CHAPTER IV
BABYLONIA.
If you will look at the map once more you will see that the Euphrates and the Tigris draw together near their outgoing into the Persian Gulf and flow together as one stream. It was not always so, however. At the earliest times of which we have any knowledge at all the sea stretched up northward into the land to a point at which the two rivers ran in separate channels, so that each went out by its own mouth into the gulf.
I told you that I did not mean to make this story about the eastern rivers nearly as long as that about the Nile. There are two reasons for this. In the first place there is not so much to tell. The records are not so many nor so full. The cause of that is plain. Egypt is a land well furnished with hard stone, granite, and the like. In the land which we will call Babylonia there is very little stone. Therefore the builders built with brick. The inscriptions were engraven on brick. And brick is not so long lasting a material as stone. It does not take the mark of the graving tool as sharply at the first cutting, and it is more liable to wear away in the course of years. Moreover, the climate of Egypt, in its upper part at least, is so dry that it is probably the best preserving climate in the world--the climate in which inscriptions on stone or papyrus would last and keep fresh longer than in any other. For these {50} reasons we have more records from Egypt than from Babylonia.
But that is only a part, and the smaller part, of the whole reason why this story that we are telling now may be told more shortly. The larger reason is that a good deal of it has been told already in the Egyptian story. There is no need for me to go back and re-tell you the history of these Babylonians living through their ages of stone weapons, bronze weapons, and iron weapons, and through their hunting stage, their flock-keeping stage, and their agricultural stage; there is no need to tell this, for it was told to you about the Egyptians, and it is the story common to all mankind as they lived and worked their way up from the most primitive conditions to civilisation.
You must please take all that for granted, as being true of the Babylonians as of the rest of the world. You may imagine, too, that the same puzzles beset them as beset the Egyptians when they began to wonder how things, including themselves, had happened--how the world had come into being and what the sun, moon, and stars were, and so on. They, like the Egyptians, wondered about the invisible forces by which they found themselves surrounded and more or less controlled. They made rather different answers to the puzzles, but the puzzles were the same.
[Illustration: ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MACHINE FOR RAISING WATER (PRESENT-DAY "SHADOOF").]
And so a great deal of the life-story of the Egyptians, of their way of living and so on, may be considered to be the way that the Babylonians followed also. What will perhaps bring the life of the Babylonians most clearly before your eyes will be to see, so far as we can, the chief differences between their lives and the lives of those old Egyptians.
[Sidenote: Water-raising]
Both nations lived along river-courses--we have {51} seen that. And both were very dependent on the overflow of the rivers for the fertilisation of their fields and for the growth of their crops. But, though this was in a measure true of both, the dependence of the Egyptians on the overflow of the Nile was much more complete {52} than the dependence of these others on the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris. Those rivers were not so punctual in the date of the overflow, and the difference between their lowest and highest flow was not so great as in the Nile. Both countries, however, depended largely on irrigation, that is to say, on leading the water by canals from the main rivers to the fields where it was wanted. Egypt, even when it had more trees than it has now, had probably less rainfall than Babylonia; but in both countries the rivers were the sources and givers of their food supply.
We have seen the Egyptians living along a river which went down between desert country, barren country, on either side. The country on either side the courses of the Euphrates and Tigris was not nearly so barren and desert as that which lay about the Nile.
[Sidenote: The neighbouring states]
But now it becomes necessary to look at the map again. If you will do so you will see just how this Babylonia is situated in relation to the countries round about it. I speak of it as Babylonia, and speak of the "other countries," but you are not to suppose that even at the latest date to which we have brought down the story at present men had at all the same distinct idea that we have now about where one country ended and another began. You may have heard of "boundary commissions," meaning committees of men appointed to trace out the boundary line between two countries. The nations we are speaking of had no boundary commissions: they had no clear idea of boundaries, or of one nation having a right to live and to bear rule up to a certain point or line and no farther. It was all very shifting, and one nation took from another what it could get.
The shifting perhaps did not matter so much in {53} those days, because people had not learnt to look on their homes as very settled, or lasting. A good many of those among whom the story is to take us now were, if not dwellers in tents themselves, at least the descendants of those who had dwelt in tents only a generation or two before.
