31 8 
TOWER OF BABEL 
other high places, were a flat surface, like those I have described 
on the summits of rocks in Persia; and which are ascribed to its 
earliest ages of a similar worship : the Bel of Nineveh and Ba¬ 
bylon, being generally understood to represent a mixed idea of 
their great apostate sovereign, with the sun ; from which they 
possibly believed him descended, and to which he returned. 
The Mithratic worship, indeed, was so much purer than this 
attributed to the Chaldeans, that it considered the orb of the 
sun as the sacellum only of the Divine Intelligence, to whom was 
given the name of Mithra ; while the others not only confused 
the identity of the sun with that of their deceased hero, Nimrod, 
but adored him in images ; and so committed, I may say, a 
double dolatry. 
That the observatory on this tower was erected in remote 
times, long antecedent to the temple by Nebuchadnezzar, we 
have good reason to believe, even from the testimony of its 
Greek conquerors. Prideaux mentions the circumstance, that 
when Alexander made himself master of Babylon, Calisthenes, 
the philosopher, who attended him thither, found amongst its 
learned men, astronomical observations from 1903 years back, 
to that very time; which, in fact, carries up the account nearly 
as high as the foundation of the tower itself. This testimony, 
Calisthenes sent from Babylon into Greece, to Aristotle; at least, 
it is so reported by Symplicius, from the authority of Porphyry, 
in his second book De Ccelo . In this simply appropriated state, 
as left by the Assyrian queen, if not quite in the dilapidated 
ruin it was quitted by the followers of Nimrod, Nebuchad¬ 
nezzar found the stupendous monument of Babel; and, con¬ 
stituting it the chief embellishment of his imperial city, built a 
temple on its old solid foundations ; but having preserved its 
