Patrick Suskind, Perfume

 

Patrick Suskind, Perfume, tr. John E. Woods, Vintage International, 2001

 

At age six he had completely grasped his surroundings olfactorily. There was not an object in Madame Gaillard’s house, no place along the northern reaches of the rue de Charonne, no person, no stone, tree, bush or picket fence, no spot be it ever so small, that he did not know by smell … And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world. (26)

 

More remarkable still, Madam Gaillard thought she had discovered his apparent ability to see right through paper, cloth, wood, even through brick walls and locked doors. Without ever entering the dormitory, he knew how many of her wards—and which ones—were in there. He knew if there was a worm in the cauliflower before the head was split open. And once, when she had hidden her money so well that she couldn’t find it herself (she kept changing her hiding places), he pointed without a second’s search to a spot behind a fireplace beam—and there it was! He could even see into the future, because he would infallibly predict the approach of a visitor long before the person arrived or of a thunderstorm when there was not the least cloud in the sky. (27)

 

It was here as well that Grenouille first smelled perfume in the literal sense of the word: a simple lavender or rose water, with which the fountains of the gardens were filled on gala occasions; but also the more complex, more costly scents, or tincture of musk mixed with oils of neroli and tuberose, jonquil, jasmine, or cinnamon. … But on the whole they seemed to him rather coarse and ponderous, more slapdashed together than composed, and he knew that he could produce entirely different fragrances. (36)

 

He was not particular about it. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell, not yet. He was greedy. The goal of the hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors, and his only condition was that the odors be new ones. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud, … (37)

 

For the first time, it was not just that his greedy nature was offended, but his very heart ached. He had the prescience of something extraordinary—this scent was the key for ordering all odors, one could understand nothing about odors if one did not understand this one scent, and his whole life would be bungled if he, Grenouille, did not succeed in possessing it. (38)

 

This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, nor that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water… and at the same time it had a warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris… This scent was blended of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk…and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk—and try as he would he couldn’t fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorized in any way—it really ought not to exist at all. And yet there it was as plain and splendid as day. (39-40)

 

Fifty yards father, he turned off to the right up the rue des Marais, a narrow alley hardly a span wide and darker still—if that was possible. Strangely enough, the scent was not much stronger. It was only purer, … (40)

 

Normally human odor was nothing special, or it was ghastly. Children smelled insipid, men ruinous, all sour sweat and cheese, women smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish. (41)

 

He, in turn, did not look at her, did not see her delicate, freckled face, her red lips, her large sparkling green eyes, keeping his eyes closed tight as he strangled her, for he had only one concern—not to lose the least trace of her scent. / When she was dead he laid her on the ground among the plum pits, tore off her dress, and the steam of scent became a flood that inundated him with its fragrance. He thrust his face to her skin and swept his flared nostrils across her, from belly to breast, to neck, over her face and hair, and back to her belly, down to her genitals, to her thighs and white legs. He smelled her over from head to toe, he gathered up the last fragments of her scent under her chin, in her navel, and in the wrinkles inside her elbow. (42-3)

 

Already he could no longer recall how the girl from the rue des Marais had looked, not her face, not her body. He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent. (44)

 

When you opened the door, Persian chimes rang out, and two silver heron began spewing violet-scented toilet water from their beaks into a gold-plated vessel, which in turn was shaped like the flacon in the Baldini coat of arms. / Behind the counter of light boxwood, however, stood Baldini himself, old and stiff as a pillar, in a silver-powdered wig and a blue coat adorned with gold frogs. A cloud of the frangipani with which he sprayed himself every morning enveloped him almost invisibly, removing him to a hazy distance. So immobile was he, he looked like part of his own inventory. Only if the chimes rang and the herons spewed—both of which occurred rather seldom—did he suddenly come to life, his body folding up into a small, scrambling figure… (45-6)

 

Baldini blew his nose carefully and pulled down the blind at the window, since direct sunlight was harmful to every artificial scent or refined concentration of odors. He pulled a fresh white lace handkerchief out of a desk drawer and unfolded it. Then, holding his head far back and pinching his nostrils together, he opened the flacon with a gentle turn of the stopper. He did not want, for God’s sake, to get a premature olfactory sensation directly from the bottle. Perfume must be smelled in its efflorescent, gaseous state, never as a concentrate. He sprinkled a few drops onto the handkerchief, waved it into the air to drive off the alcohol, and then held it to his nose. In three short, jerky tugs, he snatched up the scent as if it were a powder, immediately blew it out again, fanned himself, took another sniff in waltz time, and finally drew one long, deep breath, which he then exhaled slowly with several pauses, as if letting it slide down a long, gentle sloping staircase. He tossed the handkerchief onto his desk and fell back into his armchair. (60)

 

The second rule is: perfume lives in time; it has its youth, its maturity, and its old age. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life, can it be called successful. How often have we not discovered that a mixture that smelled delightfully fresh when first tested, after a brief interval was more like rotten fruit, and finally reeked of nothing but the pure civet we had used too much of. Utmost caution with the civet! (62)

 

Once upstairs, he said nothing to his wife while they ate. Above all, he said nothing about the solemn decision he had arrived at that afternoon. And his wife said nothing either, for she noticed that he was in good spirits, and that was enough for her. Nor did he walk over to Notre-Dame to thank God for his strength of character. Indeed, that night he forgot, for the first time ever, to say his evening prayers. (86)

 

In due time he ferreted out the recipes for all the perfumes Grenouille had thus far invented, and finally he forbade him to create new scents unless he, Baldini, was present with pen and paper to observe the process with Argus eyes and to document it step by step. In his fastidious, prickly hand, he copied his notes, soon consisting of dozens of formulas, into two different little books—one he locked in his fireproof safe and the other he always carried with him, even sleeping with it at night. That reassured him. (91)

 

Grenouille was fascinated by the process. If ever anything in his life has kindled his enthusiasm—granted, not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame—then it was this procedure for using fire, water, steam, and a cunning apparatus to snatch the scented soul from matter. That scented soul, that ethereal oil, was in fact the best thing about matter, the only reason for his interest in it. The rest of the stupid stuff—the blossoms, leaves, rind, fruit, color, beauty, vitality, and all those other useless qualities—were of no concern to him. They were mere husk and ballast, to be disposed of. (96)

 

It was much the same with their preparation. Mint and lavender could be distilled by the bunch. Other things needed to be carefully culled, plucked, chopped, grated, crushed, or even made into pulp before they were placed in the copper kettle. Many things simply could not be distilled at all—which irritated Grenouille no end.  … Grenouille tried for instance to distill the odor of glass, the clayey, cool odor of smooth glass, something a normal human being cannot perceive at all. (99)

 

He did not know that distillation is nothing more than a process for separating complex substances into volatile and less volatile components and that it is only useful in the art of perfumery because the volatile essential oils of certain plants can be extracted from the rest, which have little or no scent. For substances lacking these essential oils, the distilling process is, of course, wholly pointless. (99)

 

When the House of Giuseppe Baldini collapsed, Grenouille was already on the road to Orleans. He had left the enveloping haze of the city behind him; and with every step he took away from it, the air about him grew clearer, purer, and cleaner. It became thinner as well. Gone was the roiling of hundreds, thousands of changing odors at every pace; instead, the few odors there were—of the sandy road, meadows, the earth, plants, water—extended across the countryside in long currents, swelling slowly, abating slowly, with hardly an abrupt break. (115)

