by Georges Roux
The Assyrians were expert – or perhaps we should say employed experts – in metal work, and they have left us some very fine pieces of bronze, gold and silver plates, vessels and ornaments of various kinds. Their female slaves, working in royal factories, wove carpets of elaborate design and embroidered with fairy hands, as can be seen from the robes worn by the kings and their courtiers and reproduced in stone in the most minute detail.32 Their stone-cutters, contrary to their sculptors, preferred the traditional religious and mythological motifs to profane subjects, and the Neo-Assyrian cylinder-seals, engraved with extreme skill and care, exhibit a cold though often fascinating beauty. But among the so-called ‘minor arts’, a place of honour must be given to the ivories found in Assyria.
Known in Mesopotamia in Early Dynastic times, ivory-work fell into disuse, to reappear in the middle of the second millennium in countries under Egyptian influence: Palestine (Lachish, Megiddo) and the Mediterranean coast (Ugarit). The prosperity of the Phoenician cities, of the Israelite kingdom and of the Aramaean states of Syria, and their intensive commercial relations with Egypt (which supplied the raw material) account for the extraordinary development of this form of art not only in Syria-Palestine (Samaria, Hama) but also in Assyria, Iran (Ziwiyeh) and Armenia (Toprak Kale) at the beginning of the first millennium B.C. There is no doubt that the majority of the ivories discovered at Assur, Khorsabad, Arslan Tash (Hadâtu) and particularly at Nimrud – the richest site of all33 – had been received as tribute or taken as booty from the western districts of the empire. But a number of pieces, which are purely Assyrian in style and inspiration, must have been made in Assyrian workshops, though it is difficult to decide whether they were executed by foreign Syro-Phoenician artists or by the Mesopotamians themselves. Applied to the decoration of chairs, thrones, beds, screens and doors, or shaped into boxes, bowls, vases, spoons, pins, combs and handles, ivory was worked in many different ways: engraved, sculptured in relief, in the round or in open-work, inlaid with semi-precious stones, plain, painted or gold-plated. Not less remarkable was the variety of the subjects treated. Beside the purely Egyptian motifs, such as the birth of Horus or the goddess Hathor, there are ‘women at the window’, cows, deer and griffins which are more specifically Phoenician in style, and animals fighting together, heroes struggling with wild beasts, nude women or goddesses, hunting scenes and processions which are regarded by the experts as partly Syrian and partly Mesopotamian. These subjects, it is worth noticing, are emphatically peaceful. A few pieces portray the stiff figure of ‘the mighty King of Assur’ alone or accompanied by his soldiers, but those smiling women – the admirable ‘Mona Lisa’ from Nimrud, for instance – those gay musicians and dancers, those calm, enigmatic sphinxes, those cows suckling their calves, and in a graceful, loving movement turning their heads to lick them, are pleasantly relaxing. Whether they were made in Assyria or not, the ivories throw a new light on the mentality of their owners. They bear witness that the Assyrians were sensitive to charm and delicacy, just as their libraries testify to their taste for erudition.
CHAPTER 22
THE SCRIBES OF NINEVEH
In 1849 Sir Henry Layard, the pioneer of British archaeology in Iraq, was excavating Sennacherib's palace in Nineveh when he opened ‘two large chambers of which the whole area was piled a foot or more deep in tablets’.1 Three years later Layard's assistant, Hormuz Rassam, made a similar discovery on the same mound of Kuyunjik, in the palace of Sennacherib's grandson, Ashurbanipal. In all more than 25,000 tablets and fragments were gathered and sent to the British Museum, where they form the richest collection of their kind in the world.2 On examination, it was found that ‘Ashurbanipal's library'* could be divided into two parts: on the one hand, a relatively small number of ‘archive documents’, such as royal inscriptions, letters and administrative texts; on the other hand, ‘library documents’ consisting of literary texts proper (e.g. myths and legends) and a mass of ‘scientific’ texts among which those on divination, omina and exorcism were largely predominant. Many of these tablets were copies of ancient Sumerian and Babylonian texts made in Nineveh at the king's request, whereas others had been obtained from Babylon. Several letters preserved in the royal correspondence afford evidence that the kings of Assyria were craving for culture and had organized a widespread search for old inscriptions, particularly in the highly civilized countries of Sumer and Akkad.
