The regular duties of the priests in connec tion with the temple service were (1) to offi ciate at all the regularly appointed services of the temple, including the monthly and annual set-feasts, and (2) to carry out the worshipful desires of any individual worshipper. The minutia of conditions regnant in temple service are voluminous and touch almost every condi tion of life. Some of the incantations and psalms, already referred to, preserve the peti tions that must be recited by the suppliant. Other tablets enumerate the great variety of offerings that must be presented to the gods to secure their good-will and blessings. The multiplicity of such requirements easily kept an army of priests busy in the great temples of theprincipal cities of Babylonia-Assyria. of Babylonian-Assyrian History. — Before the excavations of the last 75 years in the ruins of Babylonia-Assyria, the two main sources of the history of the peoples and coun try in our theme were (1) the books of the Old Testament, and (2) the second-hand narratives of Berosus, Manetho and Josephus, with a few scattered statements and some questionable narrative in Greek and Roman writers. The discoveries in the ruins of Mesopotamia have now given us first-hand information of the best kind, narratives just as they were written down by the original scribes, and not copies made from age to age, as are the works above referred to. These clay, stone and metal rec ords stretch not continuously as yet, but with breaks here and there, from at least 4000 n.c. down through the fall of Babylon before the army of Cyrus 538 a.c. Of course, they cannot be regarded as infallible but are still for our purpose reasonably reliable. They give us, at least, a new panorama, of the most vivid kind, of the great nations that moved down the ave nue of time in Babylonia for nearly 4,000 years.
Chronology.— The chronology of Baby lonia must be described in part separately from that of Assyria. The early Babylonians reck oned events from some great calamity or oc currence, such as the destruction of a city, the dedication of a temple, or the opening of a new irrigating canal. Later down in the history they counted time by the years of a reigning king. There were several early dynasties in Babylonia whose succession of rulers is pretty well established. Such are those of Sumer, Akkad, Nisin, Larsa and Babylon, whose be ginnings fall approximately within 3000 to 2200 a.c. (cf. King, (A History of Sumer and Ak kad,) appendix 2, and (A History of Babylon,' appendices). The 'List of Kings,' a list of the kings (not complete) of Babylon from about 2400 a.c. to 625 ac., by dynasties, with the length of reign of each king and of each dy nasty, and the so-called 'Babylonian Chron icle,' consisting of a record of events in Baby lonia and Assyria from about 745 B.c., early in the reign of Nabonassar, to 669 the begin ning year of the reign of Shamash-shum-ukin, are valuable documents. The Ptolemaic Canon, which has some reliable features, also begins with Nabonassar's reign. Besides these guides there are references here and there that both serve as checks and give us fixed points from which and toward which we may figure. One of the most striking is that mentioned by Na bonidus (555-538 on one of his cylinder inscriptions. He there states that an inscrip tion of Sargon which he found in the corner stone of a temple had been deposited in its hid ing place 3,200 years before his day, or about 3750 B.c. The more we find of ancient Baby
lonian facts the less probable the correctness of this date seems to be. It should be reduced about 1,100 years. Then there are chronological notes and hints, such as the statement that Burna-buriash lived 700 years after Ham murabi, that Marduk-nadin-akhe defeated Tig lathpileser I 418 years before Sennacherib con quered Babylon. Each such hint furnishes a valuable check on the whole chronological scheme, and aids the scholar in his construc tion of a valid and reliable list of rulers and events, even though for the present there are some wide and embarrassing gaps in the period covered by the early history of Babylonia.
Assyrian chronology follows a unique plan. It names the years after certain officers, termed eponyms, whose term of office extended over but one year. Lists of these eponyms have been found stretching from 893 }Lc., during the reign of Adad-niran III (911-889 B.c.) down to Assurbanipal (668-626 a.c.). On some of these lists we find merely the name of the eponym, on others there is found the name of the king in authority (in fact he usually was an eponym at some time during his reign), and some one chief event of each year. The suc cession of events between the limit years men tioned above is now positively known. To verify our calculation that these Assyrian records are correctly poised in time, we find that in the month of Sivan, year of the eponymy of Pur Shagalti, there was a total eclipse of the sun in Nineveh. Astronomers have located this same eclipse on June 15, 763 a.c., thus giving us a fixed point for our calculations, and for settling specifically the dates of the entire As syrian eponym lists.
The Historical Periods — Babylonia.—The history of Babylonia may be roughly divided into three periods: (1) That stretch of time reaching from the remotest recorded events down to the time of the consolidation of the city-kingdoms of Babylonia under Hammurabi at Babylon about 2130 ac.; (2) the time included between Hammurabi's supremacy and 626 the death of Assurbanipal, last great king of Assyria, and the rise of Nabopolassar, first king of the new Babylonian (3) be ginning of Nabopolassar's reign (625 ac.) to the fall of Babylon befoie Cyrus (538 ac.).
First Period — Babylonia.— The begin nings of this period are enveloped in fog. Scat tered fragments of antiquities and archaic in scriptions tell a broken tale of a very remote antiquity. Telloh, Nippur, Babylon and Susa have yielded to the excavator many evidences of an extreme antiquity and have put into our hands material for beginning to estimate some of the elements of such early civilizations. Some of the earliest kings were those who ruled over Sumer, Akkad, Nisin, Larsa, Erech, Lagash and Babylon, which occupied territory on either side of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Other kingdoms in this early period, about 3400 B.C., were Kish and Ur. The formal name of a governor, in this earliest age was patesi. Lugal-zag-gi-si, however, King of Erech, apparently a Semitic name, designates himself (King of Erech, King of the world," but calls his father Ukush, ((patesi of Gishban." Other kings of this very early period were Ur-Nini, the foundations of whose palace at Telloh are to be seen in the first illustration. Lagash seized and maintained authority, among others, over Gishban, Kish, Erech, Ur and Larsa. These events must have occurred about 3400 B.C.