Myths of Babylonia and Assyria 1

Myths of Babylonia and Assyria 1

Myths of Babylonia and Assyria, by Donald A. Mackenzie

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Preface

Introduction

I. The Races and Early Civilization of Babylonia

II. The Land of Rivers and the God of the Deep

III. Rival Pantheons and Representative Deities

IV. Demons, Fairies, and Ghosts

V. Myths of Tammuz and Ishtar

VI. Wars of the City States of Sumer and Akkad

VII. Creation Legend: Merodach the Dragon Slayer

VIII. Deified Heroes: Etana and Gilgamesh

IX. Deluge Legend, the Island of the Blessed, and Hades

X. Buildings and Laws and Customs of Babylon

XI. The Golden Age of Babylonia

XII. Rise of the Hittites, Mitannians, Kassites, Hyksos, and

Assyrians

XIII. Astrology and Astronomy

XIV. Ashur the National God of Assyria

XV. Conflicts for Trade and Supremacy

XVI. Race Movements that Shattered Empires

XVII. The Hebrews in Assyrian History

XVIII. The Age of Semiramis

XIX. Assyria's Age of Splendour

XX. The Last Days of Assyria and Babylonia

 

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

 

This volume deals with the myths and legends of Babylonia and Assyria,

and as these reflect the civilization in which they developed, a

historical narrative has been provided, beginning with the early

Sumerian Age and concluding with the periods of the Persian and

Grecian Empires. Over thirty centuries of human progress are thus

passed under review.

 

During this vast interval of time the cultural influences emanating

from the Tigro-Euphrates valley reached far-distant shores along the

intersecting avenues of trade, and in consequence of the periodic and

widespread migrations of peoples who had acquired directly or

indirectly the leavening elements of Mesopotamian civilization. Even

at the present day traces survive in Europe of the early cultural

impress of the East; our "Signs of the Zodiac", for instance, as well

as the system of measuring time and space by using 60 as a basic

numeral for calculation, are inheritances from ancient Babylonia.

 

As in the Nile Valley, however, it is impossible to trace in

Mesopotamia the initiatory stages of prehistoric culture based on the

agricultural mode of life. What is generally called the "Dawn of

History" is really the beginning of a later age of progress; it is

necessary to account for the degree of civilization attained at the

earliest period of which we have knowledge by postulating a remoter

age of culture of much longer duration than that which separates the

"Dawn" from the age in which we now live. Although Sumerian (early

Babylonian) civilization presents distinctively local features which

justify the application of the term "indigenous" in the broad sense,

it is found, like that of Egypt, to be possessed of certain elements

which suggest exceedingly remote influences and connections at present

obscure. Of special interest in this regard is Professor Budge's

mature and well-deliberated conclusion that "both the Sumerians and

early Egyptians derived their primeval gods from some common but

exceedingly ancient source". The prehistoric burial customs of these

separate peoples are also remarkably similar and they resemble closely

in turn those of the Neolithic Europeans. The cumulative effect of

such evidence forces us to regard as not wholly satisfactory and

conclusive the hypothesis of cultural influence. A remote racial

connection is possible, and is certainly worthy of consideration when

so high an authority as Professor Frazer, author of _The Golden

Bough_, is found prepared to admit that the widespread "homogeneity of

beliefs" may have been due to "homogeneity of race". It is shown

(Chapter 1) that certain ethnologists have accumulated data which

establish a racial kinship between the Neolithic Europeans, the

proto-Egyptians, the Sumerians, the southern Persians, and the

Aryo-Indians.

 

Throughout this volume comparative notes have been compiled in dealing

with Mesopotamian beliefs with purpose to assist the reader towards

the study of linking myths and legends. Interesting parallels have

been gleaned from various religious literatures in Europe, Egypt,

India, and elsewhere. It will be found that certain relics of

Babylonian intellectual life, which have a distinctive geographical

significance, were shared by peoples in other cultural areas where

they were similarly overlaid with local colour. Modes of thought were

the products of modes of life and were influenced in their development

by human experiences. The influence of environment on the growth of

culture has long been recognized, but consideration must also be given

to the choice of environment by peoples who had adopted distinctive

habits of life. Racial units migrated from cultural areas to districts

suitable for colonization and carried with them a heritage of

immemorial beliefs and customs which were regarded as being quite as

indispensable for their welfare as their implements and domesticated

animals.

