The inscriptions of Assyrian kings have, many of them, the monotony of hell.  Made of boasts and shrieks, they recite the capture and sack of cities; the torrents of blood with which, like wool, the streets were dyed; the flaming pyramids of prisoners; the groans of men impaled; the cries of ravished women.

The inscriptions are not all infernal.  Those that relate to Assurbanipal ­vulgarly, Sandanapallos, ­are even ornate.  But Assurbanipal, while probably fiendish and certainly crapulous, was clearly literary besides.  From the spoil of sacked cities this bibliofilou took libraries, the myths and epics of creation, sacred texts from Eridu and Ur, volumes in the extinct tongues of Akkad and Sumer, first editions of the Book of God.

These, re-edited in cuneiform and kept conveniently on the second floor of his palace, fell with Nineveh, where, until recently recovered, for millennia they lay.  Additionally, from shelves set up in the days of Khammurabi ­the Amraphel of Genesis ­Nippur has yielded ghostly tablets and Borsippa treasuries of Babylonian ken.

These, the eldest revelations of the divine, are the last that man has deciphered.  The altars and people that heard them first, the marble temples, the ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, are dust.  The entire civilization from which they came has vanished.  Yet, traced with a wooden reed on squares of clay, are flights of little arrows, from which, magically, it all returns.  Miraculously with these books a world revives.  Fashioned, some of them, at an epoch that in biblical chronology is anterior to man, they tell of creation, of the serpent, the fall and the deluge.  At the gates of paradise you see man dying, poisoned by the tree of life.  Before Genesis was, already it had been written.

In the Chaldean Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in successive acts.  According to the epic of it, humanity’s primal home was a paradise where ten impressive persons ­the models, it may be, of antediluvian patriarchs ­reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally sinfully as well.  In punishment a deluge swept them away.  From the flood there escaped one man who separated a mythical from an heroic age.  In the latter epoch, beings descended from demons built Nineveh and Babylon; organized human existence; invented arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and the calendar; counted the planets; numbered the days of the year, divided them into months and weeks; established the Sabbath; decorated the skies with the signs of the zodiac, instituting, in the interim, colleges of savants and priests.  These speculated on the origin of things, attributed it to spontaneous generation, the descent of man to evolution, entertaining the vulgar meanwhile with tales of gods and ghosts.

The cosmological texts now available were not written then.  They are drawn from others that were.  But there is a vignette that probably is of that age.  It represents a man and a woman stretching their hands to a tree.  Behind the woman writhes a snake.  The tree, known as the holy cedar of Eridu, the fruit of which stimulated desire, is described in an epic that recites the adventures of Gilgames.

Gilgames was the national hero of Chaldea.  The story of his loves with Ishtar is repeated in the Samson and Delilah myth.  Ishtar, described in an Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of Girdles, was the original Venus, as Gilgames was perhaps the prototype of Hercules.  The legend of his labours is represented on a seal of Sargon of Akkad, a king who ruled fifty-seven hundred years ago.

In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by Ishtar, tried to find out how not to die.  In trying he reached a garden, guarded by cherubim, where the holy cedar was.  There he learned that one being only could teach him to be immortal, and that being, Adra-Khasis, had been translated to the Land of the Silver Sky.  Adra-Khasis, was the Chaldean Noah.  Gilgames sought him and the story of the deluge follows.  But with a difference.  On the seventh day, Adra-Khasis released from his ark a dove that returned, finally a raven that did not.  Then he looked out, and looking, shrieked.  Every one had perished.

Noah was less emotional, or, if equally compassionate, the fact is not recited.  Apart from that detail and one other, the story of the flood is common to all folklore.  Even the Aztecs knew of it.  Probably it originated in the matrix of nations which the table-land of Asia was.  But only in Chaldean myth, and subsequently in Hebrew legend, was the flood ascribed to sin.

Gilgames’ quest, meanwhile, could not have been wholly vain.  In an archaic inscription it is stated that the city of Erech was built in olden times by the deified Gilgames.

How old the olden times may have been is conjectural.  Modern science has put the advent of man sixty million years ago.  Chaldean chronology is less spacious.  But its traditions stretched back a hundred thousand years.  The traditions were probably imaginary.  Even so, in the morning of the world, already there were ancient cities.  There was Nippur, one of whose gods, El Lil, was lord of ghosts.  There was Eridu, where Ea was lord of man.  There was Ur, where Sin was lord of the moon.  There were other divinities.  There was Enmesara, lord of the land whence none return, and Makhir, god of dreams.

