Babylonians And Assyrians

Life And Customs

By The

Rev. A. H. Sayce

Professor of Assyriology at Oxford

London

John C. Nimmo

14 King William Street, Strand

MDCCCC

Contents

[pg ii]

Series Advertisement.

Series of Handbooks in Semitics

Edited By

James Alexander Craig

Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures and Hellenistic Greek, University of Michigan

Recent scientific research has stimulated an increasing interest in the study of the Babylonians, Assyrians, and allied Semitic races of ancient history among scholars, students, and the serious reading public generally. It has provided us with a picture of a hitherto unknown civilization, and a history of one of the great branches of the human family. The object of the present Series is to state its results in popularly scientific form. Each work is complete in itself, and the Series, taken as a whole, neglects no phase of the general subject. Each contributor is a specialist in the subject assigned him, and has been chosen from the body of eminent Semitic scholars both in Europe and America.

The Series will be composed of the following volumes:—

I. Hebrews. History and Government. By Professor J. F. McCurdy, University of Toronto, Canada.

II. Hebrews. Ethics and Religion. By Professor Archibald Duff, Airedale College, Bradford.

III. The Sumerians. Language, History, and Religion. By Professor Fritz Hommel, University of Munich, Germany.

IV. Babylonians and Assyrians. History to the Fall of Babylon. By Professor Fritz Hommel, University of Munich, Germany.

V. Babylonians and Assyrians. Religion. By Professor J. A. Craig, University of Michigan.

VI. Babylonians and Assyrians. Life and Customs. (With special reference to the Contract Tablets and Letters.) By Professor A. H. Sayce, University of Oxford. Now Ready.

VII. Babylonians and Assyrians. Excavations and Account of Decipherment of Inscriptions. By Professor A. V. Hilprecht, University of Pennsylvania.

VIII. Arabia. Discoveries in, and History and Religion until Mohammed. By Dr. Eduard Glazer, University of Munich, Germany.

IX. Development of Islamic Theology, Jurisprudence, and Theory of the State. By Professor D. B. MacDonald, Hartford Theological Seminary.

In addition to the above the following volumes are to be included in the Series, and others may be added from time to time:—

X. Phœnicia. History and Government, including Colonies, Trade, and Religion.

XI. Palestine and Syria. Important Discoveries in Recent Years.

XII. Arabic Literature and Science Since Mohammed.

XIII. The Influence of Semitic Art and Mythology on Western Nations.

Editor's Preface

Semitic studies, both linguistically and archæologically, have advanced by rapid strides during the last two decades. Fresh light has fallen upon the literary, scientific, theological, mercantile, and other achievements of this great branch of the human family. What these peoples thought and achieved has a very direct bearing upon some of the problems that lie nearest to the hearts of a large portion of the intelligent peoples of Christendom to-day. Classical studies no longer enjoy a monopoly of attention in the curricula of our colleges and universities. It is, in fact, more and more plainly perceived by scholars that among the early peoples who have contributed to the ideas inwrought into our present civilization there is none to whom we owe a greater debt than we do to the Semitic family. Apart from the genetic relation which the thought of these peoples bears to the Christianity of the past and present, a study of their achievements in general has become a matter of [pg vi] general human interest. It is here that we find the earliest beginnings of civilization historically known to us—here that early religious ideas, social customs and manners, political organizations, the beginnings of art and architecture, the rise and growth of mythological ideas that have endured and spread to western nations, can be seen in their earliest stages, and here alone the information is supplied which enables us to follow them most successfully in their development.

The object of this series is to present, in brief and compact form, a knowledge of the more important facts in the history of this family in a way that will be serviceable to students in colleges, universities, and theological seminaries, to the clergy, and to intelligent lay readers.

It has been the good fortune of the Editor and Publishers to secure the interest and co-operation of scholars who are fitted by their special knowledge of the subjects entrusted to them. Works written on Semitic subjects by those whose knowledge is gained from other than the original sources are sure to be defective in many ways. It is only the specialist whose knowledge enables him to take a comprehensive view of the entire field in which he labors who is able to gain the perspective necessary for the production of a general work which will set forth prominently, and in their proper relations, the salient and most interesting facts.

Each contributor to the Series presents his contribution [pg vii] subject to no change by the Editor. In cases where it may be deemed of sufficient importance to notice a divergent view this will be done in a foot-note. The authors, however, will aim to make their several contributions consistent with the latest discoveries.

James Alexander Craig.

University of Michigan,

September, 1899.

Chapter I. Babylonia And Its Inhabitants

Babylonia was the gathering-place of the nations. Berossus, the Chaldean historian, tells us that after the creation it was peopled by a mixture of races, and we read in the book of Genesis that Babel, or Babylon, was the first home of the manifold languages of mankind. The country for the most part had been won from the sea; it was the gift of the two great rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, which once flowed separately into the Persian Gulf. Its first settlers must have established themselves on the desert plateau which fringes the Babylonian plain rather than in the plain itself.

The plain is formed of the silt deposited each year by the rivers that flow through it. It is, in fact, as much a delta as Northern Egypt, and is correspondingly fertile. Materials exist for determining approximately the rate at which this delta has been formed. The waters of the Persian Gulf are continually receding from the shore, and Ainsworth[1] calculates [pg 002] that about ninety feet of land are added annually to the coast-line. But the rate of deposit seems to have been somewhat more rapid in the past. At all events, Mohammerah, which in 1835 was forty-seven miles distant from the Gulf, stands on the site of Spasinus Charax, which, in the time of Alexander the Great, was not quite a mile from the sea. In 2,160 years, therefore, no less than forty-six miles of land have been formed at the head of the Persian Gulf, or nearly one hundred and fifteen feet each year.

The deposit of soil, however, may not have been so rapid in the flourishing days of Babylonian history, when the canals were carefully attended to and the irrigation of the country kept under control. It is safer, therefore, to assume for the period preceding the rise of the Macedonian Empire a rate of deposit of not more than one hundred feet each year. The seaport of primitive Chaldea was Eridu, not far from Ur, and as the mounds of Abu-Shahrein or Nowâwis, which now mark its site, are nearly one hundred and thirty miles from the present line of coast, we must go back as far as 6500 B.C. for the foundation of the town. “Ur of the Chaldees,” as it is called in the Book of Genesis, was some thirty miles to the north, and on the same side of the Euphrates; the ruins of its great temple of the Moon-god are now known by the name of Muqayyar or Mugheir. It must have been founded on the sandy plateau of the Arabian desert at a time when the plain enclosed between the Tigris and the Euphrates was still too marshy for human habitation. As the Moon-god of [pg 003] Ur was held to be the son of El-lil of Nippur, Dr. Peters is doubtless right in believing that Ur was a colony of the latter city. Nippur is the modern Niffer or Nuffar in the north of Babylonia, and recent excavations have shown that its temple was the chief sanctuary and religious centre of the civilized eastern world in the earliest epoch to which our records reach. Eridu, Ur, and Nippur seem to have been the three chief cities of primeval Babylonia. As we shall see in a future chapter, Eridu and Nippur were the centres from which the early culture and religion of the country were diffused. But there was an essential difference between them. Ea, the god of Eridu, was a god of light and beneficence, who employed his divine wisdom in healing the sick and restoring the dead to life. He had given man all the elements of civilization; rising each morning out of his palace under the waters of the deep, he taught them the arts and sciences, the industries and manners, of civilized life. El-lil of Nippur, on the contrary, was the lord of the underworld; magical spells and incantations were his gifts to mankind, and his kingdom was over the dead rather than the living. The culture which emanated from Eridu and Nippur was thus of a wholly different kind. Is it possible that the settlers in the two cities were of a different race?

Of this there is no proof. Such evidence as we have tells against it. And the contrast in the character of the cultures of Eridu and Nippur can be explained in another way. Eridu was a seaport; its population was in contact with other races, and its [pg 004] ships traded with the coasts of Arabia. The myth which told how Ea or Oannes had brought the elements of civilization to his people expressly stated that he came from the waters of the Persian Gulf. The culture of Eridu may thus have been due to foreign intercourse; Eridu was a city of merchants and sailors, Nippur of sorcerer-priests.

Eridu and Nippur, however, alike owed their origin to a race which we will term Sumerian. Its members spoke agglutinative dialects, and the primitive civilization of Babylonia was their creation. They were the founders of its great cities and temples, the inventors of the pictorial system of writing out of which the cuneiform characters subsequently developed, the instructors in culture of their Semitic neighbors. How deep and far-reaching was their influence may be gathered from the fact that the earliest civilization of Western Asia finds its expression in the Sumerian language and script. To whatever race the writer might belong he clothed his thoughts in the words and characters of the Sumerian people. The fact makes it often difficult for us to determine whether the princes of primitive Chaldea whose inscriptions have come down to us were Semites or not. Their very names assume Sumerian forms.

It was from the Sumerian that the Semite learnt to live in cities. His own word for “city” was âlu, the Hebrew 'ohel “a tent,” which is still used in the Old Testament in the sense of “home;” the Hebrew 'îr is the Sumerian eri. Ekallu, the Hebrew hêkal, “a palace,” comes from the Sumerian ê-gal or [pg 005] “great house;” the first palaces seen by the Semitic nomad must have been those of the Chaldean towns.

But a time came when the Semite had absorbed the culture of his Sumerian teachers and had established kingdoms of his own in the future Babylonia. For untold centuries he lived in intermixture with the older population of the country, and the two races acted and re-acted on each other. A mixed people was the result, with a mixed language and a mixed form of religion. The Babylonia of later days was, in fact, a country whose inhabitants and language were as composite as the inhabitants and language of modern England. Members of the same family had names derived from different families of speech, and while the old Sumerian borrowed Semitic words which it spelt phonetically, the Semitic lexicon was enriched with loan-words from Sumerian which were treated like Semitic roots.

The Semite improved upon the heritage he had received. Even the system of writing was enlarged and modified. Its completion and arrangement are due to Semitic scribes who had been trained in Sumerian literature. It was probably at the court of Sargon of Akkad that what we may term the final revision of the syllabary took place. At all events, after his epoch the cuneiform script underwent but little real change.

Sargon was the founder of the first Semitic empire in Asia. His date was placed by the native historians as far back as 3800 B.C., and as they had an abundance of materials at their disposal for settling it, which we do not possess, we have no reason to [pg 006] dispute it. Moreover, it harmonizes with the length of time required for bringing about that fusion of Sumerian and Semitic elements which created the Babylonia we know. The power of Sargon extended to the Mediterranean, even, it may be, to the island of Cyprus. His conquests were continued by his son and successor Naram-Sin, who made his way to the precious copper-mines of the Sinaitic peninsula, the chief source of the copper that was used so largely in the work of his day. “The land of the Amorites,” as Syria was called, was already a Babylonian province, and he could therefore march in safety toward the south through the desert region which was known as Melukhkha.

How long the empire of Sargon lasted we do not know. But it spread Babylonian culture to the distant west and brought it to the very border of Egypt. It was, too, a culture which had become essentially Semitic; the Sumerian elements on which it was based had been thoroughly transformed. What Babylonian civilization was in the latest days of Chaldean history, that it already was, to all intents and purposes, in the age of Sargon. The Sumerian and the Semite had become one people.

But the mixture of nationalities in Babylonia was not yet complete. Colonies of Amorites, from Canaan, settled in it for the purposes of trade; wandering tribes of Semites, from Northern Arabia, pastured their cattle on the banks of its rivers, and in the Abrahamic age a line of kings from Southern Arabia made themselves masters of the country, and established their capital at Babylon. Their names resembled [pg 007] those of Southern Arabia on the one hand, of the Hebrews on the other, and the Babylonian scribes were forced to give translations of them in their own language.

But all these incomers belonged to the Semitic race, and the languages they spoke were but varieties of the same family of speech. It is probable that such was the case with the Kaldâ, who lived in the marshes at the mouth of the Euphrates, and from whom classical geography has derived the name of Chaldean. The extension of the name to the whole population of Babylonia was due to the reign of the Kaldâ prince, Merodach-baladan, at Babylon. For years he represented Babylonian freedom in its struggle with Assyria, and his “Chaldean” subjects became an integral part of the population. Perhaps, too, the theory is right which makes Nebuchadnezzar of Kaldâ descent. If so, there is a good reason why the inhabitants of Babylonia should have become “Chaldeans” in the classical age.

Of wholly different origin were the Kassites, mountaineers from the east of Elam, who conquered Babylonia, and founded a dynasty of kings which lasted for several centuries. They also gave their name to the population of the country, and, in the Tel-el-Amarna tablets, accordingly, the natives of Babylonia are known as “Kassi.” Sennacherib found their kinsfolk in the Elamite mountains, and here they still lived in the age of the Greek writers. Strabo calls them Kosseans, and it seems probable that they are the same as the Kissians, after whom the whole of Elam was named. At any rate the Kassites were [pg 008] neither Sumerians nor Semites; and their language, of which several words have been preserved, has no known connections. But they left their mark upon the Babylonian people, and several family names were borrowed from them.

The Babylonian was thus a compound of Sumerian, Semitic, and Kassite elements. They all went to form the culture which we term Babylonian, and which left such enduring traces on Western Asia and the world. Mixed races are invariably the best, and the Babylonians were no exception to the rule. We have only to compare them with their neighbors, the more purely blooded Semitic Assyrians, to assure ourselves of the fact. The culture of Assyria was but an imitation and reflection of that of Babylonia—there was nothing original about it. The Assyrian excelled only in the ferocities of war, not in the arts of peace. Even the gods of Assyria had migrated from the southern kingdom.

The dual character of Babylonian civilization must never be forgotten. It serves to explain a good deal that would otherwise be puzzling in the religious and social life of the people. But the social life was also influenced and conditioned by the peculiar nature of the country in which the people lived. It was an alluvial plain, sloping toward the sea, and inundated by the overflow of the two great rivers which ran through it. When cultivated it was exceedingly fertile; but cultivation implied a careful regulation of the overflow, as well as a constant attention to the embankments which kept out the waters, or to the canals which drained and watered the soil.

The inhabitants were therefore, necessarily, agriculturists. They were also irrigators and engineers, compelled to study how best to regulate the supply of water, to turn the pestiferous marsh into a fruitful field, and to confine the rivers and canals within their channels. Agriculture and engineering thus had their natural home in Babylonia, and originated in the character of the country itself.

The neighborhood of the sea and the two great waterways which flanked the Babylonian plain further gave an impetus to trade. The one opened the road to the spice-bearing coasts of Southern Arabia and the more distant shores of Egypt; the other led to the highlands of Western Asia. From the first the Babylonians were merchants and sailors as well as agriculturists. The “cry” of the Chaldeans was “in their ships.” The seaport of Eridu was one of the earliest of Babylonian cities; and a special form of boat took its name from the more inland town of Ur. While the population of the country devoted itself to agriculture, the towns grew wealthy by the help of trade.

Their architecture was dependent on the nature of the country. In the alluvial plain no stone was procurable; clay, on the other hand, was everywhere. All buildings, accordingly, were constructed of clay bricks, baked in the sun, and bonded together with cement of the same material; their roofs were of wood, supported, not unfrequently, by the stems of the palm. The palm stems, in time, became pillars, and Babylonia was thus the birthplace of columnar architecture. It was also the birthplace of decorated [pg 010] walls. It was needful to cover the sun-dried bricks with plaster, for the sake both of their preservation and of appearance. This was the origin of the stucco with which the walls were overlaid, and which came in time to be ornamented with painting. Ezekiel refers to the figures, portrayed in vermilion, which adorned the walls of the houses of the rich.

The want of stone and the abundance of clay had another and unique influence upon Babylonian culture. It led to the invention of the written clay tablet, which has had such momentous results for the civilization of the whole Eastern world. The pictures with which Babylonian writing began were soon discarded for the conventional forms, which could so easily be impressed by the stylus upon the soft clay. It is probable that the use of the clay as a writing material was first suggested by the need there was in matters of business that the contracting parties should record their names. The absence of stone made every pebble valuable, and pebbles were accordingly cut into cylindrical forms and engraved with signs. When the cylinder was rolled over a lump of wet clay, its impress remained forever. The signs became cuneiform characters, and the Babylonian wrote them upon clay instead of stone.

The seal-cylinder and the use of clay as a writing material must consequently be traced to the peculiar character of the country in which the Babylonian lived. To the same origin must be ascribed his mode of burial. The tomb was built of bricks; there were no rocky cliffs in which to excavate it, and the marshy soil made a grave unsanitary. It was [pg 011] doubtless sanitary reasons alone that caused wood to be heaped about the tomb after an interment and set on fire so that all within it was partially consumed. The narrow limits of the Babylonian plain obliged the cemetery of the dead to adjoin the houses of the living, and cremation, whether partial or complete, became a necessity.

Even the cosmogony of the Babylonians has been influenced by their surroundings. The world, it was believed, originated in a watery chaos, like that in which the first settlers had found the Babylonian plain. The earth not only rested on the waters, but the waters themselves, dark and unregulated, were the beginning of all things. This cosmological conception was carried with the rest of Babylonian culture to the West, and after passing through Canaan found its way into Greek philosophy. In the Book of Genesis we read that “darkness was on the face of the deep” before the creative spirit of God brooded over it, and Thales, the first of Greek philosophers, taught that water was the principle out of which all things have come.

The fertility of the Babylonian soil was remarkable. Grain, it was said, gave a return of two hundred for one, sometimes of three hundred for one. Herodotus, or the authority he quotes, grows enthusiastic upon the subject. “The leaf of the wheat and barley,” he says, “is as much as three inches in width, and the stalks of the millet and sesamum are so tall that no one who has never been in that country would believe me were I to mention their height.” In fact, naturalists tell us that Babylonia was the [pg 012] primitive home of the cultivated cereals, wheat and probably barley, and that from the banks of the Euphrates they must have been disseminated throughout the civilized world. Wheat, indeed, has been found growing wild in our own days in the neighborhood of Hit.

The dissemination of wheat goes back to a remote epoch. Like barley, it is met with in the tombs of that prehistoric population of Egypt which still lived in the neolithic age and whose later remains are coeval with the first Pharaonic epoch. The fact throws light on the antiquity of the intercourse which existed between the Euphrates and the Nile, and bears testimony to the influence already exerted on the Western world by the culture of Babylonia. We have, indeed, no written records which go back to so distant a past; it belongs, perhaps, to an epoch when the art of writing had not as yet been invented. But there was already civilization in Babylonia, and the elements of its future social life were already in existence. Babylonian culture is immeasurably old.

Chapter II. The Family

Two principles struggled for recognition in Babylonian family life. One was the patriarchal, the other the matriarchal. Perhaps they were due to a duality of race; perhaps they were merely a result of the circumstances under which the Babylonian lived. At times it would seem as if we must pronounce the Babylonian family to have been patriarchal in its character; at other times the wife and mother occupies an independent and even commanding position. It may be noted that whereas in the old Sumerian hymns the woman takes precedence of the man, the Semitic translation invariably reverses the order: the one has “female and male,” the other “male and female.” Elsewhere in the Semitic world, where the conceptions of Babylonian culture had not penetrated, the woman was subordinate to the man, his helpmate and not his equal.

In this respect nothing can be more significant than the changes undergone by the name and worship of the goddess Istar, when they were carried from Babylonia to the Semites of the West. In Babylonia she was a goddess of independent power, who stood on a footing of equality with the gods. But in [pg 014] Southern Arabia and Moab she became a male divinity, and in the latter country was even identified with the supreme god Chemosh. In Canaan she passed into the feminine Ashtoreth, and at last was merged in the crowd of goddesses who were but the feminine reflections of the male. A goddess whose attributes did not differ from those of a god was foreign to the religious ideas of the purely Semitic mind.

It was otherwise in Babylonia. There the goddess was the equal of the god, while on earth the women claimed rights which placed them almost on a level with the men. One of the early sovereigns of the country was a queen, Ellat-Gula, and even in Assyria the bas-reliefs of Assur-bani-pal represent the queen as sitting and feasting by the side of her husband. A list of trees brought to Akkad in the reign of Sargon (3800 B.C.) speaks of them as having been conveyed by the servants of the queen, and if Dr. Scheil is right in his translation of the Sumerian words, the kings of Ur, before the days of Abraham, made their daughters high-priestesses of foreign lands.

Up to the last the Babylonian woman, in her own name, could enter into partnership with others, could buy and sell, lend and borrow, could appear as plaintiff and witness in a court of law, could even bequeath her property as she wished. In a deed, dated in the second year of Nabonidos (555 B.C.), a father transfers all his property to his daughter, reserving to himself only the use of it during the rest of his life. In return the daughter agrees to provide him with the necessaries of life, food and [pg 015] drink, oil and clothing. A few years later, in the second year of Cyrus, a woman of the name of Nubtâ, or “Bee,” hired out a slave for five years in order that he might be taught the art of weaving. She stipulated to give him one qa, or about a quart and a half of food, each day, and to provide him with clothing while he was learning the trade. It is evident that Nubtâ owned looms and traded in woven fabrics on her own account.

