Babylonia and Assyria.— The civilization of the Mesopotamian plain is not only the old est in the world so far as known, but the first (unless with the possible exception of Egypt) where men settled in great city communities under an orderly government with a developed religion, practising agriculture by irrigation, erecting adobe buildings and using a syllabified writing. All modern Western civilization is its direct descendant through Greek and Ro man periods, so that in studying it we are studying our own ultimate intellectual and even religions pedigree. Its astronomers gave us the division of the year into months, weeks and days, the signs of the zodiac, the constellations, the division of the circle into degrees; its art was the foundation on which Greek and Etrus can art was built; its religious names, forms and traditions are a deep element in the He brew, as in its cosmogony and mythology and such forms as the Psalms, and•hence enter into Christian thought. Nor are we the only bene For some 4000 years the cuneiform was the business and literary script of the whole civilized world, the one• method of writ ing from the western Mediterranean to India, and probably the origin even of the Chinese, as Mesopotamian civilization was the parent of Chinese civilization.
The physical difficulties and dangers of ex ploration in this district (once a garden and turned into a desert by Turkish misgovernment, a region without supplies or administrative or der, and infested by hordes of dangerous Bedouins), as well as the difficulty of obtaining justice or possession of one's goods from the Turkish authorities after finding them, have kept it far behind that of Egypt in thorough ness; but the results have been not less splendid in additions to our knowledge of the past. The earliest studies — those of J. B. Rich, Indian Consul-General at Bagdad, in 1818-20, who col lected sculptures and outlined Assyrian art; the excavations by the French consul, Botta, at Khorsabad in 1843, of Nimrud and Nineveh by Layard in•1845-51, and Hormuzd Rassam in of relatively modern Assyrian sites. The first entrance on the ancient Baby lonian civilization was made at Erech (1849 52) by Loftus; a further one by Sarzac in the • important Tello excavations of 1876-81; but by far the most important was by the Americans, Peters and Haynes, with Hilprecht, at Nippur from 1889 down. This was prob ably the first city foundation in the world, dating from about 7000 }Lc., then a seaport and now 120 miles inland; and the great, temple library has poured floods of light on the politi cal and social condition of this mother-land of modern culture. Next to this, our greatest source of information— for Babylonian history almost the whole — has been the library of Nabonidus, the last king, at Babylon. • The whole fabric of Assyrian chronology rests on his statement that Naram-Sin, the son of Sar gon, lived 3,200 years before his time a sus picious number, the dubiousness of which leaves half that chronology a thousand years or so doubtful. But the subject was practically
sealed till the decipherment of the inscriptions gave the key; and this was immensely compli cated by the fact that the cuneiform character, like the modern alphabet, did not imply any given language, but was used for all the tongues of the then civilization. The first step was taken in 1800 by Grotef end, who identified Persian names and then applied the characters to other names, till he made out several Per sian inscriptions, while Bournouf (1836) and• Lassen (1836-44) worked out the rest of the Persian alphabet. But this was only a small part of the enormous Assyrian syllabary of 600 signs. The task was finally accomplished by Sir Henry Rawlinson by means of the great trilingual Behistun (q.v.) inscription, in Assy rian, Median, or Vannic, and Persian; his knowledge of old Persian gained from Zend and Sanskrit enabled him to identify the Per sian words in Assyrian character, and thus re solve the vast Assyrian syllabary. This has given the clue in turn to the other languages written in the cuneiform: the old Sumerian, Median, etc.
The general results are as follows: The earliest inscriptions show us a mixed people speaking two languages: one certainly Semitic, the other an archaic Semitic or Aryan (the Ural-Altaic affinity is . now discredited). The non-Semitic element known as. Sumerian ('river-men'?) is believed' to be' Aryan, re lated to the Caucasian 'tribes, and to be 'the original settlers of the valley. Into this valley came, somewhere between 10,000 and8000 Lc., a Semitic invasion (Accadians= ((highland ere?) from the upper Euphrates. Tigris val leys, and by 5000 B.C. had developed, through the mixture of two powerful stocks, the won derful civilization we know. The beginnings were in the Neolithic Age, but by 7000 ac. the people were already organized into nations, and built fortified towns, the centre and heart of each being the temple of the local god, raised on immense piles of brickwork. They had finely colored and ornamented pottery, made with the potter's wheel. of the arch was known as early as n.c.; the archi tecture was careful and related to the nature of material; drainage systems were constructed to prevent soaking into the adobe. Several important centres existed by about 7000 Le., including Nippur, Ur, Eridu and probably Erech. When we first find inscriptions, per haps about 4000 ac., there had already been evolved from the old picture-writing a system of conventionalized line-symbols, some pure pictographs, some ideographs, some syllables; and while at first the writing was entirely vo tive or commemorative, and stone used as the material with straight lines, it was soon ap plied to business and record, the ever-present clay utilized and the lines assumed the fa miliar wedge or cuneiform shape. Sculpture and the engraving of gems and gold were al ready at a high level shortly after 4000.