History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 (eBook)

CHAPTER II—THE TEMPLES AND THE GODS OF CHALDÆA
 

THE CONSTRUCTION AND REVENUES OF THE TEMPLES—THE POPULAR GODS AND THE THEOLOGICAL TRIADS——THE DEAD AND HADES.

Chaldæan cities: the resemblance of their ruins to natural mounds caused by their exclusive use of brick as a building material—Their city walls: the temples and local gods; reconstruction of their history by means of the stamped bricks of which they were built—The two types of ziggurât: the arrangement of the temple of Nannar at Uru.

The tribes of the Chaldæan gods—Genii hostile to men, their monstrous shapes; the south-west wind; friendly genii—The Seven, and their attacks on the moon-god; Gibil, the fire-god, overcomes them and their snares—The Sumerian gods; Ningirsu: the difficulty of defining them and of understanding the nature of them; they become merged in the Semitic deities.

Characteristics and dispositions of the Chaldæan gods—the goddesses, like women of the harem, are practically nonentities; Mylitta and her meretricious rites—The divine aristocracy and its principal representatives: their relations to the earth, oracles, speaking statues, household gods—The gods of each city do not exclude those of neighbouring cities: their alliances and their borrowings from one another—The sky-gods and the earth-gods, the sidereal gods: the moon and the sun.

The feudal gods: several among them unite to govern the world; the two triads of Eridu—The supreme triad: Anu the heaven; Bel the earth and his fusion with the Babylonian Merodach; Ea, the god of the waters—The second triad: Sin the moon and Shamash the sun; substitution of Bamman for Ishtar in this triad; the winds and the legend of Adapa, the attributes of Ramman—The addition of goddesses to these two triads; the insignificant position which they occupy.

The assembly of the gods governs the world: the bird Zu steals the tablets of destiny—Destinies are written in the heavens and determined by the movements of the stars; comets and their presiding deities, Nebo and Ishtai—The numerical value of the gods—The arrangement of the temples, the local priesthood, festivals, revenues of the gods and gifts made to them—Sacrifices, the expiation of crimes—Death and the future of the soul—Tombs and the cremation of the dead; the royal sepulchres and funerary rites—Hades and its sovereigns: Nergal, Allât, the descent of Ishtar into the infernal regions, and the possibility of a resurrection The invocation of the dead—The ascension of Etana.

The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of the Nile, by the magnificence of their ruins, which are witnesses, even after centuries of neglect, to the activity of a powerful and industrious people: on the contrary, they are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be distinguished—mounds of stiff and greyish clay, cracked by the sun, washed into deep crevasses by the rain, and bearing no apparent traces of the handiwork of man.

In the estimation of the Chaldæan architects, stone was a material of secondary consideration: as it was necessary to bring it from a great distance and at considerable expense, they used it very sparingly, and then merely for lintels, uprights, thresholds, for hinges on which to hang their doors, for dressings in some of their state apartments, in cornices or sculptured friezes on the external walls of their buildings; and even then its employment suggested rather that of a band of embroidery carefully disposed on some garment to relieve the plainness of the material. Crude brick, burnt brick, enamelled brick, but always and everywhere brick was the principal element in their construction. The soil of the marshes or of the plains, separated from the pebbles and foreign substances which it contained, mixed with grass or chopped straw, moistened with water, and assiduously trodden underfoot, furnished the ancient builders with materials of incredible tenacity. This was moulded into thin square bricks, eight inches to a foot across, and three to four inches thick, but rarely larger: they were stamped on the flat side, by means of an incised wooden block, with the name of the reigning sovereign, and were then dried in the sun.* A layer of fine mortar or of bitumen was sometimes spread between the courses, or handfuls of reeds would be strewn at intervals between the brickwork to increase the cohesion: more frequently the crude bricks were piled one upon another, and their natural softness and moisture brought about their rapid agglutination.** As the building proceeded, the weight of the courses served to increase still further the adherence of the layers: the walls soon became consolidated into a compact mass, in which the horizontal strata were distinguishable only by the varied tints of the clay used to make the different relays of bricks.

      * The making of bricks for the Assyrian monuments of the
     time of the Sargonids has been minutely described by Place,
     Ninive et l'Assyrie, vol. i. pp. 211-214. The methods of
     procedure were exactly the same as those used under the
     earliest king known, as has been proved by the examination
     of the bricks taken from the monuments of Uru and Lagash.
 
     ** This method of building was noticed by classical writers.
     The word "Bowarieh," borne by several ancient mounds in
     Chaldoa, signifies, properly speaking, a mat of reeds; it is
     applied only to such buildings as are apparently constructed
     with alternate layers of brick and dried reeds. The
     proportion of these layers differs in certain localities: in
     the ruins of the ancient temple of Belos at Babylon, now
     called the "Mujelibeh," the lines of straw and reeds run
     uninterruptedly between each course of bricks; in the ruins
     of Akkerkuf, they only occur at wider intervals—according
     to Niebuhr and Ives, every seventh or eighth course;
     according to Raymond, every seventh course, or sometimes
     every fifth or sixth course, but in these cases the layer of
     reeds becomes 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 inches wide. H. Rawlin-son
     thinks, on the other hand, that all the monuments in which
     we find layers of straw and reeds between the brick courses
     belong to the Parthian period.
 

      Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a brick preserved in the
     Louvre. The bricks bearing historical inscriptions, which
     are sometimes met with, appear to have been mostly ex-voto
     offerings placed somewhere prominently, and not building
     materials hidden in the masonry.
 

Monuments constructed of such a plastic material required constant attention and frequent repairs, to keep them in good condition: after a few years of neglect they became quite disfigured, the houses suffered a partial dissolution in every storm, the streets were covered with a coating of fine mud, and the general outline of the buildings and habitations grew blurred and defaced. Whilst in Egypt the main features of the towns are still traceable above ground, and are so well preserved in places that, while excavating them, we are carried away from the present into the world of the past, the Chaldæan cities, on the contrary, are so overthrown and seem to have returned so thoroughly to the dust from which their founders raised them, that the most patient research and the most enlightened imagination can only imperfectly reconstitute their arrangement.

The towns were not enclosed within those square or rectangular enclosures with which the engineers of the Pharaohs fortified their strongholds. The ground-plan of Uru was an oval, that of Larsam formed almost a circle upon the soil, while Uruk and Eridu resembled in shape a sort of irregular trapezium. The curtain of the citadel looked down on the plain from a great height, so that the defenders were almost out of reach of the arrows or slings of the besiegers: the remains of the ramparts at Uruk at the present day are still forty to fifty feet high, and twenty or more feet in thickness at the top. Narrow turrets projected at intervals of every fifty feet along the face of the wall: the excavations have not been sufficiently pursued to permit of our seeing what system of defence was applied to the entrances. The area described by these cities was often very large, but the...