Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

In a country where slaves were so numerous the wages of the free workmen were necessarily low. There were, however, two classes of free workmen, the skilled artisan and the agricultural laborer. The agricultural character of the Babylonian state, and the fact that so many of the peasantry possessed land of their own, prevented the agriculturist from sinking into that condition of serfdom and degradation which the existence of slavery would otherwise have brought about. Moreover, the flocks and cattle were tended by Bedâwin and Arameans, who were proud of their freedom and independence, like the Bedâwin of modern Egypt. In spite, therefore, of the fact that so much of the labor of the country was performed by slaves, agriculture was in high esteem and the free agriculturist was held in honor. Tradition told how Sargon of Akkad, the hero of ancient Babylonia, had been brought up by Akki the irrigator, and had himself been a gardener, while the god Tammuz, the bridegroom of Istar, had tended sheep. Indeed, one of the oldest titles of the Babylonian kings had been that of “shepherd.”

At the same time there was a tendency for the free laborer to degenerate into a serf, attached to the soil of the farm on which he and his forefathers had been settled for centuries. A contract dated in the first year of Cyrus is an illustration of the fact. It records the lease of a farm near Sippara, which belonged to the temple of the Sun-god, and was let to a private individual by the chief priest and the civil governor of the temple. The farm contained 60 gur of arable land, and the lease of it included “12 oxen, 8 peasants, 3 iron plough-shares, 4 axes, and sufficient grain for sowing and for the support of the peasants and the cattle.” Here the peasants are let along with the land, and presumably would have been sold with it had the farm been purchased instead of being let. They were, in fact, irremovable from the soil on which they had been born. It must, however, be remembered that the farm was the property of a temple, and it is possible that serfdom was confined to land which had been consecrated to the gods. In that case the Babylonian serfs would have corresponded with the Hebrew Nethinim, and might have been originally prisoners of war.

We learn some details of early agricultural life in Babylonia from the fragments of an old Sumerian work on farming which formed one of the text-books in the Babylonian schools. Passages were extracted from it and translated into Semitic for the use of the students, and difficult words and expressions were noted and explained. The book seems to have resembled the “Works and Days” of the Greek poet Hesiod, except that it was not in verse. We gather from it that the agricultural year began, not with Nisan, or March, but with Tisri, or September, like the Jewish civil year; at all events, it was then that the tenure of the farmer began and that his contract was drawn up with the landlord. It was then, too, after the harvest, that he took possession of the land, paying his tax to the government, repairing or making the fences, and ploughing the soil.

His tenure was of various kinds. Sometimes he undertook to farm the land, paying half the produce of it to the landlord or his agent and providing the farming implements, the seeds, and the manure himself. Sometimes the farm was worked on a co-operative system, the owner of the land and the tenant-farmer entering into partnership with one another and dividing everything into equal shares. In this case the landlord was required to furnish carts, oxen, and seeds. At other times the tenant received only a percentage of the profits—a third, a fourth, a fifth, or a tenth, according to agreement. He had also to pay the esrâ or tithe.

The most common form of tenure seems to have been that in which a third of the produce went to the lessor. Two-thirds of the rent, paid either in dates or in their monetary equivalent, was delivered to the landlord on the last day of the eighth month, Marchesvan, where the dates had been gathered and had been laid out to dry. By the terms of the lease the tenant was called upon to keep the farm buildings in order, and even to erect them if they did not exist. His own house was separate from that in which the farm-servants lived, and it was surrounded by a garden, planted for the most part with date-palms. If the farm-buildings were not built or were not kept in proper repair a fine was imposed upon him, which in the case quoted by the writer of the agricultural work was 10 shekels, or 30s. The tenant was furthermore expected to pay the laborers their wages, and the landlord had the power of dismissing him if the terms of the contract were not fulfilled.