But a look at the map will show you that this country, which we may call, in a general way of speaking, Babylonia, had its bounds, its limits, though it was not nearly as closely limited as Egypt was between the deserts. Babylonia, you will see, has the Mediterranean Sea on its west, but with Palestine and Syria between itself and that sea. On the south there is the Persian Gulf; and Arabia, which is largely desert and barren, also lies to the south and south-west. On the north, away up towards the sources of the great rivers, is a wild mountainous region whence, as we shall see, wild, fierce people were apt to come down to harass the dwellers in the rich plain.
So, on these three sides we find Babylonia bounded, though the boundaries are large as compared with the narrow boundaries of the people along the Nile; but on the fourth, the eastern side, away towards Persia and the heart of Asia, there seems no limit whatever, either of mountain or of desert or of sea. The possibilities of peoples coming in by that way seem without any limit. In this respect, then, the situations of the two ancient empires of the world were very different.
I am speaking of all this country as Babylonia, and it may occur to you to wonder at that because you will have heard so much from your Bibles of the Assyrians coming upon Palestine from this very country round about the Euphrates. And so they {54} did; and at one period in the story the Assyrians became so powerful that they took possession of all this land, and just at that time it would be more correct to call the land Assyria instead of Babylonia. But this was for a period only. At the beginning of our knowledge of this region Assyria was only a province, a northern province, of Babylonia, and was ruled from Babylon. But the Assyrians became very strong and revolted, and conquered those who had been their masters, and it was during this victorious period that they made those incursions into Palestine of which the Bible tells us. But at length the Babylonians, their old masters, rose up against them and got the mastery over them again, and after this blaze of glory Assyria sinks back into its old place as a province of Babylon, in the northern part of the empire.
Now who were they, where did they come from--the earliest of the people whom we find to have lived in Babylonia? We do not quite know that. What it is quite useful to note, however, is that we do seem to know who they were not. They were not Semites--not a Semitic people. It is useful to know they were not this, because Semitic is just what most of the people whom we now meet in the human story were.
The name comes from Shem, the name of one of the sons of Noah in the book of Genesis; and the so-called Semites appear, coming into the story of mankind, out of Arabia, that strange desert country. They came up thence into Babylonia, and in Babylonia, when they came to it, there was already a people with a high civilisation, as we know by evidences that have been found. It was different from the civilisation of the Semitic people. The name given to that earlier people and that earlier civilisation is Sumerian, and I {55} really do not think you need trouble to inquire precisely what is meant by that, for even the most learned have very little to tell us about it. It had to have a name. Let us call it Sumerian, and say it was different from the Semitic, probably older, and so leave it.
It is a curious thing about these Semites, who at a very early date came in and took possession of all Babylonia, that though they apparently came from Arabia and the south, they made their first appearance in history in the north of Babylonia. How that happened we cannot tell. Perhaps some records of a southern invasion have been lost. Or they may have skirted round on the eastern side. It is all guess-work. They appeared in the north, and they quickly overran the country--not only of Babylonia, but of Palestine and of Syria also--except, it may be, a strip of Syria along the Mediterranean shore which is called on the map Phœnicia. That is an exception which you will do well to bear in mind. It is important, because these Phœnicians belonged to one of the greatest civilisations of the old world, and because they too were great makers of history, as you shall see before very long.
[Sidenote: "Ur of the Chaldees"]
On their western border, therefore, the people of the powerful empire which began to be formed along the Tigris and Euphrates had tribes very closely akin to themselves. On the east and on the north they had neighbours of a different race from their own. It seems to have been in the south of Babylonia, near the outgoing of the great rivers, that the first capital of the empire was formed. Probably this southern Babylonia is that "Ur of the Chaldees" from which we are told that Abraham came and established himself in Palestine. He came, as we see, living with {56} his family and his dependants in tents, with flocks and herds, easily moving on from one place to another when the sheep or oxen had eaten the grass or when water failed. He was the patriarch (_pater_=father, and _arch_=ruler), the father-ruler of the small tribe or large family that came with him. In your history books you will sometimes read that "society was in the patriarchal stage." That means that the people of whom the historian is writing were living in the way in which Abraham and his dependent people lived; and we may be sure that it was the way of life of the greater number of those Semites who came up from Arabia and took possession of Syria and Palestine at a very early date. They took possession of the country of Babylonia also, and as they settled along the fertile river-banks we may imagine that they would begin to unite together into a nation and become strong, with a feeling of union, in a way that it was not at all likely that the small tribes of patriarchs and their families, moving about with their flocks and herds, would unite. So the Babylonians and the Syrians and the dwellers in Palestine would easily fall into the way of regarding each other as of different nations, although really they were of the same race.
