King A History of Babylon

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-7481-2977-6
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 467 Seiten

Thanks to recent excavation Babylon has ceased to be an abstraction, and we are now able to reconstitute the main features of one of the most famous cities of the ancient world. Unlike Ashur and Nineveh, the great capitals of Assyria, Babylon survived with but little change under the Achæmenian kings of Persia, and from the time of Herodotus onward we possess accounts of her magnificence, which recent research has in great part substantiated. It is true that we must modify the description Herodotus has left us of her size, but on all other points the accuracy of his information is confirmed. The Lion Frieze of the Citadel and the enamelled beasts of the Ishtar Gate enable us to understand something of the spell she cast. It is claimed that the site has been identified of her most famous building, the Hanging Gardens of the royal palace; and, if that should prove to be the case, they can hardly be said to have justified their reputation. Far more impressive is the Tower of Babel with its huge Peribolos, enclosing what has been aptly described as the Vatican of Babylon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

King, L. W.

Leseproben

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY: BABYLON'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF ANTIQUITY

The name of Babylon suggests one of the great centres from which civilization radiated to other peoples of the ancient world. And it is true that from the second millennium onwards we have evidence of the gradual spread of Babylonian culture throughout the greater part of Western Asia. Before the close of the fifteenth century, to cite a single example of such influence, we find that Babylonian had become the language of Eastern diplomacy. It is not surprising perhaps that the Egyptian king should have adopted the Babylonian tongue and method of writing for his correspondence with rulers of Babylon itself or of Assyria. But it is remarkable that he should employ this foreign script and language for sending orders to the governors of his Syrian and Palestinian dependencies, and that such Canaanite officials should use the same medium for the reports they despatched to their Egyptian master. In the same period we find the Aryan rulers of Mitanni, in Northern Mesopotamia, writing in cuneiform the language of their adopted country. A few decades later the Hittites of Anatolia, discarding their old and clumsy system of hieroglyphs except for monumental purposes, borrow the same character for their own speech, while their treaties with Egypt are drawn up in Babylonian. In the ninth century the powerful race of the Urartians, settled in the mountains of Armenia around the shores of Lake Van, adopt as their national script the writing of Assyria, which in turn had been derived from Babylon. Elam, Babylon's nearest foreign neighbour, at a very early period had, like the Hittites of a later age, substituted for their rude hieroglyphs the language and older characters of Babylon, and later on they evolved from the same writing a character of their own. Finally, coming down to the sixth century, we find the Achæmenian kings inventing a cuneiform sign-list to express the Old Persian language, in order that their own speech might be represented in royal proclamations and memorials beside those of their subject provinces of Babylon and Susiania.
These illustrations of Babylonian influence on foreign races are confined to one department of culture only, the language and the system of writing. But they have a very much wider implication. For when a foreign language is used and written, a certain knowledge of its literature must be presupposed. And since all early literatures were largely religious in character, the study of the language carries with it some acquaintance with the legends, mythology and religious beliefs of the race from whom it was borrowed. Thus, even if we leave out of account the obvious effects of commercial intercourse, the single group of examples quoted necessarily implies a strong cultural influence on contemporary races.
It may thus appear a paradox to assert that the civilization, with which the name of Babylon is associated, was not Babylonian. But it is a fact that for more than a thousand years before the appearance of that city as a great centre of culture, the civilization it handed on to others had acquired in all essentials its later type. In artistic excellence, indeed, a standard had been already reached, which, so far from being surpassed, was never afterwards attained in Mesopotamia. And although the Babylonian may justly be credited with greater system in his legislation, with an extended literature, and perhaps also with an increased luxury of ritual, his efforts were entirely controlled by earlier models. If we except the spheres of poetry and ethics, the Semite in Babylon, as elsewhere, proved himself a clever adapter, not a creator. He was the prophet of Sumerian culture and merely perpetuated the achievements of the race whom he displaced politically and absorbed. It is therefore the more remarkable that his particular city should have seen but little of the process by which that culture had been gradually evolved. During those eventful centuries Babylon had been but little more than a provincial town. Yet it was reserved for this obscure and unimportant city to absorb within herself the results of that long process, and to appear to later ages as the original source of the culture she enjoyed. Before tracing her political fortunes in detail it will be well to consider briefly the causes which contributed to her retention of the place she so suddenly secured for herself.
