Part 10 (1/2)
16. Mummu-Tiamat, the impersonation of chaos, the power of darkness and lawlessness, does not vanish from the scene when Bel puts an end to her reign, destroys, by the sheer force of light and order, her hideous progeny of monsters and frees from her confusion the germs and rudimental forms of life, which, under the new and divine dispensation, are to expand and combine into the beautifully varied, yet harmonious world we live in. Tiamat becomes the sworn enemy of the G.o.ds and their creation, the great principle of opposition and destruction. When the missing texts come to light,--if ever they do--it will probably be found that the serpent who tempts the woman in the famous cylinder, is none other than a form of the rebellious and vindictive Tiamat, who is called now a ”Dragon,” now ”the Great Serpent.” At last the hostility cannot be ignored, and things come to a deadly issue. It is determined in the council of the G.o.ds that one of them must fight the wicked dragon; a complete suit of armor is made and exhibited by Anu himself, of which the sickle-shaped sword and the beautifully bent bow are the princ.i.p.al features. It is Bel who dares the venture and goes forth on a matchless war chariot, armed with the sword, and the bow, and his great weapon, the thunderbolt, sending the lightning before him and scattering arrows around. Tiamat, the Dragon of the Sea, came out to meet him, stretching her immense body along, bearing death and destruction, and attended by her followers. The G.o.d rushed on the monster with such violence that he threw her down and was already fastening fetters on her limbs, when she uttered a great shout and started up and attacked the righteous leader of the G.o.ds, while banners were raised on both sides as at a pitched battle. Meridug drew his sword and wounded her; at the same time a violent wind struck against her face. She opened her jaws to swallow up Meridug, but before she could close them he bade the wind to enter into her body. It entered and filled her with its violence, shook her heart and tore her entrails and subdued her courage. Then the G.o.d bound her, and put an end to her works, while her followers stood amazed, then broke their lines and fled, full of fear, seeing that Tiamat, their leader, was conquered. There she lay, her weapons broken, herself like a sword thrown down on the ground, in the dark and bound, conscious of her bondage and in great grief, her might suddenly broken by fear.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 73.--BEL FIGHTS THE DRAGON--TIAMAT (BABYLONIAN CYLINDER).]
17. The battle of Bel-Marduk and the Dragon was a favorite incident in the cycle of Chaldean tradition, if we judge from the number of representations we have of it on Babylonian cylinders, and even on a.s.syrian wall-sculptures. The texts which relate to it are, however, in a frightful state of mutilation, and only the last fragment, describing the final combat, can be read and translated with anything like completeness. With it ends the series treating of the Cosmogony or Beginnings of the World. But it may be completed by a few more legends of the same primitive character and preserved on detached tablets, in double text, as usual--Accadian and a.s.syrian. To these belongs a poem narrating the rebellion, already alluded to, (see p. 182,) of the seven evil spirits, originally the messengers and throne-bearers of the G.o.ds, and their war against the moon, the whole being evidently a fanciful rendering of an eclipse. ”Those wicked G.o.ds, the rebel spirits,” of whom one is likened to a leopard, and one to a serpent, and the rest to other animals--suggesting the fanciful shapes of storm-clouds--while one is said to be the raging south wind, began the attack ”with evil tempest, baleful wind,” and ”from the foundations of the heavens like the lightning they darted.” The lower region of the sky was reduced to its primeval chaos, and the G.o.ds sat in anxious council. The moon-G.o.d (Sin), the sun-G.o.d (Shamash), and the G.o.ddess Ishtar had been appointed to sway in close harmony the lower sky and to command the hosts of heaven; but when the moon-G.o.d was attacked by the seven spirits of evil, his companions basely forsook him, the sun-G.o.d retreating to his place and Ishtar taking refuge in the highest heaven (the heaven of Anu). Nebo is despatched to ea, who sends his son Meridug with this instruction:--”Go, my son Meridug! The light of the sky, my son, even the moon-G.o.d, is grievously darkened in heaven, and in eclipse from heaven is vanis.h.i.+ng. Those seven wicked G.o.ds, the serpents of death who fear not, are waging unequal war with the laboring moon.” Meridug obeys his father's bidding, and overthrows the seven powers of darkness.[BB]
[Ill.u.s.tration: 74.--BATTLE BETWEEN BEL AND THE DRAGON (TIAMAT). (Smith's ”Chaldea.”)]