When you receive this letter [writes. Ashurbanipal to a certain Sha-duna] take with you these three men [their names follow] and the learned men of the city of Barsippa, and seek out all the tablets, all those that are in their houses and all those that are deposited in the temple Ezida….
Hunt for the valuable tablets which are in your archives and which do not exist in Assyria and send them to me. I have written to the officials and overseers… and no one shall withhold a tablet from you; and when you see any tablet or ritual about which I have not written to you, but which you perceive may be profitable for my palace, seek it out, pick it up, and send it to me.3
Royal palaces4 were not the only places in which valuable tablets were kept. All the capital cities and the main provincial towns of Assyria had temple libraries and even perhaps private libraries. There were important libraries at Assur and Nimrud, and Anglo-Turkish excavations at Sultan Tepe, near Harran, have brought to light a rich collection of literary and religious texts belonging to a priest of the moon-god Sin called Qurdi-Nergal and including, besides such well-known pieces as the Gilgamesh Epic, the Legend of Narâm-Sin and the ‘Tale of the Righteous Sufferer’, masterpieces of literature – like the amusing ‘Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur’ – which were formerly unknown.5
Once the ancient tablets had been brought to Assyria, they were either kept as they were or copied in the small, neat cuneiform script characteristic of the period. Many texts were partly or entirely rewritten and adapted to the fashion of the day, but others were copied to the letter, and it often happened in such cases that the scribe left in blank words or sentences which had been destroyed on the original, added his own commentary or wrote in the margin ul idi, ‘I do not understand’, or hepu labiru, ‘old break’. Sometimes the scribe did not impress his style into clay but into wax spread over ivory or wooden boards, several boards being bound together by means of metal hinges like a miniature folding screen. In 1953 a number of such writing boards, some of them still bearing traces of an astronomical composition, were discovered at Nimrud in a well where they had been thrown during the sack of the city.6 While administrative and commercial documents were usually stored in jars or baskets, library tablets seem to have been stored on shelves, but since they were invariably found scattered on the floors of ruined buildings, it is extremely difficult to understand the method of classification followed. We know, however, that tablets belonging to the same series were numbered, or ended with a catch-line announcing the first sentence of the next tablet. For instance, tablet III of Enuma elish (the epic of Creation) ends with the sentence:
They founded for him a princely chamber
which opens the narrative in tablet IV. Tablet XI of the Assyrian version of ‘Gilgamesh’ has the following ‘colophon’:
Table XI of ‘He Who Saw Everything’ (of the series of) Gilgamesh. Written down according to the original and collated. Palace of Ashurbanipal, King of the Universe, King of Assyria.
The diligence with which these written relics of the past were collected and the care with which they were preserved do honour not only to the scribes but to the kings, their masters. Paradoxically, the Assyrians who caused so much destruction saved for posterity a great deal of the spiritual treasures of Sumer, Akkad and Babylon and of their own country.
