Assyrian Historiography | Page 4

they show us the break up of the empire as we never should have suspected from the grandiloquent accounts of the monarchs themselves. Even the business documents occasionally yield us a slight help toward criticism. Add to this the references in foreign sources such as Hebrew or Babylonian, and we hardly need internal study to convince us that the annals are far from reliable.
Yet even internal evidence may be utilized. For example, when the king is said to have been the same year in two widely separated parts of the empire, warring with the natives, it is clear that in one of these the deeds of a general have been falsely ascribed to the king, and the suspicion is raised that he may have been at home in Assyria all the time. That there are many such false attributions to the king is proved by much other evidence, the letters from the generals in command to their ruler; an occasional reference to outside authorities, as when the editor of the book of Isaiah shows that the famous Ashdod expedition was actually led by the Turtanu or prime minister; or such a document as the dream of Ashur bani apal, which clearly shows that he was a frightened degenerate who had not the stamina to take his place in the field with the generals whose victories he usurped. Again, various versions differ among themselves. To what a degree this is true, only those who have made a detailed study of the documents can appreciate. Typical examples from Sargon's Annals were pointed out several years ago. [Footnote: Olmstead. _Western Asia in the Reign of Sargon of Assyria_, 1908.] The most striking of these, the murder of the Armenian king Rusash by--the cold blooded Assyrian scribe,--has now been clearly proved false by a contemporaneous document emanating from Sargon himself. Another good illustration is found in the cool taking by Ashur bani apal of bit after bit of the last two Egyptian campaigns of his father until in the final edition there is nothing that he has not claimed for himself.
The Assyrians, as their business documents show, could be exceedingly exact with numbers. But this exactness did not extend to their historical inscriptions. We could forgive them for giving us in round numbers the total of enemies slain or of booty carried off and even a slight exaggeration would be pardonable. But what shall we say as to the accuracy of numbers in our documents when one edition gives the total slain in a battle as 14,000, another as 20,500, the next as 25,000, and the last as 29,000! Is it surprising that we begin to wonder whether the victory was only a victory on the clay tablet of the scribe? What shall we say when we find that the reviser has transformed a booty of 1,235 sheep in his original into a booty of 100,225! This last procedure, the addition of a huge round number to the fairly small amount of the original, is a common trick of the Sargonide scribe, of which many examples may be detected by a comparison of Sargon's Display inscription with its original, the Annals. So when Sennacherib tells us that he took from little Judah no less than 200,150 prisoners, and that in spite of the fact that Jerusalem itself was not captured, we may deduct the 200,000 as a product of the exuberant fancy of the Assyrian scribe and accept the 150 as somewhere near the actual number captured and carried off.
This discussion has led to another problem, that of the relative order of the various annals editions. For that there were such various editions can be proved for nearly every reign. And in nearly every reign it has been the latest and worst edition which has regularly been taken by the modern historians as the basis for their studies. How prejudicial this may be to a correct view of the Assyrian history, the following pages will show. The procedure of the Assyrian scribe is regularly the same. As soon as the king had won his first important victory, the first edition of the annals was issued. With the next great victory, a new edition was made out. For the part covered by the earlier edition, an abbreviated form of this was incorporated. When the scribe reached the period not covered by the earlier document, he naturally wrote more fully, as it was more vividly in his mind and therefore seemed to him to have a greater importance. Now it would seem that all Assyriologists should have long ago recognized that _any one of these editions is of value only when it is the most nearly contemporaneous of all those preserved. When it is not so contemporaneous, it has absolutely no value when we do have