Part 27 (2/2)
But we need not go back to Ancient Egypt to find examples of corpses making long journeys in order to reach some great national burying-place. Loftus received the first hint of his suggestion from what he himself saw at Nedjef and at Kerbela, where he met funeral processions more than once on the roads of Irak-Arabi. From every town in Persia the bodies of s.h.i.+te Mussulmans, who desire to repose near the mortal remains of Ali and his son, are transported after death into Mesopotamia.[429] According to Loftus the cemetery of Nedjef alone, that by which the mosque known as _Meched-Ali_ is surrounded, receives the bodies of from five to eight thousand Persians every year. Now the journey between Nineveh and Calah and the plains of Lower Chaldaea was far easier than it is now--considering especially the state of the roads--between Tauris, Ispahan, and Teheran, on the one hand and Nedjef on the other. The transit from a.s.syria to Chaldaea could be made, like that of the Egyptian mummy, entirely by water, that is to say, very cheaply, very easily, and very rapidly.
We are brought up, however, by one objection. Although as a rule subject to the a.s.syrians, the Chaldaeans were from the eleventh to the seventh century before our era in a constant state of revolt against their northern neighbours; they struggled hard for their independence and waged long and b.l.o.o.d.y wars with the masters of Nineveh. Can the a.s.syrian kings have dared to confide their mortal remains to sepulchres in the midst of a people who had shown themselves so hostile to their domination? Must they not have trembled for the security of tombs surrounded by a rebellious and angry populace? And the furious conflicts that we find narrated in the a.s.syrian inscriptions, must they not often have interrupted the transport of bodies and compelled them to wait without sepulture for months and even years?
Further explorations and the decipherment of the texts will one day solve the problem. Meanwhile we must attempt to determine the nature of Chaldaeo-a.s.syrian beliefs as to a future life. We shall get no help from Herodotus. Intending to describe the manners and customs of the Chaldaeans in a special work that he either never wrote or that has been lost,[430] he treated Mesopotamia in much less ample fas.h.i.+on than Egypt, in his history.
All that he leaves us on the subject we are now studying is this pa.s.sing remark, ”The Babylonians put their dead in honey, and their funerary lamentations are very like those of the Egyptians.”[431] Happily we have the Chaldaean cemeteries and the sculptured monuments of a.s.syria to which we can turn for information. The funerary writings of the Egyptians allow us to read their hearts as an open book. We know that the men who lived in the days of the ancient empire looked upon the posthumous life as a simple continuation of life in the sun. They believed it to be governed by the same wants, but capable of infinite prolongation so long as those wants were supplied. And so they placed their dead in tombs where they were surrounded by such things as they required when alive, especially by meat and drink. Finally, they endeavoured to ensure them the enjoyment of these things to the utmost limit of time by preserving their bodies against dissolution. If these were to fall into dust the day after they entered upon their new abode, the provisions and furniture with which it was stocked would be of no use.
The Chaldaeans kept a similar object before them. They neglected nothing to secure the body against the action of damp, in the first place by making the sides of their vaults and the coffins themselves water-tight, secondly, by providing for the rapid escape of rain water from the cemetery,[432]
and, finally, if they did not push the art of embalming so far as the Egyptians, they entered upon the same path. The bodies we find in the oldest tombs are imperfect mummies compared with those of Egypt, but the skeleton, at least, is nearly always in an excellent state of preservation; it is only when handled that it tumbles into dust. In the more s.p.a.cious tombs the body lies upon a mat, with its head upon a cus.h.i.+on. In most cases the remains of bandages and linen cloths were found about it. Mats, cus.h.i.+ons, and bandages had all been treated with bitumen. A small terra-cotta model in the British Museum shows a dead man thus stowed in his coffin; his hands are folded on his breast, and round the whole lower part of the body the bands that gave him the appearance of a mummy may be traced.
The funerary furniture is far from being as rich and varied as it is in the tombs of Egypt and Etruria, but the same idea has governed the choice of objects in both cases. When the corpse is that of a man we find at his side the cylinder which served him as seal, his arms, arrow heads of flint or bronze, and the remains of the staff he carried in his hand.[433] In a woman's tomb the body has jewels on its neck, its wrists and ankles; jewels are strewn about the tomb and placed on the lid of the coffin. Among other toilet matters have been found small gla.s.s bottles, fragments of a bouquet, and cakes of the black pigment which the women of the East still employ to lengthen their eyebrows and enhance their blackness.[434]
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGS. 159, 160.--Vases; from Warka. British Museum.]