There would be this difference, then: the settlers along the rivers really would begin to lead settled lives, like the people who tilled the soil in Egypt, but beyond those limits there would be wanderers, with their cattle--wanderers for the most part of the same race as the settlers, but growing more and more distinct and divided from them in manners and feelings as time went on and they lived such different lives.
I spoke of these Babylonians having just the same puzzles presented to their minds by what we call "the {57} forces of Nature" as the Egyptians had, but said that they answered them a little differently. The Egyptians, as we saw, tried three different kinds of answer. They made a great god of the sun, they made a great god of Osiris, who was originally just the god of one place (like many others), and they made gods of all sorts of animals. Now, trying to understand the religion of the ancient Babylonians, we may rule out entirely all idea of animal worship--that is to say, the third kind of answer which the Egyptians made to their puzzles. It does not seem to have been thought of by the Babylonians at all. Let us forget those sacred cats and crocodiles of the Nile.
[Sidenote: Osiris and Ra]
And then, having cast them aside, we may see a very remarkable likeness between the other guesses that the two peoples made, and the way in which they tried to work the different guesses in with one another. For you may remember that the Egyptians, after forming the idea of Ra, the sun-god--a god that had his eye over all the world--and after imagining Osiris to be so powerful as to rule divinely over all Egypt: after they had thus exalted these two gods at the expense of all the others, they then began to regard the two as one--the one being but one form of the other--Osiris, as Ra, traversing the heavens, and Ra, as Osiris, ruling the earth. And since Ra, the Sun, was supposed to go under the earth at night, in order to get back to the east to begin his journey across the sky again the next morning, there was no great difficulty in imagining him, again as Osiris, ruling over the dead in the under-world also.
And now, in Babylonia, we find that almost exactly the same thing happened. Shamash was their name for the sun-god, the Egyptians' Ra. Then there was a {58} god whom they called Merodach, or Marduk: he was the god of Babylon. But Babylon was not always a great city. The earliest capital city was south of Babylon. So Marduk was only as one god among many. But then, as Babylon grew and became the great centre, Marduk came to be regarded as the great god of all the country, exactly as had happened with Osiris in Egypt. And then, again just as in Egypt, they began to look on Shamash and on Marduk as two forms of one and the same great deity. Thus, it is wonderful how like each other were the guesses at truth in the two empires. Bel-Merodach, as he was sometimes called (Bel or Baal means Lord), became of such immense importance that the king was never considered to be properly appointed as ruler until he had been received by Merodach at Babylon, in the god's great temple there. The Assyrian kings, whose capital was Nineveh, in the north of Babylonia, when they had conquered their former masters of Babylon, still came to Babylon and paid their homage to the Babylonian god.
But, again as in Egypt, there were a number of other gods besides Marduk, in other places, whose authority was considered very powerful just in these places; and there were other heavenly bodies besides Shamash, the sun, that had worship. There was Sin, the moon, and especially there was Ishtar, the planet Venus, the Ashtaroth that you read of in the Bible. Ishtar was goddess of the spring and of all the life-giving forces in Nature.
And in Babylonia, as in Egypt, there were immense numbers of priests, and their power was great. They were occupied in the ceremonies to the gods, and in care of the temples, and a great part of their time was {59} taken up in watching the stars and planets. They saw that many of the happenings on earth depended on the heavenly bodies--the sun made the seed grow in the damp warm earth; perhaps they knew that the moon affected the tides. At all events they saw that certain events on earth happened at the same time as certain other events in the heavens; so they grew to think that the earthly happenings were caused by the changes of the planets in the sky far more than they are.
[Sidenote: Astronomy]
But this mistaken idea about the influence of the stars on the earth had the excellent effect that it made these old Babylonian priests to be great star-gazers. They were great astronomers, and in spite of their errors made great steps in knowledge. And because you can go very little way in astronomy without mathematics, they became mathematicians too. We owe a great deal to what these wise men of the East, watching the stars so long ago, found out for us.
