The History of Antiquity, Vol. I (of VI)

wer, science, and skill in art. Her civilisation had developed without external assistance. If the first foundations were borrowed, and not laid by the

vailed far beyond the borders of Babylonia. The Egyptians reached the highest point that could be reached by the art of building in stone; but the buildings of the Chald?ans in brick are unsurpassed in size, strength, and height by any nation or period. To what antiquity the hydraulic works of the Chald?ans reached we do not know (the canal of Hammurab

the great temple of Belus at Babylon, and represent the Babylonians as swearing "by the great Belus."[360] In the fragments of Berosus it was Belus who smote asunder the prim?val darkness, and divided Omorka, and caused the creation of men and beasts; while according to the clay tablets of the flood, El was unwilling to save even Sisit. Of the god Hea we can at present ascertain no more from the inscriptions than that he is the "lord of the earth," "the king of rivers;" and that it is he who announced the coming flood to Sisit, and pointed out the means of safety. Anu, the god who follows next after El, was sovereign of the upper realms of the sky. In the narrative of the flood given on the clay tablets the gods fled horror-stricken before the storm into the heaven of Anu. In Assyrian inscriptions the god has frequently the epithet Malik (i. e. "king"). As the Hebrews inform us that the men of Sepharvaim worshipped Anammelech, it is obvious that Anumalik and Anammelech are one and the same deity. The creature, who brought the first revelations of language and writing, is called in Berosus Oan, by others, Y

t they would "carry Siccuth their king, and Kewan (Chiun) their star-god, their images which they had made,"[365] Sichuth-Melech can be no other god than Sakkut-Malik, i. e. Adar, and by Kewan is meant the Kaivanu (Saturn) of the inscriptions.[366] Nebo (Nabu), the god of Borsippa, was the lord of the planet Mercury. According to the inscriptions of Babylonia, he ruled over the hosts of heaven and earth. His image on the cylinder of Urukh has been mentioned above (p. 259). Statues of Nebo with long beard and hair, and a robe from the breast downwards, have been found in the ruins of Nineveh. Assyrian inscriptions entitle him the "prince of the gods." His name means the "revealer," and what we learn from western writers about a special school of Chaldaic priests at Borsippa agrees very well wi

tus the maidens of Babylonia had to worship the goddess by the sacrifice of their virginity; once in her life each was expected to sell her body in honour of the goddess, and thus to redeem herself. Hence on the festivals of Mylitta the maidens of Babylon sat in long rows in the grove of the goddess, with chaplets of cord upon their heads. Even the daughters of the wealthy came in covered cars with a numerous body of attendants. Here they had to remain till one of the pilgrims, who came to worship the goddess, cast a piece of gold into their laps, with the words, "In the name of Mylitta." Then the maiden was compelled to follow him, and comply with his wishes. The money thus earned she gave to the temple-treasury, and was henceforth freed from her obligation to the goddess. "The good-l

tablets is found a narrative of the journey of Istar to the under-world. She determines to go down to the house of the departed, to the abode of the god Irkalla, to the house which has no exit, to the road which leads not back, to the place where the entrance is without light, where dust is their nourishment and mould their food, where light is not seen, where they dwell in darkness, where the arches are filled with spirits like birds; over the gate and the panels dust is strewed. "Watchman of the waters," said Istar, "open thy gate, that I may enter. If thou openest not, I will break thy gate, and burst asunder the bars; I will shatter the threshold and destroy the doors." The watchman opened the gate, and as she passed through he took the great crown from her head; and when she passed through the second gate he took the rings from her ears; and when she passed through the third gate he took the necklace fr

on, king of Assyria, calls himself "the apple of the eye of Anu and Dagon."[375] Male figures, with a horned cap on the head, and ending in a fish, and priests with fishskins hung above them, are often found on the monuments of Nineveh. As the word Dag means "fish," we may with confidence find in the god Dakan the fish-god of the Babylonians; the god who out of moisture gives plenty, fertility, and increase. That the Canaanites also worsh

