Mesopotamian Archaeology

Transcription

1 Mesopotamian Archaeology Dr. Allan A. MacRae Faith Theological Seminary 2015 John P. MacRae IBRI Syllabi #27 ABSTRACT This is an extract from a series of seminary-level lectures on Old Testament History, going into considerable detail on the archaeology of Mesopotamia as it stood in 1949, when these lectures were given. This syllabus includes a history of the decipherment of the cuneiform languages involved; excavation in Mesopotamia; a history of Mesopotamia as reconstructed; and contacts between Mesopotamian archaeology and the Bible. The editors (DCB and RCN) have attempted to preserve Dr. MacRae's distinctive lecture style and anecdotes while eliminating a good deal of the repetition that occurs in teaching a multi-session course. Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute 1

2 Table of Contents About the Author A. New Light from Mesopotamia. 1. The History of Decipherment of Cuneiform. 2. The History of Excavation. 3. Summary of the History of Excavation. a. Ur of the Chaldees. b. Nuzi. B. Summary of the History of Mesopotamia 1. Prehistory 2. Third Millennium Sumerians Akkadians 3. Second Millennium Hammurabi Mountain people 4. The Assyrian Period 5. The Neo-Babylonian Period 6. The Persian Period C. Contacts of Mesopotamian Archaeology with the Bible. Appendix: Map of Mesopotamia with Excavations. 2

3 About the Author: Dr. Allan A. MacRae studied under the leading Old Testament and archaeological specialists in the United States, Europe, and Palestine: R. A. Torrey at Biola; Robert Dick Wilson and J. Gresham Machen at Princeton Seminary; William F. Albright at the American School of Oriental Research; and E. A. Speiser at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned the A.B., A.M., Th.B, A.M. (in Semitic Philology), and Ph.D. degrees, and studied the ancient languages related to the Bible (including Babylonian Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Arabic and Syriac). Dr. MacRae taught nearly every course of the seminary during the span of a teaching career of six decades. He taught Old Testament at three seminaries: Westminster, Faith and Biblical; and was founding president of the last two of these. His students included Joseph T. Bayly, Arthur F. Glasser, Vernon C. Grounds, R. Laird Harris, Kenneth S. Kantzer, Gordon R. Lewis, Francis A. Schaeffer, and G. Douglas Young. He is author of Nuzi Personal Names, The Gospel of Isaiah, The Prophecies of Daniel, and Biblical Christianity. 3

4 A. New Light from Mesopotamia. I might mention a couple of books which are helpful in connection with the general subject that we are discussing now, that of new light from Mesopotamia and the history contained in the Old Testament. Twenty years ago, there were two books which were the outstanding books in the field for general use. One of them was the book, Archaeology and the Bible, by Dr. George A. Barton. This book was originally published in 1916 and it went through several editions. The seventh edition was Dr. Barton was a man whose own personal views were very radical regarding the scripture. He had been brought up in a very conservative background Quaker background, and quite conservative. Then he had gone to Harvard University to take three years of graduate work in order to fit himself to be a defender of the Scripture. As he told me once, he wanted to be a second William Henry Green; but by the time he came out of Harvard University, he had decided that the Scripture was entirely wrong; and instead of being a defender of the Scripture, he became an attacker of the Scripture; he devoted fifty years of teaching to the discussion of matters relating to the Old and the New Testament, and in most cases he took a radical view, and in some cases an extremely radical view. However, he did a good deal of study in the field of archaeology touching a great many sections of the field and the American Sunday School Union asked him to publish this book; and he tried to publish a book which would be satisfactory to the American Sunday School Union. Consequently in the book his radical views are kept in the background; they are there but they are in the background. It is not at all such a book as a conservative would have written, but neither is it at all such a book as a radical would write if he were writing without this particular objective to write a book which that organization would publish. And so, while you find radical statements and suggestions all through the book here and there, yet the main intent of the book is to present you the facts on the discoveries in the field of archaeology which relate to the Bible. And in cases where they are interpreted by conservatives as corroborating the scripture, or where all have interpreted it in such a way, you will find that statement. If the radical would interpret them another way, he may say "Now conservatives interpret it this way, but others interpret it in this other way." The book has a great deal of very valuable material in it. Unfortunately, the last edition of it is 1937; and of course there has been a great deal done in the course of these last eleven years. Also, in these books, it seems to have taken a good bit of time to run them through the press because I find that in the different editions, they are usually about a year or two behind the discoveries. Now the other book, which I always mentioned twenty years ago, is a smaller book, a book by Professor Price of the University of Chicago a cousin of Dr. Seville's, by the way [Seville taught at Faith Seminary] and Professor Price entitled his book The Monuments and the Old Testament. It was published originally before 1900; and there wasn't much known from archaeology at that time, compared to what is known today. It went through about seventeen editions. Then in 1924, a new edition was 4

5 published, which is marked "New and Completely Revised." The previous editions were mostly just discarded. If you come across one of the earlier editions in the book store for about a dime, it is well worth it; but I wouldn't recommend that you pay much more for it, unless you are particularly interested in the way archaeology looked fifty years ago. For that purpose it might be of value. I am glad to have a copy in my own library, but I don't recommend it beyond that. But in 1924 he got out a new and revised edition. That is the last edition put out, and is very excellent. It really is, I think, worth more than Barton's book. It doesn't have as much material in it, but in some fields it has more material than Barton's. It is much more conservative than Barton, but is more up to date than any particular edition of Barton prior to that time. He has the discoveries made almost a month before it went to press. I marvel how he was able to have it so up to date and so well-handled on most subjects. It has good pictures in it and a very good presentation of the field in general. Now in more recent years, I don't know of any book quite like Price, that handles it quite the same way; but there is a book which was published about four years ago by Jack Finegan, Light From the Ancient Past, published by Princeton University press. It is a large book, much larger than Barton, and it is much more up to date. Finegan is not a scholar in the class with Barton, but he is a man who has done good work and a lot of study. His field is New Testament rather than Old Testament. Barton was more familiar with the Old Testament field than Finegan is, but Finegan read a great deal on it. He was well-trained in the New Testament field in Berlin, and he has given a very good summary of the field. And, of course, being a larger book than Barton, the quotations from the original sources are more extensive. I think perhaps there is a bit more of interpretation in his book than there is in Barton's or in Price's, and the interpretation may be more conservative than Barton's, more liberal than Price's would be; but Finegan's is very recent and very useful in this field. Now there are a good many other books that touch on their field, some of which are quite good and some not at all good, but these three are the main ones to mention. 1. The History of Decipherment of Cuneiform. Now in this material I am giving you on the history of decipherment and the old excavations, any one of these three will give you the main facts if you desire to get a few of the main facts fuller than I am giving in class now. A very interesting thing in this field of Old Testament archaeology is that so many discoveries have been made in the last few years, showing the Old Testament to be remarkably accurate at places where all liberal scholars have thought that it was inaccurate or undefendable. The tendency today of almost any talk on the archaeology of the Old Testament is to bring out place after place where the Old Testament has been corroborated by the findings, even though sometimes a scholar will preface his talk with a few words about how we know, of course, that it has a great many errors in it; that it is not dependable and so on; and then he may go on and give you illustration after illustration that shows how it is dependable. 5

6 It reminds me of a newspaper article I saw some years ago that had the headline, "Theories of Fundamentalists Disproved", and underneath it, "Bible Shown Not to be Free from Error" and then quoted from Dr. Breasted, who was founder and head for many years of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, saying that the Bible could never be proven to be free from error; and then it went on to say that he made this statement in connection with his giving the press the news of the discovery in Egypt of a monument there put up by King Merneptah 1 [The Merneptah Stele] telling of his conquest of Palestine just as described in the Bible. Now the discovery that he made fit with the Bible; but he was so sure that the Bible was wrong, that he made a statement the exact opposite of the discovery. And you'll find a great many such statements made. The places at which there is valid archaeological evidence which seems to contradict the statements of the Old Testament are very few indeed. There are places where there are very definite questions, but they are very few indeed; while the places at which new evidence has come to light which fits in with the Old Testament statements most unexpectedly are very numerous. I hope no one will go out from this class and say that every verse of the Old Testament, except three, has been proven correct by archaeology. I've known of popular lecturers who make silly statements like that. As you know, at least a third of the statements of the Old Testament couldn't possibly be corroborated by archaeology, because it has nothing in the world to do with that. They just have no contacts with archaeology. Archaeology touches here and there on the Old Testament, but they are isolated points, scattered points. It is not a complete examination or vindication of the Bible. Such a thing is humanly, absolutely impossible. The decipherment of the Babylonian and Assyrian writings of the cuneiform writing came not from Mesopotamia, but from Persia, further to the East. Price tells the story in his book: Oriental scholars in Germany, France, Scandinavia and other countries had set their wits to solve the wedge-language of old Persia. By shrewd guessing only did they arrive at a few results of value. No very substantial progress was made, however until a young Englishman, an officer in the Persian army, Henry C. Rawlinson, made a discovery in 1835 in the Zagros Mountains [see Behistun on our map]. Here he found a limestone hill rising out of the plain to a height of 1,700 feet. One side of this mass was almost perpendicular in form. About 350 feet above the base on this perpendicular side, Rawlinson could see a large space which had been carefully hewn off and polished. Upon this smoother surface he could also descry a large bas-relief representing a king, before whom stood a line of prisoners bound neck to neck with a rope. Adjacent to this great group were several columns of cuneiform inscriptions. Price, The Monuments and the Old Testament, (1899) p. 56. The following engraving accompanied these remarks: 1 The Merneptah Stele discovered in 1896 at Thebes, Egypt by Flinders Petrie. 6

7 The Behistun Inscription The inscription could be viewed from about a mile away. Rawlinson guessed that there had formerly been a high place to stand up facing the mountain, but this had disappeared in the course of time; and he went over to look and read the inscription. He went over to it and he managed to climb up several hundred feet up the face of the mountain till he got to this place where the mountain had been flattened off and these inscriptions made on it. At the bottom of this flattened place there was a narrow ledge with a five hundred foot drop below him, and using that ledge and ladders, he copied off these wedgeshaped marks day after day. After he finished his troop training for that day, he'd go there; and he climbed up and he copied all he could reach. Then he took a Persian with him; and they dragged the ladder up and they put the ladder on the ledge; and the Persian held the bottom, and he climbed up the ladder and copied all that he could up there; but there was one place where the ledge at the bottom was completely weathered away and he couldn't reach that section at all; so then he went 7

8 up the back of the mountain, and from the top he got down to a fairly safe place a little above the inscriptions; and there he put ropes under his arms, and they lowered him down so he was in front of it and in that way he could copy. And so it took him many months, day after day this way, to get it all copied, because there were hundreds of lines of inscription; but when he had it copied he had a good deal of cuneiform material to study. This material and other material which Rawlinson had gotten from the travelers from Persepolis [see Persepolis on map] both of them had one peculiarity that could be noticed almost immediately. There were three different kinds of writing. They were all made of these wedge-shaped characters. In Rawlinson's material you had dozens of lines of one type, and then dozens of lines of the next type, and then of the next type, three types of characters. In the material in Persepolis, it was often that you would have a piece with an inscription written across the top, and down one side, and up the other side; and these three on different sides were three types of writing. They were all written with these wedge-shaped marks, but it was easy to see, when you looked at them, that one of these types had less than thirty different characters, that would repeat and repeat in different arrangements, but less than thirty different characters altogether. Another one had something over a hundred characters; and the other one over here if you copied all of it, and were careful to find the different inscriptions you got several hundred of them; and so it was plain that there were three types of writing, all wedge-shaped, one of them using only a few characters, one using something over a hundred, and one using hundreds. Well, now it was a pretty good guess that when you had these on each of these sides, that the three said exactly the same thing; and when you had the three long inscriptions on this monument that Rawlinson had copied, the same guess was a pretty good guess. And comparing them, you could find out where you had a group of the same characters on one, and corresponding to the same on the next one; thus comparing them some progress could be made. About 70 years earlier, another explorer had made a partial copy of the Behistun inscriptions. 2 Both he and Rawlinson knew modern Persian; and both guessed that the one that had the least different characters on it was an ancient Persian. With modern Persian for a comparison, they were able to work out something of the ancient Persian. That was the beginning of the decipherment of the cuneiform writing which came, not from Mesopotamia, but from Persia, which had taken it over from Mesopotamia. Over the next decade, Rawlinson deciphered the Persian column of the Behistun inscription, which he published in A German explorer Carsten Niebuhr copied some of the inscriptions in Georg Friedrich Grotefend recognized the symbols as an alphabetic language and had deciphered 10 of the 37 symbols of Old Persian by this time. 3 Published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1846). 8

9 At Persepolis, there were a number of doorways over which the Persian monarch had placed inscriptions; and these inscriptions always had three types of writings on them, evidently from three different languages, just as for the Behistun writing. In our earlier discussion of Egyptian Archaeology, we noted the importance of the Rosetta stone, discovered in The Rosetta stone repeated its inscriptions in three languages, one of which was Greek, and another Egyptian hieroglyphics. This repetition of the text in different languages was used as an aid in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics, achieved by Champollion by about In that case, the interpretation was aided by starting with the familiar Greek language as one of the three inscribed languages. In Mesopotamia, similar inscriptions were found in three ancient languages a similar case of tri-lingual writings as in the Rosetta stone but in this case, none of the languages were familiar languages, all written in hieroglyphics: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (Akkadian). Now when you have a set of characters like this, even though you can't read any one of them, it isn't so difficult to notice where characters are repeated like if the name for Cyrus occurs in an inscription a dozen times. Even though you might have no idea whose name it is, you really could tell something from the fact that there were enough letters there, that when you find them repeated you know that there is the same word occurring a number of times. Now it so happened that at Persepolis, in the inscriptions, they always seem to have begun with the name of the king. Consequently a number of the inscriptions began with the same word, and then other inscriptions would begin with a different word. So it was easy to know that it wasn't a standard form of beginning, but that it might be the name of a king, particularly as the next words were the same. The first type of inscription, which had the alphabetic system of writing, went like this as finally translated: "Cyrus, the king of kings, the great king, the son of Cambyses, the great king." Well, then they found another inscription which named the son of Cyrus, Cambyses: "Cambyses, the king of kings, the great king, the son of Cyrus the great king"; and it was possible to gather from some of these inscriptions, to note a number of letters which are repeated in them, and then certain ones which were different in the beginning; and it was a pretty good guess that these were in the same pattern. And then if they found two inscriptions which had the same king's name in them, one having it as the father of the other, the other as the actual king himself; and they found that the one in which this man was the king himself, it simply gave his father's name and did not call him a king, that was pretty good proof that he was the founder of the dynasty, that his father had not been a king, he wasn't a king but his son was a king. Now, of course, to figure this out, simply out of whole cloth, would have been extremely difficult. One aid to it was the fact that later Persian kings, writing in a system of writing that was known to them, had used a similar form in inscription; and so this form: "So-and-so, the great king, son of so-and-so, the great king" was a 9

10 form that suggested itself as a possibility, and when you found the word "king" repeated, as in "king of kings" it was a pretty good guess that this is what the inscriptions meant. So you had then the word for "king." You didn't know how to pronounce it, but you knew that the letters represented the word for "king"; and you knew what word represented the word "great," and you knew the difference between the word "king" and the word "kings"; but you had the names of two kings with them, and you had a general idea of how to pronounce those two names; and so it was possible from that, comparing the names, Cyrus and Cambyses comparing the letters in the two names to get certain guesses as to what some of the letters were. It is quite a tedious task, and it took them a great deal of time and study. But in this way the meaning of a great many of the letters was very skillfully worked out. And Rawlinson did the same thing later; and Rawlinson says that, after he had made considerable progress on it and probably had covered much the same ground, he had a friend in England sent him a copy of Lassen's work 4. He saw that work and received further suggestions from it, but he already had done the great bulk of it himself. So you have two different men making the start in the reading of the Persian cuneiform. Now, once you have the Persian cuneiform read in these different trilingual inscriptions, you could notice what the next type of writing was which had about one hundred characters and it was rather evident that they must represent syllables. They couldn't represent single letters, because no language could have as many as one hundred individual letters in it; and so they must represent syllables, combinations of a consonant with a vowel. Consequently, they could look at that writing, and they could figure from a comparison with the other names from the names of the kings they could get an idea of certain syllables; and then from the writing of the words in between, they could tell which particular letters represented the word "king", and so on. But for many letters in that language, though, they couldn't tell how to pronounce them. Here is where Rawlinson was fortunate. The big inscription which Rawlinson discovered had in it the names of a great many places; and these places once you had a few of the letters in the Persian writing it wasn't difficult to figure out many of these geographical places named as having been conquered by king Darius in the Behistun inscription. And then once you had figured those out, then in the second type of writing you could figure how the same place is represented. And sometimes there might be a different name to it, but ordinarily the name would be about the same as written in the other language. And then they went on to try to read the third type of writing; and that is the one they were really interested in, because the third type of writing, which had hundreds of different kinds of characters, was the kind of writing which was found on the clay tablets that had been brought to England from Mesopotamia. And perhaps if they could read this, it would give them the clue to the reading of these clay tablets. So they got to work comparing the proper names in this third type of writing with the first two. 4 Christian Lassen, Die Altpersischen Keil-Inschriften von Persepolis (The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis) (1836). 10

