GEOLOGIES AND DELUGES. 253 



run a railway through it, and thus shorten our route to India by 

 a thousand miles, farm it, and thus provide ourselves with one of 

 the richest granaries in the world. 



In a land so favored, it is nothing wonderful that the inhabit- 

 ants teemed in millions, villages were everywhere dotted about, 

 and in their midst great and flourishing cities arose Ur, the City 

 of the Moon-god; Erech, the City of Books; Nippur, and, most 

 famous of all, proud Babylon, " the Gate of God," which stood on 

 the left bank of the Euphrates, some two hundred and eighty 

 miles above its present mouth. In early times, probably about 

 2300 B. c, the Jews left this beautiful land for some unknown rea- 

 son, and after various vicissitudes settled in Palestine. Another 

 branch of the Chaldean stock migrated in later times to the 

 northern part of the Tigris Valley, where they built many mighty 

 cities, and founded the warlike kingdom of Assyria. Of their 

 cities it is sufficient to mention Assur, which gave its name to the 

 kingdom, and Nineveh, which afterward became the capital. 



The Mesopotamian plain, owing to the way in which it has 

 been produced, is an almost dead flat, and ofl:ers no natural eleva- 

 tions for building ; the Chaldees, therefore, to raise the founda- 

 tions of their palaces, temples, and houses above the reach of 

 floods and fever, and for better defense against their enemies, 

 constructed, with incredible labor, great mounds, by piling to- 

 gether quantities of sun-dried bricks and rubbish, and building 

 round this a thick wall of burned bricks, well cemented together. 

 Some of these mounds, as that of Kojundjik at Nineveh, are as 

 much as sixty feet in height, and it has been computed that this 

 mound alone would have required the labor of twenty thousand 

 men for six years in its construction. But there was never any 

 difficulty in obtaining all the labor that was wanted. Prisoners 

 of war were compelled to work under the stick, and the building 

 of mounds was one of the wholesome occupations to which the 

 Jews were set during their captivity in Assyria. 



On the mound of Kojundjik stood two great palaces, one of 

 them that of King Assurbanipal. It was evidently not merely a 

 royal residence, for one of its chambers at least was devoted to 

 public purposes; this was the king's library, to which the citi- 

 zens, who were taught in their early years to read and write, 

 had free access. Whether any of the books were written on pa- 

 pyrus is uncertain ; all that have survived the conflagration, in 

 which the palace was destroyed, are on tablets of kiln-made 

 brick. Of such tablets many thousands have been recovered, not 

 only from Nineveh, but from other towns, and many of them are 

 now preserved in the British Museum. Thus within the last fifty 

 years modern Europe has obtained a glimpse, and more than a 

 glimpse, into the literature of a civilization that perished just as 