Nubtâ was the daughter of Ben-Hadad-amara, a Syrian settled in Babylonia who had been adopted by another Syrian of the name of Ben-Hadad-nathan. After the latter's death his widow brought an action before the royal judges to recover her husband's property. She stated that after their marriage she and Ben-Hadad-nathan had traded together, and that a house had been purchased with a portion of her dowry. This house, the value of which was as much as 110 manehs, 50 shekels, or £62 10s., had been assigned to her in perpetuity. The half-brother Aqabi-il (Jacob-el), however, now claimed everything, including the house. The case was tried at Babylon before six judges in the ninth year of Nabonidos, and they decided in favor of the plaintiff.

One of the documents that have come down to us from the age of Abraham records the gift of a female slave by a husband to his wife. The slave and her children, it was laid down, were to remain the property of the wife in case either of divorce or of the husband's death. The right of the woman to hold private property of her own, over which the male heirs had no control, was thus early recognized by [pg 016] the law. In later times it is referred to in numberless contracts. In the reign of Nebokin-abla, for instance, in the eleventh century B.C., we find a field bequeathed first of all to a daughter and then to a sister; in the beginning of the reign of Nabonidos we hear of a brother and sister, the children of a naturalized Egyptian, inheriting their father's property together; and in the fourth year of Cyrus his son Cambyses sued for the payment of a loan which he had made to a Babylonian on the security of some house-property, and which was accordingly refunded by the debtor's wife. Other deeds relate to the borrowing of money by a husband and his wife in partnership, to a wife selling a slave for a maneh of silver on her own account, to a woman bringing an action before six judges at the beginning of the reign of Nabonidos to recover the price of a slave she had sold, and to another woman who two years previously was the witness to the sale of a house. Further proofs are not needed of the independent position of the woman, whether married or single, and of her equality with the man in the eyes of the law.

It would seem that she was on a level with him also in the eyes of religion. There were priestesses in Babylonia as well as priests. The oracles of Istar at Arbela were worked by inspired prophetesses, who thus resembled Deborah and Huldah and the other prophetesses of Israel. When Esar-haddon inquired of the will of heaven, it was from the prophetesses of Istar that he received encouragement and a promise of victory. From the earliest period, moreover, there [pg 017] were women who lived like nuns, unmarried and devoted to the service of the Sun-god. The office was held in high honor, one of the daughters of King Ammi-Zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi or Amraphel, being a devotee of the god. In the reign of the same king we find two of these devotees and their nieces letting for a year nine feddans or acres of ground in the district in which the “Amorites” of Canaan were settled. This was done “by command of the high-priest Sar-ilu,” a name in which Mr. Pinches suggests that we should see that of Israel. The women were to receive a shekel of silver, or three shillings, “the produce of the field,” by way of rent, while six measures of corn on every ten feddans were to be set apart for the Sun-god himself. In the previous reign a house had been let at an annual rent of two shekels which was the joint property of a devotee of the Sun-god Samas and her brother. It is clear that consecration to the service of the deity did not prevent the “nun” from owning and enjoying property.

Like Samas, the Sun-god, Istar was also served by women, who, however, do not seem to have led the same reputable lives. They were divided into two classes, one of which was called the “Wailers,” from the lamentations with which each year they mourned the death of the god Tammuz, the stricken favorite of Istar. The Chaldean Epic of Gilgames speaks of the “troops” of them that were gathered together in the city of Erech. Here Istar had her temple along with her father, Anu, the Sky-god, and here accordingly her devotees were assembled. Like the goddess they [pg 018] served, it would appear that they were never married in lawful wedlock. But they nevertheless formed a corporation, like the corporations of the priests.

Babylonian law and custom prevailed also in Assyria. So far as can be gathered from the contracts that have come down to us, the Assyrian women enjoyed almost as many privileges as their sisters in Babylonia. Thus, in 668 B.C., we find a lady, Tsarpî by name, buying the sister of a man whose slave she was, for reasons unknown to us, and paying half a maneh of silver (£4 10s.) for the girl. Tsarpî was a “prefectess,” like another lady who is called “the prefectess of Nineveh,” and who, in 683 B.C., purchased seventeen slaves and a garden. It is plain from this that women could hold civil offices and even act as governors of a city.

In fact, wherever Babylonian culture and law extended, the principles and practice of it were necessarily in force. The Amorite colonies from Canaan established in Babylonia for the purposes of trade in the age of Abraham were naturally subject to the Babylonian laws, and the women among them possessed all the rights of their Babylonian neighbors. At the very beginning of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged, an Amorite lady, a certain Kuryatum, brought an action for the recovery of a field which had been the property of her father, Asalia, and won her suit. Kuryatum and her brother were themselves subsequently sued by three other “Amorites,” the children of Izi-idrê, one of whom was a woman, for a field and house, together with some slaves and palm-trees, of which, it was asserted, they had wrongfully [pg 019] taken possession. The judges, however, after hearing both sides, dismissed the case.

It is not strange that the same laws and principles should have held good in Canaan itself, which was so long a Babylonian province. Sarah, who was of Babylonian origin, owned a female slave (Gen. xvi. 2, 6, 8, 9), and the Kennizzite Caleb assigned a field with springs to his daughter Achsah in the early days of the invasion of Canaan (Josh. xv. 18, 19). A Canaanitish lady takes part in the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence, and writes to the Pharaoh on matters of state, while the Mosaic Law allowed the daughter to inherit the possessions of her father (Numb. xxxvi. 8). This, however, was only the case where there was no son; after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan, when the traditions of Babylonian custom had passed away, we hear no more of brothers and sisters sharing together the inheritance of their father, or of a wife bequeathing anything which belongs to her of right. As regards the woman, the law of Israel, after the settlement in Canaan, was the moral law of the Semitic tribes. We must go back to the age of Abraham and Sarah to find a Hebrew woman possessed of the same powers as the Babylonian lady who, in the fifth year of Cambyses, sold a slave for two manehs and five shekels of silver, her husband and mother guaranteeing the value of the chattel that was thus sold.

The dowry which the woman brought with her on marriage secured of itself her independence. It was her absolute property, and she could leave it by will as she pleased. It protected her from tyrannical conduct [pg 020] on the part of her husband, as well as from the fear of divorce on insufficient grounds. If a divorce took place the dowry had to be restored to her in full, and she then returned to her father's house or set up an establishment of her own. Where no dowry had been brought by the bride, the husband was often required by the marriage contract to pay her a specified sum of money in case of her divorce. Thus a marriage contract made in Babylon in the thirteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar stipulates that, if the husband marries a second wife, the act shall be equivalent to a divorce of the first wife, who shall accordingly receive not only her dowry, but a maneh of silver as well. The payment, in fact, was a penalty on the unfaithfulness of the husband and served as a check upon both divorce and polygamy.

The dowry consisted not of money alone, but also of slaves and furniture, the value of which was stated in the marriage contract. In the contract just referred to, for instance, part of the dowry consisted of a slave who was valued at half a maneh. Sometimes the dowry included cattle and sheep. In the sixth year of Nabonidos we hear of three slaves and “furniture with which to stock the house,” besides a maneh of silver (£6), being given as the marriage-portion. In this instance, however, the silver was not forthcoming on the wedding-day, and in place of it a slave valued at two-thirds of a maneh was accepted, the remaining third being left for payment at a subsequent date. Where the dowry could not be paid at once, security for the payment of it was taken by the bridegroom.

The payment was made, not by the bridegroom, as among the Israelites and other Semitic peoples, but by the father of the bride. If he were dead, or if the mother of the bride had been divorced and was in the enjoyment of her own property, the mother took the place of the father and was expected to provide the dowry. In such a case she also naturally gave permission for the marriage, and it was from her accordingly that consent to it had to be obtained. In one instance, however, in a deed dated in the sixteenth year of Nabonidos, a sister is given in marriage by her two brothers, who consequently furnish the dowry, consisting of a piece of ground inherited from the mother, a slave, clothes, and furniture. It is evident that in this case both the parents must have been dead.

It was the bridegroom's duty and interest to see that the dowry was duly paid. He enjoyed the usufruct of it during his life, and not unfrequently it was employed not only to furnish the house of the newly married couple, but also to start them in business. It was with his wife's dowry that Ben-Hadad-nathan bought in part the house to which his widow laid claim after his death, and we read of instances in which the husband and wife enter into partnership in order to trade with the wife's money. More frequently the wife uses her dowry to transact business separately, her purchases and loans being made in her own name; this is especially the case if she otherwise has property of her own.[2]

At times the son-in-law found it difficult to get the dowry paid. From a deed dated in the third year of Cambyses we gather that the dowry, instead of being delivered “into the hand” of the bridegroom, as ought to have been done at the time of the marriage, was still unpaid nine years later. Sometimes, of course, this was due to the inability of the father-in-law to discharge his debt, through bankruptcy, death, or other causes. Where, therefore, the money was not immediately forthcoming, security was taken for its future payment. If payment in full was impossible, owing to pecuniary losses incurred after the marriage contract had been drawn up, the bridegroom was entitled to claim a proportionate amount of it on behalf of his wife. The heirs were called upon to pay what was due if the father-in-law died between the drawing-up of the contract and the actual marriage, and when the wife died without children it returned to her “father's house.”

If the husband died and his widow married again, she carried her former dowry with her. In such a case the children of the first marriage inherited two-thirds of it upon her death, the remaining third going to the children of the second husband. This was in accordance with a law which regulated the succession [pg 023] to the property of a father who had married a second time, the children of the first marriage receiving two-thirds of it and the remainder being reserved for the children of the second wife. The law could only be overruled by a will made during the man's lifetime, and properly attested by witnesses.

The dowry could not be alienated by the wife without the consent of her parents, if they were still alive. In the year of Nergal-sharezer's accession, for example, a certain Nergal-ballidh and his wife Dhibtâ wished to sell a slave, who had constituted the dowry of Dhibtâ, for twenty-five shekels, but the sale was not considered valid until the consent of both her father and mother had been obtained.

The dowry was not the only property the woman was able to hold. She had similar power to hold and dispose of whatever else had come to her by inheritance or gift. The gains she made in business, the proceeds of the sale of her estates, and the interest upon the capital she lent, all belonged to herself, and to herself alone. For purposes of succession they were reckoned along with the dowry as constituting her property during life. In the thirty-fourth year of Nebuchadnezzar, for instance, a father stipulates that the creditors of his daughter's father-in-law should have no claim either upon her dowry or upon any other part of her possessions.

The power of the married woman over her property was doubtless the result of the system which provided her with a dowry. The principle of her absolute control over the latter once admitted, it was extended by the law to the rest of her estate. She thus [pg 024] took rank by the side of the man, and, like him, could trade or otherwise deal with her property as she chose. The dowry, in fact, must have been her original charter of freedom.

But it was so because it was given by her father, and not by the bridegroom. Where it was the gift of the bridegroom it was but a civilized form of purchasing the bride. In such a case the husband had a right to the person and possessions of the wife, inasmuch as he had bought her; as much right, in fact, as he had to the person and possessions of a slave. The wife was merely a superior slave.

Where, however, the dowry was the gift of the bride's father the conditions were reversed. The husband received not only a wife, he received also an estate along with her. He it was upon whom the benefit was conferred, and he had to accept the conditions offered him, not to make them. In a commercial state like Babylonia, property represented personalty, and the personalty of the wife accordingly remained with the family from which her property was derived, rather than with the husband, to whom the use of it was lent. Hence the independence of the married woman in Babylonia and her complete freedom of action as regards her husband. The property she possessed, the personalty it represented, belonged to herself alone.

Traces, however, may be detected of an older order of things, which once existed, at all events, in the Semitic element of the Babylonian population. The dowry had to be paid to the husband, to be deposited, as it were, in his “hand.” It was with him that [pg 025] the marriage contract was made. This must surely go back to an age when the marriage portion was really given to the bridegroom, and he had the same right over it as was enjoyed until recently by the husband in England. Moreover, the right of divorce retained by the husband, like the fact that the bride was given away by a male relation, points in the same direction. According to an early Sumerian law, while the repudiation of the wife on the part of the husband was punishable only with a small fine, for the repudiation of the husband by the wife the penalty was death. A deed drawn up in the time of Khammurabi shows that this law was still in force in the age of Abraham. It lays down that if the wife is unfaithful to her husband she may be drowned, while the husband can rid himself of his wife by the payment only of a maneh of silver. Indeed, as late as the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the old law remained unrepealed, and we find a certain Nebo-akhi-iddin, who married a singing-woman, stipulating in the marriage contract that if he should divorce her and marry another he was to pay her six manehs, but if, on the contrary, she committed adultery, she should be put to death with “an iron sword.”

In this instance, however, the husband married beneath him, and in view of the antecedents of the wife the penalty with which she was threatened in case of unfaithfulness was perhaps necessary. She came to him, moreover, without either a dowry or family relations who could give her away. She was thus little better than the concubines whom the Babylonian was allowed to keep by the side of his [pg 026] lawful wife. But even so, the marriage contract had to be made out in full legal form, and the penalty to be paid for her divorce was as much as £54. With this she could have lived comfortably and probably have had no difficulty in finding another husband.

The concubine was usually a slave who had been bought by the bridegroom. Occasionally, by agreement with the parents, the wife herself was in much the same position. Thus Dagil-ili, who married the daughter of a lady named Khammâ, gave the mother one and a half manehs of silver and a slave worth half a maneh, and agreed that if he married another wife he would give her daughter a maneh and send her back to her old home. Here the husband practically buys his wife, though even so the law obliged him to divorce her if he married again, and also fined him for doing so. Khammâ was apparently in financial difficulties, and consequently, instead of furnishing her daughter with a dowry, received money from the bridegroom. It was a private arrangement, and utterly opposed to the usual custom. The parents had, however, the power of selling their children before they came of age, and where the parents were dead, the same power was possessed—at any rate in Assyria—by a brother in the case of a sister. Doubtless the power was restricted by law, but the instances in which we hear of its being exercised are so rare that we do not know what these restrictions were.

Nor do we know the reasons which were considered sufficient to justify divorce. The language of the early laws would seem to imply that originally it was quite enough to pronounce the words: “Thou art not [pg 027] my wife,” “Thou art not my husband.” But the loss of the wife's dowry and the penalties attached to divorce must have tended to check it on the part of the husband, except in exceptional circumstances. Perhaps want of children was held to be a sufficient pretext for it; certainly adultery must have been so. Another cause of divorce was a legal one: a second marriage invalidated the first, if the first wife was still alive.

This is a very astonishing fact in a country where polygamy was allowed. It proves that polygamy was greatly restricted in practice, and that the tendency of the law was to forbid it altogether. Among the multitudinous contracts of the second Babylonian empire it is difficult to find any which show that a man had two legitimate wives living at one and the same time. The high position of the mother of the family, her independence and commercial equality with her husband, were all against it. It is only where the wife is a bought slave that polygamy can flourish.

In early times, it is true, the rich Babylonian indulged in the possession of more than one wife. Some contracts of the age of Khammurabi, translated by Mr. Pinches, are particularly instructive in this respect. We hear in them of a certain Arad-Samas, who first married a lady called Taram-Sagila and then her adopted sister Iltani. Iltani, it is ordained, shall be under the orders of her sister, shall prepare her food, carry her chair to the Temple of Merodach, and obey her in all things. Not a word is said about the divorce of the first wife; it is taken for granted that she is to remain at the head of the household, [pg 028] the younger and second wife acting as her servant. The position of Iltani, in fact, is not very different from that of a slave, and it is significant that neither wife brought a dowry with her.

As we have seen in the case of Dagil-ili, the law and custom of later Babylonia display a complete change of feeling and practice. Marriage with a second wife came to involve, as a matter of course, divorce from the first, even where there had been a mésalliance and the first wife had been without a dowry. The woman had thus gained a second victory; the rule that bound her in regard to marriage was now applied to the man. The privilege of marrying two husbands at once had been denied her; usage was now denying a similar privilege to him. It was only when the first wife was dead or divorced that a second could be taken; the wife might have a successor, but not a rival.

The divorced wife was regarded by the law as a widow, and could therefore marry again. A deed of divorce, dated in the reign of the father of Khammurabi, expressly grants her this right. To the remarriage of the widow there was naturally no bar; but the children by the two marriages belonged to different families, and were kept carefully distinct. This is illustrated by a curious deed drawn up at Babylon, in the ninth year of Nabonidos. A certain Bel-Katsir, who had been adopted by his uncle, married a widow who already had a son. She bore him no children, however, and he accordingly asked the permission of his uncle to adopt his step-son, thereby making him the heir of his uncle's property. [pg 029] To this the uncle objected, and it was finally agreed that if Bel-Katsir had no child he was to adopt his own brother, and so secure the succession of the estate to a member of his own family. The property of the mother probably went to her son; but she had the power to leave it as she liked. This may be gathered from a will, dated in the seventh year of Cyrus, in which a son leaves property to his father in case of death, which had come to him from his maternal grandfather and grandmother. The property had been specially bequeathed to him, doubtless after his mother's death, the grandmother passing over the rest of her descendants in his favor.

The marriage ceremony was partly religious, partly civil; no marriage was legally valid without a contract duly attested and signed. The Babylonians carried their business habits into all departments of life, and in the eyes of the law matrimony was a legal contract, the forms of which had to be duly observed. In the later days of Babylonian history the legal and civil aspect of the rite seems to have been exclusively considered, but at an earlier period it required also the sanction of religion; and Mr. Pinches has published a fragmentary Sumerian text in which the religious ceremony is described. Those who officiated at it, first placed their hands and feet against the hands and feet of the bridegroom, then the bride laid her neck by the side of his, and he was made to say to her: “Silver and gold shall fill thy lap; thou art my wife; I am thy husband. Like the fruit of an orchard will I give thee offspring.” Next came the ceremony of binding the sandals on the feet of the [pg 030] newly wedded pair and of handing them the latchet wherewith the shoes should be tied, as well as “a purse of silver and gold.” The purse perhaps symbolized the dowry, which was given by the father of the bride. In the time of Nebuchadnezzar the ceremony was restricted to joining together the hands of the bride and bridegroom.

Contact with the Assyrians and Babylonians in the Exilic period introduced the Babylonian conception of the legal character of marriage among the Israelites, and, contrary to the older custom, it became necessary that it should be attested by a written contract. Thus, Raguel, when he gave his daughter “to be wife to Tobias,” “called Edna, his wife, and took paper and did write an instrument of covenants, and sealed it” (Tobit vii. 14).

According to Herodotus, a gigantic system of public prostitution prevailed in Babylonia. Every unmarried woman was compelled to remain in the sacred enclosure of Mylitta—by which Istar is apparently meant—until some stranger had submitted to her embraces, while the sums derived from the sale of their personal charms by the handsome and good-looking provided portions for the ugly. Of all this there is not a trace in the mass of native documents which we now possess. There were the devotees of Istar, certainly—the ukhâtu and kharimâtu—as well as public prostitutes, who were under the protection of the law; but they formed a class apart, and had nothing to do with the respectable women of the country. On the contrary, in the age of Khammurabi it was customary to state in the marriage contracts [pg 031] that no stain whatever rested on the bride. Thus we read in one of them: “Ana-Â-uzni is the daughter of Salimat. Salimat has given her a dowry, and has offered her in marriage to Bel-sunu, the son of the artisan. Ana-Â-uzni is pure; no one has anything against her.” The dowry, as we have seen, was paid by the near relations of the wife, and where there was none, as in the case of the singing-woman married by Nebo-akhi-iddin, there was no dowry at all. The dowries provided for the ugly by the prostitution of the rich must be an invention of the Greeks.

Within what degree of relationship marriage was permitted is uncertain. A man could marry his sister-in-law, as among the Israelites, and, in one instance, we hear of marriage with a niece. In the time of Cambyses a brother marries his half-sister by the same father; but this was probably an imitation of the Persian custom.

The children, as we have seen, whether boys or girls, inherited alike, subject to the provisions of the parent's will. The will seems to have been of Babylonian origin. Testamentary devolution of property went back to an early period in a country in which the legal relations of trade had been so fully developed. Trade implied private property and the idea of individual possession. The estate belonging to a person was his absolutely, to deal with pretty much as he would. He had the same right to alienate it as he had to increase it. In a commercial community there could be no community of goods.

As far back, therefore, as our materials carry us, the unit in the Babylonian state is the individual [pg 032] rather than the family. It is he with whom both the law and the government deal, and the legal code of Babylonia is based upon the doctrine of individual responsibility. Private ownership is the key-note of Babylonian social life.

But the whole of this social life was fenced about by a written law. No title was valid for which a written document could not be produced, drawn up and attested in legal forms. The extensive commercial transactions of the Babylonians made this necessary, and the commercial spirit dominated Babylonian society. The scribe and the lawyer were needed at almost every juncture of life.