ippa, and Kutha, to Bel, Nebo, and Nergal, and Assurbanipal tells us that his rebellious brother, the viceroy of Babylon, had purchased the help of the Elamites with the treasures of the temple of Bel at Babylon, of Nebo at Borsippa, and Nergal at Kutha.[376] Hence these temples must have bee

less the expanse of earth, the more did the eye turn upwards towards the changes, movements, and life of the sky. In the clear atmosphere the eye followed the regular paths of the planets, and discovered each morning new stars, while others disappeared every evening. With the higher or lower position of the sun, or of this or that star, a new season commenced, or changes took place in the natural world; the inundation rose, and vegetation began to awaken or decay. On the rising and setting of the sun, the moon, and the stars, the life of mankind, their waking and sleeping, the

powers. Jupiter was supposed to bring the beneficent and genial warmth of the atmosphere, while Venus, the star of evening (Bilit), poured forth the cool fructifying dew. Saturn (Adar) was an unlucky star, the Great Evil; and this confirms the conclusion already drawn that Adar was thought to be a god averse

s. Hence they even call them "lords of the gods."[379] On the other hand thirty other fixed stars are "counselling gods," because they were thought to exercise only a secondary influence on the planets; and lastly, twelve fixed stars in the northern sky, and twelve in the southern were called the "judges." Of these twenty-four stars, those which were visible decided on the fortunes of the living, and those which were invisible on the fortunes of the dead.[380] The inscriptions also distinguish two classes of twelve stars each; of which one is

eration, were found in equipoise or opposition-on this depended the prosperity or misfortune of the kingdom, the king, the year, the day, the hour. Moreover it was of importance at what season of the year, and in what quarter of the sky the stars rose, or disappeared, and what colours they displayed.[383] To the east belonged withering heat, to the south warmth, to the west fertilising moisture, and to the north cold; and the planets exercised greater or less power as they stood higher or lower.[384] Tablets discovered at Nineveh allow us a closer insight into the system of these constellations.

clude from the Hebrew accounts of the sacrifices offered to Adar. Such traits are also more than outweighed by the licentious worship of Mylitta, in which the sensual elements of the Semitic character are seen in all their coarseness. With the growth of the kingdom, and the consequent effe

riestly wisdom even before the flood, inasmuch as they attribute to these places special revelations of the gods Anu and Dakan. They speak of the sacred books saved in Sippara from the flood. These books they divide into ancient, medi?val, and modern. By the "ancient" books we must understand the announcements which the god Anu caused to be made to the two earliest kings, Alorus and Alaparus, of Babylon. Under the "medi?val" are comprised the revelations received by Ammenon and Daonus of Sippara, and lastly, under the "modern" the mysteries disclosed by Dagon to Edorankhus of Sippara (p. 239). Hence we may assume that the priests of Babylon arrived at an early age at a code which included their creed and ritual, as it would seem, in seven books (p. 245). How high the cosmogonies go, of which the most essential t

nd straight strokes that the signs could be most easily traced upon slabs of mud and clay. The oldest bricks in the ruins of Mugheir, Warka, and Senkereh display pictures in outline; then beside bricks with inscriptions of this kind we find others repeating the same inscription in cuneiform signs, which now form a completely ideographic system of writing. The immediate comprehension of picture signs by the senses died away owing to abbreviations of the kind mentioned, and the picture-writing became symbolic writing. This writing, which consisted of groups of cuneiform symbols, attained a higher stage of development when a phonetic value was attributed to a part of the cuneiform groups, whether used to signify nouns or verbs and adjectives, or new groups were formed for this purpose. By cuneiform groups both simple and compound syllables are expressed. For simple syllables, i. e. for those consisting of a single consonant with a vowel before or after it in order to give the consonant a sound, the cuneiform writing of Babylon and Assyria possesses about one hundred groups, and several hundred groups for compound syllables, i. e. for those which have more than one consonant. Side by side with this syllabic writing the old abbreviated picture-writing was re

