by Will Durant
Magic formulas for the elimination of demons, the avoidance of evil and the prevision of the future constitute the largest category in the Babylonian writings found in the library of Ashurbanipal. Some of the tablets are manuals of astrology; others are lists of omens celestial and terrestrial, with expert advice for reading them; others are treatises on the interpretation of dreams, rivaling in their ingenious incredibility the most advanced products of modern psychology; still others offer instruction in divining the future by examining the entrails of animals, or by observing the form and position of a drop of oil let fall into a jar of water.99 Hepatoscopy—observation of the liver of animals—was a favorite method of divination among the Babylonian priests, and passed from them into the classical world; for the liver was believed to be the seat of the mind in both animals and men. No king would undertake a campaign or advance to a battle, no Babylonian would risk a crucial decision or begin an enterprise of great moment, without employing a priest or a soothsayer to read the omens for him in one or another of these recondite ways.
Never was a civilization richer in superstitions. Every turn of chance from the anomalies of birth to the varieties of death received a popular, sometimes an official and sacerdotal, interpretation in magical or supernatural terms. Every movement of the rivers, every aspect of the stars, every dream, every unusual performance of man or beast, revealed the future to the properly instructed Babylonian. The fate of a king could be forecast by observing the movements of a dog,100 just as we foretell the length of the winter by spying upon the groundhog. The superstitions of Babylonia seem ridiculous to us, because they differ superficially from our own. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
V. THE MORALS OF BABYLON
Religion divorced from morals—Sacred prostitution—Free love—Marriage—Adultery—Divorce—The position of woman—The relaxation of morals
This religion, with all its failings, probably helped to prod the common Babylonian into some measure of decency and civic docility, else we should be hard put to explain the generosity of the kings to the priests. Apparently, however, it had no influence upon the morals of the upper classes in the later centuries, for (in the eyes and words of her prejudiced enemies) the “whore of Babylon” was a “sink of iniquity,” and a scandalous example of luxurious laxity to all the ancient world. Even Alexander, who was not above dying of drinking, was shocked by the morals of Babylon.101
The most striking feature of Babylonian life, to an alien observer, was the custom known to us chiefly from a famous page in Herodotus:
Every native woman is obliged, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Venus, and have intercourse with some stranger. And many disdaining to mix with the rest, being proud on account of their wealth, come in covered carriages, and take up their station at the temple with a numerous train of servants attending them. But the far greater part do thus: many sit down in the temple of Venus, wearing a crown of cord round their heads; some are continually coming in, and others are going out. Passages marked oat in a straight line lead in every direction through the women, along which strangers pass and make their choice. When a woman has once seated herself she must not return home till some stranger has thrown a piece of silver into her lap, and lain with her outside the temple. He who throws the silver must say thus: “I beseech the goddess Mylitta to favor thee”; for the Assyrians call Venus Mylitta.* The silver may be ever so small, for she will not reject it, inasmuch as it is not lawful for her to do so, for such silver is accounted sacred. The woman follows the first man that throws, and refuses no one. But when she has had intercourse and has absolved herself from her obligation to the goddess, she returns home; and after that time, however great a sum you may give her you will not gain possession of her. Those that are endowed with beauty and symmetry of shape are soon set free; but the deformed are detained a long time, from inability to satisfy the law, for some wait for a space of three or four years.102
What was the origin of this strange rite? Was it a relic of ancient sexual communism, a concession, by the future bridegroom, of the jus primæ noctis, or right of the first night, to the community as represented by any casual and anonymous citizen?103 Was it due to the bridegroom’s fear of harm from the violation of the tabu against shedding blood?104 Was it a physical preparation for marriage, such as is still practised among some Australian tribes?105 Or was it simply a sacrifice to the goddess—an offering of first fruits?106 We do not know.
