-Amarna letters, and which proves to be the
same as the Hittite dialect found in the cuneiform
tablets of Boghaz Keui. We are told that he came
from a city which was in the neighbourhood of the
Karmalas, in Southern Cappadocia. Arzawaya helped
Teuwatti to conquer Damascus and then led his
followers further south. Here he acted as a free-lance,
hiring himself and his mercenaries to the rival
Canaanitish princes and professing himself to be all
the while a faithful servant of the Egyptian king. It
is amusing to read one of his letters to the Egyptian
court : " To my lord the king thus writes Arzawaya,
of Rukhiza. At the feet of my lord I prostrate
myself. My lord the king wrote that I should join
the household troops of the king my lord and his

198 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

numerous officers." Here follow four words of Hittite
which are accompanied by the translation : " I am
a servant of the king my lord." Then the letter pro-
ceeds : " I will join the household troops of the king
my lord and his officers ; and I will send everything
after them and march wherever there is rebellion
against the king my lord. And we will deliver his
enemies into the hand of the king our lord." Doubt-
less Arzawaya expected to be well paid for his help.

There is another letter from Arzawaya to the
Pharaoh in which he calls himself " the dust of his
feet and the ground on which he treads." But in this
letter he has to explain away the share he took in
entering the town of Gezer along with Labbawa,1
another Hittite leader, and there infringing the royal
prerogative by summoning a levy of the militia. In
the eyes of the home Government this was a much
more serious matter than merely plundering or killing
a few of its Canaanitish subjects, as it was equivalent
to usurping the functions of the imperial power.

Labbawa also had to write and ask for forgiveness,
and assure the Pharaoh that he is his " devoted slave,"
who does " not withhold his tribute " or disobey the
"requests" of the Egyptian commissioners. In fact,
he concludes his letter with declaring that "if the
king should write to me : Run a sword of bronze into
your heart and die, I would not fail to execute the
king's command." All the same, however, he had
established himself securely on Mount Shechem, from
whence, like Joshua in after days, he was able to
make raids on the surrounding Canaanitish towns.

1 Labbawa, or Labawa, is written Labbaya in the letter which
is in the Arzawan language.

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 1 99

In the north we hear of him at Shunem and Gath-
Rimmon, where he first appeared upon the scene in
the train of the Egyptian army at a time when Amon-
hotep III. was suppressing an insurrection in that
part of Palestine. It is probable that he had just
arrived with his band of condottieri, attracted by the
pay and the chance of plunder that the Egyptian
Pharaoh offered the free-lance. By a curious fatality
it was also in this same locality that he afterwards
met his death at the hands of the people of Gina — the
Cana of Galilee, probably, of St. John's Gospel.

Labbawa cast envious eyes on the important city
of Megiddo, and its governor — who, by the way, is
mentioned in one of the cuneiform tablets found three
years ago by the Austrian excavators on the site of
Taanach — sent piteous appeals for assistance against
him to the Egyptian Government. The beleaguered
governor declared that so closely invested was he by
the Hittite free-lances that he could not venture
outside the gates of his town. The peasantry were
afraid even to bring vegetables into it, and unless help
were forthcoming from Egypt, Megiddo was doomed.
After all, however, Labbawa was not only unable to
possess himself of the Canaanitish stronghold, but was
taken prisoner and confined in the very place he had
hoped to capture. But fortune befriended him. He
managed to bribe the governor of Acre, and the latter,
on the pretext that he was going to send Labbawa by
sea to Egypt, took him out of prison and set him free.

Labbawa now turned his attention to the south of
Palestine — the future territory of Judah. Here he
entered into alliance with the king of Jerusalem, or,
to speak more precisely, was taken into his pay, and

200 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

the two together waged war on the neighbouring
states. One of the Egyptian governors complains
that they had robbed him of Keilah, and he had to
wait for Labbawa's death before he could recover his
city.

One of the two letters in the Tel el-Amarna
collection which are in the Arzawan or Hittite
language was written by Labbawa, as we have lately
learned from Dr. Knudtzon's revised copy of it. In
this he calls himself a native of the Hittite district of
Uan, near Aleppo, and refers to "the Hittite king,"
though our knowledge of the language is too imperfect
to allow us to understand the meaning of the reference.
The letter is addressed simply "to my lord," and we
do not know, therefore, whether it was intended for
Hittite or Egyptian eyes. After his settlement in
Palestine, however, Labbawa adopted the official
language of the country ; his letters to the Pharaoh
are in Babylonian, and his son bore the character-
istically Semitic name of Mut-Baal. The fact is an
interesting example of the rapid way in which the
Hittite settlers in Palestine were Semitized. They
brought no women with them, and their wives
accordingly were natives of Canaan.

