Download Mesopotamian Archaeology

Mesopotamian Archaeology
Dr. Allan A. MacRae
Faith Theological Seminary
© 2015 John P. MacRae
IBRI Syllabi #27
ABSTRACT
This is an extract from a series of seminary-level lectures on Old Testament History,
going into considerable detail on the archaeology of Mesopotamia as it stood in 1949,
when these lectures were given. This syllabus includes a history of the decipherment
of the cuneiform languages involved; excavation in Mesopotamia; a history of
Mesopotamia as reconstructed; and contacts between Mesopotamian archaeology and
the Bible. The editors (DCB and RCN) have attempted to preserve Dr. MacRae's
distinctive lecture style and anecdotes while eliminating a good deal of the repetition
that occurs in teaching a multi-session course.
Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute
www.ibri.org
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Table of Contents
About the Author
A. New Light from Mesopotamia.
1. The History of Decipherment of Cuneiform.
2. The History of Excavation.
3. Summary of the History of Excavation.
a. Ur of the Chaldees.
b. Nuzi.
B. Summary of the History of Mesopotamia
1. Prehistory
2. Third Millennium
Sumerians
Akkadians
3. Second Millennium
Hammurabi
Mountain people
4. The Assyrian Period
5. The Neo-Babylonian Period
6. The Persian Period
C. Contacts of Mesopotamian Archaeology with the Bible.
Appendix: Map of Mesopotamia with Excavations.
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About the Author:
Dr. Allan A. MacRae studied under the leading Old Testament and archaeological
specialists in the United States, Europe, and Palestine: R. A. Torrey at Biola; Robert
Dick Wilson and J. Gresham Machen at Princeton Seminary; William F. Albright at the
American School of Oriental Research; and E. A. Speiser at the University of
Pennsylvania. He earned the A.B., A.M., Th.B, A.M. (in Semitic Philology), and Ph.D.
degrees, and studied the ancient languages related to the Bible (including Babylonian
Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Arabic and Syriac).
Dr. MacRae taught nearly every course of the seminary during the span of a teaching
career of six decades. He taught Old Testament at three seminaries: Westminster,
Faith and Biblical; and was founding president of the last two of these. His students
included Joseph T. Bayly, Arthur F. Glasser, Vernon C. Grounds, R. Laird Harris,
Kenneth S. Kantzer, Gordon R. Lewis, Francis A. Schaeffer, and G. Douglas Young. He
is author of Nuzi Personal Names, The Gospel of Isaiah, The Prophecies of Daniel, and
Biblical Christianity.
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A. New Light from Mesopotamia.
I might mention a couple of books which are helpful in connection with the general
subject that we are discussing now, that of new light from Mesopotamia and the
history contained in the Old Testament. Twenty years ago, there were two books
which were the outstanding books in the field for general use. One of them was the
book, Archaeology and the Bible, by Dr. George A. Barton. This book was originally
published in 1916 and it went through several editions. The seventh edition was
1937.
Dr. Barton was a man whose own personal views were very radical regarding the
scripture. He had been brought up in a very conservative background—Quaker
background, and quite conservative. Then he had gone to Harvard University to take
three years of graduate work in order to fit himself to be a defender of the Scripture.
As he told me once, he wanted to be a second William Henry Green; but by the time
he came out of Harvard University, he had decided that the Scripture was entirely
wrong; and instead of being a defender of the Scripture, he became an attacker of the
Scripture; he devoted fifty years of teaching to the discussion of matters relating to
the Old and the New Testament, and in most cases he took a radical view, and in
some cases an extremely radical view. However, he did a good deal of study in the
field of archaeology—touching a great many sections of the field—and the American
Sunday School Union asked him to publish this book; and he tried to publish a book
which would be satisfactory to the American Sunday School Union.
Consequently in the book his radical views are kept in the background; they are there
but they are in the background. It is not at all such a book as a conservative would
have written, but neither is it at all such a book as a radical would write if he were
writing without this particular objective—to write a book which that organization
would publish. And so, while you find radical statements and suggestions all through
the book here and there, yet the main intent of the book is to present you the facts on
the discoveries in the field of archaeology which relate to the Bible. And in cases
where they are interpreted by conservatives as corroborating the scripture, or where
all have interpreted it in such a way, you will find that statement. If the radical would
interpret them another way, he may say "Now conservatives interpret it this way, but
others interpret it in this other way." The book has a great deal of very valuable
material in it. Unfortunately, the last edition of it is 1937; and of course there has
been a great deal done in the course of these last eleven years. Also, in these books,
it seems to have taken a good bit of time to run them through the press because I
find that in the different editions, they are usually about a year or two behind the
discoveries.
Now the other book, which I always mentioned twenty years ago, is a smaller book, a
book by Professor Price of the University of Chicago—a cousin of Dr. Seville's, by the
way [Seville taught at Faith Seminary]—and Professor Price entitled his book The
Monuments and the Old Testament. It was published originally before 1900; and
there wasn't much known from archaeology at that time, compared to what is known
today. It went through about seventeen editions. Then in 1924, a new edition was
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published, which is marked "New and Completely Revised." The previous editions
were mostly just discarded. If you come across one of the earlier editions in the book
store for about a dime, it is well worth it; but I wouldn't recommend that you pay
much more for it, unless you are particularly interested in the way archaeology looked
fifty years ago. For that purpose it might be of value. I am glad to have a copy in my
own library, but I don't recommend it beyond that. But in 1924 he got out a new and
revised edition. That is the last edition put out, and is very excellent. It really is, I
think, worth more than Barton's book. It doesn't have as much material in it, but in
some fields it has more material than Barton's. It is much more conservative than
Barton, but is more up to date than any particular edition of Barton prior to that time.
He has the discoveries made almost a month before it went to press. I marvel how he
was able to have it so up to date and so well-handled on most subjects. It has good
pictures in it and a very good presentation of the field in general.
Now in more recent years, I don't know of any book quite like Price, that handles it
quite the same way; but there is a book which was published about four years ago by
Jack Finegan, Light From the Ancient Past, published by Princeton University press. It
is a large book, much larger than Barton, and it is much more up to date. Finegan is
not a scholar in the class with Barton, but he is a man who has done good work and a
lot of study. His field is New Testament rather than Old Testament. Barton was more
familiar with the Old Testament field than Finegan is, but Finegan read a great deal on
it. He was well-trained in the New Testament field in Berlin, and he has given a very
good summary of the field. And, of course, being a larger book than Barton, the
quotations from the original sources are more extensive. I think perhaps there is a bit
more of interpretation in his book than there is in Barton's or in Price's, and the
interpretation may be more conservative than Barton's, more liberal than Price's would
be; but Finegan's is very recent and very useful in this field.
Now there are a good many other books that touch on their field, some of which are
quite good and some not at all good, but these three are the main ones to mention.
1. The History of Decipherment of Cuneiform.
Now in this material I am giving you on the history of decipherment and the old
excavations, any one of these three will give you the main facts—if you desire to get a
few of the main facts fuller than I am giving in class now.
A very interesting thing in this field of Old Testament archaeology is that so many
discoveries have been made in the last few years, showing the Old Testament to be
remarkably accurate at places where all liberal scholars have thought that it was
inaccurate or undefendable. The tendency today of almost any talk on the
archaeology of the Old Testament is to bring out place after place where the Old
Testament has been corroborated by the findings, even though sometimes a scholar
will preface his talk with a few words about how we know, of course, that it has a
great many errors in it; that it is not dependable and so on; and then he may go on
and give you illustration after illustration that shows how it is dependable.
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It reminds me of a newspaper article I saw some years ago that had the headline,
"Theories of Fundamentalists Disproved", and underneath it, "Bible Shown Not to be
Free from Error" and then quoted from Dr. Breasted, who was founder and head for
many years of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, saying that the Bible
could never be proven to be free from error; and then it went on to say that he made
this statement in connection with his giving the press the news of the discovery in
Egypt of a monument there put up by King Merneptah1 [The Merneptah Stele] telling
of his conquest of Palestine just as described in the Bible. Now the discovery that he
made fit with the Bible; but he was so sure that the Bible was wrong, that he made a
statement the exact opposite of the discovery. And you'll find a great many such
statements made.
The places at which there is valid archaeological evidence which seems to contradict
the statements of the Old Testament are very few indeed. There are places where
there are very definite questions, but they are very few indeed; while the places at
which new evidence has come to light which fits in with the Old Testament statements
most unexpectedly are very numerous.
I hope no one will go out from this class and say that every verse of the Old
Testament, except three, has been proven correct by archaeology. I've known of
popular lecturers who make silly statements like that. As you know, at least a third of
the statements of the Old Testament couldn't possibly be corroborated by
archaeology, because it has nothing in the world to do with that. They just have no
contacts with archaeology. Archaeology touches here and there on the Old Testament,
but they are isolated points, scattered points. It is not a complete examination or
vindication of the Bible. Such a thing is humanly, absolutely impossible.
The decipherment of the Babylonian and Assyrian writings—of the cuneiform
writing—came not from Mesopotamia, but from Persia, further to the East. Price tells
the story in his book:
Oriental scholars in Germany, France, Scandinavia and other countries had set their
wits to solve the wedge-language of old Persia. By shrewd guessing only did they
arrive at a few results of value. No very substantial progress was made, however
until a young Englishman, an officer in the Persian army, Henry C. Rawlinson, made
a discovery in 1835 in the Zagros Mountains [see Behistun on our map]. Here he
found a limestone hill rising out of the plain to a height of 1,700 feet. One side of
this mass was almost perpendicular in form. About 350 feet above the base on this
perpendicular side, Rawlinson could see a large space which had been carefully
hewn off and polished. Upon this smoother surface he could also descry a large
bas-relief representing a king, before whom stood a line of prisoners bound neck
to neck with a rope. Adjacent to this great group were several columns of
cuneiform inscriptions.
Price, The Monuments and the Old Testament, (1899) p. 56.
The following engraving accompanied these remarks:
1
The Merneptah Stele discovered in 1896 at Thebes, Egypt by Flinders Petrie.
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The Behistun Inscription
The inscription could be viewed from about a mile away. Rawlinson guessed that
there had formerly been a high place to stand up facing the mountain, but this had
disappeared in the course of time; and he went over to look and read the inscription.
He went over to it and he managed to climb up several hundred feet up the face of
the mountain till he got to this place where the mountain had been flattened off and
these inscriptions made on it.
At the bottom of this flattened place there was a narrow ledge with a five hundred
foot drop below him, and using that ledge and ladders, he copied off these wedgeshaped marks day after day. After he finished his troop training for that day, he'd go
there; and he climbed up and he copied all he could reach. Then he took a Persian
with him; and they dragged the ladder up and they put the ladder on the ledge; and
the Persian held the bottom, and he climbed up the ladder and copied all that he
could up there; but there was one place where the ledge at the bottom was
completely weathered away and he couldn't reach that section at all; so then he went
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up the back of the mountain, and from the top he got down to a fairly safe place a
little above the inscriptions; and there he put ropes under his arms, and they lowered
him down so he was in front of it and in that way he could copy. And so it took him
many months, day after day this way, to get it all copied, because there were
hundreds of lines of inscription; but when he had it copied he had a good deal of
cuneiform material to study.
This material and other material—which Rawlinson had gotten from the travelers from
Persepolis [see Persepolis on map]—both of them had one peculiarity that could be
noticed almost immediately. There were three different kinds of writing. They were all
made of these wedge-shaped characters. In Rawlinson's material you had dozens of
lines of one type, and then dozens of lines of the next type, and then of the next
type, three types of characters.
In the material in Persepolis, it was often that you would have a piece with an
inscription written across the top, and down one side, and up the other side; and
these three on different sides were three types of writing. They were all written with
these wedge-shaped marks, but it was easy to see, when you looked at them, that
one of these types had less than thirty different characters, that would repeat and
repeat in different arrangements, but less than thirty different characters altogether.
Another one had something over a hundred characters; and the other one over here—
if you copied all of it, and were careful to find the different inscriptions—you got
several hundred of them; and so it was plain that there were three types of writing, all
wedge-shaped, one of them using only a few characters, one using something over a
hundred, and one using hundreds.
Well, now it was a pretty good guess that when you had these on each of these sides,
that the three said exactly the same thing; and when you had the three long
inscriptions on this monument that Rawlinson had copied, the same guess was a
pretty good guess. And comparing them, you could find out where you had a group of
the same characters on one, and corresponding to the same on the next one; thus
comparing them some progress could be made.
About 70 years earlier, another explorer had made a partial copy of the Behistun
inscriptions.2 Both he and Rawlinson knew modern Persian; and both guessed that the
one that had the least different characters on it was an ancient Persian. With modern
Persian for a comparison, they were able to work out something of the ancient
Persian. That was the beginning of the decipherment of the cuneiform writing which
came, not from Mesopotamia, but from Persia, which had taken it over from
Mesopotamia. Over the next decade, Rawlinson deciphered the Persian column of the
Behistun inscription, which he published in 1846.3
2
A German explorer Carsten Niebuhr copied some of the inscriptions in 1764. Georg Friedrich
Grotefend recognized the symbols as an alphabetic language and had deciphered 10 of the 37 symbols
of Old Persian by this time.
3
Published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1846).
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At Persepolis, there were a number of doorways over which the Persian monarch had
placed inscriptions; and these inscriptions always had three types of writings on
them, evidently from three different languages, just as for the Behistun writing.
In our earlier discussion of Egyptian Archaeology, we noted the importance of the
Rosetta stone, discovered in 1799. The Rosetta stone repeated its inscriptions in
three languages, one of which was Greek, and another Egyptian hieroglyphics. This
repetition of the text in different languages was used as an aid in deciphering the
Egyptian hieroglyphics, achieved by Champollion by about 1822. In that case, the
interpretation was aided by starting with the familiar Greek language as one of the
three inscribed languages.
In Mesopotamia, similar inscriptions were found in three ancient languages—a similar
case of tri-lingual writings as in the Rosetta stone—but in this case, none of the
languages were familiar languages, all written in hieroglyphics: Old Persian, Elamite
and Babylonian (Akkadian).
Now when you have a set of characters like this, even though you can't read any one
of them, it isn't so difficult to notice where characters are repeated—like if the name
for Cyrus occurs in an inscription a dozen times. Even though you might have no idea
whose name it is, you really could tell something from the fact that there were
enough letters there, that when you find them repeated you know that there is the
same word occurring a number of times.
Now it so happened that at Persepolis, in the inscriptions, they always seem to have
begun with the name of the king. Consequently a number of the inscriptions began
with the same word, and then other inscriptions would begin with a different word. So
it was easy to know that it wasn't a standard form of beginning, but that it might be
the name of a king, particularly as the next words were the same.
The first type of inscription, which had the alphabetic system of writing, went like
this—as finally translated: "Cyrus, the king of kings, the great king, the son of
Cambyses, the great king." Well, then they found another inscription which named the
son of Cyrus, Cambyses: "Cambyses, the king of kings, the great king, the son of
Cyrus the great king"; and it was possible to gather from some of these inscriptions,
to note a number of letters which are repeated in them, and then certain ones which
were different in the beginning; and it was a pretty good guess that these were in the
same pattern. And then if they found two inscriptions which had the same king's
name in them, one having it as the father of the other, the other as the actual king
himself; and they found that the one in which this man was the king himself, it simply
gave his father's name and did not call him a king, that was pretty good proof that he
was the founder of the dynasty, that his father had not been a king, he wasn't a king
but his son was a king.
Now, of course, to figure this out, simply out of whole cloth, would have been
extremely difficult. One aid to it was the fact that later Persian kings, writing in a
system of writing that was known to them, had used a similar form in inscription; and
so this form: "So-and-so, the great king, son of so-and-so, the great king" was a
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form that suggested itself as a possibility, and when you found the word "king"
repeated, as in "king of kings" it was a pretty good guess that this is what the
inscriptions meant.
So you had then the word for "king." You didn't know how to pronounce it, but you
knew that the letters represented the word for "king"; and you knew what word
represented the word "great," and you knew the difference between the word "king"
and the word "kings"; but you had the names of two kings with them, and you had a
general idea of how to pronounce those two names; and so it was possible from that,
comparing the names, Cyrus and Cambyses—comparing the letters in the two
names—to get certain guesses as to what some of the letters were. It is quite a
tedious task, and it took them a great deal of time and study. But in this way the
meaning of a great many of the letters was very skillfully worked out. And Rawlinson
did the same thing later; and Rawlinson says that, after he had made considerable
progress on it and probably had covered much the same ground, he had a friend in
England sent him a copy of Lassen's work4. He saw that work and received further
suggestions from it, but he already had done the great bulk of it himself.
So you have two different men making the start in the reading of the Persian
cuneiform. Now, once you have the Persian cuneiform read in these different trilingual
inscriptions, you could notice what the next type of writing was—which had about one
hundred characters—and it was rather evident that they must represent syllables.
