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[Authorities: Herodotus, "History" (ed. by Rawlinson); Berosus, "Fragments"; King, "History of Sumer and Akkad"; Rogers, "Outlines of the History of Early Babylonia"; Winckler, "History of Babylonia and Assyria"; McCurdy, "History, Prophecy, and the Monuments"; Rawlinson, "The Five Great Oriental Monarchies"; Sayce, "The Ancient Empires of the East"; "Budge, Babylonian Life and History"; Wright, "The Empire of the Hittites"; Radau, "Early Babylonian History"; Ragozin, "Chaldaea," "Assyria," "Media"; Sayce, "History of Sennacherib"; Budge, "History of Esarhaddon"; Smith, "History of Assurbanipal"; Layard, "Nineveh and Its Remains"; Peters, "Nippur"; Hilprecht, "Explorations in Bible Lands."]

HISTORY begins in the Asiatic land of Babylonia. Very recent discoveries have revealed to us that there, at least five thousand years before Christ, and probably twice that long ago, man had built himself cities and organized a government. This early civilization was remarkable in itself, and double remarkable as being apparently the very first wherein man rose definitely above the savage state, and realized his own destiny as master of the earth. The time- worn records of those glowing days of Intellect's first triumphant outburst have been at last been at last recovered, at least in part, from the earth in which they had lain buried for ages. The surprising glimpses thus given of the past have revolutionized many of our ideas of ancient history. The story of the world must be told all over again, from the beginning.

That first "beginning" of man, God's marvellous and mystic act of the creation of humanity, was once supposed to have taken place barely six thousand years ago; but we know now that our human race has inhabited earth for nearer sixty thousand years than six. Scientists incline today to the belief that there was only one creation, or in other words, that all mankind sprang from a single race. But the descendants of that race had spread abroad over every continent long before they became civilized enough to leave any conscious record of their lives. In almost every land today we find traces of these early "cave-dwellers." In caverns or in excavations we stumble upon their crude stone-headed hammers, their roughly carved spear-heads, and even upon their own fossilized skeletons, bones which have outlasted the brief life of the body by hundreds of centuries.

Slowly, very slowly, these human beings began to rear their heads above the low level of the beast world. Man ceased his dull submission to Nature, and asserted himself as the ruler rather than the slave of the conditions of land and climate that happened to environ him. Doubtless this growth took shape in many regions and in many ways; for man everywhere held in his possession the God-given forces of his brain, the power to weigh, to compare, and thus to reconstruct his world.

So varied, indeed, were the conditions of development in different lands that when, in Babylonia, we catch our earliest glimpse of civilization, we find mankind already divided not merely into tribes or nations, but even into distinct races. These were sharply separated by contrasts of language and of thought, and also by physical traits so marked that they have since persisted despite all the intermingling of men within historic times. Such firmly established characteristics can only be explained by assuming that their possessors had dwelt apart during uncountable centuries of the earlier, unrecorded ages.

The broad divisions thus separating the present human race must be understood and kept in mind by whoever would understand humanity; for most of the tragedy of history has been due to the clash of antagonistic ideals and purposes among these diverging peoples.

The earliest of these races to rise above the savage state were apparently the TURANIANS, or yellow folk, whose best-known descendants today are the Tartars and the Chinese. The Turanians were the pioneers in the slow climb towards civilization; but other peoples have pushed forward with keener energy, and the Turanians have long been left behind. It is of them that we first find clear traces in Babylonia, and also in China; and their aboriginal home lay; perhaps, midway between these two regions in the high table-lands of central Asia, north of the secret fastnesses of Thibet.

The second stock to become notable were the SEMITES, best typified today by the Arabs and the Hebrews. The Semites had their earliest traceable

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(The Recently Excavated Ruins of Nippur) A photograph reproduced by permission from Mr. Clarence Fisher's Excavations at Nippur," describing the work of the University of Pennsylvania Archaeological Expedition

It is an odd fact that the oldest history is the most recent to be written. Scientists are today digging amid the ruins of ancient cities, and from the fragments thus found we have at last learned much about days and nations long forgotten. We think of Rome as old, but before Rome began these nations were already three times as old a Rome is today.

The earliest civilization yet discovered is that of ancient Babylonia, the region along the lower course of the Euphrates River. Apparently the oldest city of all was Nippur, where scientists from our American University of Pennsylvania have been exploring for years. This city was repeatedly destroyed by fire or flood, and each time the people built above the old ruins, so that now many layers of ruin lie one above the other. The explorers have taken great care to leave as much as possible of the rediscovered ruins standing just as the spade dug them out, while further excavations have been continued to greater depths beneath them. The result is such as our picture shows. Strange pillars and fragments, raised one above the other, have been brought to the light of day and stand towering above the bottom of deep pits, as they never did in their own time. We are shown here the temple of the god En-lil, built upon an older temple of the storm goblins. The lowest level of all reveals the remains of an ancient fishing-village which lay upon the banks of the Euphrates at least ten thousand years ago.

home, and probably developed their racial characteristics, in the deserts of Arabia. They surpassed the Turanians both in science and in warfare, and, if not the first conquerors of other nations, were the first to leave definite record of their dominion.

Third came the HAMITES, among whom the Egyptians are the chief nation. The Hamites are of uncertain descent, possibly either Turanian or Semitic, or separate from both. Our scholars of the nineteenth century regarded the development of this race in Egypt as the oldest discoverable civilization. But we see now that Babylonian culture was of still earlier date, and was possibly the source of that of Egypt.

Fourth and last of these great stocks to assert themselves in building up nations and claiming dominion over earth have been the ARYANS. They spread abroad from some early home in eastern Persia, and became ancestors of the Persians, Hindus, Greeks, Romans, and most of the nations of modern Europe. Outside of these four stocks, there are still the negroes and other lesser peoples; but only these four have ever held the lead in the mighty upward climb of man.

The crash and tumult of these quarrelling races as they meet, perhaps for the first time since their original dispersal, forms the earliest of all the mighty dramas which History sets before us on her stupendous stage. Peering through the dim mists of the most distant past, we can watch all four of the races locking forces in confused conflict in the land of Babylon. Man had fought with Nature; he had fought with the beasts. Now he was to fight with men. History raises her portentous curtain. The impressive spectacle opens. Let us pause to note the settings of the stage.

Babylonia is the ancient name once given to the valley of the Euphrates River. A glance at the map of Asia will show that this region lying to the north of the Persian Gulf and environed by the three other seas, the Mediterranean, the Black, and the Caspian, forms a natural centre between the supposed homes of the earliest Turanians, Semites, and Aryans. Turanian tribes migrating westward from central Asia were led direct, by earth's own roadways, into Babylonia. In later history, we shall find horde after horde of barbaric Tartars, Huns, and Turks leaving their eastern homes by this same route to burst in fierce slaughter upon the western nations. As for the Semites and Aryans, their first homes, Arabia and Persia, constitute the highlands which rise on either side of the Euphrates. These races must long have looked with envious eyes toward its fair meadows.

Thus Babylonia was, perhaps, the earliest region of the earth to be seen by many differing peoples, and coveted by them all. It is a low-lying, semi-tropical pasture country, watered by both the Euphrates and Tigris rivers on their south- ward course to the Gulf of Persia. The region is amazingly fertile, and must in the days of its early civilization have been a veritable paradise. Indeed, its neighbors thought it a fit site for the Eden garden, which the Bible places there. Today Babylonia belongs to the Turkish Empire, and centuries of neglect and misrule have turned it into a waste of floods and marshes, a land of mud and hot, stagnant mists and tropic fevers.

The two rivers, once the blessing of the region, have become its curse. The Euphrates is one of the great rivers of the world. Far to the northward it rises amid the towering mountains of Armenia, whose highest summit, MountArarat, was regarded by the Babylonians as the apex of the world. From these mountains, the stream in its annual summer flood carries down vast masses of earth, and spreads the deposit wide over the face of the land. This fertilizing flood was in ancient days guided and regulated by canals and ditches, but these have long fallen into decay, so that the river ravages at will.

We are dealing here with a stupendous natural movement, an alteration of the face of the globe. The Euphrates has apparently undertaken the task of shifting the huge Armenian mountains and filling with their debris the entire Persian Gulf. Moreover, if the ages give it time, it will undoubtedly complete its work. It bears downward such enormous quantities of earth that not only does it build up its own valley floor higher every year, but it spreads the shoals around its mouth outward into the sea at an annual average of about ninety feet. At present the Tigris River joins the Euphrates some eighty miles from the gulf, and the two streams flow into the sea as one. We can, however, look back clearly to a time when the shore line lay above their junction, and they emptied from separate mouths.

We can gaze even farther back. Nearly one hundred and fifty miles from the present mouth of the Euphrates we find on the edge of the higher lands the ruins of the ancient city of Eridu, which was once a seaport town. Figure out for yourself the time taken by the river to build one hundred and fifty miles, and you will reach, as scientists have done, the impressive conclusion that Eridu must have been built more than seventy-five hundred years ago, or 5500 B.C.

Of course, there is no city of Eridu now. Thousands of years ago it had sunk into a heap of abandoned ruins. Sun and rain gnawed ceaselessly at the mass until it shrank into a mere hillock of clay over which Nature spread her luxuriant verdure. Today, there is nothing to distinguish this hill from hundreds of similar ones which dot the entire valley. The fate of Eridu was not peculiar to itself. Not one of the ancient towns of Babylonia is now in existence. Herodotus, the first Greek historian, who visited the land in the days of its splendor four hundred years before Christ, tells us it contained thousands of cities. Now their sites are marked only by these grass-grown hills. Some of these spread out for miles, some rise abruptly a hundred feet or more above

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(Building the Great Temples of Babylonia) By J. James Tissot, a recent French artist famed for his historically accurate Biblical paintings

THE Bible tells us that in this ancient land of Babylonia occurred the early "confusion of tongues." Scientific exploration now informs us of the same fact from another aspect. It was in Babylonia that the scattered races of men first met after perhaps thousands of years of separation, and each people must indeed have been puzzled and confused to encounter other beings, human like themselves, but with a speech so wholly different. The earliest inhabitants of Babylonia were of the black and yellow races. Then came possibly a Hamite or Egyptian race, and then the desertdwellers of Arabia, a white people but dark of hair and complexion like the Hebrews, and belonging, like them, to the Semite race. Among these many peoples, the Semites or Arabs finally dominated the others; but all worked together as masters or as slaves on the huge towers or "ziggurats" which they upraised for temples.

These ziggurats were built of bricks; for bricks were among man's very earliest inventions, the material out of which he created his first permanent structures. The greatest of these ziggurats was erected in the city of Babylon. It was seven stories high, piled like a child's cube of blocks, with each story smaller than the one below. These successive levels were connected not by steps but by a slanting roadway which rose from each story to the next, and so led finally to the uppermost where was enshrined the god of Babylon, Bel-Marduk.

the plain, others have sunk to be mere inequalities of ground scarcely distinguishable above the general level.