Labbawa left two sons behind him, who, in spite of
their Semitic education, followed in their father's foot-
steps and continued to lead his company of Hittite
mercenaries. Mut-Baal, moreover, made himself
useful to the Government by escorting the trading
caravans to Cappadocia, a fact which proves that he
still maintained relations with the country of his origin.
The alliance between Ebed-Kheba of Jerusalem and
his father, however, had come to an end ; Ebed-Kheba

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 201

now had the Hittites of Kas in his pay, and no longer
needed the services of the sons of Labbawa. They
therefore transferred themselves to his rivals, together
with the sons of Arzawaya, who, like Labbawa, was
now dead, and Ebed-Kheba soon found himself in
difficulties. The result was letter after letter from
him to the Egyptian court, begging for help against
his enemies, and declaring that if no help came the
king's territory would be lost. These appeals seem to
have met with no response ; the Egyptian Govern-
ment was by no means assured of Ebed-Kheba's
loyalty, and knew that if the territory of Jerusalem
were to pass into the hands of the Hittite chieftain it
would make but little difference to the imperial power.
The tribute would still be paid, the Egyptian com-
missioner would still be respected, and the new rulers
of the district would profess themselves the faithful
subjects of the Pharaoh. There would merely be a
change of governors, and nothing more. The Hittite
mercenaries were formidable only in the petty struggles
which took place between the rival Canaanitish
governors ; when it came to dealing with the regular
army of Egypt they were numerically too few to be
of account.

Ebed-Kheba calls the followers of Labbawa and
Arzawaya "Khabiri." I have long ago pointed out that
the word is found elsewhere in the Assyrian texts in
the sense of " Confederates," and that its identification
with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, though
phonetically possible, is historically impossible. Now
that we know the nationality of Labbawa and Arza-
waya the question is finally settled, and we can explain
a hitherto puzzling passage in one of Ebed-Kheba's

202 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

letters, in which he says that "when ships were on
the sea the arm of the mighty king seized Naharaim
and Kas, but now the Khabiri have seized the cities
of the king." Naharaim lay southward of the gulf of
Antioch, while Kas extended to the Cilician coast,
and they were thus, both of them, within reach of a
maritime Power ; they were, moreover, both of them
Hittite regions, Naharaim being the district afterwards
called Khattina, "the Hittite land," by the Assyrians,
while Kas was the Hittite kingdom of Cappadocia.
Ebed-Kheba, therefore, is drawing a comparison
between the power of " the mighty king " in the days
when an Egyptian fleet controlled the sea and the
present time when Hittite marauders are seizing
without let or hindrance the king's cities on the very
borders of Egypt. Even Lachish and Ashkelon had
joined the enemy.

Perhaps the most important of the King of Jeru-
salem's letters is one which has hitherto been mis-
understood, partly owing to its being broken in half
and the relation of the two halves to one another not
being recognized, partly to the imperfections of the
published copy. Now that a complete and accurate
text of it lies before us, its meaning has ceased to be
a riddle, and I will therefore give here the first
translation that has been made of the completed
text—

"To the king my lord thus says Ebed-Kheba thy
servant: at the feet of my lord the king seven times
seven I prostrate myself. Behold, Malchiel has not
separated himself from the sons of Labbawa and the
sons of Arzawaya so as to claim the king's land for
them. A governor who commits such an act, why

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 203

has not the king questioned him (about it) ? Behold,
Malchiel and Tagi have committed such an act by
seizing the city of Rabbah. And now as to Jerusalem,
if this land belongs to the king, why is it that Gaza has
been appointed for the (residence of the) king ('s
commissioner)? Behold the land of Gath-Carmel is
in the power of Tagi, and the men of Gath are (his)
bodyguard. He is (now) in Beth-Sannah. But (never-
theless) we will act. Malchiel wrote to Tagi that
they should give Labbawa and Mount Shechem to
the district of the Khabiri, and he took some boys as
slaves. They granted all their demands to the people
of Keilah. But we will rescue Jerusalem. The garri-
son which you sent by Khaya the son of Meri-Ra
has been taken by Hadad-mikhir and stationed in his
house at Gaza. [I have sent messengers] to Egypt,
[and may] the king [listen to me], . . . There is no
garrison of the king [here]. Verily by the life of the
king Pa-ur has gone down to Egypt ; he has left me
and is in Gaza. But let the king entrust to him a
garrison for the defence of the land. All the land of
the king has revolted. Send Yenkhamu and let him
take charge of the king's land.

" (Postscript) : To the secretary of the king says
Ebed-Kheba your servant : [bring] what I say
clearly before the king. Kindest regards to you !
I am your servant."

The references in this letter are explained in other
letters from the same correspondent. Malchiel was
the native governor of the Hebron district, and had
married the daughter of Tagi, whose name does not
sound Semitic. The Hittite mercenaries of Labbawa
from Shechem and of Arzawaya, who does not seem

204 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

to have established himself in any special district of
the country, were now in the pay of Malchiel, while
Ebed-Kheba, as we have seen, had secured the
services of another body of Hittites from Kas. He
had been accused at the Egyptian court of seeking by
their means to make himself independent, and more
than one of his letters is occupied with defending
himself and bringing a counter-charge against Mal-
chiel. Malchiel, however, secured the support of the
royal commissioner, Yenkhamu, who agreed to his
employment of the Hittite condottieri. With their
assistance Keilah had been recovered from the hands
of Ebed-Kheba, who, at an earlier date, had got Lab-
bawa to seize it for him, but after Labbawa's death
the tables were turned, and his sons had offered their
services to the rival party, doubtless for the sake of
better pay. It was now that Malchiel summoned the
militia of Gezer, Gath-Carmel and Keilah, and made
himself master of Rabbah, a small place north-west of
Keilah and Hebron, which Ebed-Kheba asserted
belonged to his territory. The tide was beginning to
turn against the King of Jerusalem : his enemies were
in greater favour at court than he was himself, and
they had the support of the Hittite bands. It was in
vain that he appealed to the Egyptian Government
for aid and declared that not only had his rivals
given Mount Shechem to the Hittite free-lances, but
that by their action against himself they were de-
livering the whole of Southern Palestine into Hittite
hands. " The king," he writes, " no longer has any
territory, the Khabiri have wasted all the lands of the
king. If the royal troops come this year, the
country will remain my lord the king's, but if no