Mesopotamian Science
It is unlikely that Ashurbanipal's library was much used by the king himself. He might, for his lordly pleasure, have deciphered ‘the stones from before the flood’, or read the great epic tales – Gilgamesh, Etana, Adapa – but he hardly had the time or the inclination to read the
thousands of tablets assembled on his orders. The palace library must have been accessible to the palace and temple scribes who could find there the reference document they required. It might have been part of an ‘academy’ (bît mummi, ‘House of Knowledge’), such as flourished in various cities at various periods, perhaps founded to attract and fix in Nineveh the learned men of Mesopotamia. At their disposal were not only literary, historical and religious compositions in large numbers but also philological works, lists of plants, animals and minerals, geographical lists, medical prescriptions, mathematical tables, astronomical observations, in a word a corpus of scientific documents, an encyclopedia, as it were, of Assyro-Babylonian knowledge. These documents are as invaluable to us as they were to the ancient scholars, though for different reasons, but while they call for a general survey of Mesopotamian science, alone they are insufficient for this purpose. We have therefore in this chapter made use of sources more recent or more ancient than the seventh-century Kuyunjik tablets, in particular scientific texts from Nippur, Tell Harmal, Assur and Uruk ranging from the end of the third millennium to approximately the third century B.C.7
The Greeks who knew – and admired – the ‘Chaldaeans’ mostly as magicians and fortune-tellers have done considerable harm to their memory. It is true that magic in the broader sense of the term (i.e. words or actions purporting to influence supernatural forces) had always been closely associated with Sumero-Akkadian religion and that the diviner's art had been perfected and codified in Mesopotamia at a very early date, but the vulgarization of magical practices did not come into full play until the end of the pre-Christian era. Far from being the last word in Babylonian wisdom, witchcraft and popular astrology developed as a sign of decay in a dying civilization, and we now know for certain that Sumerians and Assyro-Babylonians alike were blessed with almost all the qualities required for a truly scientific attitude of mind. They had, first of all, an insatiable curiosity, the curiosity that prompted them to collect ancient tablets, establish museums of antiquities and bring home from distant countries rare species of plants and unknown animals. They had a patience, a devotion to detail apparent in all their activities, from the compilation of accounts to their works of art. They possessed an acute sense of observation, studied nature with enthusiasm, recorded and correlated a vast amount of data, not so much for practical purposes as for the sake of pure knowledge, and at least in some fields, went a long way on the road to discovery. Finally, their mathematics prove that they were capable of abstract thinking to a degree rarely found in pre-classical antiquity. The only talent they lacked seems to be a sense of synthesis.
As soon as he went to school8 the would-be Mesopotamian scribe had occasions to apply these inborn qualities. Teaching was essentially verbal – no textbook on any subject has ever been found – and therefore developed his auditive memory. Then, the intricacies of cuneiform writing, where each sign could be read either as a word or as a syllable with several phonetic values, and the fact that two widely different languages – Sumerian and Akkadian – had to be mastered obliged him to embark at once upon fairly complex philological studies. Instead of an alphabet, he had to memorize long lists of signs with their names, their pronunciation and their meaning in both languages. Several of these ‘syllabaries’ have survived, which is most fortunate, since without them we could never have understood the Sumerian language. In a second stage the student made use of conjugation tables, of vocabularies – lists of objects, technical terms or expressions belonging to the same category – and of bi- or tri-lingual dictionaries including Sumerian dialects, Kassite, Hittite and, later, Greek. Of special interest are tablets engraved with archaic pictographic signs side by side with their Neo-Assyrian counter-parts. Since pictograms had fallen into disuse about 2,600 years before these tablets were written and could hardly be of any practical value to the Assyrians, this is further proof of their love for pure research work. Science in general lay in the realm of the god Enki-Ea and was under the protection of the god Nabû, son of Marduk, while the goddess Nisaba, ‘who in her hand holds the stylus’, presided over the difficult and much honoured art of writing.
This system of education naturally inclined the Assyro-Babylonian scholar to record his observations and offer them to his colleagues and pupils in the form of lists.9 Mesopotamian zoology, botany and mineralogy, for instance, have come to us in vocabularies, sometimes disconcertingly arranged, nevertheless representing a serious effort towards the classification of a vast material.10 Geographical texts consist mostly of lists of countries, mountains, rivers or cities, and of itineraries which are extremely useful to the modern historian, especially when they indicate in bêru, or ‘double-hours’ (approximately ten kilometres), the distance between two towns. As far as we know, there were no true maps, but plans of fields and cities have been recovered, the most interesting being a plan of Nippur which remarkably matches the survey of the ruins made by modern archaeologists. We also possess a rudimentary ‘map of the world’ on clay, dating from the sixth century B.C.: the earth is a flat surface bound by a circular ‘Bitter River’; in the middle flows the Euphrates; unfamiliar countries at the four points of the compass are described in a few words, the northernmost being called ‘land where the sun is never seen’ – which might refer either to a (mythical) dark region, as found in some literary texts, or to the fact that seen from Mesopotamia the sun never passes through the northern portion of the sky.11 If we leave aside royal annals and building inscriptions, which were really not historical but propaganda and votive texts, we find that history was also presented in tabular form: king-lists, lists of eponyms and dynasties, synchronous lists, etc. Even Babylonian chronicles, which are nearer to continuous historical narratives, are in fact no more than developed lists of events. In addition, we have mathematical and astronomical tables and medical lists of symptoms and prognoses – to say nothing of the lists of gods, temples, feasts, omens and so forth. Indeed, Mesopotamian science has been called, somewhat derisively, ‘a science of lists’, but it must be emphasized that tuition being solely verbal, the documents that have survived are ‘manuals’ or ‘vade-mecums’ rather than textbooks. There is no doubt that the Assyro-Babylonians knew much more than it would appear from their literature: the transport and erection of huge blocks of stone, for instance, or the construction of long aqueducts, postulate an advanced knowledge of several laws of physics; similarly, certain principles of chemistry, carefully hidden under secret recipes, were successfully applied in the preparation of drugs and pigments
Babylonian ‘Map of the World‘, 6th century B.C. (see text).