Some of the Babylonians also believed in fearful demons and powers of evil, and it seems as if they imagined their gods to take much more notice of their behaviour, their good and bad conduct, than the Egyptians' gods were supposed to take. We saw that the Egyptian idea was that so long as they performed all the religious rites exactly, that was all that the gods cared about. But the Babylonians thought that their gods did interest themselves a great deal about the right or wrong conduct of the men over whom they ruled, and punished or rewarded them in this life accordingly.
And through all this that I am telling you about the religion of the early Babylonians, I want you to bear in mind that Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, came from "Ur of the Chaldees," that is, from the south of Babylonia. That means that he {60} came carrying with him beliefs and customs that he and his clan (if I may call it so) had learnt in Babylonia. Telling you these Babylonian beliefs, I am really telling you the origins of the beliefs which have come down to us through the Israelites. That is what makes their story so particularly interesting for us.
The Babylonians, then, had an idea of a deity who punished their wrong-doing by sending them illnesses and famine and so on. The Egyptians had not this idea nearly so clearly, but they had the idea that the man who did well in this life would have his reward in the life after death. The Babylonians did not have this idea of the life after death; we find, at least, no reason to think that they had it. Abraham, therefore, came from Ur without this belief in a life after death. It was only at a far later period--possibly, though by no means certainly, as something they learned from the Egyptians--that the belief in a future life came to the Jews and Israelites.
But although Abraham brought traditions from Ur, so soon as we are allowed to know anything about the beliefs held by him and his people we find them to be very much more pure and free from superstitions than the Babylonian ones. The Babylonian idea of the creation was that there was at first a great dragon of prodigious size. Merodach, the chief of the gods, identified with the sun, then fought the dragon, killed him, cut him in two; of one half of his body made the firmament of heaven, of the other half made the earth. Then in the heavens, as stars, he set the lesser gods, with the moon. The moon ruled the night and regulated the division of the year into months (moon-eths). Mona is the old Anglo-Saxon word for moon.
This account is inscribed on tablets, and so much is {61} readable, but there is much more which has crumbled away so that it cannot be read. The account of the Creation given in Genesis is, of course, free of all this fantastic account of the fight with the dragon.
[Sidenote: The Flood]
There are other Babylonian tablets which give an account of the Flood, but here again we find the idea that it is sent not by one great god, but by several gods, working together. Over them all seems to be the sun-god, here called Shamash, who is in Heaven. The flood is so dreadful that it compels the lesser gods living on the earth to fly to Heaven for refuge. There Ishtar (Venus), taking pity on mankind, prays Shamash to stop the flood, and he consents to do so. One of the earth gods had warned a certain man, named Ut-napistim, that the flood was coming, and advised him to make a ship to save himself from it. So Ut-napistim built the ship, made it water-tight with pitch, put in it his family, pairs of all the animals, workmen and a pilot, and so they floated for seven days until the ship came to ground on a mountain to the east of the Tigris. Then, apparently after another seven days, Ut-napistim sent out first a dove, then a swallow, then a raven. The first two came back, but the last did not, from which Ut-napistim concluded that the raven had found dry ground somewhere.
You will see how like this is to the story of Noah and the Ark in the Bible, and almost certainly it was with some such tradition as this in their minds that Abraham and his people came from Ur.
It is my purpose, in this story of mankind around the Mediterranean, to bother you as little as possible with names, either of persons or of places, and as little as possible with dates, because the more we have of them, the more difficult it becomes to remember those {62} that are really important. For the years very far back it is impossible to fix the dates at all exactly. What is important is to know in what order the great events in the story happened.
The date at which Abraham came out of Ur and settled in the southern part of what was afterwards called Judah has been determined by scholars to have been about 2250 or 2300 B.C. You will remember that the date to which we brought down the Egyptian story was about 1500 B.C. So Abraham came to Palestine about 750 years earlier than that.
Abraham's date is more or less fixed by the evidence of what is by far the most famous code of ancient laws and customs that has come down to us, far beyond anything of the kind that has been found in Egypt, the code of Khammurabi. Khammurabi was king of Babylon, and it is considered nearly sure that it is he who is meant by "Amraphel, king of Shinar" mentioned in Genesis. He lived at the same time as Abraham.
