Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  ‡ Baron von Oppenheim unearthed at Tell Halaf and elsewhere many relics of Hittite art, which he has collected into his own museum, an abandoned factory in Berlin. Most of these remains are dated by their finder about 1200 B.C.; some of them he attributes precariously to the fourth millennium B.C. The collection includes a group of lions crudely but powerfully carved in stone, a bull in fine black stone, and figures of the Hittite triad of gods—the Sun-god, the Weather-god, and Hepat, the Hittite Ishtar. One of the most impressive of the figures is an ungainly Sphinx, before which is a stone vessel intended for offerings.

  § Cf., e.g., vadar, water; ezza, eat; uga, I (Latin ego); tug, thee; vesh, we; mu, me; kuish, who (Lat. quis); quit, what (Lat. quid), etc.3

  * Hippocrates tells us that “their women, so long as they are virgins, ride, shoot, throw the javelin while mounted, and fight with their enemies. They do not lay aside their virginity until they have killed three of their enemies. . . . A woman who takes to herself a husband no longer rides, unless she is compelled to do so by a general expedition. They have no right breast; for while they are yet babies their mothers make red-hot a bronze instrument constructed for this very purpose and apply it to the right breast and cauterize it, so that its growth is arrested, and all its strength and bulk are diverted to the right shoulder and right arm.”9

  * The oracle of Zeus had commanded the Phrygians to choose as king the first man who rode up to the temple in a wagon; hence the selection of Gordios. The new king dedicated his car to the god; and a new oracle predicted that the man who should succeed in untying the intricate bark knot that bound the yoke of the wagon to the pole would rule over all Asia. Alexander, story goes, cut the “Gordian knot” with a blow of his sword.

  † Atys, we are informed, was miraculously born of the virgin-goddess Nana, who conceived him by placing a pomegranate between her breasts.10

  * Older coins have been found at Mohenjo-daro, in India (2900 B.C.); and we have seen how Sennacherib (ca. 700 B.C.) minted half-shekel pieces.

  * The term Semite is derived from Shem, legendary son of Noah, on the theory that Shem was the ancestor of all the Semitic peoples.

  * Autran has argued that they were a branch of the Cretan civilization.16

  † Copper and cypress took their names from Cyprus.

  ‡ Cf. Gibbon: “Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old world. The discovery of the rich western continent by the Phoenicians, and the oppression of the simple natives, who were compelled to labor in their own mines for the benefit of the strangers, form an exact type of the more recent history of Spanish America.”20

  * The Greeks, who for half a millennium were raiders and pirates, gave the name “Phoenician” to anyone addicted to sharp practices.22

  * The discoveries here summarized have restored considerable credit to those chapters of Genesis that record the early traditions of the Jews. In its outlines, and barring supernatural incidents, the story of the Jews as unfolded in the Old Testament has stood the test of criticism and archeology; every year adds corroboration from documents, monuments, or excavations. E.g., potsherds unearthed at Tel Ad-Duweir in 1935 bore Hebrew inscriptions confirming part of the narrative of the Books of Kings.4a We must accept the Biblical account provisionally until it is disproved. Cf. Petrie, Egypt and Israel, London, 1925, p. 108.

  * Perhaps they followed in the track of the Hyksos, whose Semitic rule in Egypt might have offered them some protection.9 Petrie, accepting the Bible figure of four hundred and thirty years for the stay of the Jews in Egypt, dates their arrival about 1650 B.C., their exit about 1220 B.C.10

  † Manetho, an Egyptian historian of the third century B.C., as reported by Josephus, tells us that the Exodus was due to the desire of the Egyptians to protect themselves from a plague that had broken out among the destitute and enslaved Jews, and that Moses was an Egyptian priest who went as a missionary among the Jewish “lepers,” and gave them laws of cleanliness modeled upon those of the Egyptian clergy.13 Greek and Roman writers repeat this explanation of the Exodus;14 but their anti-Semitic inclinations make them unreliable guides. One verse of the Biblical account supports Ward’s interpretation of the Exodus as a labor strike: “And the king of Egypt said unto them, Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works? Get you unto your burdens.”15