The vases which are always present in well-preserved tombs, show the ideas of the Mesopotamians on death more clearly than anything else. Upon the palm of one hand or behind the head is placed a cup, sometimes of bronze, oftener of terra-cotta. From it the dead man can help himself to the water or fermented liquors with which the great clay jars that are spread over the floor of his grave are filled (Figs. 159 and 160). Near these also we find shallow bowls or saucers, used no doubt as plates for holding food.
Date-stones, chicken and fish bones are also present in great numbers. In one tomb the snout of a swordfish has been found, in another a wild boar's skull. It would seem too that the idea of adding imitation viands to real ones occurred to the Chaldaeans as well as to the Egyptians.[435] From one grave opened by Taylor four ducks carved in stone were taken.
The sepulchres in which the objects we have been mentioning were found, are the most ancient in Chaldaea--on this all the explorers are agreed. Their situation in the lowest part of the funerary mounds, the aspect of the characters engraved upon the cylinders and the style of the things they contained, all go to prove their age. In similar tombs discovered by M. de Sarzec at Sirtella, in the same region, a tablet of stone and a bronze statuette, differing in no important particular from those deposited in foundation stones, were found. The texts engraved upon them leave no doubt as to their great antiquity.[436] It is then to the early Chaldaean monarchy that we must a.s.sign these tombs, which so clearly betray ideas and beliefs practically identical with those that find their freest expression in the mastabas of the ancient Egyptian Empire.
In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, the human intellect arrived with the lapse of time at something beyond this childish and primitive belief. Men did not, however, repel it altogether as false and ridiculous; they continued to cherish it at the bottom of their hearts, and to allow it to impose certain lines of action upon them which otherwise could hardly be explained or justified. As in Egypt, and in later years in Greece, a new and more abstract conception was imposed upon the first. Logically, the second theory was the negation of its predecessor, but where imagination and sentiment play the princ.i.p.al _role_, such contradictions are lost sight of.
We have elsewhere[437] traced the process by which the imagination was led to sketch out a new explanation of the mystery of death. As man's experience increased, and his faculty for observation became more powerful, he had to make a greater mental effort before he could believe in the immortality of the body, and in a life prolonged to infinity in the darkness of the tomb. In order to satisfy the craving for perpetuity, a something was imagined, we can hardly say what, a shade, an _imago_, that detached itself from the body at the moment of death, and took itself off with the lightness of a bird. A great s.p.a.ce, with no definite size, shape, or situation, in which these shades of the departed could meet each other and enjoy greater freedom than in the tomb, was added to the first conception. This less material belief was better adapted than the first to the moral instincts of humanity. A material and organic existence pa.s.sed in the grave dealt out the same fate to good and bad alike. On the other hand, nothing was more easy than to divide the kingdom of the shades into two compartments, into two distinct domains, and to place in one those whose conduct had been deserving of reward; in the other, those whose crimes and vices had been insufficiently punished upon earth.
It is not to the Chaldaean sepulchres that we owe our knowledge that the Semites of Mesopotamia followed in the footsteps of the Egyptians, when they found themselves in face of the problem of life and death; it is to the literature of the a.s.syrians. Among those tablets of terra-cotta from the library of a.s.surbanipal that are now preserved in the British Museum, George Smith discovered, in 1873, a mythological doc.u.ment in which the descent of Istar to the infernal regions in search of her lover Tammouz is recounted. Of this he gives a first translation, which is already out of date. Since his discovery was announced, the most learned a.s.syriologists have made a study of the doc.u.ment, and now even those among them who most seldom think alike, are in agreement as to its meaning except in a few unimportant particulars.[438] No doubt remains as to the general significance of the piece; we may even compare it with other doc.u.ments from the same library in which there is much to confirm and complete its contents.
Even if there were no evidence to the contrary, we might safely affirm that the first conception was not effaced from the minds of the a.s.syrians by the second. M. Halevy has translated an a.s.syrian text, whose meaning he thus epitomizes: ”What becomes of the individual deposited in a tomb? A curious pa.s.sage in one of the 'books' from the library of a.s.surbanipal answers this question, indirectly, indeed, but without any ambiguity. After death the vital and indestructible principle, the incorporeal spirit, is disengaged from the body; it is called in a.s.syrian _ekimmou_ or _egimmou_.... The _ekimmou_ inhabits the tomb and reposes upon the bed (_zalalu_) of the corpse. If well treated by the children of the defunct, he becomes their protector; if not, their evil genius and scourge. The greatest misfortune that can befall a man is to be deprived of burial. In such a case his spirit, deprived of a resting-place and of the funerary libations, leads a wandering and miserable existence; he is exposed to all kinds of ill-treatment at the hands of his fellow spirits, who show him no mercy.”
