From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

Hillah was founded by the Arabs in the eleventh century of our era and is said by some to occupy the southern part of the site of ancient Babylon. Aside from its interesting legends and traditions—many of them connected with the Tower of Babel and the famed capital of Nebuchadnezzar—its chief attraction for us was the number and beauty of its date palms. Some of them were, doubtless, descendants of those noble trees which once graced the gardens and orchards of Babylon in the meridian of her splendor and which supplied her people with an important part of their nutriment. And, if Delitzsch’s theory regarding the site of the Garden of Eden be true, it is reasonable to suppose that some of the stately palms that now adorn the gardens of Hillah are scions of trees that once raised their graceful fronds high above the humbler plants and shrubs of the Terrestrial Paradise.

Nowhere in the world, not even in the valley of the Nile or in the fertile oases of Algeria, will one find such magnificent groves of date palms as one sees along the lower course of the Euphrates. On the west bank of the Shat-el-Arab, in the humid district of Pasra, there are more than sixty varieties of date palms while the number of trees is estimated to run into hundreds of millions. It is, indeed, from this region that are exported most of the dates of commerce.

But these nourishing and delicately flavored fruits are not a modern staple of commerce. Way back in early Babylonian times “dates of Akkad,” as they are called in cuneiform invoices of the period, were exported in exchange for gold, sheep, and oxen. With corn and flocks and herds they were among the principal sources of the country’s wealth. The early Babylonian kings specially encouraged the development of date plantations and it is related of a certain governor that he considered the planting of palms as among the most notable achievements of his administration.

And there was reason for attaching so much importance to the cultivation of the palm, because it is not only “the prince of the vegetable world,” as Humboldt declared, but also the most useful of all known trees. For it not only supplies the oriental with one of his chief articles of diet but also furnishes him with bread and wine, meal and vinegar, sugar and fuel, matting and cordage, cages and baskets, chairs, benches, beds, and other articles of household furniture and material for the construction of the house in which he lives. So manifold, indeed, are the uses of the date palm that Strabo informs us that a Persian poem enumerates no fewer than three hundred and sixty valuable properties of the palm.

We have seen how dependent the oriental is on the horse and the camel, especially the latter. But the date palm is no less essential to his well-being than the camel. What an incomparable blessing it is in his eyes is evinced by an eastern saying: “The palm is the camel and the camel the palm of the desert.” And so highly does he revere it as a gift of God that he would regard the wanton injury of the palm tree as nothing less than a mortal sin.

“Honor the palm,” enjoins Mohammed, “for it is your maternal aunt; on the stony soil of the desert it offers you a fruitful source of sustenance.” And it is to be noted that this noble tree has followed Islam in all its conquests and is now to be found in every clime which is favorable to its growth in which the followers of the Prophet have made their homes. But the high estimation in which this useful tree is universally held in the East is shown by an Arabian legend which declares that it was from the slime that surrounded a date palm that God formed the first man.

It is not, then, surprising that a tree that plays so important a rôle in the life of the oriental should never be long absent from his thoughts, especially when away from the land of his fathers. For, as the Swiss when abroad longs for his native mountains, so does the Arab pine for the stately palms whose feathery and umbrageous crowns are to him synonyms of home and sweet repose.

Abd-er-Rahman I, the founder of the Ommiad Caliphate of Cordova, was unable to endure in Spain the absence of the beautiful tree which had been the delight of his youth. He, accordingly, had a young palm brought from Syria and planted in the garden of his villa at Rusafah. It was to this tree, the lovely reminder of his native land, that the homesick Caliph addressed these pathetic verses:

When one reads these impassioned verses, one recalls the touching lines of the poet Juvenal who, in his exile in Dyene, wrote:

The words of the exiled Roman seem almost a commentary on those of the homesick Arab.