Such women, of course, were not prostitutes. But various classes of prostitutes lived within the temple precincts, plied their trade there, and amassed, some of them, great fortunes. Such temple prostitutes were common in western Asia: we find them in Israel,107 Phrygia, Phoenicia, Syria, etc.; in Lydia and Cyprus the girls earned their marriage dowries in this way.108 “Sacred prostitution” continued in Babylonia until abolished by Constantine (ca. 325 A.D.).109 Alongside it, in the wine-shops kept by women, secular prostitution flourished.110
In general the Babylonians were allowed considerable premarital experience. It was considered permissible for men and women to form unlicensed unions, “trial marriages,” terminable at the will of either party; but the woman in such cases was obliged to wear an olive—in stone or terra cotta—as a sign that she was a concubine.111 Some tablets indicate that the Babylonians wrote poems, and sang songs, of love; but all that remains of these is an occasional first line, like “My love is a light,” or “My heart is full of merriment and song.”112 One letter, dating from 2100 B.C., is in the tone of Napoleon’s early messages to Josephine: “To Bibiya: . . . May Shamash and Marduk give thee health forever. . . . I have sent (to ask) after thy health; let me know how thou art. I have arrived in Babylon, and see thee not; I am very sad.”113
Legal marriage was arranged by the parents, and was sanctioned by an exchange of gifts obviously descended from marriage by purchase. The suitor presented to the father of the bride a substantial present, but the father was expected to give her a dowry greater in value than the gift,114 so that it was difficult to say who was purchasd, the woman or the man. Sometimes, however, the arrangement was unabashed purchase; Shamashnazir, for example, received ten shekels ($50) as the price of his daughter.115 If we are to believe the Father of History,
those who had marriageable daughters used to bring them once a year to a place where a great number of men gathered round them. A public crier made them stand up and sold them all, one after another. He began with the most beautiful, and having got a large sum for her he put up the second fairest. But he only sold them on condition that the buyers married them. . . . This very wise custom no longer exists.116
Despite these strange practices, Babylonian marriage seems to have been as monogamous and faithful as marriage in Christendom is today. Premarital freedom was followed by the rigid enforcement of marital fidelity. The adulterous wife and her paramour, according to the Code, were drowned, unless the husband, in his mercy, preferred to let his wife off by turning her almost naked into the streets.117 Hammurabi out-Cæsared Cæsar: “If the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man because of another man, and she have not been taken in lying with another man, for her husband’s sake she shall throw herself into the river”118—perhaps the law was intended as a discouragement to gossip. The man could divorce his wife simply by restoring her dowry to her and saying, “Thou art not my wife”; but if she said to him, “Thou art not my husband,” she was to be drowned.119 Childlessness, adultery, incompatibility, or careless management of the household might satisfy the law as ground for granting the man a divorce;120 indeed “if she have not been a careful mistress, have gadded about, have neglected her house, and have belittled her children, they shall throw that woman into the water.”121 As against this incredible severity of the Code, we find tha
t in practice the woman, though she might not divorce her husband, was free to leave him, if she could show cruelty on his part and fidelity on her own; in such cases she could return to her parents, and take her marriage portion with her, along with what other property she might have acquired.122 (The women of England did not enjoy these rights till the end of the nineteenth century.) If a woman’s husband was kept from her, through business or war, for any length of time, and had left no means for her maintenance, she might cohabit with another man without legal prejudice to her reunion with her husband on the latter’s return.123
In general the position of woman in Babylonia was lower than in Egypt or Rome, and yet not worse than in classic Greece or medieval Europe. To carry out her many functions—begetting and rearing children, fetching water from the river or the public well, grinding corn cooking, spinning, weaving, cleaning—she had to be free to go about in public very much like the man.124 She could own property, enjoy its income, sell and buy, inherit and bequeath.125 Some women kept shops, and carried on commerce; some even became scribes, indicating that girls as well as boys might receive an education.126 But the Semitic practice of giving almost limitless power to the oldest male of the family won out against any matriarchal tendencies that may have existed in prehistoric Mesopotamia. Among the upper classes—by a custom that led to the purdah of Islam and India—the women were confined to certain quarters of the house; and when they went out they were chaperoned by eunuchs and pages.127 Among the lower classes they were maternity machines, and if they had no dowry they were little more than slaves.128 The worship of Ishtar suggests a certain reverence for woman and motherhood, like the worship of Mary in the Middle Ages; but we get no glimpse of chivalry in Herodotus’ report that the Babylonians, when besieged, “had strangled their wives, to prevent the consumption of their provisions.”129
With some excuse, then, the Egyptians looked down upon the Babylonians as not quite civilized. We miss here the refinement of character and feeling indicated by Egyptian literature and art. When refinement came to Babylon it was in the guise of an effeminate degeneracy: young men dyed and curled their hair, perfumed their flesh, rouged their cheeks, and adorned themselves with necklaces, bangles, ear-rings and pendants. After the Persian Conquest the death of self-respect brought an end of self-restraint; the manners of the courtesan crept into every class; women of good family came to consider it mere courtesy to reveal their charms indiscriminately for the greatest happiness of the greatest number;130 and “every man of the people in his poverty,” if we may credit Herodotus, “prostituted his daughters for money.”131 “There is nothing more extraordinary than the manners of this city,” wrote Quintus Curtius (42 A.D.), “and nowhere are things better arranged with a view to voluptuous pleasures.”132 Morals grew lax when the temples grew rich; and the citizens of Babylon, wedded to delight, bore with equanimity the subjection of their city by the Kassites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks.
VI. LETTERS AND LITERATURE
Cuneiform—Its decipherment—Language—Literature—The epic of Gilgamesh
Did this life of venery, piety and trade receive any ennobling enshrinement in literary or artistic form? It is possible; we cannot judge a civilization from such fragments as the ocean of time has thrown up from the wreckage of Babylon. These fragments are chiefly liturgical, magical and commercial. Whether through accident or through cultural poverty, Babylonia, like Assyria and Persia, has left us a very middling heritage of literature as compared with Egypt and Palestine; its gifts were in commerce and law.