 

On the third day of his journey he found himself under the influence of the olfactory gravity of Orleans. Long before any visible sign indicated that he was in the vicinity of a city, Grenouille senses a condensation of human stuff in the air and, reversing his original plan, decided to avoid Orleans. He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon by the sultry climate of humans. … He now avoided not just cities, but villages as well. He was almost intoxicated by air that grew ever more rarefied, ever more devoid of humankind. He would approach a settlement or some isolated farm only to get new supplies, buying his bread and disappearing again into the woods. After a few weeks even those few travelers he met on out-of-the-way paths proved too much for him; … And so it happened quite naturally and as the result of no particular decision that his plan to take the fastest road to Grasse gradually faded; the plan unraveled in freedom, so to speak, as did all his other plans and intentions. (117)

 

Finally, he traveled only by night. During the day he crept into thickets, slept under bushes, in underbrush, in the most inaccessible spots, rolled up in a ball like an animal, his earthen-colored horse blanked pulled up over his body and head, his nose wedged in the crook of an elbow so that not the faintest odor could disturb his dreams. He awoke at sunset, sniffed in all directions, and only when he could small that the last farmer had left his fields and the most daring wandered had sought shelter from the descending darkness, only when night and its presumed dangers had swept the countryside clean of people, did Grenouille creep out of hiding and set out again on his journey. He did not need a light to see by. Even before, when he was traveling by day, he had often closed his eyes for hours on end and merely followed his nose. The gaudy landscape, the dazzling abrupt definition of sight hurt his eyes. He was delighted only by moonlight. Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land with a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. (119)

 

He spent the next few days settling in on the mountain—for he had made up his mind that he would not be leaving this blessed region all that soon. First he sniffed around for water and in a crevasse a little below the top found it running across the rock in a thin film. It was not much, but if he patiently licked at it for an hour, he could quench his daily need for liquids. He also found nourishment in the form of small salamanders and ring snakes; he pinched off their heads, then devoured them whole. He also ate dry lichen and grass and mossberries. (121)

 

He was anything but a gourmet. He had no use for sensual gratification, unless that gratification consisted of pure, incorporeal odors. (122)

 

Near his watering spot he discovered a natural tunnel leading back into the mountain by many twists and turns, until after a hundred feet or so it came to an end in a rock slide. The back of the tunnel was so narrow that Grenouille’s shoulders touched the rock and so low that he could walk only hunched down. But he could sit, and if he curled up, could even lie down. That completely satisfied his requirements for comfort. For the spot had incalculable advantages: at the end of the tunnel it was pitch-black night even during the day, it was deathly quiet, and the air he breathed was moist, salty, cool. Grenouille could smell at once that no living creature had ever entered the place. As he took possession of it, he was overcome by a sense of something like sacred awe. He carefully spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down on it. He felt blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France—as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother’s belly. The world could go up in flames out there, but he would not even notice it here. He began to cry softly. He did not know whom to thank for such good fortune. / In the days that followed he went into the open only to lick at his watering spot, quickly to relieve himself of urine and excrement, and to hunt lizards and snakes. They were easy to bag at night when they retreated under flat stones or into little holes where he could trace them with his nose. (122)

 

There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance nor waiting for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near himself. (123)

 

The incomparable Empire of Grenouille! Created and ruled over by him, the incomparable Grenouille, laid waste by him if he so chose and then raised up again, made boundless by him and defended with a flaming sword against every intruder. Here there was naught but his will, the will of the great, splendid, incomparable Grenouille. And now that the evil stench of the past had been swept away, he desired that his empire be fragrant. (126)

 

And he would have remained there until his death (since he lacked for nothing), if catastrophe had not struck, driving him from his mountain, vomiting him back out into the world. (133)

 

He lay on his soft in the purple salon and slept, the empty bottles all about him. He had drunk an enormous amount, with two whole bottles of the scent of the red-haired girl for a nightcap. Apparently it had been too much; for his sleep, though deep as death itself, was not dreamless this time, but threaded with ghostly wisps of dreams. These wisps were clearly recognizable as scraps of odors. … And now it seemed as if he were standing in the middle of a moor from which fog was rising. … If he did not want to suffocate, he would have to breathe the fog in. And the fog was, as noted, an odor. And Grenouille knew what kind of odor. The fog was his own odor. His, Grenouille’s, own body odor was the fog. / And the awful thing was that Grenouille, although he knew that this odor was his odor, could not smell it. Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself! / As this became clear to him, he gave a scream as dreadful and loud as if he were being burned alive. … He was deathly afraid, his whole body shoot with the raw fear of death. Had his scream not ripped open the fog, he would have drowned in himself—a gruesome death. (133-34)

 

He did not want to create a great scent; he did not want to create a prestigious cologne such as he had once made for Baldini, one that stood out amid a sea of mediocrity and tamed the masses. Nor was even the simple orange blossom scent that he had promised the marquis his true goal. The customary essences of neroli, eucalyptus, and cypress were meant only as a cover for the actual scent that he intended to produce: that was the scent of humanness. He wanted to acquire the human-being odor—if only in the form of an inferior temporary surrogate—that he did not possess himself. (148-9)

 

…there was a basic perfumatory theme to the odor of humanity, a rather simple one, by the way: a sweaty-oily, sour-cheesy, quite richly repulsive basic theme that clung to all humans equally and above which each individual’s aura hovered only as a small cloud of more refined particularity. (149)

 

And to imitate this human odor—quite unsatisfactorily, as he himself knew, but cleverly enough to deceive others—Grenouille gathered up the most striking ingredients in Runel’s workshop. / There was a little pile of cat shit behind the threshold of the door leading out to the courtyard, still rather fresh. He took a half teaspoon of it and placed it together with several drops of vinegar and finely ground salt in a mixing bottle. Under the workshop he found a thumbnail-sized pieces of cheese, apparently from one of Runel’s lunches. It was already quite old, had begun to decompose, and gave off a biting, punching odor. From the lid a sardine tub that stood at the back of the shop, he scratched off a rancid, fishy something-or-other, mixed it with rotten egg and castoreum, ammonia, nutmeg, horn shavings, and singed pork rind, finely ground. To this he added a relatively large amount of civet, mixed these ghastly ingredients with alcohol, let it digest, and filtered it into a second bottle. The bilge smelled revolting. Its stink was putrid, like a sewer, and if you fanned it you were standing in Paris on a hot summer day, … (150)

 

On top of this disgusting base, which smelled more like a cadaver than a human being, Grenouille spread a layer of fresh, oily scents: peppermint, lavender, turpentine, lime, eucalyptus, which he then simultaneously  disguised and tamed with the pleasant bouquet of fine floral oils—geranium, rose, orange blossom, and jasmine. (150)

 

From his youth on, he had been accustomed to people’s passing him and taking no notice of him whatever, not out of contempt—as he had once believed—but because they were quite unaware of his existence. … But now, in the streets of Montpellier, Grenouille sensed and saw with his own eyes—and each time he saw it anew, a powerful sense of pride washed over him—that he exerted an effect on people. As he passed a woman who stood bent down over the edge of a well, he noticed how she raised her head for a moment to see who was there, and then, apparently satisfied, turned back to her bucket. (152)

