Assyrian Historiography | Page 4

in the field, others from the
governors in the provinces, still others from palace officials. All are of
course absolutely authentic documents, and the light they throw upon
the annals is interesting. To these we may add the prayers at the oracle
of the sun god, coming from the reigns of Esarhaddon and Ashur bani
apal, and 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