The invention of the will or documentary testament, followed naturally. The same legal powers that were required to protect a man's property during his lifetime were even more urgently required when he was dead. The will was at first the title which gave the heir his father's estate. Gradually it developed, until at last it came to be an instrument by means of which the testator retained control over his property even after his death. As an example of the form which it usually assumed, we may take one which was drawn up in the seventh year of the reign of Cyrus as King of Babylon (532 B.C.):

Nebo-baladan, the son of Samas-palassar, the son of the priest of the Sun-god, has, of his own free-will, sealed all his estate, which he had inherited from Nebo-balasu-iqbi, the son of Nur-Ea, the son of the priest of the Sun-god, the father of his mother, and from Kabtâ, the mother of Assat-Belit, his grandmother, consisting of a piece of land, a house and the slaves or serfs attached to it, in accordance with the will (literally [pg 033] tablet) which his maternal grandfather, Nebo-balasu-iqbi, and his maternal grandmother, Kabtâ, had sealed and bequeathed to Nebo-baladan, the son of their daughter, and has bequeathed them for ever to Samas-palassar, the son of Samas-ina-esi-edher, the son of the priest of the Sun-god. As long as Nebo-baladan lives the piece of ground, the house, the slaves, and all the rest of his property shall continue in his own possession, according to the terms of this his will. Whoever shall attempt to change them, may Anu, Bel, and Ae curse him; may Nebo, the divine scribe of Ê-Saggil, cut off his days! This will has been sealed in the presence of Sula, son of Bania, son of Epes-ilu; of Bel-iddin, son of Bel-natsir, son of the priest of Gula; of Nebo-sum-yukin, son of Sula, son of Sigua; of Nebo-natsir, son of Ziria, son of Sumâti; … of Nebo-sum-lisir, son of Nebo-sum-iskun, son of the wine-merchant (?), and the scribe Samas-zir-yusabsi, son of Zariqu-iddin, son of the architect. (Written at) Babylon, the 19th day of Sebat (February), the seventh year of Cyrus, king of Babylon and the world.

In this case it is a son who makes over his property to his father should he be the first to die. The will shows that the son was absolute master of his own possessions even during his father's lifetime, and could bequeath it as he chose.

A remarkable instance of the application of the principles underlying testamentary devolution is to be found in the case of Ninip-Sum-iskun, the son of a land-surveyor who handed over his property to his daughter Dhabtu, while he was still alive, stipulating only for the usufruct of it. The text begins by saying that the testator called to his daughter: “Bring me writing materials, for I am ill. My brother has deserted me; my son has offended me. To you therefore I turn. Have pity on me, and while I live [pg 034] support me with food, oil, and clothes. The income from my surveying business, in which I have two-thirds of a share with my brother, do I hand over to you.” After this preamble the deed is drawn up in due form, attested, dated, and sealed. The whole of the testator's property is assigned to his daughter “for ever,” “the usufruct of his income” only being reserved to himself “as long as he shall live.” He undertakes accordingly not to “sell” it, not to give it to another, not to pawn it or alienate a portion of it. By way of doubly securing that the deed shall take effect, the gods are invoked as well as the law.[3]

Another case in which a kind of will seems to have been made which should take effect during the lifetime of the testator, is a document drawn up by order of the Assyrian King Sennacherib. We may gather from it that Esar-haddon, though not his eldest, was his favorite son, a fact which may explain his subsequent assassination by two of his other sons, who took advantage of their brother's absence in Armenia at the head of the army, to murder their father and usurp the throne. In the document in question Sennacherib makes a written statement of his desire to leave to Esar-haddon certain personal effects, which are enumerated by name. “Gold rings, quantities of ivory, gold cups, dishes, and necklaces, all these valuable objects in plenty, as well as three sorts of precious stones, one and one-half maneh and two and one-half shekels in weight, I bequeath to Esar-haddon, my son, who bears the surname of Assur-etil-kin-pal, to be deposited in the house of Amuk.” It will be noticed that this document is not attested by witnesses. Such attestation was dispensed with in the case of the monarch; his own name was sufficient to create a title. Whether it would have been the same in Babylonia, where the king was not equally autocratic and the commercial spirit was stronger than in Assyria, may be questioned. At all events, when Gigitu, the daughter of the Babylonian King Nergal-sharezer, was married to one of his officials, the contract was made out in the usual form, and the names of several witnesses were attached to it, while the deeds relating to the trading transactions of Belshazzar when heir-apparent to the [pg 036] throne differ in nothing from those required from the ordinary citizen.

Besides possessing the power of making a will, the head of the family was able to increase it by adoption. The practice of adoption was of long standing in Babylonia. The right to become King of Babylon and so to claim legitimate rule over the civilized world was conferred through adoption by the god Bel-Merodach. The claimant to sovereignty “took the hand of Bel,” as it was termed, and thereby became the adopted son of the god. Until this ceremony was performed, however much he might be a sovereign de facto, he was not so de jure. The legal title to rule could be given by Bel, and by Bel alone. As the Pharaohs of Egypt were sons of Ra the Sun-god, so it was necessary that the kings of Babylon should be the sons of the Babylonian Sun-god Merodach. Sonship alone made them legitimate.

This theory of adoption by a god must have been derived from a practice that was already well known. And the power of adopting children was exercised by the Babylonians up to the last. It has been suggested that it was due to ancestor-worship, and the desire to prevent the customary offerings from being discontinued through the extinction of the family. But for this there is no evidence. Indeed, it is questionable whether there was any worship of ancestors in Babylonia except in the case of the royal family. And even here it had its origin in the deification of the kings during their lifetime.

The prevalence of adoption in Babylonia had a [pg 037] much less recondite cause. It was one of the results of the recognition of private property and the principle of individual ownership. The head of the family naturally did not wish his estate to pass out of it and be transferred to a stranger. Wherever monogamy is the general rule, the feeling of family relationship is strong, and such was the case among the Babylonians. The feeling shows itself in the fact that when inherited land is sold we find other members of the family signing their assent by their presence at the sale. The father or mother, accordingly, who adopted a child did so with the intention of making him their heir, and so keeping the estate they had inherited or acquired in the hands of their own kin.

That this is the true explanation of the Babylonian practice of adoption is clear from the case mentioned above in which Bel-Katsir was prevented from adopting his step-son, because his uncle and adoptive father, whose property would then have passed to the latter, objected to his doing so. It was entirely a question of inheritance. Bel-Katsir had been adopted in order that he might be his uncle's heir, and consequently the uncle had the right of deciding to whom his estate should ultimately go. He preferred that it should be the brother of Bel-Katsir, and the brother accordingly it was settled to be.

The fact that women could adopt, also points in the same direction. The woman was the equal of the man as regards the possession and management of property, and like the man, therefore, she could determine who should inherit it.

A slave could be adopted as well as a free man. It was one of the ways in which a slave obtained his freedom, and contracts for the sale of slaves generally guarantee that they have not been adopted into the family of a citizen. A curious suit that was brought before a special court at Babylon in the tenth year of Nabonidos illustrates the advantage that was sometimes taken of the fact. The action was brought against a slave who bears the Israelitish name of Barachiel, and may, therefore, have been a Jew, and it was tried, not only before the ordinary judges, but before special commissioners and “elders” as well. The following is a translation of the judgment which was delivered and preserved in the record office:

“Barachiel is the slave of Gagâ, the daughter of … , redeemable with money only. In the thirty-fifth year of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon (570 B.C.), he was given to Akhi-nuri, son of Nebo-nadin-akhi, as security for a debt of twenty-eight shekels. Now he claims that he is the adopted son of Bel-rimanni, who has joined the hands of Samas-mudam-miq, the son of Nebo-nadin-akhi, and Qudasu, the daughter of Akhi-nuri, in matrimony. The case was pleaded before the commissioners, the elders, and the judges of Nabonidos, King of Babylon, and the arguments were heard on both sides. They read the deeds relating to the servile condition of Barachiel, who from the thirty-fifth year of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, to the seventh year of Nabonidos, King of Babylon, had been sold for money, had been given as security for a debt, and had been handed over to Nubtâ, the daughter of Gagâ, as her dowry—Nubtâ, [pg 039] had afterward, by a sealed deed, given him with a house and other slaves to her son, Zamama-iddin, and her husband, Nadin-abla—and they said to Barachiel: You have brought an action and called yourself an adopted son. Prove to us your adoption. Barachiel thereupon confessed: Twice did I run away from the house of my master and for many days was not seen. Then I was afraid and pretended to be an adopted son. My adoption is non-existent; I was the slave of Gagâ, redeemable with money. Nubtâ, her daughter, made a present of me, and by a sealed deed transferred me to her son, Zamama-iddin, and her husband, Nadin-abla. After the death of Gagâ and Nubtâ, I was sold by sealed contract to Itti-Merodach-baladhu, the son of Nebo-akhi-iddin, the son of Egibi. I will go and [perform each of my duties. The commissioners,] the elders, and the judges heard his evidence and restored him to his servile condition, and [confirmed] his possession by Samas-mudammiq [the son of Nebo-nadin-akhi] and Qudasu, the daughter of Akhi-nuri, who had given him as a dowry (to his daughter).” Then follow the names of the judges and secretary, and the date and place where the judgment was delivered, two of the judges further affixing their seals to the document, as well as a certain Kiribtu who calls himself “the shield-bearer,” but who was probably one of the commissioners sent to investigate the case.

After a slave had been adopted, it was in the power of the adoptive father to cancel the act of adoption and reduce him to his former state of servitude if he had not performed his part of the contract and the [pg 040] parties who had witnessed it were willing that it should be cancelled. We learn this from a deed that was drawn up in the thirteenth year of Nabonidos. Here we read:

“Iqisa-abla, the son of Kudurru, the son of Nur-Sin, sealed a deed by which he adopted his servant, Rimanni-Bel, usually called Rimut, in return for his receiving food and clothing from Rimanni-Bel. But Rimanni-Bel, usually called Rimut, has violated the contract ever since the deed by which he was adopted was sealed, and has given neither food, oil, nor clothing, whereas Ê-Saggil-ramat, the daughter of Ziria, the son of Nabâ, the wife of Nadin-Merodach, the son of Iqisa-abla, the son of Nur-Sin, has taken her father-in-law, has housed him, and has been kind to him and has provided him with food, oil, and clothing. Iqisa-abla, the son of Kudurru, the son of Nur-Sin, has, therefore, of his own free will, cancelled the deed of adoption, and by a sealed deed has given Rimanni-Bel to wait upon Ê-Saggil-ramat and Nubtâ, the daughter of Ê-Saggil-ramat and Nadin-Merodach, the grandson of Nur-Sin; Ê-Saggil-ramat and Nubtâ, her daughter, shall he obey. After the death of Ê-Saggil-ramat he shall wait on Nubtâ, her daughter. Whoever shall change these words and shall destroy the deed which Iqisa-abla has drawn up and given to Ê-Saggil-ramat and Nubtâ, her daughter, may Merodach and the goddess Zarpanit denounce judgment upon him!” Then come the names of four witnesses and the clerk, the date and place of writing, and the statement that the deed was indented in the presence of Bissâ, the daughter of Iqisa-abla.

It is clear that the testator had little or no property of his own, and that he was too old, or otherwise incapacitated, to earn anything for himself. It is also clear that the adopted slave, who is described by the milder term gallu, or “servant,” had acquired some wealth, and that this was the motive for his adoption. He, however, deserted and neglected his adopted father after his freedom had been secured to him, and thereby failed to carry out his part of the contract. Iqisa-abla accordingly had the legal right to break it also on his side.

One of the effects of the system of adoption was to give the privileges of Babylonian citizenship to a good many foreigners. The foreign origin of Barachiel, as evidenced by his name, was no obstacle to his claim to be a citizen, and the numerous contracts in which it is certified of a foreign slave that he has never been adopted prove the fact conclusively. A commercial community cannot afford to be exclusive on the ground of race and nationality.

Such, then, was the family system in the Babylonia of the historical period. Polygamy was rare, and the married woman possessed full rights over her property and could employ or bequeath it as she chose. The dowry she brought from her father or other near relation made her practically independent of her husband. Sons and daughters alike were able to inherit, and the possessor of property had the power of making a will. The law seems to have placed but few restrictions upon the way in which he could bestow his wealth. A family could be increased or prevented from dying out by means [pg 042] of adoption, and new blood could thus be introduced into it.

The rights and duties of the individual were fully recognized; it was with him alone that the law had to deal. Nevertheless, a few traces survived of that doctrine of the solidarity of the family which had preceded the development of individual ownership and freedom of action. The bride was given in marriage by her parents, or, failing these, by her nearest male relations, and when an estate was sold which had long been in the possession of a certain family, it was customary for the rest of the family to signify their consent by attending the sale. We may gather, however, that the sale was not invalidated if the consent was not obtained. In the older days of Babylonian history, moreover, it was usual for the property of a deceased citizen to be divided among his heirs without the intervention of a will. It went in the first instance to his widow, and was then divided equally among his children, whether body heirs or adopted ones, the eldest son alone receiving an additional share in return for administering the estate. But disputes frequently arose over the division, and the members of the family went to law with one another. In such cases it became the custom to place the whole of the property in the hands of the priests of the city-temple, who thus corresponded to the English Court of Chancery, and made the division as they judged best. The results, however, were not always satisfactory, and it was doubtless in order to avoid both the litigation and the necessity of appointing executors who were not members of the [pg 043] family, that the will came to play so important a part in the succession to property. In bequeathing his possessions the head of the family was expected to observe the usual rule of division, but it ceased to be obligatory to do so.

Chapter III. Education And Death

One of the lesson-books used in the Babylonian nursery contains the beginning of a story, written in Sumerian and translated into Semitic, which describes the adventures of a foundling who was picked up in the streets and adopted by the King. We are told that he was taken “from the mouth of the dogs and ravens,” and was then brought to the asip or “prophet,” who marked the soles of his feet with his seal. What the precise object of this procedure was it is difficult to say, but the custom is alluded to in the Old Testament (Job xiii. 27). Certain tribes in the south of China still brand the soles of a boy's feet, for the purpose, it is said, of testing his strength and hardihood.

After the operation was performed the boy was handed over to a “nurse,” to whom his “bread, food, shirt, and (other) clothing were assured for three years.” At the same time, we may assume, he received a name. This giving of a name was an important event in the child's life. Like other nations of antiquity the Babylonians conformed the name with the person who bore it; it not only represented him, but in a sense was actually himself. Magical [pg 045] properties were ascribed to the name, and it thus became of importance to know what names were good or bad, lucky or unlucky. An unlucky name brought evil fortune to its possessor, a lucky name secured his success in life. A change of name influenced a man's career; and the same superstitious belief which caused the Cape of Storms to become the Cape of Good Hope not unfrequently occasioned a person's name to be altered among the nations of the ancient East.

The gods themselves were affected by the names they bore. A knowledge of the secret and ineffable name of a deity was the key to a knowledge of his inner essence and attributes, and conferred a power over him upon the fortunate possessor of it. The patron god of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged was spoken of as “the Name,” Sumu or Samu, the Shem of the Old Testament; his real title was too sacred to be uttered in speech. The name of a thing was the thing itself, and so too the name of a god or person was the actual god or person to whom it was attached.

A large proportion of Babylonian names includes the name of some divinity. In spite of their length and unwieldiness they tended to increase in number as time went on. In ordinary life, however, they were frequently shortened. In the contract given in the last chapter, the slave Rimanni-Bel is said to have been usually called Rimut, the one name signifying “Love me, O Bel,” the other “Love.” In other instances we find Samas-musezib contracted into Samsiya and Suzub, Kabti-ilâni-Merodach into [pg 046] Kabtiya, Nebo-tabni-uzur into Tabniya. The Belesys of Greek writers is the Babylonian Balasu, which is a shortened form of Merodach-balasu-iqbi, and Baladan, which is given in the Old Testament as the name of the father of Merodach-baladan, has lost the name of the god with which it must originally have begun.

Sometimes a change in the form of the name was due to its being of foreign origin and consequently mispronounced by the Babylonians, who assimilated it to words in their own language. Thus Sargon of Akkad was properly called Sargani, “The Strong One,” or, more fully, Sargani-sar-ali, “Sargani, the King of the City,” but his Sumerian subjects turned this into Sar-gina or Sargon, “The Established King.” The grandson of Khammurabi bore the Canaanitish name of Abesukh, the Abishua of the Israelites, “The Father of Welfare,” but it was transformed by the Babylonians into Ebisum, which in their own dialect meant “The Actor.” Eri-Aku or Arioch was an Elamite name signifying “The Servant of the Moon-god;” the Babylonians changed it into Rim-Sin and perhaps even Rim-Anu, “Love, O Moon-god,” “Love, O Sky-god.”

At other times the name was changed for political or superstitious reasons. When the successful general Pul usurped the throne of Assyria he adopted the name of one of the most famous of the kings of the older dynasty, Tiglath-pileser. His successor, another usurper, called Ululâ, similarly adopted the name of Shalmaneser, another famous king of the earlier dynasty. It is probable that Sargon, who was also [pg 047] a usurper, derived his name from Sargon of Akkad, and that his own name was originally something else. Sennacherib tells us that Esar-haddon had a second name, or surname, by which he was known to his neighbors. In this respect he was like Solomon of Israel, who was also called Jedidiah.

It is doubtful whether circumcision was practised in Babylonia. There is no reference to it in the inscriptions, nor is it mentioned by classical writers as among Babylonian customs. In fact, the words of the Greek historian Herodotus seem to exclude the practice, as the Babylonians are not one of the nations of Western Asia who are said by him to have learnt the rite from the Egyptians. Moreover, Abraham and his family were not circumcised until long after he had left Babylonia and had established himself in Canaan. Africa, rather than Asia, seems to have been the original home of the rite.

If the boy were the son of well-to-do parents he was sent to school at an early age. One of the texts which, in Sumerian days, was written as a head-line in his copy-book declared that “He who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise like the dawn.” Girls also shared in the education given to their brothers. Among the Babylonian letters that have been preserved are some from ladies, and the very fact that women could transact business on their own account implies that they could read and write. Thus the following letter, written from Babylon by a lover to his mistress at Sippara, assumes that she could read it and return an answer: “To the lady Kasbeya thus says Gimil-Merodach: May the Sun-god [pg 048] and Merodach, for my sake, grant thee everlasting life! I am writing to enquire after your health; please send me news of it. I am living at Babylon, but have not seen you, which troubles me greatly. Send me news of your arrival, so that I may be happy. Come in the month Marchesvan. May you live forever, for my sake!” The Tel-el-Amarna collection actually contains letters from a lady to the Egyptian Pharaoh. One of them is as follows: “To the king my lord, my gods, my sun-god, thus says Nin, thy handmaid: At the feet of the king my lord, my gods, my sun-god, seven times seven I prostrate myself. The king my lord knows that there is war in the land, and that all the country of the king my lord has revolted to the Bedâwin. But the king my lord has knowledge of his country, and the king my lord knows that the Bedâwin have sent to the city of Ajalon and to the city of Zorah, and have made mischief (and have intrigued with) the two sons of Malchiel; and let the king my lord take knowledge of this fact.”

The oracles delivered to Esar-haddon by the prophetesses of Arbela are in writing, and we have no grounds for thinking that they were written down by an uninspired pen. Indeed, the “bit riduti,” or “place of education,” where Assur-bani-pal tells us he had been brought up, was the woman's part of the palace. The instructors, however, were men, and part of the boy's education, we are informed, consisted in his being taught to shoot with the bow and to practise other bodily exercises. But the larger part of his time was given to learning how to read and write. [pg 049] The acquisition of the cuneiform system of writing was a task of labor and difficulty which demanded years of patient application. A vast number of characters had to be learned by heart. They were conventional signs, often differing but slightly from one another, with nothing about them that could assist the memory; moreover, their forms varied in different styles of writing, as much as Latin, Gothic, and cursive forms of type differ among ourselves, and all these the pupil was expected to know. Every character had more than one phonetic value; many of them, indeed, had several, while they could also be used ideographically to express objects and ideas. But this was not all. A knowledge of the cuneiform syllabary necessitated also a knowledge of the language of the Sumerians, who had been its inventors, and it frequently happened that a group of characters which had expressed a Sumerian word was retained in the later script with the pronunciation of the corresponding Semitic word attached to them, though the latter had nothing to do with the phonetic values of the several signs, whether pronounced singly or as a whole.

The children, however, must have been well taught. This is clear from the remarkably good spelling which we find in the private letters; it is seldom that words are misspelt. The language may be conversational, or even dialectic, but the words are written correctly. The school-books that have survived bear testimony to the attention that had been given to improving the educational system. Every means was adopted for lessening the labor of the [pg 050] student and imprinting the lesson upon his mind. The cuneiform characters had been classified and named; they had also been arranged according to the number and position of the separate wedges of which they consisted. Dictionaries had been compiled of Sumerian words and expressions, as well as lists of Semitic synonyms. Even grammars had been drawn up, in which the grammatical forms of the old language of Sumer were interpreted in Semitic Babylonian. There were reading-books filled with extracts from the standard literature of the country. Most of this was in Sumerian; but the Sumerian text was provided with a Semitic translation, sometimes interlinear, sometimes in a parallel column. Commentaries, moreover, had been written upon the works of ancient authors, in which difficult or obsolete terms were explained. The pupils were trained to write exercises, either from a copy placed before them or from memory. These exercises served a double purpose—they taught the pupil how to write and spell, as well as the subject which the exercise illustrated. A list of the kings of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged has come to us, for instance, in one of them. In this way history and geography were impressed upon the student's memory, together with extracts from the poets and prose-writers of the past.