Here we find certain elements of that primitive belief that would escape us in a mere examination of the Chaldaean tombs. We see how they understood the connection between the living and the dead, and why they so pa.s.sionately desired to receive due sepulture. These ideas and sentiments are identical with those which M. Fustel de Coulanges has a.n.a.lysed so deeply in his _Cite antique_. They subsisted in all their strength in a.s.syria, and must have had all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in which they could a.s.semble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its _Ament_ and Greece her _Hades_, so Chaldaea and a.s.syria had their h.e.l.l, their place of departed ghosts. We know from the narrative of Istar that they looked upon it as an immense building, situated in the centre of the earth and bounded on every side by the great river whose waters bathe the foundations of the world. This country of the dead is called the ”land where one sees nothing” (_mat la namari_), or the ”land whence one does not return” (_mat la tayarti_). The government of the country is in the hands of Nergal, the G.o.d of war, and his spouse Allat, the sister of Astarte. The house is surrounded by seven strong walls. In each wall there is a single door, which is fastened by a bolt as soon as a new comer has entered. Each door is kept by an incorruptible guardian. We cannot quote the whole of the story; we give, however, a few lines in which the chief features of the a.s.syrian conception is most clearly shown. Istar speaks:--
Let me return [toward the house],
[Toward] the house in which Irkalla lives, In which the evening has no morning, [Towards the country] whence there is no return, [Whose inhabitants,] deprived of light, [Have dust for food] and mud to nourish them, A tunic and wings for vesture, [Who see no day,] who sit in the shadows, [In the house] into which I must enter, [They live there,] (once) the wearers of crowns, [The wearers] of crowns who governed the world in ancient days, Of whom Bel and Anou have perpetuated the names and memory.
There too stand the foundations of the earth, the meeting of the mighty waters, In the palace of dust into which I must come, Live the prince and the n.o.ble, Live the king and the strong man, Live the guardians of the depths of the great G.o.ds, Live Ner and Etana.
A long dialogue follows between Istar and the guardian of the gate, by which we find that there was a rigorous law compelling all who came to strip themselves of their clothes before they could enter. In spite of her resistance, Istar herself was obliged to submit to this law. From other texts we learn that the entrance to these infernal regions was situated at the foot of the ”northern mountain,” a sort of a.s.syrian Olympus.
According to the fragment above quoted the condition of the dead was truly piteous; they had no food but dust and mud; their dwelling is sometimes called _bit-edi_, the ”house of solitude,” because in the life of misery and privation they lead no one takes any thought for others, his only care is to relieve his own troubles. Consequently there are no families nor any social or common life. The conscience protested against the injustice of confounding with the crowd those mortals who had distinguished themselves when alive by their exploits or virtues. Thus we find in a recently copied pa.s.sage from the great epic of Izdubar, the a.s.syrian Hercules, that valiant soldiers--those no doubt who had fallen in the ”Wars of a.s.sur”--were rewarded for their prowess. As soon as they entered the shadow kingdom they were stretched upon a soft couch and surrounded by their relations. Their father and mother supported the head the enemy's sword had wounded, their wives stood beside them and waited on them with zeal and tenderness. They were refreshed and had their strength restored by the pure water of life.
The idea of a final reward is expressed in still more unmistakable accents in a religious song of which two fragments have come down to us. The poet celebrates the felicity of the just taking his food with the G.o.ds and become a G.o.d himself:--
Wash thy hands, purify thy hands, The G.o.ds, thine elders, will wash and purify their hands; Eat the pure nourishment in the pure disks, Drink the pure water from the pure vases; Prepare to enjoy the peace of the just!
They have brought their pure water, Anat, the great spouse of Anou, Has held thee in her sacred arms; Iaou has transferred thee into a holy place; He has transferred thee from his sacred hands; He has transferred thee into the midst of honey and fat, He has poured magic water into thy mouth, And the virtue of the water has opened thy mouth.
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