There were many more like the latter, so many that their sanctuaries made the realm a holy land, but one which, administratively, was an aggregate of principalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand years ago, combined.  Ultimately, from sheer age, the empire tottered.  It would have fallen had not Khammurabi surged.  What Sargon made, Khammurabi solidified.  Between their colossal figures two millennia stretch.  These giants are distinct.  None the less, across the ages they seem to fuse, suggestively, not together, but into another person.

Sargon has descended through time clothed in a little of the poetry which garments nation builders.  But the poetry is not a mantle for the imaginary.  In the British Museum is a marble ball that he dedicated to a god.  Paris has the seal of his librarian. Copies of his annals are extant. In these it is related that, when a child, his mother put him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates.  Presently he was rescued.  Afterward he became a leader of men.

Khammurabi was also a leader.  He was a legislator as well.  Sargon united principalities, Khammurabi their shrines.  From one came the nation, from the other the god.  It is in this way that they fuse.  To the composite, if it be one, history added a heightening touch.

The Khammurabi legislation came from Bel, who, originally, was a local sun-god of Nippur.  There he was regarded as the possessor of the Chaldean Urim and Thummin, the tablets of destiny with which he cast the fates of men.  In the mythology of Babylonia these tablets were stolen by the god of storms, who kept them in his thunder fastness.  Among the forked flames of the lightning there they were recovered by Bel, who revealed the law to Khammurabi.

The theophany is perhaps similar to that of Sinai.  But perhaps, too, it is better attested.  A diorite block, found at Susa in 1902, has the law engraved on it.  On the summit, a bas-relief displays the god disclosing the statutes to the king.

There are other analogies.  Sinai was named after Sin, who, though but a moon-god, was previously held supreme for the reason that, in primitive Babylonia, the lunar year preceded the solar.  The sanctuary of the moon-god was Ur, of which Abraham was emir.  He was more, perhaps.  Sarratu, from which Sarai comes, was the title of the moon-goddess.  In Genesis, Sarai is Abraham’s wife.  Abraham is a derivative of Aburamu, which was one of the moon’s many names.

Among these, one in particular has since been identified with Jahveh.  In addition, a clay tablet of the age of Khammurabi, now in the British Museum, has on it: 

That flight of arrows, being interpreted, means:  Jave ilu, Jahveh is god.

Other texts show that a title of Bel was Masu, a word that letter for letter is the same as the Hebrew Mosheh or Moses.

It is in this way that Sargon and Khammurabi fuse.  Meanwhile the title Masu, or hero, was not confined to Bel.  It was given also to Marduk, the tutelary god of Babylon, from whom local monotheism proceeded.

That monotheism, in appearance relatively modern, actually was archaic.  The Chaldean savants knew of but one really existing god.  To them, all others were his emanations.  The deus exsuperantissimus was represented by a single stroke of the reed, a sign that in its vagueness left him formless and incommunicable, therefore unworshipable, hence without a temple, unless Bab-ili, Babylon, the Gate of God, may be so construed.

The name of the deity, fastidiously concealed from the vulgar, was, in English, One.  Not after, or beneath, or above, but before him, a trinity swung like a screen.  From it, for pendant, another trinity dangled.  From the latter fell a third.  Below these glories were the coruscations of an entire nation of inferior gods.  The latter, as well as the former, all of them, were but the fireworks of One.  He alone was.  The rest, like Makhir, were gods of dream.  To the savants, that is; to the magi and seers.  To the people the sidereal triads and planetary divinities throned in the Silver Sky augustly real, equally august, and in that celestial equality remained, until Khammurabi gave precedence to Bel, who as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord Marduk, became supreme.

Before Bel, then, the other gods faded as the Elohim did before Jahveh, with the possible difference that there were more to fade ­sixty-five thousand, Assurnatsipal, in an inscription, declared.  Over that army Bel-Marduk acquired the title, perhaps significant, of Bel-Kissat, Lord of Hosts.  Yet it was less as a usurper than as an absorber that the ascension was achieved.  Bel but mounted above his former peers and from the superior height drew their attributes to himself.  It was sacrilege none the less.  As such it alienated the clergy and enraged the plebs.  Begun under Khammurabi and completed under Nabonidos, it was the reason why, during the latter’s reign, orthodox Babylon received Cyrus not as a foe but a friend.

