Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

Chapter VIII. The Government And The Army

The conception of the state in Babylonia was intensely theocratic. The kings had been preceded by high-priests, and up to the last they performed priestly functions, and represented the religious as well as the civil power. At Babylon the real sovereign was Bel Merodach, the true “lord” of the city, and it was only when the King had been adopted by the god as his son that he possessed any right to rule. Before he had “taken the hands” of Bel, and thereby become the adopted son of the deity, he had no legitimate title to the throne. He was, in fact, the vicegerent and representative of Bel upon earth; it was Bel who gave him his authority and watched over him as a father over a son.

The Babylonian sovereign was thus quite as much a pontiff as he was a king. The fact was acknowledged in the titles he bore, as well as in the ceremony which legitimized his accession to the throne. Two views prevailed, however, as to his relation to the god. According to one of these, sonship conferred upon him actual divinity; he was not merely the representative of a god, but a god himself. This was the view which prevailed in the earlier days of Semitic supremacy. Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin are entitled “gods;” temples and priests were dedicated to them during their lifetime, and festivals were observed in their honor. Their successors claimed and received the same attributes of divinity. Under the third dynasty of Ur even the local prince, Gudea, the high-priest of Tello, was similarly deified. It was not until Babylonia had been conquered by the foreign Kassite dynasty from the mountains of Elam that a new conception of the King was introduced. He ceased to be a god himself, and became, instead, the delegate and representative of the god of whom he was the adopted son. His relation to the god was that of a son during the lifetime of his father, who can act for his father, but cannot actually take the father's place so long as the latter is alive.

Some of the earlier Chaldean monarchs call themselves sons of the goddesses who were worshipped in the cities over which they held sway. They thus claimed to be of divine descent, not by adoption, but by actual birth. The divinity that was in them was inherited; it was not merely communicated by a later and artificial process. The “divine right,” by grace of which they ruled, was the right of divine birth.

At the outset, therefore, the Babylonian King was a pontiff because he was also a god. In him the deities of heaven were incarnated on earth. He shared their essence and their secrets; he knew how their favor could be gained or their enmity averted, and so mediated between god and man. This deification of the King, however, cannot be traced beyond the period when Semitic rule was firmly established in Chaldea. It is true that Sumerian princes, like Gudea of Lagas, were also deified; but this was long after the rise of Semitic supremacy, and the age of Sargon of Akkad, and when Sumerian culture was deeply interpenetrated by Semitic ideas. So far as we know at present the apotheosis of the King was of Semitic origin.

It is paralleled by the apotheosis of the King in ancient Egypt. There, too, the Pharaoh was regarded as an incarnation of divinity, to whom shrines were erected, priests ordained, and sacrifices offered. In early times he was, moreover, declared to be the son of the goddess of the city in which he dwelt; it was not till the rise of the fifth historical dynasty that he became the “Son of the Sun-god” of Heliopolis, rather than Horus, the Sun-god, himself. This curious parallelism is one of many facts which point to intercourse between Babylonia and Egypt in the prehistoric age; whether the deification of the King originated first on the banks of the Euphrates or of the Nile must be left to the future to decide.

Naram-Sin is addressed as “the god of Agadê,” or Akkad, the capital of his dynasty, and long lists have been found of the offerings that were made, month by month, to the deified Dungi, King of Ur, and his vassal, Gudea of Lagas. Here, for example, are Dr. Scheil's translations of some of them: “I. Half a measure of good beer and 5 gin of sesame oil on the new moon, the 15th day, for the god Dungi; half a measure of good beer and half a measure of herbs for Gudea the High-priest, during the month Tammuz. II. Half a measure of the king's good beer, half a measure of herbs, on the new moon, the 15th day, for Gudea the High-priest. One measure of good wort beer, 5 qas of ground flour, 3 qas of cones (?), for the planet Mercury: during the month of the festival of the god Dungi. III.… Half a measure of good beer, half a measure of herbs, on the new moon, the 15th day, for the god Gudea the High-priest: during the month Elul, the first year of Gimil-Sin, king [of Ur].”

The conception of the King as a visible god upon earth was unable to survive the conquest of Babylonia by the half-civilized mountaineers of Elam and the substitution of foreigners for the Semitic or Semitized Sumerian rulers of the country. As the doctrine of the divine right of kings passed away in England with the rise of the Hanoverian dynasty, so, too, in Babylonia the deified King disappeared with the Kassite conquest. But he continued to be supreme pontiff to the adopted son of the god of Babylon. Babylon had become the capital of the kingdom, and Merodach, its patron-deity, was, accordingly, supreme over the other gods of Chaldea. He alone could confer the royal powers that the god of every city which was the centre of a principality had once been qualified to grant. By “taking his hands” the King became his adopted son, and so received a legitimate right to the throne.