The writing material was clay. Papyrus, it is true, was occasionally used, but it was expensive, while clay literally lay under the feet of everyone. While the clay was still soft, the cuneiform or “wedge-shaped” characters were engraved upon it by means [pg 051] of a stylus. They had originally been pictorial, but when the use of clay was adopted the pictures necessarily degenerated into groups of wedge-like lines, every curve becoming an angle formed by the junction of two lines. As time went on, the characters were more and more simplified, the number of wedges of which they consisted being reduced and only so many left as served to distinguish one sign from another. The simplification reached its extreme point in the official script of Assyria.

At first the clay tablet after being inscribed was allowed to dry in the sun. But sun-dried clay easily crumbles, and the fashion accordingly grew up of baking the tablet in a kiln. In Assyria, where the heat of the sun was not so great as in the southern kingdom of Babylonia, the tablet was invariably baked, holes being first drilled in it to allow the escape of the moisture and to prevent it from cracking. Some of the early Babylonian tablets were of great size, and it is wonderful that they have lasted to our own days. But the larger the tablet, the more difficult it was to bake it safely, and consequently the most of the tablets are of small size. As it was often necessary to compress a long text into this limited space, the writing became more and more minute, and in many cases a magnifying glass is needed to read it properly. That such glasses were really used by the Assyrians is proved by Layard's discovery of a magnifying lens at Nineveh. The lens, which is of crystal, has been turned on a lathe, and is now in the British Museum. But even with the help of lenses, the study of the cuneiform tablets encouraged short [pg 052] sight, which must have been common in the Babylonian schools. In the case of Assur-bani-pal this was counteracted by the out-of-door exercises in which he was trained, and it is probable that similar exercises were also customary in Babylonia.

A book generally consisted of several tablets, which may consequently be compared with our chapters. At the end of each tablet was a colophon stating what was its number in the series to which it belonged, and giving the first line of the next tablet. The series received its name from the words with which it began; thus the fourth tablet or chapter of the “Epic of the Creation” states that it contains “one hundred and forty-six lines of the fourth tablet (of the work beginning) ‘When on high unproclaimed,’ ” and adds the first line of the tablet which follows. Catalogues were made of the standard books to be found in a library, giving the name of the author and the first line of each; so that it was easy for the reader or librarian to find both the work he wanted and the particular chapter in it he wished to consult. The books were arranged on shelves; M. de Sarzec discovered about 32,000 of them at Tello in Southern Chaldea still in the order in which they had been put in the age of Gudea (2700 B.C.).

Literature of every kind was represented. History and chronology, geography and law, private and public correspondence, despatches from generals and proclamations of the king, philology and mathematics, natural science in the shape of lists of bears and birds, insects and stones, astronomy and astrology, theology and the pseudo-science of omens, all found a place [pg 053] on the shelves, as well as poems and purely literary works. Copies of deeds and contracts, of legal decisions, and even inventories of the property of private individuals, were also stored in the libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, which were thus libraries and archive-chambers in one. In Babylonia every great city had its collection of books, and scribes were kept constantly employed in it, copying and re-editing the older literature, or providing new works for readers. The re-editing was done with scrupulous care. Where a character was lost in the original text by a fracture of the tablet, the copyist stated the fact, and added whether the loss was recent or not. Where the form of the character was uncertain, both the signs which it resembled are given. Some idea may be formed of the honesty and care with which the Babylonian scribes worked from the fact that the compiler of the Babylonian Chronicle, which contains a synopsis of later Babylonian history, frankly states that he does “not know” the date of the battle of Khalulê, which was fought between the Babylonians and Sennacherib. The materials at his disposal did not enable him to settle it. It so happens that we are in a more fortunate position, as we are able to fix it with the help of the annals of the Assyrian King.

New texts were eagerly collected. The most precious spoils sent to Assur-bani-pal after the capture of the revolted Babylonian cities were tablets containing works which the library of Nineveh did not possess. The Babylonians and Assyrians made war upon men, not upon books, which were, moreover, [pg 054] under the protection of the gods. The library was usually within the walls of a temple; sometimes it was part of the archives of the temple itself. Hence the copying of a text was often undertaken as a pious work, which brought down upon the scribe the blessing of heaven and even the remission of his sins. That the library was open to the public we may infer from the character of some of the literature contained in it. This included private letters as well as contracts and legal documents which could be interesting only to the parties whom they concerned.

The school must have been attached to the library, and was probably an adjacent building. This will explain the existence of the school-exercises which have come from the library of Nineveh, as well as the reading-books and other scholastic literature which were stored within it. At the same time, when we remember the din of an oriental school, where the pupils shout their lessons at the top of their voices, it is impossible to suppose that the scribes and readers would have been within ear-shot. Nor was it probable that there was only one school in a town of any size. The practice of herding large numbers of boys or girls together in a single school-house is European rather than Asiatic.

The school in later times developed into a university. At Borsippa, the suburb of Babylon, where the library had been established in the temple of Nebo, we learn from Strabo that a university also existed which had attained great celebrity. From a fragment of a Babylonian medical work, now in the British [pg 055] Museum, we may perhaps infer that it was chiefly celebrated as a school of medicine.

In Assyria education was mainly confined to the upper classes. The trading classes were perforce obliged to learn how to read and write; so also were the officials and all those who looked forward to a career in the diplomatic service. But learning was regarded as peculiarly the profession of the scribes, who constituted a special class and occupied an important position in the bureaucracy. They acted as clerks and secretaries in the various departments of state, and stereotyped a particular form of cuneiform script, which we may call the chancellor's hand, and which, through their influence, was used throughout the country. In Babylonia it was otherwise. Here a knowledge of writing was far more widely spread, and one of the results was that varieties of handwriting became as numerous as they are in the modern world. The absence of a professional class of scribes prevented any one official hand from becoming universal. We find even the son of an “irrigator,” one of the poorest and lowest members of the community, copying a portion of the “Epic of the Creation,” and depositing it in the library of Borsippa for the good of his soul. Indeed, the contract tablets show that the slaves themselves could often read and write. The literary tendencies of Assur-bani-pal doubtless did much toward the spread of education in Assyria, but the latter years of his life were troubled by disastrous wars, and the Assyrian empire and kingdom came to an end soon after his death.

Education, as we have seen, meant a good deal more [pg 056] than merely learning the cuneiform characters. It meant, in the case of the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians, learning the ancient agglutinative language of Sumer as well. In later times this language ceased to be spoken except in learned society, and consequently bore the same relation to Semitic Babylonian that Latin bears to English. In learning Sumerian, therefore, the Babylonian learned what was equivalent to Latin in the modern world. And the mode of teaching it was much the same. There were the same paradigms to be committed to memory, the same lists of words and phrases to be learned by heart, the same extracts from the authors of the past to be stored up in the mind. Even the “Hamiltonian” system of learning a dead language had already been invented. Exercises were set in translation from Sumerian into Babylonian, and from Babylonian into Sumerian, and the specimens of the latter which have survived to us show that “dog-Latin” was not unknown.

But the dead language of Sumer was not all that the educated Babylonian or Assyrian gentlemen of later times was called upon to know. In the eighth century before our era Aramaic had become the common medium of trade and diplomacy. If Sumerian was the Latin of the Babylonian world, Aramaic was its French. The Aramaic dialects seem to have been the result of a contact between the Semitic languages of Arabia and Canaan, and the rising importance of the tribes who spoke them and who occupied Mesopotamia and Northern Arabia caused them to become the language of trade. Aramaic merchants were settled on the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, [pg 057] and conveyed the products of Babylonia and Phœnicia from one country to the other. Many of the commercial firms in Babylonia were of Aramaic origin, and it was natural that some part at least of their business should have been carried on in the language of their fathers.

Hence it was that, when the Rab-shakeh or Vizier of Sennacherib appeared before Jerusalem and summoned its inhabitants to submit to the Assyrian King, he was asked by the ministers of Hezekiah to speak in “Aramæan.” It was taken for granted that Aramaic was known to an Assyrian official and diplomatist just as it was to the Jewish officials themselves. The Rab-shakeh, however, knew the Hebrew language as well, and found it more to his purpose to use it in addressing the Jews.

Here, then, we have an Assyrian officer who is acquainted not only with Sumerian, but also with two of the living languages of Western Asia. And yet he was not a scribe; he did not belong to the professional class of learned men. Nothing can show more clearly the advanced state of education even in the military kingdom of Assyria. In Babylonia learning had always been honored; from the days of Sargon of Akkad onward the sons of the reigning king did not disdain to be secretaries and librarians.

The linguistic training undergone in the schools gave the Babylonian a taste for philology. He not only compiled vocabularies of the extinct Sumerian, which were needed for practical reasons, he also explained the meaning of the names of the foreign kings who had reigned over Babylonia, and from [pg 058] time to time noted the signification of words belonging to the various languages by which he was surrounded. Thus one of the tablets we possess contains a list of Kassite or Kossean words with their signification; in other cases we have Mitannian, Elamite, and Canaanite words quoted, with their meanings attached to them. Nor did the philological curiosity of the scribe end here. He busied himself with the etymology of the words in his own language, and just as a couple of centuries ago our own dictionary-makers endeavored to find derivations for all English words, whatever their source, in Latin and Greek, so, too, the Babylonian etymologist believed that the venerable language of Sumer was the key to the origin of his own. Many of the words in Semitic Babylonian were indeed derived from it, and accordingly Sumerian etymologies were found for other words which were purely Semitic. The word Sabattu, “the Sabbath,” for instance, was derived from the Sumerian Sa, “heart,” and bat, “to cease,” and so interpreted to mean the day on which “the heart ceased” from its labors.

History, too, was a favorite subject of study. Like the Hebrews, the Assyrians were distinguished by a keen historical sense which stands in curious contrast to the want of it which characterized the Egyptian. The Babylonians also were distinguished by the same quality, though perhaps to a less extent than their Assyrian neighbors, whose somewhat pedantic accuracy led them to state the exact numbers of the slain and captive in every small skirmish, and the name of every petty prince with whom they came [pg 059] into contact, and who had invented a system of accurately registering dates at a very early period. Nevertheless, the Babylonian was also a historian; the necessities of trade had obliged him to date his deeds and contracts from the earliest age of his history, and to compile lists of kings and dynasties for reference in case of a disputed title to property. The historical honesty to which he had been trained is illustrated by the author of the Babylonian Chronicle in the passage relating to the battle of Khalulê, which has been already alluded to. The last king of Babylonia was himself an antiquarian, and had a passion for excavating and discovering the records of the monarchs who had built the great temples of Chaldea.

Law, again, must have been much studied, and so, too, was theology. The library of Nineveh, however, from which so much of our information has come, gives us an exaggerated idea of the extent to which the pseudo-science of omens and portents was cultivated. Its royal patron was a believer in them, and apparently more interested in the subject than in any other. Consequently, the number of books relating to it are out of all proportion to the rest of the literature in the library. But this was an accident, due to the predilections of Assur-bani-pal himself.

The study of omens and portents was a branch of science and not of theology, false though the science was. But it was based upon the scientific principle that every antecedent has a consequent, its fallacy consisting in a confusion between real causes and mere antecedents. Certain events had been observed [pg 060] to follow certain phenomena; it was accordingly assumed that they were the results of the phenomena, and that were the phenomena to happen again they would be followed by the same results. Hence all extraordinary or unusual occurrences were carefully noted, together with whatever had been observed to come after them. A strange dog, for instance, had been observed to enter a palace and there lie down on a couch; as no disaster took place subsequently it was believed that if the occurrence was repeated it would be an omen of good fortune. On the other hand, the fall of a house had been preceded by the birth of a child without a mouth; the same result, it was supposed, would again accompany the same presage of evil. These pseudo-scientific observations had been commenced at a very early period of Babylonian history, and were embodied in a great work which was compiled for the library of Sargon of Akkad.

Another work compiled for the same library, and containing observations which started from a similarly fallacious theory, was one in seventy-two books on the pseudo-science of astrology, which was called “The Illumination of Bel.” But in this case the observations were not wholly useless. The study of astrology was intermixed with that of astronomy, of which Babylonia may be considered to be the birthplace. The heavens had been mapped out and the stars named; the sun's course along the ecliptic had been divided into the twelve zodiacal signs, and a fairly accurate calendar had been constructed. Hundreds of observations had been made of the [pg 061] eclipses of the sun and moon, and the laws regulating them had been so far ascertained that, first, eclipses of the moon, and then, but with a greater element of uncertainty, eclipses of the sun, were able to be predicted. One of the chapters or books in the “Illumination of Bel” was devoted to an account of comets, another dealt with conjunctions of the sun and moon. There were also tables of observations relating to the synodic revolution of the moon and the synodic periods of the planet Venus. The year was divided into twelve months of thirty days each, an intercalary month being inserted from time to time to rectify the resulting error in the length of the year. The months had been originally called after the signs of the zodiac, whose names have come down to ourselves with comparatively little change. But by the side of the lunar year the Babylonians also used a sidereal year, the star Capella being taken as a fixed point in the sky, from which the distance of the sun could be measured at the beginning of the year, the moon being used as a mere pointer for the purpose. At a later date, however, this mode of determining time was abandoned, and the new year was made directly dependent on the vernal equinox. The month was subdivided into weeks of seven days, each of which was consecrated to a particular deity.

These deities were further identified with the stars. The fact that the sun and moon, as well as the evening and morning stars, were already worshipped as divinities doubtless led the way to this system of astro-theology. But it seems never to have spread [pg 062] beyond the learned classes and to have remained to the last an artificial system. The mass of the people worshipped the stars as a whole, but it was only as a whole and not individually. Their identification with the gods of the state religion might be taught in the schools and universities, but it had no meaning for the nation at large.

From the beginning of the Babylonian's life we now pass to the end. Unlike the Egyptian he had no desert close at hand in which to bury his dead, no limestone cliffs, as in Palestine, wherein a tomb might be excavated. It was necessary that the burial should be in the plain of Babylonia, the same plain as that in which he lived, and with which the overflow of the rivers was constantly infiltrating. The consequences were twofold. On the one hand, the tomb had to be constructed of brick, for stone was not procurable; on the other hand, sanitary reasons made cremation imperative. The Babylonian corpse was burned as well as buried, and the brick sepulchre that was raised above it adjoined the cities of the living.

The corpse was carried to the grave on a bier, accompanied by the mourners. Among these the wailing women were prominent, who tore their hair and threw dust upon their heads. The cemetery to which the dead was carried was a city in itself, to which the Sumerians had given the name of Ki-makh or “vast place.” It was laid out in streets, the tombs on either side answering to the houses of a town. Not infrequently gardens were planted before them, while rivulets of “living water” flowed through the [pg 063] streets and were at times conducted into the tomb. The water symbolized the life that the pious Babylonian hoped to enjoy in the world to come. It relieved the thirst of the spirit in the underground world of Hades, where an old myth had declared that “dust only was its food,” and it was at the same time an emblem of those “waters of life” which were believed to bubble up beneath the throne of the goddess of the dead.

When the corpse reached the cemetery it was laid upon the ground wrapped in mats of reed and covered with asphalt. It was still dressed in the clothes and ornaments that had been worn during life. The man had his seal and his weapons of bronze or stone; the woman her spindle-wheel and thread; the child his necklace of shells. In earlier times all was then thickly coated with clay, above which branches of palm, terebinth, and other trees were placed, and the whole was set on fire. At a more recent period ovens of brick were constructed in which the corpse was put in its coffin of clay and reeds, but withdrawn before cremation was complete. The skeletons of the dead are consequently often found in a fair state of preservation, as well as the objects which were buried with them.

While the body was being burned offerings were made, partly to the gods, partly to the dead man himself. They consisted of dates, calves and sheep, birds and fish, which were consumed along with the corpse. Certain words were recited at the same time, derived for the most part from the sacred books of ancient Sumer.

After the ceremony was over a portion of the ashes was collected and deposited in an urn, if the cremation had been complete. In the later days, when this was not the case, the half-burnt body was allowed to remain on the spot where it had been laid, and an aperture was made in the shell of clay with which it was covered. The aperture was intended to allow a free passage to the spirit of the dead, so that it might leave its burial-place to enjoy the food and water that were brought to it. Over the whole a tomb was built of bricks, similar to that in which the urn was deposited when the body was completely burned.

The tombs of the rich resembled the houses in which they had lived on earth and contained many chambers. In these their bodies were cremated and interred. Sometimes a house was occupied by a single corpse only; at other times it became a family burial-place, where the bodies were laid in separate chambers. Sometimes tombstones were set up commemorating the name and deeds of the deceased; at other times statues representing them were erected instead.

The tomb had a door, like a house, through which the relatives and friends of the dead man passed from time to time in order to furnish him with the food and sustenance needed by his spirit in the world below. Vases were placed in the sepulchre, filled with dates and grain, wine and oil, while the rivulet which flowed beside it provided water in abundance. All this was required in that underworld where popular belief pictured the dead as flitting like bats in the gloom and darkness, and where the heroes of old [pg 065] time sat, strengthless and ghostlike, on their shadowy thrones.

The kings were allowed to be burned and buried in the palace in which they had lived and ruled. We read of one of them that he was interred in “the palace of Sargon” of Akkad, of another that his burial had taken place in the palace he himself had erected. A similar privilege was granted to their subjects only by royal permission.

Want of space caused the tombs of the dead to be built one upon the other, as generations passed away and the older sepulchres crumbled into dust. The cemetery thus resembled the city; here, too, one generation built upon the ruins of its predecessor. The houses and tombs were alike constructed of sun-dried bricks, which soon disintegrate and form a mound of dust. The age of a cemetery, like the age of a city, may accordingly be measured by the number of successive layers of building of which its mound or platform is composed. In Babylonia they are numerous, for the history of the country goes back to a remote past. Each city clustered round a temple, venerable for its antiquity as well as for its sanctity, and the cemetery which stood near it was consequently under the protection of its god. At Cutha the necropolis was so vast that Nergal, the god of the town, came to be known as the “lord of the dead.” But the cemeteries of other towns were also of enormous size. Western Asia had received its culture and the elements of its theology from Babylonia, and Babylonia consequently was a sacred land not only to the Babylonians themselves, but to [pg 066] all those who shared their civilization. The very soil was holy ground; Assyrians as well as Babylonians desired that their bodies should rest in it. Here they were in the charge, as it were, of Bel of Nippur or Merodach of Babylon, and within sight of the ancient sanctuaries in which those gods were worshipped. This explains in part the size of the cemeteries; the length of time during which they were used will explain the rest. As Dr. Peters says of each:[4] “It is difficult to convey anything like a correct notion of the piles upon piles of human relics which there utterly astound the spectator. Excepting only the triangular space between the three principal ruins, the whole remainder of the platform, the whole space between the walls, and an unknown extent of desert beyond them, are everywhere filled with the bones and sepulchres of the dead. There is probably no other site in the world which can compare with Warka in this respect.”

Babylonia is still a holy land to the people of Western Asia. The old feeling in regard to it still survives, and the bodies of the dead are still carried, sometimes for hundreds of miles, to be buried in its sacred soil. Mohammedan saints have taken the place of the old gods, and a Moslem chapel represents the temple of the past, but it is still to Babylonia that the corpse is borne, often covered by costly rugs which find their way in time to an American or European drawing-room. “The old order changes, giving place to new,” but the influence of Chaldean culture and religion is not yet past.

Chapter IV. Slavery And The Free Laborer

Slavery was part of the foundation upon which Babylonian society rested. But between slavery as it existed in the ancient oriental world and slavery in the Roman or modern world there was a great difference. The slave was often of the same race as his master, sometimes of the same nationality, speaking the same language and professing the same religion. He was regarded as one of the family, and was not infrequently adopted into it. He could become a free citizen and rise to the highest offices of state. Slavery was no bar to his promotion, nor did it imprint any stigma upon him. He was frequently a skilled artisan and even possessed literary knowledge. Between his habits and level of culture and those of his owners was no marked distinction, no prejudices to be overcome on account of his color, no conviction of his inferiority in race. He was brought up with the rest of the family to which he was considered to belong and was in hourly contact with them. Moreover, the large number of slaves had been captives in war. A reverse of fortune might consign their present masters to the same lot; history knew of instances in which master and slave had changed places [pg 068] with one another. There were some slaves, too, who were Babylonians by birth; the law allowed the parent to sell his child, the brother his sister, or the creditor his debtor under certain circumstances, and the old Sumerian legislation ordained that a son who denied his father should be shorn and sold as a slave. In times of famine or necessity a man even sold himself to be quit of a debt or to obtain the means of subsistence. A slave was always fed and clothed; the free laborer at times could get neither food nor clothing.