They couldn't represent single letters, because no language could have as many as
one hundred individual letters in it; and so they must represent syllables,
combinations of a consonant with a vowel. Consequently, they could look at that
writing, and they could figure from a comparison with the other names—from the
names of the kings—they could get an idea of certain syllables; and then from the
writing of the words in between, they could tell which particular letters represented
the word "king", and so on. But for many letters in that language, though, they
couldn't tell how to pronounce them. Here is where Rawlinson was fortunate.
The big inscription which Rawlinson discovered had in it the names of a great many
places; and these places—once you had a few of the letters in the Persian writing—it
wasn't difficult to figure out many of these geographical places named as having been
conquered by king Darius in the Behistun inscription. And then once you had figured
those out, then in the second type of writing you could figure how the same place is
represented. And sometimes there might be a different name to it, but ordinarily the
name would be about the same as written in the other language. And then they went
on to try to read the third type of writing; and that is the one they were really
interested in, because the third type of writing, which had hundreds of different kinds
of characters, was the kind of writing which was found on the clay tablets that had
been brought to England from Mesopotamia. And perhaps if they could read this, it
would give them the clue to the reading of these clay tablets. So they got to work
comparing the proper names in this third type of writing with the first two.
4
Christian Lassen, Die Altpersischen Keil-Inschriften von Persepolis (The Old Persian Cuneiform
Inscriptions of Persepolis) (1836).
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One interesting thing, which they found right away, was that sometimes where you
would have eight or ten letters in the first type of writing, you would have only one
letter corresponding in the third type. You knew that, for instance, because the word
"king" which would have about five letters in the Persian type of writing, you could
spot anywhere it occurred in the Persian inscription, and it occurred rather frequently;
and wherever it occurred in the Babylonian writing, you found one particular style and
only that one sign repeated, no other. So that made it evident that in the Babylonian,
there was one sign that meant "king"; and it didn't need more than one sign to give
the idea of king.
Similarly they found the sign for "man," and they found the sign for "river," and a
great many other words like that; they found the sign, just one sign to represent it;
they had no idea in the world how to pronounce the particular word, but they had—in
the case of the names of the kings—they had a number of signs, and they managed to
guess the sounds of various signs from them.
So it was soon evident that the writing used in Babylonia and Assyria had signs that
represented individual sounds; signs that represented syllables; and signs that
represented whole words. It's quite a complicated system, as you see. It has hundreds
of different signs, while there are only about one hundred that are really common.
Now in this Babylonian writing, then, they noticed soon that the sign that represented
"r" in the king's name might be written in any one of eight different ways; and it didn't
seem reasonable to think that there were eight different individual letters for the
letter "r," so they came to the conclusion these represented syllables. And in the
Babylonian writing it was eventually proven that letters for individual sounds occur
only to represent vowels. You have the vowel which we call "a" there; the vowel "i"; the
vowel "u"; and the vowel "e," or the letter we represent by the vowel "e", which is much
less common. We have these four different vowel sounds. And then you have about
one hundred signs which represent a consonant and a vowel together—or else a
consonant, vowel and a consonant—two letters or three letters represented by one
sign. And then you'll have hundreds of signs which represent individual words which
are not so common; a few of them very common; the others you may come across
just once in a while. This gave the clue to the Babylonian writing but it didn't sound
reasonable to the people in England.
Scholars began to write about this, and tell how they would read these inscriptions,
and how many different signs there were with different meanings. And not only that,
but one sign might be used with different meanings. For instance, there is one sign
that may mean four different syllables. Whenever you find that sign in a word, you
know it is one of those four syllables. Well, that looks very complicated, but is really
isn't nearly so bad as it looks; because if it is preceeded by a particular sign, you
know it means "in the midst"; and if it is followed by another particular sign, you
know it is another phrase; and the other two signs also occur in rather common
words, so it is usually quite easy to decide which of the four it means. But to the
person who hasn't worked in the language, a system in which many of the signs have
anywhere from two to ten different possible meanings seems like an extremely
cumbersome and awkward system of writing; and it just didn't seem possible that the
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ancient Assyrians should have had such a complicated system of writing, so that there
was much doubt and skepticism of it.
And in the British Museum, it was decided to try to prove whether there was anything
to it or not. It just happened that at one time Rawlinson was back in England, an Irish
clergyman, Edward Hincks, who had done a great deal of study of this material, and of
ancient Egyptian material, was there; a Frenchman, Jules Oppert, and another
Englishman, H. Fox Talbot: four men who had been writing on the Babylonian work
and making various suggestions. All happened to be in England at the time. And so
the trustees of the British Museum took a new inscription that had been discovered,
which no one had yet seen outside of the original discoverer. They made a copy of the
inscription—it was a fairly long inscription—they made a very careful copy of it, four
copies, and they gave each of these four men a copy, and they asked them to work
out a translation; and then they had a meeting, at which the translations were turned
in. And when the translations were turned in, they found that all four of them had
agreed that this was an inscription of King Tiglath-pileser I (ca. 1114-1076 B.C.); and
all four translated it substantially the same, although there were places where they
were uncertain. But in those places where you had substantial differences in
translation, all four had marked it "Here is a difficult place." "There are certain signs
not very familiar to us yet." But it was the same places where they found uncertainty,
and so it was good evidence that the main secrets of the reading of the ancient
Babylonian-Assyrian writing had been discovered; and this set the thing on a fairly
solid foundation.5
It was previous to 1850 that this was done. Much later than that, there were found
some inscriptions with other evidences, such as, they found pictures with an
inscription underneath; and you would give the inscription to a man who knew
cuneiform writing, and he would read it without ever having seen the picture. And the
writing would say, "I, so-and-so, the great king, met a strong lion in the wilderness. I
took my spear and I plunged it into his mouth and the back of it came out through
the back of his head, and I killed this mighty lion." He would read that inscription that
way without ever having seen the picture which was with it when it was discovered.
And the picture showed the king facing a lion with a spear going into the mouth and
coming out through the back of the head. Thus, inscriptions found describing
pictures gave a pretty definite evidence that the actual means of reading this ancient
writing had been found, even though it is altogether different from any system of
writing that had ever previously been known.
Before a great deal of advance had been made in the reading of the language, the
discovery was made that the Babylonian language was very similar to Hebrew; and of
course this proved a tremendous help. The language is related to Hebrew, though the
grammar is somewhat different; the forms have very definite differences, and the
words have different endings, yet a great many of the words are similar to Hebrew
words; and this, of course, gave a clue very frequently. You have dozens of words
which have the same consonants as the Hebrew words; and so the reading of the
5
This was published by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1857.
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cuneiform was put on a solid basis, and now they were able to read the writing to
some extent on these small tablets that had been brought.
And by this time, actual excavation had begun; and one of the first places excavated
was—we'll look at the excavations separately—but one of the first places excavated
was a great palace of the king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh [see map, under Ninevah]. In
this palace, they found that Ashurbanipal had collected a great library; and the library
contained every type of literature that you could expect to find in a modern library.
There were tablets giving history, tablets of statistics, tablets of poetry, beautiful
literature, medicine, law—all sorts of tablets were found in this library, and arranged
according to a definite system; and this gave, of course, an introduction to a
tremendous part of the culture of ancient Mesopotamia.
The great bulk of the library of Ashurbanipal, which contained over one hundred
thousand tablets, was brought to the British Museum; there were so many of these
that many have not yet been translated. Scholars have just glanced through them and
picked out the most interesting ones and copied them. Over time, more and more
have been copied. Even up to the present day, discoveries are being made in the
library of Ashurbanipal which was brought from Nineveh to the British Museum about
one hundred years ago.
It is very interesting, in that connection, that previous to 1900 a great many tablets
were brought from the city of Nippur and Ur, in southern Mesopotamia [see map], to
the University Museum in Pennsylvania. Some of them have been published, and
different scholars at different times have glanced at all of them in order to see which
are important.
About five years ago, a young man named Francis Steele—Dr. Francis Steele—
attended courses here part time at the seminary for two years. He is now connected
with the University Museum. Just a little over a year ago [1947], he looked through
some of the tablets discovered at Nippur, which had been for nearly sixty years in the
University Museum; and he found that one of those tablets was of tremendous
importance—an importance which had never been recognized by any one of the
various individuals who had looked at the tablets before.
Ever since 1901, it had been thought that the code of Hammurabi was the oldest
known law code; and Dr. Steele recognized that one of these tablets was a portion of
a law code that was made one hundred and seventy-five years earlier than the
Hammurabi code, and that it contained quite a bit of material that was also contained
in the code of Hammurabi.6 Of course the discovery is of tremendous importance for
the history of ancient Assyrian; and also of tremendous importance for the history of
law; and it showed great acuteness of understanding on Dr. Steele's part to recognize
it and interpret it correctly. His interpretation is now recognized by all scholars as
accurate, but it is interesting that the tablet was actually dug up and brought over
here sixty years before the time in which Dr. Steele discovered it.
6
Francis R. Steele, The Code of Lipit-Ishtar, University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
13
It is no wonder that, after a particularly important discovery in the British Museum in
1920, Professor Bruno Meissner, Professor of Assyriology at the University of Berlin,
said that excavation in the British Museum seemed to be more productive than
excavation in the ruins of ancient Babylon. In saying that, he was making a dig at the
German excavators in Babylon [see map] who weren't finding as much as they had
hoped to; and also at the directors of the British Museum, for not publishing the
work, and studying it as fast as he thought they might have done.
Now this shows then the tremendous amount of material which has been found and
the tremendous importance of this material for our study of ancient Mesopotamia. We
had a great deal of inscriptional material from Egypt, but the material from Egypt
does not touch on every phase of life the way this does from Mesopotamia. We have
no law code, for instance, from Egypt at all. We have a number of law codes—over a
dozen different law codes—from Mesopotamia; and we have a great many writings
which throw a tremendous amount of light on the life of the average person in
Mesopotamia. Hundreds of thousands of these tablets have been dug up. There
probably are hundreds of thousands of them still remaining.
Dr. Steele just got back day before yesterday from Mesopotamia [January, 1949]. He
has been over there investigating the desirability of another excavation at Nippur,
where the tablets now in the University Museum were found in the 1890s. They are
hoping next year to start a full-scale excavation there, in the hope of getting another
large collection of important tablets.
Now as the study of this cuneiform writing went on, it was soon found that there was
one very queer thing in the writings. You would have a sign which had a certain
known meaning. They found it could also represent several different syllables. Now
this sign, they found, also meant the sun, which doesn't sound a bit like any of these
other syllables. They found that a number of these signs have meanings which didn't
sound at all like the ordinary sound-meaning that it is used to represent.
And as they found this a great many times, they began to wonder what kind of queer
thing it represented; and some scholars suggested that there was a hidden way of
writing—a secret way of writing—used in order to conceal ideas. But that didn't seem
reasonable, because this sign here may be used to represent the sun god in any kind
of the most common sort of writing. There is nothing out of the ordinary about it.
Writings of this type were very frequent; and others suggested that possibly they
represented using terms from a different language. Now that seems queer at first
sight, until you think of the fact that we do that in English a great deal.
We write in English "etc." and we don't say et cetera when we come to "etc." We
ordinarily say "and so forth"; or we write i.e., which stand for the Latin words id est,
and we don't say "id est," we say "that is"; and in English it is customary to use a large
number of Latin words like that, or abbreviations just thrown in, in the midst of our
English writing; and when we come to them, we give our English pronunciation
instead of saying anything at all like what that is actually written there. Similarly when
in the Babylonian, you would come to this symbol which would mean the Assyrian
14
name for the sun god, and you say the Babylonian for the sun god. You pronounce it
according to the language in which you are actually talking or writing.
So other scholars made this suggestion—that it was like our English usage of using
Latin mixed in with our English—and that this represented an earlier language than
the Babylonian, from which certain words were used, as symbols for an idea. There
was a heated discussion. Some scholars took one side, some took the other in this
discussion; but it was finally solved when excavation took place at places where this
earlier people, the Sumerians, had had their cities; and all the writing was in this other
type. All the writing used this Sumerian version, and there was no Babylonian at all.
Even though the signs are similar, the meaning was all Sumerian; and they had
endings, they had the words in between, the smaller words, all in Assyrian; and so
now that argument had been settled for many years, with the agreement that there
was a people there in Mesopotamia at about 3000 B.C., or a little after, who invented
this cuneiform system of writing; and these people were called the Sumerians, and
these Sumerians invented this wedge-shaped type of writing.
We have, in fact, early inscriptions which show it in the process of the earliest
development of the writing, where they originally scratched pictures; and then these
pictures, which they scratched on these clay tablets, they came to take a rectangular
form, made with pressing in with the stylus, and making these letters; and so it
developed in the land of the Sumerians [see southern part of Mesopotamia, map]; and
every type of writing known anywhere in the world almost certainly is derived from
the impetus of this original Sumerian writing.
The Egyptians took over the idea from them and developed their hieroglyphic writing;
it was carried across the deserts—clear across Asia—and the origin of the Chinese
writing, it is generally thought, came from the idea of writing this way, which was
derived from the Sumerians. And the earliest Chinese writing has certain points of
agreement with the earliest Sumerian writing. The earliest Chinese writing is, I think,
about a thousand years later than the origin of the Sumerian, which is recognized
pretty well now to be the earliest writing anywhere in the world.
Now this Sumerian writing, then, was taken over by the Babylonians; and the
Babylonian language is about as different from the Sumerian language as—shall we
say—as Hungarian is from English? Or as Japanese is from English—much more
different than Chinese, from English.
The Babylonian is an extremely different type of language. And so, to take Sumerian
signs and use them for writing Babylonian presented a tremendous amount of
confusion.
It was just about as complicated as is the way we do, to use the Latin letters to
represent English writing, which they don't fit at all. And so our English system is very
complicated and cumbersome, because we are using letters not invented for English
at all, and they don't fit our English. We have twisted them around to make them
applicable to our English writing. When you see an English word, if you want to know
how to pronounce it, you can always ask somebody; but there's no other way to know.
15
The Babylonian isn't quite that bad. The Babylonian is much more regular than the
English and much more definite, even though it has its great disadvantage of being
carried over from the Sumerian.
Now the study, then, of this cuneiform has gone on steadily ever since the original
discoveries; and new discoveries are constantly being made in its interpretation.
There are now many thousands of tablets which have been published—tablets of all
sorts.
I, myself, prepared what you might call a phone book of a town which was destroyed
in 1400 B.C., giving a list of the people who lived there, with their relatives and what
you could learn about them from the study of the great many hundreds of tablets. We
call the book Nuzi Personal Names,7 because the town was called Nuzi [see Nuzi,
upper Babylonia, map]. It is published by the Oriental Institute at the University of
Chicago; and that is typical of the various studies which have been made in this field.
A whole civilization there, which was unknown previously, has become known to us
from this cuneiform writing. It would be extremely valuable if it stood absolutely
alone; but along side of it, we have the discoveries made of actual materials; and that
is the other phase which I wish to take up.
Before I mention this other phase, though, just another word about this cuneiform.
The idea of writing was taken over by the Egyptians and by the Chinese from the
Sumerians; but the actual writing—the actual symbols—were taken over by the
Babylonians and also by the Hittites, and by various other peoples, so that we have
over twenty different languages now which have been found written in this cuneiform
writing. It was a type of writing which came to be used very widely throughout the
ancient world. And when a king of Egypt in about 1400 B.C. desired to write to a king
of a city in Palestine, though the King of Egypt spoke Egyptian and the king of the city
in Palestine spoke Canaanite, they would write in the Babylonian language, and write
on the clay tablets in cuneiform. That was the established custom of diplomatic
usage, even among people who didn't speak this particular language; and of course,
that's very useful to us because these cuneiform tablets were discovered down in
Egypt; and if they had been written on papyrus, they would have just disappeared; but
we have these cuneiform tablets throwing great light on Palestine about 1400 B.C. We
will look at them a little next semester when we deal with that earlier period of our
history—these so-called Armara tablets—but they are Babylonian writings, cuneiform
writings, Babylonian language clay tablets, even though found in Egypt and written
largely between Egypt and Canaan. Now,
2. The History of Excavation.
It is rather hard, in a way, to take up one of these [decipherment and excavation] first
and then the other, because the two went on together. Advances were made in the
language, and this made it possible to understand better what was excavated. Further
excavation was done and you could understand better what the language meant; and
7
Gelb, Purves & MacRae, Nuzi Personal Names, Oriental Institute Publications Vol. LVII, University of
Chicago (1943).
16
also you would have a new amount of tablets to deal with. To mention all of the
places that have been excavated in Mesopotamia would take us a long time; to say
anything about them would be a very long study. I just want to give you an idea—a
little bit of the main trend of the excavation—with a few of the main places.
