Will Durant---Babylonia

babilônia from Hammurabi to nebuchadrezzar Babylonian contributions to modern civilization the land between the rivers Hammurabi his capital the Kassite domination the Amarna letters the Assyrian conquest nebuchadrezzar Babylon in the days of its glory civilization like life is a perpetual struggle with death and as life maintains itself only by abandoning old and recasting itself in younger and fresher forms so civilization achieves a precarious survival by changing its habitat or its blood it moved from Earth to Babylon and Judea from Babylon to Nineveh from these to Persepolis Sardis and Meletis and from these Egypt and Crete to Greece and Rome no one looking at the site of ancient Babylon today would suspect that these hot and dreary wastes along the Euphrates were once the rich and powerful capital of a civilization that almost created astronomy added richly to the progress of Medicine established the science of language prepared the first great codes of law taught the Greeks the rudiments of mathematics physics and philosophy gave the Jews the mythology which they gave to the world and passed on to the Arabs part of that scientific and architectural lore with which they aroused the doorman soul of medieval Europe standing before the silent Tigris and Euphrates one finds it hard to believe that they are the same rivers that watered Sumeria and Akkad and nourished the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in some ways they are not the same rivers not only because one never steps twice into the same stream but because these old rivers have long since remade their beds along new courses and MoU with their sides of whiteness other shores as in Egypt the Nile so here the Tigris and the Euphrates provided for thousands of miles an Avenue of Commerce and in their southern reaches springtime inundations that helped the peasant to fertilize his soil for rain comes to Babylonia only in the winter months from May to November it comes not at all and the earth but for the overflow of the rivers would be as arid as northern Mesopotamia was then and is today through the abundance of the rivers in the toil of many generations of men bolonia became the Eden of Semitic legend the garden and granary of Western Asia historically and ethnically Babylonia was a product of the union of the Acadians and the Sumerians their mating generated the Babylonian type in which the Akkadian Semitic strain proved dominant their warfare ended in the triumph of Akkad and the establishment of Babylon is the capital of all lower Mesopotamia at the outset of this history stands the powerful figure of Hammurabi 21:23 220 81 BC conqueror and lawgiver through a reign of 43 years primeval seals and inscriptions transmitted him to us partially a youthful of fire and genius a very whirlwind in battle who crushes all rebels cuts his enemies into pieces marches over inaccessible mountains and never loses an engagement under him the petty warring States of the Lower Valley were forced into unity and peace and disciplined into order and security by an historic code of laws the Code of Hammurabi was unearthed at sousei in 1902 beautifully engraved upon a diorite cylinder that had been carried from Babylon to Elim circa 1100 BC as a trophy of war like that of Moses this legislation was a gift from heaven for one side of the cylinder shows the king receiving the laws from shamash the Sun God himself the prologue is almost in heaven when the lofty a new king of the Anunnaki and Bell Lord of Heaven and Earth he who determines the destiny of the land committed the rule of all mankind to Marduk when they pronounced the lofty name of Babylon when they made it famous among the quarters of the world and in its midst established an everlasting Kingdom whose foundations were firm as heaven and earth at that time Anu and Bell called me Hammurabi the exalted Prince the worshipper of the gods to cause justice to prevail in the land to destroy the wicked and the evil to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak to enlighten the land and to further the welfare of the people Hammurabi the governor named by Bell am I who brought about Plenty and abundance who made everything for Nippur and Dury lue complete who gave life to the city of Uruk who supplied water in abundance to its inhabitants who made the city of poor super beautiful who stored up grain for the mighty haurache who helped his people in time of need who establishes insecurity their property in Babylon the governor of the people the servant whose deeds are pleasing to anew knit many of the words here have a modern ring one would not readily attribute them to an oriental despot 2,100 BC or suspected the laws that the introduced were based upon Sumerian prototypes now 6000 years old this ancient origin combined with Babylonian circumstance to give the code a composite and heterogeneous character it begins with compliments to the gods but takes no further notice of them in its astonishingly secular legislation it mingles the most enlightened laws with the most barbarous punishments and sets the primitive lex talionis and trial by ordeal alongside elaborate judicial procedures and a discriminating attempt to limit marital tyranny all in all these 285 laws arranged almost scientifically under the headings of personal property real estate trade and business the family injuries and labor form a code more advanced and civilized than that of Assyria a thousand and more years later and in many respects as good as that of a modern European state the mosaic code apparently borrows from it or derives with it from a common original the habit of stamping a legal contract with an official seal goes back to Hammurabi there are a few words finer in the history of law than those with which the great Babylonian brings his legislation to a close the righteous laws which Hammurabi the wise King established and by which he gave the land stable support and pure government I am The Guardian governor in my bosom I carried the people of the land of Sumer and Akkad in my wisdom I restrained them that the strong might not oppress the weak and that they should give justice to the orphan and the widow let any oppressed man who has a cause come before my image as king of righteousness let him read the inscription on my monument let him give heed to my weighty words and may my monument enlighten him as to his cause and may he understand his case may he set his heart at ease exclaiming Hammurabi indeed is a ruler who is like a real father to his people he has established prosperity for his people for all time and given a pure government to the land in the days that are yet to come for all future time may the king who is in the land observed the words of righteousness which I have written upon my monument this unifying legislation was but one of Hammurabi's accomplishments at his command a great canal was dug between Kish and the Persian Gulf thereby irrigating a large area of land and protecting the cities of the south from the destructive floods which the Tigris had been want to visit upon them in another inscription which has found its devious way from his time to ours he tells us proudly how he gave water that noble and unappreciated common place which was once a luxury security and government to many tribes even through the boasting an honest mannerism of the Orient we hear the voice of statesmanship when a new and Enlil the gods of Uruk antenna for gave me the lands of Sumer and Akkad to rule and they entrusted this scepter to me I dug the canal Hammurabi knew couche Nishi Hammurabi the abundance of the people which bringeth copious water to the land of Sumer and Akkad its banks on both sides I turned into cultivated ground I heaped up piles of grain I provided unfailing water for the lands the scattered people are gathered with pasturage and water I provided them I pastored them with abundance and settled them in peaceful dwellings despite the secular quality of his laws Hammurabi was clever enough to guild his authority with the approval of the gods he built temples as well as forts and coddled the clergy by constructing a Babylon a gigantic sanctuary for Marduk and his wife the national deities and a massive granary to store up wheat for gods and priests bees and similar gifts were an astute investment from which he expected steady returns in the order BD ins of the people from their taxes he financed the forces of law and order and had enough left over to beautify his Capital palaces and temples rose on every hand a bridge spanned the Euphrates to let the city spread itself along both banks ships manned with 90 men right up and down the river 2,000 years before Christ Babylon was already one of the richest cities that history had yet known the people were of semitic appearance dark inherent features masculine ly bearded for the most part and occasionally the wigged both sexes wore the hair long sometimes even the men dangled curls frequently the men as well as the women disguised themselves with perfumes the common dress for both sexes was a white linen tunic reaching to the feet in the women it left one shoulder bare in the man it was augmented with mantle and robe as wealth grew the people developed a taste for color and died for themselves garments of blue on red or red on blue in stripes circles checks or dots the bare feet of the Sumerian period gave way to shapely sandals and the male head in Hammurabi's time was swathed in turbans the women wore necklaces bracelets and amulets and strings of beads in their carefully coiffured hair the men flourished walking sticks with carved heads and carried on their girdles the prettily designed seals with which they attested their letters and documents the priests wore tall conical caps to conceal their humanity it is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay for wealth produces ease as well as art it softens the people to the ways of luxury and peace and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths on the eastern boundary of the new state a hardy tribe of Mountaineers the casts i'ts looked with envy upon the riches of Babylon eight years after Hammurabi's death they inundated the land plundered it retreated raided it again and again and finally settled down in it as conquerors and rulers this is the normal origin of aristocracies they were of non-semitic stock perhaps descendants of European immigrants from Neolithic days their victory over Semitic babylon represented one more swing of the racial pendulum in western asia for several centuries Babylonia lived in an ethnic and political chaos that put a stop to the development of science and art we have a kaleidoscope of this stifling disorder in the Amarna letters in which the king lets of Babylonia and Syria having sent modest tribute to Imperial Egypt after the victories of toughness the third beg for aid against rebels and invaders and quarrel about the value of the gifts that they exchanged with the disdainful Amenhotep the third and the absorbed and negligent Ignat on the cass i'ts were expelled after almost six centuries of rule as disruptive as the similar sway of the Hyksos in egypt the disorder continued for four hundred years more under obscure babylonian rulers whose polysyllabic roster might serve as an obligate owed to Gray's elegy until the rising power of assyria in the north stretched down his hand and brought Babylonia under the kings of Nineveh when Babylon rebelled Sennacherib destroyed it almost completely but the genial despotism of Easter hadn't restored it to prosperity and culture the rise of the means weakened Assyria and with their help navajo Asser liberated Babylonia set up an independent dynasty and dying bequeathed this second Babylonian kingdom to his son nebuchadrezzar the second villain of the vengeful and legendary book of daniel nebuchadrezzar his inaugural address to Marduk God in chief of Babylon reveals a glimpse of an oriental monarchs aims and character as my precious life do I love die sublime appearance outside of my city Babylon I have not selected among all settlements any dwelling at thy command o merciful Marduk may the house that I have built endure forever may I be satiated with its splendor attain old age therein with abundant offspring and received there in tribute of the kings of all regions from all mankind he lived almost up to his hopes for though illiterate and not unquestionably sane he became the most powerful ruler of his time in the Near East and the greatest warrior statesman and builder in all the succession of Babylonian Kings after Hammurabi himself when Egypt conspired with Assyria to reduce Babylonia to vassalage again nebuchadrezzar met the Egyptian hosts at caca mesh on the upper reaches of the Euphrates and almost annihilated them Palestine and Syria then fell easily under his sway and Babylonian merchants controlled all the trade that flowed across Western Asia from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea nebuchadrezzar spent the tolls of this trade the tributes of these subjects and of his people in beautifying his capital and dissuading the hunger of the priests is not this the great Babylon that I built he resisted the temptation to be merely a conqueror he sallied forth occasionally to teach his subjects the virtues of submission but for the most part he stayed at home making babylon the unrivaled capital of the Near East the largest and most magnificent metropolis of the ancient world NABBA pilaster had laid plans for the reconstruction of the city nebuchadrezzar used his long reign of 43 years to carry them to completion Herodotus who saw Babylon a century and a half