There were three classes of slaves—those who were the property of a private individual, the serfs who were attached to the soil which they cultivated, and the temple slaves who had been dedicated to the service of the gods. Of the second class but few traces are found in Babylonia. Agriculture was carried on there either by free laborers, or by the slaves of the private land-owners. Where the land belonged to priests, it was of course usually the temple slaves who tilled it. What was the exact legal position of the Jews and other exiles who were transported to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar we do not know, but they were neither serfs nor slaves. The practice of transportation had been borrowed from Assyria, and under the Assyrian system the exiled population was treated as a colony. Israelites appear among the Assyrian officials in contracts of the second Assyrian empire, and Jewish names are found in the Babylonian contracts of the age of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors.

The Babylonians were not a military people, and [pg 069] after the Kassite conquest their wars of aggression were not sufficiently numerous or extensive to provide them with a supply of captives who could be made into slaves. Slave-merchants are rarely, if ever, referred to in the Babylonian contract tablets, and the slaves must have been home-born, the children and descendants of those who had been slaves before them. In the age of Abraham it was doubtless different. Then the power of Babylonia extended throughout Western Asia, and the constant wars in the East and West must have filled the market with foreign captives. The white slaves brought from Kurdistan and the north were especially prized. Thus in the reign of Ammi-Zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi, some “white Kurdish slaves” were sold for 3 homers and 24⅔ qas of oil, which were valued at 20⅔ shekels, and in the time of his son Samsu-ditana “a white slave” from Suri or Northern Mesopotamia fetched as much as 20 shekels, or £3.

The earliest code of Sumerian laws known to us takes the slave under its protection. It assumes the principle that the life of the slave is not absolutely at his master's disposal, and enacts that, if the slave is killed, beaten, maimed, or injured in health, the hand that has so offended shall pay each day a measure of wheat. This must mean that the payment shall be continued until the slave recovers from his ill-treatment. Light is thrown upon it by a later Babylonian law, according to which, if the services of a slave have been hired by a second person and the slave falls ill or is otherwise rendered incapable of [pg 070] work, the hirer is fined for as long a time as the illness or incapacity continues. The object of the law is clear. It was intended to prevent the slave from being overworked by one who had not, as it were, a family interest in him. It protected the slave and at the same time protected the master to whom he belonged.

There are several instances of its application. Thus in the eighth year of Cyrus a slave named Nidinti was apprenticed for six years by his master and mistress to a certain Libludh in order that he might learn the trade of fulling. It was stipulated that he was to learn it thoroughly, and if at any time he was unable to work Libludh was to pay each day 3 qas (or about 4½ quarts) of wheat for his support. At the end of the period, when the trade had been learned, Libludh was to receive a cloth worth 4 shekels (12 s.) and hand over Nidinti to the service of the Sun-god of Sippara. In the same year another slave was apprenticed to the stone-cutter Quddâ, who was himself a slave and belonged to the heir-apparent, Cambyses. Quddâ undertook to teach his trade to the apprentice in four years, and if he failed to do so was to be fined 20 shekels. Six years earlier Qubtâ, the daughter of Iddina-Merodach, had given the slave of another person to a weaver for a period of five years, in order that he might be taught the art of weaving, at the same time agreeing to provide him with 1 qa (1⅗ quarts) of food each day and to pay his teacher something besides. If, however, he was incapacitated from learning, the weaver was required to pay a daily fine of half a “measure” of [pg 071] wheat, which we are told was the wage of the slave. Any infringement of the contract would be punished by a penalty of 20 manehs.

The slave was able to apprentice himself without the intervention of his owners. Thus in the sixth year of Cyrus one slave apprenticed himself of his own accord to another in order to learn a trade. In this case also the penalty for not being taught the trade was half a “measure” of wheat each day, which is again stated to be the wage of the slave. The wage, however, it would seem, had to be paid to the master, at all events in some cases; this is clear from a document which relates to the conclusion of the apprenticeship in which Nubtâ took part. The slave she had apprenticed had learnt his trade, and his master accordingly received from the teacher 5 shekels, which it was calculated were the equivalent of the services the apprentice had rendered. Ordinarily the 5 shekels would have been considered a return for the slave's maintenance during the term of his apprenticeship; but in this instance, for reasons unknown to us, the maintenance had been provided by a lady and the payment for the slave's services was consequently clear gain.

The slave, however, was allowed to accumulate capital for himself, to trade with it, and even to become rich enough to lend money to his own master or to purchase his own freedom. That a similar privilege was allowed to the slaves of the Israelites we may gather from the fact that Saul's slave offered to pay the seer Samuel a quarter of a shekel which he had about him, though it is true that this [pg 072] might have been the property of his master. In Babylonia the possession of property by the slave was not at all uncommon. In the sixth year of Cambyses, for example, a female slave named Khunnatu received a large quantity of furniture, including five beds, ten chairs, three dishes, and various other kitchen utensils, and agreed to pay the rent of the house in which she deposited them. Her master also lent her 122 shekels of silver, which were expended in buying fifty casks of beer, besides other things, and upon which she was to pay interest. Apparently she wanted to set up an inn or drinking-shop; the fact that the money was lent to her by her master proves that she must have been engaged in business on her own account. In other contracts we find the slave taking a mortgage and trading in onions and grain or employing his money in usury. In one case a slave borrows as much as 14 manehs 49 shekels, or £138 3s., from a member of the Egibi firm. In another case it is a considerable quantity of grain in addition to 12 shekels of silver that is borrowed from the slave by two other persons, with a promise that the grain shall be repaid the following month and the money a year later. The contract is drawn up in the usual way, the borrowers, who, like the witnesses, are free-born citizens, giving the creditor a security and assuming a common responsibility for the debt. The grain, however, was to be repaid in the house of the slave's master; it seems evident, therefore, that the slave had no private house of his own. The slave, nevertheless, could own a house or [pg 073] receive it in payment of a debt. This is illustrated by an interesting contract in which reference is made to Ustanni, the Tatnai of the Book of Ezra, who is called “the governor of Ebir-nâri,” “the other side of the river.” The contract is as follows:

“Two manehs of silver lent by Kurrulâ, the slave of Ustanni, the governor of Babylon and Ebir-nâri, to Merodach-sum-ibni, the son of Sula, the son of Epes-ilu. The house of the latter, which is by the side of the road of the god Bagarus, is Kurrulâ's security. No one else has any prior claim to it. The house is not to be let or interest taken upon the loan.” Then come the names of five free-born witnesses, and the document is dated at Babylon in the third year of Darius. The terms of the contract are precisely the same as those exacted by Cambyses, when he was crown-prince, from a certain Iddin-Nebo, to whom he had lent money through the agency of his secretary, receiving a house as security for the debt.

In some instances the slave was merely the confidential agent of his master, to whom therefore all or most of the profits went. Thus a deed dated in the ninth year of Cyrus describes a field situated opposite the gate of Zamama at Babylon, which had been assigned by “the judges” to a lady named Ê-Saggil-belit, and afterward mortgaged by her to a slave of Itti-Merodach-baladhu, one of the members of the Egibi firm. The lady, however, still wanted money, and accordingly proposed to Itti-Merodach-baladhu that if he would make her a “present” of 10 shekels she would hand over to him her title-deeds. This was done, and the field passed into the possession of [pg 074] Itti-Merodach-baladhu, with whom the mortgage had really been contracted.

In spite of the privileges possessed by the Babylonian slave, he was nevertheless a chattel, like the rest of his master's property. He could constitute the dowry of a wife, could take the place of interest on a debt or of the debt itself, and could be hired out to another, the wages he earned going into the pocket of his master. In the age of Khammurabi we find two brothers hiring the services of two slaves, one of whom belonged to their father and the other to their mother, for ten days. The slaves were wanted for harvest work, and it was agreed that a gur (or 180 qas) of grain should be paid them. This, of course, ultimately went to their owners. In the reign of Cambyses a man and his wife, having borrowed 80 shekels, gave a slave as security for the repayment of the loan; the terms of the contract are the same as if the security had been a house. On another occasion a slave is security for only part of a debt which amounted to a maneh and twenty shekels, interest being paid upon the shekels. His service was regarded as equivalent to the interest upon the maneh.

When a slave was sold the seller guaranteed that he was not disobedient, that he had not been adopted by a free citizen, that there was no prior claim to him, and that he had not been impressed into the royal service, or, in the case of female slaves, been a concubine of the king. Purchasers had to be on their guard on all these points. Strict honesty was not always the rule in the Babylonian commercial world, and a case which came before the judges in the early [pg 075] part of the reign of Nabonidos shows that ladies were capable of sharp practice as well as men. The judicial record states that a certain “Belit-litu gave the following evidence before the judges of Nabonidos, King of Babylon: ‘In the month Ab, in the first year of Nergal-sharezer, King of Babylon, I sold my slave, Bazuzu, for thirty-five shekels of silver to Nebo-akhi-iddin, the son of Sulâ, the descendant of Egibi; he has pretended that I owed him a debt, and so has not paid me the money.’ The judges heard the charge, and caused Nebo-akhi-iddin to be summoned and to appear before them. Nebo-akhi-iddin produced the contract which he had made with Belit-litu; he proved that she had received the money and convinced the judges. And Ziria, Nebo-sum-lisir and Edillu gave (further) evidence before the judges that Belit-litu, their mother, had received the silver. The judges deliberated and condemned Belit-litu to (pay) fifty-five shekels (by way of fine), the highest fine that could be inflicted on her, and then gave it to Nebo-akhi-iddin.”

The prices fetched by slaves varied naturally. We have seen that in the Abrahamic age 20 shekels (£3) were given for a white slave from the North, the same price as that for which Joseph was sold. In the reign of Ammi-zadok 4½ shekels only were paid for a female slave. In later times prices were considerably higher, though under Nebuchadnezzar we hear of a slave given as part of a dowry who was valued at 30 shekels, and of a female slave and her infant child whose cost was only 19 shekels. In the first year of Nergal-sharezer a slave-merchant of [pg 076] Harran sold three slaves for 45 shekels, while a little later 32 shekels were given for a female slave. The same sum was given for a slave who was advanced in years, while a slave girl four years of age only was sold for 19 shekels. In the sixth year of Cambyses an Egyptian and her child three months old, whom the Babylonian Iddin-Nebo had “taken, with his bow,” was sold by him for 2 manehs or 120 shekels, a bond for 240 gurs of dates being handed over to him as security for the payment of the sum. The Egyptian, it may be noted, received a Babylonian name before being put up for auction. In the same reign we hear of 3 manehs being paid for two slaves, of a maneh for a single slave, and of 7 manehs 56 shekels for three female slaves. This would be at the rate of 2 manehs 38 shekels or £23 14s. for each. On the whole, however, the average price seems to have been about 30 shekels. This, at any rate, was the case among the Israelites, not only in the Mosaic period (Exod. xxi. 32) but also in the time of the Maccabees (II. Macc. viii. 9, 10).

The fact that slaves sometimes ran away from their masters, like Barachiel, who pretended to be a free citizen, and that in contracts for their sale their obedience is expressly guaranteed, proves that they were not always content with their lot. Indeed, it is not strange that it should have been so. They were merely chattels, subject to the caprices and tyranny of those who owned them, and their lives were as little valued as that of an ox. Thus in the fortieth year of Nebuchadnezzar a judgment was delivered that, if it could be proved by witnesses that a certain [pg 077] Idikhi-ilu had murdered the slave of one of the Arameans settled in the town of Pekod, he was to be fined a maneh of silver; that was all the slave's life was worth in the eyes of the law, and even that was paid to the master to compensate him for the loss of his property. Sometimes the name of the slave was changed; as we have seen, the captive Egyptian woman received a Babylonian name, and a contract of the time of Khammurabi, relating to the female slave of a Babylonian lady, who had been given to her by her husband, and who, it is stipulated, shall not be taken from her by his sons after his death, mentions that the name of the slave had been changed. In this case, however, the reason seems to have been that the girl was adopted by her mistress, though the adoption was not carried out in legal form and was therefore technically invalid. The contract accordingly describes her by her proper name of Mutibasti, but adds that “she is called Zabini, the daughter of Saddasu,” her mistress.

That the law should nevertheless have regarded the slave as a person, and as such possessed of definite rights, appears strange. But Babylonian law started from the principle of individual responsibility and individual possession of property, and since the slave was a human being and could, moreover, hold property of his own, it necessarily seemed to place him more and more on a footing of equality with the free-born citizen. The causes which brought about the legal emancipation of women worked in the same direction in favor of the slave. Hence the power he had of purchasing his freedom out of his own earnings and [pg 078] of being adopted into a citizen's family. Hence, too, the claim of the law to interfere between the slave-owner and his property.

A slave, in fact, could even act as a witness in court, his testimony being put on the same legal level as that of a native Babylonian. He could also be a party to a suit. Thus we find a slave called Nergal-ritsua, in the tenth year of Nabonidos, bringing a suit for the recovery of stolen property. He had been intrusted by his master with the conveyance of 480 gur of fruit to the ships of a Syrian, named Baal-nathan, who undertook to carry it to Babylon, and to be responsible for loss. On the way part of the fruit was stolen, and Baal-nathan, instead of replacing it, absconded, but was soon caught. The slave accordingly appeared against him, and the five judges before whom the case was brought gave a verdict in his favor.

A slave could even own another slave. In the twenty-seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar, for example, the porter of the temple of the Sun-god at Sippara, who was “the slave of Nebo-baladh-yulid,” purchased a female slave for two-thirds of a shekel (2s.). The amount was small, but the purchaser did not possess so much at the moment, and credit was consequently allowed him. The list of witnesses to the contract is headed by a slave.

The condition of the slave in Assyria was much what it was in Babylonia. The laws and customs of Assyria were modelled after those of Babylonia, whence, indeed, most of them had been derived. But there was one cause of difference between the two [pg 079] countries which affected the character of slavery. Assyria was a military power, and the greater part of its slaves, therefore, were captives taken in war. In Babylonia, on the contrary, the majority had been born in the country, and between them and their masters there was thus a bond of union and sympathy which could not exist between the foreign captive and his conqueror. In the northern kingdom slavery must have been harsher.

Slaves, moreover, apparently fetched higher prices there, probably on account of their foreign origin. They cost on the average as much as a maneh (£9) each. A contract, dated in 645 B.C., states that one maneh and a half was given for a single female slave. One of the contracting parties was a Syrian, and an Aramaic docket is accordingly attached to the deed, while among the witnesses to it we find Ammâ, “the Aramean secretary.” Ammâ means a native of the land of Ammo, where Pethor was situated. About the same time 3 manehs, “according to the standard of Carchemis,” were paid for a family of five slaves, which included two children. Under Esar-haddon a slave was bought for five-sixths of a maneh, or 50 shekels, and in the same year Hoshea, an Israelite, with his two wives and four children, was sold for 3 manehs. With these prices it is instructive to compare the sum of 43 shekels given for a female slave in Babylonia only four years later.

As a specimen of an Assyrian contract for the sale of slaves we may take one which was made in 709 B.C., thirteen years after the fall of Samaria, and which is noticeable on account of the Israelitish [pg 080] names which it contains: “The seal of Dagon-melech,” we read, “the owner of the slaves who are sold. Imannu, the woman U——, and Melchior, in all three persons, have been approved by Summa-ilâni, the bear-hunter from Kasarin, and he has bought them from Dagon-melech for three manehs of silver, according to the standard of Carchemish. The money has been fully paid; the slaves have been marked and taken. There shall be no reclamation, lawsuit, or complaints. Whoever hereafter shall at any time rise up and bring an action, whether it be Dagon-melech or his brother or his nephew or any one else belonging to him or a person in authority, and shall bring an action and charges against Summa-ilâni, his son, or his grandson, shall pay 10 manehs of silver, or 1 maneh of gold (£140), to the goddess Istar of Arbela. The money brings an interest of 10 (i.e., 60) per cent. to its possessors; but if an action or complaint is brought it shall not be touched by the seller. In the presence of Addâ the secretary, Akhiramu the secretary, Pekah the governor of the city, Nadab-Yahu (Nadabiah) the bear-hunter, Bel-kullim-anni, Ben-dikiri, Dhem-Istar, and Tabnî the secretary, who has drawn up the deed of contract.” The date is the 20th of Ab, or August, 709 B.C.

The slaves are sold at a maneh each, and bear Syrian names. Addâ, “the man of Hadad,” and Ben-dikiri are also Syrian; on the other hand, Ahiram, Pekah, and Nadabiah are Israelitish. It is interesting to find them appearing as free citizens of Assyria, one of them being even governor of a city. It serves [pg 081] to show why the tribes of Northern Israel so readily mingled with the populations among whom they were transported; the exiles in Assyria were less harshly treated than those in Babylonia, and they had no memories of a temple and its services, no strong religious feeling, to prevent them from being absorbed by the older inhabitants of their new homes.

In Assyria, as in Babylonia, parents could sell their children, brothers their sisters, though we do not know under what circumstances this was allowed by the law. The sale of a sister by her brother for half a maneh, which has already been referred to, took place at Nineveh in 668 B.C. In the contract the brother is called “the owner of his sister,” and any infringement of the agreement was to be punished by a fine of “10 silver manehs, or 1 maneh of gold,” to the treasury of the temple of Ninip at Calah. About fifteen years later the services of a female slave “as long as she lived” were given in payment of a debt, one of the witnesses to the deed being Yavanni “the Greek.” Ninip of Calah received slaves as well as fines for the violation of contracts relating to the sale of them; about 645 B.C., for instance, we find four men giving one to the service of the god. Among the titles of the god is that of “the lord of workmen;” and it is therefore possible that he was regarded as in a special way the patron of the slave-trader.

It seems to have been illegal to sell the mother without the children, at all events as long as they were young. In the old Sumerian code of laws it was already laid down that if children were born to [pg 082] slaves whom their owner had sold while still reserving the power of repurchasing them, he could nevertheless not buy them back unless he bought the children at the same time at the rate of one and a half shekels each. The contracts show that this law continued in force down to the latest days of Babylonian independence. Thus the Egyptian woman who was sold in the sixth year of Cambyses was put up to auction along with her child. We may gather also that it was not customary to separate the husband and wife.[5] When the Israelite Hoshea, for instance, was put up for sale in Assyria in the reign of Esar-haddon, both his wives as well as his children were bought by the purchaser along with him. It may be noted that the slave was “marked,” or “tattooed,” after purchase, like the Babylonian cattle. This served a double purpose; it indicated his owner and identified him if he tried to run away.

In a country where slaves were so numerous the wages of the free workmen were necessarily low. There were, however, two classes of free workmen, the skilled artisan and the agricultural laborer. The agricultural character of the Babylonian state, and the fact that so many of the peasantry possessed land of their own, prevented the agriculturist from sinking into that condition of serfdom and degradation which the existence of slavery would otherwise have brought about. Moreover, the flocks and cattle were tended by Bedâwin and Arameans, who were proud [pg 083] of their freedom and independence, like the Bedâwin of modern Egypt. In spite, therefore, of the fact that so much of the labor of the country was performed by slaves, agriculture was in high esteem and the free agriculturist was held in honor. Tradition told how Sargon of Akkad, the hero of ancient Babylonia, had been brought up by Akki the irrigator, and had himself been a gardener, while the god Tammuz, the bridegroom of Istar, had tended sheep. Indeed, one of the oldest titles of the Babylonian kings had been that of “shepherd.”

At the same time there was a tendency for the free laborer to degenerate into a serf, attached to the soil of the farm on which he and his forefathers had been settled for centuries. A contract dated in the first year of Cyrus is an illustration of the fact. It records the lease of a farm near Sippara, which belonged to the temple of the Sun-god, and was let to a private individual by the chief priest and the civil governor of the temple. The farm contained 60 gur of arable land, and the lease of it included “12 oxen, 8 peasants, 3 iron plough-shares, 4 axes, and sufficient grain for sowing and for the support of the peasants and the cattle.” Here the peasants are let along with the land, and presumably would have been sold with it had the farm been purchased instead of being let. They were, in fact, irremovable from the soil on which they had been born. It must, however, be remembered that the farm was the property of a temple, and it is possible that serfdom was confined to land which had been consecrated to the gods. In that case the Babylonian serfs would have corresponded [pg 084] with the Hebrew Nethinim, and might have been originally prisoners of war.

We learn some details of early agricultural life in Babylonia from the fragments of an old Sumerian work on farming which formed one of the text-books in the Babylonian schools. Passages were extracted from it and translated into Semitic for the use of the students, and difficult words and expressions were noted and explained. The book seems to have resembled the “Works and Days” of the Greek poet Hesiod, except that it was not in verse. We gather from it that the agricultural year began, not with Nisan, or March, but with Tisri, or September, like the Jewish civil year; at all events, it was then that the tenure of the farmer began and that his contract was drawn up with the landlord. It was then, too, after the harvest, that he took possession of the land, paying his tax to the government, repairing or making the fences, and ploughing the soil.