18. There is one more detached legend known from the surviving fragments of Berosus, also supposed to be derived from ancient Accadian texts: it is that of the great tower and the confusion of tongues. One such text has indeed been found by the indefatigable George Smith, but there is just enough left of it to be very tantalizing and very unsatisfactory.
The narrative in Berosus amounts to this: that men having grown beyond measure proud and arrogant, so as to deem themselves superior even to the G.o.ds, undertook to build an immense tower, to scale the sky; that the G.o.ds, offended with this presumption, sent violent winds to overthrow the construction when it had already reached a great height, and at the same time caused men to speak different languages,--probably to sow dissension among them, and prevent their ever again uniting in a common enterprise so daring and impious. The site was identified with that of Babylon itself, and so strong was the belief attaching to the legend that the Jews later on adopted it unchanged, and centuries afterwards, as we saw above, fixed on the ruins of the hugest of all Ziggurats, that of Borsip, as those of the great Tower of the Confusion of Tongues. Certain it is, that the tradition, under all its fanciful apparel, contains a very evident vein of historical fact, since it was indeed from the plains of Chaldea that many of the princ.i.p.al nations of the ancient East, various in race and speech, dispersed to the north, the west, and the south, after having dwelt there for centuries as in a common cradle, side by side, and indeed to a great extent as one people.
FOOTNOTES:
[AW] See Fr. Lenormant, ”Die Magie und Wahrsagekunst der Chaldaer,” p.
377.
[AX] Francois Lenormant, ”Origines de l'Histoire,” Vol. II., p. 130.
[AY] ”Five Monarchies,” Vol. III., pp. 380-387.
[AZ] See ”Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology,” Feb., 1883, pp. 74-76, and ”Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,” Vol. XVI., 1884, p. 302.
[BA] The one exception to the above rule of orientation among the Ziggurats of Chaldea is that of the temple of Bel, in Babylon, (E-SAGGILA in the old language,) which is oriented in the usual way--its sides facing the _real_ North, South, East and West.
[BB] See A. H. Sayce, ”Babylonian Literature,” p. 35.
VII.
MYTHS.--HEROES AND THE MYTHICAL EPOS.
1. The stories by which a nation attempts to account for the mysteries of creation, to explain the Origin of the World, are called, in scientific language, COSMOGONIC MYTHS. The word Myth is constantly used in conversation, but so loosely and incorrectly, that it is most important once for all to define its proper meaning. It means simply _a phenomenon of nature presented not as the result of a law but as the act of divine or at least superhuman persons, good or evil powers_--(for instance, the eclipse of the Moon described as the war against the G.o.ds of the seven rebellious spirits). Further reading and practice will show that there are many kinds of myths, of various origins; but there is none, which, if properly taken to pieces, thoroughly traced and cornered, will not be covered by this definition. A Myth has also been defined as a legend connected more or less closely with some religious belief, and, in its main outlines, handed down from prehistoric times.
There are only two things which can prevent the contemplation of nature and speculation on its mysteries from running into mythology: a knowledge of the physical laws of nature, as supplied by modern experimental science, and a strict, unswerving belief in the unity of G.o.d, absolute and undivided, as affirmed and defined by the Hebrews in so many places of their sacred books: ”The Lord he is G.o.d, there is none else beside him.” ”The Lord he is G.o.d, in Heaven above and upon the earth beneath there is none else.” ”I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no G.o.d beside me.” ”I am G.o.d and there is none else.” But experimental science is a very modern thing indeed, scarcely a few hundred years old, and Monotheism, until the propagation of Christianity, was professed by only one small nation, the Jews, though the chosen thinkers of other nations have risen to the same conception in many lands and many ages. The great ma.s.s of mankind has always believed in the personal individuality of all the forces of nature, i.e., in many G.o.ds; everything that went on in the world was to them the manifestation of the feelings, the will, the acts of these G.o.ds--hence the myths. The earlier the times, the more unquestioning the belief and, as a necessary consequence, the more exuberant the creation of myths.