11 One interesting thing, which they found right away, was that sometimes where you would have eight or ten letters in the first type of writing, you would have only one letter corresponding in the third type. You knew that, for instance, because the word "king" which would have about five letters in the Persian type of writing, you could spot anywhere it occurred in the Persian inscription, and it occurred rather frequently; and wherever it occurred in the Babylonian writing, you found one particular style and only that one sign repeated, no other. So that made it evident that in the Babylonian, there was one sign that meant "king"; and it didn't need more than one sign to give the idea of king. Similarly they found the sign for "man," and they found the sign for "river," and a great many other words like that; they found the sign, just one sign to represent it; they had no idea in the world how to pronounce the particular word, but they had in the case of the names of the kings they had a number of signs, and they managed to guess the sounds of various signs from them. So it was soon evident that the writing used in Babylonia and Assyria had signs that represented individual sounds; signs that represented syllables; and signs that represented whole words. It's quite a complicated system, as you see. It has hundreds of different signs, while there are only about one hundred that are really common. Now in this Babylonian writing, then, they noticed soon that the sign that represented "r" in the king's name might be written in any one of eight different ways; and it didn't seem reasonable to think that there were eight different individual letters for the letter "r," so they came to the conclusion these represented syllables. And in the Babylonian writing it was eventually proven that letters for individual sounds occur only to represent vowels. You have the vowel which we call "a" there; the vowel "i"; the vowel "u"; and the vowel "e," or the letter we represent by the vowel "e", which is much less common. We have these four different vowel sounds. And then you have about one hundred signs which represent a consonant and a vowel together or else a consonant, vowel and a consonant two letters or three letters represented by one sign. And then you'll have hundreds of signs which represent individual words which are not so common; a few of them very common; the others you may come across just once in a while. This gave the clue to the Babylonian writing but it didn't sound reasonable to the people in England. Scholars began to write about this, and tell how they would read these inscriptions, and how many different signs there were with different meanings. And not only that, but one sign might be used with different meanings. For instance, there is one sign that may mean four different syllables. Whenever you find that sign in a word, you know it is one of those four syllables. Well, that looks very complicated, but is really isn't nearly so bad as it looks; because if it is preceeded by a particular sign, you know it means "in the midst"; and if it is followed by another particular sign, you know it is another phrase; and the other two signs also occur in rather common words, so it is usually quite easy to decide which of the four it means. But to the person who hasn't worked in the language, a system in which many of the signs have anywhere from two to ten different possible meanings seems like an extremely cumbersome and awkward system of writing; and it just didn't seem possible that the 11

12 ancient Assyrians should have had such a complicated system of writing, so that there was much doubt and skepticism of it. And in the British Museum, it was decided to try to prove whether there was anything to it or not. It just happened that at one time Rawlinson was back in England, an Irish clergyman, Edward Hincks, who had done a great deal of study of this material, and of ancient Egyptian material, was there; a Frenchman, Jules Oppert, and another Englishman, H. Fox Talbot: four men who had been writing on the Babylonian work and making various suggestions. All happened to be in England at the time. And so the trustees of the British Museum took a new inscription that had been discovered, which no one had yet seen outside of the original discoverer. They made a copy of the inscription it was a fairly long inscription they made a very careful copy of it, four copies, and they gave each of these four men a copy, and they asked them to work out a translation; and then they had a meeting, at which the translations were turned in. And when the translations were turned in, they found that all four of them had agreed that this was an inscription of King Tiglath-pileser I (ca B.C.); and all four translated it substantially the same, although there were places where they were uncertain. But in those places where you had substantial differences in translation, all four had marked it "Here is a difficult place." "There are certain signs not very familiar to us yet." But it was the same places where they found uncertainty, and so it was good evidence that the main secrets of the reading of the ancient Babylonian-Assyrian writing had been discovered; and this set the thing on a fairly solid foundation. 5 It was previous to 1850 that this was done. Much later than that, there were found some inscriptions with other evidences, such as, they found pictures with an inscription underneath; and you would give the inscription to a man who knew cuneiform writing, and he would read it without ever having seen the picture. And the writing would say, "I, so-and-so, the great king, met a strong lion in the wilderness. I took my spear and I plunged it into his mouth and the back of it came out through the back of his head, and I killed this mighty lion." He would read that inscription that way without ever having seen the picture which was with it when it was discovered. And the picture showed the king facing a lion with a spear going into the mouth and coming out through the back of the head. Thus, inscriptions found describing pictures gave a pretty definite evidence that the actual means of reading this ancient writing had been found, even though it is altogether different from any system of writing that had ever previously been known. Before a great deal of advance had been made in the reading of the language, the discovery was made that the Babylonian language was very similar to Hebrew; and of course this proved a tremendous help. The language is related to Hebrew, though the grammar is somewhat different; the forms have very definite differences, and the words have different endings, yet a great many of the words are similar to Hebrew words; and this, of course, gave a clue very frequently. You have dozens of words which have the same consonants as the Hebrew words; and so the reading of the 5 This was published by the Royal Asiatic Society in

13 cuneiform was put on a solid basis, and now they were able to read the writing to some extent on these small tablets that had been brought. And by this time, actual excavation had begun; and one of the first places excavated was we'll look at the excavations separately but one of the first places excavated was a great palace of the king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh [see map, under Ninevah]. In this palace, they found that Ashurbanipal had collected a great library; and the library contained every type of literature that you could expect to find in a modern library. There were tablets giving history, tablets of statistics, tablets of poetry, beautiful literature, medicine, law all sorts of tablets were found in this library, and arranged according to a definite system; and this gave, of course, an introduction to a tremendous part of the culture of ancient Mesopotamia. The great bulk of the library of Ashurbanipal, which contained over one hundred thousand tablets, was brought to the British Museum; there were so many of these that many have not yet been translated. Scholars have just glanced through them and picked out the most interesting ones and copied them. Over time, more and more have been copied. Even up to the present day, discoveries are being made in the library of Ashurbanipal which was brought from Nineveh to the British Museum about one hundred years ago. It is very interesting, in that connection, that previous to 1900 a great many tablets were brought from the city of Nippur and Ur, in southern Mesopotamia [see map], to the University Museum in Pennsylvania. Some of them have been published, and different scholars at different times have glanced at all of them in order to see which are important. About five years ago, a young man named Francis Steele Dr. Francis Steele attended courses here part time at the seminary for two years. He is now connected with the University Museum. Just a little over a year ago [1947], he looked through some of the tablets discovered at Nippur, which had been for nearly sixty years in the University Museum; and he found that one of those tablets was of tremendous importance an importance which had never been recognized by any one of the various individuals who had looked at the tablets before. Ever since 1901, it had been thought that the code of Hammurabi was the oldest known law code; and Dr. Steele recognized that one of these tablets was a portion of a law code that was made one hundred and seventy-five years earlier than the Hammurabi code, and that it contained quite a bit of material that was also contained in the code of Hammurabi. 6 Of course the discovery is of tremendous importance for the history of ancient Assyrian; and also of tremendous importance for the history of law; and it showed great acuteness of understanding on Dr. Steele's part to recognize it and interpret it correctly. His interpretation is now recognized by all scholars as accurate, but it is interesting that the tablet was actually dug up and brought over here sixty years before the time in which Dr. Steele discovered it. 6 Francis R. Steele, The Code of Lipit-Ishtar, University Museum, University of Pennsylvania. 13

14 It is no wonder that, after a particularly important discovery in the British Museum in 1920, Professor Bruno Meissner, Professor of Assyriology at the University of Berlin, said that excavation in the British Museum seemed to be more productive than excavation in the ruins of ancient Babylon. In saying that, he was making a dig at the German excavators in Babylon [see map] who weren't finding as much as they had hoped to; and also at the directors of the British Museum, for not publishing the work, and studying it as fast as he thought they might have done. Now this shows then the tremendous amount of material which has been found and the tremendous importance of this material for our study of ancient Mesopotamia. We had a great deal of inscriptional material from Egypt, but the material from Egypt does not touch on every phase of life the way this does from Mesopotamia. We have no law code, for instance, from Egypt at all. We have a number of law codes over a dozen different law codes from Mesopotamia; and we have a great many writings which throw a tremendous amount of light on the life of the average person in Mesopotamia. Hundreds of thousands of these tablets have been dug up. There probably are hundreds of thousands of them still remaining. Dr. Steele just got back day before yesterday from Mesopotamia [January, 1949]. He has been over there investigating the desirability of another excavation at Nippur, where the tablets now in the University Museum were found in the 1890s. They are hoping next year to start a full-scale excavation there, in the hope of getting another large collection of important tablets. Now as the study of this cuneiform writing went on, it was soon found that there was one very queer thing in the writings. You would have a sign which had a certain known meaning. They found it could also represent several different syllables. Now this sign, they found, also meant the sun, which doesn't sound a bit like any of these other syllables. They found that a number of these signs have meanings which didn't sound at all like the ordinary sound-meaning that it is used to represent. And as they found this a great many times, they began to wonder what kind of queer thing it represented; and some scholars suggested that there was a hidden way of writing a secret way of writing used in order to conceal ideas. But that didn't seem reasonable, because this sign here may be used to represent the sun god in any kind of the most common sort of writing. There is nothing out of the ordinary about it. Writings of this type were very frequent; and others suggested that possibly they represented using terms from a different language. Now that seems queer at first sight, until you think of the fact that we do that in English a great deal. We write in English "etc." and we don't say et cetera when we come to "etc." We ordinarily say "and so forth"; or we write i.e., which stand for the Latin words id est, and we don't say "id est," we say "that is"; and in English it is customary to use a large number of Latin words like that, or abbreviations just thrown in, in the midst of our English writing; and when we come to them, we give our English pronunciation instead of saying anything at all like what that is actually written there. Similarly when in the Babylonian, you would come to this symbol which would mean the Assyrian 14

15 name for the sun god, and you say the Babylonian for the sun god. You pronounce it according to the language in which you are actually talking or writing. So other scholars made this suggestion that it was like our English usage of using Latin mixed in with our English and that this represented an earlier language than the Babylonian, from which certain words were used, as symbols for an idea. There was a heated discussion. Some scholars took one side, some took the other in this discussion; but it was finally solved when excavation took place at places where this earlier people, the Sumerians, had had their cities; and all the writing was in this other type. All the writing used this Sumerian version, and there was no Babylonian at all. Even though the signs are similar, the meaning was all Sumerian; and they had endings, they had the words in between, the smaller words, all in Assyrian; and so now that argument had been settled for many years, with the agreement that there was a people there in Mesopotamia at about 3000 B.C., or a little after, who invented this cuneiform system of writing; and these people were called the Sumerians, and these Sumerians invented this wedge-shaped type of writing. We have, in fact, early inscriptions which show it in the process of the earliest development of the writing, where they originally scratched pictures; and then these pictures, which they scratched on these clay tablets, they came to take a rectangular form, made with pressing in with the stylus, and making these letters; and so it developed in the land of the Sumerians [see southern part of Mesopotamia, map]; and every type of writing known anywhere in the world almost certainly is derived from the impetus of this original Sumerian writing. The Egyptians took over the idea from them and developed their hieroglyphic writing; it was carried across the deserts clear across Asia and the origin of the Chinese writing, it is generally thought, came from the idea of writing this way, which was derived from the Sumerians. And the earliest Chinese writing has certain points of agreement with the earliest Sumerian writing. The earliest Chinese writing is, I think, about a thousand years later than the origin of the Sumerian, which is recognized pretty well now to be the earliest writing anywhere in the world. Now this Sumerian writing, then, was taken over by the Babylonians; and the Babylonian language is about as different from the Sumerian language as shall we say as Hungarian is from English? Or as Japanese is from English much more different than Chinese, from English. The Babylonian is an extremely different type of language. And so, to take Sumerian signs and use them for writing Babylonian presented a tremendous amount of confusion. It was just about as complicated as is the way we do, to use the Latin letters to represent English writing, which they don't fit at all. And so our English system is very complicated and cumbersome, because we are using letters not invented for English at all, and they don't fit our English. We have twisted them around to make them applicable to our English writing. When you see an English word, if you want to know how to pronounce it, you can always ask somebody; but there's no other way to know. 15

16 The Babylonian isn't quite that bad. The Babylonian is much more regular than the English and much more definite, even though it has its great disadvantage of being carried over from the Sumerian. Now the study, then, of this cuneiform has gone on steadily ever since the original discoveries; and new discoveries are constantly being made in its interpretation. There are now many thousands of tablets which have been published tablets of all sorts. I, myself, prepared what you might call a phone book of a town which was destroyed in 1400 B.C., giving a list of the people who lived there, with their relatives and what you could learn about them from the study of the great many hundreds of tablets. We call the book Nuzi Personal Names, 7 because the town was called Nuzi [see Nuzi, upper Babylonia, map]. It is published by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago; and that is typical of the various studies which have been made in this field. A whole civilization there, which was unknown previously, has become known to us from this cuneiform writing. It would be extremely valuable if it stood absolutely alone; but along side of it, we have the discoveries made of actual materials; and that is the other phase which I wish to take up. Before I mention this other phase, though, just another word about this cuneiform. The idea of writing was taken over by the Egyptians and by the Chinese from the Sumerians; but the actual writing the actual symbols were taken over by the Babylonians and also by the Hittites, and by various other peoples, so that we have over twenty different languages now which have been found written in this cuneiform writing. It was a type of writing which came to be used very widely throughout the ancient world. And when a king of Egypt in about 1400 B.C. desired to write to a king of a city in Palestine, though the King of Egypt spoke Egyptian and the king of the city in Palestine spoke Canaanite, they would write in the Babylonian language, and write on the clay tablets in cuneiform. That was the established custom of diplomatic usage, even among people who didn't speak this particular language; and of course, that's very useful to us because these cuneiform tablets were discovered down in Egypt; and if they had been written on papyrus, they would have just disappeared; but we have these cuneiform tablets throwing great light on Palestine about 1400 B.C. We will look at them a little next semester when we deal with that earlier period of our history these so-called Armara tablets but they are Babylonian writings, cuneiform writings, Babylonian language clay tablets, even though found in Egypt and written largely between Egypt and Canaan. Now, 2. The History of Excavation. It is rather hard, in a way, to take up one of these [decipherment and excavation] first and then the other, because the two went on together. Advances were made in the language, and this made it possible to understand better what was excavated. Further excavation was done and you could understand better what the language meant; and 7 Gelb, Purves & MacRae, Nuzi Personal Names, Oriental Institute Publications Vol. LVII, University of Chicago (1943). 16