It was the throne not only of Babylonia, but of the Babylonian empire as well. It was never forgotten that Babylonia had once been the mistress of Western Asia, and it was, accordingly, the sceptre of Western Asia that was conferred by Bel Merodach upon his adopted sons. Like the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, Babylonian sovereignty brought with it a legal, though shadowy, right to rule over the civilized kingdoms of the world. It was this which made the Assyrian conquerors of the second Assyrian empire so anxious to secure possession of Babylon and there “take the hands of Bel.” Tiglath-pileser III., Shalmaneser IV., and Sargon were all alike usurpers, who governed by right of the sword. It was only when they had made themselves masters of Babylon and been recognized by Bel and his priesthood that their title to govern became legitimate and unchallenged.

Cyrus and Cambyses continued the tradition of the native kings. They, too, claimed to be the successors of those who had ruled over Western Asia, and Bel, of his own free choice, it was alleged, had rejected the unworthy Nabonidos and put Cyrus in his place. Cyrus ruled, not by right of conquest, but because he had been called to the crown by the god of Babylon. It was not until the Zoroastrean Darius and Xerxes had taken Babylon by storm and destroyed the temple of Bel that the old tradition was finally thrust aside. The new rulers of Persia had no belief in the god of Babylon; his priesthood was hostile to them, and Babylon was deposed from the position it had so long occupied as the capital of the world.

In Assyria, in contrast to Babylonia, the government rested on a military basis. It is true that the kings of Assyria had once been the high-priests of the city of Assur, and that they carried with them some part of their priestly functions when they were invested with royal power. But it is no less true that they were never looked upon as incarnations of the deity or even as his representative upon earth. The rise of the Assyrian kingdom seems to have been due to a military revolt; at any rate, its history is that of a succession of rebellious generals, some of whom succeeded in founding dynasties, while others failed to hand down their power to their posterity. There was no religious ceremony at their coronation like that of “taking the hands of Bel.” When Esar-haddon was made King he was simply acclaimed sovereign by the army. It was the army and not the priesthood to whom he owed his title to reign.

The conception of the supreme god himself differed in Assyria and Babylonia. In Babylonia, Bel-Merodach was “lord” of the city; in Assyria, Assur was the deified city itself. In the one case, therefore, the King was appointed vicegerent of the god over the city which he governed and preserved; in the other case the god represented the state, and, in so far as the King was a servant of the god, he was a servant also of the state.

In both countries there was an aristocracy of birth based originally on the possession of land. But in Babylonia it tended at an early period to be absorbed by the mercantile and priestly classes, and in later days it is difficult to find traces even of its existence. The nobles of the age of Nebuchadnezzar were either wealthy trading families or officers of the Crown. The temples, and the priests who lived upon their revenues, had swallowed up a considerable part of the landed and other property of the country, which had thus become what in modern Turkey would be called wakf. In Assyria many of the great princes of the realm still belonged to the old feudal aristocracy, but here again the tendency was to replace them by a bureaucracy which owed its position and authority to the direct favor of the King. Under Tiglath-pileser III. this tendency became part of the policy of the government; the older aristocracy disappeared, and instead of it we find military officers and civil officials, all of whom were appointed by the Crown.

While, accordingly, Babylonia became an industrial and priestly state, Assyria developed into a great military and bureaucratic organization. It taught the world how to organize and administer an empire. Tiglath-pileser III. inaugurated a course of policy which his successors did their best to carry out. He aimed at reviving the ancient empire of Sargon of Akkad, of uniting the civilized world of Western Asia under one head, but upon new principles and in a more permanent way. The campaigns which his predecessors had carried on for the sake of booty and military fame were now conducted with a set purpose and method. The raid was replaced by a carefully planned scheme of conquest. The vanquished territories were organized into provinces under governors appointed by the Assyrian King and responsible to him alone. By the side of the civil governor was a military commander, who kept watch upon the other's actions, while under them was a large army of administrators. Assyrian colonies were planted in the newly acquired districts, where they served as a garrison, and the native inhabitants were transported to other parts of the Assyrian empire. In this way an attempt was made to break the old ties of patriotism and local feeling, and to substitute for them fidelity to the Assyrian government and the god Assur, in whose name its conquests were made.

