No, it was not those shepherds “in boundless solitude” who “made report of stars,” but the Babylonian priests who, from the summits of their zikurrats, or temple-towers, laid the foundations, broad and deep, of the sublime science of astronomy centuries before Hipparchus and Ptolemy began those admirable investigations which have rendered them immortal.

All the ruins of Babylon which we had hitherto inspected had greatly impressed us, but we did not yet have a concrete idea of the greatness and splendor of the capital of the Babylonian Kings until we visited that part which the Arabs still call the Kasr, or castle. It was the great palace which was begun by Nabopolassar and completed by his illustrious son, Nebuchadnezzar. By the Roman historians it was called the Arx, by the Greeks the Acropolis. It served not only as a citadel but also as the favored residence of the king and as the approach to the great temple of Merodach, already referred to, which was the most famous sanctuary in Babylonia.

Not until we saw the wonderful ruins of the Kasr, which have in great measure been excavated, were we able to appreciate the enormous amount of work which Dr. Koldewey and his associates have here accomplished and the splendid contributions which they have made to the science of Assyriology and to our knowledge respecting the greatest capital of the ancient world.

The massiveness of the walls of the citadel—some of them more than fifty feet in thickness—and the vastness of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace with its countless chambers were amazing. But even more noteworthy were the remnants of the Sacred Way, which were once adorned with scores of life-size figures of lions made of brilliantly enameled bricks, and the great Ishtar Gate which spanned Babylon’s Via Sacra, where it entered the older city. The hundreds of bulls and dragons, in brick relief, which cover the walls, and the delicate modeling of the figures prove conclusively that the glyptic art of the Neo-Babylonian period must have attained a very high degree of perfection.

Before the discovery of these wonderful works of art, Koldewey was disposed to be quite skeptical about the traditional splendor of Babylon, but, when he unearthed the marvels of the Sacred Way and the Ishtar Gate, which is “the largest and most striking ruin of Babylon,” he was compelled to admit that the fabled splendor of the city was not without foundation.

Adjoining Ishtar Gate are what are supposed to be the remains of the famous Hanging Gardens which antiquity classed among the Seven Wonders of the World. But a view of the semicircular arches which are said to have supported these gardens makes it difficult to understand why they were called hanging—pensiles hortus—as described by Quintus Curtius[526] and other ancient writers. So far as one can judge by an inspection of the ruins now visible, this wonder of antiquity was nothing more than an elevated garden court and far less of a miraculum, as the Roman historian calls it, than is an ordinary roof garden on one of our modern “sky-scrapers.”

In the same palace, of which the Hanging Gardens formed so conspicuous an ornament, is shown the large throne room of the Babylonian Kings. Speaking of this Dr. Koldewey does not hesitate to say that “it is so clearly marked out for this purpose that no reasonable doubt can be felt as to its having been used as their—the Kings’—principal audience chamber.” And he furthermore adds: “If anyone should desire to localize the scene of Belshazzar’s eventful banquet, he can surely place it with complete accuracy in this immense room.”[527]

Among the other objects of interest among the marvelous complexus of ruins are a huge lion of basalt, the remains of Persian and Parthian buildings and the débris of a Greek theater which, one may believe, was founded by Alexander the Great for the benefit of his countrymen who, in this remote capital of the East, would have been quite loath to forego those intellectual amusements to which they had been so devoted in the land of their birth.

So much has our knowledge of Babylon been increased by the excavation of one-half of the city that we hope that Dr. Koldewey and his scholarly associates will be able to uncover the other half. Should anything interfere with their completion of the great undertaking in which they had already achieved such splendid results, both science and history would suffer a loss that cannot easily be estimated.

From an examination of the ruins of Babylon, that which most impresses one is the immense size of the city, of its walls and palaces and temples, and that tower of Belus which “the Jews of the Old Testament regarded as the essence of human presumption.” Compared with these colossal ruins the remains of such celebrated cities as Delphi and Sparta and Olympia fade almost into insignificance.

From the descriptions of the Babylonian capital left us by the writers of antiquity, the dominant impression made on us is that of the wealth and splendor and magnificence of this famous metropolis. This impression is emphasized by the inscriptions of its kings, who tell us how lavishly their palaces and temples were embellished by the rarest woods of the East and by vast quantities of ivory and silver and gold. Thus Asurbanipal proudly declares, “I filled Esagilla with silver and gold and precious stones and made Ekua to shine as the constellations in the sky.” And Nebuchadnezzar rejoices in the treasures of art and learning which he had accumulated in his palace for “the amazement of mankind.”

