CHAPTER VI

MESOPOTAMIA THE EARLIEST CIVILIZATION KNOWNFAINT TRACES OF CHILD-SACRIFICE-LAWS FOR WOMEN AND

CHILDREN-CENSUS FIGURES

IN

STONES-CODE OF HAMMURABI THE STORY OF

SARGON.

Ο

UR great grandfathers who accepted the chronology of the good Bishop Usher,

by which the creation of the world was placed neatly and exactly at 4004 years before Christ, would never have dreamed of such periods of time as those the ethnologist, in his search for the natural history of man, compasses today in the annals of a single family, like the so-called, and at present discredited, Aryan. Nor yet would it have seemed possible to our grandfathers, that modern archæology would have made it possible for our savants and scientists to be today correcting the mistakes of Herodotus, and showing by their decipherings of new-found inscriptions and monuments, that before the earliest Greeks, the Egyptians, and even the Semitic peoples who inhabited Babylon and Assyria, there was another people,—a people whose origin it is not possible to place even now,—the Sumerians and Akkadians,

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who in the fourth millennial period B.C. werealready a cultured and civilized people.

I

Recent excavations have changed the entire historical attack. Instead of beginning with the Homeric Age as an age of legend, "civilization may now be traced beyond the Mycenæan epoch, through the different stages of Ægean culture back into the Neolithic Age." In Egypt we can now go back before the pyramid builders to the earliest dynastic kings, even to Neolithic Egyptians of whom there are no written records. Back of the known civilization of Assyria and Babylon, there has been discovered an even older civilization.

"On the northern and eastern confines of the Babylonian culture-system, new nations pass within our ken; Vannic men of Armenia, ruled by powerful kings; Kassites of the Zagros, whose language seems to contain elements which if really Aryan are probably the oldest known monuments of Indo-European speech (c. 1600 B. C.); strange tongued Elamites, also, akin neither to Iranian nor Semite. Nor does it seem to us remarkable that we should read the trilingual proclamations of Darius Hystaspis to his peoples in their original tongues, although an eighteenth century philosopher would have regarded the prospect of our ever being able to do so as the wildest of chimeras!" 2

'Leonard W. King, History of Sumer and Akkad, p. 1.

2 Hall.

Recent excavations have established the fact that the earliest known civilization was in what afterwards came to be known as Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and that groups of people living in cities and calling themselves, in the lower section of the country, the Sumerians, and in the upper section, the Akkadians, dwelt in civilized state until they were conquered by the Semitic peoples. The Semites in their conquest of the Greeks, as we now know, took from the conquered the culture of the race that was physically weaker, as indeed the Gauls did from the Romans.

In government, law, literature, and art the Sumerians were the superior people, and though the Semites improved on their models, the impulse, says King, came from the Sumerians. It is now known that Hammurabi's Code of Laws, which influenced in so marked a degree the Mosaic legislation, was of Sumerian origin, and the later religions and mythological literature from which the Hebrews borrowed so freely, was also of Sumerian origin.

Even with the excavations that are now going on and the discoveries that are being made almost daily, our evidence is still too scanty and imperfect, the gaps in it are too numerous, as Professor Sayce says, apropos of the Babylonian religion, to make it possible for us to discuss with any definite

I

2

1 L. W. King, History of Sumer and Akkad, preface, p. ix. A. H. Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, p. 253.

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ness the attitude of these first civilized peoples toward children. Years will pass before the tablets already in the museums will have been deciphered, to say nothing of those that are being dug out now. A library of 30,000 tablets was discovered by M. de Srazec at Telloh in Northern Babylonia, at Nippur in the great temple of Bel, and five times as many were discovered later by the American excavators. Once the British Museum was the sole repository of these treasures, containing everything from business contracts to prayers to the gods, but now they are in the Louvre, the Berlin Museum, the Museum of Constantinople, the University of Pennsylvania, and even in private collections.

From these Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians, however, there came the first civilization and the first humanization, for in this rich valley with its abundance of water and its rich soil, the Nomads became an agricultural people; there was plenty for all, and the germ of human tolerance that the world was to show later toward the child, was there in that long ago pre-Semitic civilization of Babylonia.

Traces there are, however, of an earlier attitude, when the first-born was sacrificed. Speaking of a Babylonian text, that he believed established the fact that there were sacrifices of the first-born among the Sumerians, Professor Sayce said:

"My interpretation of the text has been disputed, but it still appears to me to be the sole legitimate one. The text is bilingual, in both Sumerian and Semitic, and therefore probably goes

back to Sumerian times. Literally rendered, it is as follows: 'Let the abgal proclaim: the offspring who raises his head among men, the offspring for his life he must give; the head of his head among men, the offspring for the head of the man he must give, the neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he must give, the breast of the offspring for the breast of the man he must give.'” It is difficult to attach any other meaning to this than that which makes it refer to the sacrifice of children.'

Further corroboration of this belief of Professor Sayce was furnished by the recently dug up Stele of the Vultures, now in the Louvre. Here there is a representation of a wicker cage, filled with captives who are waiting to be put to death by the god Ningirsu, who holds in his hand the heraldic emblem of the city of Lagash. The Stele of the Vultures records the triumph of the King of Lagash, the great Eannatum, over the men of Umma who are undoubtedly the captives and are about to be sacrificed. 2 These few examples of human sacrifice indicate, however, that the practice had disappeared at an early date, but, as we shall see, it did not entirely disappear, or rather reappeared among the Semites of Palestine at a later period. 3

3

1 Sayce, The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp. 466– 469.

E. de Srazec, Découvertes en Chaldée, plates 48, and 48 bis. 3 Sayce, The Religions of Egypt and Babylonia, p. 466.