 

He now knew that he could do so much more. He knew that he could improve on this scent. He would be able to create a scent that was not merely human, but superhuman, an angel’s scent, so indescribably good and vital that whoever smelled it would be enchanted and with his whole heart would have to love him, Grenouille, the bearer of that scent. (155)

 

He would be the omnipotent god of scent, just has he been in his fantasies, but this time in the real world and over real people. And he knew that all this was within his power. For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. (155)

 

Grenouille sat at his ease on his bench in the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and smiled…And he said to himself that he wanted to do it because he was evil, thoroughly evil. And he smiled as he said it and was content. He looked quite innocent, like any happy person. / He sat there for a while, with an air of devout tranquility, and took deep breaths, inhaling the incense-laden air. And yet another cheerful grin crossed his face. How miserable this God smelled! How ridiculously bad the scent that this God let spill from Him. It was not even genuine frankincense fuming up out of those thuribles. A bad substitute, … (155)

 

In a word: the girl was still a child. But what a child! / The sweat stood out on Grenouille’s forehead. He knew that children did not have exceptional scent, any more than green buds of flowers before they blossom. This child behind the wall, however, this bud still almost closed tight, which only just now was sending out its first fragrant tips, unnoticed by anyone except by him, Grenouille—this child had already had a scent so terrifyingly celestial that once it had unfolded its total glory, it would unleash a perfume such as the world had never smelled before. She already smells better now, Grenouille thought, than that girl did back then in the rue des Marais—not as robust, not as voluminous, but more refined, more richly nuanced, and at the same time more natural. … People will be overwhelmed, .. and they will not know why. … they will say it is because this is a girl with beauty and grace and charm. (171)

 

Ah! He wanted to have that scent! Not in the useless, clumsy fashion by which he had had the scent of the girl in the rue des Marais. For he had merely sucked that into himself and destroyed it in the process. No, he wanted truly to possess the scent of this girl behind the wall; to peel it from her like skin and to make her scent his own. How that was to be done, he did not know yet. But he had two years in which to learn. Ultimately it ought to be no more difficult than robbing a rare flower of its perfume. (172)

 

Jasmine season began at the end of July, August was for tuberoses. The perfume of these two flowers was both so exquisite and so fragile that not only did the blossoms have to be picked before sunrise, but they also demanded the most gentle and special handling. Warmth diminished their scent; suddenly to plunge them into hot, macerating oil would have completely destroyed it. The soul of these noblest of blossoms could not be simply ripped from them, they had to be methodically coaxed away. In a special impregnating room, the flowers were strewn on the glass plates smeared with cool oil or wrapped in oil-soaked cloths; there they would die slowly in their sleep. It took three or four days for them to wither and exhale their scent into the adhering oil. Then they were carefully plucked off and new blossoms spread out. This procedure was repeated a good ten, twenty times, and it was September before the pomade had drunk its fill and the fragrant oil could be pressed from the cloths. The yield was considerably less than with macerations. But in purity and verisimilitude, the quality of the jasmine paste or the huile antique de tubereuse won by such a cold enfleurage exceeded that of any other product of the perfumer’s art. (181)

 

First he made an odor for inconspicuousness, a mousy workaday outfit of odors with the sour, cheesy smell of humankind still present, … On certain occasions, to be sure,  somewhat more redolent, slightly sweaty perfume, one with a few olfactory edges and hook, that lent him a coarser appearance and made people believe he was in hurry and on urgent business. … Another perfume in his arsenal was a scent for arousing sympathy that proved effective with middle-aged and elderly women. It smelled of watery milk and fresh, soft wood. … Once they caught a whiff of him, the market women filled his pockets with nuts and dried pears because he seemed to them so hungry and helpless. … an odor that he applied when he wanted to be avoided and left completely alone. It surrounded him with a slightly nauseating aura, like the rancid breath of an old slattern’s mouth when she awakens. It was so effective that even Druot, hardly a squeamish sort, would automatically turn aside and go in search of fresh air, without any clear knowledge, of course, of what had actually driven him away. (183-4)

 

Grenouille took a brass doorknob, whose cool, musty, brawny smell he liked, and wrapped it in beef tallow and examined it, it smelled quite clearly like the doorknob, though very faintly. (184)

 

He likewise succeeded with the porous chalky dust from a stone he found in the olive grove before his cabin. He macerated it and extracted a dollop of stone pomade, whose infinitesimal odor gave him indescribable delight. He combined it with other odors taken from all kinds of objects lying around his cabin, and painstakingly reproduced a miniature olfactory model of the olive grove behind the Franciscan cloister. Carrying it about with him bottled up in a tiny flacon, he could resurrect the grove whenever he felt like it. / There were virtuoso orders, executed as wonderful little trifles that of course no one but he could admire or would ever take note of it. He was enchanted by their meaningless perfection; and at no time in his life, either before or after, were there moments of such truly innocent happiness as in those days when he playfully and eagerly set about creating fragrant landscapes, still lifes, and studies of individual objects. For he soon moved on to living subjects. / He hunted for winter flies, for maggots, rats, small cats, and drowned them in warm oil. (185)

 

This was a most unpleasant thought for Grenouille. It frightened him beyond measure to think that once he did possess the scent that he did not yet possess, he must inevitably lose it. How long could he keep it? A few days? A few weeks? Perhaps a whole month, if he perfumed himself very sparingly with it? And then? … He felt chilled. He was overcome with a desire to abandon his plans, to walk out into the night and disappear. He would wander across the snow-covered mountains, not pausing to rest, hundreds of miles into the Auvergne, and there creep into his old cave and fall asleep and die. (191)

 

There are scents that linger for decades. A cupboard rubbed with musk, a piece of leather drenched with cinnamon oil, a glob of ambergris, a cedar chest—they all possess virtually eternal olfactory life. While other things—lime oil, bergamot, jonquil and tuberose extracts, and many floral scents—evaporate within a few hours if they are exposed to the air in a pure, unbound form. The perfumer counteracts this fatal circumstance by binding scents that are too volatile, by putting them in chains, so to speak, taming their urge for freedom—though his art consists of leaving enough slack in the chains for the odor seemingly to preserve its freedom, even when it is died so deftly that it cannot flee. Grenouille had once succeeded in performing this feat perfectly with some tuberose oil, whose ephemeral scent he had chained with tiny quantities of civet, vanilla, labdanum, and cypress—only then did it truly come into its own. … He banged his fist against his brow—to think he had not realized this before. But of course this unique scent could not be used in a raw state. He must set it like the most precious gemstone. He must design a diadem of scent, and at its sublime acme, intertwined with the other scents and yet ruling over them, his scent would gleam. He would make a perfume using all the precepts of the art, and the scent of the girl behind the wall would be the very soul of it. (193)

 

The daughter of a carpenter was found slain in her own room on the fifth floor, and no one in the house had heard the least noise, and although the dogs normally yelped the moment they picked up the scent of any stranger, not one of them had barked. (196-7)

 

Then his eyelids closed—not for sleep, but so that he could surrender himself completely to the peace of this holy night. The peace filled his heart. But it seemed also as if it reigned all about him. He smelled the peaceful sleep of the maid in the adjoining room, the deep contentment of Antoine Richin’s sleep on the other side of the corridor; he smelled the peaceful slumber of the innkeeper and his servants, of the dogs, of the animals in their stalls, of the whole village, and of the sea. (219)