As we were leaving Hillah for the ruins of Babylon, our attention was arrested by a group of happy, laughter-loving children. Having always been specially interested in the children of the Near East, particularly in those of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, we stopped to learn the cause of their mirth. We found them intently engaged in various games which seemed to afford them the keenest delight. But what was our surprise to find that the favorite games of these sunburnt children in the immediate vicinity of the ruins of Babylon were just the same as the games that are so popular among the boys and girls of America. And stranger still, many of them were quite the same as I had frequently seen played by Indian children on the plateau of the Andes and in the wilds of Brazil. The boys played ball and marbles and leap-frog, while the girls were equally preoccupied with tag, cat’s cradle, and hopscotch.

It would be interesting to know if there was any Babylonian blood in these Hillah children—they seemed to be pure Arabs—and if the games which afforded them such exquisite pleasure were in vogue among the young folk of Babylon in the days of Paltasar and Hammurabi. I commend these subjects to those ardent folklorists who love to trace the nursery tales which so delight the child of to-day back to times primeval.[489]

Our first objective, after leaving Hillah, was the mound of Babil which lies in the northern part of the ruins of Babylon. Most of the land between Hillah and the ruins of the ancient world capital is desolate in the extreme. Not a single human habitation is visible. And yet we were traversing what was during thousands of years the richest and most carefully cultivated tract of land in the world and the one, too, that had the densest population. Now it is untilled and as abandoned as the Arabian desert but a few miles to the westward. The only evidence that we were actually on the site of a once great city were the fragments of pottery and inscribed bricks and the heaps of rubbish which cumbered the ground and the innumerable mounds, high and low, which covered a region many square miles in area.

We saw nothing to remind us of the majestic ruins of Pæstum or Girgenti; no magnificent temples, no stately columns, or impressive pediments or friezes or entablatures. In the mounds which have not yet been changed by the pick and spade of the explorer we could note only occasional traces of brick walls but not the slightest vestige of stone or marble. No remains of temples or palaces or buildings of any kind. All the marvelous structures described by Ctesias and Herodotus had long since disappeared beneath the drifting sands of the desert.

As one contemplates these mounds, beneath which lay the ruined palaces and temples and strongholds of the proud Kings of Chaldea, they have, in the words of the illustrious German explorer, Dr. Robert Koldewey, “the appearance of a mountainous country in miniature; heights, summits, ravines and tablelands are all here.”[490] The landscape is, indeed, such as one might fancy to exist on the planetoid Ceres or Vesta.

We asked an Arab who accompanied us how the potsherds and fragments of vitrified bricks which littered the ground were brought here and he promptly replied—“By the Deluge.” “A foolish answer,” one will say, but it is the same answer that was given by learned men only a few generations ago to account for the occurrence of fossils on the summit of the Alps. And it is the same explanation that was given by the distinguished geologist, Buckland, of the remains of early man, which were found in many of the caverns of Europe. They were reliquæ Diluvianæ—relics of the Noachian Deluge—and the majority of the scientific men of his day were disposed to accept his conclusion as correct. It is, then, not so long ago that savants gave answers to questions that were quite as naïve as that of the untutored Arab of to-day.

But the Arabs who live in the neighborhood of Babylon tell more fantastic stories. They assure one that the ruins are haunted by evil spirits and by malignant jinn and that it is dangerous to wander among the ruins after nightfall.

They also declare that there is at the foot of one of the mounds here a rocky pit, although quite invisible to mortals, in which the wicked angels Harut and Marut were condemned by the Almighty to be suspended, in punishment for their sins, until the day of judgment.[491]

But more remarkable is their belief in the existence hereabouts of satyrs—creatures which are usually supposed to be creations of the mythologies of Greece and Rome. The natives are said to hunt them with dogs and to eat their lower half, although they decline to partake of the upper part on account of its resemblance to the human species.