[Sidenote: Code of Khammurabi]
Now, this code, or list, of laws engraved on tablets is most interesting to us not only because it is ancient, but also because it is so very modern. I mean that although these laws were made so very long ago, they are laws which we could very nearly accept as suitable for us to live under to-day. Our lives would be very little altered if we were to try to lead them according to those laws instead of according to the laws under which we actually do live.
If Khammurabi, in 2250 B.C., had these laws engraven, we may be nearly sure that they were the laws by which the country was governed many years before that. How long before, we cannot tell. Tablets on which some of them were recorded were found in {63} what has been called the library (though I do not suppose that there were exactly what we should call books in it, and the name "library" comes from _liber_, a book)--collected by a certain great king of Assyria, Assurbanipal or Sardanapalus, by name, who reigned in Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria, about 700 B.C. or a little later. A great many similar records and tablets collected by this king have been found. But a far more complete list of the laws was found later at Susa, a city which was afterwards called Persepolis.
Not only are the laws themselves such as we might make and use, but they seem to show that there existed in Babylon at that far-away time a society and a kind of life not at all unlike ours. There were doctors, lawyers and merchants, and the fees of the doctors and the ways in which the merchants were to carry on their trade were fixed by the laws. It is clear that there were a great many slaves employed--that is a difference, of course, from our society. The punishments for law-breaking were more severe than ours. Murder is the only crime which we now punish with death. In Khammurabi's code, burglary and stealing are punished by death; so is any attempt to induce witnesses in a case at law to give false witness; and there are numerous other offences for which death was the punishment in Babylon, but for which we should make the offender pay a fine or go to prison for a while. But we have to remember that it is not so very many years ago even in this country since a man could be hanged for forgery or for stealing a sheep. The laws of Khammurabi are not more severe than ours were not much more than a hundred years ago.
When there were serfs in England, labourers almost {64} in a state of slavery, English law made a great distinction between them and freemen. An offence against the laws, if committed by a serf, was very much more heavily punished than the same offence committed by a freeman. And we find exactly the same distinction made in this ancient code; the slave suffers far more heavily than the freeman.
Some of the laws show the importance of the canals for watering the land, and each owner of land beside a canal was made responsible for the canal bank which ran through or beside his property. If he let it fall into bad repair, and the water, overflowing, damaged his neighbour's land or drowned his sheep, he had to make good the loss caused to his neighbour.
The law of "a tooth for a tooth" and "an eye for an eye" which we find in the Bible, in the book of Exodus, we find here too. If you knocked out a man's eye in a fight, you would have to submit to having an eye of your own knocked out. If you knocked out a tooth, a tooth of yours would be knocked out.
Susa, where the full code of Khammurabi was found, was the capital of the kingdom of a people called Elamites, of whom you hear in the Bible. Elam lay on the eastern, the Persian, side of Babylonia, and the Elamites gave continual trouble to the Babylonian conquerors. The code is cut on a great block of black stone eight feet high. It is in forty-four columns and consists of no less than 3654 lines--a lengthy document. And at the top of it there is cut the figure of King Khammurabi receiving the tablets of the law from Shamash, the great sun-god. It must remind us of Moses receiving the tablets with the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.
There can be little doubt that these laws, more or {65} less as they are graven on this stone, were those under which the greater number of the Semitic tribes lived which inhabited Syria and Palestine. Among these tribes were the Jews. For this reason we may imagine that when the Babylonians made attacks upon them and reduced them, as they did from time to time, to submission, their own laws and customs were not much altered. They had to pay tribute, perhaps, and their homes were broken up, and some of them, like the Jews, were taken away into Babylonia, but they went among a people not altogether different from themselves either in nationality or in their ways of living.
[Sidenote: Art in Babylonia]
And just as we are surprised by the advanced state of civilisation which these old laws show us, so we have to be no less astonished by the fine works of art which they made. Stone, as we have said, was rare in Babylonia; therefore they looked on it as precious, and kept it for engraving. Some of the cut stones of very early date are finely finished. In the Louvre in Paris there is a splendidly worked Babylonian vase with a hunting scene of lions upon it, and it is thought to have been made long before the time of this Khammurabi, whose code we have been speaking of. There were lions in this country then, though there are none now. You may remember many references to lions in the Bible.