Thus an entire civilization was not only buried, but, until recent years, forgotten. European travellers journeying down the Euphrates guessed vaguely that some of the larger, steeper mounts might be the tombs of ancient cities. The ignorant inhabitants of the region treasured legends of one or two of the hills as being the "Tower of Babel," or the "City of Nimrod." Except for that, the mounds were looked upon as the home of evil spirits. The poor peasants, digging there, had come upon grim heads or arms of stone, or perhaps the figures of carved lions, and had fled from the glaring faces of the supposed demons with no suspicion that they were relics of human origin.

So Babylonia remained unknown-except for the vague account of Herodotus, which was mostly legendary, and for a few extracts preserved by the Greeks from other narratives. Some knowledge of the land could be gathered also from the Hebrew Scriptures, and something from the Egyptian hieroglyphics, where these made mention of wars between the two countries.

Yet of the real nature of the Babylonian civilization, its extreme age, remarkable development and astounding power, we had no conception until recent years, when these strange and silent tombs of cities began to yield their secrets. The first scientist to undertake with resolution the task of their exploration was a Frenchman, M. Paul Botta. In 1842, having been appointed consul in the region, he hired men to undertake a systematic digging into one of the hills. For more than two years the results were disappointing. But despite every obstacle of climate and fever, despite the extortions of Turkish officials, and the terror, treachery, and hatred of the natives, M. Botta persisted. In 1845 he laid bare the sculptured ruins of an entire ancient palace, its walls covered with inscriptions, and its doorways frescoed with strange Asiatic sphinxes, half lion and half man.

Europe was astounded and immensely impressed by the discovery. Many scientists, notably the English traveller and scholar Sir A. H. Layard, took up the work of research with eager interest. The results of these explorations were for a long time meagre; the difficulties encountered were almost insurmountable; progress was very slow. The last twenty years, however, have reaped the benefits of the earlier discouragements. Knowledge has come to us almost with a rush. Particularly impressive have been the recent elaborate excavations of the ancient cities of Lagash, Nippur, and Susa. There our scientists have dug through layer after layer of ancient ruins. Especially at Nippur they have found that the city was destroyed and re-destroyed many times in many ages, and each time a new city rose upon the debris, until now relics of the lowest town lie ninety feet below the surface structures.

Every layer of this ninety feet has been carefully explored. Tunnelling like moles in these strange "mines" of history, scholars have brought to the surface materials for much knowledge of this most ancient civilization. We now know just where Babylon stood, and its great rival Nineveh, and a score of still older cities. We have unearthed their buried temples and their palaces, their inscriptions, arts, monuments, the statues of their kings, the figures of their gods, and even the remnants of their buried dead.

Of all these discoveries, the most valuable, and certainly the most surprising, has been the recovery of the writings, the actual literature and language of this long-forgotten people. For several years Mr. Layard continued digging on the site of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, that state which for a time defeated Babylon and succeeded to its empire. Layard's search was rewarded by the discovery of the royal library of Nineveh's king, Assur-bani-pal, which contained some forty thousand records.

Here, you will say, there lay waiting for us the whole history of Assyria, and of Babylon as well. So, doubtless, it would have been had these records been such as we could read with ease. These strange old volumes were not of paper, like our books. Each was a clay tablet like a flat stone, with both of its sides stamped full of letters. These we now know were put in with a stick, something like our pen, while the clay was soft; and then the tablet was baked in order to harden and preserve it. Assur-bani-pal's volumes had met with rough usage. His palace had evidently been burned; and though the tablets, unlike our paper books, had withstood the fire, they met misfortune from another source. Apparently they were kept in a second story; and, the floor burning underneath, they were precipitated to the ground. The fall was disastrous for clay tablets; scarcely one of all the thousands remains whole. We can only fit them together in patches and uncertain fragments. Still another obstacle to the reading of these primitive volumes was the fact that no one knew their language; and though much patient work has been expended by scholars in deciphering it, no one even yet fully comprehends the intricacies of the mysterious tongue. We call it the wedge or cuneiform language, because its signs are made of little wedges. These represent syllables or words rather than letters; indeed, each one is a substitute for a picture which took too long to draw. Many of them are found to stand for three or four different things; others remain wholly unknown to us. Thus our reading of the language is still imperfect. Other libraries have since been discovered, better preserved than that of Assur-bani-pal, and many inscriptions have been unearthed from the ruined cities. Hence we have been at last enabled to gather a fairly full idea of the story of Babylonia.

Turn now from these sources of our knowledge to listen to the history

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(The Goddess Ishtar Appears to Sargon, the Gardener's Lad) By the contemporary American artist, Edwin J. Prittie

MOST of what the early dwellers in Babylonia did was forgotten by their descendants; for this land continued to be earth's chief centre of culture and of population during six thousand years or more. The earliest man to be clearly remembered was called Sargon. Tradition has handed his fame down to us through all the ages as the founder of the great city of Babylon and as its first great king. A legend grew around him, telling that he was a prince, who was exposed to death as an infant but was found and brought up by a gardener. While he worked one day in the garden a lady came to him surrounded by a cloud of doves. She was really Ishtar or Astarte, the love goddess of the Babylonians, to whom doves were sacred. Sargon did not know her, but received her in such princely fashion that she fell in love with him. Under Ishtar's guidance the gardener's boy rose to be the king of his own little city. Then he conquered other cities, and at length held all the land of Babylonia under his rule, being the first man to unite all the little warring cities into a single state.

Recent discoveries have supplied us with a knowledge of the real career of Sargon. He was a military conqueror who lived 3,800 years before Christ, and founded a gorgeous city called Accad. But the city of Babylon had existed long before his time, he only added to its splendors; and many kings had preceded him during many centuries of the slowly developing civilization along the banks of the Euphrates.

itself. We can not make this ancient tale complete; some of it is lost forever. Of the earlier part especially we can only catch clear glimpses here and there, like dissolving pictures which loom suddenly vivid from the midst of darkness and then fade into obscurity again.

What is the very first of these spectacular pictures to appear? Dimly, through the farthest, vaguest mists, perhaps twelve thousand years ago, we see a settlement on the site of Nippur by the side of one of the many channels of the lower Euphrates. Even older may have been the settlement at Susa, the city which afterward became the capital of the Persians. Susa was from the first a hill town, a refuge of violent men who sallied forth from its shelter to hunt and plunder. Nippur, on the contrary, was the home of a peaceful people, fishermen who navigated the river in queer, perfectly round boats of skin, agriculturists who raised crops of wheat and barley on the plains, as these were left bare each season by the receding river flood.

At Nippur there were at first no walls about the town, not even a dike to defend it against the yearly rising of the river. The fishermen built a palace for their king and a temple for their god. These two were elevated on an embankment to protect them from the flood. Doubtless they served also as fortresses in case of an attack. In the temple the fishermen worshipped imaginary goblins of the storm and darkness, strange evil imps whose malignance the poor folk hoped to escape by placating them with sacrifices. Gradually Nippur came to be regarded as a holy city. Its god En-lil, originally chief of the storm spirits, was worshipped as the God of Earth, differentiated from Amu the God of the Sky. Destruction fell more than once upon this city of the storm spirits. Flood came from the hand of Nature; fire from the hand of man. But always Nippur was rebuilt, and each time the sacred temple of En-lil was raised higher and made stronger than before.

Other cities began to grow into prominence. Among the earliest was the ancient seaport Eridhu, "at the mouth of the rivers." Eridhu had its own god, Ea, lord of the ocean. Tradition represented him as rising out of the sea, half man, half fish, and ruling over the city and teaching its people the arts of civilization. Perhaps we have here a hint of some still earlier culture borne to the shores of the Euphrates by voyagers from afar.

From these two cities their religious teachings spread over all the valley. Eridhu, the shrine of the gift-giving Ea, became the center of a bright and sunny worship, a religion of culture, joy, and progress. This kindly faith gave its characteristic tone to the more southern portion of the valley, the cities nearest the sea and the river mouth. Nippur, on the other hand, was the home of spells and incantations, a faith born of the earlier ages of darkness and fear. It lay to the northward, a hundred miles or more from the salt sea and its sunshine. The inland cities of the upper valley caught their religious spirit from sombre Nippur.

After a time there arose a third religious city, Erech, the shrine of Anu, the sky god. It became a sanctuary even more noted than the earlier ones. So sacred, indeed, was Erech that people of other cities journeyed thither to worship Anu. The ground of Erech became holy ground, and the dead were sent there for burial from all the surrounding region. This practice continued for thousands of years. The ruins of Erech today stand in a flat plain that extends for miles, and seems almost wholly composed of human remains. It is perhaps the vastest burial-ground the world has ever known.

Thus our earliest picture of the past shows us man chiefly as a religious being. As to his other characteristics the vision remains vague. None of these three ancient religious cities of the plain, Nippur, Eridhu, or Erech, seems ever to have embarked upon a career of conquest. Each, in turn, however, submitted to other cities which grew up to be their rivals and then their masters.

From these more warlike towns we catch our second kaleidoscopic picture of man and his beginnings. These riverside cities were all brick-built. Indeed, clay for making bricks was practically the only building material to be had along the lower course of the Euphrates. Each city needed walls for protection not only against man but even more against the annual floods. Every important structure had to be raised above the waters by an immense foundation or platform of bricks. The labor thus involved in every important structure was prodigious, and naturally the work of building passed mainly into the hands of the kings or chief rulers of each town. Moreover, from a fairly early period, it was the practice of each king to stamp his bricks with his signet or that of the city. Hence as we come upon these bricks in different places we have a curious means of tracing the old rulers and the growth of their spreading dominions.

The earliest city which we find dominating others was Lagash. It stood in the open plain near Nippur. Its rulers fought the highlanders of Susa, and drove them back from ravaging the river towns. Nippur had been partly destroyed and the rulers of Lagash rebuilt it. Then Lagash extended its apparently beneficent dominion over Erech. Thus several of the little separate communities were for a time drawn together under a single leader. Their united forces made them secure against invasion; and peace brought in its train prosperity, progress, and a higher civilization.

We are still dealing with a period five thousand years before the Christian era. The people of the Euphrates valley who thus rallied around Lagash were apparently still all of one race, Turanian; though some scientists have taken the legend of the fish-god Ea as evidence of the presence of a second, possibly Hamitic,

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(The United Kings of the Euphrates Plan Their Attack on Sodom and Gomorrah) By J. James Tissot, the noted French artist

MANY of the historical portions of the Bible find confirmation and explanation from the records of Babylonia. The Bible tells how five kings from the Euphrates fought against Sodom and Gomorrah and were afterward surprised and put to flight by Abraham. The leader of these five chiefs was Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, who, we learn, did actually for a time hold sway over the other Asiatic nations. Among the dependent kings with Chedorlaomer, the Bible mentions Amtaphel or Hammurabi, whom we find recorded on the inscriptions as king of Babylon, the greatest indeed of her early rulers.

Following the unsuccessful expedition against Sodom and Gomorrah, Hammurabi rebelled against Chedorlaomer and broke his power. Babylon thus became the capital of the entire land, which was ever afterward known as Babylonia. Hammurabi built up Babylon until it was greater than Ur or any other city of its time, a rival of the most splendid capitals of to-day. He established also a code of laws which has been recently discovered. Thus altogether, as conqueror, builder, and lawmaker, Hammurabi stands out as one of antiquity's very greatest men.

In our picture Chedorlaomer sits in the centre, heavy, stolid, and massive, a type of the fighter of the older race. Hammurabi, young, eager, shrewd and Semitic of feature, argues and pleads with arm outstretched, seeking already to sway the others to follow his lead, as later he forced them all to do.

stock among the Turanians. Moreover, in the highlands of Susa we come upon traces of a yet earlier negroid people living in subjection to the dominant Turanians. All of the lowland folk were united in their enmity toward the plundering hillmen of Susa, or Elam as the Bible calls the hill country that surrounded Susa. The valley folk named their own region Kengi, or the land of reeds, since all about the marshy shallows of the river grew great reeds a dozen feet in height. The name Kengi in the course of years gradually changed in pronunciation and became Sumer, or as the Bible spells it, Shinar. So in speaking of the land and people let us henceforth call them by the accepted form of Sumer and Sumerians. It is doubtful if the Sumerian civilization extended more than two hundred miles up the river. Babylon itself had not yet been built. The upper regions of the valley held only a few nomadic tribes.

Then comes a third picture to displace that first one of religion, and the second of city sovereignty. Somewhere about 5000 B.C. the Semite hordes began their migration from the deserts of Arabia. Some of the wanderers descended into Sumer, coming apparently less as conquerors than as visitors, attracted by this civilization so superior to their own, admirers and imitators of the Sumerian culture. By degrees these Semite invaders grew to be an important force in every city, and at length became rulers of the land. Meanwhile, the bulk of the wandering Semites passed beyond Sumer to the northward and spread over the meadow lands higher up the course of the Euphrates, where in after years they erected mighty Babylon. There the invaders settled by themselves, and gradually built up kingdoms of their own. These more northern Semites seem to have despised those of their brethren who remained in the south among the Sumerians, caught in the meshes of the soft lure of their civilization. Yet even the northern Semites borrowed much from Sumer, the art of writing and preserving records of the past, the building of cities and palaces of brick, and much of the Sumerian religion-in short, all that a strong, active, intelligent but ignorant race would naturally glean from an older, more cultured, feebler one.

The Euphrates valley by this mingling of various peoples became in very truth the place of "Babel," the confusion of tongues. The widely separated nations of earth were there drawn together, and heard, in amaze and puzzlement, languages wholly different from their own. Semites, Hamites, Turanians, and the negroid peoples must often have sought for mutual understanding, and jabbered helplessly, if not angrily, at one another in the streets of Lagash. Nor did the confusion aid them to friendship or even to respect; man has ever proved himself only too ready to despise that which he fails to understand.

From this time onward there was a constant struggle between the Sumerian cities of the south and the Semitic tribes of the north, between the ancient "lords of Kengi" and the unorganized "people of Kish," as the early records call the northerners. The first individual name that stands out recognizably from those days of beginnings is that of a king, probably of Lagash, who in an inscription calls himself En-shag-kush-anna, "lord of Kengi." The inscription announces that he gives gifts to the god En-lil of Nippur, and rejoices at having defeated the Semites whom he angrily denounces as "Kish, the wicked of heart." Yet even the name En-shag-kush-anna is in itself Semitic. Sumer had apparently found a Semitic leader necessary to defend her against the Semite hordes of the north.

At a somewhat later date, perhaps 4200 B.C., our view of Lagash becomes much clearer. We begin to find sufficient records of its kings to be able to arrange them in definite order, and establish a regular chronology. But as each ruler carved inscriptions only of his triumphs, we know no more of each than that he defeated other cities. Thus these earliest names that History enshrines are preserved to us merely as fighters. The "struggle for existence" was in their days no idle phrase. Weaker men were swept aside; the stronger ones survived. It is only through many ages of battle and death and darkness that man has climbed at last to the light of fuller understanding.

As we move onward among these scattered names of long forgotten sovereigns, known only today by some scant temple inscription which they themselves perhaps forgot as soon as made, we come upon two men before whom we pause in sudden interest. The first is called Uru-ka-gina. With him we obtain a fourth more sharply outlined picture, a vision now of an individual, a single personage, strong, earnest, and full of purpose. And as we study the recovered fragments that record Uru-ka-gina's very words, we catch from them some insight into the daily life of the world around him. We learn of simpler, more homely things than temples, palaces, and savage wars.

Uru-ka-gina stands out to us as earth's first reformer. He was not the son of a preceding king, the heir of the royal house, but seems to have sprung into power in Lagash as the leader of a peasants' revolution. Think of it! A legalized aristocracy intrenched in power and oppressing the lower classes until the latter are driven to rise in successful rebellion! And this happened, not a century ago, nor two or three centuries ago, but four thousand years before the birth of Christ! Tyranny is not a modern growth.

Uru-ka-gina, once firmly in command, reorganized the entire government of the land. The system of laws, of which we catch a glimpse from this account of his reforms, is the earliest in the world concerning which we have any knowledge. These laws show that society had already become a most complex organism. Money with its accompaniment of taxes was already among the inevitable facts of life. There were hosts of regular tax-collectors, with a host of inspec-

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(Babylon as the Chief Trading City of the World Sells Slaves of All Nations) From a painting by the English artist, Edwin Long

NOT merely by the power of the sword, but chiefly by the powers of the mind, did Babylon hold that foremost place in the ancient world to which she was raised by Hammurabi. Her sway over the ruder peoples who surrounded her was the sway of the intellect; and our world of today is the product of the thought, the culture, the civilization which was there created and spread abroad.

The city of Babylon became the centre of trade not only of Babylonia but of all western Asia, the centre and the nucleus of all wealth. The conquests made by Babylon brought to her the products and the slaves of every land. Merchants journeyed to her from afar. She was the "melting pot" of old, wherein all nations mingled and each gave its best.

Hammurabi also made his city the religious centre of the land. He destroyed the older shrines, and declared Babylon's god, Marduk or Baal-Merodach, to be the greatest of all the gods. Gradually the other cities of Babylonia accepted this belief. Much of the religious thought of Babylon was adopted by the Hebrews, and traces of it have thus been enshrined forever in the Christian Bible. Babylon became not only the London, the chief market of the ancient world, but also its Rome, its venerated religious shrine, and then its Paris, the home of all its fashion and its art.

tors over these. There were slavery, and forced labor, and grinding oppression of the laborer. There were secret theft and open robbery, theft of sheep, of asses, of fish from private fish-ponds, and of water from artificial wells. There were rules for divorce, the principal of which was that those who sought to escape the marriage pledge must pay a substantial fee to the temple of the city's god. There was a priesthood of various ranks, among them being "diviners" who were in much request as foretellers of the future, and were heard with far greater faith than their successors of today. There were also long and carefully built canals, and it was already a kingly duty to keep these in repair.

Unhappily for Uru-ka-gina, he met the fate of most reformers. In seeking to rescue his people from suffering he plunged them into disaster. He must have alienated, possibly he exterminated, the host of aristocrats who had lived upon the taxation of the people. The loss of this upper class left the state weak; presumably they had been its chief fighting force, a sort of unorganized army supported by the peasantry. At any rate, under the reforming king, Lagash failed to uphold her previous military supremacy. Her dependent cities broke away from her. A rival monarch defeated her weakened forces in the field, stormed the city, and laid it waste with fire and sword. As we hear no more of Uru-ka-gina, he doubtless perished amid the flames of his ruined capital. Yet, as a priest of desolated Lagash wrote in puzzled lamentation: "Of sin on the part of Uru-ka- gina, none was." Evidently men had already begun to dream of good deeds as deserving repayment in worldly success; and now they heard Life's grim answer to the dream -- that the gods shield not their own, that earth moves not by any practical law of poetic justice.

Turn now to another portraiture, the companion picture which we can place beside that of the downfall of earth's first reformer. This other ruler whom the rediscovered records make fairly clear to us is Uru-ka-gina's conqueror, earth's earliest empire-builder. The name of this military potentate, as nearly as we can read it from the inscriptions, was Lugal-zag-gisi. He was a son of the high- priest of Umma, a city which had long struggled against Lagash but had been finally subdued. The site of Umma has not been discovered, even its name is only guessed at; but apparently it was a border city between the Semitic north and the Sumerian south. Lugal-zag-gisi, succeeding to his father's place as chief man of Umma, threw off the dominion of Lagash. Though probably himself Sumerian, he drew under his dominion all the wandering Semitic tribes, and with them invaded and conquered the south. Lagash was not the only city which he stormed and sacked. Yet both in Sumer and in the north his victories brought peace rather than war. For the first time the entire Euphrates valley was fused into a single and apparently well-ordered kingdom. As the conqueror's inscription poetically phrases it:

The Story of the Greatest Nations

"The lands in peace
He caused to dwell.
The world with a water of joy
He watered."

Lugal-zag-gisi selected as his capital, Erech, the chief religious centre of the south. So well did he upbuild Erech that from this time, or perhaps even earlier, it became known as "The City," that is, the chief city of the world. He built also the city of Ur, or at least rebuilt it: "upraised Ur high as heaven," says his inscription. The older ruling cities, Lagash and others, he humbled, leaving them helpless "as in a stockade." Having thus established himself securely as master, he looked abroad for other worlds to conquer. The grim and ghastly game of empire-building began.

To Lugal-zag-gisi, therefore, we must attribute the dubious fame of having introduced among mankind a new poison. With him began the earth-hunger which turns to war not from necessity, but from pride, that most hideous form of human vanity which calls wholesale murder by the name of "glory."

At the head not of a ravaging horde of savages but of a well-disciplined army, the king marched westward from the Euphrates to the coast of the Mediterranean. The region seems not to have been entirely unknown. Trade had penetrated thither before conquest. The king, however, was explorer as well as conqueror. He fought where necessary, exacted tribute everywhere, and came home extremely proud of himself. In a prayer to En-lil of Nippur he asks to be continued in his good destiny, calls himself the "great regent of the gods," and in words most typical of the cruel passion for conquest he prays for armies, for "warriors as many as the grass in abundance." His wish, let us note, was not for toilers to enrich the land, but for soldiers to be fed to Death.

There his scant inscription of his "glory" stops. We know no more of him, except that his boasted empire disappeared as others have, and that all his triumphs can have led him only where he led his soldiers -- to the grave.

Our next glimpse into those old days shows us the beginning of that astonishing city from which the entire Euphrates valley came to be called Babylonia, which means the land belonging to Babylon.

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BABYLON is fallen, is fallen, that great city." Thus cried the prophet Jeremiah in the later days of the mighty city's splendor. "Babylon hath been a golden cup in the Lord's hand, that made all the earth drunken.. O thou that dwellest upon many waters, abundant in treasures, thine end is come." These also are the words of the Bible. We could almost tell the whole story of Babylon in quotations from the sacred volume. The Hebrew prophets return again and again to speak of the greatness of the city, its wealth, its size, its influence upon all the peoples of the earth. Some of them had seen Babylon with their own eyes, and were astounded and almost overwhelmed by its magnificence and opulence. Only their boundless faith in the word of their God leads them to assert that such greatness can be destroyed.

In the days of the prophets, Babylon had become the most populous city the world has ever known. Twenty million inhabitants is the estimate of some authorities. Modern London would be a village beside it. Rome, "Imperial Rome," would have been lost in one of its quarters. It stood astride the great river Euphrates, as modern cities span some little stream. Huge canals stretched through it in all directions. And its walls! They were classed by the ancients among the seven wonders of the world. Herodotus, who had seen them.

set their width at eighty-four feet and their height at over three hundred. This seemed so amazing that his own people doubted his figures, and later ages have done the same. Yet we now learn that, in part at least, he understated. The ruins of the walls have been found, and by actual measurement their width was one hundred and thirty-six and a half feet. Their height has crumbled forever; that, too, may have been greater than we think. Fifteen miles square was the space enclosed by this tremendous artificial mountain, this cliff three hundred feet in height. The suburbs of the city spread to unmeasured distances beyond.

The prophets never cease wondering about those walls. How shall foe ever surmount them, or time destroy them? Jeremiah's climax to a long list of threatened desolations is: "Yes, the wall of Babylon shall fall." He expresses his amazement constantly in such exclamations as: "The broad walls of Babylon!" Yet, so complete was the devastation of the city that sixty years ago men could not even say where Babylon had stood.

It is of the beginnings of this world-famed metropolis that we have now to tell. It was built by those Semites whom the previous chapter showed us settling to the north of Sumer. Indeed we can gain from the splendor of Babylon some idea of those earlier Sumerian cities at which we have already glanced. Nippur and Eridu, Erech and Lagash have perished. They were desolated more than once by foreign conquerors, and their records were destroyed with them, except for the few chance fragments which, having escaped both flame and robbery, are now being rediscovered amid their ruins. Hence both the glories and the sorrows of Sumer faded from men's minds. No one of the men or cities of our previous chapter remained in the memory of later generations. But then came Babylon; and men have not forgotten her.

The foundation of Babylon was ascribed by its later inhabitants to the first among the early rulers who so impressed himself upon his fellows that he became a centre of legend, and was remembered and honored by his descendants three thousand years later. This was King Sargon, to whom we attach our earliest definite date, verified by later Babylonian annals. He was the ruler of the whole Euphrates valley in the year 3800 B.C.

With regard to Sargon our own age holds a most interesting position. For many centuries he has been known as an antique myth. Now at last we can look behind the myth. The rediscovered records tell us the facts of his career. In his day the mighty Babylon of the future was itself but a minor city of the northern Semites. Neither can we trace positively that Sargon ever dwelt there, though he enlarged the town and built a palace for it. This fact doubtless united with his fame to make the later Babylonians adopt him. Their kings claimed descent from him. Their stories proclaimed him the founder and first hero of their city.

THE RETURN OF BEL-MARDUK (The Babylonians Celebrate the Rescue of Their God from Captivity) After a painting by the noted French artist, Henri Paul Motte

THOUGH Babylon remained for over two thousand years the chief city of the Euphrates valley and, indeed, of all the world, yet Babylon was not always able to impose its military power upon the other cities. More than once the metropolis was driven to struggle desperately for mere existence. On two separate occasions it had to surrender to conquerors, who carried off its chief gods and set these up in the conqueror's own capital as tokens of triumph. In this way the great god, Bel-Marduk, was held in captivity by the Elamites, a nation who lived in the mountains of Persia overlooking the Euphrates valley, and who often rushed suddenly down upon the lowlands in plundering raids.

Nebuchadnezzar I., the king of Babylon, led a great army against Elam and compelled the restoration of Bel-Marduk. The home-coming of the idol was the occasion of the gorgeous celebration here pictured. Human victims, the captured Elamites and others, probably in large numbers, were sacrificed to the god. The Babylonians seem to have been less cruel than most of the Semitic nations in their worship of the gods, but even in Babylon our modern sense of human brotherhood and divine love was so little felt that the people thought their god found pleasure, as they did, in every agony inflicted on their foes.

Babylonia -- Sargon the Conqueror

What Sargon actually did was to establish a Semitic dominion over all the cities of Sumer. He was not born a king, but won his own way, as the earlier conqueror Lugal-zag-gisi had done, to the leadership of the tribes of the north. Then in the upper Euphrates valley, a hundred miles above Nippur, not far from the site of Babylon, he built himself a splendid city, Accad. This remained for a time the capital of his successors; and from this gorgeous city the whole northern land once known as the land of Kish became to later ages the land of Accad.

Having established his authority over both Sumer and Accad, Sargon set forth, as Lugal-zag-gisi had, upon a series of journeys in search of further victories. He reduced to subjection those ever-troublesome highlanders of Elam, and burned Susa, their capital. He fought the wild tribes of the mountains around the sources of the Euphrates; and if he could scarcely be said to conquer them, he at least put them to flight. He marched, as did his predecessor, to the shores of the Mediterranean, exacting tribute all the way. He brought home among his spoils rare building-stones mined in the distant peninsula of Sinai on the borders of Africa. He even extended his exploits beyond the mainland. Ferrying his army across to the near-by island of Cyprus, he spent some time in conquering it. He seems to have invented a new title. Lugal-zag-gisi had called himself "King of the whole world." Sargon used the more elaborate phrase "King of the Four Corners of Earth," as if to imply that, not content with a general lordship over life, he had, in Elam, in Cyprus, in Sinai and in the mountains of the north, searched out earth's remotest corners, and made each tiny cranny proclaim his kingship.

How little did it amount to, this puerile boastfulness! How small, looked back upon through all the ages, seems this vainglory of the forgotten emperor! How evil the plundering! How futile the thousands of deaths inflicted upon friends and enemies! When Sargon returned from the years of battling abroad, he found his own land in rebellion against him. The lords of the other cities formed a league and besieged him in his capital. He was "brought nigh to death." Accad, however, withstood the siege, and Sargon regained something of his former authority, and closed his days in peace.

This much concerning the half-mythical founder of the Babylonian empire is fact, proven by the ancient records we have unearthed. To these facts the legends of his descendants, the Babylonians of three thousand years later, added a halo of fanciful details. They told that Sargon was born to the daughter of the head man of a minor town. His father was unknown, and the mother, to hide the child's birth, lined a basket with pitch to make it water-tight, and setting the babe within, entrusted him to the current of the Euphrates. The babe was found by Akki, a peasant drawing water from the river to irrigate his fields. By him, Sargon was cared for and brought up as a gardener's lad. Here he was seen by Ishtar, the goddess of love, who devoted herself to the handsome youth, and enabled him to win his kingship. Usually Ishtar was fickle in her loves; but to Sargon she clung faithfully; and in the great rebellion, when all the rulers turned upon him and besieged him in Accad, it was Ishtar who rescued him. The awe with which this divine friendship impressed the other princes was what led them to submit again to Sargon's rule.

We have unearthed so many records of the Sargon era that we can see with some clearness the nature of his kingdom and the deg of civilization to which Sumer and Accad had now attained. We must picture the combined Turanian and Semitic race as a people very different from those fishermen and hunters who had struggled for a precarious existence at Nippur and Susa some four thousand years before. The men of Sargon's time had been accustomed to writing and had kept chronological records for at least a thousand years. They were traders who had travelled wide, seeking their gains through all western Asia and even as far as Egypt, a land which they looked on, much as we look on China today, as being at the edge of the world, curious and very far away, and half barbaric.

Thus the proud citizens of Sumer and Accad had become fully aware of their own progress above all other nations. Not only were they travellers and historians; they were financiers, bankers, passing their profits on loan from hand to hand, and keeping watchful reckoning of contracts. They were engineers who had planned and carried out a most remarkable system of dykes and canals, fertilizing and protecting from flood all their river valley. They were scientific farmers. They were artists of considerable ability and skill; poets of rather ruder vein; and, above all, they were astronomers who had attained to a really noteworthy knowledge and understanding of the movements of the heavenly bodies. Sargon is given the credit of having rearranged and finally established the signs of the zodiac as we employ them today. Our calendar, like our writing and our laws, like our religion, and like almost every branch of our civilization, dates back to the land of Sumer and Accad.

Sargon was succeeded by his son Naram-Sin, who ruled over an empire quite as vast as that of his father. Under Naram-Sin the mines of Sinai were regularly worked; building-stones were transported hundreds of miles to take the place of homelier brick in lining the walls of his temples. He was a builder who delighted in honoring the gods and enriching their shrines. He completed the work begun by his father of re-erecting the ancient temple of En-lil at Nippur. From his days there have come down to us little carved signets so beautifully executed that they tempt one to call this the "golden age" of Babylonian culture.

But immediately after this glimpse of prosperity our picture fades again. Of the centuries that followed Naram-Sin we have few records and slight knowl

THE ASSYRIAN IN PEACE (The Founder of Assyria's Foreign Empire, Tiglath-pileser, Displays His Prowess to His People) By Frederick Arthur Bridgman, the noted American artist, painted 1878

TIGLATH-PILESER I.   was the founder of what we call the first Assyrian empire. The kingdom and the army which Tukulti-ninib and the other early kings had made strong, Tiglath-pileser used as a basis for foreign conquests. About eleven hundred years before Christ he extended his sway over all Babylonia and most of Syria and Armenia. Hence all the wealth and splendor which for over a thousand years had been flowing into Babylon now began to flow instead toward the Assyrian cities; and of these Nineveh grew to be the most gorgeous.

In those rare seasons when Tiglath-pileser was not at war, hunting was his favorite amusement. We find inscribed on one of his records that he had killed over nine hundred lions. Our picture shows him displaying his skill upon captured lions, before the people of his capital. Around him stand his guards ready to protect him should his skill fail and the lion leap upon him. But one beast has already fallen before the monarch's steady aim, and the other is assuredly about to join the nine hundred slain. Guarding the arena rises a statue of the Assyrian god Asshur, in whose honor the Assyrians inflicted all their hideous cruelties upon their captives.

edge. The empire of Accad disappears. War must have become more bitter. There were raids and counter-raids, burnings and counter-burnings. Elam was again in arms. Sumer rejected the dominion of the north.