  Moses is an Egyptian rather than a Jewish name; perhaps it is a shorter form of Ahmose.16 Professor Garstang, of the Marston Expedition of the University of Liverpool, claims to have discovered, in the royal tombs of Jericho, evidence that Moses was rescued (precisely in 1527 B.C.) by the then Princess, later the great Queen, Hatshepsut; that he was brought up by her as a court favorite, and fled from Egypt upon the accession of her enemy, Thutmose III.17 He believes that the material found in these tombs confirms the story of the fall of Jericho (Joshua, vi); he dates this fall ca. 1400 B.C., and the Exodus ca. 1447 B.C.18 As this chronology rests upon the precarious dating of scarabs and pottery, it must be received with respectful scepticism.

  * Cf. p. 287 above.

  † Cf. the story of Esther, and the descriptions of Rebecca, Bathsheba, etc.

  * Like the jolly story of Samson, who burned the crops of the Philistines by letting loose in them three hundred foxes with torches tied to their tails, and, in the manner of some orators, slew a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass.27

  † “He spake three thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five.”33

  ‡ Taken from Shalom, meaning peace.

  § Mentioned in the Tell-el-Amarna tablets as Ursalimmu, or Urusalim.

  * On the value of the talent in the ancient Near East cf. p. 228 above. The value varied from time to time; but we should not be exaggerating it if we rated the talent, in Solomon’s day, as having a purchasing power of over $10,000 in our contemporary money. Probably the Hebrew writer spoke in a literary way, and we must not take his figures too seriously. On the fluctuations of Hebrew currency cf. the Jewish Encyclopedia, articles “Numismatics” and “Shekel.” Coinage, as distinct from rings or ingots of silver or gold, does not appear in Palestine until about 650 B.C.38

  * It is likely that the site of the Temple was that which is now covered by the Moslem shrine El-haram-esh-sharif; but no remains of the Temple have been found.45

  * Other vestiges of animal worship among the ancient Hebrews may be found in 1 Kings, xii, 28, and Ezekiel, viii, 10. Ahab, King of Israel, worshiped heifers in the century after Solomon.53

  * Among some Bronze Age (3000 B.C.) ruins found in Canaan in 1931 were pieces of pottery bearing the name of a Canaanite deity, Yah or Yahu.60

  * A clumsy but useful word coined by Max Müller to designate the worship of a god as supreme, combined with the explicit (as in India) or tacit (as in Judea) admission of other gods.

  † Elisha, however, as far back as the ninth century B.C., announced one God: “I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.”83 It should be remembered that even modern monotheism is highly relative and incomplete. As the Jews worshiped a tribal god, so we worship a European god—or an English, or a German, or an Italian, god; no moment of modesty comes to remind us that the abounding millions of India, China and Japan—not to speak of the theologians of the jungle—do not yet recognize the God of our Fathers. Not until the machine weaves all the earth into one economic web, and forces all the nations under one rule, will there be one god—for the earth.

  * One of the sons of Jacob.

  * This kingdom often called itself “Israel”; but this word will be used, in these pages, to include all the Jews.

  † Translated by the Greeks into pro-phe-tes, announcer.

  * The reference is apparently to the room, made entirely of ivory, in the palace at Samaria where King Ahab lived with his “painted queen,” Jezebel (ca. 875-50 B.C.). Several fine ivories have been found by the Harvard Library Expedition in the ruins of a palace tentatively identified with Ahab’s.103

  † The book that b
ears his name is a collection of “prophecies” (i.e., sermons) by two or more authors ranging in time from 710 to 300 B.C.107 Chapters i-xxxix are usually ascribed to the “First Isaiah,” who is here discussed.