We know, then, that the Babylonians had their artists and their workers in gold. Probably the gold came to them either through Egypt or across the Red Sea from Nubia and Africa farther south; Babylonia had no gold. Some, however, may have come from the East. They made ornaments of the gold and of the cut stones, and their costume would seem to have been like that of the Egyptians, but with more flowing {66} skirts. We have seen that the Egyptians, just about the time that they began to know more of the Babylonians, that is a little before 1500 B.C., began to lengthen their skirts also. Probably the dresses of the Babylonians were more rich in ornament than the Egyptian. With both, as with the dwellers in all the warm climates of the world, there can be little doubt that the dress was a natural development from the cloth round the loins--the skirts lengthened downwards and some species of jacket drawn on over the upper part of the body. Or a long robe of light material, which I have likened to a nightgown, was put on over the shoulders and hung down to the ankles, perhaps, so that it did for both skirt and jacket in one. To this it would be very easy and natural to add a girdle or sash, to tie it in round the waist and prevent its flapping in too inconvenient a manner.
[Illustration: ASSYRIAN KING IN HIS ROBES.]
Once you get the long robe, you come to something which would need very little change to become the sort of robe which the Greeks and Romans wore--what the Romans called the "toga." I should think these long skirts would be very much in the way when those who wore them wanted to run or make any swift movement, and I suppose that when we read in {67} the Bible of people "girding up their loins," when they were going on any expedition, it means that they tucked up these skirts and fastened them round with the girdle about their waists, so that they should not hang around their legs.
[Sidenote: Rise of Assyria]
In order to make this story pleasant and easy reading, as it ought to be, I have said that I want to bother you about dates as little as possible, but it is necessary to take some notice of them. In the first place, for the understanding of this particular part of the great story--the part that has to do with Babylonia--you ought to know that the date at which the Assyrians, in the northeen section of the country, with their capital of Nineveh, revolted against the rule of Babylon, to which we find that they were subject when the story opens, was about 1900 B.C. That is to say, about 400 years before the great period of the Egyptian power, dating from 1500 B.C., or thereabouts. Assyria, which at first was subject to Babylon, revolted and became master of Babylon about 1900 B.C. and retained that mastery, with some ups and downs, for about 1500 years. This greatest story in the world deals with big spaces of time! Then the Assyrian power went to pieces and Babylon established itself again as the master power about the time of that Nebuchadnezzar of whom the Bible tells us.
So we have to realise that when, in 1500 B.C., or rather sooner, Egypt and Babylonia, according to the Egyptian records, began to clash against each other harder than ever before, with the result of squeezing very uncomfortably those Semitic tribes in Palestine, it was a Babylonia under the Assyrian domination. And the Assyrians were a more war-like people than the Babylonians. They had a better-ordered and doubtless {68} a better-equipped army. Theirs seems to have been almost what we should call a military state, constituted for war, and they called themselves masters of the whole country north of the Persian Gulf and of Egypt and of all east of the Mediterranean Sea.
In the story of mankind we find it happening again and again that after a people have been comfortably settled for a while in the fertile plains and river valleys they lose the warlike habits by means of which they got possession of these good lands, and are overthrown by others coming from a more mountainous and barren country where they have been obliged to live hardier lives. Thus, these Assyrians from the north got the better of the Babylonians, and the Assyrians in their turn were constantly being troubled by the attacks of a people called the Hittites, from farther north again.
You read of the Hittites in the Bible. Not a very great deal is known about them, but it is certain that they were a great power in all that country lying north and north-west of Assyria which is now called Asia Minor. They made incursions and attacks down south, and it is probable that after their great attacks were repulsed they left some of their tribes in the south, separated from the rest of the nation. In the latter part of our story it is these scattered tribes that we hear most about.