17 also you would have a new amount of tablets to deal with. To mention all of the places that have been excavated in Mesopotamia would take us a long time; to say anything about them would be a very long study. I just want to give you an idea a little bit of the main trend of the excavation with a few of the main places. The first excavations of importance in Mesopotamia took place shortly after In 1842 the French government created a vice-consulate at a city on the upper Tigris River; and there they appointed to the position Paul Émile Botta. Botta was given to understand, when he was appointed there, that he was not sent by the French government only to do commercial work, but that part of his work was to begin excavation and learn something about the history of ancient Mesopotamia. And so Botta found that across the Tigris river from Mosul, there was a large number of mounds there in the desert; just great hills covered with sand, nobody living there; and he went over to these hills and began digging into them; and he found evidence that people had lived there, but nothing of much importance; so after digging there for awhile, he went up to a hill fourteen miles northeast of there. Some men had come from this little village fourteen miles northeast and found him digging; they showed him some tablets they had come across up there, and they said, "Come up to our place, and you will find something worth digging for. You are not finding anything here." Evidently the section which he was digging in was a residential section of ancient Nineveh [see map]; he was finding where the common people lived there, but nothing that threw much light on ancient history. He went up to this other place, Khorsabad, fifteen miles northeast of the mounds he had been digging in; and there he found a palace, covered over with sand; he found a palace filled with interesting inscribed bas reliefs, in a city about a mile in circumference. Under the corner of the palace were many cylinders of clay with inscriptions on them. He found that it was a palace built by Sargon, the king of Assyria, who reigned from 722 to 705 B.C. Sargon had so disappeared from ancient literature that nothing whatever was known of him; and his name had not been preserved except in one place, Isaiah 20:1, a prophecy that was made at the time an Assyrian army sent by "Sargon the king of Assyria" defeated Egypt at Ashdod, in 711 B.C. A great many interesting discoveries were found here, not only of remains of the building. But statues, pictures, and also the thousands of interesting clay tablets; then he and his successors began digging again in the mound, which they thought was Nineveh, across the Tigris River. A young Englishman of French Huguenot descent Austen Henry Layard had come through there just before Botta began his diggings. He was a young man, going on his way to India to seek his fortune; but he became so interested in this matter of excavation that he soon returned; he went to Constantinople and persuaded a wealthy Englishman there, who was ambassador to Constantinople, to give him some money for the purpose of beginning excavation. Layard went back to these mounds, and he began to dig in a different part of the mound than that in which Botta had been digging; and he found the palaces of the 17

18 kings of Assyria there at Nineveh; and he did some very important excavation work during the next five years. In addition to considerable ability as an excavator, Layard also had great ability as a writer; and he was a fine student of the Bible, and was constantly quoting Biblical statements in connection with the discoveries which he was making; some of these fit very accurately, some had very little to do with the thing he was discovering; but all of them helped to arouse the interest of England in the excavations. Layard's writings are very beautifully written; he was made a knight in recognition of the work he did in the Nineveh excavation; and it was the impetus of his writing which largely stimulated people in England to give money for continuation of the excavations in Mesopotamia, as well as a continuation of the study and decipherment of cuneiform Summary of the History of Excavation. A remarkable thing has happened in Mesopotamia. The land, as we noticed, is very flat; and the result is that, in this extremely flat level land, you have this place where the two rivers flow down through it the Tigris coming almost directly down from the mountains, the Euphrates coming from way over to the west, curving around and coming down. And these rivers flowing through that very flat country have occasionally changed their course not very often but there has been a great change from the course of the rivers in antiquity; so that today, the thriving cities along the course of the rivers are often many miles removed from the place where the thriving ancient cities stood; thus the ancient cities are largely mounds left there deserted; and it is possible to go there and to excavate, without having to interfere with gardens and farms and houses and places of present civilization. There are many places in Assyria and in Palestine where the center of an ancient civilization is covered with a modern town; and, of course, that makes it extremely difficult to excavate. In Mesopotamia you rarely have that difficulty, on account of the change of the course of the rivers. This, of course, makes the mounds much more impressive from the viewpoint of excavation. You have much more of the feeling of something that is deserted and ancient in a place where you do not have a thriving, modern life going on. This is a letter from Professor Edward Chiera, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and later at the University of Chicago, who died about twenty years ago. This letter to his wife gives a little idea of the feeling of one of these mounds, and I thought I would read you a bit of it. It is the prolog of the book, They Wrote on Clay, which is material written by Edward Chiera, but put together after his death by his successor, Prof. George Cameron. He says in the letter: 8 Austen Henry Layard, Discoveries among the Ruins of Ninevah and Babylon, (1853) 18

19 This evening I made my usual pilgrimage to the mound covering the ancient temple tower. It is only a few hundred yards from our camp and it is pleasant to ascend to the summit of that tower which dominates the landscape. This brings out one of the interesting features of these ancient cities in Mesopotamia: that they usually had a temple tower, which usually rose up in stages, up and in, and then up and in like that and they often rose quite high above the city; nothing comparable to the pyramids of Egypt, but they rose to a fair height, and they towered above the city. He said: It is pleasant to ascend to the summit of that tower which dominates the landscape. Of course, today, in going up it, you would have it covered over with earth, largely. Outside, it would be a fairly steep hill. Then it might be excavated on some sides; but at the time of which he speaks, doubtless most of the sides would still be covered with earth. This I generally do in the evening after supper in the bright moonlight. Today I have come with the ambition of jotting down my impressions, for the spectacle moves me deeply. Seen from below, it does not look so high as might be expected of a Babylonian temple tower. Did not that of Babylon pretend to reach to heaven? One gets the answer after ascending it. Though rather low (it can hardly be more than five hundred feet), still from the top the eye sweeps over an enormous distance on the boundless flat plain. To say "not over five hundred feet", sounds as if he didn't think it was so large. Well it isn't, compared to something like the Empire State Building, of course. It would only be about half the height of the Empire State Building, but that's a pretty good height. Nothing breaks the view, and the plain finally melts into the horizon. About twenty miles away rises the high mound of Cutha. This city was sacred to Nergal, the god of pestilence and of the underworld. The ruins of Babylon are nearer. All around the tower small heaps of dirt represent all that remains of Kish [see map, just E of Babylon], one of the oldest cities of Mesopotamia. On all sides is desert; the yellowish soil is arid and thirsty, and no plant can survive the parching heat of the summer; sheep and camels must feed on whatever remains of the grass that has managed to sprout in the few weeks after the rains. The large network of canals, which in ancient times distributed the waters of the Euphrates over all this land, is now represented by a series of small mounds of dirt, running in all directions. Even the Euphrates has abandoned its land by changing its course. In ancient times it came very near to the city, giving water in abundance and affording an easy way of communication. But man has not yet forsaken this place, and still tries to wrest something from the avaricious ground. A mile away an Arab peasant, chanting a plaintive song, is 19

20 urging on two skinny donkeys that pull a primitive plow. He is placing his trust in the coming rains, hoping these may help multiply the few grains of barley that he will throw into the shallow furrow. If the rains should fail, so will the bread in his house. He works without energy, and the plow wriggles uncertainly over the plain. Immediately before me, and all around the tower, are the deep trenches made during last year's excavation. It is getting darker, and they are not well defined. But at night, with a full moon, they appear pitch black and bottomless a line of defense around the sacred mountain, ready to swallow whoever should attempt to approach it. The sun has just now disappeared, and a purple sky smiles, unmindful of this scene of desolation. The cool evening breeze attempts to tear away from my hand the sheet of paper on which I write these notes. A dead city! I have visited Pompeii and Ostia, and I have taken walks along the empty corridors of the Palatine. But those cities are not dead: they are only temporarily abandoned. The hum of life is still heard, and light blooms all around. They are but a step in the progress of that civilization to which they have contributed their full share and which marches on under their very eyes. Here only is real death. Not a column or an arch still stands to demonstrate the permanency of human works. Everything has crumbled into dust. The very temple tower, the most imposing of all these ancient constructions, has entirely lost its original shape. Where are now its seven stages? Where the large stairway that led to the top? Where the shrine that crowned it? We see nothing but a mound of Earth all that remains of the millions of its bricks. On the very top some traces of walls. But these are shapeless: time and neglect have completed their work. Under my feet are some holes that have been burrowed by foxes and jackals. At night they descend stealthily from their haunts in their difficult search for food, and appear silhouetted against the sky. This evening they appear to sense my presence and stay in hiding, perhaps wondering at this stranger who has come to disturb their peace. The mound is covered with white bones which represent the accumulated evidence of their hunts. This reminds me of the passage in Isaiah about the desolation predicted for the great city of Babylon. It is beginning to be really dark, and the plaintive song of the Arab has ceased. Nothing breaks the deathly silence. Cutha and Babylon have been swallowed by the darkness. In the distance some lights appear, and I can distinguish those of a village of 'friendly' Arabs who are employed in the excavation. Further away is an encampment of Bedouins, here considered as enemies. To us they represent an element of danger, for they are born thieves. But I, who have accepted their hospitality and drunk their coffee, made with dirty water and served in cups that are never washed, cannot call them enemies. They have been so trusting that they even let me take some photographs of them, a favor rarely attained from the Bedouins of the desert; who knows what danger might threaten if these should be 20

21 used in black magic? They are friends, so far as they can be friends of the foreigner and unbeliever. A jackal is now sending forth his howls, half-cry and half-threat. All the dogs of the Arab village immediately take up his challenge, and for a moment the peace is upset by howling and barking. It is now quite dark. Caution would advise descending immediately to avoid the danger of falling into one of the many trenches. But a certain fascination holds me here. I should like to find a reason for all this desolation. Why should a flourishing city, the seat of an empire, have completely disappeared? Is it the fulfillment of a prophetic curse that changes a superb temple into a den of jackals? He is thinking of Isaiah there, as you can see. Did the actions of the people who lived here have anything to do with this, or is it the fatal destiny of mankind that all its civilizations must crumble when they reach their peak? And what are we doing here, trying to wrest from the past its secrets, when probably we ourselves and our own achievements may become an object of search for people to come? I have to descend now. The moon has not yet risen, and had not my frequent visits taught me the right path to follow the descent would be really dangerous. Still absorbed in my thoughts I feel no desire to break up their course by joining my friends. In the semi-obscurity I walk through the open country and the ruins, still untouched, of the ancient city. The ground is soft, being made up entirely of the debris of centuries, and at times my foot sinks in it up to the ankle. Here the ancient habitations, with their mysteries and their tombs, have been sleeping quietly for millenniums. In a few months, perhaps in a few days, here also the ground will be broken by trenches as in a battlefield. And the repose of the poor dead will be disturbed by the frantic search for records and for data. I thought that gives an interesting picture of the situation on one of those mounds today, which are the remains of an earlier Mesopotamia. Of course there are large cities and great commercial centers in Mesopotamia and fine farm lands, but they are along the new course of the river; and the ancient course of the river is deserted and barren and desolate. Now the excavation, you noticed, began with Botta and Layard; and it continued, with a number of different excavators taking part, working in one place and another up and down through that country, finding a great many very fine statues and bas reliefs. There are many places which have not been excavated; and there are many others which have only been to a slight extent excavated; but the thing is this, that as long as the material is in the ground there, it retains its force. There are different layers. One city, which existed for anywhere from fifty to five hundred years, was destroyed by enemies, buried immediately, or perhaps a hundred years later; another city was built on top of it. It takes careful search to see just where 21

22 the ruins of one city end and the next city begins. It takes careful study to see the exact relationships and materials in there and what they mean. The result is that, as long as they remain there, they can some day be excavated and studied and much learned. Once they are dug up, we have only that which was learned by the man who dug them up. Once they are dug up, we only have individual museum pieces and what they alone can tell us. The removal of these layers, particularly the structures made of unbaked mud bricks, requires skill and the knowledge of techniques, to know how to get them out without wrecking them; to know how to find exactly where the walls are, which were often made of mud brick and have so disintegrated, that you have to watch very carefully to see exactly where they are; because once you dig them out, nobody else can ever find out their precise location. It means that as long as it is left untouched, the story is there even though it is of no use to anybody. Once it is dug up, what you get out of the story is what you've got. The earliest excavations did not yield us anything like the knowledge that the more recent ones do; but the more recent ones would not yield us this much knowledge, if it were not for the technique learned from the earlier ones; and with each excavation there is an improvement in technique and an increased understanding that helps to interpret the new things that are found. The result is that the government officials try to limit excavation to those who are competent. The Iraq government now has a Department of Antiquity which oversees all archaeological work, and no one is permitted to excavate without its permission. They have to give proof to the department that the place where they are going to excavate is one which has reasonable promise of being a worthwhile excavation. They have to give proof that they are competent to do the work reasonably well. They have to give proof that they have sufficient funds that they would be able to carry the work to a reasonable extent and not just start here and there and then just leave it. The early excavators would go in and dig into a city, looking for some nice statues that they might find for a museum, hunting for tablets; and they just went through, hunting for these things; and everything else was just left, and they went off. Often the least valued thing is the most important from the view of the knowledge that it gives; and so it is very important that the search be done on such a careful scale that you can really find out as much as possible of what is there. And so the Department of Antiquity is comparatively strict as to the giving out of permits. In the early days it was also necessary to get a permit, but in those days it was from the Turkish government, which would give permits to the one who bribed them the most; and there was no scientific oversight or anything like that. Today there is; and then, after it is excavated the experts from the Department of Antiquity come and examine what is found. They select their half, that they are going to keep there in Baghdad in the Museum; and the excavator takes the other half back to his own country. In the early days, of course, the excavator would take everything. Of course, the main outstanding facts have already been learned; and for them we only get new increased evidence. Between the two world wars there was a tremendous 22

23 amount of digging, and all the different countries took part in it. But now after the war, we find France largely impoverished; we find Germany utterly impoverished; we find England comparatively impoverished. No one of them is in a situation to do much in the way of excavation; and in addition to that, there is very strong anti-western feeling in Mesopotamia right now on account of the situation in Palestine; and consequently people are very hesitant about undertaking excavation. The work since the war is now just getting established. I mentioned yesterday the new excavation of Nippur. The University of Chicago spent a good deal of last summer searching in Mesopotamia to decide what would be the most profitable place for new large-scale excavation, and decided on Nippur. This fall they made a preliminary investigation of it, and tried to get things more or less laid out; and they plan to carry it on for a number of years, starting next fall, unless conditions interfere and make it impossible. I mentioned yesterday, I believe, that Professor Richard Haines flew over there on December 1 and got back on December 9; he spent a day and a half there on the mound investigating just how the plans were working out; and one of the things he was interested in doing there was trying to secure a little railroad that the Germans had built when they excavated the mound before the war. When they finished their excavation, they sold this railroad to one of the other governments. Now the railroad is supposed to be not of much use to them today. The government thought they would make a lot of use of it, but they haven't; so he is trying to buy this railroad that the Germans put in there, to have it there to carry away their earth from the excavation, and so on. It would be tremendously helpful if they could get this railroad, but I don't know just how far negotiations have proceeded for buying the railroad. They probably would offer it to him for about $50,000, and in the end they might sell it for $ if he bargained long enough. Well, the early excavations found much that was of value, but of course they destroyed much. They carried on a number of very important excavations, especially around Nineveh. Now there an interesting thing occurred. These excavations were largely in Nineveh, which was the center of the Assyrian empire; and consequently, the early books on the subject always speak of it as Assyrian discoveries; and then they came to speak of the language as the Assyrian language, though the Assyrians were only one of the various nations which used the language, and other nations had used it much earlier than the Assyrians. The term "Assyrian" for the language has largely been given up within the last twenty years. It is used now for one dialect of the language, the Assyrian dialect; but any book published more than twenty years ago is apt to call the language Assyrian and professors of the language were called Assyriologists up to within the last twenty years. Now, Assyrian is thought of as only one branch of the language of Assyria or Babylonia. Well these excavations found, as I say, a tremendous number of very valuable works of art and a great many some hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, many of which were of tremendous interest and importance; and the excavations went on with little interruption from about 1840 until about 1854; and then so much material had been found far more than could be decently studied immediately and decently presented so that interest waned; and from 1854 until 1872, there was practically nothing done in the way of excavation in Mesopotamia. And then in 1872, there was a 23

