The civilization of Babylonia and Assyria

Its remains, language, history, religion, commerce, law, art, and literature

by Morris Jastrow | 1915 | 168,585 words

This work attempts to present a study of the unprecedented civilizations that flourished in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley many thousands of years ago. Spreading northward into present-day Turkey and Iran, the land known by the Greeks as Mesopotamia flourished until just before the Christian era....

Next to the antiquity of the civilization of the Euphrates Valley, perhaps the most astonishing fact about it is the disappearance of practically all material traces of this civilization and the loss of detailed knowledge of a period of history extending over a stretch of several thousand years.

Until a few generations ago our knowledge of the history and culture of Babylonia and Assyria was limited to references in the Old Testament, and to the accounts in Herodotus, to statements in Josephus and to Ctesias, and to scattered notices in the writings of various Greek and Latin writers. Comparatively extensive as this material was, [1] it was yet entirely inadequate for forming an estimate of the civilization and for furnishing a historical survey. In contrast to Egypt, no picturesque remains survived to recall to the wanderer the glory of the past.

To be sure, the profound impression made upon the ancient world by the achievements of Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, the great military power that they developed, their extensive and remarkable building operations their temples, palaces and gardens as well as the wisdom for which the priests became famous all this never faded out of the memory of the people, but it remained to a large extent an impression unsupported by sufficient details to enable us to do more than draw a very general picture, vague in its outlines and deficient in details, of the civilization unfolded thousands of 3^ears ago. Fanciful exaggerations and uncertain traditions took the place of accurate knowledge.

A country that is favorably situated for the early development of culture is also apt to show features that lead to rapid decline when the decline has once set in. The overflow of the two rivers as it conditioned and promoted the remarkable fertility of the region was also, as has already been intimated, an annual menace and until the introduction of an elaborate canal system, loss of property and life accompanied the overflow, which submerged entire districts for weeks and even months.

The picture unfolded in the first chapter of Genesis, which represents the primeval chaos before the appearance of dry land as a state in which the waters covered everything, was suggested by the phenomenon which was annually witnessed throughout a considerable portion of Babylonia ; and similarly, the thought that all mankind was once annihilated in consequence of a deluge lay near to the minds of a people who witnessed such a destructive event on a small scale every spring.

The neglect into which the canal system naturally fell after the downfall of Assyria and Babylonia brought about an even more lamentable state of affairs than that which existed before its institution, for in a short time the work which generations had been busy in constructing was doomed to destruction. The cities of Babylonia and Assyria fell into decay, the process being hastened by the material that was used in the construction of the buildings.

Here again, the existence of so admirable a building material as the clay soil of Babylonia, enabling even untrained workmen to rear huge constructions of burnt and unburnt bricks, facilitated on the one hand the unfolding of culture in the Euphrates Valley, but on the other hand also conduced to the rapid destruction of the buildings. The clay structures had to be constantly repaired and we learn from the cuneiform records of Nebuchadnezzar II, that 45 years of neglect sufficed to reduce a temple to a condition bordering on complete decay.

Clay being the only building material for houses, palaces and temples in the south, and the prevailing one in the north (though here stone was also employed in the case of large constructions) , it is easy to imagine what must have happened during the two thousand years that elapsed between the desertion of the Babylonian and Assyrian cities and the effort to recover their remains.

The buildings tumbled into shapeless ruins, and the winds sweeping the sands across the plains completed the destruction, and hid even the debris from view. Of the once flourishing cities, one saw The only huge shapeless mounds [2] and yet nature, in thus covering up the work of man, proved to be a merciful destroyer.

But for the mounds which formed over the sites of ancient cities, the records of the past would have been entirely swept away or ruthlessly destroyed. Beneath these mounds were safely preserved, as afterwards turned out priceless documents, inscribed clay tablets and cylinders, monuments and sculptures, by means of which we are now enabled to rewrite the history of Babylonia and Assyria. Monuments and records without number that would long ago have fallen a prey to marauding Arabs who infested the deserted districts were thus kept from certain destruction by the protecting mounds.

The recovery of those remains and the reconstruction of the history, art, the religion and social life, of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, through the study and interpretation of this material was the work largely of the 19th century, which will always be known as the golden age of epochal discoveries in many directions discoveries that have on the one hand profoundly altered our views of the universe and modified present conditions of life, and that have on the other hand enlarged our knowledge of the past by the recovery of so many pages of the lost annals of mankind.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Put together by Niebuhr, Geschichte Assur's und Babel's (Berlin, 1857). See also Cory, Ancient' Fragments (London, 1832), for a collection of accounts of Babylonia and Assyria from Greek and Latin writers, in part based on a lost work of a "Chaldean" priest Berosua a contemporary of Alexander the Great.

[2]:

Only two ruins in all the district that suggested outlines of buildings peered out above these mounds one at a place called Sirs Nimrud, and which proved to be the site of the city of Borsippa, near Babylon; the other, still further to the south at Akerkuf both representing the remains of a stage tower. Both towers were associated by native tradition with the'" Tower of Babel," which story, it will be recalled (see p. 4), was suggested by the high stage-towers that formed a characteristic feature of the sacred architecture of Babylonia and Assyria.

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