 

When consideration is given in this connection to the conservative

element in primitive religion, it is not surprising to find that the

growth of religious myths was not so spontaneous in early

civilizations of the highest order as has hitherto been assumed. It

seems clear that in each great local mythology we have to deal, in the

first place, not with symbolized ideas so much as symbolized folk

beliefs of remote antiquity and, to a certain degree, of common

inheritance. It may not be found possible to arrive at a conclusive

solution of the most widespread, and therefore the most ancient folk

myths, such as, for instance, the Dragon Myth, or the myth of the

culture hero. Nor, perhaps, is it necessary that we should concern

ourselves greatly regarding the origin of the idea of the dragon,

which in one country symbolized fiery drought and in another

overwhelming river floods.

 

The student will find footing on surer ground by following the process

which exalts the dragon of the folk tale into the symbol of evil and

primordial chaos. The Babylonian Creation Myth, for instance, can be

shown to be a localized and glorified legend in which the hero and his

tribe are displaced by the war god and his fellow deities whose

welfare depends on his prowess. Merodach kills the dragon, Tiamat, as

the heroes of Eur-Asian folk stories kill grisly hags, by casting his

weapon down her throat.

 

He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart,

He overcame her and cut off her life;

He cast down her body and stood upon it ...

And with merciless club he smashed her skull.

He cut through the channels of her blood,

And he made the north wind to bear it away into secret places.

 

Afterwards

 

He divided the flesh of the _Ku-pu_ and devised a cunning plan.

 

Mr. L.W. King, from whose scholarly _Seven Tablets of Creation_ these

lines are quoted, notes that "Ku-pu" is a word of uncertain meaning.

Jensen suggests "trunk, body". Apparently Merodach obtained special

knowledge after dividing, and perhaps eating, the "Ku-pu". His

"cunning plan" is set forth in detail: he cut up the dragon's body:

 

He split her up like a flat fish into two halves.

 

He formed the heavens with one half and the earth with the other, and

then set the universe in order. His power and wisdom as the Demiurge

were derived from the fierce and powerful Great Mother, Tiamat.

 

In other dragon stories the heroes devise their plans after eating the

dragon's heart. According to Philostratus,[1] Apollonius of Tyana was

worthy of being remembered for two things--his bravery in travelling

among fierce robber tribes, not then subject to Rome, and his wisdom

in learning the language of birds and other animals as the Arabs do.

This accomplishment the Arabs acquired, Philostratus explains, by

eating the hearts of dragons. The "animals" who utter magic words are,

of course, the Fates. Siegfried of the _Nibelungenlied_, after slaying

the Regin dragon, makes himself invulnerable by bathing in its blood.

He obtains wisdom by eating the heart: as soon as he tastes it he can

understand the language of birds, and the birds reveal to him that

Mimer is waiting to slay him. Sigurd similarly makes his plans after

eating the heart of the Fafner dragon. In Scottish legend

Finn-mac-Coul obtains the power to divine secrets by partaking of a

small portion of the seventh salmon associated with the "well dragon",

and Michael Scott and other folk heroes become great physicians after

tasting the juices of the middle part of the body of the white snake.

The hero of an Egyptian folk tale slays a "deathless snake" by cutting

it in two parts and putting sand between the parts. He then obtains

from the box, of which it is the guardian, the book of spells; when he

reads a page of the spells he knows what the birds of the sky, the

fish of the deep, and the beasts of the hill say; the book gives him

power to enchant "the heaven and the earth, the abyss, the mountains

and the sea".[2]

 

Magic and religion were never separated in Babylonia; not only the

priests but also the gods performed magical ceremonies. Ea, Merodach's

father, overcame Apsu, the husband of the dragon Tiamat, by means of

spells: he was "the great magician of the gods". Merodach's division

of the "Ku-pu" was evidently an act of contagious magic; by eating or

otherwise disposing of the vital part of the fierce and wise mother

dragon, he became endowed with her attributes, and was able to proceed

with the work of creation. Primitive peoples in our own day, like the

Abipones of Paraguay, eat the flesh of fierce and cunning animals so

that their strength, courage, and wisdom may be increased.

 

The direct influence exercised by cultural contact, on the other hand,

may be traced when myths with an alien geographical setting are found

among peoples whose experiences could never have given them origin. In

India, where the dragon symbolizes drought and the western river

deities are female, the Manu fish and flood legend resembles closely

the Babylonian, and seems to throw light upon it. Indeed, the Manu

myth appears to have been derived from the lost flood story in which

Ea figured prominently in fish form as the Preserver. The Babylonian

Ea cult and the Indian Varuna cult had apparently much in common, as

is shown.

