II. THE TOILERS

Hunting—Tillage—Food—Industry—Transport—The perils of commerce—Money-lenders—Slaves

Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in the thick grass, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods, posed placidly for artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men. Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle.

Most of the soil was tilled by tenants or by slaves; some of it by peasant proprietors.²⁵ In the earlier centuries the ground was broken up with stone hoes, as in neolithic tillage; a seal dating some 1400 B.C. is our earliest representation of the plough in Babylonia. Probaby this ancient and honorable tool had already a long history behind it in the Land between the Rivers; and yet it was modern enough, for though it was drawn by oxen in the manner of our fathers, it had, attached to the plough, as in Sumeria, a tube through which the seed was sown in the manner of our children.²⁶ The waters of the rising rivers were not allowed to flood the land as in Egypt; on the contrary, every farm was protected from the inundation by ridges of earth, some of which can still be seen today. The overflow was guided into a complex network of canals, or stored into reservoirs, from which it was sluiced into the fields as needed, or raised over the ridges by shadufs—buckets lifted and lowered on a pivoted and revolving pole. Nebuchadrezzar distinguished his reign by building many canals, and gathering the surplus waters of the overflow into a reservoir, one hundred and forty miles in circumference, which nourished by its outlets vast areas of land.²⁷ Ruins of these canals can be seen in Mesopotamia today, and—as if further to bind the quick and the dead—the primitive shaduf is still in use in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Loire.²⁸

So watered, the land produced a variety of cereals and pulses, great orchards of fruits and nuts, and above all, the date; from this beneficent concoction of sun and soil the Babylonians made bread, honey, cake and other delicacies; they mixed it with meal to make one of their most sustaining foods; and to encourage its reproduction they shook the flowers of the male palm over those of the female.²⁹ From Mesopotamia the grape and the olive were introduced into Greece and Rome and thence into western Europe; from nearby Persia came the peach; and from the shores of the Black Sea Lucullus brought the cherry-tree to Rome. Milk, so rare in the distant Orient, now became one of the staple foods of the Near East. Meat was rare and costly, but fish from the great streams found their way into the poorest mouths. And in the evening, when the peasant might have been disturbed by thoughts on life and death, he quieted memory and anticipation with wine pressed from the date, or beer brewed from the corn.

Meanwhile others pried into the earth, struck oil, and mined copper, lead, iron, silver and gold. Strabo tells how what he calls “naphtha or liquid asphalt” was taken from the soil of Mesopotamia then as now, and how Alexander, hearing that this was a kind of water that burned, tested the report incredulously by covering a boy with the strange fluid and igniting him with a torch.³⁰ Tools, which had still been of stone in the days of Hammurabi, began, at the turn of the last millennium before Christ, to be made of bronze, then of iron; and the art of casting metal appeared. Textiles were woven of cotton and wool; stuffs were dyed and embroidered with such skill that these tissues became one of the most valued exports of Babylonia, praised to the skies by the writers of Greece and Rome.³¹ As far back as we can go in Mesopotamian history we find the weaver’s loom and the potter’s wheel; these were almost the only machines. Buildings were mostly of adobe—clay mixed with straw; or bricks still soft and moist were placed one upon the other and allowed to dry into a solid wall cemented by the sun. It was observed that the bricks in the fireplace became harder and more durable than those that the sun had baked; the process of hardening them in kilns was then a natural development, and thenceforth there was no end to the making of bricks in Babylon. Trades multiplied and became diversified and skilled, and as early as Hammurabi industry was organized into guilds (called “tribes”) of masters and apprentices.³²

Local transport used wheeled carts drawn by patient asses.³³ The horse is first mentioned in Babylonian records about 2100 B.C., as “the ass from the East”; apparently it came from the table-lands of Central Asia, conquered Babylonia with the Kassites, and reached Egypt with the Hyksos.³⁴With this new means of locomotion and carriage, trade expanded from local to foreign commerce; Babylon grew wealthy as the commercial hub of the Near East, and the nations of the ancient Mediterranean world were drawn into closer contact for good and ill. Nebuchadrezzar facilitated trade by improving the highways; “I have turned inaccessible tracks,” he reminds the historian, “into serviceable roads.”³⁵ Countless caravans brought to the bazaars and shops of Babylon the products of half the world. From India they came via Kabul, Herat and Ecbatana; from Egypt via Pelusium and Palestine; from Asia Minor through Tyre, Sidon and Sardis to Carchemish, and then down the Euphrates. As a result of all this trade Babylon became, under Nebuchadrezzar, a thriving and noisy market-place, from which the wealthy sought refuge in residential suburbs. Note the contemporary ring of a rich suburbanite’s letter to King Cyrus of Persia (ca. 539 B.C.): “Our estate seemed to me the finest in the world, for it was so near to Babylon that we enjoyed all the advantages of a great city, and yet could come back home and be rid of all its rush and worry.”³⁶