The laborers were partly slaves, partly freemen, the freemen hiring themselves out at so much a month. A contract of the age of Khammurabi, for instance, states that a certain Ubaru, had thus hired himself out for thirty days for half a shekel of silver, or 1s. 6d., but he had to offer a guarantee that he would not leave his master's service before the expiration of the month. In other cases it was a slave whose services were hired from his owner; thus, in a document from Sippara, of the same age as the preceding, we read: “Rimmon-bani hires Sumi-izitim as a laborer for his brother, for three months, at a wage of one shekel and a half, 3 measures of grain and 1½ qa of oil. There shall be no withdrawal from the agreement. Ibni-A-murru and Sikni-Ea have confirmed it. Rimmon-bani hires the laborer in the presence of Abum-ilu (Abimael), the son of Ibni-Samas, Ilisu-ibni, the son of Igas-Rimmon, and Arad-Bel, the son of Akhuwam. (Dated) the first day of Sivan.” The wages evidently went to the slave, so that he was practically in the position of a free laborer.

When we come down to a later period, we find in contract, dated at the end of the second year of a Cyrus, Bunene-sar-uzur, “the son of Sum-yukin,” hired, as a servant for a year, “from the month Nisan to the month Adar,” for 3 shekels of silver. These were paid beforehand to a third person, and the payment was duly witnessed and registered. Bunene-sar-uzur was not a slave, though 9 shillings does not seem much as wages for a whole year. However, three years later only 1 pi, or about 50 quarts of meal, were given for a month's supply of food to some men who were digging a canal. The hours of work doubtless lasted from sunrise to sunset, though we have a curious document of the Macedonian period, dated in the reign of Seleucus II., in which certain persons sell the wages they receive for work done in a temple during the “sixth part” of a day. The sum demanded was as much as 65 shekels.

The Aramean Bedâwin, who acted as shepherds, or cattle-drovers, probably received better wages than the native Babylonians. They were less numerous and were in more request; moreover, it was necessary that they should be trustworthy. The herds and flocks were left in their charge for weeks together, on the west bank of the Euphrates, out of sight of the cultivated fields of Babylonia and exposed to the attacks of marauders from the desert. Early Babylonian documents give long lists of the herdsmen and shepherds, and of the number of sheep or oxen for which they were responsible, and which were the property of some wealthy landowner. In the seventeenth year of Nabonidos, five of the shepherds received one shekel and a half of silver, as well as a gur, or about 250 quarts, of grain from the royal granary.

Some of the songs have been preserved to us with which the Babylonian laborer beguiled his work in the fields. They probably formed part of the treatise on agriculture which has already been described; at any rate, we owe their preservation to the educational text-books, in which they have been embodied, along with Semitic translations of the original Sumerian text. Here is one which the peasants sang to the oxen as they returned from the field:

My knees are marching,My feet are not resting;Taking no thought,Drive me home.

In a similar strain the ploughman encouraged his team with the words:

A heifer am I,To the mule I am yoked.Where is the cart?Go, look for grass;It is high, it is high!

Or again, the oxen, while threshing, would be addressed with the refrain:

Before the oxen,As they walk,Thresh out the grain.

Ploughing, harrowing, sowing, reaping, and threshing constituted the chief events of the agricultural year. The winters were not cold, and the Babylonian peasant was consequently not obliged to spend a part of the year indoors shivering over a fire. In fact fuel was scarce in the country; few trees were grown in it except the palm, and the fruit of the palm was too valuable to allow it to be cut down. When the ordinary occupations of the farmer had come to an end, he was expected to look after his farm buildings and fences, to build walls and clean out the ditches.

The ditches, indeed, were more important in Babylonia than in most other parts of the world. Irrigation was as necessary as in Egypt, though for a different reason. The Chaldean plain had originally been a marsh, and it required constant supervision to prevent it from being once more inundated by the waters and made uninhabitable. The embankments which hindered the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris and kept them within carefully regulated channels, the canals which carried off the surplus water and distributed it over the country, needed continual attention. Each year, after the rains of the winter, the banks had to be strengthened or re-made and the beds of the canals cleared out. The irrigator, moreover, was perpetually at work; the rainy season did not last long, and during the rest of the year the land was dependent on the water supplied by the rivers and canals. Irrigation, therefore, formed a large and important part of the farmers' work, and the bucket of the irrigator must have been constantly swinging. Without the irrigator the labors of the farmer would have been of little avail.

