BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON 47 



A Greek historian had left us a description of 

 ancient Babylon that filled every reader with amaze- 

 ment, if not incredulity. Yet even this historian, 

 Herodotus, had described the Babylonians as so low 

 in moral culture that, he said, every woman had to 

 go to a temple to be violated before she could be 

 married, and one might see groups of the less 

 favoured women pestering strangers at the doors. 

 This agreed very well with what the Jews had 

 recorded in their sacred book, and so Babylon was 

 notorious as the great city of the unredeemed world, 

 the world that " lay in darkness and the shadow of 

 death." 



Modern history and archaeology have made an end 

 of these world-wide calumnies. We have uncovered 

 the mounds of Mesopotamia and pierced to their 

 depths. In ancient Babylonia there was no stone. 

 Temples, palaces, and cities were masses of brick, 

 and so they had in large part crumbled or fused into 

 crude masses of earth ; though we shall see that the 

 walls, and even houses, of ancient Babylon are 

 preserved to a remarkable extent. But, while the 

 buildings of the old civilization were so perishable, 

 its literature — written on clay baked into stone — is 

 the least perishable in the world, and hundreds of 

 thousands of documents (or fragments of such) were 

 found in the ruins. Folk-lore, romances, temple 

 prayers and psalms, marriage contracts, commercial 

 deeds and letters, even ordinary domestic corre- 

 spondence, can be read to-day as they were four 

 thousand years ago. We thus have a remarkably 

 intimate knowledge of the ancient people, and, instead 

 of the kind of thing suggested by Hebrew legend, we 

 find a science, an art, a gravity and sobriety of 