The first excavations of importance in Mesopotamia took place shortly after 1842. In
1842 the French government created a vice-consulate at a city on the upper Tigris
River; and there they appointed to the position Paul Émile Botta. Botta was given to
understand, when he was appointed there, that he was not sent by the French
government only to do commercial work, but that part of his work was to begin
excavation and learn something about the history of ancient Mesopotamia. And so
Botta found that across the Tigris river from Mosul, there was a large number of
mounds there in the desert; just great hills covered with sand, nobody living there;
and he went over to these hills and began digging into them; and he found evidence
that people had lived there, but nothing of much importance; so after digging there
for awhile, he went up to a hill fourteen miles northeast of there. Some men had come
from this little village fourteen miles northeast and found him digging; they showed
him some tablets they had come across up there, and they said, "Come up to our
place, and you will find something worth digging for. You are not finding anything
here." Evidently the section which he was digging in was a residential section of
ancient Nineveh [see map]; he was finding where the common people lived there, but
nothing that threw much light on ancient history.
He went up to this other place, Khorsabad, fifteen miles northeast of the mounds he
had been digging in; and there he found a palace, covered over with sand; he found a
palace filled with interesting inscribed bas reliefs, in a city about a mile in
circumference. Under the corner of the palace were many cylinders of clay with
inscriptions on them. He found that it was a palace built by Sargon, the king of
Assyria, who reigned from 722 to 705 B.C.
Sargon had so disappeared from ancient literature that nothing whatever was known
of him; and his name had not been preserved except in one place, Isaiah 20:1, a
prophecy that was made at the time an Assyrian army sent by "Sargon the king of
Assyria" defeated Egypt at Ashdod, in 711 B.C.
A great many interesting discoveries were found here, not only of remains of the
building. But statues, pictures, and also the thousands of interesting clay tablets; then
he and his successors began digging again in the mound, which they thought was
Nineveh, across the Tigris River. A young Englishman of French Huguenot descent—
Austen Henry Layard—had come through there just before Botta began his diggings.
He was a young man, going on his way to India to seek his fortune; but he became so
interested in this matter of excavation that he soon returned; he went to
Constantinople and persuaded a wealthy Englishman there, who was ambassador to
Constantinople, to give him some money for the purpose of beginning excavation.
Layard went back to these mounds, and he began to dig in a different part of the
mound than that in which Botta had been digging; and he found the palaces of the
17
kings of Assyria there at Nineveh; and he did some very important excavation work
during the next five years.
In addition to considerable ability as an excavator, Layard also had great ability as a
writer; and he was a fine student of the Bible, and was constantly quoting Biblical
statements in connection with the discoveries which he was making; some of these fit
very accurately, some had very little to do with the thing he was discovering; but all of
them helped to arouse the interest of England in the excavations.
Layard's writings are very beautifully written; he was made a knight in recognition of
the work he did in the Nineveh excavation; and it was the impetus of his writing which
largely stimulated people in England to give money for continuation of the
excavations in Mesopotamia, as well as a continuation of the study and decipherment
of cuneiform.8
3. Summary of the History of Excavation.
A remarkable thing has happened in Mesopotamia. The land, as we noticed, is very
flat; and the result is that, in this extremely flat level land, you have this place where
the two rivers flow down through it—the Tigris coming almost directly down from the
mountains, the Euphrates coming from way over to the west, curving around and
coming down. And these rivers flowing through that very flat country have
occasionally changed their course—not very often—but there has been a great change
from the course of the rivers in antiquity; so that today, the thriving cities along the
course of the rivers are often many miles removed from the place where the thriving
ancient cities stood; thus the ancient cities are largely mounds left there deserted;
and it is possible to go there and to excavate, without having to interfere with
gardens and farms and houses and places of present civilization. There are many
places in Assyria and in Palestine where the center of an ancient civilization is covered
with a modern town; and, of course, that makes it extremely difficult to excavate. In
Mesopotamia you rarely have that difficulty, on account of the change of the course of
the rivers. This, of course, makes the mounds much more impressive from the
viewpoint of excavation. You have much more of the feeling of something that is
deserted and ancient in a place where you do not have a thriving, modern life going
on.
This is a letter from Professor Edward Chiera, a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, and later at the University of Chicago, who died about twenty years ago.
This letter to his wife gives a little idea of the feeling of one of these mounds, and I
thought I would read you a bit of it. It is the prolog of the book, They Wrote on Clay,
which is material written by Edward Chiera, but put together after his death by his
successor, Prof. George Cameron.
He says in the letter:
8
Austen Henry Layard, Discoveries among the Ruins of Ninevah and Babylon, (1853)
18
This evening I made my usual pilgrimage to the mound covering the ancient temple
tower. It is only a few hundred yards from our camp and it is pleasant to ascend to
the summit of that tower which dominates the landscape.
This brings out one of the interesting features of these ancient cities in Mesopotamia:
that they usually had a temple tower, which usually rose up in stages, up and in, and
then up and in—like that—and they often rose quite high above the city; nothing
comparable to the pyramids of Egypt, but they rose to a fair height, and they towered
above the city. He said:
It is pleasant to ascend to the summit of that tower which dominates the landscape.
Of course, today, in going up it, you would have it covered over with earth, largely.
Outside, it would be a fairly steep hill. Then it might be excavated on some sides; but
at the time of which he speaks, doubtless most of the sides would still be covered
with earth.
This I generally do in the evening after supper in the bright moonlight. Today I have
come with the ambition of jotting down my impressions, for the spectacle moves
me deeply.
Seen from below, it does not look so high as might be expected of a Babylonian
temple tower. Did not that of Babylon pretend to reach to heaven? One gets the
answer after ascending it. Though rather low (it can hardly be more than five
hundred feet), still from the top the eye sweeps over an enormous distance on the
boundless flat plain.
To say "not over five hundred feet", sounds as if he didn't think it was so large. Well it
isn't, compared to something like the Empire State Building, of course. It would only
be about half the height of the Empire State Building, but that's a pretty good height.
Nothing breaks the view, and the plain finally melts into the horizon. About twenty
miles away rises the high mound of Cutha. This city was sacred to Nergal, the god
of pestilence and of the underworld. The ruins of Babylon are nearer. All around the
tower small heaps of dirt represent all that remains of Kish [see map, just E of
Babylon], one of the oldest cities of Mesopotamia.
On all sides is desert; the yellowish soil is arid and thirsty, and no plant can survive
the parching heat of the summer; sheep and camels must feed on whatever
remains of the grass that has managed to sprout in the few weeks after the rains.
The large network of canals, which in ancient times distributed the waters of the
Euphrates over all this land, is now represented by a series of small mounds of dirt,
running in all directions. Even the Euphrates has abandoned its land by changing
its course. In ancient times it came very near to the city, giving water in abundance
and affording an easy way of communication.
But man has not yet forsaken this place, and still tries to wrest something from the
avaricious ground. A mile away an Arab peasant, chanting a plaintive song, is
19
urging on two skinny donkeys that pull a primitive plow. He is placing his trust in
the coming rains, hoping these may help multiply the few grains of barley that he
will throw into the shallow furrow. If the rains should fail, so will the bread in his
house. He works without energy, and the plow wriggles uncertainly over the plain.
Immediately before me, and all around the tower, are the deep trenches made
during last year's excavation. It is getting darker, and they are not well defined. But
at night, with a full moon, they appear pitch black and bottomless—a line of
defense around the sacred mountain, ready to swallow whoever should attempt to
approach it. The sun has just now disappeared, and a purple sky smiles, unmindful
of this scene of desolation. The cool evening breeze attempts to tear away from my
hand the sheet of paper on which I write these notes.
A dead city! I have visited Pompeii and Ostia, and I have taken walks along the
empty corridors of the Palatine. But those cities are not dead: they are only
temporarily abandoned. The hum of life is still heard, and light blooms all around.
They are but a step in the progress of that civilization to which they have
contributed their full share and which marches on under their very eyes.
Here only is real death. Not a column or an arch still stands to demonstrate the
permanency of human works. Everything has crumbled into dust. The very temple
tower, the most imposing of all these ancient constructions, has entirely lost its
original shape. Where are now its seven stages? Where the large stairway that led to
the top? Where the shrine that crowned it? We see nothing but a mound of Earth—
all that remains of the millions of its bricks. On the very top some traces of walls.
But these are shapeless: time and neglect have completed their work.
Under my feet are some holes that have been burrowed by foxes and jackals. At
night they descend stealthily from their haunts in their difficult search for food, and
appear silhouetted against the sky. This evening they appear to sense my presence
and stay in hiding, perhaps wondering at this stranger who has come to disturb
their peace. The mound is covered with white bones which represent the
accumulated evidence of their hunts.
This reminds me of the passage in Isaiah about the desolation predicted for the great
city of Babylon.
It is beginning to be really dark, and the plaintive song of the Arab has ceased.
Nothing breaks the deathly silence. Cutha and Babylon have been swallowed by the
darkness. In the distance some lights appear, and I can distinguish those of a
village of 'friendly' Arabs who are employed in the excavation. Further away is an
encampment of Bedouins, here considered as enemies. To us they represent an
element of danger, for they are born thieves. But I, who have accepted their
hospitality and drunk their coffee, made with dirty water and served in cups that
are never washed, cannot call them enemies. They have been so trusting that they
even let me take some photographs of them, a favor rarely attained from the
Bedouins of the desert; who knows what danger might threaten if these should be
20
used in black magic? They are friends, so far as they can be friends of the foreigner
and unbeliever.
A jackal is now sending forth his howls, half-cry and half-threat. All the dogs of
the Arab village immediately take up his challenge, and for a moment the peace is
upset by howling and barking.
It is now quite dark. Caution would advise descending immediately to avoid the
danger of falling into one of the many trenches. But a certain fascination holds me
here. I should like to find a reason for all this desolation. Why should a flourishing
city, the seat of an empire, have completely disappeared? Is it the fulfillment of a
prophetic curse that changes a superb temple into a den of jackals?
He is thinking of Isaiah there, as you can see.
Did the actions of the people who lived here have anything to do with this, or is it
the fatal destiny of mankind that all its civilizations must crumble when they reach
their peak? And what are we doing here, trying to wrest from the past its secrets,
when probably we ourselves and our own achievements may become an object of
search for people to come?
I have to descend now. The moon has not yet risen, and had not my frequent visits
taught me the right path to follow the descent would be really dangerous. Still
absorbed in my thoughts I feel no desire to break up their course by joining my
friends. In the semi-obscurity I walk through the open country and the ruins, still
untouched, of the ancient city. The ground is soft, being made up entirely of the
debris of centuries, and at times my foot sinks in it up to the ankle. Here the
ancient habitations, with their mysteries and their tombs, have been sleeping
quietly for millenniums. In a few months, perhaps in a few days, here also the
ground will be broken by trenches as in a battlefield. And the repose of the poor
dead will be disturbed by the frantic search for records and for data.
I thought that gives an interesting picture of the situation on one of those mounds
today, which are the remains of an earlier Mesopotamia. Of course there are large
cities and great commercial centers in Mesopotamia and fine farm lands, but they are
along the new course of the river; and the ancient course of the river is deserted and
barren and desolate.
Now the excavation, you noticed, began with Botta and Layard; and it continued, with
a number of different excavators taking part, working in one place and another up
and down through that country, finding a great many very fine statues and bas reliefs.
There are many places which have not been excavated; and there are many others
which have only been to a slight extent excavated; but the thing is this, that as long
as the material is in the ground there, it retains its force.
There are different layers. One city, which existed for anywhere from fifty to five
hundred years, was destroyed by enemies, buried immediately, or perhaps a hundred
years later; another city was built on top of it. It takes careful search to see just where
21
the ruins of one city end and the next city begins. It takes careful study to see the
exact relationships and materials in there and what they mean. The result is that, as
long as they remain there, they can some day be excavated and studied and much
learned. Once they are dug up, we have only that which was learned by the man who
dug them up. Once they are dug up, we only have individual museum pieces and what
they alone can tell us.
The removal of these layers, particularly the structures made of unbaked mud bricks,
requires skill and the knowledge of techniques, to know how to get them out without
wrecking them; to know how to find exactly where the walls are, which were often
made of mud brick and have so disintegrated, that you have to watch very carefully to
see exactly where they are; because once you dig them out, nobody else can ever find
out their precise location.
It means that as long as it is left untouched, the story is there even though it is of no
use to anybody. Once it is dug up, what you get out of the story is what you've got.
The earliest excavations did not yield us anything like the knowledge that the more
recent ones do; but the more recent ones would not yield us this much knowledge, if
it were not for the technique learned from the earlier ones; and with each excavation
there is an improvement in technique and an increased understanding that helps to
interpret the new things that are found.
The result is that the government officials try to limit excavation to those who are
competent. The Iraq government now has a Department of Antiquity which oversees
all archaeological work, and no one is permitted to excavate without its permission.
They have to give proof to the department that the place where they are going to
excavate is one which has reasonable promise of being a worthwhile excavation. They
have to give proof that they are competent to do the work reasonably well. They have
to give proof that they have sufficient funds that they would be able to carry the work
to a reasonable extent and not just start here and there and then just leave it.
The early excavators would go in and dig into a city, looking for some nice statues
that they might find for a museum, hunting for tablets; and they just went through,
hunting for these things; and everything else was just left, and they went off. Often
the least valued thing is the most important from the view of the knowledge that it
gives; and so it is very important that the search be done on such a careful scale that
you can really find out as much as possible of what is there. And so the Department
of Antiquity is comparatively strict as to the giving out of permits. In the early days it
was also necessary to get a permit, but in those days it was from the Turkish
government, which would give permits to the one who bribed them the most; and
there was no scientific oversight or anything like that. Today there is; and then, after
it is excavated the experts from the Department of Antiquity come and examine what
is found. They select their half, that they are going to keep there in Baghdad in the
Museum; and the excavator takes the other half back to his own country. In the early
days, of course, the excavator would take everything.
Of course, the main outstanding facts have already been learned; and for them we
only get new increased evidence. Between the two world wars there was a tremendous
22
amount of digging, and all the different countries took part in it. But now after the
war, we find France largely impoverished; we find Germany utterly impoverished; we
find England comparatively impoverished. No one of them is in a situation to do much
in the way of excavation; and in addition to that, there is very strong anti-Western
feeling in Mesopotamia right now on account of the situation in Palestine; and
consequently people are very hesitant about undertaking excavation. The work since
the war is now just getting established.
I mentioned yesterday the new excavation of Nippur. The University of Chicago spent
a good deal of last summer searching in Mesopotamia to decide what would be the
most profitable place for new large-scale excavation, and decided on Nippur. This fall
they made a preliminary investigation of it, and tried to get things more or less laid
out; and they plan to carry it on for a number of years, starting next fall, unless
conditions interfere and make it impossible. I mentioned yesterday, I believe, that
Professor Richard Haines flew over there on December 1 and got back on December
9; he spent a day and a half there on the mound investigating just how the plans were
working out; and one of the things he was interested in doing there was trying to
secure a little railroad that the Germans had built when they excavated the mound
before the war. When they finished their excavation, they sold this railroad to one of
the other governments. Now the railroad is supposed to be not of much use to them
today. The government thought they would make a lot of use of it, but they haven't;
so he is trying to buy this railroad that the Germans put in there, to have it there to
carry away their earth from the excavation, and so on. It would be tremendously
helpful if they could get this railroad, but I don't know just how far negotiations have
proceeded for buying the railroad. They probably would offer it to him for about
$50,000, and in the end they might sell it for $300.00 if he bargained long enough.
Well, the early excavations found much that was of value, but of course they
destroyed much. They carried on a number of very important excavations, especially
around Nineveh. Now there an interesting thing occurred. These excavations were
largely in Nineveh, which was the center of the Assyrian empire; and consequently,
the early books on the subject always speak of it as Assyrian discoveries; and then
they came to speak of the language as the Assyrian language, though the Assyrians
were only one of the various nations which used the language, and other nations had
used it much earlier than the Assyrians. The term "Assyrian" for the language has
largely been given up within the last twenty years. It is used now for one dialect of the
language, the Assyrian dialect; but any book published more than twenty years ago is
apt to call the language Assyrian and professors of the language were called
Assyriologists up to within the last twenty years. Now, Assyrian is thought of as only
one branch of the language of Assyria or Babylonia.
Well these excavations found, as I say, a tremendous number of very valuable works
of art and a great many—some hundreds of thousands—of clay tablets, many of
which were of tremendous interest and importance; and the excavations went on with
little interruption from about 1840 until about 1854; and then so much material had
been found—far more than could be decently studied immediately and decently
presented—so that interest waned; and from 1854 until 1872, there was practically
nothing done in the way of excavation in Mesopotamia. And then in 1872, there was a
23
meeting in England, at which George Smith, an employee of the British Museum read
a paper. Smith had already been working. He was a young man who had gone into the
British Museum; he had persuaded the authorities in the museum that he had enough
knowledge of the subject, that it would be safe to let him handle and study the
tablets; and after he had studied them awhile, they had decided that his skill was
sufficient that they put him on the payroll at a small stipend, to study and publish the
tablets; and George Smith had published two or three tablets of considerable interest.