Chapter V. Manners And Customs

Babylonia was a land of bricks. Stone was not found nearer than the mountains of Elam on the one side or the desert plains of Northern Arabia on the other. Clay, on the contrary, was plentiful, and the art of making bricks and building a house by means of them must have been invented by the first settlers in the country. The bricks were dried in the sun, the heat of which was sufficient to harden them. The clay was further bound together by being mixed with chopped reeds, though the use of the latter was not universal, at all events in the earlier times. In the later days of Babylonian history, however, they were generally employed, and we learn from the contracts that a bed of reeds grown for the sake of the brick-makers' trade was by no means an unprofitable investment. Either clay or bitumen took the place of mortar; the bitumen was procured from Hit or from the Kurdish hills, where there are still springs of naphtha; after the conquest of Canaan it may have been brought from the neighborhood of the Dead Sea. Some scholars have thought that this is referred to by Gudea, the priest-king of Lagas (2700 B.C.).

The employment of brick had a very direct effect upon the character of Babylonian architecture. Thick walls, supported by buttresses and devoid of sculpture, were necessitated by it. The buildings of Babylonia were externally plain and flat; masses of brick were piled up in the form of towers or else built into long lines of wall of unbroken monotony. The roofs were made of the stems of palm-trees, which rested on the stems of other palm-trees, where the space between one brick wall and another was too great to be safely spanned. The upright stems became columns, which were imitated first in brick and then in stone. Babylonia was thus the birthplace of columnar architecture, and in the course of centuries columns of almost every conceivable shape and kind came to be invented. Sometimes they were made to stand on the backs of animals, sometimes the animal formed the capital. The column which rested against the wall passed into a brick pilaster, and this again assumed various forms.

The monotony of the wall itself was disguised in different ways. The pilaster served to break it, and the walls of the early Chaldean temples are accordingly often broken up into a series of recessed panels, the sides of which are formed by square pilasters. Clay cones were also inserted in the wall and brilliantly colored, the colors being arranged in patterns. But the most common form of decoration was where the wall was covered with painted stucco. This, indeed, was the ordinary mode of ornamenting the internal walls of a building; a sort of dado ran round the lower part of them painted with the figures of men and animals, while the upper part was left in plain colors or decorated only with rosettes and similar designs. Ezekiel6 refers to the figures of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion on the walls of their palaces, and the composite creatures of Babylonian mythology who were believed to represent the first imperfect attempts at creation were depicted on the walls of the temple of Bel.

Among the tablets which have been found at Tello are plans of the houses of the age of Sargon of Akkad. The plans are for the most part drawn to scale, and the length and breadth of the rooms and courts contained in them are given. The rooms opened one into the other, and along one side of a house there usually ran a passage. One of the houses, for example, of which we have a plan, contained five rooms on the ground floor, two of which were the length of the house. The dimensions of the second of these is described as being 8 cubits in breadth and 1 gardu in length. The gardu was probably equivalent to 18 cubits or about 30 feet. In another case the plan is that of the house of the high priest of Lagas, and at the back of it the number of slaves living in it is stated as well as the number of workmen employed to build it. It was built, we are told, in the year when Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon, made the pavement of the temples of Bel at Nippur and of Istar at Nin-unu.

The temple and house were alike erected on a platform of brick or earth. This was rendered necessary by the marshy soil of Babylonia and the inundations to which it was exposed. The houses, indeed, generally found the platform already prepared for them by the ruins of the buildings which had previously stood on the same spot. Sun-dried brick quickly disintegrates, and a deserted house soon became a mound of dirt. In this way the villages and towns of Babylonia gradually rose in height, forming a tel or mound on which the houses of a later age could be erected.

In contrast to Babylonia the younger kingdom of Assyria was a land of stone. But the culture of Assyria was derived from Babylonia, and the architectural fashions of Babylonia were accordingly followed even when stone took the place of brick. The platform, which was as necessary in Babylonia as it was unnecessary in Assyria, was nevertheless servilely copied, and palaces and temples were piled upon it like those of the Babylonians. The ornamentation of the Babylonian walls was imitated in stone, the rooms being adorned with a sculptured dado, the bas-reliefs of which were painted in bright colors. Even the fantastic shapes of the Babylonian columns were reproduced in stone. Brick, too, was largely used; in fact, the stone served for the most part merely as a facing, to ornament rather than strengthen the walls.