 

Grenouille received the verdict without emotion. The bailiff asked him if he had a last wish. “No, nothing,” Grenouille said; he had everything he needed. / A priest entered the cell to hear his confession, but came out again after fifteen minutes with nothing accomplished. When he had mentioned the name of God, the condemned man had looked at him with total incomprehension, as if he had heard the name for the first time, had then stretched out on his plank bed and sunk at once into a deep sleep. To have said another word would have been pointless. (229)

 

The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ. Respectable women ripped open their blouses, bared their breasts, cried out hysterically, threw themselves on the ground with skirts hitched high. The men’s gazes stumbled madly over this landscape of straddling flesh; with quivering fingers they tugged to pull from their trousers their members frozen stiff by some invisible frost; they fell down anywhere with a groan and copulated in the most impossible positions and combinations: grandfather with virgin, odd-jobber with lawyer’s spouse, apprentice with nun, Jesuit with Freemason’s wife—all topsy-turvy, just as opportunity presented. The air was heavy with the sweet odor of sweating lust and filled with loud cries, grunts, and moans from ten thousand human beasts. It was infernal. (238-9)

 

And he owed it to no one—not to a father, nor a mother, and least of all to a gracious God—but to himself alone. He was in very truth his own God, and a more splendid God than the God that stank of incense and was quartered in churches. A flesh-and-blood bishop was on his knees before him, whimpering with pleasure. (240)

 

What he had always longed for—that other people should love him—became at the moment of its achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated. (240)

 

In the Auvergne he drew close to the Plomb du Cantal. He saw it lying to the west, huge and silver gray in the moonlight, and he smelled the cool wind that came from it. But he felt no urge to visit it. He no longer yearned for his life in the cave. He had experienced that life once and it had proved unlivable. Just as had his other experiences—life among human beings. He was suffocated by both worlds. He no longer wanted to live at all. He wanted to go to Paris and die. That was what he wanted. (251)

 

And though his perfume might allow him to appear before the world as a god—if he could not smell himself and thus never know who he was, to hell with it, with the world, with himself, with his perfume. (252)

 

When Grenouille came out of the arcades and mixed in with these people, they at first took no notice of him. He was able to walk up to the fire unchallenged, as if he were one of them. That later helped confirm the view that they must have been dealing with a ghost or an angel or some other supernatural being. Because normally they were very touchy about the approach of any stranger. (253)

 

That was the first thing that any of them could recall: that he had stood there and unstoppered a bottle. And then he had sprinkled himself all over with the contents of the bottle and all at once he had been bathed in beauty like blazing fire. (255)

 

And then all at once the last inhibition collapsed within them, and the circle collapsed with it. They lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, wanted to have a piece of him, a feather, a bit of plumage, a spark from that wonderful fire. They tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they plucked him, they drove their claws and teeth into his flesh, they attacked like hyenas. (255)

 

 

 

E. A. Wallis Budge, Babylonian Life and History, The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, New York, 2005

 

The vast plain between the Tigris and Euphrates runs roughly in a south-eastern direction, and classical writers called its northern part Mesopotamia, and its lower part Babylonia. (2)

 

The earliest dwellers in Babylonia known to us, the Sumerians (2)

 

The question of the race to which the Sumerians belongs has been the subject of many discussions… One thing, however, about them is certain; they were not Semites. … suggest that they were an offshoot of a people who may have lived in some part of Northern India (8-9)

 

The monuments found in the ruins of the early Sumerian cities, and among the remains of the cities built upon them by later kings, supply the names of a large number of Patesis, or kings, but it is extremely difficult to arrange these names in chronological order. … The length of the reigns of the kings who followed immediately after the Flood are equally incredible, and though it is very probable that many of them lived in the fourth, or even the fifth, millennium, BC, it is impossible to assign dates to them. (11)

 

The greatest of the Patesis who ruled over it was the mighty warrior Sharru-kin (Saragon), who reigned for fifty-five years; there is now reason to think that he reigned from 2637-2582 BC. (17)

 

About 2057 BC the First Semitic Dynasty of Babylon began to rule in the city of Babylon under its founder, Sumuabum, who reigned for about thirteen years. The Dynasty consisted of eleven kings, and they reigned for three hundred years. … but it was under the rule of Khammurabi, who was the sixth king of the Dynasty, and reigned for about forty-two years, that Babylon attained its greatest influence and splendour, and became the first city in Babylonia. … He was not only a great warrior, but a great organizing ruler, who thought that nothing concerning the welfare of his kingdom or people was too small or unimportant to deserve his personal supervision. His desire to make his subjects a law-abiding people is shown by the Code of Laws that he compiled, and it is clear from it that he realized no kingdom could stand that was not ruled by justice coupled with wisdom and humanity. He was undoubtedly the greatest king of Babylonia and perhaps the greatest man the country ever produced. (27)

 

Khammurabi enumerated the cities of Nineveh and Ashur among his possessions, and included Assyria in his kingdom. But Assyria asserted her independence soon after the death of Khammurabi, and about 1525 BC the Kassites found it advantageous to make treaties with the kings of Assyria. (32)

 

About 1250 BC, Tukulti-Enurta, King of Assyria, defeated the army of Kashtiliash II, King of Babylonia, captured the city of Babylon, and Babylonia became a province of Assyria. (33)

 

The Assyrian method of quelling rebellion was short and effective; the towns and villages of the rebels were burnt, their fields were laid waste, the rebels themselves were slain, or burnt alive or impaled, and their women and cattle and sheep were carried off into captivity. The Assyrians were a brutally cruel people, and when the Babylonians saw their acts on the battlefields, they could do nothing except make themselves tributaries of Assyria. (36)

 

…Nebuchadnezzar II came to Jerusalem, which he captured and plundered, and he carried off to Babylon, the king and his mother and family and all the craftsmen in the city, 596 BC (2 Kings xxiv. 1-17). About ten years later the people of Jerusalem again rebelled, and Nebuchadnezzar marched against Jerusalem once more, threw down the walls, burnt the Temple and houses, and carried off Zedekiah and the remainder of the people to Babylon, 587 BC (see 2 Kings xxv.). Apries, Necho’s successor, attempted to relieve Jerusalem, but failed. Nebuchadnezzar took all Palestine and Syria and the cities on the seacoast, including Tyre, which fell after a siege of thirteen years (573BC) … Nebuchadnezzar seems to have thought as lightly of his great conquests as Khammurabi, his great predecessor on the throne of Babylon, thought of his. The principal object of these kings was to record their devotion to Bel-Marduk and the other gods, and their restorations of the temples throughout the lands. (40-42)

 

