In contrast with the arid plateau of Mesopotamia, stretched the rich alluvial plain of Chaldea, formed by the deposits of the two great rivers by which it was enclosed. The soil was extremely fertile, and teemed with an industrious population. Eastward rose the mountains of Elam, southward were the sea-marshes and the ancient kingdom of Nituk or Dilvun (the modern Bender-Dilvun), while on the west the civilisation of Babylonia encroached beyond the banks of the Euphrates, upon the territory of the Semitic nomades (or Suti). Here stood Ur (now Mugheir), the earliest capital of the country; and Babylon, with its suburb, Borsippa (Birs Nimrud), as well as the two Sipparas (the Sepharvaim of Scripture, now Mosaib), occupied both the Arabian and Chaldean side of the river. (See Babylon.) The Araxes, or “River of Babylon,” was conducted through a deep valley into the heart of Arabia, irrigating the land through which it passed; and to the south of it lay the great inland fresh-water sea of Nedjef, surrounded by red sandstone cliffs of considerable height, 40 miles in length and 35 in breadth in the widest part. Above and below this sea, from Borsippa to Kufa, extend the famous Chaldean marshes, where Alexander was nearly lost (Arrian, Exp. Al., vii. 22.; Strab., xvi. 1, § 12,); but these depend upon the state of the Hindiyah canal, disappearing altogether when it is closed. Between the sea of Nedjef and Ur, but on the left side of the Euphrates, was Erech (now Warka), which with Nipur or Calneh (now Niffer), Surippac (Senkereh ?), and Babylon (now Hillah), formed the tetrapolis of Sumir or Shinar. This northwestern part of Chaldea was also called Gan-duniyas or Gun-duni after the accession of the Cassite dynasty. Southeastern Chaldea, on the other hand, was termed Accad, though the name came also to be applied to the whole of Babylonia. The Caldai, or Chaldeans, are first met with in the 9th century p.c. as a small tribe on the Persian Gulf, whence they slowly moved northwards, until under Merodach-Baladan they made themselves masters of Babylon, and henceforth formed so important an element in the population of the country, as in later days to give their name to the whole of it. In the inscriptions, however, Chaldea represents the marshes of the sea-coast, and Teredon was one of their ports. The whole territory was thickly studded with towns; but among ⅜11 this “vast number of great cities,” to use the words of Herodotus, Cuthah, or Tiggaba (now Ibrahim), Chilmad (Kalwadah), Is (Hit), and Dur-aba (Akkerkuf) alone need be mentioned, The cultivation of the country was regulated by canals, the three chief of which carried off the waters of the Euphrates towards the Tigris above Babylon,—the “Royal River,” or Ar-Malcha, entering the Tigris a little below Baghdad, the Nahr-Malcha running across to the site of Seleucia, and the Nahr-Kutha passing through Ibrahim. The Pallacopas, on the other side of the Euphrates, supplied an immense lake in the neighbourhood of Borsippa. So great was the fertility of the soil that, according to Herodotus (i. 193), grain commonly returned two hundredfold to the sower, and occasionally three hundredfold. Pliny, too (H. N., xviii. 17), says that wheat was cut twice, and afterwards was good keep for sheep; and Berosus remarked that wheat, barley, sesame, ochrys, palms, apples, and many kinds of shelled fruit grew wild, as wheat still does in the neighbourhood of Anah. A Persian poem celebrated the 360 uses of the palm (Strab., xvi. 1, 14), and Ammianus Marcellinus (xxiv. 3) states that from the point reached by Julian’s army to the shores of the Persian Gulf was one continuous forest of verdure.

Such a country was well fitted to be one of the primeval seats of civilisation. Where brick lay ready to hand, and climate and soil needed only settled life and moderate labour to produce all that man required, it was natural that the great civilising power of Western Asia should take its rise. The history of the origin and development of this civilisation, interesting and important as it is, has but recently been made known to us by the decipherment of the native monuments. The scanty notices and conflicting statements of classical writers have been replaced by the evidence of contemporaneous documents; and though the materials are still but a tithe of w hat we may hope hereafter to obtain, we can sketch the outlines of the history, the art, and the science of the powerful nations of the Tigris and Euphrates. Before doing so, however, it would be well to say a few words in regard to our classical sources of information, the only ones hitherto available. The principal of these is Berosus, the Manetho of Babylonia, who flourished at the time of Alexander’s conquests (though see Havet, Mémoire sur la Date des Ecrits qui portent les noms de Bérose et de Manethon). He was priest of Bel, and translated the records and astronomy of his nation into Greek. His works have unfortunately perished, but the second and third hand quotations from them, which we have in Eusebius and other writers, have been strikingly verified by inscriptions so fax as regards their main facts. The story of the flood taken from Berosus, for instance, is almost identical with the one preserved on the cuneiform tablets. Numerical figures, however, as might be expected, are untrustworthy. According to Berosus, ten kings reigned before the Deluge for 120 saroi, or 432,000 years, beginning with Alorus of Babylon and ending with Otiartes (Opartes) of Larankha, and his son Sisuthrus, the hero of the flood. Then came eight dynasties, which are given as follows: — [table]

Ptolemy’s canon (in the Almagest) gives the seventh dynasty in full— [table]

Next to Berosus, the authority of Herodotus ranke highest. His information, however, is scanty, and he had to trust to the doubtful statements of ciceroni. Herodotus was controverted by Ctesias of Cnidus, the physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon. But Ctesias mistook mythology for history, and the Ninus and Semiramis, the Ninyas and Sardanapalus, of Greek romance were in great measure his creations. We may yet construct an Assyrian epopee, like the Shahnameh of Firdusi, out of his pages, but we must not look to them for history. Other historical notices of Assyria and Babylonia, of more or less questionable value, are to be gathered from Diodorus and one or two more writers, but beyond Berosus and, to a limited extent, Herodotus, our only ancient authority of much value upon this subject is the Old Testament.

Ethnology and History.— The primitive population of Babylonia, the builders of its cities, the originators of its culture, and the inventors of the cuneiform system of writing, or rather of the hieroglyphics out of which it gradually developed, belonged to the Turanian or Ural-Altaic family. Their language was highly agglutinative, approaching the modern Mongolian idioms in the simplicity of its grammatical machinery, but otherwise more nearly related to the Ugro-Bulgaric division of the Finnic group; and its speakers were mentally in no w ay inferior to the Hungarians and Turks of the present day. The country waβ divided into two halves, the Sumir (Sungir, or Shinar) in the north-west, and the Accad in the south-east, corresponding most remarkably to the Suomi and Akkara-k, into which the Finnic race believed itself to have been separated in its first mountain home. Like Suomi, Sumir signified “ (the people) of the rivers,” and just as Finnic tradition makes Kemi a district of the Suomi, so Came was another name of the Babylonian Sumir. The Accadai, or Accad, were “the highlanders” who had descended from the mountainous region of Elam on the east, and it was to them that the Assyrians ascribed the origin of Chaldean civilisation and writing. They were, at all events, the dominant people in Babylonia at the time to which our earliest contemporaneous records reach back, although the Sumir, or “people of the home language,” as they are sometimes termed, were named first in the royal titles out of respect to their prior settlement in the country. A survey of the syllabary has led to the conclusion that the first attempts at writing were made before the Accad had descended into the plains and exchanged papyrus as a w riting material for clay; other considerations, however, go to show that although the system of writing may have been invented before they had entered Babylonia, it was not completed until after they had done so. In harmony with this, we find Berosus ascribing the culture of “the mixed population of Chaldea” to Oannes and other similar creatures from the Persia^ Gulf. So far as we can judge, the civilisation of Elam is at least coeval with that of Babylonia, and the capture of Babylon by the Medes, with whom the historical dynasties of Berosus are commonly supposed to begin, must be explained by an Elamite conquest. Media was the Accadian ΛIada, “the land" par excellence; and Accadian tradition looked back upon the mountainous district to the south-west of the Caspian as the cradle of their race. Among these “mountains of the east,” and in the land of Nisir (the furthermost division of Gutium beyond the Lesser Zab), rose “the mountain of the world,” the Turanian Olympus, on which the ark of the Chaldean Noah was believed to have rested. From this centre Turanian tribes spread in all directions, meeting Alarodians on the north, and Semites on the south-west. The Aryans had not yet penetrated across the great Sagartian desert. The numerous tribes of Susiana, both civilised and uncivilised, spoke languages more closely Ugrian than even that of the Accadians; the oldest towns of Northern Syria, where the Semite afterwards reigned supreme, bore Accadian names, and, as in the case of Haran, were mythologically connected with Babylon; while the chief cities of Assyria were founded by Accadians, were denoted by Accadian symbols, and were ruled by Accadian princes, in strict accordance with the statement of Genesis that out of Babylonia “went forth Asshur.” An Elamite conqueror of Chaldea, like Chedorlaomer (Gen. xiv. 1), imposed his authority not only over Shinar, but over Assyria and Gutium as well. The earliest geographical lists know only of Nuvva, or Elam, on the east, the Khani on the west, Martu, the land of “the path of the setting sun,” Subarti, or Syria, with its four races, and Gutium, which stretched across Mesopotamia from the Euphrates on the one side to the mountains of Media on the other. To these must be added Anzan, or southern Elam, with its capital Susa, Dilvun, or Nituk, on the Persian Gulf, and, at a considerably later date, the Hittites, with their chief city Carchemish.

