Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

A register of the soldiers was kept, but it would seem that those who were in charge of it sometimes forgot to strike off the names of those who were dead or discharged, and pocketed their pay. At any rate, the following official document has come down to us:—“(The names) of the deserters and dead soldiers which have been overlooked in the paymaster's account, the 8th day of Nisan, the eighth year of Cyrus, king of Babylon and of the world: Samas-akhi-iddin, son of Samas-ana-bitisu, deserted; Muse-zib-Samas, son of the Usian, ditto; Itti-Samas-eneya junior, of the family of Samas-kin-abli, ditto; Itti-Samas-baladhu, son of Samas-erba ditto; Taddannu, son of Rimut, ditto; Samas-yuballidh, his brother, ditto; Kalbâ, son of Samas-kin-abli, son of the painter(?), ditto; in all seven deserters. Libludh, son of Samas-edher, dead; Nebo-tuktê-tirri, ditto; Samas-mupakhkhiranni, ditto; Samas-akhi-erba, son of Samas-ana-bitisu, ditto; in all four dead. Altogether eleven soldiers who have deserted or are dead.”

If Babylonia copied Assyria in military arrangements, the converse was the case as regards a fleet. “The cry of the Chaldeans,” according to the Old Testament, was “in their ships,” and in the earliest age of Babylonian history, Eridu, which then stood on the sea-coast, was already a sea-port. But Assyria was too far distant from the sea for its inhabitants to become sailors, and the rapid current of the Tigris made even river navigation difficult. In fact, the rafts on which the heavy monuments were transported, and which could float only down stream, or the small, round boats, resembling the kufas that are still in use, were almost the only means employed for crossing the water. When the Assyrian army had to pass a river, either pontoons were thrown across it, or the soldiers swam across the streams with the help of inflated skins. The kufa was made of rushes daubed with bitumen, and sometimes covered with a skin.

So little accustomed were the Assyrians to navigation that, when Sennacherib determined to pursue the followers of Merodach-baladan across the Persian Gulf to the coast of Elam, he was obliged to have recourse to the Phœnician boat-builders and sailors. Two fleets were built for him by Phœnician and Syrian workmen, one at Tel-Barsip, near Carchemish, on the Euphrates, the other at Nineveh on the Tigris; these he manned with Syrian, Sidonian, and Ionian sailors, and after pouring out a libation to Ea, the god of the sea, set sail from the mouth of the Euphrates. It was probably for the support of this fleet that the 20 talents (£10,800) annually levied on the district of Assur were intended. The Phœnician ships employed by the Assyrians were biremes, with two tiers of oars.

Of the Babylonian fleet we know but little. It does not seem to have taken part in the defence of the country at the time of the invasion of Cyrus. But the sailors who manned it were furnished with food, like the soldiers of the army, from the royal storehouse or granary. Thus in the sixteenth year of Nabonidos we have a memorandum to the effect that 210 qas of dates were sent from the storehouse in the month Tammuz “for the maintenance of the sailors.” The King also kept a state-barge on the Euphrates, like the dahabias of Egypt. In the twenty-fourth year of Darius, for instance, a new barge was made for the monarch, two contractors undertaking to work upon it from the beginning of Iyyar, or April, to the end of Tisri, or September, and to use in its construction a particular kind of wood.

While we hear but little about the fleet, cargo and ferry-boats are frequently mentioned in letters and contracts. Reference has already been made to the shekel and a quarter paid by the agent of Belshazzar for the hire of a boat which conveyed three oxen and twenty-four sheep to the temple of the Sun-god at Sippara, in order that they might be sacrificed at the festival of the new year. Sixty qas of dates were at the same time given to the boatmen. In the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, 3 shekels were paid for the hire of a grain-boat, and in the thirty-sixth year of the same King 4½ shekels were given for the hire of another boat for the transport of wool.

Some documents translated by Mr. Pinches throw light on the building and cost of the ships. One of them is as follows: “A ship of six by the cubit beam, twenty by the cubit the seat of its waters, which Nebo-baladan, the son of Labasi, the son of Nur-Papsukal, has sold to Sirikki, the son of Iddinâ, the son of Egibi, for four manehs, ten shekels of silver, in one-shekel pieces, which are not standard, and are in the shape of a bird's tail (?). Nebo-baladan takes the responsibility for the management (?) of the ship. Nebo-baladan has received the money, four manehs ten shekels of white (silver), the price of his ship, from the hands of Sirikki.” The contract, which was signed by six witnesses, one of whom was “the King's captain,” was dated at Babylon in the twenty-sixth year of Darius. Another contract relates to one of the boats of the pontoon-bridge which ran across the Euphrates and connected the two parts of Babylon together: “[Two] manehs ten shekels of white (silver), coined in one-shekel pieces, not standard, from Musezib, the son of Pisaram, to Sisku, the son of Iddinâ, the son of Egibi. Musezibtum and Narum, his female slaves—the wrist of Musezibtum is tattooed with the name of Iddinâ, the father of Sisku, and the wrist of Narum is tattooed with the name of Sisku—are the security of Musezib. There is no hire paid for the slaves or interest on the money. Another possessor shall not have power over them until Musezib receives the money, two manehs ten shekels of white silver, in one-shekel pieces. Sisku, the son of Iddinâ, takes the responsibility for the non-escape of Musezibtum and Narum. The day when Musezibtum and Narum go elsewhere Sisku shall pay Musezib half a measure of grain a day by way of hire. The money, which is for a ship for the bridge, has been given to Sisku.” This contract is also dated in the twenty-sixth year of Darius.

A letter written in the time of Khammurabi, or Amraphel, throws some light on the profits that were made by conveying passengers. There were ships which conveyed foreign merchants to Babylon if they were furnished with passports allowing them to travel and trade in the dominions of the Babylonian King. They took their goods and commodities along with them; on one occasion, we are told, the boat in which some of them travelled had been used for the conveyance of 10 talents of lead. It must, therefore, have been of considerable size and draught.

That the army and navy should have been recruited from abroad was in accordance with that spirit of liberality toward the foreigner which had distinguished the Babylonians from an early period. It was partly due to the mixed character of the race, partly to the early foundation of an empire which embraced the greater portion of Western Asia, partly, and more especially, to the commercial instincts of the people. We find among them none of that jealous exclusiveness which characterized most of the nations of antiquity. They were ready to receive into their midst both the foreigner and his gods. Among Assyrian and Babylonian officials we meet with many who bear foreign names, and among the gods whose statues found a place in the national temples of Assyria were Khaldis of Armenia, and the divinities of the Bedâwin. The policy of deporting a conquered nation was dictated by the same readiness to admit the stranger to the rights and privileges of a home-born native. The restrictions placed upon Babylonian and Assyrian citizenship seem to have been but slight.

When Abraham was born at Ur of the Chaldees, Babylonia was governed by a dynasty of South Arabian origin whose names had to be translated into the Babylonian language. Throughout the country there were colonies of “Amorites,” from Syria and Canaan, doubtless established there for the purposes of trade, who enjoyed the same rights as the native Babylonians. They could hold and bequeath land and other property, could buy and sell freely, could act as witnesses in a case where natives alone were concerned, and could claim the full protection of Babylonian law.

One of these colonies, known as “the district of the Amorites,” was just outside the walls of Sippara. In the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi, a dispute arose about the title to some land included within it, and the matter was tried before the four royal judges. The following record of the judgment was drawn up by the clerk of the court: “Twenty acres by thirteen of land in the district of the Amorites which was purchased by Ibni-Hadad, the merchant. Arad-Sin, the son of Edirum, has pleaded as follows before the judges: The building land, along with the house of my father, he did not buy; Ibku-Anunit and Dhab-Istar, the sons of Samas-nazir, sold (it) for money to Ibni-Hadad, the merchant. Iddatum and Mazitum, the sons of Ibni-Hadad the merchant, appeared before the judges; they lifted up (their hands) and swore that it had been put up for sale; it had been bought by Edirum and Sin-nadni-sû who handed it over to Samas-nazir and Ibku-Anunit, selling it to them for money. The estate, consisting of twenty-two acres of land enclosed by thirty other acres, as well as eleven trees [and] a house, in the district of the Amorites, bounded at the upper end by the estate of –, and at the lower end by the river Bukai (?), is contracted in width, and is of the aforesaid nature. Judgment has been given for Arad-Sin, the son of Edirum, as follows: At the entrance to Sippara the property is situated (?), and after being put up for sale was bought by Samas-nazir and Ibku-Anunit, to whom it was handed over; power of redemption is allowed (?) to Arad-Sin; the estate is there, let him take it. Before Uruki-mansum the judge, Sin-ismeani the judge, Ibku-Anunit the judge, and Ibku-ilisu the judge. The 6th day of the month Tammuz, the year when Ammi-zadok the king constructed the very great aqueduct (?) for the mountain and its fountain (?) for the house of Life.”