24 meeting in England, at which George Smith, an employee of the British Museum read a paper. Smith had already been working. He was a young man who had gone into the British Museum; he had persuaded the authorities in the museum that he had enough knowledge of the subject, that it would be safe to let him handle and study the tablets; and after he had studied them awhile, they had decided that his skill was sufficient that they put him on the payroll at a small stipend, to study and publish the tablets; and George Smith had published two or three tablets of considerable interest. But now he announced he had a discovery of unusual interest; and so a meeting was held at one of their archaeological societies in London; and at this meeting, George Smith read his paper on some tablets which he had found in the British Museum. They had been brought from Nineveh and described a great universal flood, very similar to the one described in the Bible; and George Smith said, "Here is a remarkable corroboration of the Scripture. Here is the account of the flood." But the thing was fragmentary; there were sections of it missing, but he had found quite a bit of it and it aroused tremendous interest. George Smith, when he read his paper, it aroused such great interest that the proprietors of the London Daily Telegraph paid a sum of money for renewed excavation in Assyria, provided that George Smith would be put in charge of the excavation; and so they took the money that the Daily Telegraph paid, and George Smith rushed off to Mesopotamia with an expedition; he hunted at Nineveh for further material bearing on the story of the flood; and he found further tablets, which fit together with the ones he had already found about the story of the flood, and they had an interesting story. It had been well worth the sum of money spent. The Daily Telegraph didn't feel the desire to give more money to carry on the excavation; but Smith persuaded others in England to give money, and the British Museum raised some; and he rushed back to Mesopotamia; and he was so tremendously interested in the work; and so excited about the new discoveries; and anxious to find out all he possibly could; he is one of the most brilliant interpreters of cuneiform that we have ever had. So he overworked himself, became terrifically rundown, and in 1876 on his way to Mesopotamia for the third time he suddenly died of fever at Aleppo; and when this happened, it came like a terrific shock to the scholarly world, because George Smith was known now everywhere, to anybody who knew anything about Mesopotamia, in Germany, in France, and in England. There was tremendous consternation among people who were interested in Bible history at the news that George Smith died. I remember a German scholar one of the outstanding men in Germany when I was there remarking how as a boy in his early teens, he heard of the death of George Smith; and he said it just seemed as if the world had come to an end when he heard it. But the result of the death of George Smith was a tremendous increase in interest in excavation. He had had difficulty raising money for his last excavation; now many people came together to give money to carry on the work that George Smith had been doing. The British Museum immediately sent out a much larger expedition, which continued the work; the French very soon sent out a large expedition, which got into an entirely new section of Mesopotamia, and they made some of the most remarkable 24

25 discoveries there. Less than ten years later, interest was aroused in America; and excavation was begun by Americans representatives of the University of Pennsylvania over in Nippur, the very city of which I was speaking a few minutes ago; and at Nippur they found one of the greatest collections of tablets that has ever been found. So the Germans excavated at Babylon for many years; and they did what I think is one of the finest things that any excavation has done. They took the great procession street of Nebuchadnezzar there, which has great glazed tiles on the sides of these great walls on the side of the street; and they took a certain number of them, so as to make a street nearly a block in length, and about one fourth the height of the actual street in Babylon, but all in proportion and using original tile, and they put them in the museum in Berlin. They were put up there during the last few months that I was studying in Berlin. Up there on the top floor of this museum, so that there was glass above; and it gave you very much the impression of being out of doors, on a onefourth scale. They reproduced a part of the procession street of Babylon in the days of Nebuchadnezzar; and so there in that museum, instead of doing as you do in most museums going and looking in a little glass case and seeing a little tiny thing and saying, "Well, now that is so-and-so" you saw reproduced, on a reasonable scale, a replica with the actual material of one of the important sections of Babylon in the days of Nebuchadnezzar; and the result was, as you walked down it, you almost imagined you were right in Babylon. You just expected to see Daniel come walking around the corner any moment. Well, the French carried on excavations up in the mountains, further east in ancient Elam (ancient Susa); and there in 1901, the French discovered certain great Babylonian things that had been carried off as plunder, at one of the times when the Elamite tribesmen had made an expedition down into Mesopotamia proper. They found a black basalt pillar, containing the laws of Hammurabi, which up until last year was considered to be the earliest law code. Before that time, there were many scholars who had been saying, ''Moses could not possibly have written the Pentateuch as early as from 1400 to 1200 B.C. How could you have as extensive a set of laws as the laws of Moses? They must be hundreds of years later. That is much too early for anything as involved and complex as those laws." And here there was found, from a period some centuries earlier than Moses, a law far more involved and complex than the laws of Moses. It is certainly abundant proof that it is absurd to say that it is too early in the life of civilization for such a law code as the law code of Moses to have been given. The matter of the exact relation between the laws of Hammurabi and the laws of Moses is a very interesting question, but that is one which we take up next semester when we are dealing with the earlier portion of the Biblical history. Now we won't have time to look at many of the excavations. I just should mention a few of the outstanding ones in addition to those I have already mentioned. a. Ur of the Chaldees. [see map, extreme S of Babylonia] They were carried on beginning at 1922 that is, during the war, four years before that, there was a brief amount of excavation but then beginning in 1922, extensive excavations were carried on at Ur by the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania; 25

26 they carried on these excavations there for a number of years, and they found most remarkable and unexpected things; they found the proof that Ur of the Chaldees was a city in existence as early as the time of Abraham. Many had said, "The Bible tradition of Abraham's coming from Ur of the Chaldees is a late tradition. Abraham actually came from Haran in northern Mesopotamia. There is nothing to the idea that he was ever in Ur of the Chaldees." I've heard that statement made in the University of Pennsylvania within the last ten years: "That it is just an erroneous tradition in the Bible." They base that partly on the fact that in the Septuagint it just says "Ur," It doesn't say "Ur of the Chaldees," which after all is not much of an error. But here is this important archaeological fact in that connection to know that the city of Ur was an important place as early as the time of Abraham; not only that, but the city of Ur was a very progressive and advanced city at that early time. In fact, the luxury of the houses we wouldn't call it luxury, but compared to most ancient cities the luxury of the houses of Ur at the time of Abraham is as advanced as that of Babylon in the time of Nebuchadnezzar fifteen hundred years later; which shows how progressive and advanced the civilization of Ur was at the time of Abraham. And so when God calls Abram to go out from Ur into a land that God would show him, it was just the same to him as if someone had called one to go out from the most advanced cities of this country into the heart of Africa. It was going out into the wild and unknown West to Abram. Now these excavations at Ur were carried on jointly by the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania. Many very interesting discoveries some of which we will note in a very different connection and the material found was divided between the two museums; so some of the finest things from Ur you can actually see in the University Museum in Philadelphia; and of the others that are in the British Museum, you can find replicas here. b. Nuzi. [see map, extreme N of Babylonia] Now in 1927 Professor Chiera, whose book we mentioned, carried on excavation in northern Mesopotamia, which is much further north than Nineveh; and there he excavated a town which was destroyed about 1400 B.C., the town of Nuzi; and at this town was found a large group of tablets which are among the most interesting tablets that have been found anywhere; because it is a civilization related to that of Haran, the place at which Abraham stopped for quite a time; and where Jacob stayed for quite a while; and they throw light on many of the questions of the Pentateuch. Nuzi is quite a bit east of Haran, but the people are of the same race as those in Haran; and it is from approximately the same period that these discoveries are found; consequently, they throw special light on that. Of course, there are many other important excavations. It would take us a month or two to look briefly at them; but I think for our purpose here, it is more valuable to go on to see a summary of the history. B. A Summary of the History of Mesopotamia. 26

27 1. Prehistory. By prehistory, we mean that which happened before this period began. And history, in a technical sense, means that which is preserved for us in written records; so prehistory is that information which we can gather from the remains of buildings, of pottery, of statues, of all sorts of things that people made, but for which you have no written record. That is prehistory; and prehistory runs up to about 3000 B.C., because writing was invented in Mesopotamia at about 3000 B.C. Now how far back of 3000 B.C. it goes, nobody knows. Since history begins since 3000 B.C. you can be sure of a date in the third millennium that is from 2000 to 3000 within two or three hundred years at present. We will doubtless become much more accurate as we get more material. You can be sure of most dates between 2000 and 1000 within, say, twenty or thirty years, just roughly; and of most dates between 1000 and 400, you can probably be sure within one or two years. This is approximate; but it depends, of course, on the amount of material we have gotten, and on the number of the gaps there are, which might be longer or shorter between that, and for other periods or locations for which we have much information. But when you get back of 3000 B.C., when anyone gives you a definite date, you know that he is speaking from his great ignorance, because there is no such thing as a definite date back of 3000 B.C. 9 I do not know what is the standard text book in high schools for ancient history now. I know that, ten years ago, in a great many high schools, a book called Ancient Times was the standard text book in ancient history. It was written by Professor Breasted, who had been founding director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and one of our greatest authorities on Egyptology up to his death in In that book for high school students, Professor Breasted said, "4241 B.C. is the earliest fixed date in history, because that is the date in which the Egyptians invented their calendar: 4241." Now, of course, a child in high school, who has been told that the Bible says that Adam was created in 4004 B.C., is taught in high school that the Egyptians invented their calendar in 4241 B.C.; and immediately he has to choose between his Bible and what is taught. Actually, of course, the conflict is not between true science and true interpretation of the Bible, but between a misunderstanding of science and a misunderstanding of the Bible; because the Bible doesn't say Adam was created in 4004 B.C. It might have been a hundred thousand years earlier than that, for all we know; and as far as science is concerned, there is no scientist living today who is at all familiar with this, who believes that the Egyptians had their calendar earlier than 2700 B.C. to say nothing of 4241 B.C. which Ancient Times says is the earliest fixed date in history; so here you have a conflict between something said to be in the Bible, but is not there 9 Editor's note: An exception to this is dates of astronomical events such as solar eclipses, supernovas, extra-ordinary alignments of space objects. See the NASA List of Ancient Solar Eclipses, which lists the "Assyrian Eclipse" as June 15, 762 BC (763 BCE), an event recorded at Nineveh. See Price, The Monuments and the Old Testament (1958) 47. "Chronology of the Old Testament", p. 65. The NASA list only extends to 2,000 BC, but there is no reason why it could not be extended much further into the past. These events can be dated to astonishing accuracy (to within days or hours) as long ago as 15,000 years before the present, but to be confirmed, one needs the actual ancient sighting. dcb, rcn. 27

28 at all, and something said to be proven by science, but for which there is no scientific proof between things that have nothing to do with true science and have nothing to do with true Biblical interpretation. Now, it is true that Archbishop Ussher had a very lovely theory a theory that just as there are seven days in the week with the Sabbath the seventh day, so there would be seven thousands of years in history, with the seventh thousand being the millennium, and then that leaves two thousand before that since the time of Christ, and Christ was born in 4 B.C. and so if Adam was born in 4004 B.C. it makes exactly four thousand years between the time that Adam was here and the time of Christ; and so he tried to interpret the chronological data which are insufficient for a determination in such a way as to get it exactly four thousand years before the birth of Christ. Thus he got the date 4004 B.C. Now there have been at least fifty others, who have figured up from those data, and gotten at least fifty other dates for the creation, because the data are incomplete and we do not know when Adam was created. It may have been 104,000 B.C. for all we know. I think those who claim this is what the Bible says that is ridicule, and an attempt to make light of fundamentalists. Some people attempt to make their own calculation from the Bible. It's not of any use without written records. There is absolutely no way to do it. There are people who will say this is from about 5000 B.C. This is from about 7000 B.C. and when you find out how they figure it up, you have an occupation with a certain number of houses, one above the other, and they guess this must have taken just about that length of time. But it's a guess. I heard Hetty Goldman (Professor at Bryn Mawr, and in 1936 made the first woman professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study) describing her excavation at Tarsus [extreme top left of our map]. 10 She was interested in learning something about ancient Tarsus; and she went there with an expedition; and they went outside the modern town of Tarsus, and they began digging into a hill there; and as they dug into the hill, they hadn't gone very far down into the ground before they found the foundations of a building; and they uncovered the walls of the building, and they were different from anything that she was familiar with from those times; and they began to wonder, "Was this perhaps the place where Saul had been when he was a boy in Tarsus, or was this something, perhaps, from a period 2000 years before Paul?" And as they wondered, there was a group of natives standing on the side there looking on and watching what was happening; and an elderly woman began gesticulating and talking excitedly and waving her arms and pointing; and they wondered what she was so interested in; what she was talking about to the younger folks around her; and one of them went over, wondering what it was about, and heard her say in the modern Turkish dialect, "Why, that's where I went to school when I was a girl and that was burned down when I was eight years old." And it had been burned down and left and covered over with sand and abandoned, And now, when you found the remains of it here were some walls. "Was that from the time of Saul? Was that from the time of 2000 B.C.? What time was it from?" Well, of course, with more study this was just the first observation with more study it would have been very easy to see there were 10 Hetty Goldman, Excavations at Gözlü Kule, Tarsus, 3 vols. (Princeton University Press, ) 28

29 types of brick in the building, types of construction which came from modern times, but to tell exactly when, one way would be to find other places, those that were similar, and say it must have been about the same time. Where you find three buildings, buried one above the other, you know that the one on the bottom was made before the one on the top. You know that, and so you know the relative order; but you don't know the length of time; and any date previous to 3000 B.C. is a guess; and it is useful to make guesses. You say, "This is 4000 B.C." Well, it might be 3400 and it might be 5000, you can't tell, but you say Then here is another one which is quite clearly later than that. Well, you make it Here's one that is earlier, you make it 4200; even if those dates are all wrong, you get the relative order and it is very useful for study. And so all dates previous to 3000 B.C. are guesses, which are very valuable for getting the order of different things, but which are very undependable as to exact dates. There is a tremendous amount of material before 3000 B.C. That is, we have cities of which we have we have maybe twenty cities one above the other, getting back to the beginning of writing, and then we have ten or twelve under that; but the ones under that, you can't tell how long they lasted. You can make a guess, as to whether it looks like a city that was used for 500 years, or whether it looks like one that was used for twenty years before it was destroyed, but your guesses are very inaccurate and undependable. The period of prehistory in Mesopotamia was one from which much has been found. There is more known of prehistory in Mesopotamia than of any other section of the world. Of course, next to it is Egypt; but in Egypt there is much more that is discontinuous, at different places, while here there are more places where you have one city above another, and therefore you can be sure of the order of them. There is a great deal of very interesting material and much definite that can be said; but as to the length of it, we just don't know how long these different things took. We can say this: that the civilization just before 3000 B.C. seems to be, from an artistic viewpoint, much higher than the civilization right after 3000 B.C.; and the reason for it is that at about 3000 B.C. they discovered the smelting of copper; and everything from that point went at a greatly increased tempo. It was one of the two or three greatest advances in the history of civilization. It made for a tremendous increase in the tempo before that everything was leisurely, people had time to make beautiful things; after that the strenuous life came and everybody rushed about violently; and the citizens who didn't get on to the use of copper weapons quite as fast as the next city, were destroyed and burned back in that time; and so about 3000 B.C., you see two-thirds of the cities in Mesopotamia burned; and we have a tremendous amount of war and ravage as a result of the discovery of this new weapon; smelted copper weapons could be made more quickly and in far greater abundance than the stone weapons. Even though an individual weapon might not be much more useful than an especially good stone weapon, but it could be made in a fifth the time. You had mass production coming in. So we won't go into prehistory much in this class. It doesn't have a great deal of contact with the Bible. 29

30 2. The Third Millennium. The third millennium begins with the Sumerians in the land. We know they were there because we have their writings. The earliest writings we have are from the Sumerians; and the writing fits the Sumerian language very well, and it is quite definite that it was originated by the Sumerians. And the Sumerians were a practical people. They invented the dome and the arch. They were good at tapestry; they were good at all sorts of practical things. They were evidently a comparatively small group, but a group which by means of a practical ability held all of Mesopotamia in subjection for a good many years; and then the group died out and was absorbed by other groups, because it was a comparatively small group; and the Sumerians were succeeded in the control of Mesopotamia by people who spoke a Semitic language. Sumerian is not a Semitic language; it is utterly different from any Semitic language. But the people who succeeded them had as their capital the city of Akkad [see map, near Babylon, there spelled Accad], which is mentioned in Genesis; and from that, we call these people the Akkadians; and today the ancient language of Babylonia and Assyria is called Akkadian by scholars. When I speak in a popular way I always call it Babylonian, because people otherwise have little idea what you are talking about. But no scholar today calls it Babylonian; they call it Akkadian. And they think of Babylonian as a dialect of Akkadian. I should think it would be just as reasonable to say that Akkadian is a dialect of Babylonian, because the two dialects are quite distinct; and the people of Akkad had disappeared from history when Babylon was supreme; and Babylon was supreme far longer than Akkad was; but Akkad is earlier, so from a scholarly viewpoint a good argument can be made for using the term Akkadian for the whole language, of which we have various dialects; and the dialect spoken by the Akkadians we call Old Akkadian; and the others after the Akkadians had died out we simply call other dialects of Akkadian. These people of Akkad these Semitic people, these Akkadians were not like the Sumerians. They did not shave their faces, they had long beards; the Sumerians shaved their faces, and the tops of their heads as well, but the Babylonians let their hair grow. The Akkadians conquered the Sumerians, and their civilization is quite interesting; but the contacts with the Bible are not very numerous. Then there was a renewal of Sumerian civilization. We are not sure whether it was actual Sumerians or people who were imitating Sumerian civilization. We call this the third dynasty of Ur, or the Neo-Sumerian Empire. It doesn't have much direct contact with the Bible. 3. The Second Millennium. Our contact with the Bible, to any extent, begins with the Babylonian civilization. This contact would have been put under the third millennium up to ten years ago. In fact, it was considered that the date of Hammurabi was definite and fixed. That was believed by all scholars up to ten years ago. 30