His tenure was of various kinds. Sometimes he undertook to farm the land, paying half the produce of it to the landlord or his agent and providing the farming implements, the seeds, and the manure himself. Sometimes the farm was worked on a co-operative system, the owner of the land and the tenant-farmer entering into partnership with one another and dividing everything into equal shares. In this case the landlord was required to furnish carts, oxen, and seeds. At other times the tenant received only a percentage of the profits—a third, a fourth, a fifth, or a tenth, according to agreement. He had also to pay the esrâ or tithe.

The most common form of tenure seems to have been that in which a third of the produce went to the lessor. Two-thirds of the rent, paid either in dates or in their monetary equivalent, was delivered to the landlord on the last day of the eighth month, Marchesvan, where the dates had been gathered and had been laid out to dry. By the terms of the lease the tenant was called upon to keep the farm buildings in order, and even to erect them if they did not exist. His own house was separate from that in which the farm-servants lived, and it was surrounded by a garden, planted for the most part with date-palms. If the farm-buildings were not built or were not kept in proper repair a fine was imposed upon him, which in the case quoted by the writer of the agricultural work was 10 shekels, or 30s. The tenant was furthermore expected to pay the laborers their wages, and the landlord had the power of dismissing him if the terms of the contract were not fulfilled.

The laborers were partly slaves, partly freemen, the freemen hiring themselves out at so much a month. A contract of the age of Khammurabi, for instance, states that a certain Ubaru, had thus hired himself out for thirty days for half a shekel of silver, or 1s. 6d., but he had to offer a guarantee that he would not leave his master's service before the expiration of the month. In other cases it was a slave whose services were hired from his owner; thus, in a document from Sippara, of the same age as the preceding, we read: “Rimmon-bani hires Sumi-izitim as a laborer for his brother, for three months, at a wage of one shekel and a half, 3 measures of grain and 1½ qa of oil. There [pg 086] shall be no withdrawal from the agreement. Ibni-A-murru and Sikni-Ea have confirmed it. Rimmon-bani hires the laborer in the presence of Abum-ilu (Abimael), the son of Ibni-Samas, Ilisu-ibni, the son of Igas-Rimmon, and Arad-Bel, the son of Akhuwam. (Dated) the first day of Sivan.” The wages evidently went to the slave, so that he was practically in the position of a free laborer.

When we come down to a later period, we find in contract, dated at the end of the second year of a Cyrus, Bunene-sar-uzur, “the son of Sum-yukin,” hired, as a servant for a year, “from the month Nisan to the month Adar,” for 3 shekels of silver. These were paid beforehand to a third person, and the payment was duly witnessed and registered. Bunene-sar-uzur was not a slave, though 9 shillings does not seem much as wages for a whole year. However, three years later only 1 pi, or about 50 quarts of meal, were given for a month's supply of food to some men who were digging a canal. The hours of work doubtless lasted from sunrise to sunset, though we have a curious document of the Macedonian period, dated in the reign of Seleucus II., in which certain persons sell the wages they receive for work done in a temple during the “sixth part” of a day. The sum demanded was as much as 65 shekels.

The Aramean Bedâwin, who acted as shepherds, or cattle-drovers, probably received better wages than the native Babylonians. They were less numerous and were in more request; moreover, it was necessary that they should be trustworthy. The herds and flocks were left in their charge for weeks together, on [pg 087] the west bank of the Euphrates, out of sight of the cultivated fields of Babylonia and exposed to the attacks of marauders from the desert. Early Babylonian documents give long lists of the herdsmen and shepherds, and of the number of sheep or oxen for which they were responsible, and which were the property of some wealthy landowner. In the seventeenth year of Nabonidos, five of the shepherds received one shekel and a half of silver, as well as a gur, or about 250 quarts, of grain from the royal granary.

Some of the songs have been preserved to us with which the Babylonian laborer beguiled his work in the fields. They probably formed part of the treatise on agriculture which has already been described; at any rate, we owe their preservation to the educational text-books, in which they have been embodied, along with Semitic translations of the original Sumerian text. Here is one which the peasants sang to the oxen as they returned from the field:

My knees are marching,

My feet are not resting;

Taking no thought,

Drive me home.

In a similar strain the ploughman encouraged his team with the words:

A heifer am I,

To the mule I am yoked.

Where is the cart?

Go, look for grass;

It is high, it is high!

Or again, the oxen, while threshing, would be addressed with the refrain:

Before the oxen,

As they walk,

Thresh out the grain.

Ploughing, harrowing, sowing, reaping, and threshing constituted the chief events of the agricultural year. The winters were not cold, and the Babylonian peasant was consequently not obliged to spend a part of the year indoors shivering over a fire. In fact fuel was scarce in the country; few trees were grown in it except the palm, and the fruit of the palm was too valuable to allow it to be cut down. When the ordinary occupations of the farmer had come to an end, he was expected to look after his farm buildings and fences, to build walls and clean out the ditches.

The ditches, indeed, were more important in Babylonia than in most other parts of the world. Irrigation was as necessary as in Egypt, though for a different reason. The Chaldean plain had originally been a marsh, and it required constant supervision to prevent it from being once more inundated by the waters and made uninhabitable. The embankments which hindered the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris and kept them within carefully regulated channels, the canals which carried off the surplus water and distributed it over the country, needed continual attention. Each year, after the rains of the winter, the banks had to be strengthened or re-made and the beds of the canals cleared [pg 089] out. The irrigator, moreover, was perpetually at work; the rainy season did not last long, and during the rest of the year the land was dependent on the water supplied by the rivers and canals. Irrigation, therefore, formed a large and important part of the farmers' work, and the bucket of the irrigator must have been constantly swinging. Without the irrigator the labors of the farmer would have been of little avail.

Chapter V. Manners And Customs

Babylonia was a land of bricks. Stone was not found nearer than the mountains of Elam on the one side or the desert plains of Northern Arabia on the other. Clay, on the contrary, was plentiful, and the art of making bricks and building a house by means of them must have been invented by the first settlers in the country. The bricks were dried in the sun, the heat of which was sufficient to harden them. The clay was further bound together by being mixed with chopped reeds, though the use of the latter was not universal, at all events in the earlier times. In the later days of Babylonian history, however, they were generally employed, and we learn from the contracts that a bed of reeds grown for the sake of the brick-makers' trade was by no means an unprofitable investment. Either clay or bitumen took the place of mortar; the bitumen was procured from Hit or from the Kurdish hills, where there are still springs of naphtha; after the conquest of Canaan it may have been brought from the neighborhood of the Dead Sea. Some scholars have thought that this is referred to by Gudea, the priest-king of Lagas (2700 B.C.).

The employment of brick had a very direct effect upon the character of Babylonian architecture. Thick walls, supported by buttresses and devoid of sculpture, were necessitated by it. The buildings of Babylonia were externally plain and flat; masses of brick were piled up in the form of towers or else built into long lines of wall of unbroken monotony. The roofs were made of the stems of palm-trees, which rested on the stems of other palm-trees, where the space between one brick wall and another was too great to be safely spanned. The upright stems became columns, which were imitated first in brick and then in stone. Babylonia was thus the birthplace of columnar architecture, and in the course of centuries columns of almost every conceivable shape and kind came to be invented. Sometimes they were made to stand on the backs of animals, sometimes the animal formed the capital. The column which rested against the wall passed into a brick pilaster, and this again assumed various forms.

The monotony of the wall itself was disguised in different ways. The pilaster served to break it, and the walls of the early Chaldean temples are accordingly often broken up into a series of recessed panels, the sides of which are formed by square pilasters. Clay cones were also inserted in the wall and brilliantly colored, the colors being arranged in patterns. But the most common form of decoration was where the wall was covered with painted stucco. This, indeed, was the ordinary mode of ornamenting the internal walls of a building; a sort of dado ran round the lower part of them painted with the figures [pg 092] of men and animals, while the upper part was left in plain colors or decorated only with rosettes and similar designs. Ezekiel[6] refers to the figures of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion on the walls of their palaces, and the composite creatures of Babylonian mythology who were believed to represent the first imperfect attempts at creation were depicted on the walls of the temple of Bel.

Among the tablets which have been found at Tello are plans of the houses of the age of Sargon of Akkad. The plans are for the most part drawn to scale, and the length and breadth of the rooms and courts contained in them are given. The rooms opened one into the other, and along one side of a house there usually ran a passage. One of the houses, for example, of which we have a plan, contained five rooms on the ground floor, two of which were the length of the house. The dimensions of the second of these is described as being 8 cubits in breadth and 1 gardu in length. The gardu was probably equivalent to 18 cubits or about 30 feet. In another case the plan is that of the house of the high priest of Lagas, and at the back of it the number of slaves living in it is stated as well as the number of workmen employed to build it. It was built, we are told, in the year when Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon, made the pavement of the temples of Bel at Nippur and of Istar at Nin-unu.

The temple and house were alike erected on a platform of brick or earth. This was rendered necessary by the marshy soil of Babylonia and the inundations [pg 093] to which it was exposed. The houses, indeed, generally found the platform already prepared for them by the ruins of the buildings which had previously stood on the same spot. Sun-dried brick quickly disintegrates, and a deserted house soon became a mound of dirt. In this way the villages and towns of Babylonia gradually rose in height, forming a tel or mound on which the houses of a later age could be erected.

In contrast to Babylonia the younger kingdom of Assyria was a land of stone. But the culture of Assyria was derived from Babylonia, and the architectural fashions of Babylonia were accordingly followed even when stone took the place of brick. The platform, which was as necessary in Babylonia as it was unnecessary in Assyria, was nevertheless servilely copied, and palaces and temples were piled upon it like those of the Babylonians. The ornamentation of the Babylonian walls was imitated in stone, the rooms being adorned with a sculptured dado, the bas-reliefs of which were painted in bright colors. Even the fantastic shapes of the Babylonian columns were reproduced in stone. Brick, too, was largely used; in fact, the stone served for the most part merely as a facing, to ornament rather than strengthen the walls.

The Babylonian princes had themselves set the example of employing stone for the sake of decoration. Stone was fetched for the purpose from the most distant regions, regardless of cost. Gudea, the priest-king of Lagas, imported limestone from the Lebanon and from Samalum, near the Gulf of Antioch, while the statues which adorned his palace, and are now in [pg 094] the Louvre, are carved out of diorite from the Peninsula of Sinai. The diorite doubtless came by sea, but the blocks of hewn stone that were brought from “the land of the Amorites” must have been conveyed overland.

Even more precious materials than stone were used for decorative purposes. Gold and silver, bronze and ivory, lapis-lazuli and colored glass, ornamented the cornices and other parts of the interior of the palace. Gudea tells us that he had sent to the deserts which bordered on Egypt for gold-dust and acacia-wood, to Arabia for copper, and to Mount Amanus for beams of cedar. The elephant was still hunted on the banks of the Euphrates near the city of Carchemish, and lapis-lazuli was furnished by the mountains of Persia.

A garden was planted by the side of the house. The Babylonians were an agricultural people, and even the cities were full of the gardens attached to the houses of all who could afford to have them. Originally the garden was little more than a grove of palms. But herbs and vegetables soon began to be grown in it, and as habits of luxury increased, exotic trees and shrubs were transplanted to it and flowers were cultivated for the sake of their scent. Tiglath-pileser I. of Assyria tells us how he had “taken and planted in the gardens of his country cedars” and other trees “from the lands he had conquered, which none of the kings his predecessors had ever planted before,” and how he had “brought rare vines which did not exist in Assyria and had cultivated them in the land of Assyria.” At a later date Sennacherib laid out a [pg 095] pleasure-garden or “paradise” by the side of the palace he erected, filling it with cypresses and other trees as well as fragrant plants, and digging a lake in the midst of it by means of which it could be watered. One of the bas-reliefs in the palace of Assur-bani-pal represents the King and Queen dining in the royal garden under the shadow of its palms, while an attendant drives away the insects with a fan. The Assyrians did but imitate their Babylonian neighbors, and in the gardens of Nineveh we must see many copies of the gardens that had been laid out in Babylonia long ages before. The very word “paradise,” which in the Persian age came to signify a pleasure-park, was of Babylonian origin. It is given in the exercise-book of a Babylonian school-boy as the name of a mythical locality, and an etymological pun attempts to derive it from the name of the god Esu.

It was, of course, only the houses of the rich and noble which were artistically furnished or provided with a garden. The poorer classes lived in mud huts of conical form, which seldom contained more than one or two rooms. Air and light were admitted through the door or through small apertures in the walls. In the better class of houses, on the other hand, the windows were of large size, and were placed near the ceiling. The air was excluded by means of curtains which were drawn across them when the weather was cold or when it was necessary to keep out the sunlight. The houses, moreover, consisted of more than one story, the upper stories being approached by a flight of steps which were open to the air. They were usually built against one [pg 096] of the sides of a central court, around which the rooms were ranged, the rooms on the upper floors communicating with one another by means of a covered corridor, or else by doors leading from one chamber to the other. The apartments of the women were separate from those of the men, and the servants slept either on the ground-floor or in an outbuilding of their own.

The furniture, even of the palaces, was scanty from a modern point of view. The floor was covered with rugs, for the manufacture of which Babylonia was famous, and chairs, couches, and tables were placed here and there. The furniture was artistic in form; a seal-cylinder, of the age of Ur-Bau, King of Ur, the older contemporary of Gudea, represents a chair, the feet of which have been carved into the likeness of those of oxen. If we may judge from Egyptian analogies the material of which they were formed would have been ivory. The Assyrian furniture of later days doubtless followed older Babylonian models, and we can gain from it some idea of what they must have been like. The chairs were of various kinds. Some had backs and arms, some were mere stools. The seats of many were so high that a footstool was required by those who used them. The employment of the footstool must go back to a considerable antiquity, since we find some of the Tel-el-Amarna correspondents in the fourteenth century before our era comparing themselves to the footstool of the King. Chairs and stools alike were furnished with cushions which were covered with embroidered tapestries. So also were the couches and bedsteads used by the [pg 097] wealthier classes. The poor contented themselves with a single mattress laid upon the floor, and since everyone slept in the clothes he had worn during the day, rising in the morning was not a difficult task.

The tables had four legs, and the wood of which they were composed was often inlaid with ivory. Wood inlaid with ivory and other precious materials was also employed for the chairs and sofas. Tripods of bronze, moreover, stood in different parts of the room, and vases of water or wine were placed upon them. Fragments of some of them have been found in the ruins of Nineveh, and they are represented in early Babylonian seals. The feet of the tripod were artistically shaped to resemble the feet of oxen, the clinched human hand, or some similar design. At meals the tripod stood beside the table on which the dishes were laid. Those who eat sat on chairs in the earlier period, but in later times the fashion grew up, for the men at any rate, to recline on a couch. Assur-bani-pal, for example, is thus represented, while the Queen sits beside him on a lofty chair. Perhaps the difference in manners is an illustration of the greater conservatism of women who adhere to customs which have been discarded by the men.

Vases of stone and earthenware, of bronze, gold, and silver, were plentifully in use. A vase of silver mounted on a bronze pedestal with four feet, which was dedicated to his god by one of the high-priests of Lagas, has been found at Tello, and stone bowls, inscribed with the name of Gudea, and closely resembling similar bowls from the early Egyptian tombs, have also been disinterred there. A vase of Egyptian [pg 098] alabaster, discovered by the French excavators in Babylonia, but subsequently lost in the Tigris, bore upon it an inscription stating it to have been part of the spoil obtained by Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon of Akkad, from his conquest of the Sinaitic peninsula. In Assyrian days the vases were frequently of porcelain or glass; when these were first introduced is still unknown. Various articles of furniture are mentioned in the later contracts. Under Nabonidos, 7 shekels, or 21 shillings, were given for a copper kettle and cup, the kettle weighing 16 manehs (or 42 pounds troy) and the cup 2 manehs (5 pounds 7 ounces troy). These were left, it may be noted, in the safe-keeping of a slave, and were bought by a lady. At a later date, in the third year of Cambyses, as much as 4 manehs 9 shekels, or £36 7s., were paid for a large copper jug and qulla, which was probably of the same form as the qullas of modern Egypt. The female slave who seems to have started an inn in the sixth year of Cambyses provided herself with five bedsteads, ten chairs, three dishes, one wardrobe (?), three shears, one iron shovel, one syphon, one wine-decanter, one chain (?), one brazier, and other objects which cannot as yet be identified. The brazier was probably a Babylonian invention. At all events we find it used in Judah after contact with Assyria had introduced the habits of the farther East among the Jews (Jer. xxxvi. 22), like the gnomon or sun-dial of Ahaz (Is. xxxviii. 8), which was also of Babylonian origin (Herod., ii., 109). The gnomon seems to have consisted of a column, the shadow of which was thrown on a flight of twelve steps representing [pg 099] the twelve double hours into which the diurnal revolutions of the earth were divided and which thus indicated the time of day.

What the chairs, tables, footstools, and couches were like may be seen from the Assyrian bas-reliefs. They were highly artistic in design and character, and were of various shapes. The tables or stands sometimes had the form of camp-stools, sometimes were three-legged, but more usually they were furnished with four legs, which occasionally were placed on a sort of platform or stand. At times they were provided with shelves. Special stands with shelves were also made for holding vases, though large jars were often made to stand on tripods.

If we may judge from the old lists of clothing that have come down to us, the Babylonians must have been fond of variety in dress. The names of an immense number of different kinds of dress are given, and the monuments show that fashions changed from time to time. Thus the earliest remains of Chaldean art exhibit three successive changes in the head-dress, and similar changes are to be noticed in the dress of the Assyrian kings as it is represented in the bas-reliefs.

To the last, however, the principal constituents of Babylonian dress remained the same. There were a hat or head-dress, a tunic or shirt, and a long robe which reached to the ankles, to which in cold weather was added a cloak. The hat or cap was made of some thick substance like felt and was sometimes quilted. The Babylonian King Merodach-nadin-akhi (1100 B.C.) is represented in a square cap which is [pg 100] ornamented with a row of feathers; below these is a band of rosettes. The Assyrian King generally wore a lofty tiara; this was a survival of the tiara of the early Babylonians. Above his head was carried a parasol to protect him from the sun; but the use of the parasol was confined to the upper classes, if not to the royal family alone.

The tunic was of linen, or more often of wool, which was manufactured in Babylonia on a large scale. It reached half-way down the knees and was fastened round the waist by a girdle. Under it a second tunic or vest was sometimes worn in cold weather. Drawers were seldom used, though in the time of the second Assyrian empire the cavalry and heavy-armed bowmen wore tightly fitting drawers of plaited leather, but the custom was probably introduced from the north. A bilingual vocabulary, however, gives a Sumerian word for this article of dress, which may therefore have been occasionally adopted in pre-Semitic days.

The long robe was usually sleeveless and ornamented with a fringe. It opened in front, and in walking allowed the left leg to be seen. The girdle was often tied around it instead of round the tunic. The Assyrian King is sometimes represented as wearing a sort of richly embroidered cape over the robe. The cape or cloak, however, was specially characteristic of the Babylonians, as the Assyrians found it inconvenient in war or active exercise, and accordingly preferred to discard it. Most of them wore it only on state occasions or when in full dress.

The feet were shod with sandals, though the Babylonians, [pg 101] as a rule, went barefoot. So also did the lower classes among the Assyrians, as well as a portion of the army. The sandals were attached to the foot by leather thongs, and the heel was protected by a cap. The boot, however, was introduced from the colder regions of the north before the twelfth century B.C. At all events, Merodach-nadin-akhi is depicted as wearing soft leather shoes, and Sennacherib adopted a similar foot-covering. This was laced in front like the high-laced boots with which the Assyrian cavalry were provided toward the end of the reign of Tiglath-pileser III.

The priest was distinguished by a curiously flounced dress, made perhaps of a species of muslin, which descended to the feet, and is often pictured on the early seals. Over his shoulders was flung a goat's skin, the symbol of his office, like the leopard's skin worn by the priests in Egypt.

In the early Babylonian period the dress of all classes was naturally much more simple than that of a later date. The poor were contented with a short kilt, the King and his family with a long one. One of the early rulers of Lagas, for instance, is represented as wearing only a skull-cap and a kilt which reaches nearly to the ankles. It was under the Semitic empire of Sargon of Akkad that the long robe seems first to have become common. But it was worn over the left shoulder only, and as the tunic was not yet introduced into ordinary use, the right shoulder was left bare. Even Naram-Sin, the conqueror of Sinai, is depicted as clad in this simple costume in a bas-relief found near Diarbekr. The robe is quilted, [pg 102] and on the King's head is a conical cap of felt. The statues of the age of Gudea also show no sign of the tunic. The development out of the kilt must belong to a later age.

The costume of the women does not appear to have differed much from that of the men. Both alike adopted the long robe. But representations of women are unfortunately rare. The Queen of Assur-bani-pal is dressed in a long, sleeveless robe, over which is a fringed frock reaching to the knees, and over this again a light cape, also fringed and embroidered with rosettes. This may, therefore, be regarded as the official dress of a grand lady in the closing days of the Assyrian empire.