But now he announced he had a discovery of unusual interest; and so a meeting was
held at one of their archaeological societies in London; and at this meeting, George
Smith read his paper on some tablets which he had found in the British Museum. They
had been brought from Nineveh and described a great universal flood, very similar to
the one described in the Bible; and George Smith said, "Here is a remarkable
corroboration of the Scripture. Here is the account of the flood." But the thing was
fragmentary; there were sections of it missing, but he had found quite a bit of it and
it aroused tremendous interest.
George Smith, when he read his paper, it aroused such great interest that the
proprietors of the London Daily Telegraph paid a sum of money for renewed
excavation in Assyria, provided that George Smith would be put in charge of the
excavation; and so they took the money that the Daily Telegraph paid, and George
Smith rushed off to Mesopotamia with an expedition; he hunted at Nineveh for further
material bearing on the story of the flood; and he found further tablets, which fit
together with the ones he had already found about the story of the flood, and they
had an interesting story. It had been well worth the sum of money spent.
The Daily Telegraph didn't feel the desire to give more money to carry on the
excavation; but Smith persuaded others in England to give money, and the British
Museum raised some; and he rushed back to Mesopotamia; and he was so
tremendously interested in the work; and so excited about the new discoveries; and
anxious to find out all he possibly could; he is one of the most brilliant interpreters of
cuneiform that we have ever had. So he overworked himself, became terrifically
rundown, and in 1876 on his way to Mesopotamia for the third time he suddenly died
of fever at Aleppo; and when this happened, it came like a terrific shock to the
scholarly world, because George Smith was known now everywhere, to anybody who
knew anything about Mesopotamia, in Germany, in France, and in England. There was
tremendous consternation among people who were interested in Bible history at the
news that George Smith died.
I remember a German scholar—one of the outstanding men in Germany when I was
there—remarking how as a boy in his early teens, he heard of the death of George
Smith; and he said it just seemed as if the world had come to an end when he heard
it. But the result of the death of George Smith was a tremendous increase in interest
in excavation. He had had difficulty raising money for his last excavation; now many
people came together to give money to carry on the work that George Smith had been
doing. The British Museum immediately sent out a much larger expedition, which
continued the work; the French very soon sent out a large expedition, which got into
an entirely new section of Mesopotamia, and they made some of the most remarkable
24
discoveries there. Less than ten years later, interest was aroused in America; and
excavation was begun by Americans—representatives of the University of
Pennsylvania—over in Nippur, the very city of which I was speaking a few minutes
ago; and at Nippur they found one of the greatest collections of tablets that has ever
been found.
So the Germans excavated at Babylon for many years; and they did what I think is one
of the finest things that any excavation has done. They took the great procession
street of Nebuchadnezzar there, which has great glazed tiles on the sides of these
great walls on the side of the street; and they took a certain number of them, so as to
make a street nearly a block in length, and about one fourth the height of the actual
street in Babylon, but all in proportion and using original tile, and they put them in
the museum in Berlin. They were put up there during the last few months that I was
studying in Berlin. Up there on the top floor of this museum, so that there was glass
above; and it gave you very much the impression of being out of doors, on a onefourth scale. They reproduced a part of the procession street of Babylon in the days of
Nebuchadnezzar; and so there in that museum, instead of doing as you do in most
museums—going and looking in a little glass case and seeing a little tiny thing and
saying, "Well, now that is so-and-so"—you saw reproduced, on a reasonable scale, a
replica with the actual material of one of the important sections of Babylon in the days
of Nebuchadnezzar; and the result was, as you walked down it, you almost imagined
you were right in Babylon. You just expected to see Daniel come walking around the
corner any moment.
Well, the French carried on excavations up in the mountains, further east in ancient
Elam (ancient Susa); and there in 1901, the French discovered certain great
Babylonian things that had been carried off as plunder, at one of the times when the
Elamite tribesmen had made an expedition down into Mesopotamia proper. They
found a black basalt pillar, containing the laws of Hammurabi, which up until last year
was considered to be the earliest law code. Before that time, there were many
scholars who had been saying, ''Moses could not possibly have written the Pentateuch
as early as from 1400 to 1200 B.C. How could you have as extensive a set of laws as
the laws of Moses? They must be hundreds of years later. That is much too early for
anything as involved and complex as those laws." And here there was found, from a
period some centuries earlier than Moses, a law far more involved and complex than
the laws of Moses. It is certainly abundant proof that it is absurd to say that it is too
early in the life of civilization for such a law code as the law code of Moses to have
been given. The matter of the exact relation between the laws of Hammurabi and the
laws of Moses is a very interesting question, but that is one which we take up next
semester when we are dealing with the earlier portion of the Biblical history.
Now we won't have time to look at many of the excavations. I just should mention a
few of the outstanding ones in addition to those I have already mentioned.
a. Ur of the Chaldees. [see map, extreme S of Babylonia] They were carried on
beginning at 1922—that is, during the war, four years before that, there was a brief
amount of excavation—but then beginning in 1922, extensive excavations were
carried on at Ur by the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania;
25
they carried on these excavations there for a number of years, and they found most
remarkable and unexpected things; they found the proof that Ur of the Chaldees was
a city in existence as early as the time of Abraham. Many had said, "The Bible tradition
of Abraham's coming from Ur of the Chaldees is a late tradition. Abraham actually
came from Haran in northern Mesopotamia. There is nothing to the idea that he was
ever in Ur of the Chaldees." I've heard that statement made in the University of
Pennsylvania within the last ten years: "That it is just an erroneous tradition in the
Bible." They base that partly on the fact that in the Septuagint it just says "Ur," It
doesn't say "Ur of the Chaldees," which after all is not much of an error.
But here is this important archaeological fact in that connection—to know that the city
of Ur was an important place as early as the time of Abraham; not only that, but the
city of Ur was a very progressive and advanced city at that early time. In fact, the
luxury of the houses—we wouldn't call it luxury, but compared to most ancient
cities—the luxury of the houses of Ur at the time of Abraham is as advanced as that of
Babylon in the time of Nebuchadnezzar fifteen hundred years later; which shows how
progressive and advanced the civilization of Ur was at the time of Abraham.
And so when God calls Abram to go out from Ur into a land that God would show him,
it was just the same to him as if someone had called one to go out from the most
advanced cities of this country into the heart of Africa. It was going out into the wild
and unknown West to Abram.
Now these excavations at Ur were carried on jointly by the British Museum and the
University Museum of Pennsylvania. Many very interesting discoveries—some of which
we will note in a very different connection—and the material found was divided
between the two museums; so some of the finest things from Ur you can actually see
in the University Museum in Philadelphia; and of the others that are in the British
Museum, you can find replicas here.
b. Nuzi. [see map, extreme N of Babylonia] Now in 1927 Professor Chiera, whose
book we mentioned, carried on excavation in northern Mesopotamia, which is much
further north than Nineveh; and there he excavated a town which was destroyed
about 1400 B.C., the town of Nuzi; and at this town was found a large group of
tablets which are among the most interesting tablets that have been found anywhere;
because it is a civilization related to that of Haran, the place at which Abraham
stopped for quite a time; and where Jacob stayed for quite a while; and they throw
light on many of the questions of the Pentateuch. Nuzi is quite a bit east of Haran,
but the people are of the same race as those in Haran; and it is from approximately
the same period that these discoveries are found; consequently, they throw special
light on that.
Of course, there are many other important excavations. It would take us a month or
two to look briefly at them; but I think for our purpose here, it is more valuable to go
on to see a summary of the history.
B. A Summary of the History of Mesopotamia.
26
1. Prehistory.
By prehistory, we mean that which happened before this period began. And history, in
a technical sense, means that which is preserved for us in written records; so
prehistory is that information which we can gather from the remains of buildings, of
pottery, of statues, of all sorts of things that people made, but for which you have no
written record. That is prehistory; and prehistory runs up to about 3000 B.C., because
writing was invented in Mesopotamia at about 3000 B.C.
Now how far back of 3000 B.C. it goes, nobody knows. Since history begins—since
3000 B.C.—you can be sure of a date in the third millennium—that is from 2000 to
3000—within two or three hundred years at present. We will doubtless become much
more accurate as we get more material. You can be sure of most dates between 2000
and 1000 within, say, twenty or thirty years, just roughly; and of most dates between
1000 and 400, you can probably be sure within one or two years. This is
approximate; but it depends, of course, on the amount of material we have gotten,
and on the number of the gaps there are, which might be longer or shorter between
that, and for other periods or locations for which we have much information.
But when you get back of 3000 B.C., when anyone gives you a definite date, you know
that he is speaking from his great ignorance, because there is no such thing as a
definite date back of 3000 B.C.9 I do not know what is the standard text book in high
schools for ancient history now. I know that, ten years ago, in a great many high
schools, a book called Ancient Times was the standard text book in ancient history. It
was written by Professor Breasted, who had been founding director of the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago and one of our greatest authorities on
Egyptology up to his death in 1935. In that book for high school students, Professor
Breasted said, "4241 B.C. is the earliest fixed date in history, because that is the date
in which the Egyptians invented their calendar: 4241." Now, of course, a child in high
school, who has been told that the Bible says that Adam was created in 4004 B.C., is
taught in high school that the Egyptians invented their calendar in 4241 B.C.; and
immediately he has to choose between his Bible and what is taught.
Actually, of course, the conflict is not between true science and true interpretation of
the Bible, but between a misunderstanding of science and a misunderstanding of the
Bible; because the Bible doesn't say Adam was created in 4004 B.C. It might have
been a hundred thousand years earlier than that, for all we know; and as far as
science is concerned, there is no scientist living today who is at all familiar with this,
who believes that the Egyptians had their calendar earlier than 2700 B.C.—to say
nothing of 4241 B.C.—which Ancient Times says is the earliest fixed date in history;
so here you have a conflict between something said to be in the Bible, but is not there
9
Editor's note: An exception to this is dates of astronomical events such as solar eclipses, supernovas,
extra-ordinary alignments of space objects. See the NASA List of Ancient Solar Eclipses, which lists the
"Assyrian Eclipse" as June 15, 762 BC (763 BCE), an event recorded at Nineveh. See Price, The
Monuments and the Old Testament (1958) ¶47. "Chronology of the Old Testament", p. 65. The NASA
list only extends to 2,000 BC, but there is no reason why it could not be extended much further into
the past. These events can be dated to astonishing accuracy (to within days or hours) as long ago as
15,000 years before the present, but to be confirmed, one needs the actual ancient sighting. dcb, rcn.
27
at all, and something said to be proven by science, but for which there is no scientific
proof— between things that have nothing to do with true science and have nothing to
do with true Biblical interpretation.
Now, it is true that Archbishop Ussher had a very lovely theory—a theory that just as
there are seven days in the week with the Sabbath the seventh day, so there would be
seven thousands of years in history, with the seventh thousand being the millennium,
and then that leaves two thousand before that since the time of Christ, and Christ was
born in 4 B.C. and so if Adam was born in 4004 B.C. it makes exactly four thousand
years between the time that Adam was here and the time of Christ; and so he tried to
interpret the chronological data—which are insufficient for a determination—in such a
way as to get it exactly four thousand years before the birth of Christ. Thus he got the
date 4004 B.C.
Now there have been at least fifty others, who have figured up from those data, and
gotten at least fifty other dates for the creation, because the data are incomplete and
we do not know when Adam was created. It may have been 104,000 B.C. for all we
know. I think those who claim this is what the Bible says—that is ridicule, and an
attempt to make light of fundamentalists. Some people attempt to make their own
calculation from the Bible. It's not of any use without written records. There is
absolutely no way to do it. There are people who will say this is from about 5000 B.C.
This is from about 7000 B.C. and when you find out how they figure it up, you have
an occupation with a certain number of houses, one above the other, and they guess
this must have taken just about that length of time. But it's a guess.
I heard Hetty Goldman (Professor at Bryn Mawr, and in 1936 made the first woman
professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study) describing her excavation at
Tarsus [extreme top left of our map].10 She was interested in learning something
about ancient Tarsus; and she went there with an expedition; and they went outside
the modern town of Tarsus, and they began digging into a hill there; and as they dug
into the hill, they hadn't gone very far down into the ground before they found the
foundations of a building; and they uncovered the walls of the building, and they were
different from anything that she was familiar with from those times; and they began
to wonder, "Was this perhaps the place where Saul had been when he was a boy in
Tarsus, or was this something, perhaps, from a period 2000 years before Paul?" And
as they wondered, there was a group of natives standing on the side there looking on
and watching what was happening; and an elderly woman began gesticulating and
talking excitedly and waving her arms and pointing; and they wondered what she was
so interested in; what she was talking about to the younger folks around her; and one
of them went over, wondering what it was about, and heard her say in the modern
Turkish dialect, "Why, that's where I went to school when I was a girl and that was
burned down when I was eight years old." And it had been burned down and left and
covered over with sand and abandoned, And now, when you found the remains of it
here were some walls. "Was that from the time of Saul? Was that from the time of
2000 B.C.? What time was it from?" Well, of course, with more study—this was just the
first observation—with more study it would have been very easy to see there were
10
Hetty Goldman, Excavations at Gözlü Kule, Tarsus, 3 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1950–63)
28
types of brick in the building, types of construction which came from modern times,
but to tell exactly when, one way would be to find other places, those that were
similar, and say it must have been about the same time.
Where you find three buildings, buried one above the other, you know that the one on
the bottom was made before the one on the top. You know that, and so you know the
relative order; but you don't know the length of time; and any date previous to 3000
B.C. is a guess; and it is useful to make guesses. You say, "This is 4000 B.C." Well, it
might be 3400 and it might be 5000, you can't tell, but you say 4000. Then here is
another one which is quite clearly later than that. Well, you make it 3800. Here's one
that is earlier, you make it 4200; even if those dates are all wrong, you get the relative
order and it is very useful for study.
And so all dates previous to 3000 B.C. are guesses, which are very valuable for
getting the order of different things, but which are very undependable as to exact
dates. There is a tremendous amount of material before 3000 B.C. That is, we have
cities of which we have—we have maybe twenty cities one above the other, getting
back to the beginning of writing, and then we have ten or twelve under that; but the
ones under that, you can't tell how long they lasted. You can make a guess, as to
whether it looks like a city that was used for 500 years, or whether it looks like one
that was used for twenty years before it was destroyed, but your guesses are very
inaccurate and undependable. The period of prehistory in Mesopotamia was one from
which much has been found. There is more known of prehistory in Mesopotamia than
of any other section of the world. Of course, next to it is Egypt; but in Egypt there is
much more that is discontinuous, at different places, while here there are more places
where you have one city above another, and therefore you can be sure of the order of
them.
There is a great deal of very interesting material and much definite that can be said;
but as to the length of it, we just don't know how long these different things took. We
can say this: that the civilization just before 3000 B.C. seems to be, from an artistic
viewpoint, much higher than the civilization right after 3000 B.C.; and the reason for
it is that at about 3000 B.C. they discovered the smelting of copper; and everything
from that point went at a greatly increased tempo. It was one of the two or three
greatest advances in the history of civilization. It made for a tremendous increase in
the tempo—before that everything was leisurely, people had time to make beautiful
things; after that the strenuous life came and everybody rushed about violently; and
the citizens who didn't get on to the use of copper weapons quite as fast as the next
city, were destroyed and burned back in that time; and so about 3000 B.C., you see
two-thirds of the cities in Mesopotamia burned; and we have a tremendous amount of
war and ravage as a result of the discovery of this new weapon; smelted copper
weapons could be made more quickly and in far greater abundance than the stone
weapons. Even though an individual weapon might not be much more useful than an
especially good stone weapon, but it could be made in a fifth the time.
You had mass production coming in. So we won't go into prehistory much in this
class. It doesn't have a great deal of contact with the Bible.
29
2. The Third Millennium.
The third millennium begins with the Sumerians in the land. We know they were there
because we have their writings. The earliest writings we have are from the Sumerians;
and the writing fits the Sumerian language very well, and it is quite definite that it was
originated by the Sumerians. And the Sumerians were a practical people. They
invented the dome and the arch. They were good at tapestry; they were good at all
sorts of practical things. They were evidently a comparatively small group, but a
group which by means of a practical ability held all of Mesopotamia in subjection for a
good many years; and then the group died out and was absorbed by other groups,
because it was a comparatively small group; and the Sumerians were succeeded in the
control of Mesopotamia by people who spoke a Semitic language.
Sumerian is not a Semitic language; it is utterly different from any Semitic language.
But the people who succeeded them had as their capital the city of Akkad [see map,
near Babylon, there spelled Accad], which is mentioned in Genesis; and from that, we
call these people the Akkadians; and today the ancient language of Babylonia and
Assyria is called Akkadian by scholars. When I speak in a popular way I always call it
Babylonian, because people otherwise have little idea what you are talking about. But
no scholar today calls it Babylonian; they call it Akkadian. And they think of
Babylonian as a dialect of Akkadian. I should think it would be just as reasonable to
say that Akkadian is a dialect of Babylonian, because the two dialects are quite
distinct; and the people of Akkad had disappeared from history when Babylon was
supreme; and Babylon was supreme far longer than Akkad was; but Akkad is earlier,
so from a scholarly viewpoint a good argument can be made for using the term
Akkadian for the whole language, of which we have various dialects; and the dialect
spoken by the Akkadians we call Old Akkadian; and the others after the Akkadians
had died out we simply call other dialects of Akkadian.
