BABYLONIA 



BABYLONIA 



BABYLONIA 



VYc/ thousand mighty cedars 

 / wrarf /for //a rW. 



Cuneiform writing, and translation 



Lion from Nimrud 



Present-day site of Babylon 



PRINCIPAL DATES 

 NIMROO FOUNDED BABYLON ABOUT 



RISE OF ASSYRIA . 



ERA OF NABONASSAR ... 



FALL OF NINEVEH 



CYRUS CAPTURED BABYLON 



ALEXANDER CAPTURED BABYLON . 



Babylonia at its greatest extent 



Jl The famous Hanging Gardens 

 Built to please a woman 



A city that o 

 more than 10 - 

 square miles 



Bas-relief of warriors in battle 



They also believed that the earth was peopled 

 by good and evil spirits who could aid or harm 

 men. 



Art. The Babylonians were the first people 

 to practice architecture as a fine art. As the 

 country produced no stone, they were forced 

 to use sun-dried clay bricks as a building 

 material. To give their temples and palaces 

 a firm foundation and also to lend them dig- 

 nity, they erected them on great brick plat- 

 forms, sometimes forty feet above the plain. 

 Their palaces were one-story structures having 

 v rooms, courts and passages, tlnrk, vorti- 

 cal walls and flat roofs. The temples were 

 sometimes one story high, but oftener were a 

 type peculiar to Babylonia a series of solid 

 masses of brick placed one above the oth t , 

 with each story smaller than tin- one beneath 

 plainness of these buildings was re- 

 '1 by covering tin- )>nrk- with >tucco. upon 

 whu-li designs were painted. The Babylonians 

 made great progress in sculpture and engraving, 

 and their alabaster and tcrra-cotta vases, cop- 

 iiu! bronze statuettes, glazed tiles and seals 

 and gems showed their ability in the minor 

 arts. 



History. The history of Babylonia, like that 



of Assyria, begins in obscurity, and the two 

 districts were so closely connected that his- 

 torians find it impossible to treat them sepa- 

 rately. The first line of kings of whom there 

 is a clear record ruled about 4500 B.C. The 

 first great name in Babylonian history is that 

 of King Hammurabi (about 2100 B.C.), founder 

 of the "Old Babylonian Empire," who chose 

 Babylon as the seat of government, and who 

 made the oldest code of laws known to man. 

 For over five centuries after 1761 B.C. Baby- 

 lonia was ruled by Kassites, a people from 

 Media, but a native king sat on the throne in 

 1185 B.C. In the meantime there had been 

 centuries of warfare with Assyria; and Baby- 

 lonia, reduced to an Assyrian province in the 

 i mlit h century, was completely conquered in 

 689 B.C. by Srnnucln nl>. the impious destroyer 

 of Babylon. A century later the Babylonians, 

 aided by a horde of Medes under Cyaxares, 

 revolted, and captured and destroyed the As- 

 syrian city of Nineveh. A new Babylonian 

 kingdom was set up, which grew to be a great 

 in under NYbuchadnezzar (which see). 

 I In- 1$ known in history as the "New Baby- 

 mpire." A line of weak kings followed 

 Nebuchadnezzar, and in 538 B. c. Babylon was 