…Nabonius (555-538BC), who was a great builder and repairer of temples. But he was neither a soldier nor a practical man of affairs, and he studied the past history of the religious institutions of his country more than the means by which the power of Babylon was to be maintained or the right government of his subjects. … According to the text, the rule of Nabonidus was unjust and the people became discontented; devils took possession of him, and he built a sanctuary which the Babylonians refused to recognize as such. … temple… to the Moon-god of Harran, and forbade the celebration of the New Year Festival until the period of mourning which he had proclaimed and the work of building were ended. … During the celebration of the New Year Festival, 538BC, he committed several impious acts that showed his utter contempt for the sacred symbols of the Babylonian god Sin and the god Bel. In the last column of the tablet we read of the restoration of the old rites in Babylon, the completion of the great wall Imgur-Enlil, and the return of the gods to their cities. The work of Nabonidus was destroyed everywhere, and all records of him that could be found were broken, the text ends with a curse on Nabonidus, who is consigned to the prison in the Underworld, and with a prayer for Cyrus. (42-3) On the whole, it seems that Nabonidus was somewhat of a religious fanatic, and that he would have fulfilled his purpose in life better as a priest than as a king. It is possible that the king of Babylon who is said to have gone mad in the Book of Daniel was not Nebuchadnezzar II but Nabonidus. (44)

 

Classical writers (Diodorus and Strabo) would have us believe that the Hanging Garden ascended in terraces 6 feet high, 32 feet wide, and 400 feet long, looking like a great flight of stairs, or the tiers of seats in a theatre. It was planted with trees and flowers, and was watered by a hydraulic screw, which went down from the highest terrace to the level of the Euphrates. Every one who has seen the ruins (i.e., of the Vaulted Building) will admit that a garden of this size and kind never existed at Babylon. There may have been there a terrace, with trees and plants, (53)

 

Heroditus says that “in the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry…upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight.” A tablet translated by George Smith, formerly in the possession of Madame Fennerly, supplies the dimensions… [300 x 300 base, 300 feet high, split into 8 levels.] … This “stepped tower” was undoubtedly the Tower of Babel. (53-54)

 

Babylon must have been in existence in the fifth or fourth millennium before Christ… (56)

 

The final decay of Babylon seems to have been due to the Euphrates in the time of the Persian kings (538-331 BC). … Probably it was the alterations made in the city by this change of bed by the river that induced Seleucus I to found Seleucia near the Tigris; at all events, as the new city grew, Babylon declined. … The town of Hillah, on the west bank of the Euphrates, was founded AD 1101-2, and in a few years Babylon was left without an inhabitant. The natives did not even spare her ruins, for they began to tear down the walls of her temples and palaces and fortification, and carry away the bricks to build the towns and mosques of Kifl, Kufah and Karbala. (56-7)

 

…sanctuary of great importance… The ruin is now called Birs-i-Nimrud. It stood on the west bank of the Euphrates a few miles from Babylon. … Close to the temple was the great zikkurat, or “stepped tower,” called E-ur-imin-an-ki. This building was in seven stages, liked the Tower of Babel, and Rawlinson stated that each stage was dedicated to a planet, and had a different colour, (57) … A greatly exaggerated importance has been given to this ruin through the mistake made by Benjamin of Tudela who thought it was the Tower of Babel, which was destroyed when the speech of mankind was confounded. … Muslim tradition states that the Birs-i-Nimrud is the remains of the tower that was built by Nimrod, a contemporary of Abraham, so that he might ascend to Heaven to see God. Nimrod persecuted Abraham, but God  protected the patriarch, and destroyed Nimrod’s tower by fire. Nimrod died miserably, for a gnat entered his head through his ear or nose, and caused him agony which lasted for four hundred years. (58-9)

 

The world was created by Marduk, who formed it by kneading earth and spreading it over a mat made of rushes, which he laid on the face of the waters. This formed an abiding place for the gods of which they approved. Marduk then fashioned man, and the goddess Aruru with him created the seed of mankind. He created the beasts of the field. … He made the city of Nippur and built her temple E-Kur, he made Erech and built her temple E-Anna. (64)

 

The other version of the Story of Creation is found in the Seven Tables of Creation, large portions of which are preserved in the British Museum. According to this, in the beginning nothing existed, except an inert mass of watery matter, of boundless extent, called Aspu. … Out of Aspu came hideous devils of composite forms, and gods in the forms of men; the former lived in Aspu and the latter above it. The place where the gods lived we may call haven, and the space immediately below it, together with Aspu, we may call earth. The two oldest gods to spring from Aspu were Lakhmu and Lakhamu, but about them we know nothing. After a long and indefinite period the gods Anshar and Kishar appeared, and heaven and earth were established as separate entities. Next there came into being Anu, the god of heaven and the sky, and the god Ea, god of the “House of Water,” and several other gods. The disposition of things, which the text calls the “Way of the gods,” was displeasing to Apsu, who is here made to be the predominant being in Apsu, [!] and he took counsel with the monster she-devil, Tiamat, with the view of finding a way of overthrowing the order which had take the place of chaos. Tiamat was imagined to be a composite creature, part animal, part serpent, part bird, revolting in appearance, and evil in every way. But at the same time she was the Universe-Mother, and she had in her possession the Tablet of Fate. Nowhere in the texts is any description of this Tablet given, … (65)

 

Tiamat was the personification of chaos, night, darkness and inertness, and of every kind of evil. Apsu and Tiamat having taken counsel together determined that, with the help of Mummu, they would fight the gods and abolish their arrangement of heaven and earth. When Ea knew of their decision he went forth to do battle with the powers of darkness and chaos, and gained a victory over them … But Ea’s spell … produced a permanent effect on Apsu and Mummu, and seems actually to have killed Apsu. (65) For a time Tiamat was dismayed at the death of Apsu, but she recovered, and her anger against the gods increased. She called to her help the female devil Ummu-Khubur, who at once spawned a brood of monster devils and put them at her disposal. Tiamat next summoned her male counterpart Kingu, and place under his command the evil powers of the air, to which the texts give the names of the Viper, the Snake, Lakhamu, the Whirlwind, the Ravening Dog, the Scorpion-man, the Storm Wind, the Fishman, the Horned Beast, and all these were armed with an invincible weapon. These, together with Kingu and Tiamat, probably represent the primitive Twelve Signs of the Zodiac, which were powers of evil… (66)

 

When Ea heard what Tiamat had done, … he felt that he was not strong enough to do battle with them, and he went to Anshar… a council of the gods was called by Ea, and his son Marduk came with the rest, and offered to go as the champion of the gods to fight Tiamat. (66) … Marduk threw his net over her, and when a gale of wind entering through her mouth distended her body, he drove his spear into her hide, which as once burst asunder. Her fiends and devils tried to escape, but were prevented by the four winds; and having caught them all in his net Marduk trampled upon them. … He then crushed the skull of Tiamat with his club, and scattered her blood to the north wind. He split her body into two parts; of the hide of the one he made the vault of heaven and the hid of the other he made the abode of Ea. The plenishing of heaven and earth next occupied his attention, and he began by establishing abodes for Anu, god of the heavens, Bel, god of the earth, and Ea, god of the deep and the underworld. (67)

 

The gods, however, appear not to have been wholly satisfied with what Marduk had done for them, chiefly because there was no one to present offerings to them and to worship at their shrines. When Marduk heard their complaint he decided to create man out of “blood and bone,” and announced his decision to Ea, who suggested that one of the gods should be sacrificed to provide “blood and bone” for the man who was to be made. Thereupon Marduk asked the gods in council who was the cause of the rebellion of Tiamat and had made war, and they named Kingu, the husband of Tiamat. And they bound Kingu with fetters, … let out his blood, from which mankind was made. (68-9)

 

