Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/207

] fixed above Elam, and not above Babylonia, and &quot; the mountain of the East,&quot; the primitive home of the race, was supposed to support the firmament. The shrines on the topmost terraces of the temples were used also as observatories. Ur had its royal observatory, and so probably had the other cities of Chaldea ; in Assyria they existed at Assur, Nineveh, and Arbela, and the astronomers-royal had to send in their reports to the king twice a month. At an early date the stars were numbered and named ; but the most important astronomical work of the Accadians was the formation of a calendar. This came after the division of the heavens into degrees, since the twelve months (of 30 days each) were named after the zodiacal signs, and would seem to belong to about 2200 B.C. Somewhat strangely, the Accadian calendar appears to have passed to the Assyrians (and through them to the Jews) through the medium of the Aramaeans. The year being roughly made to consist of 360 days, intercalary months had to be added, one of them being regularly inserted every six years, and two others being counted in by the priests when necessary. The soss of GO years, the ner of 600, and the sar of 3600, were merely cycles dependent upon the general mathematical system of the Babylonians, which made 60 the unit, and then multiplied it by the factors of itself. The week of 7 days was in use from an early period ; indeed, the names which we still give to the days can be traced to ancient Babylonia ; and the seventh day was one of sulum or &quot; rest.&quot; The night was divided into three watches ; but this was afterwards superseded by the more accurate division of the day into 12 casbu (of 2 hours each), corresponding to the divisions of the equator, each casbu being further subdivided into 60 minutes, and these again into 60 seconds. The sections of the equator contained 30 degrees each a degree being 60 sosses or minutes ; but since an astrolabe, now in the Museum, divides each of the 12 sections in the outer circle into 20 degrees, and those in the inner circle into 10 degrees, it is plain that a different system was adopted for astrological purposes. Eclipses were carefully recorded from a very remote epoch, and since some of these are said to have happened &quot;according to calculation,&quot; and others &quot; contrary to calculation,&quot; their recurrence after a cycle of eighteen years must have been roughly determined. One of the Assyrian reports states that a watch was kept for an eclipse of the sun on the three last days of the month, but that, contrary to expectation, the eclipse did not take place, and we possess notices of eclipses which have been verified by modern astronomers, though antecedent to the era of Nabonassar, with whom, so far as Ptolemy knew, the first record of them began. The chief work on astronomy was one compiled for the library of Sargon of Agane in seventy tablets or books, which went through many editions, one of the latest being now in the British Museum. It was called &quot; the illumination of Bel,&quot; and was translated into Greek by Berosus. The catalogue of its contents includes observations on comets, on the pole-star, the conjunction of the sun and moon, and the motions of Yenus and Mars. The main purpose, however, of all these Babylonian astronomical observations was an astrological one; to cast a horoscope, or predict the weather, was the chief business of the Chaldean astronomer. Indeed, the patient minuteness of the meteorological observations is most curious, and it was believed that the same weather recurred after a definite number of years. In the later Assyrian period the study became more scientific, and the observatory reports have something of the precision of modern times. But from a much earlier era we obtain interesting tables of lunar longitudes and numerical equivalents of the daily increase and decrease of the moon. As is implied by the attention given to astronomy, mathematics was fairly advanced. The unit was 60, a very convenient number, especially when used as the denominator of a fraction. A tablet found at Senkereh gives a table of squares and cubes, correctly calculated, from 1 to 60 ; and a people who were acquainted with the sun-dial, the clepsydra, the lever, and the pulley, must have had no mean knowledge of mechanics. The lens, too, discovered at Nineveh, explains the minuteness of the cuneiform writing on so many of the tablets, and suggests the possibility of artificial aids to the observation of the heavens. Assyria possessed but little native literature. It was essentially a land of soldiers, and the more peaceful pursuits had their home in Babylonia, where the universities of Erech and Borsippa were renowned down to classical times. It was not until the reign of Assur-bani-pal that any attempt was made to rival Babylon in learning; then for the first time original compositions came from the pens of Assyrian scholars, and works were even written in the dead language of Accad. Syllabaries, together with grammars, dictionaries, and reading-books of Assyrian and Accadian, were drawn up, besides lists of Semitic synonyms. In these grammars and vocabularies lay the germ of comparative philology, and they are otherwise valuable as affording us the earliest native analysis of Semitic speech. But before this closing period of the empire, the Assyrians had been chiefly content to translate the ancient Accadian literature, or re-edit the contents of Babylonian libraries ; and the cramping influence of a dead language, in which all the precedents of law and the first principles of science were locked up, could not but make itself felt. Every great city of Chaldea had at least one library, and it was in imitation of this that the royal libraries at Calah, Nineveh, Assur, and elsewhere, were founded. The larger part of the literature was in clay, stamped in minute characters upon baked bricks, latemilae coctiles as Pliny calls them ; but papyrus was also used, though none of this fragile material has been preserved to our day. In fact, the use of papyrus seems to have preceded that of clay, which was not employed until after the settlement of the Accadians in the plains. The clay tablets or books were arranged in order ; and we learn from the catalogue of Sargon s library at Agane (about 2000 B.C.) that each was numbered, so that the student had only to write down the number of the tablet he wanted and the librarian thereupon handed it to him. The subjects of Accadian literary composition were multifarious. Among the most interesting are the hymns to the gods, some of which strikingly resemble the Hebrew psalms in substance as well as in form. Indeed, the parallelism of Hebrew and Assyrian poetry seems to have been borrowed from the Accadians. But the similarity of expression and feeling is no less remarkable. Thus we read in one (1.) &quot;May god, my creator: take mine hands. (2.) Guide thou the breath of my mouth : guide thou mine hands ; (3.) O lord of light!&quot; and in another (1.) In heaven who is high? Thou alone, thou art high. (2.) In earth who is high? Thou alone, thou art high. (3.) As for thee, thy word in heaven is declared : the gods bow their faces to the ground. (4.) As for thee, thy word in earth is declared : the spirits of earth kiss the ground ; &quot; or in a third (1.) &quot;0 Lord, my transgressions are many: great are my sins. (2.) The Lord in the anger of His heart: has confounded me. (3.) God in the strength of His heart: set himself against me.&quot; A collection was afterwards made of these hymns, which was used for ritualistic purposes, and regarded as an inspired volume, and has been aptly compared by M. Lenormant with the Rig- Veda of the Hindus. Of an older date is the collection of magic formulae and charms, chiefly intended to counteract the effects of sorcery and demoniac possession, which go back to the Shamanistic period of Accadian religion. Later than the hymns, but still prior to the second millennium B.C. and 