Government in Mesopotamia never succeeded in establishing such economic order as that which the Pharaohs achieved in Egypt. Commerce was harassed with a multiplicity of dangers and tolls; the merchant did not know which to fear the more—the robbers that might beset him on the way, or the towns and baronies that exacted heavy fees from him for the privilege of using their roads. It was safer, where possible, to take the great national highway, the Euphrates, which Nebuchadrezzar had made navigable from the Persian Gulf to Thapsacus.³⁷ His campaigns in Arabia and his subjugation of Tyre opened up to Babylonian commerce the Indian and Mediterranean Seas, but these opportunities were only partially explored. For on the open sea, as in the mountain passes and the desert wastes, perils beset the merchant at every hour. Vessels were large, but reefs were many and treacherous; navigation was not yet a science; and at any moment pirates, or the ambitious dwellers on the shore, might board the ships, appropriate the merchandise, and enslave or kill the crew.³⁸ The merchants reimbursed themselves for such losses by restricting their honesty to the necessities of each situation.

These difficult transactions were made easier by a well-developed system of finance. The Babylonians had no coinage, but even before Hammurabi they used—besides barley and corn—ingots of gold and silver as standards of value and mediums of exchange. The metal was unstamped, and was weighed at each transaction. The smallest unit of currency was the shekel—a half-ounce of silver worth from $2.50 to $5.00 of our contemporary currency; sixty such shekels made a mina, and sixty mina, made a talent—from $10,000 to $20,000.^38a Loans were made in goods or currency, but at a high rate of interest, fixed by the state at 20% per annum for loans of money, and 33% for loans in kind; even these rates were exceeded by lenders who could hire clever scribes to circumvent the law.³⁹ There were no banks, but certain powerful families carried on from generation to generation the business of lending money; they dealt also in real estate, and financed industrial enterprises;⁴⁰ and persons who had funds on deposit with such men could pay their obligations by written drafts.⁴¹ The priests also made loans, particularly to finance the sowing and reaping of the crops. The law occasionally took the side of the debtor: e.g., if a peasant mortgaged his farm, and through storm or drought or other “act of God” had no harvest from his toil, then no interest could be exacted from him in that year.⁴² But for the most part the law was written with an eye to protecting property and preventing losses; it was a principle of Babylonian law that no man had a right to borrow money unless he wished to be held completely responsible for its repayment; hence the creditor could seize the debtor’s slave or son as hostage for an unpaid debt, and could hold him for not more than three years. A plague of usury was the price that Babylonian industry, like our own, paid for the fertilizing activity of a complex credit system.⁴³

It was essentially a commercial civilization. Most of the documents that have come down from it are of a business character—sales, loans, contracts, partnerships, commissions, exchanges, bequests, agreements, promissory notes, and the like. We find in these tablets abundant evidence of wealth, and a certain materialistic spirit that managed, like some later civilizations, to reconcile piety with greed. We see in the literature many signs of a busy and prosperous life, but we find also, at every turn, reminders of the slavery that underlies all cultures. The most interesting contracts of sale from the age of Nebuchadrezzar are those that have to do with slaves.⁴⁴ They were recruited from captives taken in battle, from slave-raids carried out upon foreign states by marauding Bedouins, and from the reproductive enthusiasm of the slaves themselves. Their value ranged from $20 to $65 for a woman, and from $50 to $100 for a man.⁴⁵ Most of the physical work in the towns was done by them, including nearly all of the personal service. Female slaves were completely at the mercy of their purchaser, and were expected to provide him with bed as well as board; it was understood that he would breed through them a copious supply of children, and those slaves who were not so treated felt themselves neglected and dishonored.⁴⁶ The slave and all his belongings were his master’s property: he might be sold or pledged for debt; he might be put to death if his master thought him less lucrative alive than dead; if he ran away no one could legally harbor him, and a reward was fixed for his capture. Like the free peasant he was subject to conscription for both the army and the corvée—i.e., for forced labor in such public works as cutting roads and digging canals. On the other hand the slave’s master paid his doctor’s fees, and kept him moderately alive through illness, slack employment and old age. He might marry a free woman, and his children by her would be free; half his property, in such a case, went on his death to his family. He might be set up in business by his master, and retain part of the profits—with which he might then buy his freedom; or his master might liberate him for exceptional or long and faithful service. But only a few slaves achieved such freedom. The rest consoled themselves with a high birth-rate, until they became more numerous than the free. A great slave-class moved like a swelling subterranean river underneath the Babylonian state.