 

Throughout this volume special attention has been paid to the various

peoples who were in immediate contact with, and were influenced by,

Mesopotamian civilization. The histories are traced in outline of the

Kingdoms of Elam, Urartu (Ancient Armenia), Mitanni, and the Hittites,

while the story of the rise and decline of the Hebrew civilization, as

narrated in the Bible and referred to in Mesopotamian inscriptions, is

related from the earliest times until the captivity in the

Neo-Babylonian period and the restoration during the age of the

Persian Empire. The struggles waged between the great Powers for the

control of trade routes, and the periodic migrations of pastoral

warrior folks who determined the fate of empires, are also dealt with,

so that light may be thrown on the various processes and influences

associated with the developments of local religions and mythologies.

Special chapters, with comparative notes, are devoted to the

Ishtar-Tammuz myths, the Semiramis legends, Ashur and his symbols, and

the origin and growth of astrology and astronomy.

 

The ethnic disturbances which occurred at various well-defined periods

in the Tigro-Euphrates valley were not always favourable to the

advancement of knowledge and the growth of culture. The invaders who

absorbed Sumerian civilization may have secured more settled

conditions by welding together political units, but seem to have

exercised a retrogressive influence on the growth of local culture.

"Babylonian religion", writes Dr. Langdon, "appears to have reached

its highest level in the Sumerian period, or at least not later than

2000 B.C. From that period onward to the first century B.C. popular

religion maintained with great difficulty the sacred standards of the

past." Although it has been customary to characterize Mesopotamian

civilization as Semitic, modern research tends to show that the

indigenous inhabitants, who were non-Semitic, were its originators.

Like the proto-Egyptians, the early Cretans, and the Pelasgians in

southern Europe and Asia Minor, they invariably achieved the

intellectual conquest of their conquerors, as in the earliest times

they had won victories over the antagonistic forces of nature. If the

modern view is accepted that these ancient agriculturists of the

goddess cult were of common racial origin, it is to the most

representative communities of the widespread Mediterranean race that

the credit belongs of laying the foundations of the brilliant

civilizations of the ancient world in southern Europe, and Egypt, and

the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

Ancient Babylonia has made stronger appeal to the imagination of

Christendom than even Ancient Egypt, because of its association with

the captivity of the Hebrews, whose sorrows are enshrined in the

familiar psalm:

 

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down;

Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows....

 

In sacred literature proud Babylon became the city of the anti-Christ,

the symbol of wickedness and cruelty and human vanity. Early

Christians who suffered persecution compared their worldly state to

that of the oppressed and disconsolate Hebrews, and, like them, they

sighed for Jerusalem--the new Jerusalem. When St. John the Divine had

visions of the ultimate triumph of Christianity, he referred to its

enemies--the unbelievers and persecutors--as the citizens of the

earthly Babylon, the doom of which he pronounced in stately and

memorable phrases:

 

Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen,

And is become the habitation of devils,

And the hold of every foul spirit,

And a cage of every unclean and hateful bird....

 

For her sins have reached unto heaven

And God hath remembered her iniquities....

The merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her,

For no man buyeth their merchandise any more.

 

"At the noise of the taking of Babylon", cried Jeremiah, referring to

the original Babylon, "the earth is moved, and the cry is heard among

the nations.... It shall be no more inhabited forever; neither shall

it be dwelt in from generation to generation." The Christian Saint

rendered more profound the brooding silence of the desolated city of

his vision by voicing memories of its beauty and gaiety and bustling

trade:

 

The voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers and trumpeters

shall be heard no more at all in thee;

And no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any

more in thee;

And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee;

And the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no

more at all in thee:

For thy merchants were the great men of the earth;

For by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

_And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints,_

_And of all that were slain upon the earth_.[3]

 

So for nearly two thousand years has the haunting memory of the

once-powerful city pervaded Christian literature, while its broken

walls and ruined temples and palaces lay buried deep in desert sand.

The history of the ancient land of which it was the capital survived

in but meagre and fragmentary form, mingled with accumulated myths and

legends. A slim volume contained all that could be derived from

references in the Old Testament and the compilations of classical

writers.