later described it as standing in a spacious plain and surrounded by a wall 56 miles in length so broad that a four-horse chariot could be driven along the top and enclosing an area of some 200 square miles probably this included not only the city proper but a large agricultural hinterland within the walls designed to provide the teeming metropolis with sustenance in time of siege through the center of the town ran the palm-fringed Euphrates busy with commerce and spanned by a handsome bridge if we may Trust died odorous Siculus a tunnel 15 feet wide and 12 feet high connected the two banks practically all the better buildings were of brick for stone was rare in Mesopotamia but the bricks were often faced with enameled tiles of brilliant blue yellow or white adorned with animal and other figures in glazed relief which remain to this day supreme in their kind nearly all the bricks so far recovered from the site of babylon bear the proud inscription I am nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon approaching the city the travelers sought first at the crown of a very mountain of masonry an immense and lofty ziggurat rising in seven stages of gleaming enamel to a height of 650 feet crowned with a shrine containing a massive table of solid gold and an ornate bed on which each night some woman slept to await the pleasure of the God this structure thora than the pyramids of Egypt and surpassing in height all but the latest of modern buildings was probably the Tower of Babel of Hebraic myth the many storied audacity of a people who did not know yaver and whom the god of hosts were supposed to have confounded with multiplicity of tongues Babel however does not mean confusion or Babel as the legend supposes as used in the word babylon it meant the gate of god south of the ziggurats to the gigantic temple of Marduk tutelary deity of Babylon around then below this temple the city spread itself out in a few wide and brilliant avenues crossed by crowded canals and narrow winding streets alive no doubt with traffic and bazaars and oriental II odorous with garbage and humanity connecting the temples was a spacious sacred way paved with asphalt covered bricks overlaid with flags of limestone and red breccia over this the gods might pass without muddying their feet this broad avenue was flanked with walls of colored tile on which stood out in low relief 120 brightly enameled Lions snarling to keep the impious away at one end of the sacred way Rose the magnificent Ishtar Gate a massive double portal of resplendent tiles adorned with enameled flowers and animals of admirable color vitality and line 600 yards north of the Tower of Babel Rose a mound called Kassar on which nebuchadrezzar built the most imposing of his palaces at its center stood his principal dwelling place the walls have finally made yellow brick the floors of white and modeled sandstone reliefs of vivid blue glaze adorned the surfaces and gigantic basalt Lions guarded the entrance nearby supported on a succession of superimposed circular colonnades were the famous Hanging Gardens which the Greeks included among the seven wonders of the world the gallant nebuchadrezzar had built them for one of his wives the daughter of syak series king of the Metis this princess unaccustomed to the hot Sun and dust of Babylon pined for the Verger of her native Hills the topmost Terrace was covered with rich soil to the depth of many feet providing space and nourishment not merely for varied flowers and plants but for the largest and most deep-rooted trees hydraulic engines concealed in the columns and manned by shifts of slaves carried water from the Euphrates to the highest tier of the gardens here 75 feet above the ground in the cool shade of tall trees and surrounded by exotic shrubs and fragrant flowers the ladies of the Royal harem walked unveiled secure from the command I while on the planes and streets below the common man and woman ploughed wove built carry burdens and reproduced their kind to the toilers hunting tillage food industry transport the perils of commerce moneylenders slaves part of the country was still wild and dangerous snakes wandered in the thick grass and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the Lions that fouled in the woods posed placidly for artists but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men civilisation is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle most of the soil was tilled by tenants or by slaves some of it by peasant proprietors in the earlier centuries the ground was broken up with stone hoes as in Neolithic tillage a steel dating some 1400 BC is our earliest representation of the plow in Babylonia probably this ancient and honorable tool had already a long history behind it in the land between the rivers and yet it was modern enough although it was drawn by oxen in the manner of our fathers it had attached to the flowers in Sumeria a tube through which the seed was sown in the manner of our children the waters of the rising rivers were not allowed to flood the land is in Egypt on the contrary every farm was protected from the inundation by ridges of earth some of which can still be seen today the overflow was guided into a complex network of canals or stored into reservoirs from which it was loosed into the fields as needed or raised over the ridges by Hadoop's buckets lifted and lowered on a pivot in and revolving pole nebuchadrezzar distinguished his reign by building many canals and gathering the surplus waters of the overflow into a reservoir 140 miles in circumference which nourished by its outlets vast areas of land ruins of these canals can be seen in Mesopotamia today and as it further to bind the quick and the dead the primitive shadow is still used in the valleys of the Euphrates in the Loire so watered the land produced a variety of cereals and pulses great orchards of fruits and nuts and above all the date from this beneficent concoction of Sun and soil the Babylonians made bread honey cake and other delicacies they mixed it with meal to make one of their most sustaining foods and to encourage its reproduction they shook the flowers of the male palm over those of the female from Mesopotamia the grape and the olive were introduced into Greece and Rome and thence into Western Europe from nearby Persia came the peach and from the shores of the Black Sea lucullus brought the cherry tree to Rome milk so rare in the distant Orient now became one of the staple foods of the Near East meat was rare and costly but fish from the great streams found their way into the forest mouths and in the evening when the peasant might have been disturbed by thoughts on life and death he quieted memory and anticipation with wine pressed from the date or beer brewed from the corn meanwhile others pried into the earth struck oil and mind copper led iron silver and gold Strabo tells how what he calls naphtha or liquid asphalt was taken from the soil of Mesopotamia then as now and how Alexander hearing that this was a kind of water that burned tested the report incredulously by covering a boy with the strange fluid and igniting it with a torch tools which had still been of stone in the days of Hammurabi began at the turn of the last millennium before Christ to be made of bronze than of iron and the art of casting metal appeared textiles were woven of cotton and wool stops were dyed and embroidered with such skill that these tissues became one of the most valued exports of Babylonia praised to the skies by the writers of Greece and Rome as far back as we can go in Mesopotamian history we find the Weaver's loom and the potter's wheel these were almost the only machines buildings were mostly of adobe clay mixed with straw or bricks still soft and moist were placed one upon the other and allowed to dry into a solid wall cemented by the Sun it was observed that the bricks in the fireplace became harder and more durable than those that the Sun had baked the process of hardening them in kilns was then a natural development and thence forth there was no end in the making of bricks in Babylon trades multiplied and became diversified and skilled and as early as Hammurabi industry was organized into guilds called tribes of masters and apprentices local transport used wheeled carts drawn by patient asses the horses first mentioned in Babylonian records about 2100 BCE as the ass from the east apparently it came from the table lands of Central Asia conquered Babylonia with the Kassite sand reached Egypt with the Hyksos with this new means of locomotion and carriage trade expanded from local to foreign commerce Babylon grew wealthy as the commercial hub of the Near East and the nations of the ancient Mediterranean world were drawn into closer contact for good and ill nebuchadrezzar facilitated trade by improving the highways I have turned in accessible tracts he reminds the historian in to serviceable roads countless caravans brought to the bazaars and shops of Babylon the products of half the world from India they came via Kabul Herat and ik Bettina from Egypt via Pelusium and Palestine from Asia Minor through tyre sidon and Sardis to caca mesh and then down the Euphrates as a result of all this trade Babylon became under nebuchadrezzar a thriving and noisy marketplace from which the wealthy sought refuge in residential suburbs note the contemporary ring of a rich suburbanite letter to King Cyrus of Persia circa 539 BC our estate seemed to me the finest in the world for it was so near to Babylon that we enjoyed all the advantages of a great city and yet could come back home and be rid of all its rush and worry government in Mesopotamia never succeeded in establishing such economic order as that which the Pharaohs achieved in Egypt Commerce was harassed with a multiplicity of dangers and tolls the merchants did not know which to fear the more the robbers that might beset him on the way or the towns and Baron ease that exacted heavy fees from him for the privilege of using their roads it was safer where possible to take the great National Highway the Euphrates which nebuchadrezzar had made navigable from the Persian Gulf to tap saccas his campaigns in Arabia and his subjugation of Tyre opened up to Babylonian commerce the Indian and Mediterranean Seas but these are opportunities were only partially explored for on the open sea as in the mountain passes and a desert wastes perils beset the merchant at every hour were large but reefs were many and treacherous navigation was not yet a science and at any moment pirates or the ambitious dwellers on the shore might board the ships appropriate the merchandise and enslave or kill the crew the merchants reimbursed themselves for such losses by restricting their honesty to the necessities of each situation these difficult transactions were made easier by a well-developed system of finance the Babylonians had no coinage but even before Hammurabi they used besides barley and corn ingots of gold and silver as standards of value and mediums of exchange the metal was unstamped and was weighed at each transaction the smallest unit of currency was the shekel 1/2 ounce of silver worth from $2.50 to $5 of our contemporary currency 60 such shekels made a minor and 60 miners made a talent from 10,000 to $20,000 loans were made in goods or currency but at a high rate of interest fixed by the state at 20% per annum for loans of money and 33% for loans in kind even these rates were exceeded by lenders who could hire clever scribes to circumvent the law there were no banks but certain powerful families carried on from generation to generation the business of lending money they dealt also in real estate and financed industrial enterprises and persons who had funds on deposit with such men could pay their obligations by written drafts the priests also made loans particularly to finance the sowing and reaping of the crops the law occasionally took the side of the debtor for example if a peasant mortgaged his farm and through storm or drought or other act of God had no harvest from his toil the no interest could be exacted from him in that year but for the most part the law was written with an eye to protecting property and preventing losses it was a principle of Babylonian law that no man had a right to borrow money unless he wished to be held completely responsible for its repayment hence the creditor could seize the debtors slave or son as hostage for an unpaid debt and could hold him for not more than three years a plague of usury was the price that Babylonian industry like our own paid for the fertilizing activity of a complex credit system it was essentially a commercial civilization most of the documents that have come down from a tower of a business character sales loans contracts partnerships commissions exchanges requests agreements promissory notes and the like we find in these tablets abundant evidence of wealth and a certain materialistic spirit that managed like some later civilizations to reconcile piety with greed we see in the literature many signs of a busy and prosperous life but we find also at every turn reminders of the slavery that underlies all cultures the most interesting contracts have sailed from the age of Nebuchadnezzar are those that have to do with slaves they were recruited from captives taken in battle from slave raids carried out upon foreign States by marauding Bedouins and from the reproductive enthusiasm of the slaves themselves their value ranged from twenty to sixty five dollars for a woman and from fifty to a hundred dollars for a man most of the physical work in the towns was done by them including nearly all of the personal service female slaves