Both men and women were fond of jewelry, and adorned themselves with rings, bracelets, ear-rings, and necklaces. The women also wore anklets, like many of the Oriental women of to-day. The men carried a stick in the street, and all who could afford it had a small engraved cylinder of stone attached to the wrist by a ring which passed through an orifice in the cylinder. The cylinder served the purpose of a seal, and was constantly required in business transactions. No deed was valid without the seal or mark of the contracting parties; when either of them was too poor to possess a seal, a nail-mark was impressed upon the clay of the contract tablet, and a note added stating to whom it was that the mark belonged.

The seal-cylinder was a Babylonian invention. In a land where there were no stones every pebble was of value, and the Babylonians accordingly became expert gem-cutters at a very early period. [pg 103] Gem-cutting, in fact, was a highly developed art among them, and the seal-cylinder of Ibni-sarru, the librarian of Sargon of Akkad, which is now in a private collection in Paris, is one of the most beautiful specimens of the art that has ever been produced. The pebble was cut in a cylindrical shape, and various figures were engraved upon it. The favorite design was that of a god or goddess to whom the owner of the seal is being introduced by a priest; sometimes the King takes the place of the deity, at other times it is the adventures of Gilgames, the hero of the great Chaldean Epic, that are represented upon the stone. The design is usually accompanied by a few lines of inscription, giving the name of the owner of the seal, as well as that of his father, and stating of what god or King he was “the servant.” The seals were often kept in stock by their makers, a blank space being left for the inscription, which was to be engraved upon them as soon as they had found a purchaser. Hence it is that at times the names have never been filled in.

The style and pattern of the cylinder changed in the course of centuries, as well as the favorite materials of which it was made. Under the dynasty of Ur, which preceded that of Khammurabi, for instance, hæmatite was more especially in vogue; in the age of Nebuchadnezzar crystal became fashionable. At one period, moreover, or among the artists of a particular local school, the representation of a human sacrifice was common. Between the inscription on the cylinder, however, and the subjects engraved upon it there is seldom, if ever, any connection, except [pg 104] when a portrait is given of the god or King of whom the owner calls himself the servant.

A hole was drilled through the length of the cylinder, and through this a string was passed. Instead of the string a rod of metal or ivory was often employed; this was fixed in a frame of gold or bronze, and the cylinder was thus able to turn upon it. When the seal was used it was rolled over the soft clay, leaving an indelible impression behind. Among the objects found at Tello are balls of clay, which were attached to papyrus documents, like the seals of mediæval deeds, and sealed with the cylinders of the post-masters of Sargon and Naram-Sin. Above the seal comes the address, in one case to Naram-Sin, in another to the high-priest of Lagas. It is evident that a postal system had already been established between Lagas and Agade or Akkad, the capital of Sargon's empire. The impressions show that the seals must have been very beautiful specimens of workmanship. They all belonged to high officials; one to Dada, “the seer of the palace,” another to the high-priest of Lagas himself.

Great attention was paid to the hair of the head and beard. But this was more especially the case among the Semites, who were a bearded race. The older Sumerian population had but little hair upon the face, and to the last the typical Babylonian was distinguished from the Assyrian by the greater absence of beard. The result was that while the Semite encouraged his hair to grow, the Sumerian shaved it except in the case of old men. Most of the Sumerian heads which have been discovered in [pg 105] the excavations of Tello have smooth faces and shorn heads. The figures represented on the so-called Stela of the Vultures, one of the earliest examples of Chaldean art, are without beards, and on the early seal-cylinders the gods alone, as a rule, are permitted to wear them. We are reminded of the Egyptian custom which forbade the beard except to the King and the god. The barber, in fact, occupied an important position in ancient Babylonia, and the old Sumerian code of laws enjoins that a son who denies his father shall be shorn and sold as a slave.

With the rise of Semitic supremacy, however, there is a great change. Naram-Sin, in the bas-relief of Diarbekr, wears beard and whiskers and mustache like the Assyrians of a later day, and like them also his hair is artificially curled, though to a lesser extent. The same long beard also distinguishes Khammurabi in a piece of sculpture in which he is entitled “the king of the land of the Amorites.” The gods, too, now assume a mustache as well as a beard and take upon them a Semitic character.

The use of cosmetics must have become widely spread, and many of the small stone vases in which they were kept and which have been found on the sites of Babylonian cities were doubtless intended for the hair-dresser. The oil that was poured upon the hair made it bright and shining and it was worn long whether it grew on the head or on the face. The Babylonians had long been known as “the people of the black heads,” perhaps in contrast to the fairer inhabitants of the Kurdish mountains to the north, [pg 106] and the black hair, frizzled and curled, was now allowed to be visible. The working classes bound it with a simple fillet; the wealthier members of society protected it with caps and tiaras. But all alike were proud of it; the days were past when a beardless race had held rule in Western Asia.

Chapter VI. Trades, Houses, And Land; Wages And Prices

Babylonia, as we have seen, was essentially an industrial country. In spite of its agricultural basis and the vast army of slaves with which it was filled, it was essentially a land of trades and manufactures. Its manufacturing fame was remembered into classical days. One of the rooms in the palace of Nero was hung with Babylonian tapestries, which had cost four millions of sesterces, or more than £32,000, and Cato, it is said, sold a Babylonian mantle because it was too costly and splendid for a Roman to wear. The wool of which the cloths and rugs of Babylonia were made was derived from the flocks which fed on the banks of the Euphrates, and a large body of artisans was employed in weaving it into tapestries and curtains, robes and carpets. They were woven in bright and vari-colored patterns; the figures of men and animals were depicted upon them and the bas-relief or fresco could be replaced upon the wall by a picture in tapestry. The dyes were mainly vegetable, though the kermes or cochineal-insect, out of which the precious scarlet dye was extracted, was brought from the neighborhood of the Indus. So at least Ktesias states in the age of the Persian empire; and [pg 108] since teak was found by Mr. Taylor among the ruins of Ur, it is probable that intercourse with the western coast of India went back to an early date. Indeed an old bilingual list of clothing gives sindhu as the name of a material which is explained to be “vegetable wool;” in this we must see the cotton which in the classical epoch was imported from the island of Tylos, in the Persian Gulf, but which, as its name declares, must have originally been “the Indian” plant.

The looms and weavers of Babylonia are, as is natural, repeatedly referred to in the contracts, many of which, moreover, relate to the sale and purchase of wool. One of them even shows us Belshazzar, the son and heir-apparent of the King Nabonidos, as a wool-merchant on a considerable scale. “The sum of 20 manehs for wool,” it says, “the property of Belshazzar, the son of the king, which has been handed over to Iddin-Merodach, the son of Basa, the son of Nur-Sin, through the agency of Nebo-zabit, the servant of the house of Belshazzar, the son of the king, and the secretaries of the son of the king. In the month Adar (February) of the eleventh year (of Nabonidos) the debtor shall pay the money, 20 manehs. The house of —— the Persian and all the property of Iddin-Merodach in town and country shall be the security of Belshazzar, the son of the king, until he shall pay in full the money aforesaid. The money which shall (meanwhile) accrue upon (the wool) he shall pay as interest.” Then follow the names of five witnesses and a priest, as well as the date and the place of registration. This was Babylon, and the [pg 109] priest, Bel-akhi-iddin, who helped to witness the deed was a brother of Nabonidos and consequently the uncle of Belshazzar.

The weight of the wool that was sold is unfortunately not stated. But considering that 20 manehs, or £180, was paid for it, there must have been a considerable amount of it. In the reign of Cambyses the amount of wool needed for the robe of the image of the Sun-goddess  was as much as 5 manehs 5 shekels in weight. Wealthy land-owners kept large flocks of sheep, chiefly for the sake of their wool. Their prices varied greatly. Thus in the fourth year of Nabonidos, 6 shekels, or 18s., were given for a sheep, while in the thirteenth year of the same King, 18 sheep fetched only 35 shekels, or less than 6s., each. In the first year of Cyrus, 6 lambs were sold for 8¼ shekels, and 5 other lambs for 7¼ shekels, while 1 sheep cost only one shekel and a quarter; in his sixth year the price of a single sheep had risen to 4 shekels (12s.). Under Cambyses we find sheep selling for 7 and 7¼ shekels apiece. In the eighth year of Nabonidos, 100 sheep were sold for 50 shekels after they had been slaughtered; it is clear, therefore, that the dead animal was considered less valuable than the living one.

On the other hand, sheep cost a good deal to feed when the grazing season was over, and they had to be fed “in the stall.” A document dated in the seventh year of Cyrus states that 32 sheep required each day 1 pi 28 qas (or about 95 quarts) of grain, while 160 full-grown animals consumed daily 4 pi 16 qas, or more than 240 quarts. In the reign of Cambyses 1 pi 4 [pg 110] qas of fodder were needed daily for 20 old sheep, 100 qas for 100 younger sheep, and the same amount also for 200 lambs. At this time 2 pi of grain cost 6½ shekels; consequently the cost of keeping the 20 old sheep alone was about 10s 6d. a day. To this had to be added the wages of the shepherds, who were free Bedâwin. Hence, it is not wonderful that the owner demanded 7 shekels, or 21s., for the sheep he had to sell.

In the Edin or “field,” however, their keep came to but little. The pasturage was common property, and it was only the wages of the Aramean shepherds who looked after the flock which involved an outlay. The five shepherds who, in the tenth year of Nabonidos, were paid for their services by the overseer of the royal flocks in the town of Ruzabu received 30 shekels of silver and a gur of grain. The gur contained 180 qas, and since in the first year of Cyrus two men received 2 pi 30 qas, or 102 qas, of grain for their support during a month of thirty days, we may, perhaps, infer that the wages were intended to cover the third part of a month. In this case each man would have been paid at the rate of 9 shekels, or 37s., a month. It is, however, possible that the wages were really intended for the full month. The ancient Greeks considered a quart of wheat a sufficient daily allowance for a grown man, and 180 qas would mean about 1⅗ of a quart a day for each man.

We may gather from a contract dated the 5th of Sivan in the eighteenth year of Darius that it was not customary to pay for any sheep that were sold until they had been driven into the city, the cost of [pg 111] doing so being included in the price. The contract is as follows: “One hundred sheep of the house of Akhabtum, the mother of Sa-Bel-iddin, the servant of Bel-sunu, that have been sold to La-Bel, the son of Khabdiya, on the 10th day of the month Ab in the eighteenth year of Darius the king: The sheep, 200 in number, must be brought into Babylon and delivered to Supêsu, the servant of Sa-Bel-iddin. If 15 manehs of silver are not paid for the sheep on the 10th of Ab, they must be paid on 20th of the month. If the money, amounting to 15 manehs, is not paid, then interest shall be paid according to this agreement at the rate of one shekel for each maneh per month.” Then come the names of eight witnesses and a priest, the date, and the place of registration, which was a town called Tsikhu.

The contract is interesting from several points of view. The sheep, it will be seen, belonged to a woman, and not to her son, who was “the servant” of a Babylonian gentleman and had another “servant” who acted as his agent at Babylon. The father of the purchaser of the sheep bears the Hebrew name of 'Abdî, which is transcribed into Babylonian in the usual fashion, and the name of the purchaser himself, which may be translated “(There is) no Bel,” may imply that he was a Jew. Akhabtum and her son were doubtless Arameans, and it is noticeable that the latter is termed a “servant” and not a “slave.”

Before entering the city an octroi duty had to be paid upon the sheep as upon other produce of the country. The custom-house was at the gate, and the duty is accordingly called “gate-money” in the contracts. [pg 112] In front of the gate was an open space, the rébit, such as may still be seen at the entrance to an Oriental town, and which was used as a market-place. The rébit of Nineveh lay on the north side of the city, in the direction where Sargon built his palace, the ruins of which are now known as Khorsabad. But besides the market-place outside the walls there were also open spaces inside them where markets could be held and sheep and cattle sold. Babylon, it would seem, was full of such public “squares,” and so, too, was Nineveh. The suqi or “streets” led into them, long, narrow lanes through which a chariot or cart could be driven with difficulty. Here and there, however, there were streets of a broader and better character, called suli, which originally denoted the raised and paved ascents which led to a temple. It was along these that the religious processions were conducted, and the King and his generals passed over them in triumph after a victory. One of these main streets, called Â-ibur-sabu, intersected Babylon; it was constructed of brick by Nebuchadnezzar, paved with large slabs of stone, and raised to a considerable height. It started from the principal gate of the city, and after passing Ê-Saggil, the great temple of Bel-Merodach, was carried as far as the sanctuary of Istar. When Assur-bani-pal's army captured Babylon, after a long siege, the “mercy-seats” of the gods and the paved roads were “cleansed” by order of the Assyrian King and the advice of “the prophets,” while the ordinary streets and lanes were left to themselves.

It was in these latter streets, however, that the [pg 113] shops and bazaars were situated. Here the trade of the country was carried on in shops which possessed no windows, but were sheltered from the sun by awnings that were stretched across the street. Behind the shops were magazines and store-houses, as well as the rooms in which the larger industries, like that of weaving, were carried on. The scavengers of the streets were probably dogs. As early as the time of Khammurabi, however, there were officers termed rabiani, whose duty it was to look after “the city, the walls, and the streets.” The streets, moreover, had separate names.

Here and there “beer-houses” were to be found, answering to the public-houses of to-day, as well as regular inns. The beer-houses are not infrequently alluded to in the texts, and a deed relating to the purchase of a house in Sippara, of the age of Khammurabi, mentions one that was in a sort of underground cellar, like some of the beer-houses of modern Germany.

Sippara lay on both sides of the Euphrates, like Babylon, and its two halves were probably connected by a pontoon-bridge, as we know was the case at Babylon. Tolls were levied for passing over the latter, and probably also for passing under it in boats. At all events a document translated by Mr. Pinches shows that the quay-duties were paid into the same department of the government as the tolls derived from the bridge. The document, which is dated in the twenty-sixth year of Darius, is so interesting that it may be quoted in full: “The revenue derived from the bridge and the quays, and the guard-house, [pg 114] which is under the control of Guzanu, the captain of Babylon, of which Sirku, the son of Iddinâ, has charge, besides the amount derived from the tolls levied at the bridge of Guzanu, the captain of Babylon, of which Muranu, the son of Nebo-kin-abli, and Nebo-bullidhsu, the son of Guzanu, have charge: Kharitsanu and Iqubu (Jacob) and Nergal-ibni are the watchmen of the bridge. Sirku, the son of Iddinâ, the son of Egibi, and Muranu, the son of Nebo-kin-abli, the son of the watchman of the pontoon, have paid to Bel-asûa, the son of Nergal-yubal-lidh, the son of Mudammiq-Rimmon, and Ubaru, the son of Bel-akhi-erba, the son of the watchman of the pontoon, as dues for a month, 15 shekels of white silver, in one-shekel pieces and coined. Bel-asûa and Ubaru shall guard the ships which are moored under the bridge. Muranu and his trustees, Bel-asûa and Ubaru, shall not pay the money derived from the tolls levied at the bridge, which is due each month from Sirku in the absence of the latter. All the traffic over the bridge shall be reported by Bel-asûa and Ubaru to Sirku and the watchmen of the bridge.”

House-property was valuable, especially if it included shops. As far back as the reign of Eri-Aku, or Arisch, 2¼ shekels were given for one which stood on a piece of ground only 1⅚ sar in area, the sar, if Dr. Reisner is right, being the eighteen-hundredths part of the feddan or acre. In the twentieth year of Assur-bani-pal, just after a war which had desolated Babylonia, a house was sold in the provincial town of Erech for 75 shekels (£11 5s.), and in the beginning of the reign of Nabonidos a carpenter's shop in Borsippa, [pg 115] the suburb of Babylon, which was not more than 7 rods, 5 cubits, and 18 inches in length, was bought by the agent of the Syrian Ben-Hadad-nathan and his wife for 11½ manehs, or £103 10s. On the other hand, in the reign of Cambyses, we hear of smaller prices being given for houses in Babylon, 4½ manehs for a house with a piece of land attached to it, and 2 manehs for one that had been the joint property of a man and his wife; while in the ninth year of Nergal-sharezer a house was sold for only 52½ shekels.

Houses, however, were more frequently let than sold. Already, in the age of Khammurabi, we have the record of the lease of a house for eight years. At a later date contracts relating to the renting of houses are numerous. Thus in the sixth year of Cyrus a house was let at a yearly rent of 10 shekels, part of which was to be paid at the beginning of the year and the rest in the middle of it. The tenant was to renew the fences when necessary and repair all dilapidations. He was also expected to send a present to his landlord thrice a year in the months of Nisan, Tammuz, and Kisleu. Other houses in Babylon in the Persian age were let at yearly rents of 5 shekels, 5½ shekels, 7½ shekels, 9 shekels, 15 shekels, 20 shekels, 23 shekels, and 35 shekels, the leases running for two, three, five, and more years. The tenant usually undertook to keep the property in repair and to make good all dilapidations. Loss in case of fire or other accidents also fell upon him. Most of the houses seem to have been inhabited by single families; but there were tenements or flats as well, the rent of which was naturally lower than that [pg 116] of a whole house. Thus we find a woman paying only 2 shekels, or 6s., a year for a tenement in the reign of Cambyses.

Any violation of the lease involved a fine, the amount of which was stated in the contract. A house, for instance, was let at Babylon in the first year of Cambyses for 5 shekels a year, the rent to be paid in two halves “at the beginning and in the middle of the year.” In this case a breach of the contract was to be punished by a fine of 10 shekels, or double the amount of the rent. In other cases the fine was as much as a maneh of silver.

Occasionally the primitive custom was retained of paying the rent in kind instead of in coin. We even hear of “six overcoats” being taken in lieu of rent. The rent of a house might also take the place of interest upon a loan, and the property be handed over to the creditor as security for a debt. Thus in the second and last year of the reign of Evil-Merodach (560 B.C.), and on the fourth of the month Ab, the following agreement was drawn up at Babylon: “Four manehs of silver belonging to Nadin-akhi, the son of Nur-Ea, the son of Masdukku, received from Sapik-zeri, the son of Merodach-nazir, the son of Liu-Merodach. The house of Sapik-zeri, which is in the street Khuburru, and adjoins the houses of Rimut-Bel, the son of Zeriya, the son of the Egyptian, and of Zeriya, the son of Bel-edheru, shall be handed over as security to Nadin-akhi. No rent shall be paid for it, and no interest demanded for the debt. Sapik-zeri shall have it for three years. He must renew the fences and repair all injuries to the walls. [pg 117] At the end of the three years Sapik-zeri shall repay the money—namely, four manehs—to Nadin-akhi, and the latter shall vacate the house. The rent of the warehouse of the eunuch is included, of which Sapik-zeri enjoys the use. Whatever doors Nadin-akhi may have added to the house during his tenancy he shall take away.” Then come the names of three witnesses, one of them being the brother of the creditor, as well as of the clerk who drew up the document.

A few years later, in the fifth year of Nabonidos (551 B.C.), we find the heir-apparent, Belshazzar, receiving house-property on similar terms. “The house of Nebo-akhi-iddin, the son of Sula, the son of Egibi,” we read, “which adjoins the house of Bel-iddin, the son of Birrut, the son of the life-guardsman, is handed over for three years as security for a loan of 1½ manehs to Nebo-kin-akhi, the agent of Belshazzar, the son of the king, on the following conditions: no rent shall be paid for the house, and no interest paid on the debt. The tenant shall renew the fences and make good all dilapidations. At the end of three years the 1½ manehs shall be paid by Nebo-akhi-iddin to Nebo-kin-akhi, and Nebo-kin-akhi shall vacate the house of Nebo-akhi-iddin. Witnessed by Kab-tiya, the son of Talnea, the son of Egibi; by Sapik-zeri, the son of Nergal-yukin, the son of Sin-karab-seme; by Nebo-zer-ibni, the son of Ardia, and the clerk, Bel-akhi-iqisa, the son of Nebo-balasu-ikbi, at Babylon, the 21st day of Nisam (March) and the fifth year of Nabonidos, King of Babylon.”

This was not the only transaction of the kind in which Belshazzar appears, though it is true that his [pg 118] business was carried on by means of agents. Six years later we have another contract relating to his commercial dealings which has already been quoted above. It illustrates the intensely commercial spirit of the Babylonians, and we may form some idea of the high estimation in which trade was held when we see the eldest son of the reigning King acting as a wool merchant and carrying on business like an ordinary merchant.