The taxes of the empire were carefully regulated. A cadastral survey was an institution which had long been in existence; it had been borrowed from Babylonia, where, as we have seen, it was already known at a very early epoch. The amount to be paid into the treasury by each town and province was fixed, and the governor was called upon to transmit it each year to Nineveh. Thus in the time of Sennacherib the annual tribute of Carchemish was 100 talents, that of Arpad 30, and that of Megiddo 15, while, at home, Nineveh was assessed at 30 talents, and the district of Assur at 20, which were expended on the maintenance of the fleet, the whole amount of revenue raised from Assyria being 274 talents. Besides this direct taxation, there was also indirect taxation, as well as municipal rates. Thus a tax was laid upon the brick-fields, which in Babylonia were economically of considerable importance, and there was an octroi duty upon all goods, cattle, and country produce which entered a town. Similar tolls were exacted from the ships which moored at the quays, as well as from those who made use of the pontoon-bridges which spanned the Euphrates or passed under them in boats.

Long lists of officials have been preserved. Certain of the governors or satraps were allowed to share with the King the privilege of giving a name to the year. It was an ingenious system of reckoning time which had been in use in Assyria from an early period and was introduced into Cappadocia by Assyrian colonists. From Asia Minor it probably spread to Greece; at all events, the eponymous archons at Athens, after whom the several years were named, corresponded exactly with the Assyrian limmi or eponyms. Each year in succession received its name from the eponym or officer who held office during the course of it, and as lists of these officers were carefully handed down it was easy to determine the date of an event which had taken place in the year of office of a given eponym. The system was of Assyrian invention and never prevailed in Babylonia. There time was dated by the chief occurrences of a king's reign, and at the end of the reign a list of them was drawn up beginning with his accession to the throne and ending with his death and the name of his successor. These lists went back to an early period of Babylonian history and provided the future historian with an accurate chronology.

Immediately attached to the person of the Assyrian monarch was the Rab-saki, “the chief of the princes,” or vizier. He is called the Rab-shakeh in the Old Testament, by the side of whom stood the Rab-saris, the Assyrian Rab-sa-risi, or “chief of the heads” of departments. They were both civil officers. The army was under the command of the Tartannu, or “Commander-in-Chief,” the Biblical Tartan, who, in the absence of the King, led the troops to battle and conducted a campaign. When Shalmaneser II., for example, became too old to take the field himself, his armies were led by the Tartan Daian-Assur, and under the second Assyrian empire the Tartan appears frequently, sometimes in command of a portion of the forces, while the King is employing the rest elsewhere, sometimes in place of the King, who prefers to remain at home. In earlier days there had been two Tartans, one of whom stood on the right hand side of the King and the other on his left. In order of precedence both of them were regarded as of higher rank than the Rab-shakeh.

The army was divided into companies of a thousand, a hundred, fifty, and ten, and we hear of captains of fifty and captains of ten. Under Tiglath-pileser III. and his successors it became an irresistible engine of attack. No pains were spared to make it as effective as possible; its discipline was raised to the highest pitch of perfection, and its arms and accoutrements constantly underwent improvements. As long as a supply of men lasted, no enemy could stand against it, and the great military empire of Nineveh was safe.

It contained cavalry as well as foot-soldiers. The cavalry had grown out of a corps of chariot-drivers, which was retained, though shrunken in size and importance, long after the more serviceable horsemen had taken its place. The chariot held a driver and a warrior. When the latter was the King he was accompanied by one or two armed attendants. They all rode standing and carried bows and spears. The chariot itself ran upon two wheels, a pair of horses being harnessed to its pole. Another horse was often attached to it in case of accidents.

The chariots were of little good when the fighting had to be done in a mountainous country. In the level parts of Western Asia, where good roads had existed for untold centuries, they were a powerful arm of offence, but the Assyrians were constantly called upon to attack the tribes of the Kurdish and Armenian mountains who harassed their positions, and in such trackless districts the chariots were an incumbrance and not a help. Trees had to be cut down and rocks removed in order to make roads along which they might pass. The Assyrian engineers indeed were skilled in the construction of roads of the kind, and the inscriptions not infrequently boast of their success in carrying them through the most inaccessible regions, but the necessity for making them suitable for the passage of chariots was a serious drawback, and we hear at times how the wheels of the cars had to be taken off and the chariots conveyed on the backs of mules or horses. It was not wonderful, therefore, that the Assyrian kings, who were practical military men, soon saw the advantage of imitating the custom of the northern and eastern mountaineers, who used the horse for riding purposes rather than for drawing a chariot. The chariot continued to be employed in the Assyrian army, but rather as a luxury than as an effective instrument of war.