were completely at the mercy of their purchaser and were expected to provide him with bed as well as board it was understood that he would breed through them a copious supply of children and those slaves who were not so treated felt themselves neglected and dishonored the slave and all his belongings were his master's property he might be sold or pledged for death he might be put to death of his master thought him less lucrative alive than dead if he ran away no one could legally Harbor him and a reward was fixed for his capture like the free peasant he was subject to conscription for both the Army and the corvée that is for forced labor in such public works as cutting roads and digging canals on the other hand the slaves master paid his doctors fees and kept him moderately alive through illness slack employment and old age he might marry a free woman and his children by her would be free half his property in such a case went on his death to his family he might be set up in business by his master and retained part of the profits with which he might then buy his freedom or his master might liberate him for exceptional or long and faithful service but only a few slaves achieved such freedom the rest consoled themselves with a high birthrate until they became more numerous than the free a great slave class moved like a swelling subterranean river underneath the babylonian state three the law the code of hammurabi the powers of the king trial by ordeal Lex talionis forms of punishment codes of wages and prices state restoration of stolen goods such a society of course never dreamed of democracy its economic character necessitated a monarchy supported by commercial wealth or feudal privilege and protected by the judicious distribution of legal violence a landed aristocracy gradually displaced by a commercial plutocracy helped to maintain social control and served as intermediary between people and King the latter passed his throne down to any son of his choosing with the result that every son considered himself heir apparent formed a clique of supporters and as like as not raised a war of succession if his hopes were unfulfilled within the limits of this arbitrary rule the government was carried on by central and local Lords or administrators appointed by the king these were advised and checked by provincial or municipal assemblies of elders or notables who managed to maintain even under Assyrian domination a proud measure of local self-government every administrator and usually the king himself acknowledged the guidance and authority of that great body of law which had been given form under Hammurabi and had maintained its substance despite every change of circumstance in detail through fifteen centuries the legal development was from supernatural to secular sanctions from severity to lenience and from physical to financial penalties in the earlier days an appeal to the gods was taken through trial by ordeal a man accused of sorcery or a woman charged with adultery was invited to leap into the fray teas and the gods were on the side of the best swimmers if the woman emerged alive she was innocent if the sorcerer was drowned his accuser received his property if he was not he received the property of his accuser the first judges were priests and to the end of babylonian history the courts were for the most part located in the temples but already in the days of Hammurabi secular courts responsible only to the government were replacing the judgment seats presided over by the clergy phenology began with the Lex talionis or law of equivalent retaliation if a man knocked out an eye or a tooth or broke a limb of a patrician precisely the same was to be done to him if a house collapsed and killed the purchaser the architect or builder must die if the accident killed the buyers son the son of the architect or builder must die if a man struck a girl and killed her not he but his daughter must suffer the penalty of death gradually these punishments in kind were replaced by Awards of damages a famous of money was permitted as an alternative to the physical retaliation and later the fine became the sole punishment so the eye of the commoner might be knocked out for 60 shekels of silver and the eye of a slave might be knocked out for 30 for the penalty buried not merely with the gravity of the offence but with the rank of the offender and the victim a member of the aristocracy was subject to severe penalties for the same crime than a man of the people but an offence against such an aristocrat was a costly extravagance a plebeian striking of plebeian was fined at 10 shekels or $50 to strike a person of title or property cost six times more from such dissuasion s' the law passed to barbarous punishments by amputation or death a man who struck his father had his hands cut off a physician whose patient died or lost an eye is the result of an operation and his fingers cut off a nurse who knowingly substituted one child for another had to sacrifice her breasts death was decreed for a variety of crimes rape kidnapping brigandage burglary incest procurement of a husband's death by his wife in order to marry another man the opening or entering of a wine shop by a priestess the harboring of a fugitive slave cowardice in the face of the enemy malfeasance in office careless or on economic allow Swiper e or malpractice in the selling of beer in such rough ways through thousands of years these traditions and habits of order and self-restraint were established which became part of the unconscious basis of civilization within certain limits the state regulated prices wages and fees what the surge in my charge was established by law and wages were fixed by the code of hammurabi for builders Frick makers tailors stonemasons carpenters boatman herdsmen and laborers the law of inheritance made the man's children rather than his wife is natural and direct heir the widow received her dowry and her wedding gift and remained head of the household as long as she lived there was no right of primogeniture the sons inherited equally and in this way the largest estates were soon Rida vided and the concentration of wealth was in some measure checked private property in land and goods was taken for granted by the code we find no evidence of lawyers in Babylonia except for priests who might serve as notaries and describe who would write for pay anything from a will to a magical the plaintiff preferred his own plea without the luxury of terminology litigation was discouraged the very first law of the code reads with almost illegal simplicity if a man bring an accusation against a man and charge him with a capital crime but cannot prove it the accuser shall be put to death there are signs of bribery and of tampering with witnesses a Court of Appeals staffed by the king's judges sat at babylon and the final appeal might be carried to the king himself there was nothing in the code about the rights of the individual against the state that was to be a European innovation but articles 22 to 24 provided if not political at least economic protection if a man practises brigandage and be captured that man shall be put to death if the brigand be not captured the man who has been robbed shall in the presence of the God make an itemized statement of his laws and the city and governor within whose province and jurisdiction the robbery was committed shall compensate him for whatever was lost if it be a life that was lost the City and governor shall pay one miner $300 to the heirs what modern city is so well governed that it would dare to offer such reimbursements to the victims of its negligence as the law progressed since a murabbi or only increased and multiplied for the gods of Babylon religion and the state the functions and powers of the clergy the lesser gods Marduk Ishtar the Babylonian stories of the creation and the flood the love of Ishtar and Tammuz the descent of Ishtar into hell the death and resurrection of Tammuz ritual and prayer penitential Psalms sin magic superstition the power of the King was limited not only by the law and the aristocracy but by the clear technically the king was merely the agent of the city God taxation was in the name of the God and found its way directly or deviously into the temple Treasuries the king was not really king in the eyes of the people until he was invested with royal authority by the priests took the hands of Bell and conducted the image of mardukan solemn procession through the streets in these ceremonies the monarch was dressed as a priest symbolizing the union of church and state and perhaps the priestly origin of the kingship all the glamour of the supernatural hedged about the throne and made rebellion a colossal impiety which risked not only the neck that the soul even the mighty Hammurabi received his laws from the god from the potata store priests governors of Sumeria to the religious coronation of nebuchadrezzar Babylonia remained in effect a theocratic state always under the thumb of the priests the wealth of the temples grew from generation to generation as the uneasy rich shared their dividends with the gods the Kings feeling in a special need of divine forgiveness built the temples equipped them with furniture food and slaves deeded to them great areas of land and assigned to them an annual income from the state when the army won a battle the first share of the captives and the spoils went to the temples when any special good fortune befell the king extraordinary gifts were dedicated to the gods certain lands were required to pay to the temples a yearly tribute of dates corn or fruit if they failed the temples could foreclose on them and in this way the lands usually came into possession by the priests for as well as rich turned over to the temples as much as they thought profitable of their earthly gains gold silver copper lapis lazuli gems and precious woods accumulated in the sacred Treasury as the priests could not directly use or consume this wealth they turned it into productive or investment capital and became the greatest agriculturists manufacturers and Finance ears of the nation not only did they hold vast tracts of land they owned a great number of slaves or controlled hundreds of laborers who were hired out to other employers or worked for the temples in their diverse trades from the playing of music to the brewing of beer the priests were also the greatest merchants and Finance ears of Babylonia they sold the berry products of the temple shops and handled a large proportion of the country's trade they had a reputation for wise investment and many persons entrusted their savings to them confidence of a modest but reliable return they made loans on more lenient terms than the private money lenders sometimes they lent to the sick of the poor without interest merely asking a return of the principal when Marduk's should smile upon the borrower again finally they performed many legal functions they served as notaries a testing and signing contracts and making wills they heard and decided suits and trials kept official records and recorded commercial transactions occasionally the King commandeered some of the temple accumulations to meet an expensive emergency but this was rare and dangerous for the priests had laid terrible curses upon all who should touch unpermitted the smallest jot of ecclesiastical property besides their influence with the people was ultimately greater than that of the king and they might in most cases depose him if they set their combined wits and powers to this end they had also the advantage of permanence the King died but the God lived on the counsel of priests free from the fortunes of elections illnesses assassinations and Wars had a corporate perpetuity that made possible long-term and patient policies such as characterized great religious organizations to this day the supremacy of the priests under these conditions was inevitable it was fated that the merchants should make Babylon and that the priests should enjoy it who were the gods that form the invisible Constabulary of the state they were numerous for the imagination of the people was limitless and there was hardly any end to the needs that deities might serve an official census of the gods undertaken in the ninth century before Christ counted them as some 65,000 every town had its tutelary divinity and as in our own time and face localities and villages after making formal acknowledgement of the Supreme Being worship specific minor gods with a special devotion so larsa lavished its temples on shamash guru khan Ishtar wore on none are for the Sumerian pantheon had survived the Sumerian state the gods were not aloof from men most of them lived on earth in the temples ate with a hearty appetite and through nocturnal visits to pious women gave unexpected children to the busy citizens of Babylon oldest of all were the astronomic gods anew the immovable firmament shamash the Sun non are the moon and bail or bail the earth into whose bosom all Babylonians returned after death every family had household gods doomed prayers were said and libations poured each morning and night every individual had a protective divinity or as we should say a guardian angel to keep him from harm and joy and genie eye of fertility hovered beneficent Li over the fields it was probably out of this multitude of spirits that the Jews molded their cherubim we do not find among the Babylonians such signs of monotheism as appear in ignite on and the second Isaiah 2 forces however brought them near to it the enlargement of the state by conquest and growth brought local deities under the supremacy of a single God and several of the cities patriotically