The account of the flood given in the Book of Genesis is not borrowed from the Babylonian Version, as has so often been stated. It is quite true that the Accounts in cuneiform and Hebrew agree in many places very closely, but the variations in them show that their writers, or editors, were dealing with a very ancient legend which had found its way among all Sumerians, Semites, and other peoples in Western Asia. … it is pretty clear that variant versions of it existed among the Sumerians and Babylonians in the third millennium BC. (70)

 

The Legend of the Flood has nothing to do with the exploits of the mythical hero Gilgamesh, and it is difficult to see why it is included in the history of them. … The great moral lesson of the Epic of Gilgamesh is that the greatest and mightiest king must die, for all men are born to die; no man can enjoy immortality on earth. But this lesson is not what the Legend of the Flood as told by Berossos teaches [not in Gilgamesh. Xisusthros is alternate of Uta-Napistim] For according to him, when Xisuthros found that the ark had come to a standstill he looked out and saw that it was resting on a mountainside. Therefore he and his wife and daughter and the pilot left the ark, made adoration to the earth, and built an altar and offered up sacrifices to the gods and then disappeared. When those who remained in the ark found that he and his wife and daughter and the pilot did not return to them they left the ark with many lamentations, calling continually on the name of Xisuthros. They saw him no more, but they could hear his voice in the air and his admonitions to be religious. The voice told them that it was on account of his piety that he had been translated to live with the gods, and that his wife and daughter and the pilot had received the same honour. The voice also told them to return to Babylonia, to search the writings at Sippara, which they were to make know to mankind. (71-2)

 

Heaven was usually divided into three parts, viz., the heaven of Anu, the heaven of Bel, and the heaven of Ea, though some theologians held the view that there were seven heavens. … Below heaven was the earth, also divided into three parts (or seven parts), which were inhabited by Ea, men, and the gods of the Underworld. … Below the earth was the subterranean sea called “Apsu,” which could be reached by an opening made in the ground; it was surrounded by a sea that enclosed all earth and heaven. In the latter sea were eight islands. Near the Mountain of the Sunset was the entrance to the Underworld, which was called Kurnugia, or Arali, and occupied the uttermost depths of the earth. This region was divided into seven parts by seven girdle-walls, each of which was provided with two doors. It was ruled over by a goddess called Allatu, or Ereshkigal, who, with the help of the Six Hundred Anunnaki, took charge of the spirits of the dead. Another view is that as there were Seven Heavens there were also Seven Hells, and that the lowermost Hell was reserved for the spirits of those who had been the greatest sinners on earth. / The gods and goddesses of the Babylonians were many, and their names fill one of the largest tablets of the Kuyunjik Collection in the British Museum. The earliest people in Babylonia believed that everything possessed a spirit, and such religion as they had can perhaps be best described by the word Animism. Some spirits were benevolent and some malevolent, and the latter must be propitiated by gifts or supplications, or by both. (80-81)

 

The length of the animistic period in Babylonia is knot known, but there is abundant evidence that, in the fourth millennium before Christ, the Sumerians had formulated a system of gods in which each held a well-defined place. The gods were usually represented in human forms, but some had the forms of animals, birds, etc.; each had his own attributes, and each performed certain duties and work. At a comparatively late period the powers and attributes of all the gods were assigned to Marduk, the son of Ea, and some have thought in consequence that the Babylonians were Monotheists, but such was not the case. The monotheism of the Babylonians and Assyrians (for the national god Ashur was in Assyria what Marduk was in Babylonia) entirely lacked the sublime, spiritual conception of God that the Israelites possessed, and was wholly different from the monotheism of Christian nations. Among the Sumerian and Babylonia gods may be mentioned the following:

Anu, the Father and King of the Gods, the God par excellence in fact. He was not a popular god in Babylonia, for he was too great and too remote to be called upon by worshippers to help them in the affairs of daily life. [Babylonians didn’t prefer the king of the gods]. (82-3)

 

Ea, also called Nudimmud, was the son of Anu by Nammu of E-Kur. As the lord of water in all forms, rivers, lakes, seas, the water in the earth and the celestial ocean, he was called Enki. … He was the god of wisdom and knowledge, and instructed men in handicrafts, and invented the characters used in writing. He also taught man to overcome their enemies by the use of spells and incantations, and was the arch-magician and master of the art of divination. (84)

 

Marduk was also a son of Ea. … he represented… the early morning sun. At an early period he was choses as the chief god of Babylon, and after Khammurabi enlarged that city, the renown of the god increased, until at length he became the lord of the all the land. Like his father, he engaged in battle against the powers of evil… The animal sacred to him was the serpent-gryphon, and his sacred number was Ten; his star was Jupiter. (84-5)

 

The gods of the passage to the Underworld, or the “Land of no return,” were Birtu and Manungal. To reach the Underworld the spirits bound thither had to cross the river Khubur and pass through the Seven Gates, which divided it into seven parts. (87)

 

The gods were divided into two main groups; the hone group had dominion in heaven, and the other on earth and in the Underworld. The gods of heaven were called the Igigi, and those of earth the Anunnaki; the former were in number three hundred, and the latter six hundred. A text published by Ebeling makes the number of the gods to be 3,600. From first to last the attributes and characters of the gods remained practically unchanged for at least three thousand years. Besides these there were many spirits of various kinds, some good-natured and some ill-natured, … The Babylonians ascribed to their gods human attributes as well as human forms, and as they conceived of a time when the gods came into being or were born, like men and women, so they also thought it possible that a time would come when they would cease to be, or die, like men and animals. The Creation Legend described in a preceding chapter shows that the gods of evil could be killed and cease to exist. … The priests also held the view that Marduk had to cross the riven in the Underworld, and to go to the kingdom of the dead therein, where he remained for some time in close captivity. He was delivered by the gods, and then became the King of the gods and Lord of heaven. (89)

 

The gods considered man to be, in some respects, akin to themselves, for though man’s body was made of clay it was animated by a divine soul, and was made in their likeness and image. The gods were man’s overlords, and men were their vassals; but the gods were also men’s fathers, and men were their sons, and it was believed possible for a god to dwell in his son. But the gods who were thus closely related to men were gods of the lower orders of the celestial hierarchy, and there is no text which suggests that Anu, or Enlil, or Ea, ever became incarnate in man. (89-90)

 

The Moral Law… A man should avoid his neighbour’s house and the polluting of the water supply.  … The Civic Law forbade the use of false weights and measure and the use of metals with alloy in them as currency, trespass on the property of the god or the neighbours, the removal of landmarks and boundary stones, the stealing of a neighbour’s plough, the destruction of growing crops, the cutting down of reeds and thickets, the stopping of a watercourse, and, in short, any act or deed that would tend to disgrace the Local-god or cause unhappiness, injury, misery or loss in any shape or form to a neighbor. (90)

 

…there is no text containing any suggestion that the Babylonian prayed for the change of mind that would prevent him from repeating his sin. He prayed that his god would change his wrath to compassion and mercy, but he never asked him to create in him a “clean heart” and a “steadfast spirit’ (Psalm li. 10). The Babylonians in general, like the Egyptians, did not understand the importance of repentance in our sense of the word. (91)

 