Our next clear view reveals Sumer as again the centre of power. Its king is Ur- gur, who was a Semite, but whose capital was Ur, one of the ancient Sumerian cities, not far from the southern coast. Under Ur-gur and his successors Ur held supremacy over the other cities for several centuries about three thousand years before Christ. Once more the ancient temples were upraised. Ur-gur built as no king before him had attempted to. At Nippur he set up a solid mass of brick, eight feet high and covering more than five acres of ground. This gigantic mass was meant only as a foundation to raise the sanctuary above danger of flood; yet even the foundation was no mere tumbled mass of bricks; channels and drains ran through it, guiding its rain-water flow, and making it a work of art. Upon this amazingly huge artificial mound was erected a "ziggurat," or storied tower, with inclined planes for roadways to its summit. This was the first known temple to take the ziggurat form, which afterward became characteristic of Babylonian religious shrines. Perhaps indeed this very temple was the one to which the Bible refers as the tower of Babel; for En-lil, the earth-god of Nippur, had come through the centuries to be called Bel, or Baal, which means "the chief god," or lord of all.

To the supremacy of Ur, the last vestige of the old Sumerian power, there succeeded, about 2300 B.C., the supremacy of Babylon. This city of the north had been steadily growing in power until now, as the professed champion of the Semites against the Sumerians, it assumed the permanent leadership of the Euphrates valley, and the whole land gradually became known as Babylonia.

The immediate cause of Babylon's rise to power seems to have been the invasion, about 2500 B.C., of a new swarm of Semites, such as had overrun the Euphrates region some two or three thousand years before. The strength of the new horde was chiefly massed about Babylon. Indeed, the Babylonian king, whom we now find battling with Ur and other cities for the empire, was called Sumu-abi, which means "Shem is my father," or "I am a Semite," as if he sought boastfully to insist upon his desert lineage.

Sumu-abi only began the long struggle between south and north, Sumer and Accad, Turanian and Semite. It raged bitterly for many years. In the midst of it, encouraged perhaps by the increasing exhaustion of the cities of the valley, the Elamites rushed down from their hills and swept over Sumer and Accad with such destruction as they had never before inflicted. Practically the entire valley was laid waste. All the ancient records perished. Later Babylonian ages possessed no writings antedating this terrible devastation. All the temples were plundered and overthrown, except possibly the ancient shrine of the goblins at Nippur, which even the Elamites venerated. The chief gods of the ancient world, including the idols of Anu and Nana at Erech, of Ea at Eridu, and a score of others, were carried away to Elam, where, for upwards of a thousand years, they were held like state prisoners in the temples of Susa, placed in humble servitude at the feet of the Elamite gods.

Some poet of Erech, lamenting this destruction, wrote to his lost goddess Nana a plea which has been preserved to us:

Until when, oh lady, Shall the ungodly enemy ravage thy land? In thy queen city, Erech, Destruction is complete. In Eulbar, thy temple, Blood has flowed as water. O'er all thy lands the foe has poured out flame; It hangs over them like smoke.

Oh lady, it is hard for me To bend my neck to the yoke of misfortune! Oh lady, thou hast let me suffer, Thou hast plunged me in sorrow!

The mighty evil foe Broke me as a reed; I know not what to resolve; I trust not in myself. Like a thicket of waving reeds I moan low, day and night. I bow my head before thee! I am thy servant!

The king of Elam who led his people in this cyclonic raid was called Kudur- nankhundi; its date we can fix with some confidence as 2285 or 2295 B.C. Kudur- nankhundi felt that his devastation entitled him to call himself in his turn "Lord of the world"; and he exacted tribute not only from Sumer and Accad, but even from cities as far west as Palestine, the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which lay by the shores of the Dead Sea.

We note here our Bible story most interestingly overlapping and supporting the records of Babylonia. The sacred volume tells us how, after paying tribute for twelve years, Sodom and the other cities by the Dead Sea finally refused further payments. Then came an army led by Kudur-lagamar, or, as the English Bible spells his name, Chedorlaomer; a successor of Kudur-nankhundi. The rebellious cities were utterly defeated by Chedorlaomer; but as the victor marched homeward with his spoils, his forces were suddenly assailed by a small band led by the patriarch Abraham, and were put to flight.

Did Abraham, who belonged by birth to the Euphrates region, perhaps to Babylon itself, know that he was striking a blow for his fellow countrymen? Whether he did or no, such was the actual, we might almost say the world-altering, result of his attack. Among the subject kings who attended Chedorlaomer was one whom the Bible calls Amraphel, and whom the Babylonian records enable us to identify with some confidence as Hammurabi, one of Babylonia's monarchs. Hammurabi took advantage of this hour of failure, or perhaps some other similar one, to rebel against Chedorlaomer. Babylon threw off the yoke of Elam, and after a long war established herself as the protector as well as the armed master of all the cities of the Euphrates valley. So thoroughly did Hammurabi consolidate his power that thereafter the entire region became known as Babylonia, the land of Babylon. The names of Sumer and Accad pass out of history. That of Babylonia takes their place.

In the story of Babylon, therefore, Hammurabi ranks as the second great figure. Sargon was venerated as the city's founder; Hammurabi as its rescuer, restorer, and second builder. Though we hear of this great monarch first as a warrior, we know him chiefly as a statesman, a wise and watchful benefactor of mankind. Instead of oppressing and terrifying his subject cities, he aimed to win their friendship. He repaired their walls and their temples as Sargon and Ur-gur had done. He built great canals, uniting the earlier ones into a single vast system which insured rich harvests to all the valley. Probably the world has never seen a land more fertile or a system of agriculture more wide-spread and complete than that of Babylonia some two thousand years before Christ.

Most notable today of all Hammurabi's work was the complete code of laws which he formulated and established throughout his domains. This code is the earliest of which we have definite knowledge; for Uru-ka-gina's earlier laws are known to us only by his comments on them. Hammurabi's code was recently discovered, engraved on a pillar which had been set up in Susa. From it we gain a full picture of the civilization of the day. The Babylonians had courts of justice; but they had also slaves. They had inns for travellers, taverns for the sale of strong drink, and prisons for delinquent debtors. They punished folk for oppression, for immorality, and even for slander. They had skilled laborers, carpenters, rope-makers, masons, potters, with some system of association and with bound apprentices. Sailors were a distinct class of society, with a code of their own for boats passing and making way for one another upon the river. Bankers transferred money by promissory notes, and trafficked by means methods, the people were deeply superstitious, and a man could be executed for "putting a spell" upon another.

The sudden yet complete and lasting subjection to Babylon on the part of all the restless cities of both Sumer and Accad would seem strange if we did not pause for a moment to realize how Babylon's intellectual and commercial supremacy had been long preparing the road for her political sway. The Babylonians have been called the Greeks of the East, because their culture, their arts, their business abilities spread their influence earlier and farther than their arms. Their capital was indeed "a golden cup," from which all the earth had drunk. It became a centre of religion as well. It was at once the Rome, the Paris, and the London of the time. And when Babylon's empire was wrested from her by the younger and more military people of Assyria, her real power remained for centuries, even until the political sceptre was restored to her in a second period of empire. Hers was the power of mind and civilization.

It was Hammurabi who made Babylon the chief religious centre of the land. The ancient shrine of En-lil at Nippur had become so celebrated that it was spared even by the Elamite ravagers. But now, in a time of perfect peace, it appears to have been deliberately destroyed by Hammurabi's order. He proclaimed that Babylon's special "bel," or god, Marduk, was a son of En-lil, and as such intended to assume all his father's labors of protecting and dooming mankind. While thus dutifully relieving his aged father of so much toil, Marduk had decided to relieve him also of his rank as chief god.

We can imagine the protests of the priests of En-lil at this attack upon their deity. But they were powerless. Their temple was swept away; the religious rites of Nippur sank into obscurity. After uncounted thousands of years of priestly ceremonial the shrine of En-lil lay bare and unattended. The earth goblins and the imps of storm were left unappeased to wreak their malice where they might. Thus, in this fratricidal war of gods, so quaintly engineered by men, Marduk of Babylon drove out his father. In Babylon itself the worship of Marduk was in no way new. Indeed the very name of the city means "the gate of the god," the entrance by which worshippers might reach the deity. The splendid shrine which Hammurabi built for Marduk, or "Bel-Merodach," became one of the wonders of the world.

Hammurabi had, in fact, to rebuild Babylon almost entirely, so destructive had been the Elamite scourge; and from this time the city grew into the marvel of legend and history of which the prophets tell. National architecture is every- where the product of the land itself. The Egyptian saw always before him solemn stone cliffs, so he quarried from them the Immense stone blocks for his obelisks and his pyramids. There was no stone in Babylonia; in that flat valley of river mud even trees were scarce; it was chiefly a land of grassy marshes. So man, with his ever-ready ingenuity, had learned to build with the earth itself, moulding and baking the clay, which hardened into bricks. Those ancient Babylonian bricks are said to be as good as the best of modern manufacture; and today, as in centuries past, a regular industry is the digging them out, not for scientific research, but for the building of modern houses. In many an Asiatic town there are recent buildings whose bricks still show the stamp and name of kings who perished and were forgotten ages ago.

The raising of the mighty walls of Babylon must have strangely resembled the work of a colony of ants, each carrying his little load of bricks, each toiling by himself, and adding his mite to the mass that slowly grew around him. Hammurabi, Ur-gur, Nebuchadnezzar, any of the great builders, could have told the Hebrew prophets how those walls must eventually fall. The kings were kept constantly busy repairing the older temples and fortifications. The soft, yielding soil, the terrific rains which saturated the bricks and widened every fissure, the stupendous weight of the towering structures themselves -- all combined to destroy the foundations. These, despite every art of man, would gradually bulge outward, and threaten to give way. Only the walls of the richest palaces could afford even an outer facing of stone; for this had to be brought in slabs from great distances.

The splendid reign of Hammurabi lasted fifty-five years. After that his successors seem to have degenerated gradually in ability, until in the eighteenth century B.C., a half-savage swarm of invaders overran Babylonia. These were the Kassites, a mountain race from the northeast, seemingly the very folk whom Sargon, founder of Babylon, had harried from their homes two thousand years before when he "searched the corners of the earth." Now the Kassite chief, Gandis, seized the throne; and his people held sway in Babylon for over three hundred years. Under them the ancient empire crumbled. The Kassite soldiery formed merely a sort of rough and turbulent aristocracy, parasites upon he almost inexhaustible wealth of commercial and agricultural Babylonia.

Of the real Babylonians of these days -- the traders who spread wide the fame their great city, the priests who so successfully upheld her religious doctrines, the philosophers and scientists who shaped the future of her civilization, -- of all these we know little. The inscriptions of the period which we have recovered are either business records -- that is, mere lists of commercial transactions stored away for reference -- or they are the barren, boastful annals of the kings. Neither kind makes interesting reading. These Kassite monarchs had no large view of their duties or their destinies. They spent their reigns in petty personal squabbling or in civil wars; real empire-building was beyond them. They never held any but a nominal sway over most of the provinces of the former Babylonian empire.

We do indeed find one of these Kassite kings, Agumkakrimi, rebuilding temples and securing from his more savage relatives who had remained in the north the restoration of some of the idols which had been plundered from Babylon. By this he won high honor from the priesthood and favor with his people. But Agumkakrimi was a diplomat who thus secured from friendship what he could not have gained by war. On the whole the Kassite rule was very weak.