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 205

troops come, the territory of the king my lord is
lost"

At this point the story breaks off abruptly. The
Tel el-Amarna correspondence comes to an end and
the fate of Jerusalem and the surrounding districts is
unknown to us. Soon afterwards religious troubles at
home forced the Egyptian Government to withdraw
its troops from Canaan altogether, and for awhile the
Egyptian empire in Asia ceased to exist. It was
restored, however, by Seti I. and his son, Ramses II.,
at the beginning of the Nineteenth dynasty, and
among the cities whose conquest is celebrated by
Ramses on the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes is
Shalem or Jerusalem. But this second Egyptian
empire in Asia did not last long, and when the
Israelitish Exodus took place it was already passing
away. When some years later the Israelitish invaders
planted themselves in Labbawa's old stronghold on
Mount Shechem, the Egyptian occupation of Canaan
belonged to the history of the past.

Like the Saxons in England, however, the Hittite
chieftains must have founded principalities for them-
selves in the south of Canaan, as we know from the
evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets and the Egyp-
tian monuments that they did in the north. Ezekiel,
in fact, tells us that the mother of Jerusalem was a
Hittite, and the Jebusites, from whom Jerusalem took
its name in the age of the Israelitish conquest, were
probably the descendants of the followers of the
Hittite Arzawaya. They had, moreover, found a
Hittite population already settled in the country,
descendants of older bands who had made their way
from the highlands of Asia Minor to the frontiers

206 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

of Egypt in days when as yet Abraham was unborn.
At the very commencement of the Egyptian twelfth
dynasty we hear of the Pharaohs destroying "the
palaces of the Hittites" in Southern Palestine,1 and
archaeology has recently shown that the painted
pottery discovered in the earlier strata of Lachish and
Gezer by English excavators had its original home in
Northern Cappadocia and is an enduring evidence of
Hittite culture and trade.

The Hittites had been preceded in their occupation
of Canaan by the Amorites, as we have learnt from
the Babylonian inscriptions. But in the Tel el-
Amarna age the specifically Amoritish territory was
in the north, eastward of Tyre and Gebal. Here
Ebed-Asherah and his son Aziru had their seat
and from hence they led their forces northwards
towards Aleppo to resist " the king of the Hittites "
on behalf of the Egyptian Government, or attacked
the Phoenician cities on their own account. In the
north, in fact, they played much the same part as
the Hittite mercenaries did in the south, with the
additional advantage of being able to secure secret
assistance when it was needed from Mitanni. Between
Amorites and Hittites the Canaanites must have had
a somewhat unhappy time, like the Britons after the
departure of the Roman legions, who found themselves

1 A copy of the text (Louvre, C i) is given by Professor
Breasted in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and
Literature, xxi. 3 (1905). The determinative attached to the
name is not that of " country" but of "going," showing that the
scribe supposed the name to be connected with some otherwise
unknown word that signified " to go," just as in Gen. xxiii.
"The sons of Heth" are supposed by the Hebrew writer to
derive their name from the Hebrew khatht "terror."

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 207

the alternate prey of Saxons and Scots. But we can
now understand and appreciate the ethnological notice
in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), which tells us that
" the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites
dwell in the mountains, and the Canaanites dwell by
the sea and by the coast of Jordan."

The Amorite princes, however, were more formid-
able to the Egyptian Government than the Hittite
chieftains, or else must have played their cards a
little too openly, for we find Aziru receiving a scold-
ing such as the Egyptian court seldom had the
courage or energy to give. The letter from the
Egyptian Foreign Office, which is a long one, is
worth translating in full —

" To the governor of the land of the Amorites
[thus] says the king your lord. The governor of
Gebal, thy brother, whom his brother has driven from
the gate (of the city) has said : ' Take me and
bring me back into my city, [and] I will then give
you money, [for] I have nothing [of value] with me
now.' So he spoke to you.

" Behold, you write to the king your lord saying :
I am your servant like all the loyal governors who are
each in his city. Yet you have acted wrongly in
taking a governor whom his brother had driven from
the gate of his city, and being in Sidon you handed
him over to the governors (there) at your own discre-
tion, as if you did not know that they were rebellious.

"If you are really a servant of the king why have
you not seen that he should go up to the presence of
the king your lord instead of thinking, ' This governor
wrote to me saying, " Take me to thyself and restore
me to my city " ' ?

208 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

" But if you have acted loyally and nothing that I
write is correct, the king has devised a lie in saying
that nothing which you declare is true.

" But it happens that one has heard that you have
made a treaty with the (Hittite) prince of Kadesh to
deliver food and drink to one another, and it is true.
Why have you acted thus? Why have you made
a treaty with a governor with whom another governor
is at enmity ? For if you act with loyalty to him
and observe your and his engagements you cannot
look after (our) interests as you have undertaken
to do long ago. Whatever be your conduct in
the matter you are not on the side of the king your
lord.