conferred omnipotence upon their favorite divinities trust in neighbors his neighbor trust in no other God this is not unlike the first of the commandments given to the Jews gradually the number of the gods was lessened by interpreting the minor ones as forms or attributes of the major deities in these ways the god of Babylon Marduk originally a Sun God became sovereign of all Babylonian divinities hence his title Belmar Duke that his Marduk be God to him and to Ishtar the Babylonians sent up the most eloquent of their prayers Ishtar Astarte to the Greeks ashteroth to the Jews interests us not only as analogue of the Egyptian Isis and prototype of the Grecian Aphrodite in the Roman Venus but as the formal beneficiary of one of the strangers to Babylonian customs she was Demeter as well as Aphrodite no mere goddess of physical beauty and love but the gracious divinity of bounteous motherhood the secret inspiration of the growing soil and the creative principle everywhere it is impossible to find much harmony from a modern point of view and the attributes and functions of Ishtar she was the goddess of war as well as of love of prostitutes as well as of mothers she called herself a compassionate courtesan she was represented sometimes as a bearded bisexual deity sometimes as a nude female offering her breasts to suck and though her worshipers repeatedly addressed her as the virgin the holy virgin and the Virgin Mother this merely meant that her amours were free from all taint of wedlock Gilgamesh rejected her advances on the ground that she could not be trusted and she not once loved seduced and then slain a lion it is clear that we must put our own moral code to one side if we are to understand her note with what fervor the Babylonians could lift up to her throne litanies of law Dacian only less splendid than those which attend their piety once raised to the mother of god i beseech the lady of ladies goddess of goddesses Ishtar queen of all cities leader of all men thou art the light of the world thou art the light of heaven mighty daughter of sin the moon God supreme as thy might o lady exalted art thou above all gods thou renewest judgment and die decision is righteous unto thee our subject the laws of the earth and the laws of heaven the laws of the temples and the shrines the laws of the private apartment in the secret chamber where is the place where thy name is not and where is the spot where thy Commandments are not known that thy name the earth and the heavens shake and the gods they tremble thou lookest upon the oppressed and to the downtrodden now bring us justice every day how long queen of heaven and earth how long how long shepherdess of pale faced men will tout tarry how long o queen whose feet are not weary and whose knees make haste how long lady of hosts lady of battles glorious one whom all the spirits of heaven fear who subdue stall angry God's mighty above all rulers who hold us the reigns of Kings opener of the womb of all women great is thy light shining light of heaven light of the world and Lightner of all the places where men dwell who gather us together the hosts of the nations goddess of men divinity of women by counsel passeth understanding where thou glances the dead come to life and the sick rise and walk the mind of the diseased is healed when it looks upon thy face how long a lady shall mine enemy triumph over me command and at that command the angry God will turn back Ishtar is great Ishtar is Queen my lady is exalted my lady is Queen in any the mighty daughter of sin there is none like unto her with these gods as dramatis personae the Babylonians constructed myths which have in large measure come down to us through the Jews as part of our own religious lore there was first of all the myth of the creation in the beginning was chaos in the time when nothing which was called heaven existed above and when nothing below had yet received the name of Earth OPSEU the ocean who first was their father and Tiamat chaos who gave birth to them all mingled their waters in one things slowly began to grow and take form but suddenly the monster goddess Tiamat set out to destroy all the other gods and to make herself chaos supreme a mighty revolution ensued in which all order was destroyed then another god Marduk's luteum out with her own medicine by casting a hurricane of wind into her mouth as she opened it to swallow him then he thrust his Lance into Tiamat swin swollen paunch and the goddess of chaos blew up Marduk recovering his calm since the legend split the dead Tiamat into two longitude no halves as one does a fish for drying then he hung up one of the halves on high which became the heavens the other half he spread out under his feet to form the earth this is as much as we yet know about creation perhaps the ancient poet meant to suggest that the only creation of which we can know anything is the replacement of chaos with order for in the end this is the essence of art and civilization we should remember however that the defeat of chaos is only a myth the Babylonian story of creation consists of seven tablets one for each day of creation found in the ruins of a Shabana falls library at kouyunjik Nineveh in 1854 they are a copy of a legend that came down to Babylonia and Assyria from Sumeria having moved heaven and earth into place Marduk undertook to need earth with his blood and thereby may men for the service of the gods mesopotamian legends differed on the precise way in which this was done they agreed in general that man was fashioned by the deity from a lump of clay usually they represented him as living at first not in a paradise but in bestial simplicity and ignorance until a strange monster called Hannes half fish and half philosopher taught him the Arts and Sciences the rules for founding cities and the principles of law after which show on has plunged into the sea and wrote a book on the history of civilization presently however the gods became dissatisfied with the men who may had created and sent a great flood to destroy them and all their works the god of wisdom eeeyah took pity on mankind and resolved to save one man at least shamash niscitam and his wife the flood raged men encumbered the sea like fishes spawn then suddenly the gods wept and gnashed their teeth at their own folly asking themselves who will make the accustomed offerings now but shamash now fished him had built an ark had survived the flood had perched on the Mount of Nasir and had sent out the wreck annoyed ring dove now he decided to sacrifice to the gods who accepted his gifts with surprise and gratitude the gods snuffed off the odor the gods snuffed up the excellent odor the gods gathered like flies above the offering lovelier than this vague memory of some catastrophic inundation is the vegetation death of Ishtar and Tammuz in the Sumerian form of the tale Tom loses Ishtar's young brother in the babylonian form he has sometimes her lover sometimes her son both forms seemed to have entered into the myths of Venus and Adonis Demeter and Persephone and a hundred scattered legends of death and resurrection Tammuz son of the great God eeeyah is a shepherd pastoring his flock under the great tree areeda which covers the whole earth with its shade when Ishtar always insatiable falls in love with him and chooses him to be the spouse of her youth but Tammuz like Adonis is gored to death by a wild boar and descends like all the dead in that dark subterranean Hades which the Babylonians called arulu and over which they set his ruler Ishtar's jealous sister Ereshkigal Ishtar morning inconsolably resolves to go down to era Lu and restore Tammuz to life by bathing his wounds in the waters of a healing spring soon she appears at the gates of Hades in all her imperious beauty and demands entrance the tablets tell the story vigorously when a rush Kegel heard this as when one hues down a tamarisk she trembled as when one cuts a reed she shook what has moved her heart what has stirred her liver ho there does this one wish to dwell with me to eat clay as food to drink dust as wine I weep for the men who have left their wives I weep for the wives torn from the embrace of their husbands for the little ones cut off before their time go gate keeper open I gave for her deal with her according to the ancient decree the ancient decree is that none birth in the nude shall enter arulu therefore at each of the successive gates through which Ishtar must pass the keeper divest Sur of some garment or ornament first her crown then her earrings than her necklace then the ornaments from her bosom then her many jeweled girdle then the spangles from her hands and feet and lastly her loincloth and Ishtar for testing gracefully yields now when Ishtar had gone down into the land of no return Ereshkigal saw her and was angered at her presence Ishtar without reflection threw herself at her Ereshkigal opened her mouth and spoke to namtar a messenger go nom thar imprison her in my palace send against her sixty diseases eye disease against her eyes disease of the side against her side foot disease against her foot heart disease against her heart head disease against her head against her whole being while Ishtar is detained in Hades by these sisterly attentions the earth missing the inspiration of her presence forgets incredibly all the arts and ways of love plant no longer fertilizes plant vegetation languages animals experience no heat men cease to yearn after the lady Ishtar had gone down into the land of no return the bull did not mount the cow the ass approached not the she ass to the maid in the street no man drew near the man slept in his apartment the maid slept by herself population begins to diminish and the gods note with alarm a sharp decline in the number of offerings from the earth in panic they command Ereshkigal to release his star it is done but Ishtar refuses to return to the surface of the earth unless she is allowed to take Tom who's with her she wins her point passes triumphantly through the seven gates receives her loin cloth for spangles her girdle her pectorals her necklace her earrings and her crown as she appears plants grow and bloom again the land swells with food and every animal resumes the business of reproducing his kind love stronger than death is restored to its rightful place as master of gods and men to the modern scholar it is only an admirable Legend symbolizing delightfully the yearly death and rebirth of the soil and that omnipotence of Venus which Lucretius was to celebrate in his own strong birth to the Babylonians it was sacred history faithfully believed and annually commemorated in a day of mourning and wailing for the dead Tammuz followed by riotous rejoicing over his resurrection nevertheless the Babylonian derived no satisfaction from the idea of personal immortality his religion was terrestrially practical when he prayed he asked not for celestial rewards but for earthly goods he could not trust his gods beyond the grave it is true that one text speaks of mardukas he who gives back life to the dead and the story of the flood represents its two survivors as living forever but for the most part the Babylonian conception of another life was like that of the Greeks dead men saints and villains geniuses and idiots alike went to a dark and shadowy realm within the bowels of the earth and none of them saw the light again there was a heaven but only for the gods the Arado to which all men descended was a place frequently a punishment never of joy there the dead lay bound hand and foot forever shivering with cold and subject to hunger and thirst unless their children placed food periodically in their graves those who had been especially wicked on earth was subjected to horrible tortures leprosy consumed them or some other of the diseases which Nergal and a lot male and female Lords of our Alalu had arranged for their rectification most bodies were buried in vaults a few were cremated and their remains were preserved in urns the dead body was not embalmed but professional mourners washed and perfumed it clad it presented leave painted its cheeks darkened its eyelids put rings upon its fingers and provided it with the change of linen if the corpse was that of a woman it was equipped with scent bottles combs cosmetic pencils and I think to preserve its fragrance and complexion in the netherworld if not properly buried the dead would torment the living if not buried at all the soul would prowl about sewers and gutters for food and might afflict an entire city with pestilence it was a medley of ideas not as consistent as Euclid but suffice into fraud the simple Babylonian to keep his gods and priests well-fed the usual offering was food and drink for these had the advantage that if they were not entirely consumed by the gods the surplus need not go to waste a frequent sacrifice on Babylonian altars was the lamb and an old babylonian incantation strangely anticipates the symbolism of judaism and christianity the lamb as a substitute for a man the lamb he gives for his life sacrifice was a complex ritual requiring the expert services of a priest every act and word of the ceremony was settled by sacred tradition and any amateur deviation from these forms might mean that the gods would eat without listening in general to the Babylonian religion meant correct ritual rather than the good life to do one's duty to the gods one had to offer a proper sacrifice to the temples and recite the appropriate prayers for the rest he might cut out the eyes of his fallen enemy cut off the hands and feet of captives and roast their remainders alive in a furnace without much offense to heaven to participate in or reverently