  * We know nothing of the history of this writer, who, by a literary device and license common to his time, chose to speak in the name of Isaiah. We merely guess that he wrote shortly before or after Cyrus liberated the Jews. Biblical scholarship assigns to him chapters xl-lv, and to another and later unknown, or unknowns, chapters lvi-lxvi.132a

  * Referring, presumably, to the road from Babylon to Jerusalem.

  † Modern research does not regard the “Servant” as the prophetic portrayal of Jesus.134a

  * Torah is Hebrew for Direction, Guidance; Pentateuch is Greek for Five Rolls.

  * A distinction first pointed out by Jean Astruc in 1753. Passages generally ascribed to the “Yahvist” account: Gen. ii, 4 to iii, 24, iv, vi-viii, xi, 1-9, xii-xiii, xviii-xix, xxiv, xxvii, 1-45, xxxii, xliii-xliv; Exod. iv-v, viii, 20 to ix, 7 x-xi, xxxiii, 12 to xxxiv, 26; Numb, x, 29-36, xi, etc. Distinctly “Elohist” passages: Gen. xi, 10-32, xx, 1-17, xxi, 8-32, xxii, 1-14, xl-xlii, xiv; Exod. xviii, 20-23, xx-xxii, xxxiii, 7-11; Numb, xii, xxii-xxiv, etc.142

  † Cf. Plato’s Symposium.

  ‡ Cf. the Greek poet Hesiod (ca. 750 B.C.), in Works and Days: “Men lived like gods, without vices or passions, vexations or toil. In happy companionship with divine beings they passed their days in tranquillity and joy. . . . The earth was more beautiful then than now, and spontaneously yielded an abundant variety of fruits. . . . Men were considered mere boys at one hundred years old.”146

  * Cf. Deut. xiv. Reinach, Roberston Smith and Sir James Frazer have attributed the avoidance of pork not to hygienic knowledge and precaution but to the totemic worship of the pig (or wild boar) by the ancestors of the Jews.151 The “worship” of the wild boar, however, may have been merely a priestly means of making it tabu in the sense of “unclean.” The great number of wise hygienic rules in the Mosaic Code warrant a humble scepticism of Reinach’s interpretation.

  * The procedure recommended by Leviticus (xiii-xiv) in cases of leprosy was practised in Europe to the end of the Middle Ages.155

  † By making race ultimately unconcealable. “The Jewish rite,” says Briffault, “did not assume its present form until so late a period as that of the Maccabees (167 B.C.). At that date it was still performed in such a manner that the jibes of Gentile women could be evaded, little trace of the operation being perceptible. The nationalistic priesthood therefore enacted that the prepuce should be completely removed.”157

  ‡ It was the usual thing for ancient law-codes to be of divine origin. We have seen how the laws of Egypt were given it by the god Thoth, and how the sun-god Shamash begot Hammurabi’s code. In like manner a deity gave to King Minos on Mt. Dicta the laws that were to govern Crete; the Greeks represented Dionysus, whom they also called “The Lawgiver,” with two tables of stone on which laws were inscribed; and the pious Persians tell how, one day, as Zoroaster prayed on a high mountain, Ahura-Mazda appeared to him amid thunder and lightning, and delivered to him “The Book of the Law.”159 “They did all this,” says Diodorus, “because they believed that a conception which would help humanity was marvelous and wholly divine; or because they held that the common crowd would be more likely to obey the laws if their gaze were directed towards the majesty and power of those to whom their laws were ascribed.”160

  * In Hebrew Yahveh is written as Jhvh; this was erroneously translated into Jehovah because the vowels a-o-a had been placed over Jhvh in the original, to indicate that Adonai was to be pronounced in place of Yahveh; and the theologians of the Renaissance and the Reformation wrongly supposed that these vowels were to be placed between the consonants of Jhvh.167

  * Later this gentle and ancient totem became the Paschal Lamb of Christianity, identified with the dead Christ.