These people of Akkad—these Semitic people, these Akkadians—were not like the
Sumerians. They did not shave their faces, they had long beards; the Sumerians
shaved their faces, and the tops of their heads as well, but the Babylonians let their
hair grow. The Akkadians conquered the Sumerians, and their civilization is quite
interesting; but the contacts with the Bible are not very numerous.
Then there was a renewal of Sumerian civilization. We are not sure whether it was
actual Sumerians or people who were imitating Sumerian civilization. We call this the
third dynasty of Ur, or the Neo-Sumerian Empire. It doesn't have much direct contact
with the Bible.
3. The Second Millennium.
Our contact with the Bible, to any extent, begins with the Babylonian civilization. This
contact would have been put under the third millennium up to ten years ago. In fact,
it was considered that the date of Hammurabi was definite and fixed. That was
believed by all scholars up to ten years ago.
30
Hammurabi's dynasty—while we know a tremendous amount about it—comes before
a long period of which we know comparatively little; and it was quite a guess what
was the length of this period; new discoveries made within the last ten years enable
us to shorten this period very materially; a period formerly thought to be about five
hundred years in length was cut down to about one hundred. So Hammurabi, who
used to be dated between 2100 and 2000, is now usually dated about 1750 B.C.
This Babylonian dynasty, of which Hammurabi was the sixth king, was a very
progressive dynasty. They were great conquerors; they conquered all of Mesopotamia
and much of the territory as far west as the Mediterranean Sea.
But they were progressive in other ways. They took the Sumerian writing; and they
changed it quite a bit. They modernized the spelling. Instead of going on with such
silly things as [in English] spelling "was" w a s, when "a" is pronounced "uh" and "s"
shouldn't be pronounced "ess"; such silly things as writing "though" when all they
mean is "tho"; they gave up some of those crazy habits that the former Akkadians
had, and adopted a revised spelling system which was continued from that time on to
the end of Mesopotamia's history. So the change in the method of writing is very
important at this time.
And then they took the old literary conventions, and revised them, and edited them,
and they made them standard at this time. So Hammurabi's day is a day of
standardization; a day of general improvement, not only in military affairs, but in the
religious life, and the literary life, and many phases of the life of the people. And
Babylon secured a prominence in people's minds in the time of Hammurabi—so great,
that even though not so very long after Hammurabi's time, the people were
conquered by a group of invaders, and fell into the position of a city of comparatively
small importance in a political way—yet the name of Babylon continued a great name
right on through the next two thousand years; and it had a tremendous hold on the
imagination of people, because of its preeminence in literature and in scholarship, in
commerce and in religion.
Now this second millennium B.C. is a period in general of which we know much less
than we do about the third millennium. The first part of it—Hammurabi and the first
Babylonian dynasty come in the first part—is comparatively well known. Hammurabi
was the first great codifier of law; and in his day there was the great spelling reform;
an improvement in the methods of writing; an improvement of the system to adapt it
to the Babylonian system—a system not naturally adapted to it—a great improvement
such is so sadly needed in our English writing, but we have not yet produced a
Hammurabi who would carry it through. Therefore we have a system that is very
awkward. The Babylonian system was greatly revised and improved, and the great
standard classics of Babylonian literature were put into a definite form at this time.
This literature included a story of creation, and. a story of the flood, and other great
stories of the early days of humanity. We've mentioned already the part which the
rediscovery of the narrative of the flood had in stimulating interest in archaeology,
the question of the relation of these stories to the Biblical stories.
31
Now this king Hammurabi conquered most of the nations round about; and one of the
last that he conquered was one with which he had been allied for a very long time, a
city-state called Mari [see map] on the northern Euphrates River; and this city of Mari
was excavated by the French just before the war, and thousands of clay tablets from it
were taken to France. During the war, when the Germans had conquered France—and
the German scholars had to be helping their armies and making their plans and
translating documents and censoring newspapers and all that sort of thing—the
French scholars and the Belgian scholars, seeing that their land had been conquered
and they could no longer perform any war-like acts, had their time entirely at their
disposal; so they were able during the war to study forward on these Mari tablets; and
since the war, two volumes have already been published, and I understand there are
two more in manuscript, which will soon appear: volumes of these texts from Mari. It
is as a result of these texts that the date of Hammurabi is now moved forward about
400 years from the previous date that had been given to it. These are very interesting
texts, because they are mostly letters from the king and the leaders in his court, to
his representatives in the court of Hammurabi. We might say they give us an intimate
view of history at that time, and they have solved many problems; but they have
raised twice as many new ones, that we didn't even know about before.
Some people think they have found the name David and the name Benjamin, which we
find used in the Bible, and which we find parallels to in the Mari text now. Whether
these are actual parallels and throw light on the Biblical story is a matter that needs to
be further thought through. Already the Mari tablets are of great importance; and they
promise to be increasingly important in the next few years, because they throw light
on this very important period of Mesopotamian civilization.
Now the Babylonian first dynasty was conquered by a people from the mountains,
who came down there and overran the country; they set up their own civilization in
imitation to the Babylonian, pretending to carry on Babylonian civilization, but actually
knowing little about it. It used to be thought that their power lasted over five hundred
years. Now it is cut down to a little over a hundred, in the opinion of scholars. We
don't know a great deal about the period when they held Babylon; but politically, it fell
to a comparative insignificant position; and it was another thousand years before it
regained its great importance; but it held a place in people's imagination, established
from the time of Hammurabi that was never altogether lost. During this second
millennium, we notice this invasion of these mountain peoples and there were other
peoples that came flooding into the land during this time and some of them even
went clear across Mesopotamia, Assyria, Palestine and one group of them went down
into Egypt and conquered Egypt and held Egypt for quite a time—the so-called
Hyksos people. So the second millennium, was a kind of upheaval of great migrations.
Toward the end of the millennium these begin to quiet down and people become
more settled and established and consequently we have a period of which we know
much more in the first millennium B.C. and that is a period with much more contact
with the Biblical account. So much so that I am dividing it into sections and so
4. The Assyrian Period.
32
Instead of heading this as the first millennium B.C., I am calling it the Assyrian period.
I have mentioned that Mesopotamia we divide in general into two parts. Southern, or
Lower Mesopotamia, we call Babylonia; and Northern, or Upper Mesopotamia, we call
Assyria. Southern Mesopotamia is a very flat area—very dry except for where the
rivers come through and make it possible to irrigate the land and to have very
extensive and fertile cities. The northern part of Mesopotamia is somewhat different
than southern Mesopotamia. It becomes more hilly. There is somewhat more rainfall.
The mountains are nearer.
The mountain folk, to descend upon Babylon, had to come across quite an area of
plain land, and they might be intercepted and held back; but the Assyrian settlements
are fairly near the mountains and consequently in much more danger. It is a wilder
type of country than Babylonia, the southern part of Mesopotamia, and there was
more trouble with the wild beasts than in southern Mesopotamia. And as a result, you
have in northern Mesopotamia a somewhat more warlike people than in southern
Mesopotamia. This northern area we call Assyria, after the name of the city of Ashur
[see map, under Aššur, in S Assyria], a city which was founded by Sumerian colonists
in the third millennium B.C. It gained considerable power, as the people managed to
maintain themselves by fighting off the wild beasts, and by fighting off the mountain
folk; and gradually they developed very strong war-like powers, and established other
colonies in the neighborhood. Gradually they developed quite a strong power up there
during the latter part of the third millennium and during the whole second
millennium.
When Babylon was conquered by the mountain folk, the Assyrians resisted them,
gained their independence through the conquest of Babylon, and maintained their
independence. We have some interesting tablets that have been discovered about the
Assyrian power; it gradually increased during this second millennium B.C.; but the
time that we are interested in, and which we call the Assyrian period, is the period in
which the Assyrians became the leading power in Mesopotamia. We can begin this
period roughly around 1000 B.C. but its real high point is the period which begins
between 800 and 600 B.C.
These Assyrian people were not primarily a commercial people like the Babylonians;
nor were they a literary people. They took over all these things from the Babylonians,
but they were primarily a warlike people. The Babylonians thought that war was a
valuable instrument of national policy, and they used it but they didn't glory in it. The
Assyrians gloried in it. The Assyrians, in their inscriptions, devote more space by far
to telling of their great victories in war, than to any other subject; and each king
seemed to vie with his predecessors in an attempt to conquer more territory, and to
extend his arms, until finally you have the kings of Assyria extending their power
clear to the west, as far as the Mediterranean Sea.
The first great Assyrian king whose army went as far as that—that is, after the
beginning of the first millennium B.C.—is a man named Ashurnasirpal, the king who
reigned from 884 to 860. He is very important from a historical viewpoint, because of
the fact that he seems to have been the first to establish frightfulness as a definite
instrument of policy. Previous kings of Assyria often were very cruel; and they
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mention their cruelty; and we find kings in every nation that have engaged in war, at
times being very cruel; but Ashurnasirpal went out of his way to try to make people
know how cruel he was. He seems to have thought that after he had conquered an
area, if he would make the people frightened of him, they would be less apt to revolt,
and he could hold them more permanently—not very good psychology, I don't believe.
It may hold people somewhat longer than otherwise, but it keeps alive the spirit of
rebellion; and makes it more difficult to hold them to him.
Ashurnasirpal, when he conquered a city, might treat the people fairly well. He would
take off the leaders as prisoners, and he would do a certain amount of cruelty to
them, but in general it was not much worse than other nations; but after he had
conquered a city, then if that city revolted, and he reconquered it, there was no limit
to the cruelty which he showed. And he boasts of it in his inscriptions. He tells, for
instance, of conquering one city and he says, "The people of the city are marched out;
I took the men, and hundreds of them I flayed alive; others I stuck up on spears
around the city; others of them, I cut off their heads and made great piles; and he
described all these terrible things which he did in the inscriptions which he posted,
evidently with the definite purpose of scaring the other people of the empire into
thinking what terrible things would happen if they revolted against him. So this
brutality as a definite instrument of policy was put forward by Ashurnasirpal. He
doesn't say that he originated it, but he is the first one of whom we have very definite
evidence that he is making very great use of it in his inscriptions; and so it is
altogether possible that he originated it as an instrument of military policy. You can
well imagine, then—when the Assyrian kings from this time on carried on this policy—
you can well imagine the effect upon the people far to the west as they heard of the
coming of the Assyrian army.
You can imagine how it frightened people to think of their coming; and naturally most
of them would scurry together to make alliances and plans to resist, and efforts at all
possible hazards, to hold them off. Occasionally you would find one, like Ahaz, who
would think that he could protect himself from the neighboring people by making an
alliance with the Assyrians behind them; and such schemes were never successful for
a very long time, as Isaiah pointed out. Now Ashurnasirpal was succeeded by his son
Shalmaneser III; and Shalmanezer III has a name which is somewhat more important
for our history—for our Biblical history—than the name of Ashurnasirpal, though in
the history of Assyria he may not be any more important; just as important though,
because he came nearer to Palestine than did his father, and he claims to have
received tribute from the kings of Palestine.
Ashurnasirpal describes his first approach to Palestine in a year which is figured out
as 854 B.C.; and this is rather important, because this gives us our first definite date
which scholars feel can be dated absolutely from archaeological sources—this date
854 B.C.—and so it is a key date in the dating of Biblical events. He says that in the
year of—the way he entitles the year—which scholars figure as being 854 B.C., in the
month of Tishrin, in the fourteenth day, I departed from the city of Nineveh.
Though Ashur was the first great city of the Assyrians, Nineveh was another of their
great cities; and by this time, it had come to be their leading city. It was also one of
34
their very oldest cities. And he described in this tablet—which was doubtless posted
at many places in the empire—how in that year he approached the city of Qarqar; and
he destroyed, he says, the city of Qarqar; and then he met a great coalition against
him; and he describes Benhadad of Damascus, and Ahab of Israel as leaders of the
force against him.
The Bible tells us nothing of the alliance of Ahab with Benhadad for the purpose of
fighting Shalmaneser. But it is interesting to find the name of Ahab, which previous to
the discovery of this tablet, the name had been not known to us from anything written
in the time of Ahab. That is to say, in the Bible, of course, it is copied and copied and
recopied; but we don't have the original thing on which it was written then; nor do we
have any monument on which Ahab actually had his name put up in his lifetime; but
here is this inscription of King Shalmaneser, of which we have the tablets which we
consider come right from the very lifetime of Shalmaneser, the very tablet written
then, on which he names Ahab the king of Israel and Benhadad, the king of
Damascus.
It is interesting that he doesn't call him Benhadad; he calls him Hadad-Isri, and so
when this tablet was first found, scholars thought that the royal name of the King of
Damascus was Hadad-Isri; but that Benhadad was another form of the name used by
the Israelites. Since that time, we have found an inscription actually put up by
Benhadad, in which uses the name in this latter form, using the Aramaic word bar
instead of the Hebrew ben, but otherwise it is exactly the same; and in view of that, it
is now accepted by scholars that Benhadad, is the Hebrew way of saying Barhadad,
which was the actual name of the king when he himself put up an inscription; and
then it was the Assyrians who used another form of the name, but that the Bible
preserves the actual form used by the king himself, Benhadad.
This Shalmaneser inscription tells us how all this coalition met this king; and he
overthrew their arms, and pulled off a slaughter through the plain with their mighty
troops. "With weapons I made their blood to flow; the field was too narrow for
smiting; with their corpses I dammed the river" and so on—he tells how completely he
defeated them. But he never went past that spot in any of his later expeditions. So
scholars consider it pretty safe to say, that in all these words in which he tells us of
how completely he annihilated them, they are just his boastful way of trying to cover
up the fact that actually they fought him to a standstill, because he never went past
the place in later expeditions; and so it is considered that this was a successful
holding back of the Assyrian invasion.
Had there been so sweeping a triumph as Shalmaneser claimed, he certainly would
have pressed forward; and so this is very important for us, because it shows us that
Ahab must have been living in the years when he fought against King Shalmaneser;
and since we can date the Assyrian dates pretty definitely here, it results in trying to
fit the Biblical dates into such an arrangement as will have Ahab living in 854 B.C.; but
it is a striking confirmation of the name of Ahab, the fact that he and Benhadad were
contemporaries and the fact that he was actually a king of Israel.
35
Now Shalmaneser, in another inscription, tells us of Jehu. He mentions Jehu as
bringing tribute to him. This was one of the earliest great inscriptions found. It is a
black obelisk—not a high thing like the Egyptian obelisks, it only stands about so
high [6.5 feet]—and it is square and black; and on its side, we have pictures of people
bringing tribute to the king; and among them one is named as Jehu, the son of Omri;
and so the name of Jehu is found there as bringing tribute to king Shalmaneser. And
in another of Shalmaneser's inscriptions (we have quite a large number of his
inscriptions preserved) he mentions that Hazael, son of a nobody, seized the throne
of Syria; and he mentions Jehu as a king of Israel, showing the change from Ahab to
the destroyer of his dynasty, Jehu; and the change from Benhadad to Hazael, son of a
nobody.
Now, after this king Shalmaneser III, there is a period in Assyrian history in which
there was a depression which lasted about a century. They had evidently
overextended themselves. They had gone beyond the resources they had in their
conquests, and had not been able to hold the conquered territory permanently, so
there was a depression of about a century; but it was not a complete end by any
means to their power, because their power became much greater afterwards than it
had been before.
We find the revival of the power of the king of Assyria about a century later under a
very important king whose name we spell in modern spelling as Tiglath-Pileser III. He
called himself Tiglath-Pileser. He did not call himself the third, so when they first
found inscriptions by him they just called him Tiglath-Pileser. Then when they found
inscriptions of an earlier king, they began calling him Tiglath-Pileser II; and when they
found inscriptions of another earlier Tiglath-Pileser they called him Tiglath-Pileser III;
and they found inscriptions of a third earlier king, so they called him Tiglath-Pileser
IV; and a copy of Barton's Archaeology of the Bible, about the fifth edition, calls him
Tiglath-Pileser lV. Then it was discovered that two of the earlier Tiglath-Pilesers were
really the same man; that there were two different inscriptions that had been thought
to be two different kings, but were really the same man; so Tiglath-Pileser IV was
demoted to Tiglath-Pileser III and that is the name by which he is quite definitely
known. Tiglath-Pileser III.
He was evidently a general called Pul; but when he became king, he took a different
name. He took the old Assyrian name of Tiglath-Pileser; and he proceeded to make
himself the most famous king who ever bore this name. He was a great general, a
successful conqueror, and able ruler. He carried on the policy of frightfulness of
Ashurnasirpal. He reigned from 745 to 727; and during his reign, he succeeded in
extending the Assyrian arms even further than Shalmaneser III had extended it.
During his reign he received a letter from Ahab, King of Judah, offering him heavy
tribute to come and help him against the king of Israel; and we have already noticed
how the Assyrian king came and overwhelmed Syria and Israel; and the king of Judah
thought he was doing it for his benefit, but he found out later it hadn't been for his
benefit at all.
36
Ahab certainly paid tribute. They certainly carried expensive gifts. Doubtless it was a
group of Judean nobles who went across the desert to see Tiglath-Pileser. TiglathPileser describes his conquest of Israel and Assyria, but doesn't mention his
relationship to King Ahaz. He conquered Damascus, and incorporated Syria in his
empire. This is told in the Bible, and we also are told it in the Assyrian inscriptions.
Tiglath-Pileser conquered the King of Israel; but he, however, did not establish
himself as king over it. Instead he allowed a puppet king, Hoshea, to set up his
power.
He says in one of his inscriptions,
Pekah, their king, they had overthrown. Hoshea [as king] over them I placed. 10
talents of gold.... talents of silver I received as tribute from them.
George A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible (1916) p.368.
And the Bible tells us that these people rose up against Pekah in this war; and that
Hoshea became king; and for the next nine years Hoshea reigned as king of the
Northern Kingdom. Menahem was mentioned in another inscription of Tiglath-Pileser;
and the name Hoshea is included in Tiglath-Pileser's inscriptions; and the events
which he describes are similar to the events of which the Bible tells of this time.
There are many Biblical names in Tiglath-Pileser's inscriptions, including a great many
interesting geographical names. Those inscriptions are a source that gives us a great
deal of material with definite contact between Assyria and the Bible, and the contexts
fit right together. Tiglath-Pileser carried on the policy of calculated frightfulness of
Ashurnasirpal, but he introduced a new policy in addition. He found that no matter
how frightful his control was; no matter how he tried to scare people; he found that
once his army would go from a conquered territory, the people revolted; and he didn't
have enough Assyrian soldiers to keep a strong enough garrison in all the conquered
territories to hold them permanently; and so he thought of a new scheme, a scheme
of forced migration; and Tiglath-Pileser seems to have been the first to use this policy
of forced migration. He would go into a territory, and he would take the leading
people of the territory, and lead them all captives to another area.
We have already noticed this in connection with our history of Israel. Tiglath-Pileser
was the one who introduced it; and consequently, he began moving populations in
order to try to have the able leaders in an area where the common people were of a
different race from them, and without much sympathy with them; and thus the able
people would have to look to him as their protector. And so Tiglath-Pileser is
extremely important in Bible history for these various reasons.
In the year 732, he conquered the city of Damascus. He died in 727, and was
succeeded by his son Shalmaneser V; he reigned only five years. On account of the
rebellion of Hoshea, King of Israel, Shalmaneser overran his kingdom; he besieged
Samaria for three years, as we see in II Kings 17:3-7, but he died before Samaria was
actually taken. He was succeeded by Sargon, another general, who seems to have
been a usurper; there recently is evidence which leads us to think he may have been
another son of Tiglath-Pileser. But that is a recent discovery, and it is not yet in a
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stage of certainty. Sargon—who has been considered to be a usurper up until this
recent somewhat uncertain discovery—took over the power before Samaria was taken,
and so
At the beginning of my reign, in my first year Samaria I besieged, I captured.
27,290 people from its midst I carried captive. 50 chariots I took there as an
addition to my royal force.... People from lands which my hands had captured I
settled in the midst. My officers over them as governors I appointed. Tribute and
taxes I imposed upon them after the Assyrian manner."
George A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible (1916) p.369.
So here is the account of the conquest of Samaria; and it is dated, you see, definitely,
by the accession of Sargon, who says that it was in his first year that he took it, which
is 722-721 B.C.
As far as we know, Tiglath-Pileser didn't actually besiege the city. He overran the
country of Israel; and the people of Israel seem to have—in the midst of the confusion
and the excitement—risen up against their king and killed him, as people generally do
in a time like that. They blame the king if he is unsuccessful in protecting them; and
in the situation Tiglath-Pileser, though he conquered Damascus and made it part of
his empire, rather than go to the time and expense of a siege of Samaria and all that,
he contented himself with allowing a puppet king Hoshea, to reign, with the idea that
Hoshea would be faithful to the Assyrian king.
But after six years, Hoshea found that the tribute was just too heavy a load for his
country to bear, and he revolted; and this time when the people revolted, they knew if
the Assyrians conquered them now, they would be absolutely unsparing with them;
and therefore they fought to the very utmost, and it took a three-year siege to
conquer Samaria this time; so there were the two conquests of the land of Israel, but
so far as we know only the one siege of the city of Samaria.
Well now this king Sargon is not named in the Bible—except in the one place in Isaiah
in the 20th chapter and the first verse. Our inscriptions show that he was a very
powerful and successful ruler. He reigned from 722 to 705, but his actual name is
mentioned in none of the historical records known until recent times except in this
one place in the Bible. Now Sargon—who is generally called Sargon II—was succeeded
by his son Sennacherib.
Sennacherib became king in 705 and reigned until 681. Sennacherib is mentioned
more times in the Bible, perhaps, than any other Assyrian king. Sennacherib inherited
the situation in which the Northern Kingdom [Israel] had been overcome, and the
Southern Kingdom [Judah] was right next to it; and Sennacherib set out to conquer
the Southern Kingdom too. He was a powerful ruler, a successful conqueror; he
conquered many territories; he conquered many cities much stronger and more
powerful than the city of Jerusalem; and therefore it is quite surprising when we read
in his annals,
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And as to Hezekiah, the Judean, who had not submitted to my yoke, 46 of his
strongholds, fortified cities, and smaller cities of their environs without number,
with the onset of battering rams and the attack of engines, mines, breaches, and
axes (?), I besieged, I captured. 200,150 people, small and great, male and female,
horses, mules, asses, camels, oxen, and sheep without number I brought out of
their midst and counted as booty. He himself I shut up like a caged bird in
Jerusalem, his capital city; I erected beleaguering works against him, and turned
back by command every one who came out of his city gate. The cities, which I had
captured, from his country... As to Hezekiah himself, the fear of the luster of my
lordship overcame him and the Urbi and his favorite soldiers, whom he had
brought in to strengthen Jerusalem, his capital city, deserted.
George A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible (1916) p.373.
He shut him up like a caged bird in Jerusalem. It sounds pretty small. I don't
remember any other case in the Assyrian records, where they think it is something to
boast about that they shut a king up like a bird in a cage in his capital city. Every
other time they claim that they conquered the city, and carried the king out a captive;
and doubtless, they did. But in this case, Sennacherib was prevented in a most
unexpected way from conquering this powerful city of Jerusalem—but far less
powerful than many another a city which he had conquered—and we have already in
our history of Judah noticed the account of the way in which the Lord delivered
Jerusalem from the attack of King Sennacherib.
And we've noticed that for the second most important city of Judah—the city of
Lachish—Sennacherib had a wonderful picture of the conquest of that city put up in
his palace; and underneath it he had the inscription, "Sennacherib, king of the world,
King of Assyria, sat on his throne, and the spoil of the city of Lachish passed before
him." Why would he boast about this second city of a secondary country? Instead of all
the far greater cities he had conquered? My own guess is that it was a compensation
to him for the fact that he had failed to conquer the city of Jerusalem.
Now one thing that troubled Sennacherib all his life might be mentioned here: it was
the control of Babylon. And we find it also mentioned in the Bible, because the Bible in
Isaiah 39:1 tells how Merodach-Baladan, king of Babylon, sent an embassy to
Hezekiah, "for he had heard that he had been sick, and was recovered." Barton
comments on this visit: "It is clear from what the Assyrian accounts tell us that his real
motive in sending to Hezekiah was to induce him to rebel against Assyria." [ibid.
p.377].
In Sennacherib's inscriptions, we find that he had to fight several times against
Merodach-Baladan, King of Babylon. Babylon had been conquered by the Assyrians
quite a time before this, and was supposed to be subject to him. King Tiglath-Pileser
was King of Babylon, also; but the Babylonians were very proud people, and they
would not recognize themselves as subject to Assyria. They were ready to die, it
seemed, before they would do that; and so the Assyrians were ready to use a different
form of words in order to satisfy the Babylonians, because it was a great city, and an
important city, and a city with a tremendous influence; and so the Babylonians when
they were absolutely unable to resist the Assyrians, but wouldn't give in to be
39
recognized themselves as under the Assyrians, the Assyrians found the Babylonians
would give in to this: they would make this concession, that they would take the
Assyrian king as their king. And so Tiglath-Pileser, the king of Assyria, became total
king of Babylon, keeping his own name, instead of his royal name in Assyria. He is
Pul, king of Babylon.
And the Assyrian kings didn't much care whether Babylon was called part of the
Assyrian empire or whether the Assyrian king was simply king of Babylon, as long as
it amounted to the same thing; but there is another feature of it. For many centuries,
the Babylonians had had a custom at their new year's festival of having their king take
the hand of their god, and from him to receive the control of the city of Babylon for
the coming year. And so long as the Assyrian king was there with his forces in
Babylon on New Year's day, he could take the hand of the god and through the New
Year's festival would be crowned as king for one year. But the king of Assyria liked to
be off on warlike expeditions a great part of his time; and when he wasn't doing that,
he preferred to enjoy the pleasures of his capital at Nineveh rather than to have to
make a trip down to Babylon at this particular point in every year. He'd do it when he
could, but when he wasn't able to do it, it made trouble; and the Babylonians had to
have somebody to crown king on New Year's Day; and if the Assyrian king wasn't
there they would crown somebody else.
And so Tiglath-Pileser had a great deal of trouble with the Babylonians; and Sargon
decided, instead of having to make this trip every year, to try to put up a puppet king;
he took a Babylonian whom he thought would be loyal to him, and let him be king;
and then he could take the hands of the god every year. But every once in a while, the
Babylonian king would revolt against the Assyrian king. One time he was driven away;
and he hid in the marshes down at the southern end of Mesopotamia; and he was
about twenty years down there; and then he came back, and the people rallied around
him; and again there was a great rebellion against Assyria. And so during the reign of
Sennacherib, there were two or three times when Babylon was independent for a
period of years; and finally Sennacherib became so angry at the Babylonians, that he
led a great army against them; and he tells us in his inscriptions that he conquered
the city of Babylon, and he utterly devastated it; he ran plows over it; he reduced it to
an absolute wilderness; he took and killed most of the people; the rest he sold into
captivity; he left nothing there. But in the reign of his son, it was a strong and
flourishing city; so we think he must have exaggerated the destruction which he
accomplished in Babylon.
Sennacherib or Sargon: which of the two made the shift? I would guess it was Sargon
rather than Sennacherib. Then Sennacherib, we read in the Bible, was killed as he was
worshiping in the temple of his god; that he was killed and his sons, who did it,
escaped into the land of Armenia. We read that in the Bible; and we have noticed that
in the Bible, it tells how Isaiah said he would go back to his own land, and would die
there; and we read that his army was annihilated; he went back to his land, and there
he was killed in the temple; and it doesn't say that it happened immediately, but it
doesn't say there was an interval; and so people jump to the conclusion—as you could
very easily do in this particular case—that there was no interval, that it took place
right immediately.
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Now, of course, if it took place right immediately, that would have been the next year
or two after he went back; but it is quite certain there were twenty years after his loss
of his army and health and before his assassination—a twenty year period
intervened—a warning to us, when we read in the Bible of two events in the past, or in
the future, mentioned next to each other, not to assume that they necessarily come
right at the same time. Unless it says that they happened at the same time or
immediately thereafter. There may have been an interval, unless the Scripture says;
and in this case there was an interval of twenty years.
Now his son Esarhaddon reigned from 681 to 658; and Esarhaddon carried on the
policies of his father. He kept the kingdom together quite successfully. He doesn't
seem to have had—well, he led an expedition against Egypt—he had some important
conquests. He doesn't have as many Biblical contacts as some of these other Assyrian
rulers. He is mentioned in II Kings 19:37 and Isaiah 37:38 as Sennacherib's successor;
and he, in one of his inscriptions, mentions Manasseh, the king of Judah, the son of
Hezekiah. He is also alluded to in Ezra 4:2.
But from the historical viewpoint the most interesting thing about Esarhaddon is that
he was just as fond of the Babylonians as his father was opposed to them.
Esarhaddon was the youngest son; he was not the oldest son, and he was one who
was very much interested in Babylonian culture and Babylonian civilization. He was
fond of all these things. The Babylonians looked on the Assyrians as barbarians; but
then most people who are looked upon that way, turn around and consider the other
one a barbarian—that's what Sennacherib did—but Esarhaddon didn't do it.
Esarhaddon tried to imitate the Babylonian culture and civilization; and he lavished
great amounts of money on Babylon to beautify the city and build the city of Babylon,
thinking that then the people would recognize him as their great patron, and be true
to Assyria; but this didn't work either. Esarhaddon, however, had no great difficulty
with Babylon during his lifetime. He died in 668; and at his death he left a very
cumbersome arrangement. He said, "Ashurbanipal is to be the next king." His son
Ashurbanipal is referred to in Ezra 4:10 in the corrupt form "Asnapper" (or Osnappar).
That's the way the Arameans spoke of Ashurbanipal.
But Ashurbanipal, who reigned from 668 to 626, was quite a powerful conqueror and
also a man of culture; and in his pictures, he also shows himself—not as most of the
Assyrians do, simply with a big spear or sword—but on the other side he always had a
stylus, the instrument the scribes used to write on a clay tablet; and this, they say,
shows a king who is also a scribe; and Ashurbanipal reports in his inscriptions how
skilled he was in wisdom and knowledge of the work of the scribes. He was evidently
a man of more cultural training than his predecessors; but this doesn't mean he was
any less bloodthirsty or cruel. In a test I gave one year, someone spoke of him as
different from his ancestors in that he had a quiet and peaceful disposition. Well,
there is no evidence whatever for any such theory as that about him. Ever since, I felt I
shouldn't say too much about his cultural side, without balancing it with the other,
lest people get a false impression of this cruel Assyrian king.
41
Esarhaddon left Ashurbanipal as king of Assyria ruling in Nineveh, but he took
another son of his, Sharma, and made him king of Babylon—a son of the king of
Assyria. He gave him great prominence and glory as the king of Babylon, supreme in
everything except subject to Ashurbanipal. Well that was an arrangement which didn't
work any better than the previous arrangement. The people of Babylon kept telling
Sharma "Why should you be subject to your brother, that barbarian up there in
Nineveh? After all, you are a much finer man than he is. Why shouldn't you be
independent here in Babylon?" And he gave in to their suggestions; and as
Ashurbanipal tells us in his beautiful literary inscriptions, "He broke the bonds of
brotherhood and closed the gates of the cities of southern Mesopotamia."
The result was a tremendous war, which enveloped the whole civilized world, and
lasted for many years; but in the end Babylon was conquered. Sharma shut himself up
in the palace, and set fire to it, and perished in the flames; and then Ashurbanipal
treated the city again as his grandfather Sennacherib. First, he says, he punished
those who were implicated in the murder of his grandfather; and that is a strange
statement. We don't know just what it means. It is one of the interesting mystery
stories of ancient times, just who were the people in the conspiracy against
Sennacherib? What is the whole situation? A number of monographs have been written
on it, but we need further evidence to know the full story. But at any rate
Ashurbanipal claimed to have wrought terrific devastation in Babylon, even as
Sennacherib had; and yet, in the next generation, we find Babylon rising to heights it
had never reached before, so evidently he also didn't destroy it as completely as he
claimed to have done.
Now Ashurbanipal was—as I said—much interested in literary things and he built a
great library in Nineveh. I don't think he had us in mind in doing it, but it was very
helpful to us, because he gathered the literature of all of Mesopotamia. He got the
tablets of history, of literature, of art, of religion, of law. Every type of tablet had been
arranged in his library, so that he could get any one he wanted on quick notice.
And then within a very few years, Nineveh was destroyed; and his library was covered
over with the sand of the ages; and those tablets remained there until about a century
ago, when they were dug up and carried to the British Museum. So we have it that the
greatest collection of ancient Babylonian records ever made, was made by
Ashurbanipal, and is now in London; and it is tremendously helpful to our knowledge
of the cultural life of ancient Mesopotamia.
In the latter years of his life, Ashurbanipal was not very vigorous in fighting; he didn't
even go off on great lion hunts so often; he loves to tell us how he would meet a lion,
and send a spear through his head; or how he would go up and grab it by the mane
with his right hand, and cut off its head with his sword in his other hand; and was
very proud of his prowess in fighting lions. Just how much of this is true and how
much is fantasy, of course we don't know; but he boasts of it a great deal; but in the
latter part of his life, he had a reputation which kept peace. Everybody was afraid of
him. But he let his army disintegrate to some extent. He had a very quiet period
towards the end of his life, but the forces of disintegration and rebellion and
dissatisfaction were accumulating.
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And when he died in 626, it was the signal for the waking up of the forces which had
not dared to fight against him; so after his death in 626, there were two or three
unimportant kings of Assyria, none of whom was able to cope with the situation
which had become serious; and in 612, just fourteen years after the death of
Ashurbanipal, Nineveh was destroyed. The Medes came from the east, and the
Babylonians from the south, and the two armies met; and they attacked the city of
Nineveh, and destroyed it so completely that it never was rebuilt; it remained a ruin
until modern times; and in the Bible we have the book of Nahum, three chapters
devoted entirely to the account of the destruction of the city of Ninevah.
Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery; the prey departeth not; The
noise of a whip, and the noise of the rattling of the wheels, and of the prancing
horses, and of the jumping chariots. (Nahum 3:1-2)
and so on.
The lion did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses,
and filled his holes with prey, and his dens with ravin. (Nahum 2:12)
The whole book is devoted to the account of the way in which God caused this great
city, which was the terror of the nations, to be destroyed; and it has remained a ruin
up until this day.
Speaking about the Assyrian period in our summary of the history of Mesopotamia,
we noticed the value of the frequent inscriptions. Now this is a phenomenon which is
worth noting as a whole about the Assyrian period—the historical inscriptions of the
kings. You find more of them in this period than in any other period of ancient times.
In Egyptian history, our history is based upon many different sources, but we do not
have in Egypt this wonderful source which we have from Assyria. Each of the Assyrian
kings was anxious that all the people of his realm and posterity should know of his
great deeds in detail; and he describes them to us. Very few Egyptian kings did this;
and when they did it, they had a special purpose in mind.
It is not common for the Babylonian kings to do it. Nebuchadnezzar, in his
inscriptions, tells us much about the great buildings which he constructed, but very
little about the military events of his reign. However in the Assyrian period, the
Assyrian kings seem to have a special desire to list the events of their reign; and to
show step by step what they did in each year; how many enemies they conquered,
from period to period, during their reign. They list these deeds, and they tell where
they went; they tell how much booty they took. They give all this in great detail; and
so we are in a position to know more about the history of the kings of the Assyrian
period than of any other nation in antiquity.
That does not mean but what there are certain other times when we know more about
the people, perhaps, than we do about the Assyrian period. There are other times that
we may know more about certain phases of life than we do in this Assyrian period.
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But the matter which occupies so great a part of the attention of most historians—the
deeds of the kings and their military conquests and their relations with other
nations—this phase of history is far better known to us in the Assyrian period than in
any other part of ancient history, perhaps better than in most parts of medieval or
modern history, because the Assyrian kings were particularly interested in this. To
them, war was the great activity of life; and they were interested that people should
know about the details of their wars, and how successful they were in them.
We notice that the Assyrian period comes to an end in—well it doesn't end in 612, it
continues to 604—but the city of Nineveh comes to an end in 612; one of the few
pages in history where a great capital city has been destroyed, and it has remained
ever after deserted, a wilderness. Nineveh was never rebuilt. Its very site was soon
forgotten; and it was not until within the last century that we are able to know exactly
where it was, because it remained absolutely deserted, covered over with the dust of
the ages.
The city was destroyed in 612; the Assyrian empire continued with a capital—a
temporary capital at Haran, the old city where Abraham had lived for a number of
years. That was the new capital, temporary capital, but then in the great battle of
Carchemish in northwestern Mesopotamia, the Assyrians, and their allies the
Egyptians, were defeated by the Babylonians, and the Assyrian period comes to a
complete end.
In modern times there is the city of Mosul, which is across the Tigris River from the
ruins of Nineveh; and that has been there for many centuries, just across the Tigris.
But the very identity of the mounds across the river—that they were the ruins of
Nineveh—was forgotten for almost 2500 years.
In contrast to this, when Babylon was destroyed it was always rebuilt almost
immediately. We've noticed two cases of its destruction; and Babylon kept on until the
early middle ages, when Babylon was finally deserted. But Nineveh was once
destroyed and left to ruin. Just what the stages were in between, we don't have
evidence, as to whether people lingered on in little villages around, or hid in the
mountains for a time—we don't know. As to whether there is any evidence as to when
Mosul was founded across the Tigris, I don't know that; but it is an Arabic city, it may
be—I am quite sure it did not exist before the time of Christ.
The city of Nineveh was originally a rather small area. Then, as the Assyrian kings
carried on their great conquests during this period, more and more suburbs were
built around and added on to the city; and eventually there seems to have been a
large wall built around the whole complex, about fifty or sixty miles around this
complete metropolitan area. Sargon evidently got tired of being right in the midst of
all the crowd; and he went out and built himself a castle out in the country, and made
his headquarters there. He had a wonderful headquarters there, but the succeeding
kings went back to Nineveh. It seems to have been only this one king.
As to the further details of the final Battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C., I don't know as
we have so much information. It was at a time when historical events were moving
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very rapidly; and those who were most interested in leaving us full details of historical
events could no longer write anything, because they were the inferiors and the
Babylonians who conquered the Assyrians did not have an interest in preserving
historical data that the Assyrians had. Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror, has an
entirety different attitude in his inscriptions.
There used to be a question raised about Daniel. If Daniel was so great a man at the
court of Nebuchadnezzar, why don't we have inscriptions that tell about him? Well, we
have a few inscriptions now that give the names of a few officials in
Nebuchadnezzar's court, but very scanty is the information that throws any light on
his court. The Assyrians left us abundant information about the leaders in their court.
The Assyrians would name each year after a particular individual; and thus each
individual's name was preserved in that way of the leaders in the Assyrian court; and
then the Assyrian kings would tell of the great events during the part of their reign
when they had something to boast about. Toward the ends of their lives, they didn't
bother with describing things as a rule, but the Assyrians left all these written
inscriptions.
Now Nebuchadnezzar, up until the discovery recently, we have not even the name of
any of the leaders in Nebuchadnezzar's court. They are all just a blank. In these
inscriptions, Nebuchadnezzar did everything himself. No other officials are
mentioned. He says, "I crossed great mountains, I fought mighty armies, I conquered
great cities, I devastated tremendous areas." He's just describing all that he had done,
and he'd run it all together. He didn't name the countries, or the cities, or anything.
The Assyrian king would say. "In the first year I marked out, I attacked this city; and
then I attacked this city; then I went to that; I met these people; I met this group, and
so on; but Nebuchadnezzar doesn't do anything. Then he tells you, after he has given
you about a paragraph of telling you of the way in which he—just running together all
these tremendous conquests which he did—then he says, "I was anxious to establish
the glory of the great gods in Babylon, and therefore I took his temple which had
fallen into decay."
Well, that is getting into
5. The Neo-Babylonian Period.
It is often customary to run the Assyrian period up to 604, and to begin the NeoBabylonian period with 626. It is not at all illogical if that is done, because very soon
after the death of Ashurbanipal in 626, Babylon gained its independence and
therefore during the succeeding years Nineveh is going down but still is a power—an
important force—and Babylon is coming up and is already an important force; so you
have the Neo-Babylonian period and the later Assyrian period, one ending and the
other beginning.
Now the Babylonians had tried before repeatedly to gain their independence and had
held it for a certain length of time; but these powerful Assyrian kings of the last
century before the downfall of Nineveh had each time re-conquered Babylon and had
held it under their control. Now, however, when the strong king Ashurbanipal died,
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very soon after his death the viceroy of Babylon, who was himself a Chaldean,
revolted against the Assyrians and established himself in independence; and the
Assyrians were not able to re-conquer Babylon; and so the Babylonian power
increased and made alliances with other powers. They increased in their strength, and
eventually they succeeded in conquering Nineveh itself and destroying it in 612; and
then finally in 604, they succeeded in conquering the last great Assyrian army, and in
putting a complete end to any power at all in the Assyrian empire. Now the viceroy of
Babylon, who was thus the first king of the neo-Babylonian or Chaldean empire,
Nabopolassar, himself died in the same year in which the Assyrian empire was ended,
in 604; and his son Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon, was the general of the army, who
had just defeated the army of the Assyrians and annihilated them, and also defeated
the army of the Egyptians.
He pursued them as the Egyptians fled pell-mell down the coast of Palestine toward
Egypt, and Jeremiah from the hilltops of Judea looked down on the plain, the flat
country by the sea. Jeremiah 46 describes the fleeing of the Egyptian army before the
forces of Nebuchadrezzar. Nebuchadrezzar is the correct spelling of his name, but it
seems entirely probable that in accurate pronunciation he was called
Nebuchadnezzar; and in the Bible, we find it in both ways, Nebudhadrezzar and
Nebuchadnezzar.
Now when word reached the general that his father the king had died in far away
Babylon, he gave up the further pursuit of the Egyptians at this time and rushed back
to Babylon to establish himself as king. That was very necessary. In Assyria or in
Babylonia, when a king died there was always a dangerous period until the next king
was established; but Nebuchadnezzar was established as king and he became the
powerful ruler of the Neo-Babylonian period. He re-conquered all of the Assyrian
empire; he conquered Egypt; he held a tremendously large area. And then he devoted
himself, as we have noticed, to these great building works, building up not only
Babylon but all the cities of Mesopotamia, increasing the beauty and the strength of
those wonderful ancient cities.
Nebuchadnezzar had a long reign; and we remember that, toward the end of his
reign, in 586 he destroyed Jerusalem. He was succeeded by his son Amal-marduk,
who is mentioned in the Bible, in 2 Kings 25:27-30. This son of Nebuchadnezzar only
lived for two years. However, he seems to have had either a nature disposing him to
friendliness to captives, or a particular friendship to the Judean captives, because
Jehoiachin—who you remember was taken captive in 597 after the death of his
father—Jehoiachin was in prison most of Nebuchadnezzar's reign in Babylon. Many
years he was in confinement, but the Bible tells us that Amal-marduk—or Evilmerodach, I think is the way our English Bible spells it—the king of Babylon released
Jehoiachin from his confinement and gave him a seat at his own table.
Well, Jehoiachin must have been well along in years when this happened. This king
then, son of Nebuchadnezzar, seems to have been a man entirely unworthy of his
father's blood. He was a weakling, he only reigned for two years; and the throne was
taken back by a strong man, one of Nebuchadnezzar's generals but already well along
in years. This man, Neriglissar, reigned a few years, and then was succeeded by his
46
son who was a weakling; and he was succeeded after two years by a man of far
greater strength but who was unrelated to him, a man named Nabonidus. And this
Nabonidus, who took his son Belshazzar into power as co-king with him towards the
end of his life, was the last king of Babylon; and then was succeeded by the Persians
who conquered Babylon.
In 539 B.C., the year 539-538, the Babylonian period comes to an end. And then
6. The Persian period.
And the Persian period in Mesopotamia is a period in which Mesopotamia is subject to
Persia, and so is Palestine; and so the power moves up into the mountains of Persia;
and there we have the Persian kings ruling at one of the great palaces, and we have
the book of Esther describing events at one time during this period.
The Persian period begins with Cyrus reviewing the policy of the kings of Babylon.
The kings of Babylon had carried on the policy of the kings of Assyria, taking the
captive peoples and moving them to other areas, thus trying to strengthen their hold
on different territories. This, of course, did strengthen their empire, but it made them
hated by the various people; and the Persian king seemed to have decided to adopt
the opposite policy. He was very strong, had very powerful control; the different
national groups were already pretty well broken up as a result of the Assyrian and
Babylonian policy; and he thought he could win the friendship of the people; and we
find in his inscriptions, that the various gods of the various nations—the idols that
had been brought to Babylon—he allowed to have given back to the various people;
and he allowed the people, who had been taken captive, what remained of them, to
go back to their homes; and we have inscriptions from him telling how he, the servant
of certain of these gods, allowed the people of these gods to return to their homes
and gave them back the statues of their gods.
We do not have preserved the inscription which he gave of a similar nature regarding
the Jews, but we have these inscriptions that show that that was the policy of Cyrus,
the first of the kings of the Persian Empire. And in the Bible we have a decree from
Cyrus, which is similar to the decrees which we have archaeological evidence of, that
he gave to other gods; and just as in those inscriptions, he describes himself as the
servant of the gods, helping them, sending back their people who have been captured
by the Babylonians, this is similar to the one quoted in the Bible. He describes himself
as the servant of the god of the Jews, and as releasing those people who have been
held by the Babylonians; allowing them to go back; giving them their own property,
that is giving certain money from the kings, from the royal treasury to help them to
go back; and they had no statue to take back to those countries, they had no image of
their gods; but instead, then, of giving them an image, he gave them the vessels from
the temple. He gave them the golden vessels which had been in the temple, which
had been taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar; and so we have a parallel between his
treatment of other nations as described in the archaeological inscriptions, and his
treatment of the Jews as described in the Bible.
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Now the Persian period runs on from 538 to 331. It is a period of over 200 years,
much longer than the Neo-Babylonian Empire. During this Persian period, we do not
have a great deal of history recorded in the Bible; and in the latter part of it, we have
no history recorded from it to speak of. This may be because they began using
papyrus more for writing, and consequently the material didn't last. At any rate, the
last part of the Persian period is a very dark period—a period which the Jews
completely forgot about—so that in the Talmud, and in some of the Apocryphal
writings, it speaks of events which were taking place, in which men who were taken
captive when the Jews went into captivity, were still alive at the end of the Persian
period, at the coming of Alexander the Great. Now of course, that is utterly
impossible and it is evident that this long period was forgotten, and thought to have
lasted only about forty years.
It is a strange thing, that the Jews who had kept such a full history of previous times
could so completely have forgotten such a long period in the Persian period. Now, of
course, these are not parts of the Bible that give this. These are other Jewish writings.
They are not inspired. Nevertheless, there are those who suggest that this is an
evidence that our idea of the Persian period is wrong. They would not say the Jewish
idea was right, but they would say that it wasn't nearly as long as modern historians
think it was; that it was much shorter. The latter part of it is the darkest period of
ancient history, the one which we know least well.
Now you all know, I believe, that in 331 B.C. the Persian empire was conquered by
Alexander the Great; and Greek culture now spread all over the eastern world;
Hellenistic civilization came in. I don't say civilization came in—in the sense that there
was not civilization before—there was just as high or higher a civilization before in
some ways, not as high in other ways. But there was a unified culture that spread
through the whole land, as the result of the conquest of Alexander the Great, and of
the Greek rulers who came after him. So much then for this rapid summary of the
history of Mesopotamia. Let us go into
C. Contacts of Mesopotamian Archaeology with the Bible.
We have looked at a good many of these contacts as we have been going through the
history, so that this will largely be a matter now of recapitulation.
We have noticed the contacts in the time of Genesis very briefly. We haven't gone into
the study of them. We notice that there is slight contact at the time of Israel's
conquest of Canaan, but after that there is little contact with Mesopotamia until the
time of the divided kingdom. Then we find that during the Assyrian period, we notice
that there were a tremendous number of contacts. We notice that the names of many
Biblical kings are included in various writings of the Assyrian kings; and certain
Assyrian kings whose names are recorded in the Bible, we find under the same names
on the Assyrian monoliths.
And so there are two things of interest about these names: the general arrangement
of the names, and the spelling of the names. You have your names in the Bible, giving
you the names of kings of Israel and Judah; and then alongside of those, kings of
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Assyria occasionally mentioned in connection with certain kings of Judah; and then
occasionally, you have a king of Egypt mentioned, like the pharaoh who killed Josiah
at Megiddo. Now as to the matter of the relation of these kings, we have a list of
perhaps fifty kings—perhaps not quite as many as that—names during this period in
the Bible, which names can also be found on the monuments.
There are those who claim this Biblical account of history is made up—that it is not
based on actual contemporary records. But if that were the case, how could these
many names and events have been preserved, in correct relationships to the actual
events, as we have uncovered them in archaeological work over the past 200 years?
Such a result would be virtually impossible; to fit the names and events in the right
order, and in the right relationship with one another, having contemporaneous those
kings that reigned at the same time.
If you were simply to take a list, for instance, of presidents of the United States and
prime ministers of Great Britain one hundred years ago. Suppose I give you a list of
the prime ministers of Great Britain, without giving you the dates, or without giving
you the right order, between 1800 and 1875; and a list of the premiers or presidents
of France for that period; and that you already know the list of the presidents of the
United States during that period; but you don't go and make a special hunt in history
text books—which weren't available in those days—for the exact order and length of
administration. And then suppose you start out and try to write a history, making up
your stories, and fitting these names in. You can imagine how difficult it would be.
The chances are one in ten thousand that you would get them arranged in the right
order or in the right contemporaneous relation.
Sir Walter Scott was a very fine student of ancient times—that is, not as far ancient as
we have been talking about, but of early English and Scottish history—and in his
books, he gives you the real flavor of the times with which he deals. His knowledge of
it was very extensive; and yet, as someone has pointed out, in his book Ivanhoe which
is such a wonderful picture of English life in the early days of English history, in the
reign of Richard I, he has in it a woman who was the daughter of the Saxon nobleman,
who held the castle before it was conquered; and has her telling this story to Cedric
the Saxon, and when you figure things up, you find that there would have been maybe
a hundred and fifty or two hundred years since the time of the conquest, before the
time when she would have been telling this story to him. It is just an example of little
things of this type that creep into the work even of a man who is as accurate and as
careful as Sir Walter Scott was on such matters. And without the historical sources
that he had to go to, there would be a tremendous amount of such things.
So every time that we find evidence of an Assyrian king and an Israelite fitting
together in the same general relationship as they are in the Bible, it is further
evidence that the Bible gives us accurate information that has been transmitted, and
not simply a series of legends that have been worked up and had names inserted into
them by the later writers. And as we have noticed, we have a great many of these
incidents.
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Now another thing that is very striking about these names is the spelling of them.
Before mentioning that, we should know that it is a difficult thing to spell the names
of people of one nation in the writing of another nation. We have our Latin method of
writing, which doesn't fit our English language at all well. Most of us, being
accustomed to it, aren't so familiar with that fact; but we become familiar with it a
little when we note some of the names of people of other lands who also have the
Latin method of writing and see how differently they are spelled from the way that we
spell them.
I had that stressed upon me in the difference between Dutch and German. Both of
them use our Latin method of writing, but their spelling is utterly different.
I found that, knowing German, if I take a Dutch work and try to read it, I don't know
so many of the short words in Dutch; but when you come to the long words, I seldom
have difficulty figuring out what they mean. But I find that if I look at a word in the
Dutch book, I have no idea of what it means. It doesn't look like anything I have ever
seen before in my life; but I look at it, and I just make any kind of stab at pronouncing
it, and then I listen and see what it sounds like; and I usually find that it sounds
enough like a German word, though spelled entirely differently, to show me what the
meaning of it is. It is related to this German word but spelled utterly different.
I have noticed that time after time in the relationship between Dutch and German. It is
a very difficult thing to represent a name from one language in the writing of another,
because the sounds don't exactly correspond. They are somewhere in between. They
are not exactly the same. I noticed that in Germany, our English "L" sounds to
Germans just like a queer noise. They have no idea what our English "L" is. It is
entirely different from their "L". And often our English "B", it just sounds like some
queer sound to them. I know once, when I had been in Germany a short time, and I
asked the taxi driver—I was in a hurry and I asked him to take me to the University,
giving it the best German pronunciation that I thought I was capable of at the time—
and he asked me, "Where?" I repeated it. I repeated it a couple of times and he said,
"Oh", he said. It sounded like just something queer to him. He just couldn't figure it
out at all. It just shows how those little sounds are so different in one language from
another, even two languages so closely related as English and German are.
And when you take two languages as far apart as Egyptian and Hebrew—or Assyrian
and Hebrew would be nearer together, but still quite far apart—and different types of
writing altogether, it's quite a question how you are going to represent it in your
writing; and so it wouldn't be at all surprising if the names were not at all similar.
But as a matter of fact we find a very close resemblance between the names as
represented on the Assyrian inscriptions—the names of Assyrians, and the names of
Hebrews—and the same names as we find them written in the Bible. We find this in so
many cases, that it is a very striking evidence of the accuracy, the care of the scribes
of the Hebrew, and the accuracy of the preservation of the Old Testament. In fact, I
think I can say it is a phenomenon that is really unparalleled. You do not have other
literature that has been copied and recopied and recopied and handed on down like
the Bible has, that has such an accuracy.
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If you want to see striking evidence of that, take the Septuagint, which was translated
from the Hebrew about 200 B.C. or a little later than that; and which has been copied
and recopied as our Hebrew has been copied and recopied; and we have earlier
manuscripts of the Septuagint than we have of these manuscripts of Hebrew. But take
these manuscripts of the Septuagint, some of which go back to the third or fourth
century A.D.; and so that all these had three or four centuries of copying and
recopying, instead of a thousand or fifteen hundred years, as most of our Hebrew
manuscripts have; and look at the proper names in them, and you find that with many
of them it is just impossible to recognize them.
Bathsheba, the wife of David, is Beersheba in the Septuagint, the name of the city.
One place where the Hebrew mentions a man's name, the name got so twisted in the
Greek that in some copy it is simply "He ran." It's the man who was over the house,
and it describes—this man was over the treasury and this man was over a certain
department in Solomon's empire—and "he ran" to his help when it should be the
name of the man who was over the house. And the preservation of the Septuagint is
not bad as ancient manuscripts go; but the proper names in it are so poorly
transmitted compared with the Hebrew that it is a remarkable evidence of the
accuracy of the preservation of the Hebrew text.
We mentioned Alexander the Great a few minutes ago. Alexander the Great had
various Greek companions with him on his conquest, naturally; and there was a story
which was written, supposed by his friend and historian, but later proven not to be by
him. We don't know who it is by, so we call it the Pseudo-Callisthenes. It gives the
names of Alexander's ten companions. The book has been translated in early days
into Syriac; and the Greek copy was copied and copied and copied; the Syriac was
copied and copied and copied; now we compare the two and we cannot recognize any
of the names in the Greek and in the Syriac, that they are the same name. They've so
changed that we don't know what the names of his companions originally were;
though, in general the two manuscripts preserve substantially the same story—the
Syriac and the Greek.
It simply shows how difficult it is to preserve proper names in copying and recopying
of manuscripts, particularly of a language unfamiliar to that of the scribes who are
copying it, or to the original scribes. But in the case of this Assyrian period, you have
case after case where the names have been preserved with remarkable accuracy.
I want to call your attention to one such case in the Babylonian period. It is a similar
case to this in the Assyrian, but it happens to come from the Babylonian period. It is
Jeremiah 39:3.
In Jeremiah 39:3 we have a list of the men who came into Jerusalem when it was
conquered. If you would turn to that passage, Jeremiah 39:3 you would find some
names that were queer, outlandish names to the Israelites. We read after the
Babylonians conquered that
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All the princes of the king of Babylon came in and sat in the middle gate, even
Nergal-sharezer, Samgar-nebo, Sarsechim, Rab-saris, Nergal-sharezer, Rab-mag,
with all the residue of the princes of the king of Babylon.
Well now you can imagine what those names sounded like to the Hebrew scribes—
about the same as they sound to you—and consequently, as you look at the names
there, you wonder just what they correspond to, whether they represent any actual
thing. It is interesting that this name Nergal-sharezer occurs twice in the list. That
would seem rather strange, wouldn't it, to have one name occur twice in a list like
that, without any indicating mark that this is Nergal-sharezer, Jr. or Nergal-sharezer
of some other place, or something like that.
Well, up to about twenty years ago, we knew nothing about any of these names; and
then there was discovered a tablet giving a list of some of Nebuchadnezzar's officials;
and in this list of Nebuchadnezzar's officials, we found Nergal-sharezer's name; and
Nergal-sharezer is the one whose name in Greek, abbreviated some, is "Marganasar"
[LXX Jer. 46:3]. He was the second king, the successor after Nebuchadnezzar, second
of the powerful kings of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. At this time, he is a general
under Nebuchadnezzar; and we find him, in this one inscription, described as Nergalsharezer of Sin. Thus his identity is indicated by the place, either from which he came,
or over which he ruled at certain periods, Nergal-sharezer of Sin.
Suppose you had the word Samgar, and you wanted to represent it in Hebrew; how
would you spell it in Hebrew?11 What would be your first letter? The Hebrew letter "sin"
or "samech". So in Hebrew it would be "Samgar." Which word does our English have? It
has it "Samgar" so it could be either the Hebrew "sin" or "samech." In the Hebrew it
could be represented as "Samgar"—in our Hebrew Bibles it uses "samech."
Now Nergal-sharezer of Sin, then, would be written in Hebrew as Nergal-sharezer; for
the next name, Samgar—you know the vowels were not written down in Hebrew till
later—could easily be written as "Samgar," but it is very difficult to preserve the
vowels when they weren't written down at all in a foreign name. All, of course, that
Hebrew deals with properly are the consonants. You notice the two names would be
written as Nergal-shareser Samgar.
Now we have in our Hebrew a hyphen between Samgar and nebo. Evidently that
hyphen was put in by a later scribe who didn't understand it. He thought that Nergalsharezer was a name and that another name came right after it so he put a hyphen in
it—Samgar-nebo. Actually the hyphen is a mistake. It should be Nergal-sharezer of
Samgar. And then the next one—you don't need to delete your hyphen, just move it
over. Nebo-Sarsechim, that would be a good Babylonian name. Nebo-Sarsechim was
Rabsaris, while Nergal-Sharezer was Rab-mag. Ram-saris and Rab-mag are typical
Assyrian titles of position. The chief of the bakers, and the chief of the Magi. They
would be the sort of title that would be given to a general in the Assyrian army. So I
11
Recall that Biblical Hebrew is written using consonants only. Babylonian names are written in
cuneiform, which does not have symbols for consonants: it has symbols for vowels and for
combinations of vowels and consonants. Thus transliteration of Babylonian names into Hebrew is
problematic.
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would say we have here the names of two men, Nergal-Sharezer of Sim, NeboSarsechim as Rab-saris, and when you have mentioned the title of him, the writer tells
us what the title of Nergal-Sharezer was.
One effect in our preservation of the names here is the hyphen, which has been put in
the wrong place; it belongs—probably the hyphens were put in much later than the
usual writing—anyway, it belongs between Nebo and Sarsechim, instead of between
Samgar and Nebo; and otherwise you would have the name Nergal-sharezer exactly
as the Babylonians spelled it; and you have the name exactly as a Hebrew would hear
it, and would write it.
Rab-mag literally would mean the chief of the bakers. Well, we know the general
wasn't actually the chief of the bakers—that is, it seems unlikely he was. It is a
probably a title that was given to the leader, just like in modern English positions will
often give an honorary title to a man.
Well, now, this is another interesting case of the remarkably accurate preservation of
a name. Now in this neo-Babylonian period, we have another interesting
archaeological corroboration—the life of Nebuchadnezzar: his power, the general
nature of the man, his tremendous interest in building. Daniel describes him saying,
"Is not this great Babylon which I have built?"—that exactly fits with his general
character.
We have one interesting little light which archaeology sheds on this period, which is
somewhat questionable, and yet I think fairly reliable. In the book of Daniel, we have
described the time when Nebuchadnezzar gave the order that the people should bow
down and worship before the great image that he set up; and when he gave that
order, we read that all the princes bowed down except Shadrach, Meshach and
Abednego; and so they were cast into the fiery furnace. Now scholars have said, "Why
should there be persecution right at this time?" They have said, "The book of Daniel
was not written till the Maccabean period. We have no evidence of any religious
persecution at the time of the book of Daniel. It was written at a later time and they
invented this story. Well, it is interesting that Wooley, in excavating at Ur of the
Chaldees, uncovered a great temple that had largely rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar; and
you can tell what parts were rebuilt, because Nebuchadnezzar wanted everybody to
know what he did; and so every few bricks he would put the inscription, stamped on,
that would say, "Nebuchadnezzar, the great king, the king of Babylon, the rebuilder of
this temple," and so we have over a million bricks that have been excavated in
Babylon with that on them about Nebuchadnezzar.
Well, now, down in Ur of the Chaldees you find it on these bricks; and so it is possible
to reconstruct the arrangement of the temple before Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt it and
the arrangement afterwards, which is substantially the same; but there is one striking
difference. In the temple of at Ur of the Chaldees before Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt it,
you have in front of the shrine of the god in which the image was—the image of the
moon god—in front of that shrine you have little rooms, which evidently were storerooms; so that the actual worship of the god was carried on by the priests, who went
in through narrow passages back into this shrine where the statue was; and the
53
people would be out in the open courtyard, and the priests carrying their sacrifice in
to the god; but Nebuchadnezzar removed all these little storerooms in front and
made an open space right straight out from where the statue of the god was, right
out to the outer court, so that the people out there could look right in to the statue of
the god.
Now, instead of worship being carried on by a few priests going in and carrying the
prayers and the gifts of the people into the little inner shrine, it was opened up so
that all the people could see the statue; and all the people would naturally be
expected then to fall down before it, and so that would seem to indicate the
introduction of an extended shrine worship by Nebuchadnezzar over what had
existed before; what existed before being a matter of the priest on behalf of the
people; and this new arrangement making all the people, or at least all the officials,
take part in it. And so while it is not absolutely certain that is the correct
interpretation, it seems very reasonable; and it fits right in with this incident in the
book of Daniel here, where we have the officials put in this position where they had to
either do what the king ordered them to, or to be false to that which God claimed of
them. So that is a very interesting small corroboration.
Of course, the most interesting large corroboration in this time is the corroboration of
Belshazzar. Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus; he was not an independent king of
Babylon, and so when inscriptions were first discovered, there was no evidence of the
existence of Belshazzar—only Nabonidus. The Bible tells us that Belshazzar was the
last king of Babylon, and that he was killed. The inscriptions discovered tell us that
Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon, and that the king of Persia allowed him to
live on and gave him a pension; and there is quite a conflict between the name, and
what was said to be done to him; and consequently it used to be said this was sure
proof that Daniel was not written till Maccabean times. All it says about Belshazzar is
purely imaginary. There was never such a man as Belshazzar.
And then, in the inscriptions which had been taken to the British museum, in the
various business documents there, there was found a sufficient number of tablets
mentioning the name Belshazzar to prove his existence; mentioning Belshazzar as a
member of the royal family, to prove his relationship as the son of Nabonidus; and
then, further, showing—eventually tablets were found showing his power in the
kingdom at the end of the reign—tablets sufficient to prove that Belshazzar was
indeed the actual reigning king, even though theoretically simply co-king along with
his father, Nabonidus. Professor Dougherty of Yale University, in 1928, in the Oriental
Research series, wrote a book on this entitled Nabonidus and Belshazzar.12 The book
summarizes the situation by remarking,
Fortunately we are dependent no longer upon pure supposition in dealing with the
problem. There is now available a rich and valuable accumulation of Babylonian
texts making specific reference to Nabonidus and Belshazzar. These new
contemporary sources of information have thrown so much light upon the period
12
Raymond Philip Dougherty, Nabonidus and Belshazzar: A Study of the Closing Events of the NeoBabylonian Empire, (1929).
54
under investigation that it is necessary to revise former critical and historical
conclusions.
If we had another hour in this semester, I might detail to you something of the book.
As it is, you can find it in the library if you are interested further, now or later on; but
I mention to you simply the outstanding feature of it, that Professor Dougherty was
convinced and gave evidence that seemed conclusive, that Belshazzar was the second
ruler in the kingdom and then Professor Dougherty says the book of Daniel has an
accuracy which is not paralleled in any other ancient writing. He sums up the book as
follows:
The foregoing summary of information concerning Belshazzar, when judged in the
light obtained from the texts discussed in this monograph, indicates that of all
non-Babylonian records dealing with the situation at the close of the NeoBabylonian empire, the fifth chapter of Daniel ranks next to [contemporary - dcb]
cuneiform literature in accuracy so far as outstanding events are concerned. The
Scriptural account may be interpreted as excelling because it employs the name
Belshazzar; because it attributes royal power to Belshazzar; and because it
recognizes that a dual rulership existed in the kingdom. Babylonian cuneiform
documents of the sixth century B. C. furnish clear-cut evidence of the correctness
of these three basic historical nuclei contained in the Biblical narrative dealing with
the fall of Babylon...
The total information found in all available chronologically-fixed documents, later
than the cuneiform texts of the sixth century B. C. and prior to the writings of
Josephus, of the first century A. D. could not have provided the necessary material
for the historical framework of the fifth chapter of Daniel."
ibid., p. 200, (emphasis in the original.)
And the last statement is footnoted as follows:
The view [almost universally held by critical scholars - dcb] that the fifth chapter of
Daniel originated in the Maccabaean age is discredited. Biblical critics have pushed
back its date to the third century B. C.... However, a narrative characterized by such
an accurate historical perspective as Daniel 5 ought to be entitled to a place much
nearer in time to the reliable documents which belong to the general epoch with
which it deals [i.e. ought to be judged to be contemporary with the events
described - dcb]."
ibid. note 671.
What Dougherty says here, is that we have no other ancient writing telling of this
history after the actual time of the events described, up to the time of Josephus,
which is built on the book of Daniel, which mentions Belshazzar or recognizes his
power in the kingdom. In particular the apocryphal book of Baruch cannot be the
source of the material in Daniel.13 There is no plausible source for the verified
information in Daniel except a source that would have to be contemporary with the
13
Ibid., note #670 and p. 190.
55
events, from around 539 B.C., at the time of the events. In other words the book of
Daniel, at least in the narration of this remarkable event is genuine and
contemporary, a most remarkable evidence of the accuracy of the Biblical account.
56
Appendix
Map of Mesopotamia (1200 BC)
Showing the locations mentioned here,
date and director of first major excavations
57