2. But G.o.ds and spirits are not the only actors in myths. Side by side with its sacred traditions on the Origin of things, every nation treasures fond but vague memories of its own beginnings--vague, both from their remoteness and from their not being fixed in writing, and being therefore liable to the alterations and enlargements which a story invariably undergoes when told many times to and by different people, i.e., when it is transmitted from generation to generation by oral tradition. These memories generally centre around a few great names, the names of the oldest national heroes, of the first rulers, lawgivers and conquerors of the nation, the men who by their genius _made_ it a nation out of a loose collection of tribes or large families, who gave it social order and useful arts, and safety from its neighbors, or, perhaps, freed it from foreign oppressors. In their grateful admiration for these heroes, whose doings naturally became more and more marvellous with each generation that told of them, men could not believe that they should have been mere imperfect mortals like themselves, but insisted on considering them as directly inspired by the deity in some one of the thousand shapes they invested it with, or as half-divine of their own nature. The consciousness of the imperfection inherent to ordinary humanity, and the limited powers awarded to it, has always prompted this explanation of the achievements of extraordinarily gifted individuals, in whatever line of action their exceptional gifts displayed themselves.
Besides, if there is something repugnant to human vanity in having to submit to the dictates of superior reason and the rule of superior power as embodied in mere men of flesh and blood, there is on the contrary something very flattering and soothing to that same vanity in the idea of having been specially singled out as the object of the protection and solicitude of the divine powers; this idea at all events takes the galling sting from the constraint of obedience. Hence every nation has very jealously insisted on and devoutly believed in the divine origin of its rulers and the divine inst.i.tution of its laws and customs. Once it was implicitly admitted that the world teemed with spirits and G.o.ds, who, not content with attending to their particular spheres and departments, came and went at their pleasure, had walked the earth and directly interfered with human affairs, there was no reason to disbelieve _any_ occurrence, however marvellous--provided it had happened very, very long ago. (See p. 197.)
3. Thus, in the traditions of every ancient nation, there is a vast and misty tract of time, expressed, if at all, in figures of appalling magnitude--hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of years--between the unpierceable gloom of an eternal past and the broad daylight of remembered, recorded history. There, all is shadowy, gigantic, superhuman. There, G.o.ds move, dim yet visible, shrouded in a golden cloud of mystery and awe; there, by their side, loom other shapes, as dim but more familiar, human yet more than human--the Heroes, Fathers of races, founders of nations, the companions, the beloved of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, nay, their own children, mortal themselves, yet doing deeds of daring and might such as only the immortals could inspire and favor, the connecting link between these and ordinary humanity--as that gloaming, uncertain, s.h.i.+fting, but not altogether unreal streak of time is the borderland between Heaven and Earth, the very hot-bed of myth, fiction and romance. For of their favorite heroes, people began to tell the same stories as of their G.o.ds, in modified forms, transferred to their own surroundings and familiar scenes. To take one of the most common transformations: if the Sun-G.o.d waged war against the demons of darkness and destroyed them in heaven (see p. 171), the hero hunted wild beasts and monsters on earth, of course always victoriously. This one theme could be varied by the national poets in a thousand ways and woven into a thousand different stories, which come with full right under the head of ”myths.” Thus arose a number of so-called HEROIC MYTHS, which, by dint of being repeated, settled into a certain defined traditional shape, like the well-known fairy-tales of our nurseries, which are the same everywhere and told in every country with scarcely any changes. As soon as the art of writing came into general use, these favorite and time-honored stories, which the ma.s.s of the people probably still received as literal truth, were taken down, and, as the work naturally devolved on priests and clerks, i.e., men of education and more or less literary skill, often themselves poets, they were worked over in the process, connected, and remodelled into a continuous whole. The separate myths, or adventures of one or more particular heroes, formerly recited severally, somewhat after the manner of the old songs and ballads, frequently became so many chapters or books in a long, well-ordered poem, in which they were introduced and distributed, often with consummate art, and told with great poetical beauty. Such poems, of which several have come down to us, are called EPIC POEMS, or simply EPICS. The entire ma.s.s of fragmentary materials out of which they are composed in the course of time, blending almost inextricably historical reality with mythical fiction, is the NATIONAL EPOS of a race, its greatest intellectual treasure, from which all its late poetry and much of its political and religious feeling draws its food ever after. A race that has no national epos is one devoid of great memories, incapable of high culture and political development, and no such has taken a place among the leading races of the world. All those that have occupied such a place at any period of the world's history, have had their Mythic and Heroic Ages, brimful of wonders and fanciful creations.