At first the cavalry were little more than mounted horsemen. Their only weapons were the bow and arrow, and they rode without saddles and with bare legs. At a later period part of the cavalry was armed with spears, saddles were introduced, and the groom who had run by the side of the horse disappeared. At the same time, under Tiglath-pileser III., the rider's legs were protected by leathern drawers over which high boots were drawn, laced in front. This was an importation from the north, and it is possible that many of the horsemen were brought from the same quarter. Sennacherib still further improved the dress by adding to it a closely fitting coat of mail.

The infantry outnumbered the cavalry by about ten to one, and were divided into heavy-armed and light-armed. Their usual dress, at all events, up to the foundation of the second Assyrian empire, consisted of a peaked helmet and a tunic which descended half-way down the thighs, and was fastened round the waist by a girdle. From the reign of Sargon onward they were divided into two bodies, one of archers, the other of spearmen, the archers being partly light-armed and partly heavy-armed. The heavy-armed were again divided into two classes, one of them wearing sandals and a coat-of-mail over the tunic, while the other was dressed in a long, fringed robe reaching to the feet, over which a cuirass was worn. They also carried a short sword, and had sandals of the same shape as those used by the other class. Each had an attendant waiting upon him with a long, rectangular shield of wicker-work, covered with leather. The light-armed archers were encumbered with but little clothing, consisting only of a kilt and a fillet round the head. The spearmen, on the contrary, were protected by a crested helmet and circular shield, though their legs and face were usually bare.

Changes were introduced by Sennacherib, who abolished the inconveniently long robe of the second class of heavy-armed archers, and gave them leather greaves and boots. The first class, on the other hand, are now generally represented without sandals, and with an embroidered turban with lappets on the head. Sennacherib also established a corps of slingers, who were clad in helmet and breastplate, leather drawers, and short boots, as well as a company of pioneers, armed with double-headed axes, and clothed with conical helmets, greaves, and boots. These pioneers were especially needed for engineering the way through the pathless defiles and rugged ground over which the extension of the empire more and more required the Assyrian army to make its way.

The heads of the spears and arrows were of metal, usually of bronze, more rarely of iron. The helmets also were of bronze or iron, a leather cap being worn underneath them, and the coats-of-mail were formed of bronze scales sewn to a leather shirt. Many of the shields, moreover, were of metal, though wicker-work covered with leather seems to have been preferred. Battering-rams and other engines for attacking a city were carried on the march.

Baggage wagons were also carried, as well as standards and tents. The tents of the officers were divided into two partitions, one of which was used as a dining-room, while the royal tent was accompanied by a kitchen. Tables, chairs, couches, and various utensils formed part of its furniture. One of these chairs was a sort of palanquin in the shape of an arm-chair with a footstool, which was borne on the shoulders of attendants.

The Assyrian army was originally recruited from the native peasantry, who returned to their fields at the end of a campaign with the spoil that had been taken from the enemy. Under the second Assyrian empire, however, it became a standing army, a part of which was composed of mercenaries, while another part consisted of troops drafted from the conquered populations. Certain of the soldiers were selected to serve as the body-guard of the King; they had a commander of their own and doubtless possessed special privileges. The army was recruited by conscription, the obligation to serve in it being part of the burdens which had to be borne by the peasantry. They could be relieved of it by the special favor of the government just as they could be relieved of the necessity of paying taxes.

The Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors was modelled on that of the Assyrians. We can gather from the receipts for the provisions and accoutrements furnished to it how the army of Tiglath-pileser or Sennacherib must have been fed and paid. Thus in the first year of Nabonidos, 75 qas of flour and 63 qas (nearly 100 quarts) of beer were provided for the troops in the camp near Sippara, and in the second year of the same King 54 qas of beer were sent on the 29th of Nisan for “the soldiers who had marched from Babylon.” Similarly in the tenth year of the same reign we have a receipt for the despatch of 116 qas of food on the 14th of Iyyar for “the troops which had marched [to Sippara] from Babylon,” as well as for 18 qas of “provisions” provided each day for the same purpose from the 15th to the 18th of the same month. In the first year of Nabonidos 3 gur of sesame had been ordered for the archers during the first two months of the year, and as in his thirteenth year 5 gur of wheat were provided for fifteen soldiers, we may calculate that rather more than two and one-half bushels were allotted to each man. It may be added that at the beginning of Nebuchadnezzar's reign we find a contractor guaranteeing “the excellence of the beer” that had been furnished for the “army that had entered Babylon,” though it is possible that here artisans rather than soldiers are meant.