31 Hammurabi's dynasty while we know a tremendous amount about it comes before a long period of which we know comparatively little; and it was quite a guess what was the length of this period; new discoveries made within the last ten years enable us to shorten this period very materially; a period formerly thought to be about five hundred years in length was cut down to about one hundred. So Hammurabi, who used to be dated between 2100 and 2000, is now usually dated about 1750 B.C. This Babylonian dynasty, of which Hammurabi was the sixth king, was a very progressive dynasty. They were great conquerors; they conquered all of Mesopotamia and much of the territory as far west as the Mediterranean Sea. But they were progressive in other ways. They took the Sumerian writing; and they changed it quite a bit. They modernized the spelling. Instead of going on with such silly things as [in English] spelling "was" w a s, when "a" is pronounced "uh" and "s" shouldn't be pronounced "ess"; such silly things as writing "though" when all they mean is "tho"; they gave up some of those crazy habits that the former Akkadians had, and adopted a revised spelling system which was continued from that time on to the end of Mesopotamia's history. So the change in the method of writing is very important at this time. And then they took the old literary conventions, and revised them, and edited them, and they made them standard at this time. So Hammurabi's day is a day of standardization; a day of general improvement, not only in military affairs, but in the religious life, and the literary life, and many phases of the life of the people. And Babylon secured a prominence in people's minds in the time of Hammurabi so great, that even though not so very long after Hammurabi's time, the people were conquered by a group of invaders, and fell into the position of a city of comparatively small importance in a political way yet the name of Babylon continued a great name right on through the next two thousand years; and it had a tremendous hold on the imagination of people, because of its preeminence in literature and in scholarship, in commerce and in religion. Now this second millennium B.C. is a period in general of which we know much less than we do about the third millennium. The first part of it Hammurabi and the first Babylonian dynasty come in the first part is comparatively well known. Hammurabi was the first great codifier of law; and in his day there was the great spelling reform; an improvement in the methods of writing; an improvement of the system to adapt it to the Babylonian system a system not naturally adapted to it a great improvement such is so sadly needed in our English writing, but we have not yet produced a Hammurabi who would carry it through. Therefore we have a system that is very awkward. The Babylonian system was greatly revised and improved, and the great standard classics of Babylonian literature were put into a definite form at this time. This literature included a story of creation, and. a story of the flood, and other great stories of the early days of humanity. We've mentioned already the part which the rediscovery of the narrative of the flood had in stimulating interest in archaeology, the question of the relation of these stories to the Biblical stories. 31

32 Now this king Hammurabi conquered most of the nations round about; and one of the last that he conquered was one with which he had been allied for a very long time, a city-state called Mari [see map] on the northern Euphrates River; and this city of Mari was excavated by the French just before the war, and thousands of clay tablets from it were taken to France. During the war, when the Germans had conquered France and the German scholars had to be helping their armies and making their plans and translating documents and censoring newspapers and all that sort of thing the French scholars and the Belgian scholars, seeing that their land had been conquered and they could no longer perform any war-like acts, had their time entirely at their disposal; so they were able during the war to study forward on these Mari tablets; and since the war, two volumes have already been published, and I understand there are two more in manuscript, which will soon appear: volumes of these texts from Mari. It is as a result of these texts that the date of Hammurabi is now moved forward about 400 years from the previous date that had been given to it. These are very interesting texts, because they are mostly letters from the king and the leaders in his court, to his representatives in the court of Hammurabi. We might say they give us an intimate view of history at that time, and they have solved many problems; but they have raised twice as many new ones, that we didn't even know about before. Some people think they have found the name David and the name Benjamin, which we find used in the Bible, and which we find parallels to in the Mari text now. Whether these are actual parallels and throw light on the Biblical story is a matter that needs to be further thought through. Already the Mari tablets are of great importance; and they promise to be increasingly important in the next few years, because they throw light on this very important period of Mesopotamian civilization. Now the Babylonian first dynasty was conquered by a people from the mountains, who came down there and overran the country; they set up their own civilization in imitation to the Babylonian, pretending to carry on Babylonian civilization, but actually knowing little about it. It used to be thought that their power lasted over five hundred years. Now it is cut down to a little over a hundred, in the opinion of scholars. We don't know a great deal about the period when they held Babylon; but politically, it fell to a comparative insignificant position; and it was another thousand years before it regained its great importance; but it held a place in people's imagination, established from the time of Hammurabi that was never altogether lost. During this second millennium, we notice this invasion of these mountain peoples and there were other peoples that came flooding into the land during this time and some of them even went clear across Mesopotamia, Assyria, Palestine and one group of them went down into Egypt and conquered Egypt and held Egypt for quite a time the so-called Hyksos people. So the second millennium, was a kind of upheaval of great migrations. Toward the end of the millennium these begin to quiet down and people become more settled and established and consequently we have a period of which we know much more in the first millennium B.C. and that is a period with much more contact with the Biblical account. So much so that I am dividing it into sections and so 4. The Assyrian Period. 32

33 Instead of heading this as the first millennium B.C., I am calling it the Assyrian period. I have mentioned that Mesopotamia we divide in general into two parts. Southern, or Lower Mesopotamia, we call Babylonia; and Northern, or Upper Mesopotamia, we call Assyria. Southern Mesopotamia is a very flat area very dry except for where the rivers come through and make it possible to irrigate the land and to have very extensive and fertile cities. The northern part of Mesopotamia is somewhat different than southern Mesopotamia. It becomes more hilly. There is somewhat more rainfall. The mountains are nearer. The mountain folk, to descend upon Babylon, had to come across quite an area of plain land, and they might be intercepted and held back; but the Assyrian settlements are fairly near the mountains and consequently in much more danger. It is a wilder type of country than Babylonia, the southern part of Mesopotamia, and there was more trouble with the wild beasts than in southern Mesopotamia. And as a result, you have in northern Mesopotamia a somewhat more warlike people than in southern Mesopotamia. This northern area we call Assyria, after the name of the city of Ashur [see map, under Aššur, in S Assyria], a city which was founded by Sumerian colonists in the third millennium B.C. It gained considerable power, as the people managed to maintain themselves by fighting off the wild beasts, and by fighting off the mountain folk; and gradually they developed very strong war-like powers, and established other colonies in the neighborhood. Gradually they developed quite a strong power up there during the latter part of the third millennium and during the whole second millennium. When Babylon was conquered by the mountain folk, the Assyrians resisted them, gained their independence through the conquest of Babylon, and maintained their independence. We have some interesting tablets that have been discovered about the Assyrian power; it gradually increased during this second millennium B.C.; but the time that we are interested in, and which we call the Assyrian period, is the period in which the Assyrians became the leading power in Mesopotamia. We can begin this period roughly around 1000 B.C. but its real high point is the period which begins between 800 and 600 B.C. These Assyrian people were not primarily a commercial people like the Babylonians; nor were they a literary people. They took over all these things from the Babylonians, but they were primarily a warlike people. The Babylonians thought that war was a valuable instrument of national policy, and they used it but they didn't glory in it. The Assyrians gloried in it. The Assyrians, in their inscriptions, devote more space by far to telling of their great victories in war, than to any other subject; and each king seemed to vie with his predecessors in an attempt to conquer more territory, and to extend his arms, until finally you have the kings of Assyria extending their power clear to the west, as far as the Mediterranean Sea. The first great Assyrian king whose army went as far as that that is, after the beginning of the first millennium B.C. is a man named Ashurnasirpal, the king who reigned from 884 to 860. He is very important from a historical viewpoint, because of the fact that he seems to have been the first to establish frightfulness as a definite instrument of policy. Previous kings of Assyria often were very cruel; and they 33

34 mention their cruelty; and we find kings in every nation that have engaged in war, at times being very cruel; but Ashurnasirpal went out of his way to try to make people know how cruel he was. He seems to have thought that after he had conquered an area, if he would make the people frightened of him, they would be less apt to revolt, and he could hold them more permanently not very good psychology, I don't believe. It may hold people somewhat longer than otherwise, but it keeps alive the spirit of rebellion; and makes it more difficult to hold them to him. Ashurnasirpal, when he conquered a city, might treat the people fairly well. He would take off the leaders as prisoners, and he would do a certain amount of cruelty to them, but in general it was not much worse than other nations; but after he had conquered a city, then if that city revolted, and he reconquered it, there was no limit to the cruelty which he showed. And he boasts of it in his inscriptions. He tells, for instance, of conquering one city and he says, "The people of the city are marched out; I took the men, and hundreds of them I flayed alive; others I stuck up on spears around the city; others of them, I cut off their heads and made great piles; and he described all these terrible things which he did in the inscriptions which he posted, evidently with the definite purpose of scaring the other people of the empire into thinking what terrible things would happen if they revolted against him. So this brutality as a definite instrument of policy was put forward by Ashurnasirpal. He doesn't say that he originated it, but he is the first one of whom we have very definite evidence that he is making very great use of it in his inscriptions; and so it is altogether possible that he originated it as an instrument of military policy. You can well imagine, then when the Assyrian kings from this time on carried on this policy you can well imagine the effect upon the people far to the west as they heard of the coming of the Assyrian army. You can imagine how it frightened people to think of their coming; and naturally most of them would scurry together to make alliances and plans to resist, and efforts at all possible hazards, to hold them off. Occasionally you would find one, like Ahaz, who would think that he could protect himself from the neighboring people by making an alliance with the Assyrians behind them; and such schemes were never successful for a very long time, as Isaiah pointed out. Now Ashurnasirpal was succeeded by his son Shalmaneser III; and Shalmanezer III has a name which is somewhat more important for our history for our Biblical history than the name of Ashurnasirpal, though in the history of Assyria he may not be any more important; just as important though, because he came nearer to Palestine than did his father, and he claims to have received tribute from the kings of Palestine. Ashurnasirpal describes his first approach to Palestine in a year which is figured out as 854 B.C.; and this is rather important, because this gives us our first definite date which scholars feel can be dated absolutely from archaeological sources this date 854 B.C. and so it is a key date in the dating of Biblical events. He says that in the year of the way he entitles the year which scholars figure as being 854 B.C., in the month of Tishrin, in the fourteenth day, I departed from the city of Nineveh. Though Ashur was the first great city of the Assyrians, Nineveh was another of their great cities; and by this time, it had come to be their leading city. It was also one of 34

35 their very oldest cities. And he described in this tablet which was doubtless posted at many places in the empire how in that year he approached the city of Qarqar; and he destroyed, he says, the city of Qarqar; and then he met a great coalition against him; and he describes Benhadad of Damascus, and Ahab of Israel as leaders of the force against him. The Bible tells us nothing of the alliance of Ahab with Benhadad for the purpose of fighting Shalmaneser. But it is interesting to find the name of Ahab, which previous to the discovery of this tablet, the name had been not known to us from anything written in the time of Ahab. That is to say, in the Bible, of course, it is copied and copied and recopied; but we don't have the original thing on which it was written then; nor do we have any monument on which Ahab actually had his name put up in his lifetime; but here is this inscription of King Shalmaneser, of which we have the tablets which we consider come right from the very lifetime of Shalmaneser, the very tablet written then, on which he names Ahab the king of Israel and Benhadad, the king of Damascus. It is interesting that he doesn't call him Benhadad; he calls him Hadad-Isri, and so when this tablet was first found, scholars thought that the royal name of the King of Damascus was Hadad-Isri; but that Benhadad was another form of the name used by the Israelites. Since that time, we have found an inscription actually put up by Benhadad, in which uses the name in this latter form, using the Aramaic word bar instead of the Hebrew ben, but otherwise it is exactly the same; and in view of that, it is now accepted by scholars that Benhadad, is the Hebrew way of saying Barhadad, which was the actual name of the king when he himself put up an inscription; and then it was the Assyrians who used another form of the name, but that the Bible preserves the actual form used by the king himself, Benhadad. This Shalmaneser inscription tells us how all this coalition met this king; and he overthrew their arms, and pulled off a slaughter through the plain with their mighty troops. "With weapons I made their blood to flow; the field was too narrow for smiting; with their corpses I dammed the river" and so on he tells how completely he defeated them. But he never went past that spot in any of his later expeditions. So scholars consider it pretty safe to say, that in all these words in which he tells us of how completely he annihilated them, they are just his boastful way of trying to cover up the fact that actually they fought him to a standstill, because he never went past the place in later expeditions; and so it is considered that this was a successful holding back of the Assyrian invasion. Had there been so sweeping a triumph as Shalmaneser claimed, he certainly would have pressed forward; and so this is very important for us, because it shows us that Ahab must have been living in the years when he fought against King Shalmaneser; and since we can date the Assyrian dates pretty definitely here, it results in trying to fit the Biblical dates into such an arrangement as will have Ahab living in 854 B.C.; but it is a striking confirmation of the name of Ahab, the fact that he and Benhadad were contemporaries and the fact that he was actually a king of Israel. 35

36 Now Shalmaneser, in another inscription, tells us of Jehu. He mentions Jehu as bringing tribute to him. This was one of the earliest great inscriptions found. It is a black obelisk not a high thing like the Egyptian obelisks, it only stands about so high [6.5 feet] and it is square and black; and on its side, we have pictures of people bringing tribute to the king; and among them one is named as Jehu, the son of Omri; and so the name of Jehu is found there as bringing tribute to king Shalmaneser. And in another of Shalmaneser's inscriptions (we have quite a large number of his inscriptions preserved) he mentions that Hazael, son of a nobody, seized the throne of Syria; and he mentions Jehu as a king of Israel, showing the change from Ahab to the destroyer of his dynasty, Jehu; and the change from Benhadad to Hazael, son of a nobody. Now, after this king Shalmaneser III, there is a period in Assyrian history in which there was a depression which lasted about a century. They had evidently overextended themselves. They had gone beyond the resources they had in their conquests, and had not been able to hold the conquered territory permanently, so there was a depression of about a century; but it was not a complete end by any means to their power, because their power became much greater afterwards than it had been before. We find the revival of the power of the king of Assyria about a century later under a very important king whose name we spell in modern spelling as Tiglath-Pileser III. He called himself Tiglath-Pileser. He did not call himself the third, so when they first found inscriptions by him they just called him Tiglath-Pileser. Then when they found inscriptions of an earlier king, they began calling him Tiglath-Pileser II; and when they found inscriptions of another earlier Tiglath-Pileser they called him Tiglath-Pileser III; and they found inscriptions of a third earlier king, so they called him Tiglath-Pileser IV; and a copy of Barton's Archaeology of the Bible, about the fifth edition, calls him Tiglath-Pileser lv. Then it was discovered that two of the earlier Tiglath-Pilesers were really the same man; that there were two different inscriptions that had been thought to be two different kings, but were really the same man; so Tiglath-Pileser IV was demoted to Tiglath-Pileser III and that is the name by which he is quite definitely known. Tiglath-Pileser III. He was evidently a general called Pul; but when he became king, he took a different name. He took the old Assyrian name of Tiglath-Pileser; and he proceeded to make himself the most famous king who ever bore this name. He was a great general, a successful conqueror, and able ruler. He carried on the policy of frightfulness of Ashurnasirpal. He reigned from 745 to 727; and during his reign, he succeeded in extending the Assyrian arms even further than Shalmaneser III had extended it. During his reign he received a letter from Ahab, King of Judah, offering him heavy tribute to come and help him against the king of Israel; and we have already noticed how the Assyrian king came and overwhelmed Syria and Israel; and the king of Judah thought he was doing it for his benefit, but he found out later it hadn't been for his benefit at all. 36

