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the
heavy infantry were armed with a pike tipped with bronze
ox-copper,
an
axe or sharp adze, a stone-headed mace, and a dagger; the light
troops
were provided only with the bow and sling. As early as the third
millennium
b.c., the king went to battle in a chariot drawn by onagers,
or
perhaps horses; he had his own peculiar weapon, which was a
curved
bâton
probably terminating in a metal point, and resembling the sceptre
of
the Pharaohs. Considerable quantities of all these arms were
stored
in
the arsenals, which contained depots for bows, maces, and pikes,
and
even
the stones needed for the slings had their special department for
storage.
At the beginning of each campaign, a distribution of weapons
to
the newly levied troops took place; but as soon as the war was at
an
end,
the men brought back their accoutrements, which were stored till
they
were again required. The valour of the soldiers and their chiefs
was
then rewarded; the share of the spoil for some consisted of
cattle,
gold,
corn, a female slave, and vessels of value; for others, lands or
towns
in the conquered country, regulated by the rank of the recipients
or
the extent of the services they had rendered.
[Illustration:
266.jpg A SOLDIER BRINGING PRISONERS AND SPOIL.]
Drawn
by Faucher-Gudin, from the Chaldæan intaglio in the
British.
Museum.
Property
thus given was hereditary, and privileges were often added to
it
which raised the holder to the rank of a petty prince: for
instance,
no
royal official was permitted to impose a tax upon such lands, or
take
the
cattle off them, or levy provisions upon them; no troop of
soldiers
might
enter them, not even for the purpose of arresting a fugitive.
Most
of
the noble families possessed domains of this kind, and constituted
in
each
kingdom a powerful and wealthy feudal aristocracy, whose
relations
to
their sovereign were probably much the same as those which bound
the
nomarchs to the Pharaoh. The position of these nobles was not
more
stable
than that of the dynasties under which they lived: while some
among
them gained power by marriages or by continued acquisitions of
land,
others fell into disgrace and were ruined. As the soil belonged
to
the
gods, it is possible that these nobles were supposed, in theory,
'to
depend
upon the gods; but as the kings were the vicegerents of the gods
upon
earth, it was to the king, as a matter of fact, that they owed
their
elevation. Every state, therefore, comprised two parts, each
subject
to a distinct régime: one being the personal domain of the
suzerain,
which he managed himself, and from which he drew the revenues;
the
other was composed of fiefs, whose lords paid tribute and owed
certain
obligations to the king, the nature of which we are as yet
unable
to define.
The
Chaldæan, like the Egyptian scribe, was the pivot on which the
machinery
of this double royal and seignorial administration turned.
He
does not appear to have enjoyed as much consideration as his
fellow-official
in the Nile Valley: the Chaldæan princes, nobles,
priests,
soldiers, and temple or royal officials, did not covet the
title
of scribe, or pride themselves upon holding that office side
by
side with their other dignities, as we see was the case with
their
Egyptian
contemporaries. The position of a scribe, nevertheless, was an
important
one. We continually meet with it in all grades of society--in
the
palace, in the temples, in the storehouses, in private dwellings;
in
fine,
the scribe was ubiquitous, at court, in the town, in the country,
in
the army, managing affairs both small and great, and seeing that
they
were
carried on regularly. His education differed but little from that
given
to the Egyptian scribe; he learned the routine of administrative
or
judicial affairs, the formularies for correspondence either with
nobles
or with ordinary people, the art of writing, of calculating
quickly,
and of making out bills correctly. We may well ask whether he
ever
employed papyrus or prepared skins for these purposes. It would,
indeed,
seem strange that, after centuries of intercourse, no caravan
should
have brought into Chaldæan any of those materials which were in
such
constant use for literary purposes in Africa;* yet the same clay
which
furnished the architect with such an abundant building material
appears
to have been the only medium for transmitting the language which
the
scribes possessed. They were always provided with slabs of a fine
plastic
clay, carefully mixed and kept sufficiently moist to take easily
the
impression of an object, but at the same time sufficiently firm
to
prevent
the marks once made from becoming either blurred or effaced.
When
a scribe had a text to copy or a document to draw up, he chose
out
one
of his slabs, which he placed flat upon his left palm, and taking
in
the
right hand a triangular stylus of flint, copper, bronze, or
bone,**
he
at once set to work. The instrument, in early times, terminated in
a
fine
point, and the marks made by it when it was gently pressed upon
the
clay were slender and of uniform thickness; in later times, the
extremity
of the stylus was cut with a bevel, and the impression then
took
the shape of a metal nail or a wedge.