to attend long and solemn processions like those in which the priests carried from sanctuary to sanctuary the image of Marduk and performed the drama of his death and resurrection to anoint the idols with sweet scented oils to burn incense before them clothe them with rich vestments or adorn them with jewelry to offer up the virginity of their daughters in the great festival of Ishtar to put food and drink before the gods and to be generous to the priests these were the essential works of the devout Babylonian soul perhaps we misjudge him as doubtless the future will misjudge us from the fragments that accident will rescue from our decay some of the finest literary relics of the Babylonians are prayers that breathe a profound and sincere piety here the proud nebuchadrezzar humbly addressing Marduk without the Lord what could there be for the King thou lovest and dust call his name thou shalt bless his title as thou wilt and unto him vouch safer paths direct I the Prince obeying thee and what thy hands have made tis thou who art my Creator and trusting me with the rule of hosts of men according to thy mercy Lord turned into loving-kindness thy dread power and make to spring up in my heart of reverence for thy divinity give as thou thinkest best the surviving literature abounds in hymns full of that passionate self abasement with which the semi tries to control and conceal his pride many of them take the character of penitential Psalms and prepare us for the Magnificent feeling and imagery of David who knows but they served as models for that many headed muse I thy servant full of Sighs cry unto thee thou accept us the fervent prayer of him who was burdened with sin thou lookest upon a man and that man lives look with two favour upon me and accept my supplication and then as if uncertain of the sex of the God how long my god how long my goddess until thy face be turned to me how long known and unknown God until the anger of thy heart shall be appeased how long known and unknown goddess until the unfriendly heart be appeased mankind is perverted and has no judgment of all men who are alive who knows anything they do not know whether they do good or evil o Lord do not cast aside thy servant he is cast to the mire take his hand the sin which I have sinned turned to mercy the iniquity which I've committed let the wind carry away my many transgressions tear off like a garment my God my sins are seven times seven forgive my sins My Goddess my sins are seven times seven forgive my sins forgive my sins and I will humble myself before thee may thy heart is the heart of a mother who hath borne children be glad as a mother with foreign children as a father who has begotten may it be glad such Psalms and hymns were sung sometimes by the priests sometimes by the congregation sometimes by both in strophe and antistrophe perhaps the strangest circumstances that like all the religious literature of Babylon they were written in the ancient Sumerian language which served the Babylonian and Assyrian churches precisely as Latin serves the Roman Catholic Church today and just as a Catholic hymnal made juxtaposed the Latin text to a vernacular translation so some of the hymns that have come down to us from Mesopotamia have a Babylonian or Assyrian translation written between the lines of the classic Sumerian original in the fashion of a contemporary schoolboys interlinear and as the form of these hymns and rituals led to the psalms of the Jews and the Liturgy of the Roman Church so their content priests aged the pessimistic and sin struck plaints of the Jews the early Christians and the modern Puritans the sense of sin though it did not interfere victoriously in Babylonian life build the Babylonian chants and rang a note that survives in all Semitic liturgies and their anti-semitic derivatives Lord cries one hymn my sins are many great are my misdeeds I sink under affliction I can no longer raise my head I turned to my merciful God to call upon him and I groan Lord reject not thy servant these groanings were rendered more sincere by the Babylonian conception of sin sin was no mere theoretical state of the soul like sickness it was the possession of the body by a demon that might destroy it prayer was in the nature of an incantation against a demon that had come down upon the individual out of the ocean of magic forces in which the ancient Orient lived and moved everywhere and the Babylonian view these hostile demons lurked they hid in strange crannies slipped through doors or even through bolts and sockets and pounced upon their victims in the form of illness or madness whenever some sinned and withdrawn for a moment the beneficent guardianship of the gods giants dwarfs cripples above all women had sometimes the power even with a glance of the evil eye to infuse such a destructive spirit into the bodies of those toward whom they were ill disposed partial protection against these demons was provided by the use of magic amulets talismans and kindred charms images of the gods carried on the body would usually suffice to frighten the devil's away little stones strung on a thread or a chain and hung about the neck were especially effective but care had to be taken that the stones were such as tradition associated with good luck and the thread had to be a black white or red according to the purpose in view thread spun from virgin kids was particularly powerful but in addition to such means it was wise also to exorcise the demon by fervent incantation and magic ritual for example by sprinkling the body with water taken from the sacred streams the Tigris or the Euphrates or an image of the demon could be made placed on a boat and sent over the water with a proper formula if the boat could be made to capsize so much the better the demon might be persuaded by the appropriate incantation to leave its human victim and enter an animal a bird a pig most frequently a lamb magic formulas for the elimination of demons the avoidance of evil and the provision of the future constitute the largest category and the Babylonian writings found in the library of Ashurbanipal some of the tablets are manuals of astrology others are lists of omens celestial and terrestrial with expert advice for reading them others are treatises on the interpretation of dreams rivaling in their ingenious in credibility the most advanced products of modern psychology still others offer instruction in divining the future by examining the entrails of animals or by observing the form and position of a drop of oil that fall into a jar of water Pepa Tosca P observation of the liver of animals was a favorite method of divination among the Babylonian priests and passed from them into the classical world for the liver was believed to be the seat of mind in both animals and men no king would undertake a campaign or advance to a battle no Babylonian would risk a crucial decision or begin an enterprise of great moment without employing a priest or a soothsayer to read the omens for him in one or another of these recondite ways never was a civilization richer in superstitions every turn of chance from the anomalies of birth to the varieties of death received a popular sometimes an official and sesor total interpretation in magical or supernatural terms every movement of the rivers every aspect of the Stars every dream every unusual performance of man or beast revealed the future to the properly instructed Babylonian the fate of a king could be forecast by observing the movements of a dog just as we foretell the length of the winter by spying upon a groundhog the superstitions of Babylonia seem ridiculous to us because they differ superficially from our own there is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present underneath all civilization ancient or modern moved and still moves a sea of magic superstition and sorcery perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away five the morals of Babylon religion divorced from morals sacred prostitution free love marriage adultery divorce the position of woman the relaxation of morals this religion with all its failings probably helped to prod the common Babylonian into some measure of decency and civic facility else we should be hard but to explain the generosity of the Kings to the priests apparently however it had no influence upon the morals of the upper classes in the later centuries for in the eyes and words of her prejudiced enemies the of Babylon was a sink of iniquity and the scandalous example of luxurious laxity to all the ancient world even Alexander who was not above dying of drinking was shocked by the morals of Babylon the most striking feature of Babylonian life to an alien observer was the custom known to us chiefly from a famous page in Herodotus every native woman is obliged once in her life to sit in the Temple of Venus and have intercourse with some strange and many disdaining to mix with the rest being proud on account of their wealth come and covered carriages and take up their station at the temple with the numerous train of servants attending them but the far greater part do thus many sit down in the Temple of Venus wearing a crown of cord round their heads some are continually coming in and others are going out passages marked out in a straight line lead in every direction through the women along which strangers pass and make their choice when a woman has once seated herself she must not return home till some stranger has thrown a piece of silver into her lap and lain with her outside the temple he who throws the silver must say thus I beseech the goddess Malita to favor thee for the Assyrians called Venus militia Assyrians meant for the Greeks both Assyrians and Babylonians the litter was one of the forms of Ishtar the silver may be ever so small for she will not reject it in as much as it is not lawful for her to do so for such silver is accounted sacred the woman follows the first man that throws and refuses no one but when she has had intercourse and has absorbed herself from her obligation to the goddess she returns home and after that time however greater some you may give her you will not gain possession of her those that are endowed with beauty and symmetry of shape are soon set free but the deformed are detained a long time from inability to satisfy the law for some wait for a space of 3 or 4 years what was the origin of this strange right was it a relic of ancient sexual communism a concession by the future bridegroom of the use prima noctus or right of the first night to the community as represented by any casual and anonymous citizen was it due to the bridegroom's fear of harm from the violation of the taboo against shedding blood was it a physical preparation for marriage such as is still practiced among some Australian tribes or was it simply a sacrifice to the goddess an offering of firstfruits we do not know such women of course were not prostitutes but various classes of prostitutes lived within the temple precincts plied their trade there and amassed some of them great fortunes such temple prostitutes were common in Western Asia we find them in real Phrygia Phoenicia syria etc in lydia and cyprus the girls earned their marriage dowries in this way sacred prostitution continued in Babylonia until abolished by Constantine circa 325 AD alongside it in the wine shops kept by women's secular prostitution flourished in general the Babylonians were allowed considerable premarital experience it was considered permissible for men and women to form unlicensed unions trial marriages terminable at the will of either party but the woman in such cases was obliged to wear an olive in stone or terracotta as a sign that she was a concubine some of the tablets indicate that the Babylonians wrote poems and sang songs of love but all that remains of these is an occasional first line like my love is a light or my heart is full of merriment and song one letter dating from 2100 BC is in the tone of Napoleon's early messages to Josephine to be BIA may shamash and Marduk give the health forever I have sent to ask after thy health let me know how thou art I have arrived in Babylon and see thee not I am very sad legal marriage was arranged by the parents and was sanctioned by an exchange of gifts obviously descended from marriage by purchase the suitor presented to the father of the bride a substantial present but the father was expected to give her a dowry greater in value than the gift so that it was difficult to say who was purchased the woman or the man sometimes however the arrangement was unabashed purchase shamash nazir for example received ten shekels or fifty dollars as the price of his daughter if we are to believe the father of history those who had marriage' builders used to bring them once a year to a place where a great number of men gathered round them a public crier made them stand up and sold them all one after another he began with the most beautiful and having got a large sum for her he put up the second fairest but he only sold them on condition that the buyers married them this very wise custom no longer exists despite these strange practices Babylonian marriage seems to have been as monogamous and faithful as marriage in Christendom is too a premarital freedom was followed by the rigid enforcement of marital fidelity the adulterous wife and her paramour according to the code word round unless the husband in his mercy preferred to let his wife off by turning her almost naked into the streets Hammurabi outseason Caesar if the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man because of another man and she have not been taken in line with another man for her husband's sake