" Now as for these men to whom you want to turn,
they are seeking to get you into the fire and to burn
(you) and all you most love. Whereas if you submit
yourself to the king your lord, what is there which
the king cannot do for you ? If in anything you love
to act wickedly and if you lay up wickedness, even
thoughts of rebellion, in your heart, then you will
die by the axe of the king along with all your family.
Submit therefore to the king your lord, and you shall
live, for you know that the king has no wish to be
angry with all the land of Canaan.

" And since you write : ' Let the king excuse me
this year and I will go next year to the court of the
king my lord, my son not being with me,' the king
your lord accordingly will excuse you this year as
you have asked. Go yourself instead of sending your
son, and you shall see the king in the sight of whom
all the world lives, and do not say : let me be excused
this year also from going to the court of the king

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 209

your lord ; and do not send your son to the king
your lord ; he must not go in your place.

" And now the king your lord has heard that you
wrote to the king saying, ' Let the king my lord
permit Khanni the messenger of the king to come to
me for the second time, and I will deliver the enemies
of the king into his hand.' Now he will go to you
as you have asked ; do you therefore deliver them (to
him) and do not let a single one of them escape.
Now the king your lord sends you the names of the
king's enemies in this letter by the hand of Khanni
the king's messenger ; so deliver them to the king
your lord and let not a single one of them escape,
but put fetters of bronze upon their feet. Behold, the
men you are to send to the king your lord are Sarru
with all his sons, Tuia, Liya with all his sons, Yisyari
with all his sons, (and) the son-in-law of Manya with
his sons and wives. The treasurer of Khanni is the
official who will read the dispatch. Dasirti, Paluwa
and Nimmakhi have gone [to collect taxes ?] into the
country of the Amorites.

" And know that the king, the Sun-god in heaven,
is well ; his soldiers and chariots are many ; from the
upper country to the lower country, from the rising
of the sun [to] the setting of the sun all is peace."

We hear again of one of the rebels mentioned in
this letter in the tablet discovered at Lachish in
Palestine by Mr. Bliss. Yisyari is there described as
inciting the governor of Lachish to revolt and promis-
ing assistance if he would call out the militia of his
city against the king. That an Amorite of the north
should thus have been able to interfere in the politics
of a city in the south of Palestine is an interesting

o

210 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

illustration of what I may call the solidarity of Syria
and Canaan in the pre-Mosaic period. They had
not yet been broken up into a series of isolated States ;
like the Hittites, the Amorites still claimed to be a
power in the future territory of Judah as well as in
the neighbourhood of Sidon or Hamath.

It is possible that a well-known but somewhat
mysterious personage of the Old Testament was one
of the Hittite leaders who succeeded in carving out
a principality for himself: I mean Balaam the son
of Beor. He is said to have come from the Hittite
town of Pethor near Carchemish, and besides being a
seer and a prophet he was also a soldier who fell in
the ranks of the Midianites in a war against Israel.
But Balaam the son of Beor was not only a native of
Pethor ; we hear of him again in the Book of Genesis,
and here he appears as the first king of Edom, his
name heading the list of Edomite kings extracted from
the state annals of Edom and probably brought to
Jerusalem when David conquered the country. In
the light of what we have learnt from the tablets of
Tel el-Amarna it is perhaps not going too far to sup-
pose that in Balaam we have one of those Hittite
chieftains who, after playing the part of prophet,
made himself leader of a band of Hittite free-lances
and established a kingdom for himself in Edom,
finally falling in battle by the side of his Midianite
allies.

However this may be, the important place occupied
by the Hittites in creating the Canaan which the
Israelites invaded is now clear. While the larger
bands of Hittite raiders settled in the north, where
they prepared the way for the Hittite king himself

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 21 1

with his regular army, and where Hittite power
became so firmly established that even the great
Ramses could not dislodge it, smaller companies of
condottieri made their way to the extreme south of
Palestine, hiring their services to the rival governors
and princes and seizing a town or district for them-
selves when the opportunity offered. So long as the
tribute was paid, and its subjects were not too trouble-
some, the Egyptian Government looked on with
equanimity while the states of Canaan were practically
ruled by the leaders of foreign mercenaries who trans-
ferred their services from one paymaster to another
with the most perfect impartiality.

What is most curious is that the Imperial Govern-
ment recognized the legal position not only of the
Hittite or Amorite mercenaries, but even of organized
bands of Bedawin and outlaws. As for the Bedawin,
it had companies of them in its own pay, like the
Egyptian Government in more recent times, and the
governor of Gebal complains that the Egyptian com-
missioner Pa-Hor had sent some of the latter to
murder his garrison of Serdani or Sardinians, who
were themselves mercenaries in the Egyptian army.
That bodies of outlaws should have been subsidized
by the native princes with the permission, or at least
the connivance, of the Egyptian court may seem
surprising. But after all it is only what we find
happening in later times when the king of Gath
similarly enrolled David and his band of outlaws into
his bodyguard without any remonstrance on the part
of the other Philistine " lords." Still it is startling to
find one of the Pharaoh's governors coolly announcing
that he and his soldiers and chariots, together with

212 ARCHAEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

his brothers, his " cut-throats " and his Bedawin, are
ready to join the royal troops, at the very time when
another governor is piteously begging the great king
to " save " him " out of the hands of the cut-throats
and Bedawin." Here is a strange picture of Canaan-
itish life in the days when as yet the Israelite was not
in the land.