*
On the Assyrian monuments we frequently see scribes taking
a
list of the spoil, or writing letters on tablets and some
other
soft material, either papyrus or prepared skin. Sayce
has
given good reasons for believing that the Chaldæanns of
the
early dynasties knew of the papyrus, and either made it
themselves,
or had it brought from Egypt.
**
See the triangular stylus of copper or bronze reproduced
by
the side of the measuring-rule, and the plan on the
tablet
of Gudea, p. 248 of this volume. The Assyrian Museum
in
the Louvre possesses several large, flat styli of bone,
cut
to a point at one end, which appear to have belonged to
the
Assyrian scribes. Taylor discovered in a tomb at Eridu a
flint
tool, which may have served for the same purpose as
the
metal or bone styli.
[Illustration:
268.jpg MANUSCRIPT ON PAPYRUS IN HEIROGLYPHICS]
They
wrote from left to right along the upper part of the tablet, and
covered
both sides of it with closely written lines, which sometimes ran
over
on to the edges. When the writing was finished, the scribe sent
his
work
to the potter, who put it in the kiln and baked it, or the writer
may
have had a small oven at his own disposition, as a clerk with us
would
have his table or desk. The shape of these documents varied, and
sometimes
strikes us as being peculiar: besides the tablets and the
bricks,
we find small solid cones, or hollow cylinders of considerable
size,
on which the kings related their exploits or recorded the history
of
their wars or the dedication of their buildings. This method had
a
few
inconveniences, but many advantages. These clay books were heavy
to
hold
and clumsy to handle, while the characters did not stand out well
from
the brown, yellow, and whitish background of the material; but,
on
the
other hand, a poem, baked and incorporated into the page itself,
ran
less danger of destruction than if scribbled in ink on sheets of
papyrus.
Fire could make no impression on it; it could withstand water
for
a considerable length of time; even if broken, the pieces were
still
of
use: as long as it was not pulverized, the entire document could
be
restored,
with the exception, perhaps, of a few signs, or 'some
scraps
of a sentence. The inscriptions which have been saved from the
foundations
of the most ancient temples, several of which date back
forty
or fifty centuries, are for the most part as clear and legible
as
when they left the hands of the writer who engraved them or of
the
workmen
who baked them. It is owing to the material to which they were
committed
that we possess the principal works of Chaldæan literature
which
have come down to us--poems, annals, hymns, magical incantations;
how
few fragments of these would ever have reached us had their
authors
confided
them to parchment or paper, after the manner of the Egyptian
scribes!
The greatest danger that they ran was that of being left
forgotten
in the corner of the chamber in which they had been kept,
or
buried under the rubbish of a building after a fire or some
violent
catastrophe;
even then the _débris_ were the means of preserving them,
by
falling over them and covering them up. Protected under the
ruins,
they
would lie there for centuries, till the fortunate explorer should
bring
them to light and deliver them over to the patient study of the
learned.
The
cuneiform character in itself is neither picturesque nor
decorative.
It
does not offer that delightful assemblage of birds and snakes, of
men
and
quadrupeds, of heads and limbs, of tools, weapons, stars, trees,
and
boats, which succeed each other in perplexing order on the
Egyptian
monuments,
to give permanence to the glory of Pharaoh and the greatness
of
his gods. Cuneiform writing is essentially composed of thin short
lines,
placed in juxtaposition or crossing each other in a somewhat
clumsy
fashion; it has the appearance of numbers of nails scattered
about
at haphazard, and its angular configuration, and its stiff and
spiny
appearance, gives the inscriptions a dull and forbidding aspect
which
no artifice of the engraver can overcome.
[Illustration:
271.jpg Page image]
[Illustration:
272.jpg Page Image]
Yet,
in spite of their seemingly arbitrary character, this mass of
strokes
had its source in actual hieroglyphs. As in the origin of the
Egyptian
script the earliest writers had begun by drawing on stone or
clay
the outline of the object of which they desired to convey the
idea.
