74 



THK VIRILE BABYLONIAN. 



When human beings first appeared on the earth and for many a 

 generation afterwards, men could only have just held their own 

 against wild animals and, while their dwelling-places were sur- 

 rounded by forests and jungles, the unending struggle must have 

 left them but little time to make any real advance in civilization. 

 It was far different in oases of Arabia and practical oases like 

 Anah and Hit on the upper Euphrates. Here it was possible for 

 men to destroy the existing wnld beasts and as their numbers 

 could not be recruited out of the deserts, they were exterminated ; 

 and men had leisure to become gradually civilized. "Amalek was 

 the first of the nations," was spoken with knowledge of the Arabs 

 stretching from the delta of the Nile to the upper Euphrates. 

 Living in tents and using gourds for vessels, they have left no 

 traces such as we see in Egypt and Babylonia ; but Arabia has 

 been able to pour forth from her parched loins her virile sons who 

 began the subjugation of both the Nile valley and the valley of 

 the Euphrates. Everything in Egypt was easy and to hand ; the 

 Nile was and is the most stately and majestic of rivers and carry- 

 ing a moderate amount of deposit creates no serious difficulties 

 for the dwellers on its banks ; the Garden of the Lord, the land 

 of Egypt, is very fertile ; and the climate is mild in winter and 

 never parches in summer. Egypt, therefore, produced no world 

 ideas. None of her sons were possessed of a fine frenzy with 

 eyes glancing from heaven to earth and earth to heaven. It was 

 far dififerent with Babylonia. The Tigris and Euphrates in flood 

 are raging torrents and their ungoverned and turbid waters need 

 curbing with no ordinary bridle. Babylonia's soil is very fertile, 

 but the winters are severe indeed and the summers savage and 

 prolonged. The range of temperature is between 20° and 120° 

 in the shade. Brought up in a hard school they possessed virile 

 intellects. Moses' first contact with Babylonian beliefs and cre- 

 ations in the house of the priest of Alidian on the slopes of 

 Horeb, entranced him ; in the burning bush of the deserts he saw 

 the footsteps of the Almighty, while heavenly voices .spoke to him 

 out of the storms raging on the summit of Sinai. In comiection 

 with this we must remember that Moses' wife is called, in one 

 ])lace, a daugliter of the priest of Midian, and in auDthcr a 

 Cushite or Babylonian woman. Her father was jiroljably a 

 learned Babylonian exercising priestly functions among the Arabs. 



The extraordinary dry heat of the summer, by day and by 

 night, gives a luster to the stars, a distinctness to the constella- 

 tions, and a glow to the fields of powdered stars (called here the 

 milky way) which cannot be conceived by one who has not s])ent 

 the whole summer in the plains of Shinar. The sons of Sumer 

 and Akkad were the first astronomers and thinkers of the world. 

 They divided the year into n>onths, the months into weeks and 



