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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



templating ; desolation meets desolation ; 

 a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder ; for 

 there is nothing to relieve the mind, to 

 lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone 

 by. These huge mounds of Assyria made 

 a deeper impression upon me, gave rise 

 to more serious thoughts and more ear- 

 nest reflection than the temples of Baal- 

 bec, and the theaters of Ionia." 



DARKNESS OF CENTURIES BROKEN 



The darkness of centuries has since 

 been broken, and broken mainly, in the 

 first instance, by the man who wrote these 

 sentences. Let us therefore seek to out- 

 line what we have gradually come to 

 know of the earliest story of the human 

 race in these lands, which seems, as far 

 as can be judged, to be possibly the ear- 

 liest story of the human race in the 

 world — that is to say, as civilized and 

 organized beings. 



Scripture, of course, places the first be- 

 ginnings of human story in this land. 

 The Garden of Eden is described in a 

 way that leaves the actual situation 

 which the writer was aiming to indicate 

 very vague ; but certainly it is in the 

 neighborhood of the Euphrates, which is 

 definitely named as one of the rivers 

 which water it ; and the word "Eden" it- 

 self is the ordinary term for a plain in 

 the Sumerian speech, the oldest language 

 existing in this region. 



THE GARDEN OF THE PLAIN 



So the Garden of Eden simply meant 

 the Garden of the Plain, and the first 

 forefathers of our race were believed to 

 have had their home in this most fertile 

 spot. The story of the Deluge moves in 

 the same region, and the Babylonian rec- 

 ords preserve a tradition which corre- 

 sponds almost detail for detail with that 

 of Noah and the Ark. 



In Genesis xi we have the Hebrew tra- 

 dition of the beginnings of organized 

 civilization, with the rise of the first city, 

 and the origin of the strifes and jealous- 

 ies which have separated the various na- 

 tions from one another. It is. of course. 

 poetically described, but the place where 

 these beginnings occurred and the meth- 

 ods adopted by these earliest organizers 

 of the race are stated with perfect clear- 



ness, and they correspond exactly with 

 the conditions existing in Babylonia. 



"It came to pass, as they journeyed 

 from the east, that they found a plain in 

 the land of Shinar ; and they dwelt there. 

 And they said one to another, 'Go to, let 

 us make brick, and burn them thor- 

 oughly.' And they had brick for stone, 

 and slime had they for mortar. And they 

 said. 'Go to, let us build a city and a 

 tower whose top may reach unto heaven ; 

 and let us make us a name, lest we be 

 scattered abroad upon the face of the 

 whole earth.' " 



Here we have the terse and vivid state- 

 ment of what must necessarily have hap- 

 pened when men first began to realize 

 their powers and to organize themselves 

 in such a land. The Avriter of Genesis 

 puts in two sentences, as if it were a 

 single act, what no doubt, in actual fact, 

 took hundreds or perhaps thousands of 

 years to attain. 



But there and in that fashion there is 

 no doubt that cities took their rise and 

 civilization began to develop. The fertile 

 plain invited habitation. Men felt the 

 need of gathering for mutual protection 

 against their human enemies or the wild 

 beasts which abounded ; and when they 

 cast about as to how to build they found 

 themselves faced by the fact that Baby- 

 lonia produces no building stone. 



Their buildings had to be reared of the 

 mud of which their land was composed; 

 and, from the dawn of history to its close, 

 buildings in Babylonia were of brick, 

 huge masses of crude sun-dried mud, 

 cased on the outside only with the harder 

 kiln-burned bricks. 



A CITY FOR PROTECTION' AND A TOWER FOR 

 WORSHIP 



"A city and a tower." says the writer, 

 and again he is true to the facts. The 

 city for protection and the tower for 

 worship. For the characteristic feature 

 of Babylonian temple architecture, dis- 

 tinguishing it sharply from the Egyptian 

 temples, with their succession of cham- 

 bers on the ground level, is the "Zig- 

 gurat." or temple tower, rising in suc- 

 cessive stages, each stage a little less in 

 area than the one beneath it, until the 

 shrine on the summit is reached. 



