January 13, 19 16] 



NATURE 



539 



THE HISTORY OF BABYLON.^ 



PROF. L. W. KING'S " History of Babylon " 

 appears at the moment when, owing- to the 

 folly, ambition, and half-relig-ious, half-patriotic 

 fanaticism of a small, intelligent, but absolutely 

 immoral clique that has arrogated to itself the 

 government of the Turkish Empire, England 

 finds herself at war with her old allies of the 

 Crimea and friends of 1878, and British soldiers 

 are contending with the hosts of the Padishah 

 on the ancient plains of Babylonia. It is a day 

 which many Englishmen and many Turks had never 

 thought to see ; but if the most energetic men in 

 Turkey happen to be thoroughly evil, and choose 

 wilfully to make friends rather with the militarism 

 of Prussia than with the liberalism of England, it 

 is one that cannot be helped. Kismet ! it was so 

 written, say those Turks who would still be our 

 friends : the issue is in the hands 

 of Allah, As Babylon fell, so will 

 Turkey. But the battle of Ctesi- 

 phon, fought not so far away from 

 Babylon's ruins, shows us that it 

 is no easy task that Turkey, sold 

 to Prussia, has forced us to 

 undertake. 



Prof. King tells us the ancient 

 history of the country in which 

 our men and their Indian com- 

 rades are now struggling with 

 the hardy peasant-soldiers of 

 Anatolia, the descendants of 

 those Hittites who long ago 

 sacked Babylon and brought the 

 dynasty of Hammurabi to its 

 end. He takes us from the 

 foundation of the Semitic king- 

 dom of Babylon down to the 

 conquest by Alexander, through 

 a period of some two thou- 

 sand years. The earlier history 

 of Babylonia under its Sumerian 

 inhabitants has already been told 

 by him in his " History of Sumer and Akkad," 

 the first of a trilogy of which the " History of 

 Babylon " is the second, and a forthcoming " His- 

 tory of Assyria " will be the third volume. The 

 book is of the same format and has the same 

 fine appearance as its predecessor, and is printed 

 and produced in the same good style, which re- 

 flects great credit on the publishers. 



Prof. King starts by describing the great city 

 itself, as it is now shown to us excavated by the 

 labours of the German archaeolc^ists, led by Prof. 

 Koldewey, who for some years past have been 

 ci'S^ffJogf up its remains. We see the great zig- 

 S^urat or Temple of Bel-Marduk (the Tower of 

 Babel itself, that so struck the imagination of 

 the Hebrews in their captivity that they enshrined 

 it in their oldest legends), the broad street of 

 Aiburshabu, the splendours of the Gate of Ishtar 

 with Its reliefs of many-coloured ceramic enamel ; 



"A History of Babylon from the Foiindatio*' of the Monarchy to the 

 Persian Conquest." By Prof. L. W. King. Pp. xxili + 340. (lA>ndon : 

 Ch.itto and Windus, 1915.) Price i8r. net. 



NO. 241 T, VOL. 96] 



all the ruined glories of Babylon the great, that 

 Nebuchadnezzar the king made, so mighty and 

 splendid; the courts of Jamshyd, that now the 

 lion and the lizard keep. 



We are then taken through certain chrono- 

 logical problems that have lately arisen to be 

 discussed, and must be settled before we can 

 settle down to the course of the history itself. 

 These problems are largely concerned with the 

 determination of the date of Hammurabi, the 

 great Semitic king and law-giver, and of his 

 dynasty. In the light of new evidence lately 

 brought to light. Prof. King revises the date he 

 before considered probable, and shows us that we 

 can now date Hammurabi with practical certainty 

 to about 2100 B.C., a century and a half earlier 

 than was before considered possible. 



We then are told all that is known (and it is 

 a great deal) of the great king himself and of 



The Temple- Tower of E-zida at Borsippa. From "A History of Babylon." 



the age in which he lived, down to the extinction 

 of his dynasty by the Hittites from Asia Minor. 

 The long period of the Kassite kings, Indo- 

 European conquerors from northern Persia, now 

 follows, Babylon first comes into contact with 

 Egypt, and the secular struggle with her daugh- 

 ter and enemy Assyria begins, until finally 

 Babylon shrinks into a mere unwilling dependency 

 of Nineveh that is finally destroyed by the ruthless 

 Sennacherib, a worthy model for the destroyers of 

 Louvain and their Young-Turk friends. The 

 heau geste of the more civilised Esarhaddon 

 follows, and Babylon is restored, to take her re- 

 venge on her oppressor, Nineveh, when the latter 

 fell amid the rejoicings and execrations of the 

 nations, as we hope some day Berlin will also fall. 

 For, as Prof. J. L. Myres has already shown in 

 his brilliant little book, "The Dawn of History," 

 published two years before the war, it is no 

 fortuitous resemblance that modern Germany 

 bears to ancient Assyria. 



