124 



The wine, the flowers, the music, the myriad lamps, and 

 blazing tripods which scented the air around with sweet 

 perfume, and, above all, the azure vault of an Eastern summer 

 sky, form a picture that ill becomes the deathbed of an 

 empire. Yet such it was. The tramp of armed men, the 

 clash of swords and spears, a short, sharp struggle, and 

 Babylon, the glory of the Chaldeans, became the victors' 

 prize. 



So on that night, Tammuz the 15th, B.C. 539, Babylon, the 

 glory of the Chaldeans, fell, and Cyrus became king. 



There must have been great joy among the Hebrew captives 

 at the fall; and with what joyous hearts must they have 

 welcomed Cyrus, " the anointed.'^ He who was to say to 

 Jerusalem, "Thou shalt be built, and to the Temple, Thy founda- 

 tions shall be laid" (Isaiah xliv. 28) . The inscribed monuments 

 of this period throw a new and important, though at first 

 startling, light upon the character of Cyrus. Judging by the 

 passages in the xliv., xlv., xlvi. chapters of Isaiah, the con- 

 queror appears as " a man after God's own heart," an icono- 

 clast, a rigid, stern monotheist and hater of idolatry. The 

 selection of Cyrus as the deliverer of the Jews, and the 

 exposition of the worship of Jehovah which the prophet Isaiah 

 gives in these chapters, and which so closely resembles the 

 praises of Ahuramazda in the Persian inscriptions and the 

 Zend Avesta, have usually been considered by commentators 

 to have been in some measure due to the purity of the 

 Zorostrian faith, of which Cyrus was considered to have been 

 a follower. In support of this supposition we may compare 

 the following passages from the Hebrew writings, with others 

 from the inscriptions of a true Zoroastrian king of Persia, 

 namely, Xerxes, the son of Darius : — 



" I have made the earth, and created man upon it ; 

 I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens ; 

 I form the light and create darkness ; 

 I make peace and create evil." 



Isaiah xlv. 12 and 7. 



" Oh, great god. Or Mazda, who is the greatest of the gods, who created 

 this earth, who has created that heaven, who has created mankind, who has 

 given happiness to man." — Inscript of Xerxes at Van. ' 



Passing now to the cylinder inscriptions of Cj'rus, inscribed 

 soon after his occupation of Babylon, we meet with the 

 following passage : — 



" The gods dwelling within them (the temples) to their 

 places 1 restored and the gods of the land of Sumir and 