[Sidenote: Cuneiform writing]
Now, the earliest of the inscriptions which tell us anything about these people of Babylonia goes back to the time before the Semites had come up from Arabia in the south. Edim, or the plain of Babylonia, from which we may suppose that the name Eden, in Genesis, came, was probably then inhabited by those Sumerians of whom we know very little. We know little, but we find inscriptions by them, and the inscriptions are in {69} a very curious form of writing, a writing which went on being used for thousands of years. It is called cuneiform, from "cuneus," meaning a wedge, because all the lines of the writing are inclined to go into the shape of a wedge.
You will remember something about the Egyptian hieroglyphic and picture writing. Probably all writing began in this way, with making pictures. Then it was found troublesome to make a picture of everything that you wanted to say, and a few dashes or lines, very roughly representing the thing, were used instead, and began to be understood as standing for a sign of that thing.
This wedge writing of the Babylonians doubtless began in this way. I say doubtless, because some of it is almost picture-writing, and the older the inscriptions the more like actual pictures of the thing as we see it the signs are. Thus, the sign which they made to mean heaven was something like this *, which we call an asterisk, from "aster," meaning a star. They made a drawing like a star to give the idea of heaven, because heaven is the place where the stars are. The rays, as we call them, of the star, were more wedge-shaped than the lines of our asterisk, but that is a small difference. It is said that when the "stilus," which is the tool they used for making the inscriptions, is used to make the mark of a line on wet clay, the shape into which that mark would naturally go is that of a wedge; they had much clay for their bricks, and very likely that is why we see this writing in the form that it has.
You may remember how we cited, as an instance of the way in which the Egyptians developed their writing, that we had first the picture of an eye, and then {70} the picture of a bird, and, putting the eye before the bird, we got the idea "I see a bird." Now, in much the same way, in the wedge-writing we find that an arrangement of three upright wedges is taken as the sign which means "water." There is an arrangement of a good many wedges which is the sign that means "mouth," and this arrangement is in such a shape that it must make us think that it came from an original drawing of a mouth. So, having this sign for water and this other sign for a mouth, what these cuneiform writers did when they wanted to make a sign which should mean "drinking" was to put the sign for water inside the sign for mouth. A good idea!
But all this writing, so far, proceeded on the plan of making signs to represent things that you saw or the ideas that came from what you saw. And then, I imagine, it occurred to some inventive genius to say, "Suppose, instead of making these signs to represent things that we see, that we make them represent sounds--make them stand for the names that we call them by? Now, suppose we take the word 'dog': (only he, of course, would make use of the Babylonian sound, whatever it was, which they used for 'dog'). "Suppose we take the word 'dog,'" he said, "and suppose we take one of our signs, which we use to represent things, and let it stand for the first sound that we make in saying the word. Suppose that we take another sign to stand for the second sound, the middle sound, in the word, and a third sign to stand for the last sound."
"Well," the people to whom he suggested the idea might say, "you do not seem to gain much by that. It would be much simpler and easier to go on making the sign for a dog, as we always have done."
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"Yes," he might answer, "that is quite true, so far as writing about a dog, and a dog only, is concerned, but the advantage that I claim for my idea is that these signs, which I say we might use to stand for the sound that we make when we say 'dog,' may be used over and over again, whenever we have to make those sounds. And we do not make a very large number of different sounds--not nearly so many as there are ideas and objects that we wish to write about. So, on my plan, we shall not need nearly so many signs as we have been using."
[Sidenote: The alphabet]
I take it that it was thus, or in some way rather like this, that what we call writing (that is to say, making signs on paper or some other substance to represent the sounds by which we call things), came to take the place of the more primitive way of sending messages, or of making records, which was by drawing pictures of them. We, as you know, have twenty-six signs, twenty-six letters, in what we call our alphabet--twenty-six signs for the sounds that we make in speaking. The alphabet is called so from the first two letters "alpha" and "beta," corresponding to our "a" and "b," in the Greek alphabet. Different alphabets have different numbers of letters, standing for different sounds. In our own alphabet we know that the same letter, that is to say the same sign, may stand for different sounds. Take the very first letter "a," and take the words "father," "paper," and "many"; there you have three quite different sounds for each of which the one sign "a" does the work. An alphabet with signs enough to include all the sounds we make in talking would be terribly long.