she shall throw herself into the river perhaps the law was intended as a discouragement to gossip the man could divorce his wife simply by restoring her dowry to her and saying thou art not my wife but if she said to him thou art not my husband she was to be drowned childlessness adultery incompatibility or careless management of the household might satisfy the law as ground for granting the man a divorce indeed if she have not been a careful mistress have gathered about have neglected her house and have belittled her children they shall throw that woman into the water as against this incredible severity of the code we find that in practice the woman though she might not divorce her husband was free to leave him if she could show cruelty on his part and fidelity on her own in such cases she could return to her parents and take her marriage portion with her along with what other property she might have acquired the women of England did not enjoy these rights till the end of the 19th century if a woman's husband was kept from her through business or war for any length of time and had left no means for her maintenance she might cohabit with another man without legal prejudice to her reunion with her husband on the latter's return in general the position of woman in Babylonia was lower than in Egypt or Rome and yet not worse than in classic Greece or medieval Europe to carry out her many functions the getting and rearing children fetching water from the river or the public well grinding corn cooking spinning weaving cleaning she had to be free to go about in public very much like the man she could own property enjoy its income sell and buy inherit and bequeath some women kept shops and carried on commerce some even became scribes indicating the girls as well as boys might receive an education but the Semitic practice of giving almost limitless power to the oldest male of the family one against any matriarchal tendencies that may have existed in prehistoric Mesopotamia among the upper classes by a custom that led to the perda of Islam and India the women were confined to certain quarters of the house and when they went out they were chaperoned by eunuchs and pages among the lower classes they were maternity machines and if they had no dowry they were little more than slaves the worship of Ishtar suggests a certain reverence for woman and motherhood like the worship of Mary in the Middle Ages but we get no glimpse of chivalry in Herodotus's report that the Babylonians when besieged had strangled their wives to prevent the consumption of their provisions with some excuse then the egyptians look down upon the Babylonians it's not quite civilized we miss here the refinement of character and feeling indicated by Egyptian literature and art when refinement came to Babylon it was in the guise of an effeminate degeneracy young men died and curled their hair perfumed their flesh rouged their cheeks and adorned themselves with necklaces bangles earrings and pendants after the Persian conquest the death of self-respect brought an end of self-restraint the manners of the courtesan crept into every class women of good family came to considerate mere courtesy to reveal their charms indiscriminately for the greatest happiness of the greatest number and every man of the people in his poverty if we make creditor auditors prostituted his daughters for money there is nothing more extraordinary than the manners of this city wrote Quintus Kirsch's 42 ad and nowhere are things better arranged with a view to voluptuous pleasures morals cruel acts when the temples grew rich and the citizens of Babylon wedded to delight bore with equanimity the subjection of their city by the Kasich's the Assyrians the Persians and the Greeks six letters and literature Junia form its decipherment language literature the epic of gilgamesh did this life of Beanery piety and trade receive any ennobling enshrinement in literary or artistic form it is possible we cannot judge a civilization from such fragments as the ocean of time is thrown up from the wreckage of babylon these fragments are chiefly liturgical magical and commercial whether through accident or through cultural poverty Babylonia like Assyria and Persia has left us a very middling heritage of literature as compared with Egypt and Palestine its gifts were in commerce and law nevertheless scribes were as numerous in cosmopolitan Babylon as in Memphis or Thebes the art of writing was still young enough to give its master a high rank in society it was the Open Sesame to governmental and Sasser dental office its possessor never failed to mention the distinction in narrating his deeds and usually he engraved a notice of it on his cylinder seal precisely as Christian scholars and gentlemen once listed their academic degrees on their cards the Babylonians wrote in cuneiform upon tablets of damp clay with a stylus or pencil cut at the end into a triangular prism or wedge when the tablets were filled they dried and baked them into strange but durable manuscripts of brick if the thing written was a letter it was dusted with powder and then wrapped in a clay envelope stamped with the sender's cylindrical seal tablets in jars classified and arranged on shelves filled numerous libraries in the temples and palaces of Babylonia these Babylonian libraries are lost but one of the greatest of them that of Bursa was copied and preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal whose 30,000 tablets are the main source of our knowledge of Babylonian life the decipherment of Babylonian baffled students for centuries their final success is an honorable chapter in the history of scholarship in 1802 Georg grote ephant professor of Greek at the University of göttingen told the girding and Academy how for years he had puzzled over certain cuneiform inscriptions from ancient Persia now at last he had identified 8 of the 42 characters used and had made out the names of three kings in the inscriptions there for the most part the matter rested until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson a British diplomatic officer stationed in Persia quite unaware of groats offense work likewise worked out the names of his TAS peas Darius and Xerxes in an inscription couched in Old Persian a cuneiform derivative of Babylonian script and through these names he finally deciphered the entire document this however was not Babylonian Rawlinson had still defined like champignon a rosetta stone in this case some inscription bearing the same text in Old Persian and Babylonian he found it 300 feet high on an almost inaccessible rocket Bay his tomb in the mountains of media where Darius the first had caused his Carver's to engrave a record of his wars and victories in three languages Old Persian Assyrian and Babylonian day after day Rawlinson risked himself on these rocks often suspending himself by a rope copying every character carefully even making plastic impressions of all the engraved surfaces after 12 years of work he succeeded in translating both the Babylonian and the Assyrian texts in 1847 to test these and similar findings the Royal Asiatic Society sent an unpublished cuneiform document to four Assyria lodgest s' and asked them working without contact or communication with one another to make independent translations the four reports were found to be an almost complete agreement through these unheralded campaigns of scholarship the perspective of history was enriched with the new civilization the Babylonian language was a Semitic development of the old tongues of Sumeria and Akkad it was written in characters originally Sumerian but the vocabulary diverged in time like French from Latin into a language so different from Sumerian that the Babylonian sent to compose dictionaries and grammars to transmit the old classic and Saturday looting of Sumeria to young scholars and priests almost 1/4 of the tablets found in the Royal Library at Nineveh is devoted to dictionaries and grammars of the Sumerian Babylonian and Assyrian languages according to tradition such dictionaries had been made as far back as Sargon of Akkad so oldest scholarship in Babylonian as in Sumerian the characters represented not letters but syllables Babylon never achieved an alphabet of its own but remained content with a syllabic of some 300 signs the memorizing of these syllabic symbols formed with mathematics and religious instruction the curriculum of the temple schools in which the priests imparted to the young as much as it was expedient for them to know one excavation unearthed an ancient classroom in which the clay tablets of boys and girls who had copied virtuous Maxim's upon them some 2,000 years before Christ still lay on the floor as if some almost welcome disaster had suddenly interrupted the lesson the Babylonians like the Phoenicians looked upon letters as a device for facilitating business they did not spend much of their play upon literature we find animal fables in verse one generation of an endless dynasty hymns in strict metre sharply divided lines and elaborate stanzas very little surviving secular verse religious rituals force aging but never becoming drama and tons of historiography official chroniclers recorded the piety and conquests of the kings the vicissitudes of each temple and the important events in the career of each City Boro sews the most famous of Babylonian historians circa 280 BC narrated with confidence full details concerning the creation of the world and the early history of man the first king of Babylonia had been chosen by a god and had reigned 36 thousand years from the beginning of the world to the great flood said / OSes with praiseworthy exactitude and comparative moderation there had elapsed six hundred ninety one thousand two hundred years twelve broken tablets found in ashurbanipal's library and now in the British Museum formed the most fascinating relic of Mesopotamian literature the Epic of Gilgamesh like The Iliad it is an accretion of loosely connected stories some of which go back to Sumeria 3000 BC part of it is the Babylonian account of the flood Gilgamesh was a legendary ruler of Uruk or Erik a descendant of the shamash 'nope ishtam who had survived the deluge and it never died Gilgamesh enters upon the scene as a sort of Adonis Samson tall massive heroically powerful and troublesome Lee handsome two-thirds of him is God one-third of him is man there's none can match the form of his body all things he saw even to the ends of the earth he underwent all learned to know all he peered through all secrets through wisdoms mantle that veil at all what was hidden he saw what was covered he undid of times before the storm flood he brought report he went on a long far away giving himself toil and distress rope then on a stone tablet the whole of his labor fathers complained to Ishtar that he leads their sons out to exhausting toil building the walls through the day through the night and husbands complained that he leaves not a wife to her master not a single virgin to her mother Ishtar begs Gilgamesh is godmother a rule to create another son equal to Gilgamesh and able to keep him busy in conflict so that the husbands of Ulrich may have peace a rule rule needs a bit of clay spits upon it and molds from it the stator angee do a man with the strength of a boar the mane of a lion and the speed of a bird angee who does not care for the Society of men but turns and lives with the animals he browses with the gazelles he sports with the creatures of the water he quenches his thirst with the beasts of the field a hunter tries to capture him with nets and traps but fails and going to Gilgamesh the hunter begs for the loan of a priestess who may snare and either with love go my hunter says Gilgamesh take a priestess when the beasts come to the watering place let her display her beauty he will see her and his beasts that troop around him will be scattered the hunter and the priestess go forth and find angee do there he is woman loosen the buckle unveiled I delight that he may take his philippi hang not back take up his lust when he sees the he will draw near open thy robe that he rest upon thee arousing him rapture the work of woman then will he become a stranger to his wild beasts who on his own steps grew up with him his bosom will press against thee then the priestess loosened her buckle unveiled her delight for him to take his fill of her she hung not back she took up his lust she opened her robe that he rest upon her she aroused in him rapture the work of woman his bosom pressed against her angee toe forgot where he was born for six days but seven nights and he knew her remains with the sacred woman when he tires of pleasure he awakes to find his friends the animals gone whereupon he swoons with sorrow but the priestess chides him thou who art superb as a God start live among the beasts of the field come I will conducting to Luke where is Gilgamesh whose might is supreme and snared by the vanity of phrase and the conceit of his strength and ghee who follows the priestess to Ulrich saying lead me to the place where his Gilgamesh I will fight with him and manifest to him my power whereat the gods and husbands are well pleased but Gilgamesh overcomes him first with strength then with kindness they become devoted friends they march forth together to protect rule from Elim they return glorious with exploits and victory Gilgamesh put aside his war harness he put on his white garments he adorned himself with the royal insignia and bound on the diadem whereupon Ishtar the insatiate falls in love with him raises her great eyes to him and says come Gilgamesh be my husband though thy love give it to me as a gift