Thus opportunity was left open for the growth of a new state; and a province which had begun as a mere outlying colony of the ancient Semitic land of Babylonia rose to be its rival and then its conqueror. This second establisher of empire over all the civilized world was Assyria.

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ASSYRIA, a daughter land born of Babylon, thrust aside the mother city and for a brief time held control of the Euphrates valley. Assyria has long stood in history as the symbol of ferocity and brutal cruelty. This view is enforced not only by the lamentations in the Bible, the outcry of the stricken Hebrews, but also by the boastful inscriptions of the Assyrians themselves, and by the desolation which they left everywhere behind them.

The Assyrians were a Semitic race, and, like most of the Semites, they had attained to the religious idea of a single, all-controlling god. They called this god Asshur; and, as did the Hebrews with Jehovah, the Assyrians regarded themselves as their god's chosen people. Not only do they ascribe all their victories to Asshur's favor, but they attribute to his command all their hideous barbarities. In the inscriptions of their conquering kings we read constantly that they tore out the tongues of thousands of prisoners "by Asshur's bidding," or they impaled masses of men on stakes and left them to die in agony because Asshur had ordered the extinction of "that rebellious nation."

The rise of Assyria to power was a natural consequence of the weakness of Babylon under her foreign Kassite kings. These, being fully occupied in suppressing rebellion at home, had no time for guarding against the growing strength of neighboring nations. For several centuries between 1600 and 800 B.C., western Asia thus became the seat of various jarring powers, no one able to master the others completely. None was strong enough to overcome the difficulties which climate and distance opposed to universal conquest. Among the contenders were the Elamites, who were so sheltered in their mountain fastnesses that no Babylonian conqueror had ever succeeded in exterminating them. Another strong power was that of the Hittites of the Bible, or Khatti, as the inscriptions call them. These were a Hamitic, or possibly even an Aryan, race dwelling in Syria and Armenia, with their chief capital at Karchemish on the upper Euphrates. Such was their strength, both in numbers and valor that had they been united they might easily have been in their turn "Lords of the four corners of the earth"; but they fought among themselves, city against city, Karchemish on the Euphrates, against Kadesh, or Hamath, or Damascus in Syria.

More notable than either Hittites or Elamites were the Egyptians, who now came forth from their sheltered African home. Some Asiatic tribes, the "Hyksos," had once conquered Egypt; now the Pharaohs sought revenge. Somewhere about 1500 B.C., the Egyptian monarch Thothmes III. made fifteen great raids into Asia, -- fifteen raids in eighteen years -- sweeping everything before him and bearing home enormous loads of plunder and tribute. None of the people of Palestine could withstand him. He defeated the Hittites at Megiddo, at Kadesh, at Karchemish; and having thus reached the Euphrates valley, he received tribute from both Babylon and Assyria. The Euphrates region was, however, too distant for permanent Egyptian conquest, nor does Thothmes seem to have striven for any more lasting purpose than plunder. Hence the ravaged and exhausted lands were left almost helpless to the ruthless, newly growing might of the Assyrians.

Assyria occupied originally the hill country along the middle course of the Tigris River, and gradually spread its power throughout the upper Euphrates valley, and thence southward over the whole of ancient Sumer and Accad. The Assyrians were a younger tribe of the Semites; and in their distant borderland, far removed from the excesses of Babylon, they had retained their freedom, their vigor of body, and also their purity of race. The first historical mention we find of them is when Thothmes III., in his boastful inscription of conquest, enumerates among the lesser princes who sent him tribute the "Chief of Assur."

By 1450 B.C., Assur, the mother city of Assyria, had so grown in power that we find its ruler warring with the great metropolis Babylon, and making a treaty on equal terms. A little later, however, a soured Babylonian king complained bitterly to the Egyptians because they had failed to recognize his ancient authority over his neighbor and had despatched a direct kingly message to the

BABYLON'S PRAYER AGAINST SENNACHERIB (The Priests of Babylon Make Sacrifice to Their God to Help Them Against Sennacherib) By the contemporary German artist, E. Sturtevant

SENNACHERIB, even in his own records, looms before us as the most ferocious and terrible of all the tiger kings of Assyria. He boasts that in his ravaging of Palestine he carried off as prisoners two hundred thousand of the people. Often after storming a city he hanged every inhabitant or put them all to torture. Yet, on the whole, he was not a successful ruler. Perhaps the very savagery of his punishments drove men to a frenzy of defiance; for he faced constant rebellions. The Babylonian priests were particularly bitter against Sennacherib and roused Babylon to revolt. They declared that their great "baal" or god, Marduk, would never accept him as king. Babylonian revolts had been frequent, but had always before been softened by a peace party, which, when the city surrendered, took control under Assyrian protection. But now there was no peace party. The priests stirred the people to fury; and in the temples of Marduk huge sacrifices were offered to secure the active protection of the god.

Marduk, however, failed to uphold his adherents. Sennacherib stormed and captured Babylon; and, resolving this time to put an end to its rebellions forever, he destroyed the city utterly (B.C. 689). He tore down the walls and temples, set fire to the mass of ruins, and then turned the waters of the Euphrates so that they flowed over the spot where the great city had stood. The first and oldest Babylon, which Hammurabi had built fifteen hundred years before, disappeared completely.

Assyrian. This ancient letter of protest is one of a most interesting batch of documents recently found in Egypt, and called from their place of discovery the Tel-el-Amarna letters. They represent the state correspondence between Egypt and Asia at about this period, and from them we learn that the Babylonian tongue was used for communication between different governments, just as Latin was in mediaeval Europe, or French during the mighty sovereignty of Louis XIV.

About 1360 B.C., the ever-turbulent Kassite soldiery of Babylon, in a sudden revolt, slew their king, and placed on the throne "a man of low parentage," as the later monarchs scornfully called him. The murdered king had been connected by marriage with the ruler of Assur; so we find the latter promptly marching up to Babylon, where he restored by force the rightful heir, his own grandson.

From this time Assyria seems rather the stronger power of the two. With the exception of an occasional Elamite raid in the south, or an expedition by the Assyrians against the less civilized nations to the north, the history of the two rival capitals becomes, for centuries, merely a tedious chronicle of wars between them. They drained each other's life-blood. Again and again they fought until they sank exhausted, unable longer to supply soldiers for their armies. Then for a generation or so the lesser neighboring states would flourish and grow insolent, till the two lions again roused themselves. Slowly Assyria's predominance increased. One king advanced her frontier to the suburbs of Babylon. Another, Tukulti-ninib, captured the metropolis itself, looted the palaces and temples, and appointed governors to rule there.

Seven years later the Babylonians successfully revolted and the struggle recommenced. The real reason and object of these endless wars is scarcely clear to us. Probably they arose from far deeper causes than the mere ambition of monarchs or the cupidity of soldiers. Famine and religious faith have been suggested as seeming to be their ultimate sources. We must remember that back of these kings whose inscriptions have survived there stood millions of ordinary mortals who have left us little trace, yet who shaped the destinies of their times. We get glimpses of failing harvests, of powerful officials driving weak kings this way or that, of oratorical priests swaying a frenzied multitude. We must not think of these old kingdoms as being each the mere plaything of an absolute monarch, but as being what all such governments have been called, "despotism tempered by assassination." An unjust and cruel king seldom long survived the rancors he aroused.

One Babylonian ruler of these days towers for a time above the rest, the most notable man of all this tumulatuous period. This was Nebuchadnezzar I., a worthy predecessor of the famous Nebuchadnezzar of later date. The line of the Kassite kings of Babylon had died out, and Nebuchadnezzar was a native Babylonian, chosen as king by the people themselves. He defeated the Assyrians repeatedly, and threatened Assur with siege. Then he turned upon Elam. The Elamites had recently been victorious over Babylon, plundering the city and carrying off the statues of its gods to Susa, the Elamite capital, there to be held in bondage to their god. Nebuchadnezzar invaded Elam, suddenly, in midsummer; and though his army almost perished from heat and thirst, the unexpected raid carried them without opposition up to the very walls of Susa. There a tremendous battle was fought amid storm and whirlwind, wherein "no man could see the face of his neighbor." Nebuchadnezzar, charging at the head of his army, was separated from his followers and almost paid for his daring with his life; he was encircled by foes and would have perished but for a devoted chieftain who broke through the threatening ring and rescued him.

This battle was so decisive that the Elamites sued for peace and restored to Nebuchadnezzar the statue of the chief Babylonian god, Bel-Marduk. During Bel- Marduk's captivity the Assyrians had also made a prisoner of the statue of a second or substitute Bel, leaving Babylon in a peculiarly godless state. The restoration of Marduk was therefore a source of great joy to the Babylonians, as well as of encouragement. It was a symbol of the god's renewed favor and of their restoration to power. Hence Nebuchadnezzar was long held in highest honor by his people.

Out of this tragic welter of conflicting nations, one finally rose supreme. This was Assyria, whose throne, about 1120 B.C., passed to a sovereign called Tiglath-pileser I.   He was a great military genius, or perhaps we might better say a mighty maniac, whose one passion in life was for hunting and slaughtering, whether beasts or men. Among his favorite sports was the organizing of prodigious elephant hunts in which thousands of his soldiers were employed to surround the beasts and drive them toward the king. He was so proud of his exploits that at an early period of his reign he had carved on his inscriptions that he himself, either on foot or from his chariot, had slain over nine hundred lions. Moreover, when in his conquests he reached the Mediterranean, he proudly records that he sailed out on the sea in a Phoenician ship and with his own hand killed a "sea-monster," probably a porpoise.

But the chief business of Tiglath-pileser's life was war. Every year he regularly marshalled his armies, and led them on raids farther and farther afield. No foe could stand before him. His troops penetrated to the sources of the Euphrates in the north, where he pursued the mountaineers through wild passes hitherto unknown, and, according to his inscriptions, "across cloud- capped mountains whose peaks were as the point of a dagger."

To the south he conquered the whole of Babylonia, even to the Persian Gulf;

THE VENGEANCE UPON SENNACHERIB (Sennacherib is Slain by His Own Sons) By A. Murch, a recent English artist. From the Dalziel Gallery

THE tyrant Sennacherib was slain by his own sons eight years after he destroyed Babylon. Thus his cruelties availed him nothing; they reacted upon himself. His sons attacked him suddenly in a temple, "while he was worshipping in the house of his god." Possibly the attack was part of another priestly revolt such as that of Babylon; for the priesthood of the empire seem to have been always set against Sennacherib, and his death resulted in a civil war, at the end of which not the sons who had killed him but another son, Esar-haddon, succeeded to the throne. This new king was a favorite of the priests, who aided him in making his reign one of splendor and of peace.

