15 
architecture, their scul})ture, their military system may have 
had on western countries belongs to a much later age. We 
have no evidence that the Assyrians cultivated any branch of 
science, though they used their art of writing for all the pur¬ 
poses which an advanced stage of civilization demands. In 
Babylonia, on the contrary, astronomy was studied from a very 
early period. The accounts of observations extending 31,000 
years front the time of Alexander the Great are, of course, 
exaggerations, but the fact that Ptolemy has preserved an 
account of lunar eclipses, as far back as 721 b. c., which, com¬ 
pared with calculations made backward by the modern lunar 
tables, agree with slight difference,—this fact, I say, is suffi¬ 
cient to prove that the Babylonian astronomers were very 
careful and accurate observers ; an art which our secretarv will 
tell us is the fruit of long practice only. Babylon furnished 
the materials from which the Greek intellect deduced scientific 
astronomy. If the art w'as degraded into an instrument of 
superstition and trickery, so that the Chaldeans became one of 
the pests of imperial Pome and had to he expelled from Italy 
(Suet. Vit. 14), the morbid curiosity of their employers should 
bear the blame. 
With all their wide and desolating conquests, the Assyrian 
and Babylonian Empires left little mark on the history of the 
world. It might have been otherwise if they had succeeded in 
' establishing themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean. 
Their occupation of Lower Egypt was transient; both of them 
unsuccessfully attempted the conquest of Tyre. But the his¬ 
tory of the Jewish people was essentially modified by their 
vicinity to the great powers established on the banks of the 
Tigris and the Euphrates. One half of the nation was carried 
off into a distant region, where all traces of them perished \ 
the other, purified by their affliction,, returned to their native 
land, to be the subject of a history more wonderful, more 
deeply interesting, than anything in their past experience. 
From what has been said it will be evident that the discovery 
of the remains of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities, com¬ 
bined vvith the decipherment of the cuneiform character, has 
given us a view into the history of centuries which were a 