thou shalt be my spouse and I shall be thy wife I shall place the in a chariot of lapis Gold with golden wheels and mountings of Onyx thou shalt be drawn in and by great lions and thou shalt enter our house with the odorous incense of cedar wood all the country by the sea shall embrace thy feet Kings shall bow down before thee the gifts of the mountains and the plains they will bring before thee as tribute Gilgamesh rejects her and reminds her of the hard fate she has inflicted upon her varied lovers including Tammuz a hawk a stallion a gardener and a lion thou lovest me now he tells her afterwards thou wilt strike me as thou didst ease the angry Ishtar asks of the great God I knew that he create a wild URIs to kill Gilgamesh anew refuses and rebukes her canst enough remain quiet now that Gilgamesh has enumerated to thee thy unfaithfulness and ignominy 'he's she threatens that unless he grants her request she will suspend throughout the universe all the impulses of desire and love and so destroy every living thing anew yields and creates the ferocious URIs but Gilgamesh helped by angie who overcomes the beast and when Ishtar curses the hero and he who throws a limb of the uris into her face Gilgamesh rejoices and is proud but Ishtar strikes him down in the midst of his glory by afflicting Angie do with a mortal illness warning over the corpse of his friend whom he's loved more than any woman Gilgamesh wanders over the mystery of death is there no escape from that dull fatality one man eluded it shamash niscitam he would know the secret of deathlessness yoga mesh resolves to seek shaman appeased him even if he must cross the world to find him the way leads through a mountain guarded by a pair of giants whose heads touched the sky and whose breasts reach down to Hades but they let him pass and he picks his way for twelve miles through a dark tunnel he emerges upon the shore of a great ocean and sees far over the waters the throne of Saba two virgin goddess of the Seas he calls out to her to help him across the water if it cannot be done I will lay me down on the land and die solitude takes pity upon him and allows him to cross through 40 days of Tempest to the happy Island where lives shaman episteme possessor of immortal life Gilgamesh begs of him the secret of deathlessness shamash 'no fish team answers by telling at length the story of the flood and how the gods relenting of their mad destructiveness had made him and his wife immortal because they had preserved the human species he offers Gilgamesh a plant whose fruit will confer renewed youth upon him who eats it and Gilgamesh happy starts back on his long journey home but on the way he stops to bathe and while he bathes a serpent crawls by and steals the plant the snake was worshipped by many early peoples as a symbol of immortality because of its apparent power to escape death by molting its skin desolate Gilgamesh reaches Ulrich he prays in temple after Temple that a needle may be allowed to return to life if only to speak to him for a moment ng to appears and Gilgamesh inquires of him the state of the Dead and Guiteau answers I cannot tell at thee if I were to open the earth before thee if I were to tell thee that which I have seen terror would overthrow thee thou wouldst faint away Gilgamesh symbol of that brave stupidity philosophy persists in his quest for truth terror will overthrow me I shall faint away but tell it to me and he who describes the miseries of Hades and on this gloomy note the fragmentary epic ends seven artists the lesser arts music painting sculpture bar relief architecture the story of Gilgamesh is almost the only example by which we may judge the literary art of Babylon that a keen aesthetic sense if not a profound creative spirit survived to some degree the Babylonian absorption in commercial life epicurean recreation and compensatory piety may be seen in the chance relics of the minor arts patiently glazed tiles glittering stones finely wrought bronze iron silver and gold delicate embroideries soft rugs and richly dyed robes luxurious tapestries pedestal tables beds and chairs these lent grace if not dignity or final worth to Babylonian civilization jewellery abounded in quantity but missed the subtle artistry of Egypt it went in for a display of yellow metal and thoughted artistic to make entire statues of gold there were many musical instruments flutes psalteries harps bagpipes liars drums horns Rheem pipes trumpets cymbals and tambourines orchestras played and singers sang individually and coralie in temples and palaces and at the feasts of the well-to-do painting was purely subsidiary it decorated walls and statuary but made no attempt to become an independent art we do not find among Babylonian ruins the distemper paintings that glorified the Egyptian tombs or such frescoes has adorned the palaces of Crete Babylonian sculpture remained similarly undeveloped and was apparently stiffened into an early death by conventions derived from Sumeria and enforced by the priests all the faces portrayed are one face all the kings have the same thick and muscular frame all the captives are cast in one mould very little babylonian statuary survives and that without excuse the bow reliefs are better but they too are stereotyped and crude a great gulf separates them from the mobile vigor of the reliefs that the Egyptians had carved a thousand years before they reach sublimity only when they depict animals possessed of the silent dignity of nature or enraged by the cruelty of men Babylonian architecture is safe from judgment now for hardly any of its remains rise to more than a few feet above the sands and there are no carved or painted representations among the relics to show us clearly the form and structure of palaces and temples houses were built at Ryde mud or among the rich of brick they seldom new windows and their doors open not upon the narrow street but upon an interior court shaded from the Sun tradition describes the better dwellings is rising to three or four storeys in height the temple was raised upon foundations level with the roofs of the houses whose life it was to dominate usually it was an enormous square of tilted masonry built like the houses around the court in this court most of the religious ceremonies were performed near the temple in most cases Rose a ziggurat literally a high place a tower of superimposed and diminishing cubicle stories surrounded by external stairs its uses were partly religious as a lofty shrine for the God partly astronomic as an observatory from which the priests could watch the old revealing stars the great ziggurat had priciple was called the stages of the seven spheres each story was dedicated to one of the seven planets known to Babylonia and bore a symbolic color the lowest was black as the color of Saturn the next above it was white as the color of Venus the next was purple for Jupiter the fourth blue for mercury the fifth scarlet for Mars the sixth silver for the moon the seventh gold for the Sun these spheres and stars beginning at the top designated the days of the week there was not much art in this architecture so far as week envision it now it was a mass of straight lines seeking the glory of Sighs here and there among the ruins are vaults and arches forms derived from Sumeria negligently used and unconscious of their destiny decoration interior and exterior was almost confined to enameling some of the brick surfaces with bright glazes of yellow blue white and red with occasional tiled figures of animals or plants the use of vitrified glaze not merely to beautify but to protect the masonry from Sun and rain was at least as old as na ROM sin and was to continue in Mesopotamia down to days in this way ceramics though seldom producing rememberable pottery became the most characteristic art of the ancient Near East despite such aid Babylonian architecture remained a heavy and prosaic thing condemned to mediocrity by the material it used the temples rose rapidly out of the earth which slave labor turned so readily into brick and cementing pitch they did not require centuries for their erection like the monumental structures of Egypt or medieval Europe but they decayed almost as quickly as they rose 50 years of neglect reduced them to the dust from which they had been made the very cheapness of brick corrupted Babylonian design with such materials it was easy to achieve size difficult to compass beauty brick does not lend itself to sublimity and sublimity is the soul of architecture eight Babylonian science mathematics astronomy the calendar geography medicine being merchants the Babylonians were more likely to achieve successes in science than an art commerce created mathematics and United with religion to beget astronomy in their varied functions as judges administrators agricultural and industrial magnates and soothsayers skilled in examining entrails and stars the priests of Mesopotamia unconsciously laid the foundations of those sciences which in the profane hands of the Greeks were for a time to depose religion from its leadership of the world Babylonian mathematics rested on a division of the circle into 360 degrees and of the year into 360 days on this basis had developed a sexagesimal system of calculation by 60s which became the parent of later duodecimal systems of reckoning by twelves the numeration used only three figures a sign for one repeated up to nine a sign for ten repeated up to 90 and a sign for 100 computation was made easier by tables which showed not only multiplication and division but the halves quarters thirds squares and cubes of the basic numbers geometry advanced to the measurement of complex and irregular areas the Babylonian figure for pi the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle was three a very crude approximation for a nation of astronomers astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians for which they were famous throughout the ancient world here again magic was the mother of science the Babylonians studied the Stars not so much to chart the courses of caravans and ships as to divine the future fates of men they were astrologers first and astronomers afterward every planet was a God interested and vital in the affairs of men Jupiter was Marduk mercury was Nabu Mars was negaal the Sun was Shama the moon was sin Saturn was ninive Venus was Ishtar every movement of every star determined or forecast some terrestrial event if for example the moon was low a distant nation would submit to the king if the moon was in crescent the king would overcome the enemy such efforts to wring the future out of the stars became a passion with the Babylonians priests skilled in astrology reaped rich rewards from both people and King some of them were sincere students pouring zealously over astra logic which according to their traditions had been composed in the days of Sargon of Akkad they complained of the quacks who without such study went about reading horoscopes for a fee or predicting the weather a year ahead in the fashion of our of modern almanacs astronomy developed slowly out of this astrological servation and charting of the Stars as far back as 2000 BC the Babylonians had made accurate records of the Alaia coryza and setting of the planet Venus they had fixed the position of various stars and were slowly mapping the sky the Kassite conquest interrupted this development for a thousand years then under Nebuchadnezzar astronomic progress was resumed the priests scientists plotted the orbits of Sun and Moon noted their conjunctions and eclipses calculated the courses of the planets and made the first clear distinction between a planet and a star to the Babylonians a planet was distinguished from the fixed stars by it's observable motion or wandering in modern astronomy a planet is defined as a heavenly body rhaggy revolving about the Sun they determined the dates of winter and summer solstices of vernal and autumnal equinox 'iz and following the lead of the Sumerians divided the ecliptic that is the path of the earth around the Sun into the 12 signs of the zodiac having divided the circle into 360 degrees they divided the degree into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds they measured time by a CLEP Sidra or water clock and a sundial and these seemed to have been not merely developed but invented by them they divided the year into 12 lunar months six having 30 days 629 and as this made but 354 days in all they added a 13th month occasionally to harmonize the calendar with the seasons the month was divided into four weeks according to the four phases of the Moon an attempt was made to establish a more convenient calendar by dividing the month into six weeks of five days but the phases of the Moon proved more effective than the conveniences of men the day was reckoned not from midnight to midnight but from one rising of the moon to the next it was divided into twelve hours and each of these hours was divided into thirty minutes so that the Babylonian minute had the feminine quality of being four times as long as its name might suggest the division of our month into four weeks of our clock into twelve hours instead of 24 and of our hour into sixty minutes and of our minute into 60 seconds our unsuspected Babylonian vestiges in our contemporary world from charting the skies the Babylonians turned to mapping the earth the oldest maps of which we have any knowledge were those which the priests prepared of the roads and cities of Nebuchadnezzar's Empire a clay tablet found in the ruins of gasps or 200 miles north of Babylon and dated back to 1600 BC contains in a space hardly an inch square a map of the province of