Esar-haddon proved the best as well as the most successful among the monarchs of Assyria's magnificence. He began his reign by rebuilding Babylon, seeking even to enhance its former greatness. The Babylonian leaders were everywhere freed from captivity, the former inhabitants were invited back to their city, and supported there. We even find it recorded that, as the corner-stones of the great buildings were laid, Esar-haddon himself assumed the dress of the masons, and conducted the religious rites of the ceremony. All through the land of Babylonia Esar-haddon restored the shrines of the gods. There were thirty-six temples in all, which we are told that he "lined with shining sheets of gold and silver." He built palaces as well, encouraged all the arts of peace, and restored religion to its earlier dignity and influence.

and in the west he pierced to the Mediterranean, the first Euphrates sovereign since the almost forgotten Hammurabi, over a thousand years before, to extend his dominion to that sea. Even the King of Egypt sent him presents, which the Assyrian naturally regarded as tribute. Toward the close of his reign, however, he seems to have met a sudden and serious defeat from the Babylonians; and we hear no more of him. His carven records of triumph cease abruptly; and the empire became much weaker after his death.

From about this time dates the splendor of Nineveh, the gorgeous Assyrian capital which rivalled Babylon. Nineveh, from its favorable situation, gradually became the greatest of the four chief cities of Assyria, wholly supplanting the older capital, Assur. Later ages attributed the origin of Nineveh to a mythical king, Ninus, and his goddess wife, Semiramis, who, they said, made herself queen of all Asia. But the story is a mere romantic fancy. There is more truth in the legend of another Assyrian monarch of these days, Assur-dain-pal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks. The records show that he rebelled against his father, Shalmaneser, and ruled as king over several Assyrian cities for seven years. Two years after the old king had died Sardanapalus was overthrown by the armies of his brother (822 B.C.). According to legend, Sardanapalus was besieged in Nineveh, and when he saw capture was inevitable he massed his treasures, his wives, and his soldiers in one appalling funeral pyre, seated himself at the top, and, having set fire to the whole, perished.

What is known as the "Second Assyrian Empire," the period of the nation's real supremacy and permanent dominion over most of western Asia and even over Egypt, belongs to a later era, a time well within historic knowledge. This Second Empire had its origin in the year 763 B.C., when an eclipse of the sun started a religious rebellion in Nineveh. This eclipse seems to have been accepted as evidence that the god Asshur had turned his back upon the ancient race of kings, who traced their origin into the forgotten beginnings of Assyria. So there were nearly twenty years of tumult and civil war, at the end of which a new man, Pul, the son of a common gardener, had forced his way to the front as a successful general, and become king. Pul took the title of the great conqueror of the past and called himself Tiglath-pileser, being the third monarch of that name.

Pul, or Tiglath-pileser III., was a king of much more modern type than the earlier Assyrians. His victories over surrounding countries were not mere raids for the purpose of plundering or exacting tribute. The territory of each conquered land was annexed permanently to his own. The method by which this was accomplished was crude but effective. Such of the defeated natives as were not slain were marched away in masses to some other portion of the Assyrian domain and there colonized, while the loyal subjects and soldiers of Assyria were rewarded with the vacant lands of the conquered district. It was these wholesale deportations by Pul and his successors that swept the people of Samaria, the "lost tribes" of Israel, out of Palestine.

Moreover, the Assyrian kings began to see that there were other means than war of making a kingdom great. They sought to control the trade of Asia by taking possession of the cities along the chief trade-routes, and garrisoning them with Assyrian troops. Thus Assyria became the real master of the Euphrates valley as no nation had ever been before. She united her influence to that of the still powerful trading metropolis, Babylon, and appeared for a time in the role of benefactor, since any policeman, however savage in himself, is a benefactor to those whom he protects from a swarm of other plunderers.

On Pul's death, a second and then a third Assyrian general seized the throne. The last of these called himself Sargon II., after the famous King of Accad. He was a rough but shrewd old warrior, who established himself and his empire so firmly that his family retained the throne for the one last and most gorgeous century that remained to Assyria before its final downfall.

Sargon II.   was murdered suddenly, we do not know why, by a foreign soldier; and his son Sennacherib succeeded him. Let us remember this series of the five tremendously powerful kings who ruled Assyria in the time of her widest dominion. They were Pul, Sargon II., Sennacherib, and after these, Esar-haddon and Assur-bani-pal. We have seen many previous chieftains making raids into far lands and compelling a temporary submission to their arms, but these mighty Assyrian sovereigns were the first whose word was permanently accepted as law throughout an empire almost as large as our own United States.

Of Sennacherib you have heard in the Bible. He seems to have been weak and cruel, false and boastful. His father's splendid army enabled him to defeat the Egyptians and to overrun Judea. Two hundred thousand Jews were sent captive to Assyria. But the Jewish king, Hezekiah, shut up in Jerusalem, defied the tyrant; and then occurred that strange destruction of the foe of which the Bible tells us. Sudden death, perhaps in the form of a pestilence, swept through the camp, and Sennacherib fled. Contrary to all Assyrian precedent, he failed to return to the attack. Hezekiah remained independent and defiant.

Meanwhile, Babylon had been in constant turmoil with Assyria, yielding, rebelling, intriguing, struggling, surrendering. Pul, Sargon, and Sennacherib had each in succession seized the city by force. But her bitterest opposition seems to have been reserved for Sennacherib; for he strove to destroy the religious and commercial supremacy which meant to Babylon far more than military dominion. Of all her conquerors, Sennacherib is the only one whom the priests persistently refused to acknowledge as their king; and now under priestly lead the Babylonians expelled his troops from their city.

In 689 B.C., Sennacherib captured by storm the famous old metropolis of

THE COMING OF THE SCYTHIANS (Hordes of Unknown Barbarians Invade Assyria and Are Defeated by Esar-haddon) After Henry H. Armstead, R.A., the English artist, died 1905

THE military records of Esar-haddon's reign may be classed under three great triumphs. Most important of these in the light of future events was his defeat of the barbarian hordes of the north. These finally destroyed Assyria's empire; but on their first invasion they were met and hurled back by Esar-haddon. From what race of mankind these first hordes sprang, or whence they came, we do not know. Out of the darkness of the north they burst, ravaging and plundering; and into that chaos Esar-haddon swept them back again, crushed and despairing. They were an unorganized mass of fighters, formidable only through ferocity and numbers. But such was the Assyrian terror of them that the priests held a great sacrifice lasting a hundred days, to secure the help of the gods against the devastation.

Esar-haddon's other two achievements were, first, the invasion and subjugation of the Arabian desert, which by its barren menace had hitherto protected its tribes from every foe; and, second, the conquest of Egypt. This final victory over Asia's most distant and most persistent rival for the leadership of civilization made Assyria the acknowledged ruler of all the known world. Her power seemed assured forever. All civilization bowed at last before a single lord.

the world and wreaked brutal vengeance on it. For days his soldiers were turned loose in its streets with orders to kill every one they found. The walls and buildings were torn down; the canals were choked with ruins; and for eight years the stubborn priests, refusing even then to acknowledge the conqueror, record the desolation in the tragic phrase "there were no kings."

We cannot but be impressed and awed by the tremendous power which we now find centred in one man. Sennacherib, by a word, made a desolation of the largest city in the world; but a greater than he did a greater thing. Within another eight years the next king rebuilt Babylon on a scale grander even than before.

This king was Esar-haddon, whom the Greeks called Sarchedon, the last celebrated warrior king of Assyria. Sennacherib had been murdered by two of his sons; but Esar-haddon, who was another favorite son, defeated and punished both of the murderers, and succeeded to the kingdom. He is the one Assyrian king to whom we can turn with any real liking; the others seem to us ruthless, snarling tigers, bent only on devouring the nations.

Esar-haddon's policy throughout his empire was one of kindness and conciliation. He set about the rebuilding of Babylon, the holy city, with real religious fervor; and the priests gladly hailed him as their rightful ruler. He brought Manasseh, King of Jerusalem, in chains to his feet, and then forgave him. Before the end of his reign he did the same with the great King of Egypt. He repelled from his borders the Kimmerians, the first of those successive waves of ferocious barbarians who, throughout the ages, have burst upon the world from the wilds of Central Asia. He penetrated the very heart of the Arabian desert, venturing with his troops across the burning sands where no army had ever marched before. Even the wandering Arab tribes acknowledged his supremacy. As the last and proudest triumph of the Assyrian power, Esar-haddon conquered Egypt. He divided the land of the Pharaohs into twenty dependent provinces. They rose in revolt; and it was while quelling this uprising that he died.

To Esar-haddon, the last warrior king, succeeded his son Assur-bani-pal. The new monarch was a man of peace, who sent his generals to the field, while he himself remained in ease and comfort in his palace. He was a patron of literature, and before his death gathered at Nineveh the great library from which we have learned so much of his country. At first his generals were successful. The Egyptian revolt was crushed and the old Egyptian capital, Thebes, was destroyed.

Assyrian arms were then turned against the one independent nation remaining in their world, the Elamites. Stubborn and bitter was the resistance of these ancient mountaineers, and when at last Susa, their capital, was taken and destroyed, the captured land lay empty, swept wholly clear of men and of all their possessions. The Elamites, with their civilization as old as that of Sumer, ceased to exist. When next we read of their land, it is as the residence of the Persians, a new race who had taken unchallenged possession of its ruined homes.

Assyria herself was drained of soldiers by this bloody Elamite struggle. She was almost at the point of exhaustion. Outwardly she was at the zenith of her power. No foe was left to face her. Embassies came even from the borders of Europe to honor her and entreat her favor. But the Babylonians and the Arabians and the Egyptians knew her real weakness. Presently all three rebelled; and though the first two were painfully reconquered after years of feeble effort, Egypt had escaped forever.

There was not even an attempt to hold her, for a new and appalling danger threatened. A second horde of savages, the Scyths, coming from the great plains beyond the Caspian Sea, had burst like a cyclone into the land; and there was no Esar-haddon now to check them. When Assur-bani-pal's long reign of over forty years ended, the doom of Assyria had already sounded.

There are no writings, no carefully carved inscriptions to guide us through the few terrible years that remained. There was no time for such arts of peace; the people were struggling for life against the barbarians. Among the ruins of the great royal enclosure in one of the Assyrian capitals there has been uncovered in one corner a little, poorly built, crumbling shanty of a palace, looking queer enough in the company of the majestic ruins around it. It was the work of a shadowy king, otherwise almost unknown, who must have ruled during those last years of terror. It typifies well the falling nation.

Assyria's provinces deserted her. One of her generals, Nabopolassar, being sent to govern Babylon, usurped supreme power there. He strengthened the city, ingratiated himself with the people, and then led them back in an assault against Nineveh. It was the death-struggle, and the Assyrians knew it. They rose grandly in the might of despair. Again and again they beat back their ancient foes. Nabopolassar began to look anxiously around for assistance. Egypt, which had seized on Palestine and Syria in the confusion, promised help; but it was slow in coming. A nearer and more eager ally was found in the barbarian king who had seized the mountainous region of Media. He gave his daughter to be the wife of Nabopolassar's son; and the wild Scyths and Medes joined the Babylonians in the final siege of Nineveh.