As one contemplates the utter ruin and desolation which are here so overpowering and listens to the strange stories of the Arabs, one recalls the words of Isaiah—I quote from the King James version:

Babil is one of the loftiest eminences in southern Babylonia and it is for this reason that we visited it before any of the other parts of the ruined Chaldean capital. From its summit, which towers seventy-one feet above the surrounding plain, one has a magnificent view not only of the ruins as a whole but also of many notable features in their immediate vicinity. To the west and southwest are the palm-fringed Euphrates and a number of Arabian villages and gardens along its banks. Several miles southward is Hillah with its gleaming minaret, while some six miles towards the southwest of it is the famous tower of Borsippa, called by the natives Birs Nimrud, and long supposed by many European travelers to be identical with the tower of Babel “the top whereof was to reach to heaven.”[493]

The prospect that greets the vision of the spectator from Babil is always interesting, but to the student of sacred and profane history the word interesting but feebly expresses one’s emotions. This is particularly true when, at the hour of sunset, the long amethystine shadows cast on the dun-colored plain, bring out into bold relief the rich golden lines of the spell-weaving ruins of that great city which, in her glory, ruled over the kings of the eastern world. Then the prospect is absolutely thrilling. Then one loves to be in media solitudine—such a solitude as Babylon is to-day—to watch the magnificent sunset—a burnished-gold splendor shading up starward into delicate rubies and emeralds—to be alone with one’s thoughts while musing on the vanished glories of what was once earth’s proudest and most powerful capital, where for centuries

but of which all we can now say is contained in the words of a Greek comic poet, quoted by Strabo,—“the great city is a great desert.”[494]

Babil—from the old Semitic name Bab-ili—which signifies “The Gate of the Gods,” was the ancient name of the city of Babylon. As locally used it now designates the most northerly mound of the great city. It is, doubtless, because of its name that many travelers have mistaken it for the Tower of Babel spoken of in the eleventh chapter of Genesis.

Thus John Eldred, an English merchant-traveler, who, in the sixteenth century, made three journeys from Aleppo to Bagdad—which he calls New Babylon—speaks of seeing not only “at his goode leisure many olde ruines of the mightie citie of Babylon” but also of having “sundry times” visited “the olde tower of Babell.”[495] From his description, however, one would infer that the ruin which he took for the tower of Babel, was not the Babil of which we have been speaking but rather the imposing ruin of Akerkuf which is a few miles to the northwest of Bagdad, and which is locally called Nimrod’s Tower.[496]

The first European to give an elaborate description of Babil was Pietro della Valle.

The picture of this mound, which he had made by an artist who accompanied him, gives one a very good idea of what has been considered by many to be the Tower of Babel but which, after the noble Roman’s visit to it, was long known as Della Valle’s Ruin.[498]

But the excavations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” under the direction of Dr. Koldewey have completely exploded all the theories that have hitherto obtained regarding the mound of Babil. Far from being the Tower of Babel, or Nimroud or Belus, as has been asserted by many writers and travelers, it is now demonstrated to be the ruin of one of the numerous palaces of Nebuchadnezzar. And it is highly probable that it is the structure to which this monarch refers in one of his inscriptions, in which he declares:

There were, however, other ruins that have at various times been identified with the Tower of Babel. Among these, as has been stated, was that of Borsippa, commonly called Birs-Nimrud, which lies some six miles southwest of Hillah. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited these parts in the twelfth century, speaks of it as “the tower built by the dispersed generation” and declares that it was struck by a heavenly fire which “split it to the very foundation”[500]—a description that is quite applicable to its present appearance.

The distinguished explorers Carsten Niebuhr, Claudius Rich, and Robert Ker Porter were also of the opinion that in Birs-Nimrud “we see the very tower of Babel, the stupendous artificial mountain erected by Nimrod in the plain of Shinar and on which in after ages Nebuchadnezzar raised the temple of Belus.”[501]

But the tradition which identifies the tower of Birs-Nimrud with that of Babel, which is often spoken of as “the oldest building in the world,” rests on no better foundation than does that which would make Babil the tower whose progress was arrested by “the confusion of tongues.” The researches of Assyriologists, which have thrown such a flood of light on many Scriptural subjects, have so far been unable to identify the Tower of Babel, or to indicate where the famous structure was located. Neither the renown of the tower of Babil nor that of Borsippa proves that either of them was the famous tower begun by the ambitious descendants of Noah in the plain of Shinar, for the populace, especially in the East, “is fickle-minded in this as in other matters and holy fanes have the periods when they are in the fashion, just like everything else.”[503]

