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The Story of the Fall of Babylon

Ishtar Gate from ancient Babylon
Ishtar Gate from ancient Babylon [Source: Wikipedia]
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Theophilus G. Pinches [1856-1934], “From World Dominion to Subjection; The Story of the Fall of Babylon,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 49 (1917): 107-141.

From World Dominion to Subjection;

The Story of the Fall of Babylon

The romance connected with the power and the wonders of Nineveh and Babylon has for ages attracted the attention of the world, and this romance has, perhaps, been rather increased than diminished by the legendary nature of what has come down to us with regard to the realm of which Babylon was the capital. Surrounded, as it was, by the mystery with which tradition had invested it, hints of other wonders over and above those related by the historians naturally fired the student’s imagination. And that Babylonia was in very deed a country of wonders there can be no doubt. As everyone who has watched the progress of the Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia knows, the Persian Gulf region is, for Europeans, an inhospitable tract, parched, dry, and rainless in summer, and swampy, notwithstanding drainage (to a certain extent) by innumerable waterways, in winter. In the wet season, malaria reigns, and the stranger finds life altogether too burdensome. Babylonia’s fruitfulness in springtime, and later, is wonderful. It is one of the principal homes of the date-palm-that tree whose fruit both Babylonians and Europeans have always highly appreciated. Otherwise, however, the tract north of the Persian Gulf is a treeless plain, into which all timber which the people need has to be imported. Before the fierce heats of summer it is a land of corn and the fruits of the earth which are able to grow there, and it might become one of the granaries of the world.
Here, in this land of the Middle East, were located, of old, two races-the Sumerians and the Akkadians-non-Semites and Semites respectively; races suited to the soil, who became thoroughly acclimatized to their fruitful but sun-scorched country. Divided, in the beginning, like the Heptarchy in England, into several small states, a great nation ultimately arose by their gradual amalgamation under the military pressure and leadership of Babylon, and became the pioneer of ancient civilization in the Semitic East. The irrigation of their land had made the states of Babylonia great canal-diggers; the dearth of stone made them great users of brick in the constructions and buildings; and the bitumen-springs of Hit supplied them with a substitute for mortar (“slime”). The floods which inundate the country in the early spring, when the snows melt in the Armenian mountains, probably obliged the Babylonians to become geometricians, as they had to find and reinstate the boundaries of their plots. As agriculturists they were, in their day, probably unsurpassed, and they were among the earliest of great cattle-raisers and ass-breeders. Their literature was largely drawn upon by the Greeks and the Romans in the domain of sacred myth and history, and many thousands of documents testify to their knowledge and acuteness as lawyers, their inventiveness as writers and poets, and the wonders of their mythology and their religious system-their teachings in the domain of cosmology and theology. Their trying climate and the other disadvantages under which they laboured do not, therefore, seem to have impaired their energy as workers and as inventors, or their progress in war, art, literature, or such of the sciences as they were acquainted with, for besides agriculture it is probable that not only writing, but also astronomy, began in the Land of Shinar.

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