If we may argue from the names, Arad-Sin, who brought the action, was of Babylonian descent; and in this case native Babylonians as well as foreigners could hold land in the district in which the Amorites had settled. At any rate, in the eyes of the law, the native and the foreign settler must have been upon an equal footing; they were tried before the same judges, and the law which applied to the one applied equally to the other. It is clear, moreover, that the foreigner had as much right as the native to buy, sell, or bequeath the soil of Babylonia.

Whether or not this right was restricted to particular districts, we do not know. In Syria, in later days, “streets,” or rows of shops in a city, could be assigned to the members of another nationality by special treaty, as we learn from I Kings xx. 34, and at the end of the Egyptian eighteenth dynasty we hear of a quarter at Memphis being given to a colony of Hittite merchants, but such special assignments of land may not have been the custom in ancient Chaldea. The Amorites of Canaan may have been allowed to settle wherever they liked, and the origin of the title “district of the Amorites” may have simply been due to the tendency of foreign settlers to establish themselves in the same locality. The fact that Arad-Sin seems to have been a Babylonian, and that his action was brought before Babylonian judges, is in favor of the view that such was the case.

Moreover, as Mr. Pinches has pointed out, Amorites could rise to the highest offices of state. Not only could they serve as witnesses to a deed, to which all the other parties were native Babylonians, they could also hold civil and military appointments. On the one hand we find the son of Abi-ramu, or Abram, who is described as “the father of the Amorite,” acting as a witness to a contract dated in the reign of the grandfather of Khammurabi, or Amraphel; on the other hand, “an Amorite” has the same title of “servant” of the King as the royal judge Ibku-Anunit, and among the Assyrians of the second empire, who were slavish imitators of Babylonian custom and law, we meet with more than one example of a foreigner in the service of the Assyrian government. Thus, in the reign of Sargon, thirteen years after the fall of Samaria, the Israelites, Pekah and Nadabiah, who appear as witnesses to the sale of some slaves, are described, the one as “the governor of the city,” the other as a departmental secretary. The founder, again, of one of the leading commercial families at Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar and his successors is entitled “the Egyptian,” and the clerk who draws up a contract in the first year of Cambyses is the grandson of a Jew, Bel-Yahu, “Bel is Yahveh,” while his father's name, Ae-nahid, “Ae is exalted,” implies that the Israelitish Yahveh had been identified with the Babylonian Ae. Hebrew and Canaanite names appear in legal and commercial documents of the age of Khammurabi and earlier by the side of names of purely native stamp; Jacob-el and Joseph-el, for instance, Abdiel and Ishmael, come before us with all the rights and privileges of Babylonian citizens. The name of Ishmael, indeed, is already met with on a marble slab from Sippara, which is as early as about 4,000 B.C. In the time of Sargon of Akkad the Babylonian “governor” of Syria and Canaan bears the Canaanitish name of Uru-Malik, or Urimelech, and under the later Assyrian empire, the “tartan” of Comagene, with the Hittite name of Mar-lara, was an eponym, who gave his name to the year.

Mr. Pinches is probably right in seeing the name “Israel” itself in that of a high-priest who lived in the district of the Amorites outside Sippara in the reign of Ammi-zadok. His name is written Sar-ilu, and it was by his order that nine acres of ground “in the district of the Amorites” were leased for a year from two nuns, who were devotees of the Sun-god, and their nieces. Six measures of grain on every ten acres were to be paid to the Sun-god at the gate of Malgia, the women themselves receiving a shekel of silver as rent, and the field was to be handed back to them at harvest-time, the end of the agricultural year. That the women in the Amorite settlements enjoyed the same freedom and powers as the women of Babylonia is shown by two documents, one dated in the reign of the second King of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged, the other in the reign of Khammurabi's great-grandfather. In the first, Kuryatum, the daughter of an Amorite, receives a field of more than four acres of which she had been wrongfully deprived; in the second, the same Kuryatum and her brother Sumu-rah are sued by the three children of an Amorite, one of whom is a woman, for the recovery of a field, house, slaves, and date-palms. The case was brought before “the judges of Bit-Samas,” “the Temple of the (Babylonian) Sun-god,” who rejected the claim.