And the doctrines of the priests encouraged men to enjoy life to the full, for their descriptions of the Underworld were terrifying indeed. Once arrived there man’s body turned into mud, and his spirit took the form of a bird and flitted about in darkness. … Underworld… the spirits of the dead entered it through an opening in the earth in the West. The first obstacle was the river Khybur, which was crossed in a ferry worked by the ferry man Khumuttabal, who had a bird’s head and four hands and feet. … Then it had to pass through Seven, or Fourteen, Doors, … each of which was guarded. … The spirit was … stripped of all clothing and it entered into the presence of the goddess naked. The doors passed, the spirit entered the dark house of Irkalla. … without light, they feed upon the dust and they eat mud; they never see the light, but sit in darkness; they wear feathers like the birds and the dust lies thick on the door and its bolts. (91-2)

 

One section of the Underworld must have been set apart for the spirits who were not condemned by the Anunnaki, for we read of some who reclined on couches and drank water, and of others who had their fathers and mothers to support their heads, and their wives to sit by their sides. Presumably such spirits lived upon the spirits of the offerings made to the dead by the living, and the libations poured out in this world found their way to those in the Underworld. (93)

 

Among the Babylonians the belief in the immortality of the soul (or spirit) was fundamental, and the doctrine of annihilation appears to have been wholly unknown to them. (93)

 

The Sumerians had a Code of family laws, some of which are preserved on a tablet in the British Museum; of these the following are examples; “If a son saith unto his father, ‘Thou art not my father,’ they shall brand him, bind him in fetters, and sell him for money as a slave.” “If a man saith unto his mother, ‘Thou art not my mother’, they shall brand him on the face, and forbid him in the city, and drive him out of the house.” “If a wife hateth her husband and saith unto him, ‘Thou art not my husband,’ they shall throw her into a river.” “If a husband saith unto his wife, ‘Thou art not my wife,’ he shall pay [to her] half a maneh of silver.” (96-7)

 

When Khammurabi had conquered the whole of Babylonia and reduced the countries to the east of the Tigris to subjection, he formulated a Code of Laws, by which he intended all his subjects to regulate their lives and affairs. The Laws were not invented by him, but were drawn up from earlier codes which had been in existence for many centuries, and had been observed in all well-governed City-States. (97) …

If a man casts a spell on a man and does not justify his action, the man who is under the spell shall go to the sacred river and cast himself in, and if the river drowns him the caster of the spell shall take his house as his property. If the river does not drown him the caster of the spell shall be put to death, and the innocent man shall take his house. (100)

 

If a man steals an ox, or a sheep, or an ass, or a pig, or a boat from the temple or palace, he shall pay thirty-fold. The poor man shall pay ten-fold. If the thief has no money, he shall be killed. (101)

 

If a man has enticed a maid of the temple or palace, or the slave or maid of a poor man outside the gate, he shall be killed. (101)

 

The man who is caught stealing during a fire shall be thrown into the fire. (101)

 

If a wine-merchant allows riotous men to assemble in his house and does not expel them, he shall be killed. (101)

 

A man and a woman caught in adultery shall be cast into the water, but the husband of the woman may save her, and the king may save the man. (101)

 

If a man forced a betrothed maiden living in her father’s house, the man shall be killed and the woman shall go free. (102)

 

If there be provisions in the house of a man who is taken captive, and his wife goes to another man, she shall be cast into the waters. / If there be no provisions in the house and she goes to another man and bears him children, if the husband returns she shall go back to him, and the father of the children shall keep them. (102)

 

If a man forsakes his city and his wife, and then returns, his wife shall not return to him. (102)

 

If a wife spends her time out of the house, behaves foolishly, wastes her husband’s goods, and holds him in contempt, he can say “I divorce her,” and send her away without paying back to her her dowry; if he does not say “I divorce her,” he shall marry another woman, and the wasteful wife shall live in his house as a servant. / If a blameless wife has been reviled by her husband, she shall take her dowry and return to her father’s house. / If a wife is not blameless, and had wasted her husband’s goods and reviled him, she shall be thrown into the waters. (102)

 

If a man strikes a gentlewoman and she miscarries, he shall pay ten shekels of silver for her loss of offspring. / If the gentlewoman dies, the striker’s daughter shall be killed. If the woman be the daughter of a poor man, the striker shall pay five shekels for her miscarriage. If the poor man’s daughter dies, the striker shall pay half a maneh of silver. (103)

 

The earliest and most persistent form of Sumerian and Babylonia literature is a rhythmic prose. Rhyming was unknown. The earliest song consisted of what we may call verses, each of which contained two halves with the same form and expressing the same sense; two such verses formed a distich. Nearly all poetic compositions were written in this form, which was also used in exorcisms, incantations, and even in historical inscriptions. The greater part of Babylonian poetical literature consists of Hymns and Prayers in which the gods are praised extravagantly, and their help demanded by the suppliant. (105-6)

 

We know that they had gods, great gods whom they worshipped at festivals and on state occasions, but they thought that they were too great, too far removed from them, to trouble about the daily wants and affairs of men. (115)

 

The Babylonian … most of all he feared the Seven Evil Spirits, who were the creators of all evil. The first was the South Wind, the second a dragon, the third a leopard, the fourth a viper, the fifth a raging beast, the sixth a whirlwind, and the seventh a storm (hurricane). These evil spirits were created by Anu, … (117)

 

The Babylonians did not usually resort to prayer to the gods or appeal to the good spirits when afflicted by evil spirits, but went to the priest, who often assumed the character of a god, and who exorcised the devils by reciting incantations. (118)

 

Another class of beings was greatly feared by the Babylonians, viz. warlocks and witches. These were usually men and women who were deformed, or who possessed some physical peculiarity which led their neighbours to believe that they were closely associated with devils, and that they sometimes served as dwelling-places for the powers of evil. As possessors of human intelligence, they were often considered to be more baneful than the devils themselves. They were specially masters of the Evil Eye and the Evil Spell… (119)

 

Besides the priests who used the cedar-wood staff and the bowl, there were many “prophets” in Babylonia who professed to be able to tell the future without reading the omens on the bodies of the birds or animals that were sacrificed. The use of the liver of an animal in divination dates from the earliest time, and it was believed that the science of reading the signs on it was the invention of Shamash. A fine example of an inscribed model, in clay, of a sheep’s liver is preserved in the British Museum. (121)

 

Babylonian Book of Wisdom: … Harm not in any way thine adversary. / Recompense the man who doeth evil to thee with good. / Oppose thine enemy with righteous dealing. (122)

 

The Kassite Boundary Stones usually record grants of land to favoured or deserving subjects by kings, and the earliest mention of them dates from about 1400 BC. The inscriptions mention the names of the kings, describe the boundaries of the lands granted, and sometimes tell us why they were granted. They usually end with a series of curses on the man who shall destroy or remove the landmark, and with figures and symbols of the gods whoa are invoked to make the curses effective. …

 