But how are these grandiloquent statements of monarchs and historians substantiated by the investigations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gessellschaft”? That Babylon

that, as a trade center, its activities extended from

there is no room for doubt. But from the glowing descriptions of the Greek and Latin writers, we are also led to infer that the buildings of the city—especially its temples and palaces—rivaled in beauty and grandeur the imposing structures of Athens under Pericles and the sumptuous edifices of Rome under Augustus. The discoveries, however, of the German excavators compel us greatly to revise many of our notions regarding the famed palm-embosomed capital on the Euphrates.

One of their most startling revelations is that, so far as their investigations enable them to determine, hewn stone was employed “in bulk for building,” only in the construction of the northern wall of the Kasr, the Sacred Way, the bridge over the Euphrates and in the arches that supported the Hanging Gardens. In this respect Babylon was far behind Nineveh, its great Assyrian rival, where stone was a common building material. Nearly all of its buildings, even its most lauded temples, were composed chiefly of sun-dried bricks. Only in certain parts of the larger temples were kiln-dried bricks employed. What a contrast between such mud structures and the superb marble temples of Baalbec and Palmyra, or the highly polished granite fanes of Thebes and Abydos on the banks of the Nile! What a contrast, even, between the mud temple of Marduk—the greatest in Babylonia—and the immense stone Temple of the Sun erected by the Incas of Peru in their capital of Cuzco!

The dwelling houses of Babylon, according to Herodotus, were mostly three or four stories high. So far, however, the evidence based on excavations goes to prove that private houses were of but a single story. They were probably, like most of the one-story houses in Babylonia to-day—with flat mud roofs which served as dormitories during the intense heat of summer. Such dwellings were almost exactly like the modern one-story adobe houses everywhere visible in New and Old Mexico. The Mexican houses, however, have windows, while those in Babylon had none—at least on the side facing the street. In this respect, however, they were not unlike so many dwelling houses seen in the Near East to-day.

As I contemplated the large mud buildings of ancient Babylon, I could not but compare them with those of the Great Chimu, whose ruins are now among the most remarkable remains of pre-Hispanic Peru. To look at them one would imagine that some jinnee had picked up a section of the Babylonian city and transported it to the far-distant shore of the South Pacific.[528]

With the exception of the Sacred Way and a few other streets, the thoroughfares of Babylon were unpaved. But none of them, not even the great Via Sacra, although polished by long and continuous use, exhibits any trace, as do the pavements of Pompeii, of having ever been used for wheeled traffic. This would seem to indicate that such traffic, even in the Neo-Babylonian period, was rare or nonexistent.

Still more surprising is the fact that the excavations, outside of some of the larger buildings, show but few traces of a drainage system. How so large and flourishing a city could have endured so long without one is a mystery that remains to be solved.

In the light, then, of the German excavations, it is apparent that Babylon, on whose splendor and magnificence the old classical writers so loved to dilate, and concerning whose beauty and grandeur legend and tradition have long spun such wonderful fairy tales, was a city that was remarkable rather for the vastness of its public buildings than for their elegance of design or beauty of execution. Even the temples and palaces were low, squat structures with flat mud roofs and were, from an architectural point of view, quite inferior to many caravanseries that one may now find in various parts of the East. Such ornaments as they possessed were evidences of barbaric richness and prodigality and showed none of the purity of taste that so characterized the matchless creations of Phidias and Ictinus.

But, although Babylon was, in its architectural features, a much overrated city, it has, nevertheless, deserved well of the world and has contributed to the advance of civilization as did few other cities before the rise of Athens and Rome. For, as has been observed, Babylon is “the oldest seat of earthly empire.” And “when the West was shrouded in a darkness that neither history nor tradition can penetrate, ... while wild beasts or naked savages roamed over the future sites of Athens and Rome and Florence and London,”[529] Babylon was laying the foundations of art and science, of law and literature and of that civilization which was subsequently developed and elaborated by the great nations of the West.

It has been the custom, time out of mind, to speak of Egypt as the cradle of civilization. And there was reason for this. For her venerable monuments—her pyramids and temples and obelisks and colossal rock—sculptures—which seemed to be coeval with the dawn of history, appear to justify the theory that our race here took its first steps forward in its great career of material and intellectual development. But recent investigations among the ruins along the Euphrates prove that Babylonia is entitled to the honor which has so long been so freely accorded to the valley of the Nile.

The proofs of this thesis are as numerous as interesting; and, so far as inductive evidence goes, are practically conclusive. But most of them are of so recondite a character that they can be properly discussed only in special works bearing on the archæology and prehistory of the two countries in question. One may, however, be permitted to indicate a few of the more obvious reasons which have led Orientalists to conclude that the civilization in the land of the Pharaohs had its origin in Babylonia.

Thus, recent discoveries in Upper Egypt seem to prove beyond doubt that there was intercourse between the two countries in prehistoric times and that, as a result of this early communication, wheat was first introduced from the valley of the Euphrates to that of the Nile. Another consequence of the intercourse between the two lands was that the Egyptians became acquainted with the Babylonian system of irrigation—a system which had rendered the soil of Babylonia the most productive in the then known world. Babylonian engineers, there is reason to believe, introduced into Egypt the shadoff and the sakieh or water wheel, both of which were Babylonian inventions, as is clearly attested by early Assyrian bas-reliefs and by still earlier Sumerian inscriptions.