Civilization and barbarism were arrayed together against the royal city; and even the elements joined in the assault; for, according to legend, after a two years' siege the river rose in the night and carried away a portion of the walls. The assailants entered at the breach, and the city fell (607 B.C.).

Babylon was triumphant at last; and her people took full-revenge on their ancient foe. Nineveh was destroyed so completely that men forgot even where

ASSYRIA'S FALL (Nineveh is Stormed by the Scyths and Babylonians) By the noted English artist, John Martin, K.L.B., died 1854

DESPITE all the splendor and power of Assyria, never perhaps has any other empire perished so suddenly, so completely, and so unexpectedly. Esar-haddon was succeeded quietly by his son Assur-bani-pal, who ruled in much the same wise way, cultivating the arts of peace, and gathering a great library which has come down to us. He held his vast empire firmly together and quickly suppressed rebellion where-ever it appeared.

But after Assur-bani-pal's death the storm clouds gathered fast. Babylon reasserted its independence, and carried most of the lesser cities with it in revolt. In the midst of the resulting struggle, another horde of barbarians burst upon the country, similar to that which Esar-haddon had destroyed two generations before. Assyria's plains were ravaged from end to end by these barbarians, whom we know as the Scyths or Medes.

Meanwhile, the Babylonians continued their attacks and finally besieged the Assyrians within their great city of Nineveh. Finding Nineveh still too powerful to be overthrown, the Babylonians made an alliance with the barbarians. Earth's oldest and most cultured people united with her newest and most reckless children in the assault upon the hated tyrant of the nations. Legend says that even Nature turned against Nineveh in that last hour. The river undermined a portion of the huge insurmountable wall, and through this unexpected breach the foe rushed into victory (B.C. 607).

it had stood. The very completeness of its desolation left the apparently worthless ruins untouched through all the centuries; and it is at Nineveh that modern investigation has reaped its richest harvest of relics for the study of the past.

Glancing back for a moment over the history of these two ancient states, we can see that it forms a curious parallel to that other history which we commonly call ancient, the tale of Greece and Rome. Greece, which became the European heir of all this Asiatic civilization, was like Babylon, an intellectual power. The Grecian rule was older than that of Rome, and when the Romans, strong like the Assyrians in youth and brute force, conquered Greece, the older power's culture established its sway over them, as did that of Babylon upon the ruder Assyrians. Assyria was overwhelmed by barbarians, even as Rome was; and over these second conquerors also did Babylon extend a temporary influence, as did the Greek-Roman empire of Constantinople after Rome had fallen. History has thus strikingly repeated itself.

After the fall of Nineveh, a second Babylonian Empire rose on the ruins of its rival. The conqueror Nabopolassar maintained his friendship with the wild tribes of Scyths and Medes. He quarrelled with the Egyptians who had failed to aid him, and wrested from them their newly seized Asiatic possessions. From Media to the sea Babylon was again the queen of Western Asia.

It is here that the name Chaldaea came into history. You remember the land which the Euphrates kept building at its mouth. Through all these thousands of years that we have passed over in an easy half-hour, this land had been growing to the south of Sumer. An Arabian tribe, called kaldees, or Chaldees, had established themselves amid the sandbars and marshes of the new region, and their people gradually spread among the Babylonians. The new monarch, Nabopolassar, is reputed to have been a Chaldee; and as members of the race became more and more prominent in the new empire which he now built up, it was often called the Chaldaean empire. The name Chaldaea, especially with the Greek and Latin writers, gradually came to mean the same as Babylonia.

Nabopolassar was succeeded by that son who had married the Median princess, and who is known to us as the mighty Nebuchadnezzar of history and the Bible. He had already gained fame as a general in his father's lifetime; and that fame he increased by repeatedly defeating the Egyptians, by twice taking Jerusalem, and by subduing the hitherto invincible Phoenician city of Tyre, after a grim, unrelenting, thirteen-year siege.

His chief fame, however, is as a builder. He made Babylon a marvel whose fame will never die. It was for this labor of building that he tore the Jews and thousands of other poor captives from their homes. It was Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon that so impressed the unhappy prophet Jeremiah, when he compared its colossal structures with his own ruined Jerusalem. In addition to the famous walls, which were only partly his, Nebuchadnezzar built a stupendous palace, and greatly enlarged and improved the canal system. By means of locks he was able at will to turn the entire Euphrates into these canals; and he seems to have lined the whole bed of the river with brick, where it flowed through his city. Then he built for his Median queen Amyitis, perhaps because she longed for her native mountains, the famous hanging gardens, placed on arches seventy feet high, with all manner of strange plants and great trees growing on the summit.

The heart of the proud monarch was in his work; and when it was all finished he asked the prophet Daniel: "Is not this great Babylon that I have built . . . for the honor of my majesty." Then a strange madness overtook him, and for four gloomy years he took no active interest in his empire. The Bible tells us that during this period he was insane; "he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen."

Nebuchadnezzar was the last important King of Babylon. A few years after his death his line died out; and the priests raised a weak tool of their own, Nabonidos, to the throne. He caused all the idols from the other cities of his empire to be brought to Babylon, thinking, apparently, to make it the one great religious centre of the land. But the step proved unfortunate. Its real result was to produce heart-burnings, jealousies, and secret treasons which finally overthrew him.

The Persians under Cyrus captured the city in 538 B.C. Nabonidos had an army in the field against them under his son Belshazzar, but it was out-generaled and defeated. The impregnable city seems to have made no defense; its gates were opened, surely by treachery, to the conqueror. We have found Cyrus' own record of his entry, and we must accept its declaration that "without combat or battle" did he enter Babylon. Nabonidos was made prisoner, and soon died. The Babylonian Empire had vanished forever. Babylon sank again to the secondary position it had held under Assyrian rule.

Several times the city rebelled, under leaders who claimed to be descendants of Nebuchadnezzar or sons of Nabonidos; but in each instance the revolt was put down, with more or less injury to the city. Somewhere amid this confusion must be placed the Hebrew account of Belshazzar, though with our present uncertain knowledge it is difficult to say precisely where.

The Babylonian inscriptions tell us that this Belshazzar was the eldest son of Nabonidos and general of all his armies; very probably he had even been made king with his father and the two shared a united rule. Belshazzar was by far the more vigorous man of the two. Whatever there had been of brave resistance against the Persians was from him. Later, while he feasted and revelled with his comrades in Babylon, there came that supernatural hand-

SARDANAPALUS (The Legendary King of Nineveh Destroys Himself at the Downfall of His City) A celebrated painting by Louis Chalon, a modern Parisian artist

So complete was the destruction of Nineveh that later ages forgot even where it had stood. The true history of its monarchs disappeared; and legend preserved only their names, in connection with distorted and confused tales of their exploits. Most celebrated of these tales was that of Sardanapalus, the name representing the form adopted by later Greek historians for spelling that of either the last great sovereign, Assur-bani-pal, or perhaps an earlier king, Assur-dain-pal. The legend is that Sardanapalus was the last king of Nineveh, and that he wasted his life in pleasure and effeminate pursuits within his palace walls. When his kingdom was attacked by the barbarians, he roused himself suddenly to an able and vigorous resistance. And when at last his city was stormed, he built a vast funeral pile of all his treasures, his servants, and his wives, seated himself upon the summit, had the whole mass set on fire, and so perished.

The only true connection this tale has with the great Assur-bani-pal is his interest in the arts of peace rather than of war. The earlier Assur-dain-pal was a rebel sovereign, who was besieged in one of the Assyrian cities by an elder brother, and the city was stormed and Assur-dain-pal perished Possibly he killed himself in the fashion described; for that was not an uncommon ending, by which Asiatic chieftains sought to foil the rapacity of the conqueror and escape the hideous vengeance which awaited them upon capture.

writing on the wall. You will find the account in the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel.

Of Belshazzar and his feasting companions it says, "They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone." "In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote."

Belshazzar was terrified, and asked his soothsayers what this fiery writing meant: "MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN." Merely as words, these were probably plain to all present. Their sense in English seems to be, "a mina, a mina, a shekel, to the Persians," the mina being the most valuable gold coin of the times, and the shekel a comparatively worthless piece. But what did the words signify when thus placed together and flaming upon the wall? No man knew; or, if any guessed, they dared not tell the fierce king. Then Daniel, the Lord's prophet, was brought into the hall, and saw clearly the true meaning and menace of the words. Unflinchingly he denounced the haughty monarch and revealed the approaching doom. "This is the interpretation of the thing:

"MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.

"TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

"PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians."

In that night, says the Bible, dramatically closing its account, was Belshazzar slain.

Herodotus tells us that at one time the Persians seized the city by turning aside the Euphrates from its course, during the night, and entering along the bare bed of the river. The unsuspecting defenders were found helpless in drunken revelry. Perhaps this was the occasion of Belshazzar's sudden death.

The later history of Babylon is soon traced. Some of the Persian kings lived much in the city; it was a sort of second capital to them; but already its decline had begun. Xerxes punished it severely for a rebellion in 481 B.C. The great seven-story temple of Bel, with many other of the finest buildings, was overthrown; and a portion of the city was given up to pillage. Greek travellers, like Herodotus, saw many traces of decay within the walls, in some places whole quarters lying in ruins or turned into fields.

The city surrendered easily to the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. Its magnificence so impressed Alexander that he planned to make it his capital, but death prevented. It was the Greek princes who succeeded him in Asia, the Seleucidae, who finally accomplished the ruin of Babylon. They built a new capital of their own, Seleucia, within a few miles of it. Gradually all the wealthy inhabitants removed to the newer, gayer city; the poor soon followed them, leaving fallen Babylon alone with its great memories.

The Parthians captured and burned it about 140 B.C. In the time of Christ there was only a little village in the midst of the ruins; and the Christian father Jerome, writing in the fourth century A.D., tells us it had become an enclosed forest wherein the Persian kings hunted. Fallen Babylon had indeed become what Isaiah and Jeremiah predicted, "a burnt mountain." "But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there."

NEBUCHADNEZZAR CONQUERS JERUSALEM (The Jewish Captives Carried Away to Babylon)

A noted painting by Eduard Bendemann, Head of the Dusseldorf Academy, died 1889

THE overthrow of Assyria enabled Babylon to regain much of her former control of western Asia. Her most celebrated ruler during this, her second period of empire, was Nebuchadnezzar II.   He did what Sennacherib had failed to do, conquered the mountain fortress of Jerusalem. Hence Nebuchadnezzar's name also stands black and terrible in the records of the Hebrews. They resisted the Babylonian army in two sieges. The first of these Nebuchadnezzar conducted in person; and after the city had surrendered he carried away all the chief men, the nobles, the warriors and the builders. This is the moment of his triumph shown in Bendemann's celebrated picture. Jeremiah the prophet, who had warned the Jews not to attempt resistance, is shown as he was left, mourning amid the remnant of his country folk.

The second siege was an unimportant affair from the Babylonian viewpoint, a brief outbreak