The fact that under her West-Semitic kings Babylon should have taken rank as the capital city does not in itself account for her permanent enjoyment of that position. The earlier history of the lands of Sumer and Akkad abounds with similar examples of the sudden rise of cities, followed, after an interval of power, by their equally sudden relapse into comparative obscurity. The political centre of gravity was continually shifting from one town to another, and the problem we have to solve is why, having come to rest in Babylon, it should have remained there. To the Western Semites themselves, after a political existence of three centuries, it must have seemed that their city was about to share the fate of her numerous predecessors. When the Hittite raiders captured and sacked Babylon and carried off her patron deities, events must have appeared to be taking their normal course. After the country, with her abounding fertility, had been given time to recover from her temporary depression, she might have been expected to emerge once more, according to precedent, under the aegis of some other city. Yet it was within the ancient walls of Babylon that the Kassite conquerors established their headquarters; and it was to Babylon, long rebuilt and once more powerful, that the Pharaohs of the eighteenth Dynasty and the Hittite kings of Cappadocia addressed their diplomatic correspondence. During Assyria's long struggle with the southern kingdom Babylon was always the protagonist, and no raid by Aramean or Chaldean tribes ever succeeded in ousting her from that position. At the height of Assyrian power she continued to be the chief check upon that empire's expansion, and the vacillating policy of the Sargonids in their treatment of the city sufficiently testifies to the dominant she continued to play in politics. And when Nineveh had fallen, it was Babylon that took her place in a great part of Western Asia.
This continued pre-eminence of a single city is in striking contrast to the ephemeral authority of earlier capitals, and it can only be explained by some radical change in the general conditions of the country. One fact stands out clearly: Babylon's geographical position must have endowed her during this period with a strategical and commercial importance which enabled her to survive the rudest shocks to her material prosperity. A glance at the map will show that the city lay in the north of Babylonia, just below the confluence of the two great rivers in their lower course. Built originally on the left bank of the Euphrates, she was protected by its stream from any sudden incursion of the desert tribes. At the same time she was in immediate contact with the broad expanse of alluvial plain to the south-east, intersected by its network of canals.
But the real strength of her position lay in her near neighbourhood to the transcontinental routes of traffic. When approaching Baghdad from the north the Mesopotamian plain contracts to a width of some thirty-five miles, and, although it has already begun to expand again in the latitude of Babylon, that city was well within touch of both rivers. She consequently lay at the meeting-point of two great avenues of commerce. The Euphrates route linked Babylonia with Northern Syria and the Mediterranean, and was her natural line of contact with Egypt; it also connected her with Cappadocia, by way of the Cilician Gates through the Taurus, along the track of the later Royal Road. [1] Farther north the trunk-route through Anatolia from the west, reinforced by tributary routes from the Black Sea, turns at Sivas on the Upper Halys, and after crossing the Euphrates in the mountains, first strikes the Tigris at Diarbekr; then leaving that river for the easier plain, it rejoins the stream in the neighbourhood of Nineveh and so advances southward to Susa or to Babylon. A third great route that Babylon controlled was that to the east through the Gates of Zagros, the easiest point of penetration to the Iranian plateau and the natural outlet of commerce from Northern Elam. [2] Babylon thus lay across the stream of the nations' traffic, and in the direct path of any invader advancing upon the southern plains.



That she owed her importance to her strategic position, and not to any particular virtue on the part of her inhabitants, will be apparent from the later history of the country. It has indeed been pointed out that the geographical conditions render necessary the existence of a great urban centre near the confluence of the Mesopotamian rivers. [3] And this fact is amply attested by the relative positions of the capital cities, which succeeded one another in that region after the supremacy had passed from Babylon. Seleucia, Ctesiphon and Baghdad are all clustered in the narrow neck of the Mesopotamian plain, and for only one short period, when normal conditions were suspended, has the centre of government been transferred to any southern city. [4] The sole change has consisted in the permanent selection of the Tigris for the site of each new capital, with a decided tendency to remove it to the left or eastern...