Yet more exhaustive researches regarding the early script used in the two countries and the relations of the language of Babylonia, which was a Semetic tongue, to that of Egypt lead to the same conclusion as do investigations respecting the introduction of wheat from the land of the Euphrates, where it still grows wild, into that of the Nile, and the identity of the irrigation machines which have been in continuous use in both lands for thousands of years.

It may, indeed, be admitted that no one of these facts is, of itself, sufficient to demonstrate that the culture and the engineering science of Egypt were Babylonian in origin; but, when they are all found to point in the same direction, the argument based on them has a cumulative force that is quite unassailable. Dr. Sayce gives judgment in a single sentence when he declares “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Semitic-speaking people who brought the science of irrigation and the art of writing to the banks of the Nile came, like the wheat they cultivated, from the Babylonian plain.”[531]

Those, however, who are interested in this fascinating theory, which ascribes to Babylonia not only Egyptian civilization but also the ancestors of the historical Egyptians, should read the remarkable work on the subject by Professor Hommel—a work[532] of profound scholarship and one which has convinced many of the most eminent Orientalists that there can no longer be any doubt that the civilization and culture of Egypt came originally from Babylonia.

But interesting as are the discoveries respecting the cultural relations between the two countries in question, no notice of Babylonia would be complete without some reference to her contributions to the science of astronomy. Here we have more positive information than has hitherto been available regarding the primeval intercourse between the peoples of the Euphrates and the Nile. As one might expect, however, in dealing with subjects carrying us back into the mists of antiquity, we find that the question of Babylonian astronomy is one that is deeply involved in myth and legend, but such myths and legends as help to corroborate the findings of historians and archæologists concerning the labors of the astronomers of old Chaldea.

Even in the question regarding the origin of astronomy, as in that concerning the beginnings of civil engineering in Egypt, we note the same old debate among the learned as to who were the more ancient astronomers, the Egyptians or the Babylonians. The people of the Nileland boasted that Hermes or Osiris was the founder of their astronomical system, while the Chaldeans, that is the Babylonians, claimed that the first astronomer was Belus,[533] the son of Nimrod, who was the grandson of Noah and the reputed builder of the Tower of Babel. This tower, often confused with the tower of Bel described by Herodotus, was, according to Chaldean legend, the first astronomical observatory.

It was not, however, thousands of years before the Christian era, as certain writers would have us believe, that Chaldean astronomy became an exact science. This was not possible and for a very simple reason—the absence of a strict chronology to which the Chaldean observers of the heavens did not attain until 747 B. C., when they adopted what is known as the era of Nabonnassar. Previously there could be no certainty regarding the calculation of time. Not, indeed, until the first recorded eclipse, March 21, 721 B. C., was astronomy raised to the dignity of an exact science.

It is only during the last quarter of a century that we have been able to determine the advances made by astronomy at different periods of Babylonian history and we owe this knowledge almost entirely to the persistent labors of three Jesuits, Fathers Epping, Kugler, and Straszmaier.[535] By a long and careful study of the cuneiform inscriptions bearing on astronomy, many of which they have deciphered, interpreted, and published, they have, for the first time, put the history of Babylonian astronomy on a firm, scientific basis. And they have at the same time completely dissipated the poetical fancy of “Chaldean shepherds discovering the causes of eclipses while watching their flocks” and the oft repeated fable that it was Babylonian astronomers who discovered the precession of the equinoxes—an achievement that was due to the genius of Hipparchus of Nicæa.

Thanks, however, to the researches of the three savants named, it must now be conceded that certain discoveries which have hitherto been attributed to Hipparchus should be credited to the astronomers of Babylonia. Among these were discoveries regarding the inequalities of the lengths of the seasons, the methods of determining in advance the phenomena of the five known planets, the duration of their synodic revolutions, and the dates of the phases and eclipses of the moon. In a remarkable cuneiform inscription, dated as early as 523 B. C., is given what is practically a monthly ephemeris not only of the sun and moon and eclipses but also the more notable phenomena of the planets. With reason does Father Kugler consider this “the oldest known document of the scientific astronomy of the Chaldeans.” And so greatly is he impressed by the marvelous astronomical tables which were constructed by the priest astronomers of Babylonia that he declares:

Recent research has also shown that some of the very accurate calculations of lunar periods which, from the time of Ptolemy, have been attributed to Hipparchus, should in reality be ascribed to the astronomers of Babylonia.[537] That these ancient observers, who had none of the instruments of precision which are now available in our observatories, should have been able to make so exact calculations is marvelous in the extreme.