The fact is, the Canaanites were an unwarlike
people. Inland, they were agriculturists ; on the
sea coast they were traders. And, like other trading
communities, they were disinclined to fight, preferring
to entrust the protection of themselves and their
property to a paid soldiery, while at the same time
their wealth made them a tempting prize to the
assailant. It is true that they maintained a native
militia, as we have learned from one of the cuneiform
tablets discovered at Taanach, but it was upon a small
scale, and apparently so long as the person on the roll
could produce the one or two men for whom he was
responsible he was not himself obliged to serve. It
was again a case of paying others to fight instead of
themselves.

The fighting population of Canaan, in short, were
the foreigners, and these it was who gradually made
themselves its practical masters. The leaders of the
mercenaries became the rulers of the Canaan ite states,
which thus passed into the hands of a dominant
military caste. When the Israelites entered the
country it was with this military upper class that
they had principally to deal ; where the Canaanite
had not its protection he trusted for his defence to
his iron chariots and the strong and lofty walls of his
towns. It is instructive to read the long list of

CANAAN BEFORE THE EXODUS 213

unconquered cities and districts given by the Hebrew
historian in the first chapter of the Book of Judges ;
among them are the Jebusites of Jerusalem, while we
are told that "the Amorites forced the children of
Dan into the mountain, for they would not suffer
them to come down to the valley."

Canaan, it will probably be thought, was a some-
what insecure country in which to live in the days of
the Egyptian Empire. There seem to have been
constant turmoil and confusion, governor attacking
governor and bribing bands of foreign mercenaries to
help him. But the turmoil and confusion were mainly
on the surface. When a town is taken from one
governor by another we do not hear of its population
or their possessions suffering materially ; they soon
appear upon the scene again as prosperous as before.
It is merely the governor and his immediate surround-
ings who suffer ; the capture of the town was probably
an affair amicably arranged between the condottieri
who were attacking it and the condottieri who were
its defenders. The Egyptian commissioners go up
and down the country, hearing complaints and
settling disputes, and no one ventures even to protest
against their decisions, while a few Egyptian troops
are stationed in places where the Government was not
quite sure of the fidelity of its subjects. Caravans
of merchants passed through Canaan going from
Egypt to the north, and the traders of Babylonia and
Asia Minor travelled along its high roads under the
escort of Hittite and other chieftains who were
subsidized for the purpose by the Egyptian court.
Even in the days when the Egyptian Government was
breaking up, the constant fighting among the foreign

214 ARCHEOLOGY OF CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

mercenaries and their employers seems to have affected
the mass of the population little, if at all.

What happened when the strong hand and control-
ling power of the Egyptian Pharaoh were removed we
do not yet know. We must look for information to
the systematic excavations that are at last being made
on the sites of the old Canaanitish towns. Already
cuneiform tablets have been found on them, and
though these belong to the Egyptian period we may
hope that before long others may be discovered of
later date. We have still to bridge over the age
which elapsed between the final withdrawal of
Egyptian domination and the conquest of the country
by Philistines and Israelites. When that age begins
the script and official language of Canaan are still
Babylonian ; when it closes the cuneiform characters
have been superseded by the letters of the Phoenician
alphabet, and the language of the inscriptions engraved
in them is the language no longer of Babylonia or of
Hittite lands, but of Canaan itself.

INDEX

Abercromby, the Hon. J., 64

Abram, 153

Abu Shahrein. See Eridu

Achsemenian dynasty, II ; inscrip-
tions, 10 ; transcripts (second),
26, 27

Acre, 199

Adamu, Adam, 68, 76, 78, 80,

91

Aita-gama, 197
Akkad, 69, 73, 79, 87, 95
Akkadian, 24, 28-30, 69
Amiaud, 29

Amon-hotep III., 149, 199
Amon-hotep IV., 136, 188, 192
Amorites, 139, 141, 142, 147, 179,
206, 207 ; land of, 139, 141,

143, 179. 194

Amraphel (Khammu-rabi), 143

Animals, domesticated, 83, 99

Anquetil-Duperron, 10

Anupum (Anubis), 127

Ape in Babylonia, 129

ApesofThoth, 127

Arabia, Southern, 123

Archaeological versus literary evi-
dence, 43

Archaeology, science of, 36, etc.

Arioch (Eri-Aku), 143

Armenia, 31, 160, etc.