Chateau Salah it represents mountains by rounded lines water by tilting lines rivers by parallel lines the names of various towns are inscribed and the direction of north and south is indicated in the margin the dependence of Babylonian signs upon religion had a more stagnant effect in medicine than in astronomy it was not so much the obscurantism of the priests that held the science back as the superstition of the people already by the time of Hammurabi the art of healing had separated itself in some measure from the domain and domination of the clergy a regular profession of physician had been established with fees and penalties fixed by law a patient who called in a doctor could know in advance just how much he would have to pay for such treatment or operation and if he belonged to the poorer classes the fee was lowered accordingly if the doctor bungled badly he had to pay damages to the patient in extreme cases as we have seen his fingers were cut off so that he might not readily experiment again but this almost secularized science found itself helpless before the demand of the people for Supernatural diagnosis and magical cures sorcerers and necromancer's were more popular than physicians and enforced by their influence with the populace irrational methods of treatment disease was possession and was due to sin therefore it had to be treated mainly by incantations magic and prayer when drugs were used they were aimed not to cleanse the patient but to terrify and exorcise the demon the favorite drug was a mixture deliberately compounded of disgusting elements apparently on the theory that the sick man had a stronger stomach than the demon that possessed him the usual ingredients were raw meat snake flesh and wood shavings mixed with wine and oil or rotten food crushed bones fat and dirt mingled with animal or human urine or excrement occasionally this dreck Apothic was replaced by an effort to appease the demon with milk honey cream and sweet-smelling herbs if all treatment failed the patient was in some cases carried into the marketplace so that his neighbors might indulge their ancient propensity for prescribing infallible cures perhaps the 800 medical tablets that survived to inform us of Babylonian medicine do it in justice reconstruction of the whole from a part is hazardous in history and the writing of history is the reconstruction of the whole from a part quite possibly these magical cures were merely subtle uses of the power of suggestion perhaps those evil concoctions were intended as a metics and the babylon may have meant nothing more irrational by his theory of illness as due to invading demons and the patient's sins than we do by interpreting it as due to invading bacteria invited by culpable negligence uncleanliness agreed we must not be too sure of the ignorance of our ancestors nine philosophers religion and philosophy the Babylonian job the Babylonian qohelet and anti-clerical a nation is born stoic and Di's epicurean at its cradle to repeat a thoughtful adage religion stands and philosophy accompanies it to the grave in the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently at every step the gods are with them and will not let them perish until they do even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath evil does not destroy faith but strengthens it if victory comes if war is forgotten in security and peace then wealth grows the life of the body gives way in the dominant classes to the life of the senses in the mind toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease science weakens faith even while thought and comfort we confer ility and fortitude at last men begin to doubt the gods they mourn the tragedy of knowledge and seek refuge in every passing delight Achilles is at the beginning at the cure us at the end after David comes job and after job Ecclesiastes since we know the thought of Babylon mostly from the later rains it is natural that we should find it shot through with the weary wisdom of tired philosophers who took their pleasures like Englishmen on one tablet Volta Ottawa complains that though he has obeyed the commands of the gods more strictly than anyone else he has been laid low with a variety of misfortunes he has lost his parents and his property and even the little that remained to him has been stolen on the highway his friends like jobs replied that his disaster must be in punishment of some secret sin perhaps that hip hrus or insolent pride of prosperity which particularly arouses the jealous anger of the gods they show him that evil is merely good in disguise some part of the divine plan seemed to narrowly by frail minds unconscious of the whole let Balta Ottawa keep faith and courage and he will be rewarded in the end better still his enemies will be punished but the Ottawa calls out to the gods for help and the fragment suddenly ends another poem found among the ruins of a Shabana falls collection of Babylonian literature presents the same problem or definitely in the person of Tobey O'Toole Enlil who appears to have been a ruler in the poor he describes his difficulties my eyeballs he obscured bolting them is with a lock my ears he bolted like those of a deaf person a king I have been changed into a slave as a madman my companions maltreat me sent me help from the pit dug for me by day deep sighs at night weeping the month cries the year distress he goes on to tell what a pious fellow he has always been the very last man in the world who should have met with so cruel a faith as though I had not always set aside the portion for the God and had not invoked the goddess at the meal have not bowed my face and brought my tribute as though I were one in whose mouth supplication and prayer were not constant I taught my country to guard the name of the God to honor the name of the goddess I accustomed my people I thought that such things were pleasing to a god stricken with disease despite all this formal piety he muses on the impossibility of understanding the gods and on the uncertainty of human affairs who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven the plan of a god full of mystery who can understand it he who was alive yesterday is dead today in an instant he is cast into grief of a sudden he is crushed for a moment he sings and plays in a twinkling he wails like a mourner like a net trouble has covered me my eyes look but see not my ears are open but they hear not pollution has fallen upon my genitals and it has assailed the glands in my bowels with death grows dark my whole body all day the pursuer pursues me during the night he gives me no breath for a moment my limbs are dismembered they march out of Yunus in my dung I passed the night like an ox like a sheep I mix in my excrements like Joe he makes another act of faith but I know the day of the cessation of my tears and the day of the grace of the protecting spirits then divinity will be merciful in the end everything turns out happily a spirit appears and cures all of Tommy's ailments a mighty storm drives all the demons of disease out of his frame he praises Marduk offers rich sacrifice and calls upon everyone never to despair of the gods it is probable that this composition prototypes of which are found in Sumeria influenced the author of the book of Job as there is but a step from this to the book of Job so we find in late Babylonian literature unmistakable premonitions of Ecclesiastes in the epic of gilgamesh the goddess sabi - advises the hero to give up his longing for a life after death and to eat drink and be merry on the earth o Gilgamesh why does thou run in all directions the life that thou seekest thou wilt not find when the gods created mankind they determined death from mankind life they kept in their own hands thou o Gilgamesh fill thy belly day and night be thou merry day and night be joyous and content let thy garments be pure thy head be washed washed thyself with water regard the little one who takes hold of thy hand enjoy the wife in Nabu 'some compared with Ecclesiastes chapter 9 verses 7 to 9 go thy way II thigh bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart for God now accepteth thy works let thy garments be always white and that I had lacked no aunt meant live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity in another tablet we hear a bitter note culminating in atheism and blasphemy Gubar ooo a Babylonian Alcibiades interrogate SAN elder skeptically a very wise one o possessor of intelligence let thy heart groan the heart of God is as far as the inner parts of the heavens wisdom is hard and men do not understand it to which the old man and with a foreboding of Amos and Isaiah give attention my friend and understand my thought men exalt the work of the great man who is skilled in murder they disparage the poor man who has done no sin they justify the wicked man whose fault is grave they drive away the just man who seeks the will of God they let the strong take the food of the poor they strengthen the mighty they destroy the weak man the rich man drives him away he advises GU Baro to do the will of the gods nonetheless but GU Baro will have nothing to do with gods or priests who were always on the side of the biggest fortunes they have offered lies and untruth without ceasing they say in noble words what is in favor of the rich man is his wealth diminished they come to his help they ill treat the weak man like a thief they destroy him in a tremor they extinguish him like a flame we must not exaggerate the prevalence of such moods in Babylon doubtless the people listened lovingly to their priests and crowded the temples to seek favors of the gods the marvel is that they were so long loyal to a religion that offered them so little consolation nothing could be known said the priests accept by divine revelation and this revelation came only through the priests the last chapter of that revelation told how the dead soul whether good or bad ascended into a Rollo or Hades to spend their an eternity in darkness and suffering is it any wonder that Babylon gave itself to revelry while nebuchadrezzar having all understanding nothing fearing everything went mad 10 epitaph tradition and the Book of Daniel unverified by any document known to us tell how nebuchadrezzar after a long rain of uninterrupted victory and prosperity after beautifying his city with roads and palaces and directing 54 temples to the gods fell into a strange insanity thought himself a beast walked on all fours and ate grass for four years his name disappears from the history and governmental records of Babylonia it reappears for a moment and then in 562 BC he passes away within 30 years after his death his empire crumbled to pieces nabonidus who held the throne for 17 years prefered archaeology to government and devoted himself to excavating the antiquities of Sumeria while his own realm was going to ruin the army fell into disorder businessmen forgot love of country in the sublime internationalism of Finance the people busy with trade and pleasure unlearned the arts of war the priests usurped more and more of the royal power and fattened their Treasuries with wealth that tempted invasion and conquest when Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates the anti-clerical z' of babylon connived to open the city to him and welcomed his enlightened domination for two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as part of the greatest empire that history had yet known then the exuberant Alexander came captured the unresisting capital conquered all the Near East and drank himself to death in the palace of nebuchadrezzar the civilization of Babylonia was not as fruitful for Humanity as Egypt's not as varied and profound as India's not as subtle and mature as China's and yet it was from Babylonia that those fascinating legends came which through the literary artistry of the Jews became an inseparable portion of Europe's religious lore it was from Babylonia rather than from Egypt that the roving Greeks brought to their city-states and thence to Rome and ourselves the foundations of mathematics astronomy medicine grammar lexicography archaeology history and philosophy the Greek names for the metals and the constellations for weights and measures for musical instruments and many drugs are translations sometimes mere transliterations of Babylonian names while Greek architecture derived its forms and inspiration from Egypt and Crete Babylonian architecture through the ziggurat led to the towers of Muslim mosques the steeples and campanella's of medieval art and the set back style of contemporary architecture in America the laws of Hammurabi became for all ancient societies a legacy comparable to Rome's gift of order and government to the modern world through a serious conquest of Babylon her appropriation of the ancient city's culture and her dissemination of that culture throughout her wide Empire through the long captivity of the Jews and the great influence upon them of Babylonian life and thought through the Persian and Greek conquests which opened with unprecedented fullness and freedom all the roads of communication and trade between Babylon and the rising cities of Ionia Asia Minor and Greece through these and many other ways the civilization of the land between the rivers passed down into the cultural endowment of our race in the end nothing is lost for good or evil every event has effects forever

Channel: Rocky C

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Keywords: Will Durant, Babylonia, History, Ancient History

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Length: 111min 47sec (6707 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018