37 Ahab certainly paid tribute. They certainly carried expensive gifts. Doubtless it was a group of Judean nobles who went across the desert to see Tiglath-Pileser. Tiglath- Pileser describes his conquest of Israel and Assyria, but doesn't mention his relationship to King Ahaz. He conquered Damascus, and incorporated Syria in his empire. This is told in the Bible, and we also are told it in the Assyrian inscriptions. Tiglath-Pileser conquered the King of Israel; but he, however, did not establish himself as king over it. Instead he allowed a puppet king, Hoshea, to set up his power. He says in one of his inscriptions, Pekah, their king, they had overthrown. Hoshea [as king] over them I placed. 10 talents of gold... talents of silver I received as tribute from them. George A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible (1916) p.368. And the Bible tells us that these people rose up against Pekah in this war; and that Hoshea became king; and for the next nine years Hoshea reigned as king of the Northern Kingdom. Menahem was mentioned in another inscription of Tiglath-Pileser; and the name Hoshea is included in Tiglath-Pileser's inscriptions; and the events which he describes are similar to the events of which the Bible tells of this time. There are many Biblical names in Tiglath-Pileser's inscriptions, including a great many interesting geographical names. Those inscriptions are a source that gives us a great deal of material with definite contact between Assyria and the Bible, and the contexts fit right together. Tiglath-Pileser carried on the policy of calculated frightfulness of Ashurnasirpal, but he introduced a new policy in addition. He found that no matter how frightful his control was; no matter how he tried to scare people; he found that once his army would go from a conquered territory, the people revolted; and he didn't have enough Assyrian soldiers to keep a strong enough garrison in all the conquered territories to hold them permanently; and so he thought of a new scheme, a scheme of forced migration; and Tiglath-Pileser seems to have been the first to use this policy of forced migration. He would go into a territory, and he would take the leading people of the territory, and lead them all captives to another area. We have already noticed this in connection with our history of Israel. Tiglath-Pileser was the one who introduced it; and consequently, he began moving populations in order to try to have the able leaders in an area where the common people were of a different race from them, and without much sympathy with them; and thus the able people would have to look to him as their protector. And so Tiglath-Pileser is extremely important in Bible history for these various reasons. In the year 732, he conquered the city of Damascus. He died in 727, and was succeeded by his son Shalmaneser V; he reigned only five years. On account of the rebellion of Hoshea, King of Israel, Shalmaneser overran his kingdom; he besieged Samaria for three years, as we see in II Kings 17:3-7, but he died before Samaria was actually taken. He was succeeded by Sargon, another general, who seems to have been a usurper; there recently is evidence which leads us to think he may have been another son of Tiglath-Pileser. But that is a recent discovery, and it is not yet in a 37

38 stage of certainty. Sargon who has been considered to be a usurper up until this recent somewhat uncertain discovery took over the power before Samaria was taken, and so At the beginning of my reign, in my first year Samaria I besieged, I captured. 27,290 people from its midst I carried captive. 50 chariots I took there as an addition to my royal force... People from lands which my hands had captured I settled in the midst. My officers over them as governors I appointed. Tribute and taxes I imposed upon them after the Assyrian manner." George A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible (1916) p.369. So here is the account of the conquest of Samaria; and it is dated, you see, definitely, by the accession of Sargon, who says that it was in his first year that he took it, which is B.C. As far as we know, Tiglath-Pileser didn't actually besiege the city. He overran the country of Israel; and the people of Israel seem to have in the midst of the confusion and the excitement risen up against their king and killed him, as people generally do in a time like that. They blame the king if he is unsuccessful in protecting them; and in the situation Tiglath-Pileser, though he conquered Damascus and made it part of his empire, rather than go to the time and expense of a siege of Samaria and all that, he contented himself with allowing a puppet king Hoshea, to reign, with the idea that Hoshea would be faithful to the Assyrian king. But after six years, Hoshea found that the tribute was just too heavy a load for his country to bear, and he revolted; and this time when the people revolted, they knew if the Assyrians conquered them now, they would be absolutely unsparing with them; and therefore they fought to the very utmost, and it took a three-year siege to conquer Samaria this time; so there were the two conquests of the land of Israel, but so far as we know only the one siege of the city of Samaria. Well now this king Sargon is not named in the Bible except in the one place in Isaiah in the 20th chapter and the first verse. Our inscriptions show that he was a very powerful and successful ruler. He reigned from 722 to 705, but his actual name is mentioned in none of the historical records known until recent times except in this one place in the Bible. Now Sargon who is generally called Sargon II was succeeded by his son Sennacherib. Sennacherib became king in 705 and reigned until 681. Sennacherib is mentioned more times in the Bible, perhaps, than any other Assyrian king. Sennacherib inherited the situation in which the Northern Kingdom [Israel] had been overcome, and the Southern Kingdom [Judah] was right next to it; and Sennacherib set out to conquer the Southern Kingdom too. He was a powerful ruler, a successful conqueror; he conquered many territories; he conquered many cities much stronger and more powerful than the city of Jerusalem; and therefore it is quite surprising when we read in his annals, 38

39 And as to Hezekiah, the Judean, who had not submitted to my yoke, 46 of his strongholds, fortified cities, and smaller cities of their environs without number, with the onset of battering rams and the attack of engines, mines, breaches, and axes (?), I besieged, I captured. 200,150 people, small and great, male and female, horses, mules, asses, camels, oxen, and sheep without number I brought out of their midst and counted as booty. He himself I shut up like a caged bird in Jerusalem, his capital city; I erected beleaguering works against him, and turned back by command every one who came out of his city gate. The cities, which I had captured, from his country... As to Hezekiah himself, the fear of the luster of my lordship overcame him and the Urbi and his favorite soldiers, whom he had brought in to strengthen Jerusalem, his capital city, deserted. George A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible (1916) p.373. He shut him up like a caged bird in Jerusalem. It sounds pretty small. I don't remember any other case in the Assyrian records, where they think it is something to boast about that they shut a king up like a bird in a cage in his capital city. Every other time they claim that they conquered the city, and carried the king out a captive; and doubtless, they did. But in this case, Sennacherib was prevented in a most unexpected way from conquering this powerful city of Jerusalem but far less powerful than many another a city which he had conquered and we have already in our history of Judah noticed the account of the way in which the Lord delivered Jerusalem from the attack of King Sennacherib. And we've noticed that for the second most important city of Judah the city of Lachish Sennacherib had a wonderful picture of the conquest of that city put up in his palace; and underneath it he had the inscription, "Sennacherib, king of the world, King of Assyria, sat on his throne, and the spoil of the city of Lachish passed before him." Why would he boast about this second city of a secondary country? Instead of all the far greater cities he had conquered? My own guess is that it was a compensation to him for the fact that he had failed to conquer the city of Jerusalem. Now one thing that troubled Sennacherib all his life might be mentioned here: it was the control of Babylon. And we find it also mentioned in the Bible, because the Bible in Isaiah 39:1 tells how Merodach-Baladan, king of Babylon, sent an embassy to Hezekiah, "for he had heard that he had been sick, and was recovered." Barton comments on this visit: "It is clear from what the Assyrian accounts tell us that his real motive in sending to Hezekiah was to induce him to rebel against Assyria." [ibid. p.377]. In Sennacherib's inscriptions, we find that he had to fight several times against Merodach-Baladan, King of Babylon. Babylon had been conquered by the Assyrians quite a time before this, and was supposed to be subject to him. King Tiglath-Pileser was King of Babylon, also; but the Babylonians were very proud people, and they would not recognize themselves as subject to Assyria. They were ready to die, it seemed, before they would do that; and so the Assyrians were ready to use a different form of words in order to satisfy the Babylonians, because it was a great city, and an important city, and a city with a tremendous influence; and so the Babylonians when they were absolutely unable to resist the Assyrians, but wouldn't give in to be 39

40 recognized themselves as under the Assyrians, the Assyrians found the Babylonians would give in to this: they would make this concession, that they would take the Assyrian king as their king. And so Tiglath-Pileser, the king of Assyria, became total king of Babylon, keeping his own name, instead of his royal name in Assyria. He is Pul, king of Babylon. And the Assyrian kings didn't much care whether Babylon was called part of the Assyrian empire or whether the Assyrian king was simply king of Babylon, as long as it amounted to the same thing; but there is another feature of it. For many centuries, the Babylonians had had a custom at their new year's festival of having their king take the hand of their god, and from him to receive the control of the city of Babylon for the coming year. And so long as the Assyrian king was there with his forces in Babylon on New Year's day, he could take the hand of the god and through the New Year's festival would be crowned as king for one year. But the king of Assyria liked to be off on warlike expeditions a great part of his time; and when he wasn't doing that, he preferred to enjoy the pleasures of his capital at Nineveh rather than to have to make a trip down to Babylon at this particular point in every year. He'd do it when he could, but when he wasn't able to do it, it made trouble; and the Babylonians had to have somebody to crown king on New Year's Day; and if the Assyrian king wasn't there they would crown somebody else. And so Tiglath-Pileser had a great deal of trouble with the Babylonians; and Sargon decided, instead of having to make this trip every year, to try to put up a puppet king; he took a Babylonian whom he thought would be loyal to him, and let him be king; and then he could take the hands of the god every year. But every once in a while, the Babylonian king would revolt against the Assyrian king. One time he was driven away; and he hid in the marshes down at the southern end of Mesopotamia; and he was about twenty years down there; and then he came back, and the people rallied around him; and again there was a great rebellion against Assyria. And so during the reign of Sennacherib, there were two or three times when Babylon was independent for a period of years; and finally Sennacherib became so angry at the Babylonians, that he led a great army against them; and he tells us in his inscriptions that he conquered the city of Babylon, and he utterly devastated it; he ran plows over it; he reduced it to an absolute wilderness; he took and killed most of the people; the rest he sold into captivity; he left nothing there. But in the reign of his son, it was a strong and flourishing city; so we think he must have exaggerated the destruction which he accomplished in Babylon. Sennacherib or Sargon: which of the two made the shift? I would guess it was Sargon rather than Sennacherib. Then Sennacherib, we read in the Bible, was killed as he was worshiping in the temple of his god; that he was killed and his sons, who did it, escaped into the land of Armenia. We read that in the Bible; and we have noticed that in the Bible, it tells how Isaiah said he would go back to his own land, and would die there; and we read that his army was annihilated; he went back to his land, and there he was killed in the temple; and it doesn't say that it happened immediately, but it doesn't say there was an interval; and so people jump to the conclusion as you could very easily do in this particular case that there was no interval, that it took place right immediately. 40

41 Now, of course, if it took place right immediately, that would have been the next year or two after he went back; but it is quite certain there were twenty years after his loss of his army and health and before his assassination a twenty year period intervened a warning to us, when we read in the Bible of two events in the past, or in the future, mentioned next to each other, not to assume that they necessarily come right at the same time. Unless it says that they happened at the same time or immediately thereafter. There may have been an interval, unless the Scripture says; and in this case there was an interval of twenty years. Now his son Esarhaddon reigned from 681 to 658; and Esarhaddon carried on the policies of his father. He kept the kingdom together quite successfully. He doesn't seem to have had well, he led an expedition against Egypt he had some important conquests. He doesn't have as many Biblical contacts as some of these other Assyrian rulers. He is mentioned in II Kings 19:37 and Isaiah 37:38 as Sennacherib's successor; and he, in one of his inscriptions, mentions Manasseh, the king of Judah, the son of Hezekiah. He is also alluded to in Ezra 4:2. But from the historical viewpoint the most interesting thing about Esarhaddon is that he was just as fond of the Babylonians as his father was opposed to them. Esarhaddon was the youngest son; he was not the oldest son, and he was one who was very much interested in Babylonian culture and Babylonian civilization. He was fond of all these things. The Babylonians looked on the Assyrians as barbarians; but then most people who are looked upon that way, turn around and consider the other one a barbarian that's what Sennacherib did but Esarhaddon didn't do it. Esarhaddon tried to imitate the Babylonian culture and civilization; and he lavished great amounts of money on Babylon to beautify the city and build the city of Babylon, thinking that then the people would recognize him as their great patron, and be true to Assyria; but this didn't work either. Esarhaddon, however, had no great difficulty with Babylon during his lifetime. He died in 668; and at his death he left a very cumbersome arrangement. He said, "Ashurbanipal is to be the next king." His son Ashurbanipal is referred to in Ezra 4:10 in the corrupt form "Asnapper" (or Osnappar). That's the way the Arameans spoke of Ashurbanipal. But Ashurbanipal, who reigned from 668 to 626, was quite a powerful conqueror and also a man of culture; and in his pictures, he also shows himself not as most of the Assyrians do, simply with a big spear or sword but on the other side he always had a stylus, the instrument the scribes used to write on a clay tablet; and this, they say, shows a king who is also a scribe; and Ashurbanipal reports in his inscriptions how skilled he was in wisdom and knowledge of the work of the scribes. He was evidently a man of more cultural training than his predecessors; but this doesn't mean he was any less bloodthirsty or cruel. In a test I gave one year, someone spoke of him as different from his ancestors in that he had a quiet and peaceful disposition. Well, there is no evidence whatever for any such theory as that about him. Ever since, I felt I shouldn't say too much about his cultural side, without balancing it with the other, lest people get a false impression of this cruel Assyrian king. 41

42 Esarhaddon left Ashurbanipal as king of Assyria ruling in Nineveh, but he took another son of his, Sharma, and made him king of Babylon a son of the king of Assyria. He gave him great prominence and glory as the king of Babylon, supreme in everything except subject to Ashurbanipal. Well that was an arrangement which didn't work any better than the previous arrangement. The people of Babylon kept telling Sharma "Why should you be subject to your brother, that barbarian up there in Nineveh? After all, you are a much finer man than he is. Why shouldn't you be independent here in Babylon?" And he gave in to their suggestions; and as Ashurbanipal tells us in his beautiful literary inscriptions, "He broke the bonds of brotherhood and closed the gates of the cities of southern Mesopotamia." The result was a tremendous war, which enveloped the whole civilized world, and lasted for many years; but in the end Babylon was conquered. Sharma shut himself up in the palace, and set fire to it, and perished in the flames; and then Ashurbanipal treated the city again as his grandfather Sennacherib. First, he says, he punished those who were implicated in the murder of his grandfather; and that is a strange statement. We don't know just what it means. It is one of the interesting mystery stories of ancient times, just who were the people in the conspiracy against Sennacherib? What is the whole situation? A number of monographs have been written on it, but we need further evidence to know the full story. But at any rate Ashurbanipal claimed to have wrought terrific devastation in Babylon, even as Sennacherib had; and yet, in the next generation, we find Babylon rising to heights it had never reached before, so evidently he also didn't destroy it as completely as he claimed to have done. Now Ashurbanipal was as I said much interested in literary things and he built a great library in Nineveh. I don't think he had us in mind in doing it, but it was very helpful to us, because he gathered the literature of all of Mesopotamia. He got the tablets of history, of literature, of art, of religion, of law. Every type of tablet had been arranged in his library, so that he could get any one he wanted on quick notice. And then within a very few years, Nineveh was destroyed; and his library was covered over with the sand of the ages; and those tablets remained there until about a century ago, when they were dug up and carried to the British Museum. So we have it that the greatest collection of ancient Babylonian records ever made, was made by Ashurbanipal, and is now in London; and it is tremendously helpful to our knowledge of the cultural life of ancient Mesopotamia. In the latter years of his life, Ashurbanipal was not very vigorous in fighting; he didn't even go off on great lion hunts so often; he loves to tell us how he would meet a lion, and send a spear through his head; or how he would go up and grab it by the mane with his right hand, and cut off its head with his sword in his other hand; and was very proud of his prowess in fighting lions. Just how much of this is true and how much is fantasy, of course we don't know; but he boasts of it a great deal; but in the latter part of his life, he had a reputation which kept peace. Everybody was afraid of him. But he let his army disintegrate to some extent. He had a very quiet period towards the end of his life, but the forces of disintegration and rebellion and dissatisfaction were accumulating. 42

43 And when he died in 626, it was the signal for the waking up of the forces which had not dared to fight against him; so after his death in 626, there were two or three unimportant kings of Assyria, none of whom was able to cope with the situation which had become serious; and in 612, just fourteen years after the death of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh was destroyed. The Medes came from the east, and the Babylonians from the south, and the two armies met; and they attacked the city of Nineveh, and destroyed it so completely that it never was rebuilt; it remained a ruin until modern times; and in the Bible we have the book of Nahum, three chapters devoted entirely to the account of the destruction of the city of Ninevah. Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery; the prey departeth not; The noise of a whip, and the noise of the rattling of the wheels, and of the prancing horses, and of the jumping chariots. (Nahum 3:1-2) and so on. The lion did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his holes with prey, and his dens with ravin. (Nahum 2:12) The whole book is devoted to the account of the way in which God caused this great city, which was the terror of the nations, to be destroyed; and it has remained a ruin up until this day. Speaking about the Assyrian period in our summary of the history of Mesopotamia, we noticed the value of the frequent inscriptions. Now this is a phenomenon which is worth noting as a whole about the Assyrian period the historical inscriptions of the kings. You find more of them in this period than in any other period of ancient times. In Egyptian history, our history is based upon many different sources, but we do not have in Egypt this wonderful source which we have from Assyria. Each of the Assyrian kings was anxious that all the people of his realm and posterity should know of his great deeds in detail; and he describes them to us. Very few Egyptian kings did this; and when they did it, they had a special purpose in mind. It is not common for the Babylonian kings to do it. Nebuchadnezzar, in his inscriptions, tells us much about the great buildings which he constructed, but very little about the military events of his reign. However in the Assyrian period, the Assyrian kings seem to have a special desire to list the events of their reign; and to show step by step what they did in each year; how many enemies they conquered, from period to period, during their reign. They list these deeds, and they tell where they went; they tell how much booty they took. They give all this in great detail; and so we are in a position to know more about the history of the kings of the Assyrian period than of any other nation in antiquity. That does not mean but what there are certain other times when we know more about the people, perhaps, than we do about the Assyrian period. There are other times that we may know more about certain phases of life than we do in this Assyrian period. 43

44 But the matter which occupies so great a part of the attention of most historians the deeds of the kings and their military conquests and their relations with other nations this phase of history is far better known to us in the Assyrian period than in any other part of ancient history, perhaps better than in most parts of medieval or modern history, because the Assyrian kings were particularly interested in this. To them, war was the great activity of life; and they were interested that people should know about the details of their wars, and how successful they were in them. We notice that the Assyrian period comes to an end in well it doesn't end in 612, it continues to 604 but the city of Nineveh comes to an end in 612; one of the few pages in history where a great capital city has been destroyed, and it has remained ever after deserted, a wilderness. Nineveh was never rebuilt. Its very site was soon forgotten; and it was not until within the last century that we are able to know exactly where it was, because it remained absolutely deserted, covered over with the dust of the ages. The city was destroyed in 612; the Assyrian empire continued with a capital a temporary capital at Haran, the old city where Abraham had lived for a number of years. That was the new capital, temporary capital, but then in the great battle of Carchemish in northwestern Mesopotamia, the Assyrians, and their allies the Egyptians, were defeated by the Babylonians, and the Assyrian period comes to a complete end. In modern times there is the city of Mosul, which is across the Tigris River from the ruins of Nineveh; and that has been there for many centuries, just across the Tigris. But the very identity of the mounds across the river that they were the ruins of Nineveh was forgotten for almost 2500 years. In contrast to this, when Babylon was destroyed it was always rebuilt almost immediately. We've noticed two cases of its destruction; and Babylon kept on until the early middle ages, when Babylon was finally deserted. But Nineveh was once destroyed and left to ruin. Just what the stages were in between, we don't have evidence, as to whether people lingered on in little villages around, or hid in the mountains for a time we don't know. As to whether there is any evidence as to when Mosul was founded across the Tigris, I don't know that; but it is an Arabic city, it may be I am quite sure it did not exist before the time of Christ. The city of Nineveh was originally a rather small area. Then, as the Assyrian kings carried on their great conquests during this period, more and more suburbs were built around and added on to the city; and eventually there seems to have been a large wall built around the whole complex, about fifty or sixty miles around this complete metropolitan area. Sargon evidently got tired of being right in the midst of all the crowd; and he went out and built himself a castle out in the country, and made his headquarters there. He had a wonderful headquarters there, but the succeeding kings went back to Nineveh. It seems to have been only this one king. As to the further details of the final Battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C., I don't know as we have so much information. It was at a time when historical events were moving 44

45 very rapidly; and those who were most interested in leaving us full details of historical events could no longer write anything, because they were the inferiors and the Babylonians who conquered the Assyrians did not have an interest in preserving historical data that the Assyrians had. Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror, has an entirety different attitude in his inscriptions. There used to be a question raised about Daniel. If Daniel was so great a man at the court of Nebuchadnezzar, why don't we have inscriptions that tell about him? Well, we have a few inscriptions now that give the names of a few officials in Nebuchadnezzar's court, but very scanty is the information that throws any light on his court. The Assyrians left us abundant information about the leaders in their court. The Assyrians would name each year after a particular individual; and thus each individual's name was preserved in that way of the leaders in the Assyrian court; and then the Assyrian kings would tell of the great events during the part of their reign when they had something to boast about. Toward the ends of their lives, they didn't bother with describing things as a rule, but the Assyrians left all these written inscriptions. Now Nebuchadnezzar, up until the discovery recently, we have not even the name of any of the leaders in Nebuchadnezzar's court. They are all just a blank. In these inscriptions, Nebuchadnezzar did everything himself. No other officials are mentioned. He says, "I crossed great mountains, I fought mighty armies, I conquered great cities, I devastated tremendous areas." He's just describing all that he had done, and he'd run it all together. He didn't name the countries, or the cities, or anything. The Assyrian king would say. "In the first year I marked out, I attacked this city; and then I attacked this city; then I went to that; I met these people; I met this group, and so on; but Nebuchadnezzar doesn't do anything. Then he tells you, after he has given you about a paragraph of telling you of the way in which he just running together all these tremendous conquests which he did then he says, "I was anxious to establish the glory of the great gods in Babylon, and therefore I took his temple which had fallen into decay." Well, that is getting into 5. The Neo-Babylonian Period. It is often customary to run the Assyrian period up to 604, and to begin the Neo- Babylonian period with 626. It is not at all illogical if that is done, because very soon after the death of Ashurbanipal in 626, Babylon gained its independence and therefore during the succeeding years Nineveh is going down but still is a power an important force and Babylon is coming up and is already an important force; so you have the Neo-Babylonian period and the later Assyrian period, one ending and the other beginning. Now the Babylonians had tried before repeatedly to gain their independence and had held it for a certain length of time; but these powerful Assyrian kings of the last century before the downfall of Nineveh had each time re-conquered Babylon and had held it under their control. Now, however, when the strong king Ashurbanipal died, 45

46 very soon after his death the viceroy of Babylon, who was himself a Chaldean, revolted against the Assyrians and established himself in independence; and the Assyrians were not able to re-conquer Babylon; and so the Babylonian power increased and made alliances with other powers. They increased in their strength, and eventually they succeeded in conquering Nineveh itself and destroying it in 612; and then finally in 604, they succeeded in conquering the last great Assyrian army, and in putting a complete end to any power at all in the Assyrian empire. Now the viceroy of Babylon, who was thus the first king of the neo-babylonian or Chaldean empire, Nabopolassar, himself died in the same year in which the Assyrian empire was ended, in 604; and his son Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon, was the general of the army, who had just defeated the army of the Assyrians and annihilated them, and also defeated the army of the Egyptians. He pursued them as the Egyptians fled pell-mell down the coast of Palestine toward Egypt, and Jeremiah from the hilltops of Judea looked down on the plain, the flat country by the sea. Jeremiah 46 describes the fleeing of the Egyptian army before the forces of Nebuchadrezzar. Nebuchadrezzar is the correct spelling of his name, but it seems entirely probable that in accurate pronunciation he was called Nebuchadnezzar; and in the Bible, we find it in both ways, Nebudhadrezzar and Nebuchadnezzar. Now when word reached the general that his father the king had died in far away Babylon, he gave up the further pursuit of the Egyptians at this time and rushed back to Babylon to establish himself as king. That was very necessary. In Assyria or in Babylonia, when a king died there was always a dangerous period until the next king was established; but Nebuchadnezzar was established as king and he became the powerful ruler of the Neo-Babylonian period. He re-conquered all of the Assyrian empire; he conquered Egypt; he held a tremendously large area. And then he devoted himself, as we have noticed, to these great building works, building up not only Babylon but all the cities of Mesopotamia, increasing the beauty and the strength of those wonderful ancient cities. Nebuchadnezzar had a long reign; and we remember that, toward the end of his reign, in 586 he destroyed Jerusalem. He was succeeded by his son Amal-marduk, who is mentioned in the Bible, in 2 Kings 25: This son of Nebuchadnezzar only lived for two years. However, he seems to have had either a nature disposing him to friendliness to captives, or a particular friendship to the Judean captives, because Jehoiachin who you remember was taken captive in 597 after the death of his father Jehoiachin was in prison most of Nebuchadnezzar's reign in Babylon. Many years he was in confinement, but the Bible tells us that Amal-marduk or Evilmerodach, I think is the way our English Bible spells it the king of Babylon released Jehoiachin from his confinement and gave him a seat at his own table. Well, Jehoiachin must have been well along in years when this happened. This king then, son of Nebuchadnezzar, seems to have been a man entirely unworthy of his father's blood. He was a weakling, he only reigned for two years; and the throne was taken back by a strong man, one of Nebuchadnezzar's generals but already well along in years. This man, Neriglissar, reigned a few years, and then was succeeded by his 46

47 son who was a weakling; and he was succeeded after two years by a man of far greater strength but who was unrelated to him, a man named Nabonidus. And this Nabonidus, who took his son Belshazzar into power as co-king with him towards the end of his life, was the last king of Babylon; and then was succeeded by the Persians who conquered Babylon. In 539 B.C., the year , the Babylonian period comes to an end. And then 6. The Persian period. And the Persian period in Mesopotamia is a period in which Mesopotamia is subject to Persia, and so is Palestine; and so the power moves up into the mountains of Persia; and there we have the Persian kings ruling at one of the great palaces, and we have the book of Esther describing events at one time during this period. The Persian period begins with Cyrus reviewing the policy of the kings of Babylon. The kings of Babylon had carried on the policy of the kings of Assyria, taking the captive peoples and moving them to other areas, thus trying to strengthen their hold on different territories. This, of course, did strengthen their empire, but it made them hated by the various people; and the Persian king seemed to have decided to adopt the opposite policy. He was very strong, had very powerful control; the different national groups were already pretty well broken up as a result of the Assyrian and Babylonian policy; and he thought he could win the friendship of the people; and we find in his inscriptions, that the various gods of the various nations the idols that had been brought to Babylon he allowed to have given back to the various people; and he allowed the people, who had been taken captive, what remained of them, to go back to their homes; and we have inscriptions from him telling how he, the servant of certain of these gods, allowed the people of these gods to return to their homes and gave them back the statues of their gods. We do not have preserved the inscription which he gave of a similar nature regarding the Jews, but we have these inscriptions that show that that was the policy of Cyrus, the first of the kings of the Persian Empire. And in the Bible we have a decree from Cyrus, which is similar to the decrees which we have archaeological evidence of, that he gave to other gods; and just as in those inscriptions, he describes himself as the servant of the gods, helping them, sending back their people who have been captured by the Babylonians, this is similar to the one quoted in the Bible. He describes himself as the servant of the god of the Jews, and as releasing those people who have been held by the Babylonians; allowing them to go back; giving them their own property, that is giving certain money from the kings, from the royal treasury to help them to go back; and they had no statue to take back to those countries, they had no image of their gods; but instead, then, of giving them an image, he gave them the vessels from the temple. He gave them the golden vessels which had been in the temple, which had been taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar; and so we have a parallel between his treatment of other nations as described in the archaeological inscriptions, and his treatment of the Jews as described in the Bible. 47

48 Now the Persian period runs on from 538 to 331. It is a period of over 200 years, much longer than the Neo-Babylonian Empire. During this Persian period, we do not have a great deal of history recorded in the Bible; and in the latter part of it, we have no history recorded from it to speak of. This may be because they began using papyrus more for writing, and consequently the material didn't last. At any rate, the last part of the Persian period is a very dark period a period which the Jews completely forgot about so that in the Talmud, and in some of the Apocryphal writings, it speaks of events which were taking place, in which men who were taken captive when the Jews went into captivity, were still alive at the end of the Persian period, at the coming of Alexander the Great. Now of course, that is utterly impossible and it is evident that this long period was forgotten, and thought to have lasted only about forty years. It is a strange thing, that the Jews who had kept such a full history of previous times could so completely have forgotten such a long period in the Persian period. Now, of course, these are not parts of the Bible that give this. These are other Jewish writings. They are not inspired. Nevertheless, there are those who suggest that this is an evidence that our idea of the Persian period is wrong. They would not say the Jewish idea was right, but they would say that it wasn't nearly as long as modern historians think it was; that it was much shorter. The latter part of it is the darkest period of ancient history, the one which we know least well. Now you all know, I believe, that in 331 B.C. the Persian empire was conquered by Alexander the Great; and Greek culture now spread all over the eastern world; Hellenistic civilization came in. I don't say civilization came in in the sense that there was not civilization before there was just as high or higher a civilization before in some ways, not as high in other ways. But there was a unified culture that spread through the whole land, as the result of the conquest of Alexander the Great, and of the Greek rulers who came after him. So much then for this rapid summary of the history of Mesopotamia. Let us go into C. Contacts of Mesopotamian Archaeology with the Bible. We have looked at a good many of these contacts as we have been going through the history, so that this will largely be a matter now of recapitulation. We have noticed the contacts in the time of Genesis very briefly. We haven't gone into the study of them. We notice that there is slight contact at the time of Israel's conquest of Canaan, but after that there is little contact with Mesopotamia until the time of the divided kingdom. Then we find that during the Assyrian period, we notice that there were a tremendous number of contacts. We notice that the names of many Biblical kings are included in various writings of the Assyrian kings; and certain Assyrian kings whose names are recorded in the Bible, we find under the same names on the Assyrian monoliths. And so there are two things of interest about these names: the general arrangement of the names, and the spelling of the names. You have your names in the Bible, giving you the names of kings of Israel and Judah; and then alongside of those, kings of 48

49 Assyria occasionally mentioned in connection with certain kings of Judah; and then occasionally, you have a king of Egypt mentioned, like the pharaoh who killed Josiah at Megiddo. Now as to the matter of the relation of these kings, we have a list of perhaps fifty kings perhaps not quite as many as that names during this period in the Bible, which names can also be found on the monuments. There are those who claim this Biblical account of history is made up that it is not based on actual contemporary records. But if that were the case, how could these many names and events have been preserved, in correct relationships to the actual events, as we have uncovered them in archaeological work over the past 200 years? Such a result would be virtually impossible; to fit the names and events in the right order, and in the right relationship with one another, having contemporaneous those kings that reigned at the same time. If you were simply to take a list, for instance, of presidents of the United States and prime ministers of Great Britain one hundred years ago. Suppose I give you a list of the prime ministers of Great Britain, without giving you the dates, or without giving you the right order, between 1800 and 1875; and a list of the premiers or presidents of France for that period; and that you already know the list of the presidents of the United States during that period; but you don't go and make a special hunt in history text books which weren't available in those days for the exact order and length of administration. And then suppose you start out and try to write a history, making up your stories, and fitting these names in. You can imagine how difficult it would be. The chances are one in ten thousand that you would get them arranged in the right order or in the right contemporaneous relation. Sir Walter Scott was a very fine student of ancient times that is, not as far ancient as we have been talking about, but of early English and Scottish history and in his books, he gives you the real flavor of the times with which he deals. His knowledge of it was very extensive; and yet, as someone has pointed out, in his book Ivanhoe which is such a wonderful picture of English life in the early days of English history, in the reign of Richard I, he has in it a woman who was the daughter of the Saxon nobleman, who held the castle before it was conquered; and has her telling this story to Cedric the Saxon, and when you figure things up, you find that there would have been maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred years since the time of the conquest, before the time when she would have been telling this story to him. It is just an example of little things of this type that creep into the work even of a man who is as accurate and as careful as Sir Walter Scott was on such matters. And without the historical sources that he had to go to, there would be a tremendous amount of such things. So every time that we find evidence of an Assyrian king and an Israelite fitting together in the same general relationship as they are in the Bible, it is further evidence that the Bible gives us accurate information that has been transmitted, and not simply a series of legends that have been worked up and had names inserted into them by the later writers. And as we have noticed, we have a great many of these incidents. 49