  * This, of course, was the man’s ideal; if we may believe Isaiah (iii, 16-23), the real women of Jerusalem were very much of this world, loving fine raiment and ornament, and leading the men a merry chase. “The daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, . . . mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet,” etc. Perhaps the historians have always deceived us about women?

  * Theoretically the land belonged to Yahveh.195

  * Psalm is a Greek word, meaning “song of praise.”

  * A selection of the best Psalms would probably include VIII, XXIII, LI, CIV, CXXXVII and CXXXIX. The last is strangely like Whitman’s paean to evolution.219

  * The Proverbs, of course, are not the work of Solomon, though several of them may have come from him; they owe something to Egyptian literature and Greek philosophy, and were probably put together in the third or second century B.C. by some Hellenized Alexandrian Jew.

  * Scholarship assigns it tentatively to the fifth century B.C.228 Its text is corrupt beyond even the custom of sacred scriptures everywhere. Jastrow accepts only chapters iii-xxxi, considers the rest to be edifying emendations, and suspects many interpolations and mistranslations in the accepted chapters. E.g., “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (xiii, 5) should be, “Yet I tremble not,” or “Yet I have no hope.”229 Kallen and others have found in the book the likeness of a Greek tragedy, written on the model of Euripides.230 Chapters iii-xli are cast in the typical antistrophic form of Hebrew poetry.

  * “The sceptic,” wrote that prolific sceptic, Renan, “writes little, and there are many chances that his writings will be lost. The destiny of the Jewish people having been exclusively religious, the secular part of its literature had to be sacrificed.”236 The repetition of “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” in the Psalms (XIV, I; LIII, I), indicates that such fools were sufficiently numerous to create some stir in Israel. There is apparently a reference to this minority in Zephaniah, i, 12.

  * The authorship and date of the book are quite unknown. Sarton attributes it to the period between 250 and 168 B.C.239 The author calls himself, by a confusing literary fiction, both “Koheleth” and “the son of David, king in Jerusalem”—i.e., Solomon.240

  * Probably the modern Hamadan.

  * At Susa, says Strabo, the summer heat was so intense that snakes and lizards could not cross the streets quickly enough to escape being burned to death by the sun.16

  † Generally identified with the district of Arran on the river Araxes.

  * Some examples of the correlation:

  Old Persian

  Sanskrit

  Greek

  Latin

  German

  English

  pitar

  pitar

  pater

  pater

  Vater

  father

  nama

  nama

  onoma

  nomen

  Nahme

  name

  napat (grandson)

  napat

  anepsios

  nepos

  Neffe

  nephew

  bar

  bhri

  ferein

  ferre

  führen

  bear

  matar

  matar

  meter

  mater

  Mutter

  mother

  bratar

  bhratar

  phrater

  frater

  Bruder

  brother

  çta

  stha

  istemi

  sto

  stehen

  stand21

  † “They carry on their most important deliberations,” Strabo reports, “when drinking wine; and they regard decisions then made as more lasting than those made when they are sober.”27

  * But having no relation with his name; daric was from the Persian zariq—“a piece of gold.” The gold daric had a face value of $5.00. Three thousand gold darics made one Persian talent.32

&nbs
p; * The word survives in the present title of the Persian king—Shah. Its stem appears also in the Satraps or provincial officials of Persia, and in the Kshatriya or warrior caste of India.

  † Five hundred castrated boys came annually from Babylonia to act as “keepers of the women” in the harems of Persia.39

  * Because the soldier Mithridates, in his cups, blurted out the fact that it was he, and not the king, who should have received credit for slaying Cyrus the Younger at the battle of Cunaxa, Artaxerxes II, says Plutarch, “decreed that Mithridates should be put to death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lay down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, they offer him food, and if he refuse to eat it, they force him to do it by pricking his eyes; then, after he has eaten, they drench him with a mixture of milk and honey, pouring it not only into his mouth but all over his face. They then keep his face continually turned toward the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle upon it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards. In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired.”50