At a very early period of Babylonian history the Syrian god Hadad, or Rimmon, had been, as it were, domesticated in Babylonia, where he was known as Amurru, “the Amorite.” He had come with the Amorite merchants and settlers, and was naturally their patron-deity. His wife, Asratu, or Asherah, was called, by the Sumerians, Nin-Marki, “the mistress of the Amorite land,” and was identified with their own Gubarra. Nin-Marki, or Asherah, presided over the Syrian settlements, the part of the city where the foreigners resided being under her protection like the gate which led to “the district of the Amorites” beyond the walls. The following lawsuit which came before the courts in the reign of Khammurabi shows that there were special judges for cases in which Amorites were concerned and that they sat at “the gate of Nin-Marki.” “Concerning the garden of Sin-magir which Nahid-Amurri bought for money. Ilu-bani claimed it for the royal stables, and accordingly they went to the judges, and the judges sent them to the gate of Nin-Marki and the judges of the gate of Nin-Marki. In the gate of Nin-Marki Ilu-bani pleaded as follows: I am the son of Sin-magir; he adopted me as his son, and the seal of the document has never been broken. He further pleaded that ever since the reign of the deified Rim-Sin (Arioch) the garden and house had been adjudged to Ilu-bani. Then came Sin-mubalidh and claimed the garden of Ilu-bani, and they went to the judges and the judges pronounced that ‘to us and the elders they have been sent and in the gate of the gods Merodach, Sussa, Nannar, Khusa, and Nin-Marki, the daughter of Merodach, in the judgment-hall, the disputants (?) have stood, and the elders before whom Nahid-Amurri first appeared in the gate of Nin-Marki have heard the declaration of Ilu-bani.’ Accordingly they adjudged the garden and house to Ilu-bani, forbidding Sin-mubalidh to return and claim it. Oaths have been taken in the name of the Moon-god, the Sun-god, Merodach, and Khammurabi, the king. Before Sin-imguranni the president, Edilka-Sin, Amil-izzitim, Ubarrum, Zanbil-arad-Sin, Ak-hiya, Kabdu-gumi, Samas-bani, the son of Abia-rak-has, Zanik-pisu, Izkur-Ea the steward, and Bauila. The seals of the parties are attached. The fourth day of Tammuz, the year when Khammurabi the king offered up prayer to Tasmit.”

While a portion of the land was thus owned by foreigners, there was a considerable part of it which belonged to the temples. Another part consisted of royal domains, the revenue of which went to the privy purse of the King. The King could make grants of this to his favorites, or as a reward for services to the state. The Babylonian King Nebo-baladan, for example, gave one of his officials a field large enough, it was calculated, to be sown with 3 gur of seed, and Assur-bani-pal of Assyria made his vizier, Nebo-sar-uzur, the gift of a considerable estate on account of his loyalty from the time that the King was a boy. All the vizier's lands, including the serfs upon them, were declared free from taxation and every kind of burden, the men upon them were not to be impressed as soldiers, nor the cattle and flocks to be carried away. It was also ordered that Nebo-sar-uzur, on his decease, should be buried where he chose, and not in the common cemetery outside the walls of the city. Like the monarch, he might have his tomb in the royal palace or in his own house, and imprecations were called down on the head of anyone who wished to disturb his final resting-place. The deed of gift and privilege was sealed, we are told, with the King's own “signet-ring.”

A grant of immunity from taxation and other burdens could be made to the inhabitants of a whole district. A deed exists, signed by a large number of witnesses, in which Nebuchadnezzar I. of Babylon (about 1200 B.C.) makes a grant of the kind to the district of Bit-Karziyabku in the mountains of Namri to the east of Babylonia. We read in it that, throughout the whole district, neither the royal messengers nor the governor of Namri shall have any jurisdiction, no horses, foals, mares, asses, oxen, or sheep shall be carried off by the tax-gatherers, no stallions shall be sent to the royal stables, and no taxes of grain and fruit shall be paid to the Babylonian treasury. Nor shall any of the inhabitants be impressed for military service. It speaks volumes for the commercial spirit of the Babylonians that a royal decree of this character should have been thrown into legal form, and that the names of witnesses should have been attached to it, just as if it had been a contract between two private persons. The contrast is striking with the decree issued by the Assyrian King, Assur-bani-pal, to his faithful servant Nebo-sar-uzur. All that was needed where the King of Assyria was concerned was his signet-seal and royal command. But Assur-bani-pal was an autocrat at the head of a military state. The Babylonian sovereign governed a commercial community and owed his authority to the priests of Bel.