50 Now another thing that is very striking about these names is the spelling of them. Before mentioning that, we should know that it is a difficult thing to spell the names of people of one nation in the writing of another nation. We have our Latin method of writing, which doesn't fit our English language at all well. Most of us, being accustomed to it, aren't so familiar with that fact; but we become familiar with it a little when we note some of the names of people of other lands who also have the Latin method of writing and see how differently they are spelled from the way that we spell them. I had that stressed upon me in the difference between Dutch and German. Both of them use our Latin method of writing, but their spelling is utterly different. I found that, knowing German, if I take a Dutch work and try to read it, I don't know so many of the short words in Dutch; but when you come to the long words, I seldom have difficulty figuring out what they mean. But I find that if I look at a word in the Dutch book, I have no idea of what it means. It doesn't look like anything I have ever seen before in my life; but I look at it, and I just make any kind of stab at pronouncing it, and then I listen and see what it sounds like; and I usually find that it sounds enough like a German word, though spelled entirely differently, to show me what the meaning of it is. It is related to this German word but spelled utterly different. I have noticed that time after time in the relationship between Dutch and German. It is a very difficult thing to represent a name from one language in the writing of another, because the sounds don't exactly correspond. They are somewhere in between. They are not exactly the same. I noticed that in Germany, our English "L" sounds to Germans just like a queer noise. They have no idea what our English "L" is. It is entirely different from their "L". And often our English "B", it just sounds like some queer sound to them. I know once, when I had been in Germany a short time, and I asked the taxi driver I was in a hurry and I asked him to take me to the University, giving it the best German pronunciation that I thought I was capable of at the time and he asked me, "Where?" I repeated it. I repeated it a couple of times and he said, "Oh", he said. It sounded like just something queer to him. He just couldn't figure it out at all. It just shows how those little sounds are so different in one language from another, even two languages so closely related as English and German are. And when you take two languages as far apart as Egyptian and Hebrew or Assyrian and Hebrew would be nearer together, but still quite far apart and different types of writing altogether, it's quite a question how you are going to represent it in your writing; and so it wouldn't be at all surprising if the names were not at all similar. But as a matter of fact we find a very close resemblance between the names as represented on the Assyrian inscriptions the names of Assyrians, and the names of Hebrews and the same names as we find them written in the Bible. We find this in so many cases, that it is a very striking evidence of the accuracy, the care of the scribes of the Hebrew, and the accuracy of the preservation of the Old Testament. In fact, I think I can say it is a phenomenon that is really unparalleled. You do not have other literature that has been copied and recopied and recopied and handed on down like the Bible has, that has such an accuracy. 50

51 If you want to see striking evidence of that, take the Septuagint, which was translated from the Hebrew about 200 B.C. or a little later than that; and which has been copied and recopied as our Hebrew has been copied and recopied; and we have earlier manuscripts of the Septuagint than we have of these manuscripts of Hebrew. But take these manuscripts of the Septuagint, some of which go back to the third or fourth century A.D.; and so that all these had three or four centuries of copying and recopying, instead of a thousand or fifteen hundred years, as most of our Hebrew manuscripts have; and look at the proper names in them, and you find that with many of them it is just impossible to recognize them. Bathsheba, the wife of David, is Beersheba in the Septuagint, the name of the city. One place where the Hebrew mentions a man's name, the name got so twisted in the Greek that in some copy it is simply "He ran." It's the man who was over the house, and it describes this man was over the treasury and this man was over a certain department in Solomon's empire and "he ran" to his help when it should be the name of the man who was over the house. And the preservation of the Septuagint is not bad as ancient manuscripts go; but the proper names in it are so poorly transmitted compared with the Hebrew that it is a remarkable evidence of the accuracy of the preservation of the Hebrew text. We mentioned Alexander the Great a few minutes ago. Alexander the Great had various Greek companions with him on his conquest, naturally; and there was a story which was written, supposed by his friend and historian, but later proven not to be by him. We don't know who it is by, so we call it the Pseudo-Callisthenes. It gives the names of Alexander's ten companions. The book has been translated in early days into Syriac; and the Greek copy was copied and copied and copied; the Syriac was copied and copied and copied; now we compare the two and we cannot recognize any of the names in the Greek and in the Syriac, that they are the same name. They've so changed that we don't know what the names of his companions originally were; though, in general the two manuscripts preserve substantially the same story the Syriac and the Greek. It simply shows how difficult it is to preserve proper names in copying and recopying of manuscripts, particularly of a language unfamiliar to that of the scribes who are copying it, or to the original scribes. But in the case of this Assyrian period, you have case after case where the names have been preserved with remarkable accuracy. I want to call your attention to one such case in the Babylonian period. It is a similar case to this in the Assyrian, but it happens to come from the Babylonian period. It is Jeremiah 39:3. In Jeremiah 39:3 we have a list of the men who came into Jerusalem when it was conquered. If you would turn to that passage, Jeremiah 39:3 you would find some names that were queer, outlandish names to the Israelites. We read after the Babylonians conquered that 51

52 All the princes of the king of Babylon came in and sat in the middle gate, even Nergal-sharezer, Samgar-nebo, Sarsechim, Rab-saris, Nergal-sharezer, Rab-mag, with all the residue of the princes of the king of Babylon. Well now you can imagine what those names sounded like to the Hebrew scribes about the same as they sound to you and consequently, as you look at the names there, you wonder just what they correspond to, whether they represent any actual thing. It is interesting that this name Nergal-sharezer occurs twice in the list. That would seem rather strange, wouldn't it, to have one name occur twice in a list like that, without any indicating mark that this is Nergal-sharezer, Jr. or Nergal-sharezer of some other place, or something like that. Well, up to about twenty years ago, we knew nothing about any of these names; and then there was discovered a tablet giving a list of some of Nebuchadnezzar's officials; and in this list of Nebuchadnezzar's officials, we found Nergal-sharezer's name; and Nergal-sharezer is the one whose name in Greek, abbreviated some, is "Marganasar" [LXX Jer. 46:3]. He was the second king, the successor after Nebuchadnezzar, second of the powerful kings of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. At this time, he is a general under Nebuchadnezzar; and we find him, in this one inscription, described as Nergalsharezer of Sin. Thus his identity is indicated by the place, either from which he came, or over which he ruled at certain periods, Nergal-sharezer of Sin. Suppose you had the word Samgar, and you wanted to represent it in Hebrew; how would you spell it in Hebrew? 11 What would be your first letter? The Hebrew letter "sin" or "samech". So in Hebrew it would be "Samgar." Which word does our English have? It has it "Samgar" so it could be either the Hebrew "sin" or "samech." In the Hebrew it could be represented as "Samgar" in our Hebrew Bibles it uses "samech." Now Nergal-sharezer of Sin, then, would be written in Hebrew as Nergal-sharezer; for the next name, Samgar you know the vowels were not written down in Hebrew till later could easily be written as "Samgar," but it is very difficult to preserve the vowels when they weren't written down at all in a foreign name. All, of course, that Hebrew deals with properly are the consonants. You notice the two names would be written as Nergal-shareser Samgar. Now we have in our Hebrew a hyphen between Samgar and nebo. Evidently that hyphen was put in by a later scribe who didn't understand it. He thought that Nergalsharezer was a name and that another name came right after it so he put a hyphen in it Samgar-nebo. Actually the hyphen is a mistake. It should be Nergal-sharezer of Samgar. And then the next one you don't need to delete your hyphen, just move it over. Nebo-Sarsechim, that would be a good Babylonian name. Nebo-Sarsechim was Rabsaris, while Nergal-Sharezer was Rab-mag. Ram-saris and Rab-mag are typical Assyrian titles of position. The chief of the bakers, and the chief of the Magi. They would be the sort of title that would be given to a general in the Assyrian army. So I 11 Recall that Biblical Hebrew is written using consonants only. Babylonian names are written in cuneiform, which does not have symbols for consonants: it has symbols for vowels and for combinations of vowels and consonants. Thus transliteration of Babylonian names into Hebrew is problematic. 52

53 would say we have here the names of two men, Nergal-Sharezer of Sim, Nebo- Sarsechim as Rab-saris, and when you have mentioned the title of him, the writer tells us what the title of Nergal-Sharezer was. One effect in our preservation of the names here is the hyphen, which has been put in the wrong place; it belongs probably the hyphens were put in much later than the usual writing anyway, it belongs between Nebo and Sarsechim, instead of between Samgar and Nebo; and otherwise you would have the name Nergal-sharezer exactly as the Babylonians spelled it; and you have the name exactly as a Hebrew would hear it, and would write it. Rab-mag literally would mean the chief of the bakers. Well, we know the general wasn't actually the chief of the bakers that is, it seems unlikely he was. It is a probably a title that was given to the leader, just like in modern English positions will often give an honorary title to a man. Well, now, this is another interesting case of the remarkably accurate preservation of a name. Now in this neo-babylonian period, we have another interesting archaeological corroboration the life of Nebuchadnezzar: his power, the general nature of the man, his tremendous interest in building. Daniel describes him saying, "Is not this great Babylon which I have built?" that exactly fits with his general character. We have one interesting little light which archaeology sheds on this period, which is somewhat questionable, and yet I think fairly reliable. In the book of Daniel, we have described the time when Nebuchadnezzar gave the order that the people should bow down and worship before the great image that he set up; and when he gave that order, we read that all the princes bowed down except Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego; and so they were cast into the fiery furnace. Now scholars have said, "Why should there be persecution right at this time?" They have said, "The book of Daniel was not written till the Maccabean period. We have no evidence of any religious persecution at the time of the book of Daniel. It was written at a later time and they invented this story. Well, it is interesting that Wooley, in excavating at Ur of the Chaldees, uncovered a great temple that had largely rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar; and you can tell what parts were rebuilt, because Nebuchadnezzar wanted everybody to know what he did; and so every few bricks he would put the inscription, stamped on, that would say, "Nebuchadnezzar, the great king, the king of Babylon, the rebuilder of this temple," and so we have over a million bricks that have been excavated in Babylon with that on them about Nebuchadnezzar. Well, now, down in Ur of the Chaldees you find it on these bricks; and so it is possible to reconstruct the arrangement of the temple before Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt it and the arrangement afterwards, which is substantially the same; but there is one striking difference. In the temple of at Ur of the Chaldees before Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt it, you have in front of the shrine of the god in which the image was the image of the moon god in front of that shrine you have little rooms, which evidently were storerooms; so that the actual worship of the god was carried on by the priests, who went in through narrow passages back into this shrine where the statue was; and the 53

54 people would be out in the open courtyard, and the priests carrying their sacrifice in to the god; but Nebuchadnezzar removed all these little storerooms in front and made an open space right straight out from where the statue of the god was, right out to the outer court, so that the people out there could look right in to the statue of the god. Now, instead of worship being carried on by a few priests going in and carrying the prayers and the gifts of the people into the little inner shrine, it was opened up so that all the people could see the statue; and all the people would naturally be expected then to fall down before it, and so that would seem to indicate the introduction of an extended shrine worship by Nebuchadnezzar over what had existed before; what existed before being a matter of the priest on behalf of the people; and this new arrangement making all the people, or at least all the officials, take part in it. And so while it is not absolutely certain that is the correct interpretation, it seems very reasonable; and it fits right in with this incident in the book of Daniel here, where we have the officials put in this position where they had to either do what the king ordered them to, or to be false to that which God claimed of them. So that is a very interesting small corroboration. Of course, the most interesting large corroboration in this time is the corroboration of Belshazzar. Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus; he was not an independent king of Babylon, and so when inscriptions were first discovered, there was no evidence of the existence of Belshazzar only Nabonidus. The Bible tells us that Belshazzar was the last king of Babylon, and that he was killed. The inscriptions discovered tell us that Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon, and that the king of Persia allowed him to live on and gave him a pension; and there is quite a conflict between the name, and what was said to be done to him; and consequently it used to be said this was sure proof that Daniel was not written till Maccabean times. All it says about Belshazzar is purely imaginary. There was never such a man as Belshazzar. And then, in the inscriptions which had been taken to the British museum, in the various business documents there, there was found a sufficient number of tablets mentioning the name Belshazzar to prove his existence; mentioning Belshazzar as a member of the royal family, to prove his relationship as the son of Nabonidus; and then, further, showing eventually tablets were found showing his power in the kingdom at the end of the reign tablets sufficient to prove that Belshazzar was indeed the actual reigning king, even though theoretically simply co-king along with his father, Nabonidus. Professor Dougherty of Yale University, in 1928, in the Oriental Research series, wrote a book on this entitled Nabonidus and Belshazzar. 12 The book summarizes the situation by remarking, Fortunately we are dependent no longer upon pure supposition in dealing with the problem. There is now available a rich and valuable accumulation of Babylonian texts making specific reference to Nabonidus and Belshazzar. These new contemporary sources of information have thrown so much light upon the period 12 Raymond Philip Dougherty, Nabonidus and Belshazzar: A Study of the Closing Events of the Neo- Babylonian Empire, (1929). 54

55 under investigation that it is necessary to revise former critical and historical conclusions. If we had another hour in this semester, I might detail to you something of the book. As it is, you can find it in the library if you are interested further, now or later on; but I mention to you simply the outstanding feature of it, that Professor Dougherty was convinced and gave evidence that seemed conclusive, that Belshazzar was the second ruler in the kingdom and then Professor Dougherty says the book of Daniel has an accuracy which is not paralleled in any other ancient writing. He sums up the book as follows: The foregoing summary of information concerning Belshazzar, when judged in the light obtained from the texts discussed in this monograph, indicates that of all non-babylonian records dealing with the situation at the close of the Neo- Babylonian empire, the fifth chapter of Daniel ranks next to [contemporary - dcb] cuneiform literature in accuracy so far as outstanding events are concerned. The Scriptural account may be interpreted as excelling because it employs the name Belshazzar; because it attributes royal power to Belshazzar; and because it recognizes that a dual rulership existed in the kingdom. Babylonian cuneiform documents of the sixth century B. C. furnish clear-cut evidence of the correctness of these three basic historical nuclei contained in the Biblical narrative dealing with the fall of Babylon... The total information found in all available chronologically-fixed documents, later than the cuneiform texts of the sixth century B. C. and prior to the writings of Josephus, of the first century A. D. could not have provided the necessary material for the historical framework of the fifth chapter of Daniel." ibid., p. 200, (emphasis in the original.) And the last statement is footnoted as follows: The view [almost universally held by critical scholars - dcb] that the fifth chapter of Daniel originated in the Maccabaean age is discredited. Biblical critics have pushed back its date to the third century B. C... However, a narrative characterized by such an accurate historical perspective as Daniel 5 ought to be entitled to a place much nearer in time to the reliable documents which belong to the general epoch with which it deals [i.e. ought to be judged to be contemporary with the events described - dcb]." ibid. note 671. What Dougherty says here, is that we have no other ancient writing telling of this history after the actual time of the events described, up to the time of Josephus, which is built on the book of Daniel, which mentions Belshazzar or recognizes his power in the kingdom. In particular the apocryphal book of Baruch cannot be the source of the material in Daniel. 13 There is no plausible source for the verified information in Daniel except a source that would have to be contemporary with the 13 Ibid., note #670 and p

56 events, from around 539 B.C., at the time of the events. In other words the book of Daniel, at least in the narration of this remarkable event is genuine and contemporary, a most remarkable evidence of the accuracy of the Biblical account. 56

57 Appendix Map of Mesopotamia (1200 BC) Showing the locations mentioned here, date and director of first major excavations 57