An interesting document, drawn up in Babylonia in the eleventh year of Sargon (710 B.C.), shortly after the overthrow of Merodach-Baladan, contains an account of a lawsuit which resulted from the purchase of two “ruined houses” in Dur-ilu, a town on the frontier of Elam. They had been purchased by a certain Nebo-liu for 85 shekels, with the intention of pulling them down and erecting new buildings on the site. In order to pay the purchase money Nebo-liu demanded back from “Bel-usatu, the son of Ipunu,” the sum of 30 shekels which he claimed to have lent him. Bel-usatu at first denied the claim, and the matter was brought into court. There judgment was given in favor of the plaintiff, and the defendant was ordered to pay him 45 shekels, 15, or half the amount claimed, being for “costs.” Thereupon Bel-usatu proposed:

“ ‘Instead of the money, take my houses, which are in the town of Der.’ The title-deeds of these houses, the longer side of which was bounded to the east by the house of Bea, the son of Sulâ, and to the west by the entrance to a field which partly belonged to the [pg 119] property, while the shorter side was bounded to the north by the house of Ittabsi, and to the south by the house of Likimmâ, were signed and sealed by Nebo-usatu, who pledged himself not to retract the deed or make any subsequent claim, and they were then handed over to Nebo-liu.” The troubles of the latter, however, were not yet at an end. “Ilu-rabu-bel-sanât, Sennacherib, and Labasu, the sons of Rakhaz the [priest] of the great god, said to Nebo-liu: ‘Seventy-three shekels of your money you have received from our father. Give us, therefore, 50 shekels and we will deliver to you the house and its garden which belonged to our father.’ The house, which was fit only to be pulled down and rebuilt, along with a grove of forty date-bearing palms, was situated on the bank of the canal of Dûtu in Dur-ilu, its longer side adjoining on the north the house of Edheru, the son of Baniya, the priest of Â, and on the south the canal of Dûtu, while its shorter side was bounded on the east by the house of Nergal-epus, and on the west by the street Mutaqutu. Nebo-liu agreed, and looked out and gave Rakhaz and his sons 50 shekels of silver, together with an overcoat and two shekels by way of a bakshish to bind the bargain, the whole amounting to 52 shekels, paid in full.” The custom of adding a bakshish or “present” to the purchase-money at the conclusion of a bargain is still characteristic of the East. Other examples of it are met with in the Babylonian contracts, and prove how immemorially old it is. Thus in the second year of Darius, when the three sons of a “smith” sold a house near the Gate of Zamama, at Babylon, to the grandson of another “smith,” [pg 120] besides the purchase money for the house, which amounted to 67½ shekels, the buyer gave in addition a bakshish of 2½ shekels (7s. 6d.) as well as “a dress for the lady of the house.” Three shekels were further given as “a present” for sealing the deed. So too, the negotiations for the sale of some land in the second year of Evil-Merodach were accompanied by a bakshish of 5 shekels.

Lawsuits connected with the sale or lease of houses do not seem to have been uncommon. One of the documents which have come down to us from the ancient records of Babylon is a list of “the judges before whom Sapik-zeri, the son of Zirutu, and Baladhu, the son of Nasikatum, the slave of the secretary for the Marshlands,” were called upon to appear in a suit relating to “the house and deed which Zirutu, the father of Sapik-zeri, had sealed and given to Baladhu,” who had afterward handed both of them over to Sapik-zeri. Among the judges we find the governor of the Marshlands, who acted as president, the sub-governor, the mayor of Erech, the priest of Ur, and one of the governors of the district “beyond” the Euphrates. The list is dated the 6th of Nisan or March, in the seventeenth year of Nebuchadnezzar.

The value of land was proportionate to that of house-property. In the early days of Babylonia its value was fixed by the amount of grain that could be grown upon it, and it was accordingly in grain that the owner was paid by the purchaser or lessee. Gradually, however, a metal currency took the place of the grain, and in the later age of Babylonian history even the rent was but rarely paid in kind. We [pg 121] learn from a lawsuit decided in the reign of Samsu-iluna, the son of Khammurabi, that it was customary for an estate to be “paced round” by the rabianum or “magistrates” of the city. The ceremony was equivalent to “beating the bounds” of a parish in modern England, and it is probable that it was performed every year. Such at least is the custom in Egypt, where the limits of a piece of property are measured and fixed annually. The Babylonian document in which the custom is referred to relates to a dispute about a plantation of acacias which grew in the neighborhood of the modern Tel Sifr. The magistrates, before whom it was brought, are described as looking after not only the city but also “the walls and streets,” from which we may gather that municipal commissioners already existed in the Babylonian towns. The plaintiff made oath before them over the copper libation-bowl of the god of Boundaries, which thus took the place of the Bible in an English court of law.

A few years later, in the reign of Ammi-zadok, three men rented a field for three years on terms of partnership, agreeing to give the owner during the first two years 1 gur of grain upon each feddan or acre. The whole of the third harvest was to go to the lessees, and the partners were to divide the crop in equal shares “on the day of the harvest.”

When we come to the twelfth century B.C., however, the maneh and shekel have been substituted for the crops of the field. Thus we hear of 704 shekels and a fraction being paid for a field which was calculated to produce 3 gur of corn, and of 110 shekels [pg 122] being given for another estate which contained a grove of date-palms and on which 2 gur of grain were sown. How much grain could be grown on a piece of land we can gather from the official reports of the cadastral survey. In the sixth year of Cyrus, for example, the following report was drawn up of the “measurement of a corn-field and of the corn in the ear” belonging to a Babylonian taxpayer:

Length of the field on its longer side. Length of the field on its narrower side. Amount of crop. Value in grain. Tenant.
1020 395 13 gur, 18 qa, of which 1 gur, 18 qa, are destroyed. Each 25 gur is worth 300 gur of grain. Nadbanu.
540 550 10 gur, 2 pi, 29 qa, of which 3 gur are destroyed. Each 20 gur is worth 130 gur. Arad-Bel.

The cadastral survey for purposes of taxation went back to an early period of Babylonian history. It was already at work in the age of Sargon of Akkad. The survey of the district or principality of Lagas (now Tello) which was drawn up in that remote epoch of history is in our hands, and is interesting on account of its reference to a “governor” of the land of the Amorites, or Canaan, who bears the Canaanitish name of Urimelech. The survey states that the district in question contained 39,694 acres, 1,325 sar, as well as 17 large towns and 8 subdivisions.

Another cadastral survey from Lagas, but of the period of Khammurabi, which has recently been published by Dr. Scheil, tells us that the towns on the [pg 123] lower banks of “the canal of Lagas” had to pay the treasury each year 35⅚ shekels of silver according to the assessment of the tax-collector Sin-mustal. One of the towns was that of the Aramean tribe of Pekod. Another is called the town of the Brewers, and another is described as “the Copper-Foundry.” Most of the towns were assessed at half a shekel, though there were some which had to pay a shekel and more. Among the latter was the town of Ninâ, which gave its name to the more famous Nineveh on the Tigris. The surveyor, it should be added, was an important personage in Babylonian society, and the contract tablets of the second Babylonian empire not unfrequently mention him.

Assyria, like Babylonia, has yielded us a good many deeds relating to the sale and lease of houses and landed estate. We can estimate from them the average value of house-property in Nineveh in the time of the second Assyrian empire, when the wealth of the Eastern world was being poured into it and the Assyrian kings were striving to divert the trade of Phœnicia into their own hands. Thus, in 694 B.C., a house with two doors was sold for 3 manehs 20 shekels, and two years subsequently another which adjoined it was purchased for 1 maneh “according to the royal standard.” The contract for the sale is a good example of what an Assyrian deed of sale in such a case was like. “The nail-marks of Sar-ludari, Akhassuru, and Amat-Suhla, the wife of Bel-suri, the official, the son of the priest, and owner of the house which is sold. The house, which is in thorough repair, with its woodwork, doors, and court, situated in [pg 124] the city of Nineveh and adjoining the houses of Mannu-ki-akhi and Ilu-ittiya and the street Sipru, has been negotiated for by Zil-Assur, the Egyptian secretary. He has bought it for 1 maneh of silver according to the royal standard from Sar-ludari, Akhassuru, and Amat-Suhla, the wife of Bel-duri. The money has been paid in full, and the house received as bought. Withdrawal from the contract, lawsuits, and claims are hereby excluded. Whoever hereafter at any time, whether these men or others, shall bring an action and claims against Zil-Assur, shall be fined 10 manehs of silver. Witnessed by Susanqu-khatna-nis, Murmaza the official, Rasuh the sailor, Nebo-dur-uzur the champion, Murmaza the naval captain, Sin-sar-uzur, and Zidqa (Zedekiah). The sixteenth of Sivan during the year of office of Zaza, the governor of Arpad (692 B.C.).” It is noticeable that the first witness has a Syrian name.

One of the characteristics of the Assyrian deeds is that so few of the parties who appear in them are able to write their names. Nail-marks take the place of seals even in the case of persons who hold official positions and who are shown by the contracts to have been men of property. In this respect Assyria offers a striking contrast to Babylonia, where “the nail-mark” seldom makes its appearance. Closely connected with this inability to write is the absence of the seal-cylinder, which was part of the ordinary dress of the Babylonian gentleman. In the Assyrian contracts, on the other hand, it is conspicuous by its absence. The use of it in Assyria was an imitation of Babylonian manners, and was confined for the [pg 125] most part to the scribes and higher official class, who had received a literary education.

Land in Assyria was measured by homers rather than by feddans or acres as in Babylonia. In 674 B.C. an estate of 35 homers, in the town of Sairi, was sold for 5 manehs, any infringement of the contract being punished by a fine of 10 manehs of silver or one of gold, to be paid into the treasury of the temple of Istar. We learn incidentally from this that the value of gold to silver at the time was as one to ten. Five years previously 6 homers of land in another small Assyrian town had been let at an annual rent of 1 maneh of silver “according to the standard of Carchemish.” In the reign of Assur-bani-pal a homer of corn-land was rented for six years for 10 shekels a year. The land was calculated to produce 9 qas of grain, and at the end of the first three years it was stipulated that there should be a rotation of crops. About the same time two fields, enclosing an area of 3⅔ homers, were leased by a certain Rimu-ana-Bel of Beth-Abimelech, whose father's name, Yatanael, shows that he was of Syrian origin. The steward of “the son of a king” took them for six years at an annual rent of 12 shekels. One of the fields contained a well, and yielded 15 qas of grain to each homer. It is stated in the contract that the fields had no mortgage upon them, and that the lessee had a right to the whole of the crop which they produced.

It was not in Assyria only that plots of ground could be leased and sold in accordance with the provisions of Assyrian law. Conquest had brought [pg 126] landed property into the hands of Assyrians in other parts of the Eastern world, and it could be put up to auction at Nineveh, where the proprietors lived. About 660 B.C., for instance, a considerable estate was thus sold in the oasis of Singara, in the centre of Mesopotamia. It lay within the precincts of the temple of Istar, and contained a grove of 1,000 young palms. It included, moreover, a field of 2 homers planted with terebinths, house-property extending over 6 homers, a house with a corn-field attached to it, and another house which stood in the grove of Yarkhu, the Moon-god. The whole was sold for 4 shekels of silver “according to the standard of Carchemish,” and the penalty for any infringement of the contract was again to be the payment of a maneh of gold (£90) to the treasury of the goddess Istar. When one of the parties to the contract was of Aramean descent, it was usual to add an explanatory docket in Aramaic to the deed of sale. Indeed, this seems to have been sometimes done even where there were no Arameans in the case, so thoroughly had Aramaic become the common language of trade. Thus in the year of Sennacherib's office as eponym (687 B.C.) we hear of the sale of three shops in Nineveh on the part of a certain Dain-kurban, whose name is written in Aramaic letters on the outer envelope of the deed of sale. Thirty shekels were paid for them, and a fine of 10 manehs imposed upon anyone who should attempt to invalidate the sale. The shops seem to have been situated in the Syrian quarter of the city, as we are told that they were opposite the tenement of Nakharau, “the man of Nahor.”

It will have been noticed how frequently it is stated that a “plantation” or grove of palms is attached to the house or field which is rented and sold. In Babylonia, in fact, an estate was not considered complete without its garden, which almost invariably included a clump of palms. The date-palm was the staple of the country. It was almost the only tree which grew there, and it grew in marvellous abundance. Stem, leaves, and fruit were all alike turned to use. The columns and roofing-beams of the temples and houses were made of its stem, which was also employed for bonding the brick walls of the cities. Its fibres were twisted into ropes, its leaves woven into baskets. The fruit it bore was utilized in many ways. Sometimes the dates were eaten fresh, at other times they were dried and exported to foreign lands; out of some of them wine was made, out of others a rich and luscious sugar. It was little wonder that the Babylonian regarded the palm as the best gift that Nature had bestowed upon him. Palm-land necessarily fetched a higher price than corn-land, and we may conclude, from a contract of the third year of Cyrus, that its valuation was seven and one-half times greater.

Trade partnerships were common, and even commercial companies were not unknown. The great banking and money-lending firm which was known in Babylonia under the name of its founder, Egibi, and from which so many of the contract-tablets have been derived, was an example of the latter. It lasted through several generations and seems to have been but little affected by the political revolutions and changes [pg 128] which took place at Babylon. It saw the rise and fall of the empire of Nebuchadnezzar, and flourished quite as much under the Persian as under the native kings.

As far back as the reign of Samsu-iluna we find women entering into partnership with men for business purposes on a footing of absolute equality. A certain Amat-Samas, for instance, a devotee of the Sun-god, did so with two men in order to trade with a maneh of silver which had been borrowed from the treasury of the god. It was stipulated in the deed which was indentured when the partnership was made that in case of disagreement the capital and interest accruing from it were to be divided in equal shares among the three partners.

In the later Babylonian period the contract was drawn up in much the same form, though with a little more detail. In the report of a trial dated the eighth day of Sebat or January, in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar II., we have the following reference to one that had been made twenty-one years before: “A partnership was entered into between Nebo-yukin-abla and his son Nebo-bel-sunu on the one side and Musezib-Bel on the other, which lasted from the eighteenth year of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, to the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. The contract was produced before the judge of the judges. Fifty shekels of silver were adjudged to Nebo-bel-sunu and his father Nebo-yukin-abla. No further agreement or partnership exists between the two parties.… They have ended their contract with one another. All former obligations in their names are rescinded.”

One of the latest Babylonian deeds of partnership that have come down to us is dated in the fifth year of Xerxes. It begins with the statement that “Bel-edheru, son of Nergal-edheru and Ribâta, son of Kasmani, have entered into partnership with one another, contributing severally toward it 2½ manehs of silver in stamped shekel-pieces and half a maneh of silver, also in stamped shekel-pieces. Whatever profits Ribâta shall make on the capital—namely, the 3 manehs in stamped shekel-pieces—whether in town or country, [he shall divide with] Bel-edheru proportionally to the share of the latter in the business. When the partnership is dissolved he shall repay to Bel-edheru the [2½] manehs contributed by him. Ribâta, son of Kasmani, undertakes all responsibility for the money.” Then come the names of six witnesses.

Money, however, was not the only subject of a deed of partnership. Houses and other property could be bought and sold and traded with in common. Thus we hear of Itti-Merodach-baladh, the grandson of “the Egyptian,” and Merodach-sapik-zeri starting as partners with a capital of 5 manehs of silver and 130 empty barrels, two slaves acting as agents, and on another occasion we find it stipulated that “200 barrels full of good beer, 20 empty barrels, 10 cups and saucers, 90 gur of dates in the storehouse, 15 gur of chickpease (?), and 14 sheep, besides the profits from the shop and whatever else Bel-sunu has accumulated, shall be shared between him” and his partner.

The partners usually contributed in equal parts to the business, and the profits were divided equally [pg 130] among them. Where this was not the case, provision was made for a proportionate distribution of profit and loss. All profits were included, whether made, to use the language of Babylonian law, “in town or country.” The partnership was generally entered into for a fixed term of years, but could be terminated sooner by death or by agreement. One of the partners could be represented by an agent, who was often a slave; in some instances we hear of the wife taking the place of her husband or other relation during his absence from home. Thus in a deed dated in the second year of Nergal-sharezer (559 B.C.) we read: “As long as Pani-Nebo-dhemi, the brother of Ili-qanua, does not return from his travels, Burasu, the wife of Ili-qanua, shall share in the business of Ili-qanua, in the place of Pani-Nebo-dhemi. When Pani-Nebo-dhemi returns she shall leave Ili-qanua and hand over the share to Pani-Nebo-dhemi.” As one of the witnesses to the document is a “minister of the king” who bears the Syrian name of Salammanu, or Solomon the son of Baal-tammuh, it is possible that Pani-Nebo-dhemi was a Syrian merchant whose business obliged him to reside in a foreign country.

That partnerships in Babylonia were originally made for the sake of foreign trade seems probable from the name given to them. This is kharran, which properly means a “road” or “caravan.” The earliest partners in trade would have been the members of a caravan, who clubbed together to travel and traffic in foreign lands and to defend themselves in common from the perils of the journey.

The products of the Babylonian looms must have [pg 131] been among the first objects which were thus sent abroad. We have already described the extensive industry which brought wealth into Babylonia and made it from the earliest ages the centre of the trade in rugs and tapestries, cloths and clothing. A large part of the industrial population of the country must have been employed in the factories and shops where the woven and embroidered fabrics were produced and made ready for sale. Long lists exist giving the names of the various articles of dress which were thus manufactured. The goodly “Babylonish garment” carried off by Achan from the sack of Jericho was but one of the many which found their way each year to the shores of the Mediterranean.

The trades of the dyer and the fuller flourished by the side of that of the cloth-maker. So, too, did the trade of the tanner, leather being much used and finely worked. The shoes of the Babylonian ladies were famous; and the saddles of the horses were made with elaborate care.

The smith, too, occupied an honorable position. In the earlier period of Babylonian history, gold, silver, copper, and bronze were the metals which he manufactured into arms, utensils, and ornaments. At a later date, however, iron also came to be extensively used, though probably not before the sixteenth century B.C. The use of bronze, moreover, does not seem to go back much beyond the age of Sargon of Akkad; at all events, the oldest metal tools and weapons found at Tello are of copper, without any admixture of tin. Most of the copper came from the mines of the Sinaitic Peninsula, though the metal [pg 132] was also found in Cyprus, to which reference appears to be made in the annals of Sargon. The tin was brought from a much greater distance. Indeed, it would seem that the nearest sources for it—at any rate in sufficient quantities for the bronze of the Oriental world—were India and the Malayan Peninsula on the one hand, and the southern extremity of Cornwall on the other. It is not surprising, therefore, that it should have been rare and expensive, and that consequently it was long before copper was superseded by the harder bronze. Means, however, were found for hardening the copper when it was used, and copper tools were employed to cut even the hardest of stones.

The metal, after being melted, was run into moulds of stone or clay. It was in this way that most of the gold and silver ornaments were manufactured which we see represented in the sculptures. Stone moulds for ear-rings have been found on the site of Nineveh, and the inscriptions contain many references to jewelry. The gold was also worked by the hand into beaded patterns, or incised like the silver seals, some of which have come down to us. Most of the gold was originally brought from the north; in the fifteenth century before our era the gold mines in the desert on the eastern side of Egypt provided the precious metal for the nations of Western Asia.

A document found among the records of the trading firm of Murasu at Nippur, in the fifth century B.C., shows that the goldsmith was required to warrant the excellence of his work before handing it over to the customer, and it may be presumed that the same rule [pg 133] held good for other trades also. The document in question is a guarantee that an emerald has been so well set in a ring as not to drop out for twenty years, and has been translated as follows by Professor Hilprecht: “Bel-akh-iddina and Bel-sunu, the sons of Bel, and Khatin, the son of Bazuzu, have made the following declaration to Bel-nadin-sumu, the son of Murasu: As to the gold ring set with an emerald, we guarantee that for twenty years the emerald will not fall out of the ring. If it should fall out before the end of twenty years, Bel-akh-iddina [and the two others] shall pay Bel-nadin-sumu an indemnity of ten manehs of silver.” Then come the names of seven witnesses and of the clerk who drew up the deed, and the artisans add their nail-marks in place of seals.

Many of the articles of daily use in the houses of the people, such as knives, tools of all kinds, bowls, dishes, and the like, were made of copper or bronze. They were, however, somewhat expensive, and as late as the reign of Cambyses we find that a copper libation-bowl and cup cost as much as 4 manehs 9 shekels, (£37 7s.), and about the same time 22 shekels (£3 3s.) were paid for two copper bowls 7½ manehs in weight. If the weight in this case were equivalent to that of the silver maneh the cost would have been nearly 4d. per ounce. It must be remembered that, as in the modern East, the workman expected the metal to be furnished by his customer; and accordingly we hear of 3 manehs of iron being given to a smith to be made into rods for bows. Three manehs of iron were also considered sufficient for the manufacture of six swords, two oboe-rings, and two [pg 134] bolts. All this, of course, belongs to the age of the second Babylonian empire, when iron had taken the place of bronze.

The carpenter's trade is another handicraft to which there is frequent allusion in the texts. Already, before the days of Sargon of Akkad, beams of wood were fetched from distant lands for the temples and palaces of Chaldea. Cedar was brought from the mountains of Amanus and Lebanon, and other trees from Elam. The palm could be used for purely architectural purposes, for boarding the crude bricks of the walls together, or to serve as the rafters of the roof, but it was unsuitable for doors or for the wooden panels with which the chambers of the temple or palace were often lined. For such purposes the cedar was considered best, and burnt panels of it have been found in the sanctuary of Ingurisa at Tello. Down to the latest days panels of wood were valuable in Babylonia, and we find it stipulated in the leases of houses that the lessee shall be allowed to remove the doors he has put up at his own expense.