136 



E. J. SEWELL^ ESQ.^ ON POMPEII. 



student. As far as I know, no parallel to this exists ; the nearest 

 approach thereto being the case of Nineveh, which, however, was 

 not overwhelmed by ashes from a volcano, but destroyed by fire. 

 The ruin caused thereby had, nevertheless, a similar effect, for the 

 debris from above covered, and in many cases preserved, the objects 

 of art, etc., upon which it fell. Fire, the destroyer, like Vesuvius, 

 became, indirectly, the preserver of what it had spared. 



The following are some of the points which struck me whilst Mr. 

 Sewell was reading his paper : — Like the Pompeians, the Babylonians 

 preferred cash-payments, but their contracts are often on a long- 

 credit basis, with the advantage of high interest ; indeed. Babylonia 

 was possibly the school in which the Hebrews acquired their 

 commercial knowledge. Dice have, I believe, been found in the 

 ruins of Babylonia and Assyria, but they probably belong to the Grseco- 

 Roman period, and, to the best of my recollection, are not loaded. ' If, 

 however, the Babylonians had dice at an earlier period, they would 

 certainly have gambled with them, as they had a great veneration 

 for numbers. Indeed, it was with them that the great Platonian 

 " number of better and worse births " originated. The names of 

 the Babylonian deities, it may be noted, could be indicated by 

 numerals as well as in the usual ideographic way. Referring to " the 

 number of the Beast " in the Book of Revelation, it is noteworthy 

 that this numeral, " six hundred three score and six," is composed 

 of the Babylonian nei- (600), sos (60) as (6) — the first 10 times more 

 and the last 10 times less than the sexagesimal unit (sum, sos, 60) 

 which enabled the Babylonians to attain such proficiency in problems 

 of arithmetic. 



Emperor-worship recalls to the mind of the Babylonian student 

 the fact, that most of the Babylonian and Assyrian kings were 

 regarded as divine. How old the custom of deifying their rulers 

 was, may be judged from the fact that their earliest ruler, Merodach 

 (the Nimrod of Genesis), was also their chief deity in later times. It 

 is doubtful whether the Babylonian and Assyrian kings stood out 

 as the incarnation of power — they were rather the representatives 

 of the gods upon earth. It is interesting to know that the myth of 

 Osiris and Isis embodied the loftiest and purest conceptions of the 

 ancient Egyptians, approaching the monotheistic idea of an omni- 

 present god, and associating therewith belief in a blessed immortality. 

 In all probability there were at least some in Babylonia who were 



