BABYLON.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17063, 23 July 1917, Page 8

BABYLON.

I.—THE FIGHT WITH THE DESERT. By W. W. Tabn. Few parts o£ the world have seen more history made than Mesopotamia. True, we no longer believe that civilisation originated on the Euphrates; but a con- ; siderable part of civilisation did. And i though Babylon itself to some extent took over and. spread a civilisation which others had created, it came to typify that civilisation. No other city has ever so imposed itself on the imagination of tho world. For two or three centuries, in Europe, Rome was the city, and the fact coloured all European history for a long time. But for some fifteen centuries, to the world west of China, Babylon was the city; and if this fact led Greek writers to exaggerate its size and splendour, the exaggeration itself bears witness to an old pre-eminence of fame. Even Bagdad in its prime never meant to Asia what Babylon meant. Babylon itself, in one Lense, was as much an Arab city as Bagdad-r—that is to say, each was a product of the mating of men coming from Arabia with a foreign civilisation, Bagdad with the Persian, Babylon with the Sumerian. Arabia has been a great mother of peoples. The country was more fertile in antiquity than at present. There are near Aden huge stone cisterns which to-day there is no water to fill; rivers which orv>\i ran above ground now run, if at underground, beneath their old bfij}; in the time of the Emperor Augjaxus, the gigantic dam of Mariba, one of the wonders of the world, burst, ruining the prosperity of part of Yemen. And Arabia has from time to time sent out swarms of emigrants, peoples nearly akin in blood and of cognate language. History knows of four such swarmings. The . earliest, perhaps long before 4000 8.C., was that of the Semites of Mesopotamia, who ultimately founded Babylon. The second was that of the Amorites (Amurru), who were to raise Babylon to splendour, and whose blood, mixed with indigenous races, was to form the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. The third was that of the Aremeans, whose chief seat was Damascus—"a rose-red city, half as old as time," —and whose blood is to-day mingled with that of the Arabs in Syria. And the fourth was that. of the Arabs of Islam. When the Russian troops were driving the Turks from Kermanshah to the Paitak Pass—the famous "gates of Zagros," where some of the old steps cut in the rock can still be seen, —they passed a cliff with_ a smooth face, covered with writing cut in the stone in curious wedge-shaped letters. This is the famous inscription of Beliistim, carved by order of Darius. King of Persia, which records the acts and conquests of his' reign in three languages, Babylonian, Elamite, and Old Persian, all three written in cuneiforms. This -cliff furnished the key to some 3000 years of Mesopotamian history. Grotefend guessed out the lettering of the Persian version from the proper names; the Persian was ultimately read by the aid of Parsee scholars; with its help Sir Henry Rawlinson and others deciphered the Babylonian. Then the ruined mounds 'of Mesopotamia began to give up their secrets. The plain of Lower Mesopotamia is covered with these mounds, always either along the old channels of the Euphrates or 'branch canals of the Euphrates; the day of the Tigris was not yet, for the swift stream of the Tigris, named after the tiger which in the old legends appears as the swiftest creature on earth, was too much for the early irrigators to cope with.- The Arabs call the mounds Jebel, "mountains '; and every king in every old city, when he built a wall or a palace, boasted that he had raised it "lite a mountain," safe above the swamps and the floods. Cities were ruined and rebuilt on the ruins; each rebuilding raised them higher above water-level, till some of them stood on regular platforms. The destruction worked by the Mogul, and centuries of Turkish misgovernment, have brought Irak back to where it started; only a small part of the land once cultivated is in cultivation now, and civilisation has to begin again in its struggle with the desert and the swamp, as the early Sumerians and Semites began it. Fortunately the Turkish intruder has now been cleared out of the whole of Lower Mesopotamia, where he never had any vestige of right; and civilisation is free to take up again the work begun more than 5000 years ago. How that work appeared to the men of the time can be seen in the Babylonian religion. _ The Sumerians had founded their cities from the coast upward; their sacred city of Eridu (Abu Shahrain) stood on what wa-s then a branch of the Pp.rsia.ri Gulf. The Semites fi;om Arabia, who must have entered Irak by the usual route through Syria, founded theirs more to the north. _ We need not sketch the history of the mingling of the two races, which took > many centuries to accomplish, and was ultimately to produce in Babylon a city whose greatness and culture absorbed that of all the others; we merely wish to point out the ever-present background of the whole, the struggle with swamp, and desert. The gods were gods of the friendly town and the friendly fields of corn; but over against them stood a host of creatures whose home was the desert. These fill the early literature; and, as men drained the swamps they fought also against the demons of the swamps. In the old Persian religion God created the cul. tivated land and the devil created the desert and the scorpions and centipedes of the desert; and much the same contrast obtained in Babylonia. _ Men were beset at every turn by the 'hosts of this evil world"; the six species of demons, things without limbs or faces, who lay in wait on all sides, blowing in with the desert wind and causing fever and the headache that leads to madness; creatures half demon, half human, among them one who as Lillith, appears in the legend as Adam's first wife, and is mentioned even bv Isaiah under the form of the screech-owl, still a bird of ill omen to Arabs; worst' perhaps, of all, the disembodied dead, who, athirst for mischief, swarmed earthward when some accident opened the gates of the Land of No Return." One of the most dreaded demons was a female ghoul who lurked in the cane brakes of the undrained swamps and carried off children. At the head of these creatures were the Seven Spirits of Evil known as Maskim, who inhabited the seven stages of the underworld. Fear is not in them nor awe; Supplication th-ey heed, not nor prayer; For they know no compassion nor law, 1 And are deaf to the cries of despair.* •So runs a verse of the fine "Song of the Seven Maskim," one of the oldest poems in the world. All illness was caused by these demons. One good remedy for fever was to make an image of the fever spirit, and seat it on the sick man's stomach; then the spirit looked out of the sick man's eyes and saw its own foulness, and fled away in terror, so that the man recovered. Another excellent thing to do was to get a wax image of yourself made; then a magician spoke the word of power, and the evil spirit passed from yourself into the image. This was infallible, provided that the . exorciser knew the right word of power ; but as it was difficult to be certain he a-Ways. recited all those that he could riSember; this mac's sure; but it took some time, and you might die before he reached the right one. In the British Museum to-day you can see tablet after tab.et covered with these incantations, as well as images of the fever spirits, which leave little to be desired on the score of ugliness. It must have been a perplexing sort of existence; the literature of Babylonian magic leaves one with the imprepion that there were few acta of life which could safely be performed at any time of any day without giving occasion to some demon to annoy you. The most famous prohibition is that which forbids the king, every seventh day, to eat meat or ride in his chariot.

. Things alter slowly in this world. The ancient water-wheels still turn on the Euphrates; and the Babylonian demon is the direct ancestor of the Jinn, of Arab legend, who are also creatures of the detert, though some of them through time have grown beneficent. The Arabs to-day call a madman "Majunun"—i.e., on© possessed of a Jinn. When Marco Poiu toid his story of the Gobi desert—how the benighted traveller would see a caravan on its way, with flashing lights and tinkling bells, and how, if he were unwise enougli

* From Prof. Xionis Dyer's metrical version.

to join himself to this mirage of tho Jmn, they led him to certain death—he told a story that would have fitted well ■ivith the Babylonian ghouls who decoyed away travellers. But the demons were primarily a Sumerian product; we shall see later that, in Semitic hands, very different religious ideas were to take shape. Tlie whole thing w-as, in Babylonia, essentially an episode in the fight of man against the swamp and the desert, a fight now to be taken up with other weapons. (Per favour of tho secretary of the C&lonial Institute.)