Incredible as it may seem, as much ignorance long prevailed among the learned of Europe respecting the site of the city of Babylon as about that of the tower which was generally supposed to be located either within its walls or in its immediate neighborhood. Writing about the famed capital of Nebuchadnezzar at the beginning of the last century, a learned English scholar declared, “Well indeed may the glory of this renowned place be said to have departed when even its site cannot with precision be ascertained and when the antiquary and the traveler are alike bewildered amid the perplexity of their researches.”[504] The same author expresses the same opinion in different words when he writes of Babylon, called Babel by the Arabs, that “its vast remains lay for ages in the depths of time as much forgotten by the learned of Europe as if it had been a city of the antediluvians.”[505] Even the Turkish geographer, Djihannuma, was so in the dark about the location of the ruins of Babylon that he placed them at Teluja, nearly eighty miles northwest of their actual site.

How great was the ignorance of Europeans during the Middle Ages regarding the capital of the ancient world may be gathered from a statement of Sir John Mandeville, who tells his readers that “Babylone is in the grete desertes of Arabye, upon the waye as men gon toward the kyndome of Caldee. But it is fulle longe sithe ony man durste neyhe to the toure, for it is alle deserte and full of dragons and grete serpentes and fulle deverse veneymouse bestes alle abouten.”

Even in the second part of the last century the distinguished Orientalist, Oppert, head of the French expedition to Mesopotamia in the years 1851 to 1854,[506] was entirely in error as to the site of Babylon. Influenced, no doubt, by the accounts of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and other classical writers regarding the vast extent of Babylon, he made it to embrace both Babil and Birs-Nimrud, which are full fifteen miles apart from each other, and to include an area that the researches of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have demonstrated to be preposterously large.[507]

But, in order fully to realize how greatly the size of Babylon was exaggerated by the ancient writers and to understand how this capital of thousands of years was able, throughout the ages, to cast so great a spell upon the peoples of the earth, one must briefly consider some of their statements respecting its vastness and magnificence. Only in this way is it possible to appreciate the glamour that has so long attached to it and to discover the reasons for the countless legends and romances to which it has given rise since the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Semiramis.

Of the ancient writers who have given us the most minute descriptions of Babylon, Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus are the most deserving of notice. As Herodotus spent some time in the city and was an eye-witness of what he describes he is, notwithstanding the charges of credulity and exaggeration which have frequently been made against him in certain of his statements, more trustworthy than are those authors who wrote only from hearsay.

What most impressed the writers of antiquity who have given us the most graphic descriptions of the Babylonian capital was its stupendous walls and the vast area which the city embraced. According to Herodotus, who is followed by Pliny, who evidently accepted the measurements of the Greek historian, the wall which girdled this wonderful metropolis was seventy-five feet in thickness and three hundred feet in height.

Such a prodigious wall seems impossible, but when we remember the Great Wall of China, which has nearly thirty times the length of that which Herodotus says surrounded Babylon, we cannot insist that the historian’s account is inherently improbable. But when we know that the Babylonian wall was composed almost exclusively of sun-dried bricks we feel compelled to doubt the writer’s measurements for the simple reason that it was quite impossible for the material used to support a structure of so great a height. It is true that Nebuchadnezzar, in a notable inscription, describes his wall as “mountains high,” but this is a bit of hyperbole in which the self-glorifying monarch was wont frequently to indulge. His statement is quite as much of an exaggeration as that of Diodorus Siculus,[509] who declares that Semiramis, to whom he attributes this colossal work, employed two million men in building the wall of Babylon and that she built it at the rate of a furlong a day and had it completed in the space of a single year.

The circumference of the immense wall of Babylon, according to Herodotus, measured no less than four hundred and eighty statia—somewhat more than fifty-three miles. Ctesias, however, makes the circuit of the city but a trifle more than forty miles. In either case the area enclosed by the wall was enormous and far greater than that included within the extended walls of Paris or within those of Nanking, which is the largest city site in China.