But,
whereas in Egypt the artistic temperament of the race, and the
increasing
skill of their sculptors, had by degrees brought the drawing
of
each sign to such perfection that it became a miniature portrait
of
the
being or object to be reproduced, in Chaldæa, on the contrary,
the
signs became degraded from their original forms on account of the
difficulty
experienced in copying them with the stylus on the clay
tablets:
they lost their original vertical position, and were placed
horizontally,
retaining finally but the very faintest resemblance to the
original
model. For instance, the Chaldaean conception of the sky was
that
of a vault divided into eight segments by diameters running from
the
four cardinal points and from their principal subdivisions
[symbol]
the
external circle was soon omitted, the transverse lines alone
remaining
[symbol], which again was simplified into a kind of irregular
cross
[symbol]. The figure of a man standing, indicated by the lines
resembling
his contour, was placed on its side [symbol] and reduced
little
by little till it came to be merely a series of ill-balanced
lines
[symbol] [symbol]. We may still recognize in [symbol] the five
fingers
and palm of a human hand [symbol]; but who would guess at the
first
glance that [symbol] stands for the foot which the scribes strove
to
place beside each character the special hieroglyph from which it
had
been
derived. Several fragments of these still exist, a study of which
seems
to show that the Assyrian scribes of a more recent period were at
times
as much puzzled as we are ourselves when they strove to get at
the
principles
of their own script: they had come to look on it as nothing
more
than a system of arbitrary combinations, whose original form had
passed
all the more readily into oblivion, because it had been borrowed
from
a foreign race, who, as far as they were concerned, had ceased to
have
a separate existence. The script had been invented by the
Sumerians
in
the very earliest times, and even they may have brought it in an
elemental
condition from their distant fatherland. The first articulate
sounds
which, being attached to the hieroglyphs, gave to each
an
unalterable pronunciation, were words in the Sumerian tongue;
subsequently,
when the natural progress of human thought led
thi
Chaldæans to replace, as in Egypt, the majority of the signs
representing
ideas by those representing sounds, the syllabic values
which
were developed side by side with the ideographic values were
purely
Sumerian. The group [symbol] throughout all its forms,
designates
in the first place the sky, then the god of the sky, and
finally
the concept of divinity in general. In its first two senses it
is
read ana, but in the last it becomes dingir, dimir; and though it
never
lost its double force, it was soon separated from the ideas which
it
evoked, to be used merely to denote the syllable an wherever it
occurred,
even in cases where it had no connection with the sky or
heavenly
things. The same process was applied to other signs with
similar
results: after having merely denoted ideas, they came to stand
for
the sounds corresponding to them, and then passed on to be mere
syllables--complex
syllables in which several consonants may be
distinguished,
or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and
one
vowel, or vice versa. The Egyptians had carried this system still
further,
and in many cases had kept only one part of the syllable,
namely,
a mute consonant: they detached, for example, the final u from
pu
and bu, and gave only the values b and p to the human leg J and
the
mat
Q. The peoples of the Euphrates stopped halfway, and admitted
actual
letters
for the vowel sounds a, i, and u only. Their system remained a
syllabary
interspersed with ideograms, but excluded an alphabet.
[Illustration:
274.jpg Page image]
It
was eminently wanting in simplicity, but, taken as a whole, it
would
not
have presented as many difficulties as the script of the
Egyptians,
had
it not been forced, at a very early period, to adapt itself to
the
exigencies
of a language for which it had not been made. When it came to
be
appropriated by the Semites, the ideographs, which up till then
had
been
read in Sumerian, did not lose the sounds which they possessed in
that
tongue, but borrowed others from the new language. For example,
"god"
was called ilu, and "heaven" called shami: [symbol], when
encountered
in inscriptions by the Semites, were read [symbol] when
the
context showed the sense to be "god," and shami when the
character
evidently
meant "heaven." They added these two vocables to the preceding
ana,
an, dingir, dimir; but they did not stop there: they confounded
the
picture of the star [symbol] with that of the sky, and sometimes
attributed
to [symbol], the pronunciation kakkabu, and the meaning of
star.
The same process was applied to all the groups, and the Semitic
values
being added to the Sumerian, the scribes soon found themselves in
possession
of a double set of syllables both simple and compound. This
multiplicity
of sounds, this polyphonous character attached to their
signs,
became a cause of embarrassment even to them. For instance,
[symbol]
when found in the body of a word, stood for the syllables hi
or
hat, mid, mit, til, ziz; as an ideogram it was used for a score
of
different
concepts: that of lord or master, inu, bilu; that of blood,
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