BOOKS OF 5000 YEARS AGO

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16965, 29 March 1917, Page 8

BOOKS OF 5000 YEARS AGO

EXCAVATIONS IN MESOPOTAMIA]* VALLEY. Meu, and, perhaps, women, too, wore writing books 5000 years ago. In time wo may know if any of these little baked and unbaked tablet-tomes rescued from the dirt above pre-Biblical cities in the Mesopotamian Valley were "best sellsrs," so great and so complete is becoming the knowlodge of antiquity.that scientific excavators and scholars are wresting from the soil there.

Yale University has found (says the Now York Sun) in its Babylonian collection tho only dialogue that, as far as is known, has been unearthed in ancient Babylonia. It was, apparently, written to entertain, perhaps to amuse. As much of it as can be deciphered' appears to be a conversation between father and son, and is intimate, familiar even, to our ears, so little change hns there actually been in civilisation these 5000 or more years. Babylonian and Sumerian-Akkadian gentlemen and ladies bought such clay " books " j read them, discussed them, let us hope, and then laid them on the shelves of their libraries. Slaves dusted them. Wo conjure up a picture of culture and domesticity in 3000 B.C.—a picture that was destroyed and buried by the elements, and of which men have been striving with pick and shovel since 1820 to reclaim evidences.

For a number of years Yale University had on exhibition in its old library building several large Assyrian slabs of bas relief and bricks, to which were added from time to time tablets and other antiquities that had been dug up by wandering Arabs and sold to dealers in Bagdad, from whom Yale purchased them. To-day the collection has grown to comprise about 8000 Sumerian and Semitic Babylonian or Akkadian inscriptions dating from the earliest period known in history down to the second century before Christ. The deciphering that is being pushed forward indicates the importance of the collection, and the tablet interpretations published are of interests to the general public in their documentaTy testimony to the unchangeableness of civilisation. Dictionaries were found in every well regulated Babylonian household. The library of tho Palace of Ashurbanipal—that last restorer of the tenrole of Bel or Entil at Nippur and the Babylonian King Evilmerodach, who is mentioned in -Jeremiah lii, 31, and in II Kings xxv, 27—when unearthed through excavations covering years yielded many syllabaries or dictionaries registering the meanings of the old cuneiform signs, thereby enabling scholars to make rapid advance in the deciphering of ancient tablets.

Yalo has recorded a remarkable syllabary in its collection. It is "written in two columns on both sides of a tablet, and each column is divided ur> into four columns. It contains 321 lines and more than 100 signs. The first column in each division of four gives the Sumerian word or meaning, the second the sign to be interpreted or explained, the third the name of the sign, and the fourth the Semitic Babylonian or Akkadian value corresponding 'to th'e Sumerian in the first column. Each time the sign is used it is repeated, but the name of the sign is given only once, and after that ditto marks—our own little old ditto marks, are used. Babylonians writing to their friends or creditors on tho other side of the river and "in the'next "county" had only to take down this precious book from the shelf in order to know how to spell and to be grammatical in their neighbours' tongues. Innumerable copies of it must have been in existence, for the ancient Babylonians were a thorough and efficient race. Witness their achievements in irrigation and other engineering feats. Inpumerable copies were undoubtedly in the libraries of temples and palaces to which men and women went for reading and reference; and surely there was a circulating dictionary, not say dictionaries. So advanced in civilisation were these old pre-Biblical people, so intelligent and intellectual, that one feels confident that there must have been a circulating library, and that any poor fellow could take "out a spelling book for seven days or two weeks. Yale's specimen, while similar to other syllabaries unearthed, " contains a number of hitherto unknown signs, with their values," and corrects "several which have been imperfectly transcribed. But of special importance are the several hundred new values in Sumerian and Babylonian, not to mention names of the signs, about three score of which are new." It is known that the Babylonian man did not step through a curtained doorway ahead of a woman, or snatch down the syllabary to dun his Sumerian brother when she wanted it to heln her to write a bit of gossip to her best friend in Babel. Chivalry to women—politeness, i-J you will —goes back a long, long way. Its antiquity is demonstrated anew in' the code that -preceded the code of Hammurabi, anil which has now turned up in the Yalo co 1 lection.

The deciphering of the code of Hammurabi about two years ago was very gratifying to scholars, -who were well aware that the good and iust lawgiver based his list on laws that were then existent. That their nrototype is the stone in the Yale collection purporting to be the Snmerian laws of Nisaba, a goddess, and Khani, a «od, is determined from the fact that two of its laws are found condensed into one law on Hammurabi's code.

To the modern interest, the most important thing .about this' find is the placing of the female name first. It is done punctiliously; one would sav with studied effect, as became an elegant people. As for the rest, the laws are written in Sumerian, the language of Southern Babylonia- before the conquest of the Semites or Akkadians in the time of Hammurabi. There have been found in other collections at various times manifestations ' of the courtesy of men to women in these ages. On business documents and contracts her name appears first. She worked side by side with him in the temple, as scribe, thus showing that her education was equal to his, and she received the same wage for the same work, as shown by the time lists arid bookkeeping accounts in the temple archives; but the names of the women invariably appear first in these records.