From the spoliation, meanwhile, no nebulousness resulted.  Bel was distinctly anthropomorphic.  His earthly plaisance was the Home of the Height, a seven-floored mountain of masonry, a rainbow pyramid of enamelled brick.  At the top was a dome.  There, in a glittering chamber, on a dazzling couch, he appeared.  Elsewhere, in the vermillion recesses of a neighbouring chapel, that winged bulls guarded and frescoed monsters adorned, once a year he also appeared, and, above the mercy seat, on an alabaster throne, sat, or was supposed to sit, contemplating the tablets of destiny, determining when men should die.

To the Greeks, the future lay in the lap of the gods.  To the Babylonians the gods alone possessed it, as alone also they possessed the present and the past.  They had all time as all men have their day.  That day was here and it was brief.  Death was a descent to Aralu, the land whence none return, a region of the underworld, called also Shualu, where the departed were nourished on dust.  Dust they were and to dust they returned.

Extinction was not a punishment or even a reward, it was a law.  Punishment was visited on the transgressor here, as here also the piety of the righteous was rewarded.  When death came, just and unjust fared alike.  The Aryan and Egyptian belief in immortality had no place in this creed, and consequently it had none either in Israel, where Sheol was a replica of Shualu.  To the Sémites of Babylonia and Kanaan, the gods alone were immortal, and immortal beings would be gods.  Man could not become divine while his deities were still human.

Exceptionally, exceptional beings such as Gilgames and Adra-Khasis might be translated to the land of the Silver Sky, as Elijah was translated to heaven, but otherwise the only mortals that could reach it were kings, for a king, in becoming sovereign, became, ipso facto, celestial.  As such, ages later, Alexander had himself worshipped, and it was in imitation of his apotheosis that the subsequent Caesars declared themselves gods.  Yet precisely as the latter were man-made deities, so the Babylonian Baalim were very similar to human kings.

For their hunger was cream, oil, dates, the flesh of ewe lambs.  For their nostrils was the perfume of prayers and of psalms; for their passions the virginity of girls.  Originally the first born of men were also given them, but while, with higher culture, that sacrifice was abolished, the sacred harlotry, over which Ishtar presided, remained.  Judaism omitted to incorporate that, but in Kanaan, which Babylonia profoundly influenced, it was general and, though reviled by Israel, was tempting even, and perhaps particularly, to Solomon.

The latter’s temple was similar to Bel’s, from which the Hebraic ritual, terms of the Law, the Torah itself, may have proceeded, as, it may be, the Sabbath did also.  On a tablet recovered from the library of Assurbanipal it is written:  “The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky day, a sabbatuv” ­literally, a day of rest for the heart.

In Aralu that day never ceased; the dead there, buried, Herodotos said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to the Silver Sky.  Yet though that was an article of faith, through a paradox profoundly poetic, there was a belief equally general, in ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the faces of ravens, in others with the bodies of scorpions, and in the post-mortem persistence of girls that died pure.

These latter, in searching for someone whom they might seduce, must have afterward wandered into the presence of St. Anthony.  Perhaps, too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks.  Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilit, the Lilith of the Talmud, Adam’s vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin.  In these also the Babylonians believed, and naively they represented them in forms so revolting that the sight of their own image alarmed them away.

From these shapes or, more exactly, from sin itself, it was very properly held that all diseases came.  Medicine consequently was a branch of religion.  The physician was a priest.  He asked the patient:  Have you shed your neighbour’s blood?  Have you approached your neighbour’s wife?  Have you stolen your neighbour’s garment?  Or is it that you have failed to clothe the naked?  According to the responses he prescribed.

But the priest who was a physician was also a wizard.  He peeped and muttered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted philters in which simples had been dissolved.  These devices failing, there was a series of incantations, the Ritual of the Whispered Charm, in which the most potent conjuration was the incommunicable name.  To that all things yielded, even the gods. But like the Shem of the Jews, it was probably never wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, not wholly known.  In the formulae of the necromancers it is omitted, though in practice it may have been pronounced.

Even that is doubtful.  A knowledge of it conferred powers similar to those that have been attributed to the Christ, and which the Sadducees ascribed to his knowledge of the tetragrammation.  A knowledge of the Babylonian Shem was as potent.  It served not only men but gods.  Ishtar, for purposes of her own, wanted to get into Aralu.  In the recovered epic of her descent, imperiously she demanded entrance: 

  Porter, open thy door. 
  Open thy door that I may enter. 
  If thou dost not open thy door,
  I will attack it, I will break down the bars,
  I will cause the dead to rise and devour the living.