Quintus Curtius asserts positively “that the enclosure contained sufficient pasture and arable land to support the whole population during a long siege.”[511]

If such was the case we should be forced to conclude that the population of the city was out of all proportion to its size. The English geographer, Rennell,[512] is disposed to allow to Babylon during its most flourishing period a population of a million and a quarter, but this is but a surmise, and all estimates of the number of inhabitants in the great city are, at best, the merest conjectures.

For nearly twenty-five centuries the accounts of Ctesias, Strabo, Herodotus, and the writers who accompanied Alexander the Great to the East were our sole authorities respecting the size and the magnificence of the great capital on the Euphrates. Since, however, the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have begun to publish the results of their carefully conducted excavations we find that we must greatly modify many of our views concerning the city about which there has been so much legend and romance, and envisage it in the light of the cold, scientific facts which have been submitted to us, as the results of long research, by Dr. Koldewey and his scholarly associates. While many of the descriptions of Herodotus and other early writers are found to be accurate, it is now clear that many of their measurements require very considerable revision. Thus, in lieu of the fifty-three miles which Herodotus has given as the circuit of the city and the forty miles at which Ctesias has estimated it, Dr. Koldewey finds that these figures must be reduced to eleven miles. The learned investigator noting that the circumference given by Ctesias approximates closely to four times the correct measurement is lead to suspect that the Greek writer “mistook the figures representing the whole circumference for the measure of one side of the square.”[513]

The excavations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” seem, therefore, to prove conclusively that Babylon, far from covering an area so large that both Paris and London could find place within it, side by side, was in reality, as Delitzsch declares, no larger than Munich or Dresden.[514]

But in spite of the great reduction that Koldewey found himself compelled to make in the measurements of the classical writers he does not hesitate to declare “that, in any case, the city, even in circumference, was the greatest of any in the ancient East, Nineveh, which in other respects rivalled Babylon, not excepted.” He also pertinently observes that “it must always be remembered that an ancient city was primarily a fortress of which the inhabited part was surrounded and protected by the encircling girdle of the walls. Our modern cities are of an entirely different character; they are inhabited spaces open on all sides. A reasonable comparison can, therefore, only be made between Babylon and other walled cities and, when compared with them, Babylon takes the first place, as regards the extent of its enclosed and inhabited area, not only for ancient but also for modern times.”[515]

After spending some time on and round about the mound of Babil we proceeded to explore the ruins in the southern part of the city. On our way thither we strolled along the east bank of the Euphrates which, in places, is fringed with stately palms whose feathery crowns are always a delight to the eye. Indeed, the palm is so indispensable a feature of an eastern landscape that no picture of a town or a river seems complete without groves and clumps of this most picturesque of oriental trees. I was glad to find so many of them bordering the Euphrates and the western ruins of Babylon, as I had always imagined that they must here, more than anywhere else, be an essential part of the environment. But, although I was delighted to find so many of these noble trees, it was not for them that I was then specially looking. I was seeking rather a specimen of the weeping willow—the graceful Salix Babylonica—which, in my mind, has always been associated with what is the most pathetic threnody ever written in any language. I refer to the plaintive elegy of the Children of Israel during their captivity in Babylon. Seating myself under an umbrageous palm near a cluster of delicate weeping willows, I said to myself: “This is the one place in the world where one can best appreciate the overmastering sadness of the homesick exiles when their captors asked them to sing the songs of their native land.” And, taking my breviary from my pocket, I read again and again what then seemed to me the most affecting lines ever composed. Put yourself, in fancy, gentle reader, on the bank of the Euphrates in sight of the ruined palace of Nebuchadnezzar and read aloud the lamentation of the disconsolate Hebrews, as given in Psalm 137:

Is it possible to put in words a more soul-subduing “Home Sweet Home” than this affecting Super flumina Babylonis of the heart-broken captives of Israel? But it is only when it is sung in its beautifully rhythmic Hebrew that one can fully appreciate its depth of pathos and exceeding beauty of expression.