Perhaps the most -valuable piece of the co'loction is the cylinder of Nabonidos, King of Babylonia (555-538 8.C.), in which he dedicates his daughter, who is the sister of Belshazzar, as <a votary. In Babylon and the land of Shumer were many religious houses to which women went, consecrating their lives to the worship of gods. Excavations which have revealed and restored the outlines of the quarters of hese orders with their sleeping cells, their temples,, and sacrificial altars, are not the least interesting of all the old buildings that have been dug up. Belshazzar is made very real by the finds of late years, and in the Tale collection is a small, unbaked clay tablet containing the inscription of a dream concerning him and his father, Nabonidos: — "In the month of Tebet, day 15th, year 7th of Nabonidos. King of Babylon, Shumukin says as follows:—I saw"the great star Venus, Kaksidi the moon, and the sun in my dream; it means favour for Nabonidus, King of Babylon, my lord, and favour for Belshazzar, the son" of. the King, my lord; may my ear attend to them," etc. Still another tablet here, bnt one not so complete, refers to Belshazzar as an important official, a man of worth before his father was made King. We are reminded that boring into the earth for history did not begin with what we are pleased to call our civilisation, and that old Nabonidos himself delighted in upturning the ruins of "ancient" temples during his reign, thereby bringing to light data that gratified his splendid mind and helped present-day archeology, since he recorded his discoveries on tablets and columns, and thus preserved invaluable information about history prior to his, time.

"Nabonidos," says Dr Clay, "knew more about Babylonian chronology than modern scholars." To him we ara in-

debted for fixing the date of Narem-Sin. the son of Sargon of Agadc, who livod, he declared, 3200 years before his time—that is, about 3750 *b.c. It had been thought that Sargon I and Narem-Sin lived at least 10C0 years later than that; but Dr If- V. Hilprecht verified the record of Nabonidos by further excavations in Nippur, beginning in 1889 with the University of Pennsylvania Museum expeditions there.

All this research on tho banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates is, after all, most important to moderns when light is thrown more definitely and fully on Old Testament history through pro-biblical chronology and discoveries. A reading of the fourth law of the code of Nisaba, and Khani, spoken of above, and an interpretation of it by Dr Clay arrests attention because ho says:—"The fourth law is of special interest in connection with the parable of the prodigal son, inasmuch as it shows that it is based on legjj grounds."

Tims tho law:—"lf (a son) say unto his father and his mother, 'Not my father, not my mother,' from the house, field, plantation, servants, property, animals, he shall go forth; and his portion, to its full amount, he (tho father) shall give him. His father and his mother shall say to him 'Not our son,' from tho neighbourhood of the house he shall go." As to its application to the parable of the prodigal son, Dr Clay says: "The law legislates with reference to a son who, desiring to venture upon a separate career, renounces his sonship, receives his wages or portion, after which he leaves his home and is thereafter legally separated from his family. It is not stated what the portion is. The Code of Hammurabi, in providing for an adopted child which the foster father desired to repudiate, requires that 'he give him of his goods'one- 1 hird of the portion of a son, and he shall go. He shall not give to him of field, garden, or house.' This implies that the portion differed from that which the law of inheritance would have granted him. The legal banishment contained in the words of the law 'thou are not our son/ etc., was prudential in character. The son had no further claim upon the estate. As a son he was legally dead. This provision annulled the law, which provided a share for him after the death of the father. It also protected the parents from further demands, and was a wise provision in the interest of the other children, who were the sole heirs. "The son in the parable does not make a request, but rather a demand: 'Father, give me ithe portion of substance that falleth to me'; and after he received it 'he gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.' In his extremity, knowing that he was legally dead as a son, he could at least ask to be taken in as a hired servant.

"His brother, the sole beneficiary of the estate, who is generally unjustly condemned, naturally showed anxiety as to what his father intended doing. Whereupon his father reminded him of the fact that all'lie had was his, but at the same time ne told him that it was meet to rejoice over the return of his brother, -who, though legally dead, was still his son. "This legal aspect of the parable does not seem to have been even surmised by the commentators. It heightens the contrast between the father, who/ on the one hand, complied with what the law permitted the son to demand, and on the other the forgiving father, who rejoiced over his return, not as a legal heir, but as a real son."

Among the Yale tablets, as in other collections, the finding of an absolutely new fact is rare; but verifications of manners and customs already suspected or halfrevealed by previous 'finds have cropped out m records that are virtually intact. Thus it would appear that the Babylonians had a. kind of Sabbath:

In a large archive of temple documents in the Yale collection, discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Erech, there is found a srrourj of 23 tablets containing monthly receipts of animals, -which were apparently intended for the temple service. Nearly all the tablets are baked, and are more or less perfect. They are dated the fifth year of Cyrus (534 b.c) and the sixth year of Cambyses (523 b.0.) 5 in- , elusive. The general character of tlio contents is quite similar. "The important feature of theso lists is the note following certain days' of the month—the 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th days, in some instances, however, one day earlier, which reads :—' One young kid, an offering,' or simply.'one offering.' " These tablets .-with these interesting phenomena .furnish the first actual observance of anything that suggests the existence of a parallel to the Sabbath in Babylonia ; and yet, as is well known, some scholars hold that the Hebrew Sabbath had its origin in Babylonia. " There were those in the ancient Jewish Church, and there are those who maintain at the present that the Sabbath originally belonged to tlie lunar month, instead of occurring, as it now does, in a succession of seven days, or at the end of the week, for the Sabbaths and new moons frequently coincide., One. is impressed with this view _ when this new find is taken into consideration, or when hcreflects how the entire system of. feasts, new moons, and Sababths, and solemn assemblies were coupled with the lunar month, ' arid the way the new moon and the Sabbath' are frequently mentioned together."