From B. Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 1925.
and the manufacture of coloured glass12 and enamelled bricks. Moreover, in at least two domains – mathematics and astronomy – we are able to understand the mental mechanism that presided over scientific development, and it is precisely in those fields that the Mesopotamians made their greatest strides.
In a country where almost the entire population was illiterate, the scribes, frequently issued of families of scribes, well-paid and universally respected, played a crucial role; indeed the most important role in all periods, since without them Mesopotamian society would have been non-existent, or would have collapsed.13
Mathematics and Astronomy
Our knowledge of Mesopotamian mathematics14 is derived from two categories of texts: lists of numbers arranged in various ways (increasing and decreasing series, multiplication and division tables, etc.) and problems. Surprisingly, the majority of these problems are exercises for advanced students (or even possibly intellectual recreations) and not, as one would expect in a so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ society, problems relating to architecture, land-surveying, irrigation and other matters of practical interest. The following examples are particularly demonstrative:
Problem No. 1
‘I found a stone but did not weigh it; then I added one seventh and I added one-eleventh. I weighed: one mana. What was the origi
nal weight of the stone? The weight of the stone was: 1 mana, 8 shekels and 22½ “lines”.’15
Problem No. 2
‘If somebody asks you thus: as much as the side of the square which I made I dug deep, and I extracted one musaru (603) and a half of volume of earth. My base (ground) I made a square. How deep did I go?
‘You, in your procedure operate with 12. Take the reciprocal of 12 and multiply by 1, 30,0,0 which is your volume. 7,30,0 you will see. What is the cube root of 7,30,0? 30 is the cube root. Multiply 30 by 1, and 30 you see. Multiply 30 by another 1, and 30 you see. Multiply 30 by 12, and 6,0 (360) you see. 30 is the side of your square, and 6,0 (360) is your depth.’16
The sentence introducing the first problem shows that it is purely hypothetical. The solution is given, but the way to reach it must have been verbally indicated by the teacher. In the second problem, on the cont~ary, the procedure is fully developed. It will be seen that Babylonian mathematicians were fully conversant with cube roots, and this as early as the seventeenth or eighteenth century B.C, which is the date of this tablet. They also knew, of course, of square roots and were able to calculate the square root of 2 with only a very minute error (1.414213 instead of 1.414214). The calculations involved also point to the two main characteristics of Mesopotamian mathematics: they were based on the sexagesimal system, and while all systems of numeration used in antiquity (including the Roman system) were ‘juxtapositional’, they alone used a place-value notation or ‘positional’ system, that is to say a system where the value of a given numeral varies according to its position in the written number. (This is what we do when we write, for instance, 3,333, the same numeral being worth 3,000, 300, 30 and 3 respectively.) Both the sexagesimal and the positional systems offered definite advantages for calculations, but unfortunately, the decimal system was also used within units of the sexagesimal one, and the figure ‘zero’ was unknown until the Seleucid period. The interpretation of Mesopotamian problems is therefore often fraught with difficulty, even for experts, and we must assume that in many cases the students were verbally supplied with the necessary indications.