 

It is only within the past half-century that the wonderful story of

early Eastern civilization has been gradually pieced together by

excavators and linguists, who have thrust open the door of the past

and probed the hidden secrets of long ages. We now know more about

"the land of Babel" than did not only the Greeks and Romans, but even

the Hebrew writers who foretold its destruction. Glimpses are being

afforded us of its life and manners and customs for some thirty

centuries before the captives of Judah uttered lamentations on the

banks of its reedy canals. The sites of some of the ancient cities of

Babylonia and Assyria were identified by European officials and

travellers in the East early in the nineteenth century, and a few

relics found their way to Europe. But before Sir A.H. Layard set to

work as an excavator in the "forties", "a case scarcely three feet

square", as he himself wrote, "enclosed all that remained not only of

the great city of Nineveh, but of Babylon itself".[4]

 

Layard, the distinguished pioneer Assyriologist, was an Englishman of

Huguenot descent, who was born in Paris. Through his mother he

inherited a strain of Spanish blood. During his early boyhood he

resided in Italy, and his education, which began there, was continued

in schools in France, Switzerland, and England. He was a man of

scholarly habits and fearless and independent character, a charming

writer, and an accomplished fine-art critic; withal he was a great

traveller, a strenuous politician, and an able diplomatist. In 1845,

while sojourning in the East, he undertook the exploration of ancient

Assyrian cities. He first set to work at Kalkhi, the Biblical Calah.

Three years previously M.P.C. Botta, the French consul at Mosul, had

begun to investigate the Nineveh mounds; but these he abandoned for a

mound near Khorsabad which proved to be the site of the city erected

by "Sargon the Later", who is referred to by Isaiah. The relics

discovered by Botta and his successor, Victor Place, are preserved in

the Louvre.

 

At Kalkhi and Nineveh Layard uncovered the palaces of some of the most

famous Assyrian Emperors, including the Biblical Shalmaneser and

Esarhaddon, and obtained the colossi, bas reliefs, and other treasures

of antiquity which formed the nucleus of the British Museum's

unrivalled Assyrian collection. He also conducted diggings at Babylon

and Niffer (Nippur). His work was continued by his assistant, Hormuzd

Rassam, a native Christian of Mosul, near Nineveh. Rassam studied for

a time at Oxford.

 

The discoveries made by Layard and Botta stimulated others to follow

their example. In the "fifties" Mr. W.K. Loftus engaged in excavations

at Larsa and Erech, where important discoveries were made of ancient

buildings, ornaments, tablets, sarcophagus graves, and pot burials,

while Mr. J.E. Taylor operated at Ur, the seat of the moon cult and

the birthplace of Abraham, and at Eridu, which is generally regarded

as the cradle of early Babylonian (Sumerian) civilization.

 

In 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson superintended diggings at Birs Nimrud

(Borsippa, near Babylon), and excavated relics of the Biblical

Nebuchadrezzar. This notable archaeologist began his career in the

East as an officer in the Bombay army. He distinguished himself as a

political agent and diplomatist. While resident at Baghdad, he devoted

his leisure time to cuneiform studies. One of his remarkable feats was

the copying of the famous trilingual rock inscription of Darius the

Great on a mountain cliff at Behistun, in Persian Kurdistan. This work

was carried out at great personal risk, for the cliff is 1700 feet

high and the sculptures and inscriptions are situated about 300 feet

from the ground.

 

Darius was the first monarch of his line to make use of the Persian

cuneiform script, which in this case he utilized in conjunction with

the older and more complicated Assyro-Babylonian alphabetic and

syllabic characters to record a portion of the history of his reign.

Rawlinson's translation of the famous inscription was an important

contribution towards the decipherment of the cuneiform writings of

Assyria and Babylonia.

 

Twelve years of brilliant Mesopotamian discovery concluded in 1854,

and further excavations had to be suspended until the "seventies" on

account of the unsettled political conditions of the ancient land and

the difficulties experienced in dealing with Turkish officials. During

the interval, however, archaeologists and philologists were kept fully

engaged studying the large amount of material which had been

accumulated. Sir Henry Rawlinson began the issue of his monumental

work _The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia_ on behalf of the

British Museum.

 

Goodspeed refers to the early archaeological work as the "Heroic

Period" of research, and says that the "Modern Scientific Period" began with Mr. George Smith's expedition to Nineveh in 1873.