OVER THE PORTAL Great Anu, Bel and Ea, all have fled. Ra, Amon, Thoth are with the Mighty Dead. No man is ever greater than his God. Up from the night the self-same path they trod. Lo, we have made our God more grand, more vast For they who made our Lords their witness give, And though what skilful artist toil till late While heretics among the faithful dwell, So, o'er the temple gate where enter those To all the broken Gods of yesterday; To One, our Present Lord; to Him whose sway 1 CHAPTER XVII. THE BIRTH OF THE GODS Through the dimness of that marvelous dawn, while the light of intelligence was growing stronger and stronger, we have traced the footprints of the human race with some assurance, yet with great uncertainty, from his Miocene home in central Asia almost until the white light of history reveals him as a civilized human being. From these Asiatic plains, growing more arid and less habitable each year, the human race is supposed to have scattered to the ends of the earth. Those who were to be the black men wandered southward into the East Indies and India and Africa. Those who were to be the yellow men went eastward into China and Japan. The red men constitute a problem in themselves but they are generally believed to be closely related to the Mongolian tribes and to have wandered into America by way of the land-bridge of the Aleutian Islands. Those who were to be the white men of today, classified with more or less correctness as Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic, for the most part went westward, following one of the three principal migration routes, the first being via Phoenicia and North Africa into Europe over the land-bridges of Tunis to Italy and Morocco to Gibraltar; the second being via Asia Minor and the Dardanelles and the Danube Valley; and the third being north of the Caspian and Black Seas into central Europe. The sun of civilization, therefore, as it rose, shone first upon those countries, the original home land where mankind passed through the tutelage of Paleolithic and Neolithic times, whose gray light gradually brightened into the dawn of historic culture. For that reason, we are not surprised to learn that the oldest Neolithic culture which the study of archaeology has as yet revealed to man comes to us from Anau and Susa on the plateau of Iran. There, among the hills, at a time when the ice-sheets covered the greater part of Europe and in a climate which was doubtless more moist and better suited to life than it is at present, the men of Iran laid the foundation of modern civilization. There indeed their thunder god, Enlil, had planted for them a garden in which he had made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, every grass that their cattle required, and every kind of game that their hearts might desire. To such a land they came as they wandered in the east and there they founded the most ancient civilization known to history. Years passed and the moisture withdrew until the Aral and Caspian seas became separated and mankind again was forced westward by the growing aridity of its habitat. Directly in their pathway lay the rich and fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. So the curtain of history lifts and we behold a vast level plain, lush with grasses, studded with palm trees, ribboned with irrigation canals and supported by two great rivers. It is Kengi, the lower half of Babylonia. Dotted here and there are little cities, of what size and population we do. not know exactly. Each is a cluster of houses gathered about a temple-tower (ziggurat), and one, the palace of the priest-king, is larger than the others. This ziggurat consists of three, five, or seven quadrangular masses of brick set one above the other, each upper story smaller than the one below it. It represents, perhaps, the hilltops on which primeval man, the ancestors of these settlers in the valley, had been accustomed to worship their gods. Perhaps also they served for points of vantage for observation of the stars, primitive observatories, though this is by no means certain. One irresistibly guesses that these people who have thus appeared in a full stage of civilization as inhabitants of what will later be known as Chaldea are a part of that belt of brown-white peoples who, during prehistoric days, spread practically around the world, following their isothermal line. Most anthropologists recognize as true that such a racial diffusion is at the bottom of those similarities which appear in the civilizations of countries so wide apart as Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, Mexico and Peru. These were the people who built the long barrows, the dolmens, as distinguished from their Keltic successors of the round barrows. They also buried their dead where their successors cremated them. Their culture is supposed to embrace such singular customs as the couvade, the putting to bed of the father as well as the mother upon the birth of a child, which may have originated at the time of the first discovery that men were really necessary to conception. The erection of megaliths also was one of their distinctive characteristics, and massage, and the swastika Map to illustrate the broader lines of dispersal of the principal races of man. from Matthew. (Courtesy of the Yale University Press.) Modified was a symbol which they seemed to have created. Among other customs characteristic of their culture were mummifying their dead, artificially deforming the skull by bandages, tattooing the body, the association of the sun and serpent in worship and the erection of great megalithic monuments. The Mediterranean races were typical examples of their stock; rather small of statue, dolichocephalic, dark-haired brunettes. Whether they were the first settlers in Mesopotamia or whether they found the Sumerians already established in the valley is still a matter undetermined. These Sumerians, who spoke an agglutinative language, seem to have been of Mongolian stock. At the earliest moment of recorded history we find these two breeds of men mingling in lower Babylonia, with a settled civilization five thousand years or more before Christ. That there was an important substructure of brown-white Semites as a basis of Chaldean civilization seems clear. The first scene of the drama reveals to us certain of these little city-states struggling for supremacy. Perhaps the very oldest of them was Nippur which, with Eridu, were the Mecca and the Medina of Babylonia. For religion chiefly was Nippur famous in the first years of history. Eridu, like Ur of the Chaldees, was a sea-port of the Persian Gulf. Both of these cities are now 160 miles northwest of the Gulf. It is a well known fact that between the years 325 B. C., when, in the time of Alexander, Spasinus Charax was founded and 1835 A. D., forty-six miles of new land had been formed from the mud deposited by the rivers, approximately 100 feet per year. A simple calculation shows us that Ur could not have been a sea-port later than 6,500 years B. C., nor Nippur, whose early religious prestige suggests a greater age and more ancient glory, one later than 10,000 B. C. It is interesting to note that seashells are found as far north as the site of Babylon. Eridu was the center of the worship of Ea, god of the waters, and Ur of Sin, the moon god. Some 30 miles away was Larsam whose patron deity was Shamash, the sun, and again only twelve miles distant was Uruk or Erech, the center of worship of Ishtar, (Venus), the evening star, goddess of love. And not far away were two other ancient cities, Mar and Lagash, while in the northern part of Babylonia were Kutha, where Nergal was worshipped, and Sippar, loyal to Shamash, and Agade, the famous capital of Accad. These represent the elder towns of Babylonia. |