the Babylonian system was known to the Western Semitic tribes; it even passed over from Syria to Cyprus, where we find it assuming a peculiar form, and displaying throughout the character of a syllabic mode of writing. At the same time among the Syrians and Phenicians a cursive method was developed, just as in Egypt the hieratic writing grew up beside the hieroglyphic. This cursive writing of the Western Semitic nations has not, however, arisen out of the cuneiform symbols, but out of the hieratic writing of the Egyptians. The Phenicians must claim the merit of having abbreviated still further, for their own use, the cursive writing of the Egyptians. But the picture-symbols of the hieratic writing were not merely contracted and simplified; the mixture of pictorial, syllabic, and alphabetic

welve hours, to correspond to the twelve months of the year; the hours they divided into sixty parts, and each of these sixtieths was again subdivided into sixty parts. Their measures were also duodecimal. The cubit was twenty-four finger-breadths; and on the same system, their numerals were based upon the sossus, or sixty,-a derivative from twelve, and the sarus, or square of the sossus. When they attempted to fix the position and intervals of the stars in the sky, the basis taken for their measurements was the diameter of the sun. They divided the daily course of the sun, like the ecliptic, into 360 parts, and then attempted to measure these at the equinox. At the moment when the sun was seen in the sky on the morning of the equinox, a jar filled with water was opened. From this the water was allowed to run into a second small jar, till the orb of the sun was completely visible; then it ran into a third and larger jar, till the sun was again seen on the horizon on the following morning. They concluded that the diameter of the sun must stand in the same proportion to the cycle it passed through as the water

his period they fixed the average length of the synodic and periodic month with such accuracy that our astronomers here found the first to be too large by four seconds only, and the last by one second. Their observations of ten lunar eclipses, and three conjunctions of planets and fixed stars, have come down to us.

bic measures the division of the units into sixtieths (min?, i. e. parts) was retained. The quadrantal, or Maris, contained one Babylonian cubic foot, and the sixtieth part of this was the Log. The weight i

d one quadrantal, according to the estimate of the Chald?ans, i. e. 60? pounds, and the mina was a little heavier than a pound of our weight. But in weighing the precious metals, the Chald?ans used units, which differed from the imperial weights in use for all other purposes. They calculated by little circular pieces, or rings, or bars (tongues) of silver and gold, and the smallest of these was equivalent to the shekel, or sixtieth part of the mina of the heavy talent.

urately 13? : 1.[400] By making the silver shekel (i. e. the fiftieth part of the silver mina), which corresponded to the weight of the light gold talent, a little heavier, a silver coin was obtained which stood to the fiftieth of the light gold mina, nearly in the ratio of 10 : 1. Ten silver

TNO

Diod.

masc. Fragm. 9,

Fragm. adesp.

Keilschriften," s. 123; "Keilsc

son, "Five Mona

Kings

Amos

"Theologg. Studien und Kr

Alt. Test." s. 167, 272; "Assyr.-ba

, "Babylone,

Religion der Ba

Herod.

43 (Ep. Jerem.); cf. G

t, "Babylon

ald?er," s. 405. So, too, Istar of

v." p. 220; Schrader,

lschriften und Alt.

h, "Assurbani

Diod.

rch, "De Is

Diod.

Diod.

"Bibl. Arch

Kings xx

Diod.

gionsysteme der V?lker

"Bibl. Arch?o

2, 30, 31;

p. 268; Str

ligion der Ph?niz

syrisch. Babyl. Kei

"Les Ach?menides." Recently a tablet has been

d. Bair. Akad. d." 10, 1867, pp. 84-124. The inscription of Mesha, king of Moab, proves b

booty-was found at Nineveh.-Layard, "Discoveries," p. 601; Schrader,

Chronologie," 1, 207; Sayc

ternkunde der Ch

s, "Münzwese

Herod.

Münzwesen Vorder

th, "Records of

e more recent forms established by Brand

dis, loc.