Ishtar was admitted.  But Aralu was the land whence none return.  Once in, she could not get out until, ultimately, the incommunicable name was uttered.  The epic says that, in the interim, there was on earth neither love nor loving.  In possible connection with which incantations have been found, deprecating “the consecrated harlots with rebellious hearts that have abandoned the holy places."

In addition to the Ritual of the Whispered Charm, there was the Illumination of Bel, an encyclopaedia of astrology in seventy-two volumes which the suburban library of Borsippa contained.  During the captivity many Jews must have gone there.  In the large light halls they were free to read whatever they liked, religion, history, science, the romance of all three.  The books, catalogued and numbered, were ranged on shelves.  One had but to ask.  The service was gratis.

Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, was the most respectable place on earth.  For ten thousand years man had there consulted the stars.  But though respectable, it was also equivocal.  During a period equally long ­or brief ­the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, stranger or neighbour, that asked.  In the service of the goddess their brothers occasionally feigned that they too were girls.  Meanwhile, from the summit of a seven-floored pyramid, mortals contemplated the divine.

Beneath was cosmopolis, the golden cup that, in the words of Jeremiah, made the whole world drunk.  Seated immensely on the twin banks of the Euphrates ­banks that bridges above and tunnels beneath interjoined ­Babylon more nearly resembled a walled nation than a fortified town.  Within the gates, in an enclosure ample and noble, a space that exceeded a hundred square miles, an area sufficient for Paris quintupled, observatories and palaces rose above the roar of human tides that swept in waves through the wide boulevards, surged over the quays, flooded the gardens, eddied through the open-air lupanar, circled among statues of gods and bulls, poured out of the hundred gates, or broke against the polychrome walls and seethed back in the avenues, along which, to the high flourishes of military bands, passed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins, Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara’d princes, burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms ­prostitutes, pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep ­the flux and reflux of the gigantic city.

In that ocean, the captive Jews, if captive they were, rolled, lost as a handful of salt spilt in the sea.  Yet, from the depths, a few had swum up and, filtering adroitly, had reached the dignity of high place.  One was pontiff.  Others were viceroys.  In addition to being pontiff, Daniel was chancellor of the realm.  Ezra was rector of the university.  As pontiff of a college of wizards, Daniel may have known the future.  As Minister of Wisdom, Ezra may have known, what is quite as difficult, the past.  For the moment there was but the present.  Over it ruled Belshazzar.

Yet, ruler though he was, there were powers potenter than his own:  Baalim, outraged at the elevation of a parvenu god; a priesthood consequently disaffected; and, without, at the gates, the foe.

It would have been interesting to have assisted at the final festival when, beneath cyclopean arches, in the sunlight of clustered candelabra, amid the glitter of gold and white teeth, among the fair sultanas that were strewn like flowers through the throne-room of the imperial court, Belshazzar lay, smiling, amused rather than annoyed at the impudent menace of Cyrus.

Babylon was impregnable.  He knew it.  But the subtle Jews, the indignant gods, the alienated priests to whom the Persian was a redeemer, of these he did not think.  Daniel had indeed warned him and, vaguely, he had promised something which he had since forgot.

Beyond, an orchestra was playing.  Further yet, columns upheld a ceiling so lofty that it was lost.  On the adjacent wall was a frieze of curious and chimerical beasts.  Belshazzar was looking at them.  In their dumb stupidity was a suggestion of the foe.  The suggestion amused.  Smiling still he raised a cup.  Abruptly, before it could reach his lips, it fell with a clatter on the lapis lazuli of the floor beneath.  Before him, on that wall, beneath those beasts, the necromancy of the priesthood had projected an armless, fluidic hand that mounted, descended, tracing with a forefinger the three luminous hierograms of his doom.

The story, a little drama, was, with the tale concerning Nebuchadnezzar, that of Daniel, and other novels quite as strange, evolved long later in the wide leisures of Jerusalem.  The fluidic hand did not appear.  Even had it zigzagged there was no Belshazzar to frighten.

Only the doom was real.  Cyrus was clothed with it.  To the trumpetings of heralds and the sheen of angels’ wings, triumphantly he came.  Then, presently, by royal decree, the Jews, manumitted and released, retraced their steps, burdened with spoil; with the lore of two distinct civilizations, which, fusing in the great square letters of the Pentateuch, was to become the poetry of all mankind.

Babylon, ultimately, with her goblin gods and harlot goddess, sank into her own Aralu.  Nourished there on dust, Lilit, with the sister vampires of eternal night, fed on her.