4. From these remarks it will be clear that the preceding two or three chapters have been treating of what may properly be called the Religious and Cosmogonic Myths of the Shumiro-Accads and the Babylonians. The present chapter will be devoted to their Heroic Myths or Mythic Epos, as embodied in an Epic which has been in great part preserved, and which is the oldest known in the world, dating certainly from 2000 years B.C., and probably more.
5. Of this poem the few fragments we have of Berosus contain no indication. They only tell of a great deluge which took place under the last of that fabulous line of ten kings which is said to have begun 259,000 years after the apparition of the divine Man-Fish, Oannes, and to have reigned in the aggregate a period of 432,000 years. The description has always excited great interest from its extraordinary resemblance to that given by the Bible. Berosus tells how XISUTHROS, the last of the ten fabulous kings, had a dream in which the deity announced to him that on a certain day all men should perish in a deluge of waters, and ordered him to take all the sacred writings and bury them at Sippar, the City of the Sun, then to build a s.h.i.+p, provide it with ample stores of food and drink and enter it with his family and his dearest friends, also animals, both birds and quadrupeds of every kind.
Xisuthros did as he had been bidden. When the flood began to abate, on the third day after the rain had ceased to fall, he sent out some birds, to see whether they would find any land, but the birds, having found neither food nor place to rest upon, returned to the s.h.i.+p. A few days later, Xisuthros once more sent the birds out; but they again came back to him, this time with muddy feet. On being sent out a third time, they did not return at all. Xisuthros then knew that the land was uncovered; made an opening in the roof of the s.h.i.+p and saw that it was stranded on the top of a mountain. He came out of the s.h.i.+p with his wife, daughter and pilot, built an altar and sacrificed to the G.o.ds, after which he disappeared together with these. When his companions came out to seek him they did not see him, but a voice from heaven informed them that he had been translated among the G.o.ds to live forever, as a reward for his piety and righteousness. The voice went on to command the survivors to return to Babylonia, unearth the sacred writings and make them known to men. They obeyed and, moreover, built many cities and restored Babylon.
6. However interesting this account, it was received at second-hand and therefore felt to need confirmation and ampler development. Besides which, as it stood, it lacked all indication that could throw light on the important question which of the two traditions--that reproduced by Berosus or the Biblical one--was to be considered as the oldest. Here again it was George Smith who had the good fortune to discover the original narrative (in 1872), while engaged in sifting and sorting the tablet-fragments at the British Museum. This is how it happened:[BC]--”Smith found one-half of a whitish-yellow clay tablet, which, to all appearance, had been divided on each face into three columns. In the third column of the obverse or front side he read the words: 'On the mount Nizir the s.h.i.+p stood still.
Then I took a dove and let her fly. The dove flew hither and thither, but finding no resting-place, returned to the s.h.i.+p.' Smith at once knew that he had discovered a fragment of the cuneiform narrative of the Deluge.
With indefatigable perseverance he set to work to search the thousands of a.s.syrian tablet-fragments heaped up in the British Museum, for more pieces. His efforts were crowned with success. He did not indeed find a piece completing the half of the tablet first discovered, but he found instead fragments of two more copies of the narrative, which completed the text in the most felicitous manner and supplied several very important variations of it. One of these duplicates, which has been pieced out of sixteen little bits (see ill.u.s.tration on p. 262), bore the usual inscription at the bottom: 'The property of a.s.shurbanipal, King of hosts, King of the land of a.s.shur,' and contained the information that the Deluge-narrative was the eleventh tablet of a series, several fragments of which, Smith had already come across. With infinite pains he put all these fragments together and found that the story of the Deluge was only an incident in a great Heroic Epic, a poem written in twelve books, making in all about three thousand lines, which celebrated the deeds of an ancient king of Erech.”