Babylon

an ancient capital and metropolis of Babylonia. It appears to have been one of several important cities. It succeeded Ur of the Chaldees as the capital. It was in turn supplanted by Nineveh, and reduced to the position of a provincial town of the Assyrian Empire. In 690 B. C. it revolted, and was subdued by Sennacherib, who writes that he "pulled down, dug up, and burned with fire the town and the palaces, root and branch; destroyed the fortress and the double wall, the temples of the gods, and the towers of brick, and threw the rubbish into the river." Under Nebuchadnezzar, however, the city was rebuilt. The later city is the Babylon of the Scriptures, whose ruins are still the astonishment of scholars.

Just what credence is due to Herodotus and other ancient writers it is impossible to say; but we are told that the city was laid out in the form of a square, occupying both sides of the river Euphrates. According to these accounts, it was surrounded by an astonishing brick wall 300 feet high, 85 feet wide, and from 40 to 60 miles in length. This wall included about 200 square miles of territory. A moat ran along the outside of the wall. The clay dug from the moat sufficed to make sun-dried brick for the wall. The wall was guarded by 250 towers. It was broad enough to allow four-horse chariots to turn about on it, and was pierced by 100 brass gates hung in brazen frames. A wall ran along each bank of the Euphrates and was pierced by twenty-five gates. Quays led from the gates to the water's edge. Ferry boats crossed the river from quay to quay. A roofed bridge of masonry crossed the Euphrates on stone piers, and joined the central parts of the city. It was defended by a citadel or royal palace at each end. The city proper was surrounded by orchards and gardens watered by canals from the Euphrates. The building material of the Babylonians consisted of adobe or sundried brick, with facings of vitrified tiles or painted plaster for ornamentation. Blocks of stone, quarried in distant Armenia, were used only for sculpture and inside finish of the most expensive kind.

The hanging gardens of Babylon were considered one of the wonders of the world. They were gardens of trees and flowers, planted on terraces, one upon another, to the height of not less than 150 feet. Water for these plants was elevated by means of a device supposed to resemble the screw of Archimedes. The most noteworthy edifice was the Temple of Bel. It was a pyramid of eight square terraces, one above the other. The lowest measured 600 feet on a side. A winding ascent led to the topmost terrace on which stood a shrine containing a golden image of the god forty feet in height, and a golden table forty feet long and fifteen feet broad. Two smaller statues were made of the same precious material. The total amount of gold, if ancient accounts may believed, was something enormous. This, like all other Chaldean temples, stood with a corner turned toward each of the four cardinal points of the compass.

The immense buildings of the Babylonians were made possible not only by the vast wealth derived from tributary towns and peoples, but from the taxes levied on merchants who resorted thither with their caravans from the east and from the west.

Recent excavations have unearthed many evidences of Chaldean scholarship. Their literature was engraved in cuneiform characters with a sharp tool on fresh tablets of clay, which were afterward placed in a furnace and baked. Many collections of these tablets, including one of 30,000, have been found in the ruins of Babylon. It is said that they were numbered and arranged as carefully as any modern collection of books. When a student selected his numbers from a catalog, the librarian was able to bring him the tablets without delay. Libraries and schools, universities, they might be called, were maintained in connection with the large temples. It is known that rolls of papyrus made from the reed which grows in the Euphrates as well as in the Nile were used also; but none of these have been preserved. The archives of the wealthy merchants contain deeds, contracts, mortgages, bills of sale, promissory notes, and other business documents engraved on tablets, extending, as shown by their dates, through several centuries. Even the names of business firms have been preserved in this way. From marriage contracts, wills, and signatures extant, it appears that a woman was legally enabled to own property and to carry on business in her own name. The duodecimal system of arithmetic and the number sixty appear to have been favored. Our division of the day and night into twelve hours each, of the hour into sixty minutes, and of the minute into sixty seconds is inherited from the Chaldeans. As might be inferred, they were astronomers and engineers. They divided the circle into 360 degrees, and the year into 360 days. The week of seven days is also an inheritance from them.

The literature of the Babylonians as it is preserved on these tablets is very interesting. It deals with conquest and pillage, with commercial methods, with fortune telling, geometry, and astronomy; with the healing art, with diplomacy and trading. Some sets of tablets are dictionaries; others are grammars, and other again are translations. One set found in 1902 contains a complete set of laws, the oldest legal code known. Some light is thrown on Babylonian customs by the penalties prescribed to prevent the bribery of officials, or overcharges, and for the punishment of ignorant physicians and dishonest and incompetent building contractors.

The moral literature of the Babylonians parallels many of the phrases and thoughts, in fact, entire passages, found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The chronologies of the two literatures agree remarkably well. The two accounts of the deluge are much the same. During the war between Babylon and Egypt the Israelites took up with the wrong side of the quarrel and were carried away to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar as a punishment for having entered into an alliance with Egypt. During this period, known as the Babylonian Captivity, the lamentations of Jeremiah were written. It is small wonder that they show evidences of Babylonian influence.

See Mesopatamia; Euphrates

The city stands on a broad plain, and is an exact square, 120 furlongs in length each way, so that the entire circuit is 480 furlongs. While such is its size, in magnificence there is no other city that approaches it. It is surrounded, in the first place, by a broad and deep moat, full of water, behind which rises a wall 50 royal cubits in width and 200 in height. And here I may not omit to tell the use to which the mould dug out of the great wall was turned, nor the manner wherein the wall was wrought. As fast as they dug the moat, the soil which they got from the cutting was made into bricks, and when a sufficient number were completed they baked the bricks in kilns. Then they set to building, and began with bricking the borders of the moat, after which they proceeded to construct the wall itself, using throughout for their cement hot bitumen, and interposing a layer of wattled reeds at every thirtieth course of the brick. On the top, along the edges of the wall, they constructed buildings of a single chamber facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to turn. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side posts. . . . In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. . . . On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple.--Herodotus.

Strabo and the historians of Alexander substitute 50 for the 200 cubits of Herodotus, and it may therefore be suspected that the latter author referred to hands, four of which were equal to the cubit. The measure, indeed, of 50 fathoms or 200 royal cubits for the walls of a city in a plain is quite preposterous. . . . My own belief is that the height of the walls of Babylon did not exceed 60 or 70 English feet. --H. C. Rawlinson.