The Babylonian princes had themselves set the example of employing stone for the sake of decoration. Stone was fetched for the purpose from the most distant regions, regardless of cost. Gudea, the priest-king of Lagas, imported limestone from the Lebanon and from Samalum, near the Gulf of Antioch, while the statues which adorned his palace, and are now in the Louvre, are carved out of diorite from the Peninsula of Sinai. The diorite doubtless came by sea, but the blocks of hewn stone that were brought from “the land of the Amorites” must have been conveyed overland.

Even more precious materials than stone were used for decorative purposes. Gold and silver, bronze and ivory, lapis-lazuli and colored glass, ornamented the cornices and other parts of the interior of the palace. Gudea tells us that he had sent to the deserts which bordered on Egypt for gold-dust and acacia-wood, to Arabia for copper, and to Mount Amanus for beams of cedar. The elephant was still hunted on the banks of the Euphrates near the city of Carchemish, and lapis-lazuli was furnished by the mountains of Persia.

A garden was planted by the side of the house. The Babylonians were an agricultural people, and even the cities were full of the gardens attached to the houses of all who could afford to have them. Originally the garden was little more than a grove of palms. But herbs and vegetables soon began to be grown in it, and as habits of luxury increased, exotic trees and shrubs were transplanted to it and flowers were cultivated for the sake of their scent. Tiglath-pileser I. of Assyria tells us how he had “taken and planted in the gardens of his country cedars” and other trees “from the lands he had conquered, which none of the kings his predecessors had ever planted before,” and how he had “brought rare vines which did not exist in Assyria and had cultivated them in the land of Assyria.” At a later date Sennacherib laid out a pleasure-garden or “paradise” by the side of the palace he erected, filling it with cypresses and other trees as well as fragrant plants, and digging a lake in the midst of it by means of which it could be watered. One of the bas-reliefs in the palace of Assur-bani-pal represents the King and Queen dining in the royal garden under the shadow of its palms, while an attendant drives away the insects with a fan. The Assyrians did but imitate their Babylonian neighbors, and in the gardens of Nineveh we must see many copies of the gardens that had been laid out in Babylonia long ages before. The very word “paradise,” which in the Persian age came to signify a pleasure-park, was of Babylonian origin. It is given in the exercise-book of a Babylonian school-boy as the name of a mythical locality, and an etymological pun attempts to derive it from the name of the god Esu.

It was, of course, only the houses of the rich and noble which were artistically furnished or provided with a garden. The poorer classes lived in mud huts of conical form, which seldom contained more than one or two rooms. Air and light were admitted through the door or through small apertures in the walls. In the better class of houses, on the other hand, the windows were of large size, and were placed near the ceiling. The air was excluded by means of curtains which were drawn across them when the weather was cold or when it was necessary to keep out the sunlight. The houses, moreover, consisted of more than one story, the upper stories being approached by a flight of steps which were open to the air. They were usually built against one of the sides of a central court, around which the rooms were ranged, the rooms on the upper floors communicating with one another by means of a covered corridor, or else by doors leading from one chamber to the other. The apartments of the women were separate from those of the men, and the servants slept either on the ground-floor or in an outbuilding of their own.

The furniture, even of the palaces, was scanty from a modern point of view. The floor was covered with rugs, for the manufacture of which Babylonia was famous, and chairs, couches, and tables were placed here and there. The furniture was artistic in form; a seal-cylinder, of the age of Ur-Bau, King of Ur, the older contemporary of Gudea, represents a chair, the feet of which have been carved into the likeness of those of oxen. If we may judge from Egyptian analogies the material of which they were formed would have been ivory. The Assyrian furniture of later days doubtless followed older Babylonian models, and we can gain from it some idea of what they must have been like. The chairs were of various kinds. Some had backs and arms, some were mere stools. The seats of many were so high that a footstool was required by those who used them. The employment of the footstool must go back to a considerable antiquity, since we find some of the Tel-el-Amarna correspondents in the fourteenth century before our era comparing themselves to the footstool of the King. Chairs and stools alike were furnished with cushions which were covered with embroidered tapestries. So also were the couches and bedsteads used by the wealthier classes. The poor contented themselves with a single mattress laid upon the floor, and since everyone slept in the clothes he had worn during the day, rising in the morning was not a difficult task.