Equally noteworthy were the discoveries of the hellenized Chaldean, Seleucus, who proved that the movement of the tides is due to the action of the moon and who, contrary to the view which then generally prevailed, taught the helio-centric theory of the solar system—nearly two thousand years before the epochal achievements of Copernicus and Galileo.

The foregoing paragraphs clearly evince that it was the Babylonians who laid the foundations of astronomy, and not, as Buckle, Draper, and others would have us believe, the Arabians under the Caliphate. “The place of honor in science, therefore,”—a place which for ages was conceded to the Babylonians and which, through Father Epping’s studies, has been won for them anew—“will henceforth remain to them uncontested and incontestable.”[538]

In order, however, to have a correct idea of the far-reaching influence of Babylonian civilization, one must know more about it than its contribution to science, art, and literature. One must know something about the social condition of the people and of their manners and customs as described in their history and reflected in their laws. For this a few words will suffice and these will be based on the wonderful code of Hammurabi, the king who ruled over Babylonia more than two thousand years before our era and who was the real founder of her greatness.[539]

It is true that the great legal code which bears his name was, like all other ancient codes, based to a great extent on precedent and on earlier collections of laws, some of which, there is reason to believe, antedated Hammurabi’s great compilation by more than a thousand years. But it is because it is chiefly a codification of preëxisting laws that the great code of the Babylonian King is so valuable and instructive. We find that, unlike the warlike Assyrians, the Babylonians were not only a peaceable and intelligent but also a very humane and deeply religious people. In the words of one who has made a special study of the history and laws of the people over whom Hammurabi bore rule for forty-three years:

Among the laws of the great Babylonian legislator that are especially remarkable are those which safeguard the rights and privileges of married women. That such laws should have been enacted and enforced more than four thousand years ago shows better than anything else the high plane of social progress to which the Babylonians had thus early attained. To quote from the distinguished Orientalist, L. W. King, they “throw an interesting light on the position of the married woman in the Babylonian community, which was not only unexampled in antiquity but compares favorably in point of freedom and independence with her status in many countries in modern Europe.”[541]

One of the many results of the discovery of Hammurabi’s Code was, curiously enough, completely to demolish a favorite argument of certain Biblical critics respecting the laws of Moses. So elaborate a legislative code as that attributed to the Jewish lawgiver was, they contended, quite improbable at the early date assigned to it, and it must, therefore, have had its origin at a subsequent period when society was more highly organized. It must, then, the critics maintained, have been the work of the Jewish priesthood in the later days of Israel, who, in order to give it the necessary sanction, falsely attributed it to Moses. What then must have been their surprise and confusion, on the appearance of Father Scheil’s translation of Hammurabi’s Code, to find that it was more than five hundred years older than that of Moses, and that with its two hundred and eighty-two enactments it revealed a more elaborate social organization than that described in the violently attacked Book of Exodus? But this is only one of many similar surprises which the Higher Critics have found in the monuments of Babylonia. And in proportion as the cuneiform inscriptions continue to disclose their long-withheld secrets, so also, we may feel sure, will they, in all essential matters, be found to verify and corroborate the declarations of the Sacred Text.

Our last bird’s-eye view of the abomination of desolation that was Babylon was from the highest accessible point of the great royal palace on the Kasr. It was at the hour when the noonday sun was pouring his irradiating beams on the scattered and crumbling ruins of temples and palaces and citadels, which seemed to have been blasted by the lightnings of a wrathful heaven and to be lying under a major anathema maranatha of an offended Deity. In this accursed haunt of serpents and scorpions,—and the Arabs add—dragons and satyrs—the earth was absolutely verdureless. No four-footed thing trod the earth; no winged creature circled through the air; not a tree or a shrub adorned the brown, sun-baked mound. Where once stood the Hanging Gardens that were the glory of an arrogant potentate and the wonder of a marveling world; where once were gorgeous halls, with throne of ivory and gold; where kings and nobles feasted in bejeweled robes; where loud choruses swelled to the joyous notes of harp and cymbal and psaltery; where brazen bacchanals drank to Bel from golden goblets looted from Salem’s desecrated temple, there now was the silence and the vacuity and the oblivion of the tomb. Desolation was everywhere made desolate. Of a truth has Babylon the great, “the mother of the abominations of the earth,” “been thrown down and shall be found no more at all.”[542]

We stood on a spot which must have been near that occupied by Nebuchadnezzar when, in the pride of his heart, he exultantly exclaimed:

But before this word was uttered the Prophet Jeremias, speaking with all the detail of an eye-witness, had foretold what would be the fate of the proud and wicked city on the Euphrates. How literally true are his predictions, let the reader judge from the following verses:

Reading these graphic words of the inspired prophet in the presence of the ruins of Babylon as they appear to-day, one can but exclaim with the Royal Psalmist: