Chương Chương 7 · The Sumerians

THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US THE STORY

OF ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POT

The fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. Columbus tried

to find a way to the island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and

unsuspected continent. An Austrian bishop equipped an expedition which

was to travel eastward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy,

a voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not visited by

western men until a generation later. Meanwhile a certain Venetian by

the name of Barbero had explored the ruins of western Asia and had

brought back reports of a most curious language which he had found

carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless

pieces of baked clay.

But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the

end of the eighteenth century that the first “cuneiform inscriptions”

(so-called because the letters were wedge-shaped and wedge is called

“Cuneus” in Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor,

named Niebuhr. Then it took thirty years before a patient German

school-master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four

letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian King

Darius. And another twenty years had to go by until a British officer,

Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us

a workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of

Champollion had been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the

Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon

the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded

pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which

showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been

developed. A few examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning

a star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows:

[Illustration]. This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short

while when the meaning of “heaven” was added to that of star the

picture was simplified in this way [Illustration] which made it even

more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from [Illustration]

into [Illustration] and a fish changed from [Illustration] into

[Illustration]. The sun was originally a plain circle [Illustration]

and became [Illustration]. If we were using the Sumerian script today

we would make an [Illustration] look like [Illustration]. This system

of writing down our ideas looks rather complicated but for more than

thirty centuries it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and

the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races which forced

their way into the fertile valley.

[Illustration: A TOWER OF BABEL]

The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First

the Sumerians came from the North. They were a white people who had

lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods

on the tops of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed

artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They

did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their

towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea,

as you may see in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries

lead from one floor to another. We may have borrowed other ideas from

the Sumerians but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely

absorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later

date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia.

The Jews saw them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and

they called them towers of Bab-Illi, or towers of Babel.

[Illustration: NINEVEH]

In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered

Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards overpowered by the Akkadians,

one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common

dialect and who are known as the “Semites,” because in the olden days

people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the

three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced

to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe

whose great King Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the

holy city of Babylon and who gave his people a set of laws which made

the Babylonian state the best administered empire of the ancient

world. Next the Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament,

overran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not carry

away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert

God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of

Nineveh the center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all

of western Asia and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject

races until the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ

when the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and

made that city the most important capital of that day. Nebuchadnezzar,

the best known of their Kings, encouraged the study of science, and

our modern knowledge of astronomy and mathematics is all based upon

certain first principles which were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the

year 538 B.C. a crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land

and overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years later,

they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the

Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a

Greek province. Next came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks,

and Mesopotamia, the second centre of the world’s civilisation, became

a vast wilderness where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient

glory.

[Illustration: THE HOLY CITY OF BABYLON]