Our walk from Babil southward was one of rare delight and interest. It was through gardens and cultivated fields and attractive palm groves which occupied the greater part of the narrow strip of fertile land which separates the Euphrates from the great city of ruins. The methods employed in tilling the soil here are the same as those used in the days of the Jewish Captivity. There is the same primitive plow, the same process of treading out and winnowing grain, the same methods of irrigating the land as obtained when the prophets Daniel and Ezekiel were here the teachers and the consolers of their exiled countrymen.

The width of the Euphrates varies according to the season. As the rainfall in this subtropical land is rarely more than three inches a year, the river is quite shallow, except when its bed is filled by the annual flood from the mountains of Armenia. At Babylon it is rarely more than four hundred feet wide; and during the dry season its surface is considerably below its banks. For this reason the inhabitants from the earliest times have, in order to irrigate their lands, had recourse not only to canals but also to various devices for lifting water from a lower to a higher level. Among these contrivances are the dolab or chain pump, the na’ura or water wheel, and the djird, a huge leather bag, which, when filled with water is, by means of a simple machine operated by an ox, lifted the desired height and automatically emptied into the channel by which the field or garden is irrigated. The strident notes of these various water elevators and the accompanying songs of the native attendants are often the only sounds that penetrate the solemn stillness which reigns amid the venerable ruins that cover the ground from the mound of Babil on the north to the village of Djumdjuma in the southern part of Babylon.

Herodotus tells us that in his time the Euphrates divided the city into “two distinct portions.” But the present bed of the shifting river is considerably to the westward of that which existed in his day. As a result of this shifting, the western part of the city has almost completely disappeared, for nothing of it now remains on the right side of the present channel except slight vestiges of its once massive walls. The same writer also tells us that the two halves of the city were connected by a stone bridge which spanned the river near the center of the metropolis. He attributes this feat of engineering to Queen Nitocris, but, as there is no record of this queen, either in Berosus or in the Babylonian inscriptions, it is probable that Herodotus was misinformed about her existence, or that he had in mind Queen Amuita, the Median wife of Nebuchadnezzar, who is said to have suggested to her royal consort the construction of the famous hanging gardens which were long ranked among the seven wonders of the world. Diodorus,[516] however, will have it that the bridge was due to Semiramis, to whom antiquity ascribes many other of Babylon’s most notable works. But in spite of the determination of the ancient historian to give the credit of this remarkable achievement to a woman, and in spite of the denials of many modern writers that such a bridge ever existed, or that its construction was even possible in the age in which it is said to have been built, the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” in 1910 actually discovered incontestable remains of the much disputed bridge and demonstrated that its construction was due not to Nitocris, or Amuita, or Semiramis, but to the renowned Nebuchadnezzar or to his father, Nabopolassar.

At the spot once occupied by the eastern bridgehead of this notable structure we found ourselves on the famous Procession Street which was long one of the most remarkable features of Babylon. This was the street along which passed the great processions of Marduk-Merodach—the tutelar deity of the Chaldean capital, and of Nabu-Nebe—his son. In this respect it served the same purpose as the magnificent Via Sacra, which extended from Athens to Eleusis and which was used by the solemn Panathenaic procession which was annually held for the celebration, in the great Elusinian temple, of the impressive mysteries of Demeter, Iacchus, and Persephone. An inscribed brick recently found informs us of the part Nebuchadnezzar had in the construction of the Sacred Way of Babylon and gives us the characteristic prayer that he addressed to his gods, which reads:

Passing eastwards along Procession Street we soon find ourselves between the two ruins of the great temple of Merodack and of the famous Tower of Babylon.

In the temple, according to Herodotus, there was a sitting statue of Zeus—the name he gives to the god Merodach—all of gold. “Before the figure stands a large golden table and the throne whereon it sits and the base on which the throne is placed are likewise of gold”—the weight of the gold of these divers objects aggregating eight hundred talents.