Armenian and Sumerian, 59

Armenians, modern, 165

Aryan language, the, 72

Arzawa, 34, 1 75 ; language of,
176, 200

Arzawan letters, vi., 175, 200

Arzawaya, 178, 197, 198, 202, 203,
205

Asari of Eridu, 119

Asherah, 150, 153

Ashtoreth (Istar), 153

Asia Minor, 61, 62, 160 et seq.,

J73> *74 > g0^ or> 62 ; bronze

in, 66
Askabad, excavations at, 54, 61,

83

Ass, domesticated, 83

Assur (Qal'at Shirqat), 41
Assur, the god, 95
Assur-bani-pal, 73
Assur-natsir-pal, 33, 163
Assur-yuballidh, 172
Assyria, the sword in, 65
Assyrian culture, 113; grammar,

25 ; kings, 172 ; Semitic, 19 ;

syllabary, 19; types, 73
Asur, 172

Babylonia (and Egypt), 10 1, etc. ;
Canaanite dynasty in, 142 ;
copper age in, 55 ; no neolithic
age in, 45, 157 ; picture-writing

of, 57, 75

Babylonian anthropomorphism, 94,
125; chronology, 114; civiliza-
tion, 75, 83 ; irrigation, 101 ;
priesthood, 96 ; script, 17, 83 ;
seal-cylinder, 1 1 1 ; trade, 92

Babylonians a mixed people, 87

Balaam, 2IO

Barley, origin of, 108

Bashan, 192, 193

Behistun, 15, 16, 20, 22, 26

Bel, 95, 97

Belck, 33, 163, 166, 171, 174

Bellerophon, 183

Bes, 129

Beth-el, 147

15

2l6

INDEX

Bezold, 28

Black Obelisk, the, 20, 21, 179

Bliss, Mr., 209

BoghazKeui, vi., 34, 171, 174, 175,

178, 184, 195, 197
Borsippa, 78
Botta, 18

Boz Eyuk, pottery of, 171
Brick, use of, 113
British Museum, how it excavates,

39,40
Bronze, 56, 59, 66 ; scimitars, 57,

65 ; earliest use in Egypt, 60 ;

in Krete, 60 ; in the Caucasus,

60 ; origin of, in Britain, 64
Bronze age in Europe, 64
Burnouf, 13, 14

Calah, 18. See Nimrud

Canaan, 126, 137, 190, 213 (see

Palestine); and Egypt, 177;

before the Exodus, 187 et seq. ;

Hittite pottery in, 179 ; neolithic

age in, 146
Canaanite civilization, 1 50 et seq. ;

dynasty in Babylonia, 142 ;

deities, 152 ; language, 35, 89,

142 ; luxury, 156 ; postal service,

143, 189 ; pottery, 63 ; sacrifice

of children, 148
Cappadocia, Assyrians in, 169
Cappadocian tablets, 171
Carchemish, 40, 172, 195
Careri, 9

Chaldsea, port of, 80
Chaldasans, 90

Chantre, 47, 53. 17°. I7l» 174, 178
Chardin, Sir J., 9
Chedor-laomer, 143
Cilicia, 173, 175
Clay as writing material, m
Comana, 173
Cones, terra-cotta, 134
Copper, use of, 51, 54. 55. 5$, 59.

62 ; mines, 170
Copper in Sumerian, 58, 59
Cossseans. See Kossreans
Crete. See Krete
Cros, Captain, 48, 55
Cubit, Babylonian, 122

Cuneiform a cursive script, 77,
84, 184; used by Egypt, 126,
190

Cypriotic syllabary, 182

Cyprus, 65, 140, 182 ; seal-cylin-
ders in, 140

Damascus, 197

Darius I., 9, 12, 16, 35

Darius, how pronounced, 12

Deecke, 186

Deification of king, 95

Delitzsch, F., 35

Determinatives, 57. 84

Dieulafoy, 73

Dirk, 65 ; in Danube valley, 65 ;

characteiizes bronze age, 66
Domestication of animals, 83
Dwarfs, sacred, 127, 128

Ea or Oannes, 75, 79, 81, 119

Ebed-Kheba, King of Jerusalem,
196, 200, 201, 202, 204

Eden, 78, 79

Edin, the " Plain," 78, 79, 93

Egypt, 47, 54, 102 ; Asiatic in-
fluence on, 125 ; excavations in,
42 ; and Babylonia, 101, 107,
no, 133

Egyptian irrigation, 102 ; chro-
nology, 115 ; hieroglyphs, 104 ;
language Semitic, 107, no;
letter of an, 207 ; neolithic cul-
ture, 125 ; rule in Canaan, 213 ;
seal-cylinders, 112, 114

Egyptians, dynastic, no, 114

Elam, 26, 46, 71, 73, 144; copper
age in, 51

Elamite pottery, 47, 48 ; dialects,
71 ; race, 73

El-IIibba, 41

El-Kab, sculpture at, 117

Elwend, inscription of, 20

Erech, 93

Eri-aku (Arioch), 143

Eridu, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85,
92, 118, 120; excavations at,

55
Erman, 107
Etruscan model of liver, 186

INDEX

217

Euphrates, 8r, 102, 103
Evans, A. J., 141, 159, 183

Fibula, introduction of, 65, 66
Figurines in Elam, 52, 54 ; at

Kara Eyuk, 171
Flower, Samuel, 8

Garstang, 62

Gezer, 57, 60, 63, 65, 145, etc.,

154, 158, 198, 204, 206 ; graves

at, 151
Gladstone, Dr., analysis of metals,

60, 61, 170
Gold, word for, 58
Gordium, pottery of, 171
Grotefend, 10-13, 17, 35
Gudea, 53, 59, 73, 141
Guyard, Stanislas, 33, 162