Nevertheless, scribes were as numerous in cosmopolitan Babylon as in Memphis or Thebes. The art of writing was still young enough to give its master a high rank in society; it was the open sesame to governmental and sacerdotal office; its possessor never failed to mention the distinction in narrating his deeds, and usually he engraved a notice of it on his cylinder seal,133 precisely as Christian scholars and gentlemen once listed their academic degrees on their cards. The Babylonians wrote in cuneiform upon tablets of damp clay, with a stylus or pencil cut at the end into a triangular prism or wedge; when the tablets were filled they dried and baked them into strange but durable manuscripts of brick. If the thing written was a letter it was dusted with powder and then wrapped in a clay envelope stamped with the sender’s cylinder seal. Tablets in jars classified and arranged on shelves filled numerous libraries in the temples and palaces of Babylonia. These Babylonian libraries are lost; but one of the greatest of them, that of Borsippa, was copied and preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal, whose 30,000 tablets are the main source of our knowledge of Babylonian life.
The decipherment of Babylonian baffled students for centuries; their final success is an honorable chapter in the history of scholarship. In 1802 Georg Grotefend, professor of Greek at the University of Göttingen, told the Göttingen Academy how for years he had puzzled over certain cuneiform inscriptions from ancient Persia; how at last he had identified eight of the forty-two characters used, and had made out the names of three kings in the inscriptions. There, for the most part, the matter rested until 1835, when Henry Rawlinson, a British diplomatic officer stationed in Persia, quite unaware of Grotefend’s work, likewise worked out the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes in an inscription couched in Old Persian, a cuneiform derivative of Babylonian script; and through these names he finally deciphered the entire document. This, however, was not Babylonian; Rawlinson had still to find, like Champollion, a Rosetta Stone—in this case some inscription bearing the same text in old Persian and Babylonian. He found it three hundred feet high on an almost inaccessible rock at Behistun, in the mountains of Media, where Darius I had caused his carvers to engrave a record of his wars and victories in three languages—old Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. Day after day Rawlinson risked himself on these rocks, often suspending himself by a rope, copying every character carefully, even making plastic impressions of all the engraved surfaces. After twelve years of work he succeeded in translating both the Babylonian and the Assyrian texts (1847). To test these and similar findings, the Royal Asiatic Society sent an unpublished cuneiform document to four Assyriologists, and asked them—working without contact or communication with one another—to make independent translations. The four reports were found to be in almost complete agreement. Through these unheralded campaigns of scholarship the perspective of history was enriched with a new civilization.134
The Babylonian language was a Semitic development of the old tongues of Sumeria and Akkad. It was written in characters originally Sumerian, but the vocabulary diverged in time (like French from Latin) into a language so different from Sumerian that the Babylonians had to compose dictionaries and grammars to transmit the old “classic” and sacerdotal tongue of Sumeria to young scholars and priests. Almost a fourth of the tablets found in the royal library at Nineveh is devoted to dictionaries and grammars of the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian languages. According to tradition, such dictionaries had been made as far back as Sargon of Akkad—so old is scholarship. In Babylonian, as in Sumerian, the characters represented not letters but syllables; Babylon never achieved an alphabet of its own, but remained content with a “syllabary” of some three hundred signs. The memorizing of these syllabic symbols formed, with mathematics and religious instruction, the curriculum of the temple schools in which the priests imparted to the young as much as it was expedient for them to know. One excavation unearthed an ancient classroom in which the clay tablets of boys and girls who had copied virtuous maxims upon them some two thousand years before Christ still lay on the floor, as if some almost welcome disaster had suddenly interrupted the lesson.135
The Babylonians, like the Phoenicians, looked upon letters as a device for facilitating business; they did not spend much of their clay upon literature. We find animal fables in verse—one generation of an endless dynasty; hymns in strict meter, sharply divided lines and elaborate stanzas;136 very little surviving secular verse; religious rituals presaging, but never b
ecoming, drama; and tons of historiography. Official chroniclers recorded the piety and conquests of the kings, the vicissitudes of each temple, and the important events in the career of each city. Berosus, the most famous of Babylonian historians (ca. 280 B.C.) narrated with confidence full details concerning the creation of the world and the early history of man: the first king of Babylonia had been chosen by a god, and had reigned 36,000 years; from the beginning of the world to the great Flood, said Berosus, with praiseworthy exactitude and comparative moderation, there had elapsed 691,200 years.137
Twelve broken tablets found in Ashurbanipal’s library, and now in the British Museum, form the most fascinating relic of Mesopotamian literature—the Epic of Gilgamesh. Like the Iliad it is an accretion of loosely connected stories, some of which go back to Sumeria 3000 B.C.; part of it is the Babylonian account of the Flood. Gilgamesh was a legendary ruler of Uruk or Erech, a descendant of the Shamash-napishtim who had survived the Deluge, and had never died. Gilgamesh enters upon the scene as a sort of Adonis-Samson—tall, massive, heroically powerful and troublesomely handsome.