The tables had four legs, and the wood of which they were composed was often inlaid with ivory. Wood inlaid with ivory and other precious materials was also employed for the chairs and sofas. Tripods of bronze, moreover, stood in different parts of the room, and vases of water or wine were placed upon them. Fragments of some of them have been found in the ruins of Nineveh, and they are represented in early Babylonian seals. The feet of the tripod were artistically shaped to resemble the feet of oxen, the clinched human hand, or some similar design. At meals the tripod stood beside the table on which the dishes were laid. Those who eat sat on chairs in the earlier period, but in later times the fashion grew up, for the men at any rate, to recline on a couch. Assur-bani-pal, for example, is thus represented, while the Queen sits beside him on a lofty chair. Perhaps the difference in manners is an illustration of the greater conservatism of women who adhere to customs which have been discarded by the men.

Vases of stone and earthenware, of bronze, gold, and silver, were plentifully in use. A vase of silver mounted on a bronze pedestal with four feet, which was dedicated to his god by one of the high-priests of Lagas, has been found at Tello, and stone bowls, inscribed with the name of Gudea, and closely resembling similar bowls from the early Egyptian tombs, have also been disinterred there. A vase of Egyptian alabaster, discovered by the French excavators in Babylonia, but subsequently lost in the Tigris, bore upon it an inscription stating it to have been part of the spoil obtained by Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon of Akkad, from his conquest of the Sinaitic peninsula. In Assyrian days the vases were frequently of porcelain or glass; when these were first introduced is still unknown. Various articles of furniture are mentioned in the later contracts. Under Nabonidos, 7 shekels, or 21 shillings, were given for a copper kettle and cup, the kettle weighing 16 manehs (or 42 pounds troy) and the cup 2 manehs (5 pounds 7 ounces troy). These were left, it may be noted, in the safe-keeping of a slave, and were bought by a lady. At a later date, in the third year of Cambyses, as much as 4 manehs 9 shekels, or £36 7s., were paid for a large copper jug and qulla, which was probably of the same form as the qullas of modern Egypt. The female slave who seems to have started an inn in the sixth year of Cambyses provided herself with five bedsteads, ten chairs, three dishes, one wardrobe (?), three shears, one iron shovel, one syphon, one wine-decanter, one chain (?), one brazier, and other objects which cannot as yet be identified. The brazier was probably a Babylonian invention. At all events we find it used in Judah after contact with Assyria had introduced the habits of the farther East among the Jews (Jer. xxxvi. 22), like the gnomon or sun-dial of Ahaz (Is. xxxviii. 8), which was also of Babylonian origin (Herod., ii., 109). The gnomon seems to have consisted of a column, the shadow of which was thrown on a flight of twelve steps representing the twelve double hours into which the diurnal revolutions of the earth were divided and which thus indicated the time of day.

What the chairs, tables, footstools, and couches were like may be seen from the Assyrian bas-reliefs. They were highly artistic in design and character, and were of various shapes. The tables or stands sometimes had the form of camp-stools, sometimes were three-legged, but more usually they were furnished with four legs, which occasionally were placed on a sort of platform or stand. At times they were provided with shelves. Special stands with shelves were also made for holding vases, though large jars were often made to stand on tripods.

If we may judge from the old lists of clothing that have come down to us, the Babylonians must have been fond of variety in dress. The names of an immense number of different kinds of dress are given, and the monuments show that fashions changed from time to time. Thus the earliest remains of Chaldean art exhibit three successive changes in the head-dress, and similar changes are to be noticed in the dress of the Assyrian kings as it is represented in the bas-reliefs.