The first monarchs whose monumental records we possess had their seat at Ur, on the right bank of the Euphrates. Ur, in Accadian, signified “the city” par excellence, and so bore testimony to the supremacy claimed by its rulers over the rest of Babylonia. The great temple of the Moon-god there was one of the oldest buildings in the country, and its erection was due to a prince who claimed sovereignty over the whole of Babylonia, and adorned Erech, Nipur, Larsa, and other cities with temples of vast size, dedicated to the sun, to Istar, and to Bel. He seems to have been the first great Babylonian builder; and this would imply that it was under him that Ur rose to its prominent position, and united the numerous principalities of Chaldea under one head. The enormous brick structures were cemented with bitumen in the place of lime mortar; but the use of the buttress, of drains, and of external ornamentation, shows that architectural knowledge was already advanced. The cuneiform system of writing had attained its full development, signet stones were carved with artistic skill, and the amount of human force at the disposal of the monarch may be estimated from the fact that the Bowariyeh mound at Warka, on the site of the temple of the Sun-god, is 200 feet square and 100 feet high, so that above 30,000,000 bricks must have been employed upon its construction. The vicinity of Ur to the Semitic tribes of Arabia implies that the Accadian sovereigns had been turning their attention in that direction, and we find nothing surprising therefore in the Scriptural account of Abraham’s migration from this place, or the Phoenician tradition of the original home of the Canaanitish race on the shores of the Persian Gulf (Strab., i. 2, 35, xvi. 3, 4, 27; Justin, xviii. 3, 2; Pliny, A r . II., iv. 36). Indeed, we have clear evidence that Semitic was spoken in Ur itself at this remote epoch. Although the ruling caste were Accadian, and generally wrote their inscriptions in that language, Dungi, one of their earliest monarchs, in spite of his Turanian name, has left us a short legend in Semitic; and it is more than probable that the imperial title of “Sumir and Accad” was soon to be assumed to mark a linguistic as well as a geographical distinction. The brick legends of the various viceroys who governed the cities of Chaldea under this dynasty are all, however, in Accadian.

The supremacy of Ur had been disputed by its more ancient rival Erech, but had finally to give way before the rise of Nisin or Karrak, a city whose site is uncertain, and Karrak in its turn was succeeded by Larsa. Elamite conquest seems to have had something to do with these transferences of the seat of power. In 2280 b.c. —the date is fixed by an inscription of Assur-bani-pal’s—Cudur-nankhundi, the Elamite, conquered Chaldea at a time when princes with Semitic names appear to have been already reigning there, and Cudur-mabug not only overran “the west,” or Palestine, but established a line of monarchs in Babylonia. His son and successor took an Accadian name, and extended his sway over the whole country. Twice did the Elamite tribe of Cassi or Kossaeans furnish Chaldea with a succession of kings. At a very early period we find one of these Kossaean dynasties claiming homage from Syria, Gutium, and Northern Arabia, and rededicating the images of native Babylonian gods, which had been carried away in war, with great splendour and expense. The other Cassite dynasty was founded by Khammuragas, who established his capital at Babylon, which henceforward continued to be the seat of empire in the south. The dynasty is probably to be identified with that called Arabian by Berosus, and it was during its domination that Semitic came gradually to supersede Accadian as the language of the country. Khammuragas himself assumed a Semitic name, and a Semitic inscription of his is now in the Louvre. A large number of canals were constructed during his reign, more especially the famous Nahr-Malcha, and an embankment built along the banks of the Tigris. The king’s attention seems to have been turned to the subject of irrigation by a flood which overwhelmed the important city of Mulhas. His first conquests were in the north of Babylonia, and from this base of operations he succeeded in overthrowing Naram-Sin (or Rim-Acuî) in the south, and making himself master of the whole of Chaldea. Naram-Sin and a queen had been the last representatives of a dynasty which had attained a high degree of glory both in arms and in literature. Naram-Sin and his father Sargon had not only subdued the rival princes of Babylonia, but had successfully invaded Syria, Palestine, and even, as it would seem, Egypt. At Agane, a suburb of Sippara, Sargon had founded a library, especially famous for its works on astrology and astronomy, copies of which were made in later times for the libraries of Assyria. Indeed, so prominent a place did Sargon take iu the early history of Babylonia, that his person became surrounded with an atmosphere of myth. Not only was he regarded as a sort of eponymous hero of literature, a Babylonian Solomon, whose title was “the deviser of law and prosperity,” popular legends told of his mysterious birth, how, like Romulus and Arthur, he knew no father, but was born in secrecy, and placed by his mother in an ark of reeds and bitumen, and left to the care of the river; how, moreover, this second Moses was carried by the stream to the dwelling of a ferryman, who reared him as his own son, until at last the time came that his rank should bo discovered, and Sargon, “the constituted king,” for such is the meaning of his name, took his seat upon the throne of his ancestors. It was while the Cassite sovereigns were reigning in the south, and probably in consequence of reverses that they suffered at the hands of the Egyptians, who, under the monarchs of the 18th dynasty, were pushing eastward, that the kingdom of Assyτia took its rise. Its princes soon began to treat with their southern neighbours on equal terms; the boundaries of the two kingdoms were settled, and intermarriages between the royal families took place, which led more than once to an interference on the part of the Assyrians in the affairs of Babylonia. Finally, in the 14th century b.c., Tiglath-A dar of Assyria captured Babylon, and established a Semitic line of sovereigns there, which continued until the days of the later Assyrian empire. From this time down to the destruction of Nineveh, Assyria remained the leading power of Western Asia. Occasionally, it is true, a king of Babylon succeeded in defeating his aggressive rival and invading Assyria; but the contrary was more usually the case, and the Assyrians grew more and more powerful at the expense...