Nebuchadnezzar, speaking of this temple, of which he calls himself “the fosterer,” says he adorned it with the wealth of the sea and the mountains and all conceivable valuables,—gold and silver and precious stones. The shrine of Merodach, he declares, “I made to gleam as the sun. The best of my cedars that I brought from Lebanon, the noble forest, I sought out for the roofing of the chamber of his lordship, which cedars I covered with gleaming gold. For the restoration of this temple I make supplication every morning to Merodach, the king of the gods, the lord of lords.” To judge from his inscriptions, it would be difficult to find a pagan king who was more prayerful or who exhibited greater devotion to his gods than did this proud ruler of old Babylonia.

It was in one of the sanctuaries of this temple, apparently in that of the god Ea, lord of wisdom and life and healer of the sick—whom the Greeks identified with Serapis—that the generals of Alexander the Great “asked the god whether it would be better and more desirable for Alexander,” who was then lying critically ill in a palace but a bowshot away, “to be carried into his temple in order as a suppliant to be cured by him. A voice issued from the god saying that he was not to be carried into the temple but that it would be better form to remain where he was. This answer was reported by the Companions and soon after Alexander died as if, forsooth, this were now the better thing.”[518]

Alexander had planned to make Babylon the capital of his world empire, but, shortly after taking possession of the city, his meteoric career in the prime of youthful manhood, was cut short by death, the only invincible foe he had ever encountered. His death was the downfall of the city whence he purposed to rule both Asia and Europe. One of his generals, Seleucus Nicator, succeeded him as ruler of Babylonia and soon thereafter transferred his capital from the banks of the sluggish Euphrates[519] to a new city, Seleucia, named after himself, which he had founded on the banks of the swift-flowing Tigris. And it was not long after this that the great metropolis of Babylonia, which for nearly two thousand years had been the leading capital of the ancient world and which had so long been “the glory of the kingdoms and the beauty of the Chaldees excellency” had literally, in the words of Isaiah, become the habitation of the wild beasts of the desert and was reduced to such a state of decay that, according to St. Jerome,[520] its walls, once the marvel of the world, served only to enclose a hunting park for the diversion of the Parthian Kings.

A furlong to the north of the temple of Merodach is the ruin of the famous tower of Babylon, which by many has been considered identical with the Tower of Babil. So colossal was it that the Babylonians called it “the foundation stone of heaven and earth,” and Nebuchadnezzar, who contributed materially towards its restoration and enlargement, declared in an inscription that he had raised the top of the tower “to rival heaven,” but this was a form of oriental exaggeration in which this monarch frequently indulged. Herodotus tells us that it was a stadium—six hundred feet “in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower and on that a third, and so on up to the eighth, above which there is a great temple.”[521] According to Strabo,[522] this quadrangular pyramid was “five hundred feet high”—nineteen feet higher than the great pyramid of Gizeh. As, however, the existing ruin of the tower of Babylon has not yet been excavated it is impossible, by actual measurements, to control the statements of ancient writers regarding its magnitude. But, from an old inscribed tablet which has been translated by the noted Orientalist, G. Smith, and more recently by Father Scheil, the distinguished French Dominican, we gather that the estimates of the Greek writers were probably excessive, for, according to the tablet in question, the summit of the tower was only three hundred feet above the surrounding plain.

Diodorus[523] informs us that this tower was used by the Chaldeans as an astronomical observatory. In the thick, dust-laden atmosphere of Babylonia, where sand storms are so frequent, such a lofty structure would be quite a necessity for the successful observations of the priest astronomers of Babylonia. “The greatly renowned clearness of the Babylonian sky,” as Koldewey truly observes, “is largely a fiction of European travelers who are rarely accustomed to observe the night sky of Europe without the intervention of city lights.”[524] Cicero, therefore, was quite as mistaken as modern travelers when he thought that the broad plains of Chaldea, where the sky was visible on all sides,[525] were specially favorable to star-gazing and the cultivation of astronomy. Equally misled was the poet who sang of Chaldean shepherds who