The Country and People

Assyria was the name given to the district which had been called 'the land of Assur' by its own inhabitants. Assur, however, had originally been the name, not of a country, but of a city founded in remote times on the western bank of the Tigris, midway between the Greater and the Lesser Zab. It was the primitive capital of the district in which it stood, and to which, accordingly, it lent its name. It seems to have been built by a people who spoke an agglutinative language, like the languages of the modern Fins and Turks, and who were afterwards supplanted by the Semitic Assyrians. The name in their language probably signified 'water-boundary.' When the country was occupied by the Semitic Assyrians the name was slightly changed, so as to assume the form of a word which in Assyrian meant 'gracious.'

It so happened that Assyrian mythology knew of a deity who represented the firmament, and was addressed as Sar. The name of Sar came in time to be confused with that of Assur, the divine patron of the Assyrian capital, the result being that Assur signified not only a city and country, but also the supreme deity worshipped by their inhabitants. Assur, in fact, became the divine impersonation of the power and constitution of Assyria; at the same time he was also 'the gracious' god and the primæval firmament of heaven.

Assur, whose ruins are now called Kalah Sherghat, did not always remain the capital of Assyria. Its place was taken by a group of cities some 60 miles to the north, above the Greater Zab, and on the eastern side of the Tigris, namely, Nineveh, Calah, and Dur-Sargon. The foundation of Nineveh, the modern Kouyunjik, probably goes back to as early an age as that of Assur, but it was not until a much later period that it became an important city, and supplanted the older capital of the kingdom. Calah, now called Nimrûd, though built some four centuries before, was not made the seat of royalty until the reigns of Assur-natsir-pal and Shalmaneser II, in the 9th century B.C., and Dur-Sargon (the modern Khorsabad), as its name implies, was the creation of Sargon. Instead of Dur-Sargon the Book of Genesis (x. 11) mentions Resen 'between Nineveh and Calah.' The site of Resen has not been identified, though its name has been met with in the Assyrian inscriptions under the form of Res-eni, 'the head of the spring.'

The passage of Genesis in which Resen is referred to unfortunately admits of a double translation. If we adopt the rendering of the margin, and translate 'out of that land he went forth into Assyria and builded Nineveh,' we might infer that Nineveh and its neighbouring towns had no existence before the days when Babylonian emigrants settled in the territory of the city of Assur, and superseded its older inhabitants. However this may be, we know from the cuneiform monuments that the rise of Assyria did not take place until the Babylonian monarchy was already growing old. The country afterwards known as Assyria had been comprised in Gutium or Kurdistan, a name which has been identified, with great probability, by Sir H. Rawlinson, with the Goyyim or 'nations' of Genesis xiv. over which Tidal was king. There seems to have been a time when the rulers of Assur were mere governors appointed by the Babylonian monarchs; at all events, the earliest of whom we know do not give themselves the title of king, but use a word which signifies 'viceroy' in the Chaldean inscriptions.

These viceroys, however, managed eventually to shake off the yoke of their Babylonian masters, and one of them, Bel-kapkapi by name, established an independent kingdom at Assur in the 17th or 16th century before our era. His kingdom extended on both sides of the Tigris, and doubtless included the country north of the Greater Zab, where Nineveh was situated. The exact frontiers of Assyria, however, were never accurately fixed. They varied with the military power and conquests of its monarchs. Sometimes portions of the plateau of Mesopotamia on the west were comprehended within it, as well as the country through which the Tigris flowed, as far south as the borders of Babylonia, and as far north as the Kurdish mountains. At other times Assyria was confined to the narrow space within which its great cities stood.

The inhabitants of Assyria belonged to the Semitic stock, that is to say, they were allied in blood and language to the Hebrews, the Aramæans, and the Arabs. The older population had been either expelled or destroyed. The Assyrians thus differed from the Babylonians, who were a mixed race, partly Semitic and partly non-Semitic. The non-Semitic element is generally termed Accadian; it spoke agglutinative dialects, and was the original possessor of the plain of Chaldæa. The Accadians invented the cuneiform system of writing, founded the chief cities and civilisation of Babylonia, and erected the earliest Babylonian monuments with which we are acquainted. It was only gradually that they yielded to the advance of the Semites; in fact, the final triumph of the Semites in Babylonia was only effected by their amalgamation with the old population of the country, and their complete acceptance of Accadian culture. The Accadian language lingered long, and when it died out was preserved as a learned language, like Latin in our own day, which every educated Babylonian was expected to know.

It was natural, therefore, that the pure-blooded Semites of Assyria and the mixed population of Babylonia should differ from one another in many respects. The Babylonians were agriculturists, fond of literature and peaceful pursuits. The Assyrians, on the contrary, have been appropriately termed the Romans of the East: they were a military people, caring for little else save war and trade. Their literature, like their culture and art, was borrowed from Babylonia, and they never took kindly to it. Even under the magnificent patronage of Assur-bani-pal, Assyrian literature was an exotic. It was cultivated only by the few; whereas in Babylonia the greater part of the population seems to have been able to read and write. If the Assyrian was less luxurious than his Babylonian neighbour, he was also less humane. Indeed, the Assyrian annals glory in the record of a ferocity at which we stand aghast. On the other hand, the Assyrian was not so superstitious as the Babylonian, though he ascribed his successes to the favour of Assur, and impaled the inhabitants of conquered towns or burnt them alive because they did not believe in his national deity. He was, as Nahum declared, the lion which 'did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his holes with prey, and his dens with ravin.'

Assyria was so wholly a military power, that the destruction of Nineveh not only destroyed the Assyrian Empire but blotted out the Assyrian nation itself. When 'the gates of the rivers' of Nineveh—the Tigris and Khusur—were opened, and 'the palace dissolved,' Assyria ceased to exist. In the Sassanian period the mounds which covered the ruins of the old city were for a short time occupied by the houses of a village, but these, too, disappeared after a while, and the very site of Nineveh remained for centuries unknown. Rich, in 1818, conjectured that the mounds of Kouyunjik, opposite the modern town of Mosul, concealed its ruins beneath them, but it was not until the excavations of the Frenchman Botta, in 1842, and the Englishman Layard, in 1845, that the remains first of Dur-Sargon, and then of Nineveh itself, were revealed to the eyes of a wondering world. The capital of the Assyrian Empire was recovered, and with it the sculptured monuments of its kings, and the relics of its clay-inscribed library. The discovery came at an opportune moment. The cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had at last yielded up their secrets to the patient sagacity of European scholars, and had furnished the key to other inscriptions,—also in cuneiform characters, but of a wholly different kind, and expressing a wholly different language—which now proved to be the long-lost records of the Assyrian people. Little by little the records were deciphered; fresh expeditions to the buried cities of Assyria and Babylonia returned to Europe with fresh spoils, and it is now possible to describe the history and even the daily life and thoughts of a people who but half a century ago were but a mere name. The following pages are intended to give a picture of that history and life.