Hadad-nirari L, 57, 157, 172

Halevy, 28

Hall, H. R., 40

Hamadan, inscription of, 15

Hathor identified with Istar, 129

Haupt, 29

Haynes, 56

Hazael, 21

Hebrew, 142

Hebron, 203

Heeren, 13

Heraldic position in art, 117, 180

Herat, seal-cylinder from, 184

Herbert, Thomas, 9

Herodotus, 131

Heuzey, 40, 53, 117, 121, 133

Hezekiah, 21

Hierakonpolis, 62, 115, 117

Hilprecht, 56

Hincks, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 31,
161, 162

Hittite, 34; art, 180 et seq.;
chiefs, 197 ; dirk, 65 ; inscrip-
tions, 195 ; kings, vi., 175 ;
language, 34, 174, 176, 200 ;
mercenaries, 177, 193, 196, etc.;
pottery, vi., 63, 149, 178, 179,
206

Hittites, 169, 170, 173, 174, 179,
194, etc., 206

Hommel, 105, 106, 116, 120

Horus, followers of, 61, no, 123,
124

Hut-urns, 171

Hyksos, 52, 145, 156, 190; intro-
duce bronze, 63 ; axe-heads,
171

In-Susinak, 50

Iron, name of, 58 ; in Armenia,

166 ; in Egypt, 62
Isaac, 154
Israelites, their advent in Canaan,

212
Istar, 52, 128, 129, IM
Ivories of Ephesus, 184

Jacob-el (see Ya'qub-el), 145, 190

Jebuskes, 205, 213

Jehu, 21

Jensen, 34, 168

Jequier, 121

Jerusalem, 21, 178, 201, 205, 210,

213 ; king of, 196, 199, etc., 202,

204
Jones, F., 24

Kadish, 197, 208

Kara Eyuk, 47, 48, 53, 166, 169,

170, 171, 173, 181
Karnak, 54
Kas, 195, 201, 202
Kassites, 89 ; dynasty of, 97
Khabiri, 196, 201, 202
Khaldis, Khaldian, 164, 165
Khammu-rabi (see Amraphel), Si,

127, 143, 152, 157 ; code of

laws of, 153; dynasty of, 155,

156, 167 ; letters of, 45
Khattina. (Hittites), 202
Khorsabad, 18, 19
King, L. W., 40
Knossus, clay tablets at, 183
Knudtzon, 174, 196, 200
Kossseans (Kassites), 35, 144
Kretan script, 141, 159, 181 ;

pottery, 178; monsters in art,

180
Krete, 141, 182
Kflyunjik, 18,131. See Nineveh.

218

INDEX

Labbawa, Labbaya, 174, 198, 199,
201, 202, 204

Lachish, 146, 202, 209 ; excava-
tions at, 145, 149, 158, 206

Lagas, 73, 141

Language and race, 109

Lassen, 14

Layard, 18, 23, 32, 39, 131, 161

Lebanon, 152

Legrain, 54

Lehmann, 33, 163

Lenormant, Fr., 28, 162, 163

Libraries, Babylonian, 138

Lichtenberg, von, 53

Liver, bronze, 186

Loftus, 26, 80

Longperier, de, 19

Macalister, 57, 63, 146, 147, 151,

154, 155
Mace-heads, 1 33
Magan, 134
Mai-Amir, 27

Map of world, Babylonian, 80
Maspero, 131
Megiddo, 148, 156, 199
Merodach-baladan, 90
Merodach-nadin-akhi, 73
Messerschmidt, 28, 34, 168
Mitanni, 33, 34, 167, 193, 196 ;

language of, 1 68
Montellius, 64
Morgan, H. de, 55
Morgan, J. de, 27, 33, 46, 73, 74,

80, 82, 121
Moschians, 173
Miinter, Bishop, 10
Muqayyar {see Ur), 55
Mussian, excavations at, 50, 53
Mykense, 65
Mykenaean pottery, 171
Myres,J. L., 63, 178

Naharaim (Mitanni), 196, 202
Naram-Sin, 56, 73, 88, 140, 143
Nar-Buzau, palette of, 117, 121, 123
Nar-Mer, 117
Nebuchadrezzar, 17, 21, 45
Neolithic age not in Babylonia, 48,
57

Neo-Susian, 27

Niebuhr, Carsten, 9

Niffer (Nippur), excavations at, 40,

56, 76, 77, 78
Nimrud, 18, 21
Nineveh, excavations at, 18, 57 ;

library of, 23, 24, 161
Niobe of Mount Sipylus, 54
Norris, Edwin, 16, 26
Nu-gidda, 128, 129

Oannes, 75

Obelisk, the Black, 20, 21, 179

Obsidian, 51, 171

Oppert, Jules, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28

Osiris, 119, 123

Palestine and Babylonia, 135 et
seq. ; Exploration Fund, 135,
145 ; Hittites in, 193, 194

Palette of Nar-Buzau, 121, 123

Papyrus, 84

Pegasus, 180

Pehlevi inscriptions, 10

Pepi, statue of", 62 ; Pyramid texts
of, 120

Persian Gulf, 75 ; land increases at
head of, 80

Peters, Dr., 56

Petrie, Flinders, 52,60, 61, 62, 117,
121, 156, 182

Philology, value of, 43, 44

Phoenician alphabet, 159, 183, 185

Picture-writing, Babylonian, 75, 82,
105 ; analysed, 98-100

Pietro della Valle, 8

Pinches, Dr., 73, 74, 144, 171

Polyphony, 22

Postal service in Babylonia, 143 ;
in Canaan, 143, 189

Pottery, importance of, 36 et seq. ;
Babylonian, 39, 42 ; Elamite, 47,
48, 54; Hittite, 63, 149, 179;
Kretan, 178; Mykensean, 171 ;
South Canaanite, 63, 149, 178,
206 ; Susian, 47, 51, 53 ; Vannic,
166 ; black with incised lines, 52,