The first paragraph gives the name and title of Nebuchadnezzar I (1146-1123) … / “or shall cut out the name of a god or of the king which is written down herein, and shall substitute another; or shall incite a simple man, or a deaf man, or a blind man, or an evilly-disposed man, to break in pieces this memorial with a stone, or shall destroy it by fire, or cast it into the river, or bury it in a field where it cannot be seen; may all the great gods whose names are invoked in heaven and upon earth curse that man with a curse of wrath; and may both king and god frown upon him in anger. May ENURTA, the king of heaven and earth, and Gula, the bride of E-sharra, destroy his landmark and blot out his seed. May ADAD, the ruler of heaven and earth, the giver of springs and rain, block up his canals with mud. May he make him to be hungry and in want, may disaster, misfortune and calamity cling to his side by night and by day, and may ruin seize the inhabitants of his city. May the great gods SHUMALIA, the Lady of the shining mountain, who dwelleth in the heights and goeth by the water-springs, and ADAD, NEGRAL, and NANA, the gods of Namar, and SIRU, the shining god, the son of the temple of Der, and SIN, the Lady of Akkad, the gods of Bit-Khabban, in the wrath of their hearts bring calamity upon him. Let another possess the house which he hath built. With a dagger in his neck and a knife in his eye, let him cast himself upon his face before his conqueror, and let his adversary reject his supplication and cut off his life. Through the downfall of his house may his hands claw the mud. May he be bound to sorrow so long as his life lasteth, and as long as heaven and earth endure may his posterity be blotted out.” Sometimes the utterer of the curse prays that the destroyer of his landmark may be smitten with leprosy, or dropsy, or wasting of the bowels, and that he may wander like a starving dog through his city all night long, and lie down with the wild ass outside the city wall. (126)

 

There seems to be little doubt that in Sumerian times the population was divided into two (or three) classes, but it was not until the reign of Khammurabi that these classes were sharply defined. His Code recognizes three classes, viz., the Amelum (or Awelum), the Mushkinu, and the Wardum. The Amelum included the king, his governors and nobles, the landed proprietors, the priests and the educated class, the higher officers of the Government, and the highly skilled handicraftsmen. … The Amelium enjoyed many privileges, but on the other hand, if they were fined because of an accident which caused loss of life or limb to any man, their fine was heavier than that imposed on the ordinary folk. (128)

 

The Mushkinu, or “serf”, lived in a special quarter of the city, and we know from the Code that he contributed less than the Amelum to the temples, and that all his fines and fees were on a lower scale than theirs. He was a free man, or partly so, and was, like the Amaleum, compensated for property destroyed or for loss of limb. He was never put in the fighting line in war time, but served in the camps. Nothing is known as to his origin or mode of life in general, and it is difficult to find a word that will translate exactly the title mushkinu. In later times it lost its original significance, and its equivalent in Arabic, maskin, whence it has passed into European languages, means “destitute”. (129)

 

The Wardum, or slave, was the absolute property of his master, whether acquired by purchase or born on his land; his head was generally shaved in a peculiar way, and he was branded. He was fed and housed by his master, who provided him with a wife, whose offspring was the master’s property. He could own property, and many slaves lived as tenants on their lords’ estates. A slave might buy his freedom, or be freed by his master, to serve in the temple, or he might receive freedom by marrying a free woman, or on adoption by his own or another master. (129)

 

A man was master of his house and family, and the full responsibility for the upkeep of the house and fields, and the maintenance of his wife and children and cattle and salves was his. But the wife of a free man, or of any man, had considerable power, and enjoyed many rights and privileges. A wife was always mistress of the dowry that she had brought, and if she were so disposed could, in the event of her dying childless, arrange for that and her personal property to go back to her father’s family. And she could spend her money in any way she pleased. The contract tablets and other documents prove that women invested their money in commercial undertakings, and bought and sold estates and slaves and lent money on interest… (130)

 

From one of the laws in the Code of Khammurabi it seems certain that there was great infant mortality in Babylonia. In that country, as elsewhere in the East, girls and children who were not wanted, or who, for some reason, could not be reared by their parents, were cast into pits, or thrown out into the desert to be devoured by jackals and wild beasts… it is clear from the law in the Code of Khammurabi that children were sometimes allowed to die… (131)

 

When the bridegroom had finished speaking, he took his wife’s hand and embraced her, and the two then passed into the bridal chamber, where they remained for the greater part of a week. At the end of that time the bridegroom rejoined his friends and amused himself with them, and the young wife took up her duties as mistress of the house. (133)

 

Polygamy was recognized and was common, but to all intents and purposes the Babylonian was a monogamist, and only took a concubine to give him children when his wife was unable to fulfil her duties. (133)

 

[Working men] wore nothing at all, except a string tied round the loins. Men of the upper classes wore a sort of fringed tunic. Working women wore a narrow band round the loins; those of the upper classes wrapped themselves in a kind of shawl, but always left the right breast uncovered. (134)

 

The well-to-do Babylonian, like all Orientals, loved a change of apparel, and enjoyed sitting in a clean place. His religion demanded cleanliness of person, and no man would dare to make supplication to his god in a dirty state or wearing dirty garments. The climate necessitated frequent ablutions, and when a man went dirty or wore filthy garments by choice his neighbors knew that he was in trouble or suffering mentally and physically. The custom of appearing before the god naked shows how difficult it was for a man to keep himself ceremonially clean. (135)

 

Next to ablutions and clean apparel for personal comfort and a feeling of well-being, the Babylonian required anointing with perfumed oils and unguents. The perfume of flowers or the odor of sweet incense was absolutely necessary for him. (135)

 

A cleansing preparation made of oil and potash was used as soap, and its seems that in some parts of Mesopotamia the use of depilatories was not unknown. (136)

 

The fertility of the soil enabled the Babylonian generally to eat his fill, but he lived for the most part on a vegetable diet. His usual drink was water from one of the rivers or large canals, and on special occasions or days of festival he drank palm wine. In humble houses the family sat round the bowl or tray that held the food, and each person helped himself with his fingers, which were usually washed before the meal began. By way of grace the master or mistress mentioned the name of Ishtar or Shamash. … In rich men’s houses the guests sat after the meal and drank deeply of wine, probably fermented, oftentimes until they were drunk. (136)

 

From our point of view we must consider the Babylonians a very religious people, for there is no doubt that they frequented the temples and made their prayers and presented their offerings. … but there is no evidence that any system of public worship, in our sense of the word, existed. (136)

 

The most important and most significant offering the suppliant gave was the animal, usually a sheep, which was killed before the god, and was intended to be a substitute for the suppliant himself, or for one or all his family. By the sacrifice of the animal he intended to show the god that he recognized his divinity, and acknowledges his own wickedness, which merited death. (137)

 

The most important object in early temples was the low, rectangular mass of brickwork on which the offerings were laid, and which served as an altar. This was originally quite flat, but when the animals brought as sacrifices were to be slaughtered upon it, it had slightly raised edges and a kind of spout through which the blood flowed out. Sometimes, especially during the late period, a square pillar stood in the middle of it, and on this the animal was lifted up and slain. … on the altar itself, ie. the higher part, fruits, flowers, vegetables, joints of meat, etc. were laid. (138)

 

As there was no stone in Babylonia and very little wood, both had to be imported. (141)

 

But the Babylonian was, on the whole, a humane man, and there is every reason to believe that the lot of his slave was better than is ordinarily supposed. (142)

 

He loved life, and hated death because he believed that the life he would live after death would be sad and dreary, and perhaps painful. In the next world he believed he would sit in darkness with the shades of other departed beings about him, and be clothed in feathers like a bird, and eat dust and feed upon clay. There is no definite statement on the subject in the texts, but it seems that Babylonians and Akkadians thought that any good or virtuous actions performed in this world were rewarded by long life and prosperity in this world, and not by a life of bliss in the next. (142)