The cuneiform writing was in use up to within 100 years of the birth of Christ, and its use extended {72} from very far up in the north of Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf and away south-westward of the Red Sea in Upper Egypt. It is there found on some very important tablets of just about that greatest date in all Egyptian history, 1500. And it was in use for trading and correspondence from Elam on the eastern boundary of Babylonia, right to the Mediterranean Sea.
Thus it was of far more general use in those old days than the picture-writing of the Egyptians. Probably it was far more convenient. Then, in its turn, it fell out of use because of the invention of a mode of writing more convenient still, and not unlike ours--from which, indeed, ours is taken. But that is "another story," as Rudyard Kipling says.
Let us just take a look now and see what Abraham and his descendants were doing in this interval between their coming up from Ur, which was in the land of the Chaldee, in the south of Babylonia, and the year 1500 B.C. The story will not be long in the telling, because we know so little about it.
What we do know is that they lived for many many years in the southern part of the country which, later on, was called Judah. We may imagine that they increased and multiplied, till they became a large and formidable tribe. It is thought that they stayed in this Southern Judah, leading a pastoral life, with sheep and cattle, for some 600 years. And then there came upon them a time of famine, when there was no food for their sheep or oxen and very little for themselves. But they lived right on the great road by which the traders and merchants travelled when they went from Egypt into Babylonia, or _vice versâ_, and it was told to them that "there is corn in Egypt."
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You will remember that, about the corn in Egypt, from the story of Joseph and his brethren, as told in the Bible. And the end of that story, as you know, is that the whole tribe--all the children of Israel, as the Bible says--moved down into that "land of Goshen" which was in the north-east of Egypt. It was a country of rich land, lying low.
Now, what are we to suppose was the reason that the Egyptians allowed these foreigners to come down, as they did, and settle on this land over which they claimed to rule? We may answer that question in this way.
[Sidenote: The Shepherd Kings]
If the Israelites, as we now may call them--the tribe of which Jacob, who was also called Israel, was the head--were in the south of Judah for 600 years, between the time that they came from Chaldæa and the time that they went into the land of Goshen, it must have been in somewhere about the year 1700 B.C. that they made this later journey. That is 200 years before the rule of the famous eighteenth dynasty. And in 1700 B.C. the dynasty then ruling in Egypt was the so-called Hyksos dynasty. It was also called the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings. The Egyptians, as we have seen, had become weakened as a nation. They were constantly quarrelling among themselves, rather as the old English barons used to quarrel among themselves or against the king. The result was that foreign invaders came in from time to time, in the course of the story, and took the kingship for a while, excluding all the native Egyptian great men from the throne.
These Hyksos, who had the rule in Egypt when the Israelites were welcomed there, were invaders of this kind, foreigners who had seized the throne and the {74} power. They were shepherds, living the pastoral life--though perhaps they left off that when they became the rulers of Egypt--and wherever they came from, whether direct from Arabia or, as is more likely, from farther north, probably from Syria, all scholars are, I think, agreed that they were Semites. Josephus, the historian of the Jews, asserts that they actually were the Israelites. Modern historians think him mistaken there. But, though not Israelites, they were almost certainly of the same Arabian origin.
And there you have the answer to the question how it came about that the Israelites found a welcome in Egypt. The powerful people in the country were their relations.
And so things went well with them for many years, perhaps about three or four hundred; but other powers--"a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph"--at length threw off the yoke of the Hyksos, the Shepherds, and took the throne from them. The Israelites were shown no favour then. They were set hard tasks, were treated like slaves, until finally, under the leadership of a very great man and prophet, Moses, they decided to flee away into the desert, away from the land of Goshen, in which they were made so unhappy, although it was a fertile land.
[Sidenote: After the Exodus]
Probably they were very useful slaves and tillers of the soil, and probably that was the reason why, as we are told in the Bible, Pharaoh was so unwilling to let them go. At length, however, go they did--only, as we are further told, to be pursued, and only, as the Bible also tells us, to be saved by a miracle at the passage of the Red Sea.
This Exodus, as it is called, probably took place in 1200 B.C. or a little earlier, and the Israelites wandered {75} some forty years in the wilderness, living in tents, and moving about as the manner of pastoral tribes was, and is, with their flocks and herds. We see, then, that 1150 B.C. or a few years sooner, would be about the date at which they would begin, under Joshua, the invasion of Canaan. Our story has not reached that point yet.
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