The Historians' History of the World 01 [Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia]

Cities have been, and vanished; fanes have sunk,

Heaped into shapeless ruin; sands o’erspread

Fields that were Edens; millions too have shrunk

To a few starving hundreds, or have fled

From off the page of being. Now the dead

Are the sole habitants of Babylon;

Kings, at whose bidding nations toiled and bled,

Heroes, who many a field of carnage won,

Their names—their boasted names to utter death are done.—James Gates Percival.

It should be explained here at the very beginning that in speaking of the Mesopotamian civilisation as a unit, we are adopting for the sake of convenience a form of expression that is not historically accurate. Even the word “Mesopotamia” cannot be justified on strict analysis. The word is from the Greek, and means, literally, “between the rivers,” an obvious reference to the fact that the important portion of the territory in question lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The word was used by the Greeks in indiscriminate application to Babylonia and Assyria, and its extreme convenience as a generic term has led to its retention in lieu of a better one; yet, as has been said, it cannot be applied with strict accuracy unless its etymological significance be quite overlooked; for, curiously enough, neither Babylon nor Nineveh was wholly situated in the territory which the Greek word describes. Babylon lay partly on the western shore of the Euphrates river, and Nineveh was situated on the eastern shore of the Tigris. But in common usage, as so often happens, the exact implication of the word “Mesopotamia” has been overlooked, and the word itself has come to be applied to the entire region of Babylonia and Assyria. In this sense, rather than in the more restricted one, we shall find it convenient as a substitute for the more cumbersome appellation, Babylonia-Assyria.

It has already been pointed out that we have to do with different races of people in dealing with Mesopotamian history. After a long dispute, carried on chiefly by philologists, it is now generally conceded that the earliest civilisation of southern Babylonia was due to a non-Semitic people, the Sumerians.[16] To this people, it would seem, must be ascribed the honour of developing the chief features of Mesopotamian civilisation, including the invention of the cuneiform system of writing. It is not at all clear at precisely what time the Semitic people, destined ultimately to become predominant in this region, made their appearance. Nor is the place of Semitic origin agreed upon among students of the subject. Some authors,[17] as Von Kremer, Guidi, and Hommel, hold that Babylonia was itself originally the cradle of the race. Others, including Sprenger, Sayce, Schrader, De Goeje, Wright, and Barton, contend that the Semites invaded Babylonia from Arabia. Yet others, including Palgrave, Gerland, Bertin, Brinton, Nöldeke, Jastrow, Keane, and Schmidt, hold to the African origin; while a modification of these views advocated by Wiedemann, De Morgan, and Erman supposes that both the Semites and Hamites rose in Arabia, and had their common civilisation before the Hamites went to Africa. Confronted with such conflict of opinions, the historian must be content to regard the exact antecedents of the Semites, previous to their appearance in Babylonia, as quite unknown.

As to the date of the beginnings of Semitic civilisation in Mesopotamia, Dr. John P. Peters, making use of Ainsworth’s estimates as to the amount and rate of alluvial deposit at the head of the Persian Gulf, computes that the seacoast must have been established this side of the site of the city of Ur about 6600 B.C., which date must, therefore, represent the earliest possible period for the foundation of that city. Ur was apparently the most southerly city of old Babylonia, and Nippur apparently the most northerly. Dr. Peters’ excavations at Nippur lead him to base its foundation at some period previous to 6000 B.C., and possibly previous to 7000 B.C.a He sums up his theory as follows:

“My suggestion, from the various facts here marshalled, would be that the original home of civilisation in Babylonia was the strip of land from Nippur southward to the neighbourhood of Ur, and not, as has sometimes been argued, the region about Babylonia and northward to Sippara; while the latter region is in itself older, it does not seem to have been older as the home of civilised man.

“The ancestors of the civilisation of Babylonia seem to have come from the region between Nippur and what was then the coast of the Persian Gulf. This would accord also with the tradition preserved to us in later sources that civilisation came to Babylonia out of the Persian Gulf. Possibly Eridu, on the Arabian plateau near the western shore and not far from the head of what was then the Persian Gulf, may represent the oldest seat of that civilisation. However that may be, at a very early period Nippur became the centre of civilisation and religion, being founded at a time when everything below Ur probably was still under water. As early as the close, if not the beginning, of the seventh millennium B.C., this strip of land at the head of the then Persian Gulf seems to have been the home of the civilised men, and from here civilisation spread northward.”f

THE LAND

The land of the Euphrates and Tigris lies between the Iranian country on the east and the Syrio-Arabian district on the west, from the chain of mountains of the Zagros to the rocky heights of the Lebanon and the Syrian desert. From the mountains of Armenia, in which both rivers have their source, the land gradually declines to the plain, extending from the point of their union to where they fall into the Persian Gulf.

The upper-river beds, winding through a high-lying, sometimes fertile steppe country, are surrounded by heights, where plane and cypress groves alternate with green meads and a rich growth of many-coloured flowers and plants.

As the land grows flatter, these valleys widen to fertile pastures on the river-banks, whilst the wide central plain grows more and more bare and treeless, until it ends at last in a desert trodden only by a few wandering shepherds with their flocks, and full of ostriches, bustards, and wild game. This is known as the between-river (Mesopotamia) district, which extends into a wide plain of rich brown soil, about a hundred miles above the mouth, where the two rivers approach most nearly, and the banks touch the so-called Median wall.