53. 171

Ptah, Semitic origin of, 129
Pumpelly, Professor, 54, 64
Pyramid texts, 122

INDEX

219

Qal'at Shirqat (Assur), 41

Ramsay, Sir W. M., 174, 195
Ramses II., treaty of, vi.
Rask, 13, 14

Rassam, Hormuzd, 23, 32
Rawlinson, Sir II. C, 15, 16, 20,

21, 22, 24, 26, 80
Razor, use of, 134
Reisner, 118

Resurrection, the Babylonian, 120
Rhind, 41, 42
Rich, 8
Royal Society, 8

Sacred trees of Egypt, 123

Sacy, de, 10

Saint-Martin, 13

Samsu-ditana, 28

Saqia, the, 132

Sardinians, 211

Sargon of Akkad, 19, 49, 56, 59,
87, 88, 132, 139, 140, 155, 182

Sarzec, M. de, 40, 121

Saulcy, de, 19, 20, 25

Scheil, 27

Schliemann, 54, 60, 61, 65, 166,
180

Schools, Babylonian, 138

Schulz, 31, 32, 160, 161

Schweinfurth, 108, 123

Scimitar, Semitic invention, 65,
66; of Hadad-nirari, 157

Seal-cylinder, ill, 112, 114, 117,
118, 140, 152, 180, 181, 184;
dwarfs on, 128 ; from Herat, 184 ;
in Cyprus, 140 ; in Troy, 180

Sellin, 157

Semite culture, origin of, 30 ; influ-
ence, 49, 52, 86, 90 ; religion,
93 et seq. ; kings deified, 95

Semites in Babylonia, 86

Semitic Empire, 69, 87

Semitic family of speech, 89 ; lan-
guages, 70, 72 ; types, 73, 74

Sennacherib, 21

Shaduf, 99, 130, 131 et seq.

Shalmaneser I., 172

Shalmaneser II., 179; annals of,
Zl

Shechem, 198, 204

" Shepherd " kings, 93

Sidonian seals, 35, 152

Silver, name of, 58

Sin (Sinai), 128, 129

Sippara, 46, 79, 142

Spouted vases, 134

Subari, 172, 181

Sumer, language of, 28, 29, 68 et
seq., 86

Sumerian, 24, 28-30, 69 ; animism,
94 ; civilization, 98-100 ; cul-
ture, 98 — in Canaan, 138 ; dia-
lects, 29, 69 ; origin of, 74 ;
origin of culture, 75 ; physical
type, 72 j priest, 96 ; study of,
29, 30 ; survival in Southern
Babylonia, 88

Sumerians, the, 67 et seq.

Susa, 26 ; excavations at, 27, 46,
73 ; pottery of, 47, 53 ; metal
age of, 49

Swords, earliest, 65 ; in Cyprus,
65 ; in Krete, 65

Syros, 53

Taanach, excavations at, 148 et

seq., 152, 157, 199, 212
Tablets, writing-, 82, 84
Talisb, excavations at, 55
Tarkhundaraba, 175
Taylor, 55, 78
Tel el-Amarna, 136, 188 ; tablets,

33. 35. 136, 144. 167, 168,

172, 174, 177, 178, 187, 191,

193, 195. !96, 197. 200, 205
Tel el-Hesy, 147. See Lachish
Tello, 29, 40, 53, 55, 72, 73, 91,

121, 122 ; pottery of, 48
Thothmes III., annals of, 156
Thureau Dangin, 29, 87, 91,

141
Tiglath-pileser I., 173
Tigris, 80, 102, 103
Tin, 60, 64

Toprak Kaleh, 166, 171
Trees, sacred, in Egypt, 123
Troy, 54, 60, 61/ 65, 166, 171,

182
Tychsen, 10

220

INDEX

Uan, 175, 200

Ur, 78, 85, 141 ; excavations at,
55

Valle, Pietro della, 8

Van (Biainas), 31, i6r, 164

Vannic, 31, 162; deciphered, 32,

162, 163, 164 ; deities, 165 ;

kings, 31, 32
Vases, Egyptian, 121, 128
Vases of hard stone, 82, 121,

133
Vine, home of, 59, 165
Vishtaspa, 13
Vyse, 62

Ward, Hayes, 40, 79

Week, Babylonian, 122 ; Cappado-

cian, 172
Weissbach, 27
Westergaard, 16, 25
Wheat, 132; in prehistoric graves,

108
Wood, use of, 83, 84
Writing material, primitive, 83

Xerxes, 12, 35, 161 ; Persian form
of, 12; name of, on vase, 13

Ya'qub-el {see Jacob-el), 145
Year, division of, 122
Yortan, pottery of, 17 1

Zend, 10

Richard Clay & Softs, Limited, London and Bungay.

J

SOUTHERNREcfnL0/ Ca"'f0rnia

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