THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY.

LECTURE XLI.

THE EXILES.

WHEN the race of Israel found itself in Chaldæa, it entered once more on the great theatre of the world, which it had quitted on its Exodus out of the valley of the Nile, and from which for a thousand years, with the exception1 of the reign of Solomon, it had been secluded among the hills of Palestine.

Babylon.

I. Unlike Egypt,2 which still preserves to us the likeness of the scenes and sights which met the eye of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, Babylon has more totally disappeared than any other of the great Powers which once ruled the earth. Not a single architectural monument-only one single sculpture remains of "the glory of the Chaldees' excellency." Even the natural features are so transformed as to be hardly recognizable. But by a singular compensation its appearance has been recorded more exactly than any of the contemporary capitals with which it might have been compared. Of Thebes,

1 Lecture XXVI. 2 Lecture IV.

For the description of Babylon I refer to the obvious sources of Herodotus and Ctesias (in Diodorus Siculus, ii. 8), Rich's Memoir on Babylon, Ainsworth's Researches in Assyria, Layard's Nineveh and Baby

lon, Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies and his edition of Herodotus. To these I must add the valuable infor mation I have orally received from Captain Felix Jones, R. N., employed on the Survey of the Eu phrates Valley.

Memphis, Nineveh, Susa, no eye-witness has left us a plan or picture. But Babylon was seen and described, not indeed in its full splendor, but still in its entirety, by the most inquisitive traveller of antiquity within one century from the time when the Israelites were within its walls, and his accounts are corrected or confirmed by visitors who saw it yet again fifty years later, when the huge skeleton, though gradually falling to pieces, was distinctly visible.

Of all the seats of Empire of all the cities that the pride or power of man has built on the surface of the globe - Babylon was the greatest. Its greatness, as it was originated, so in large measure it was secured, by its natural position. Its founders took advan

Its situation.

tage of the huge spur of tertiary rock which projects itself from the long inclined plane of the Syrian desert into the alluvial basin of Mesopotamia, thus furnishing a dry and solid platform on which a flourishing city might rest, whilst it was defended on the south by the vast morass or lake, if not estuary, extending in that remote period from the Persian Gulf. On this vantage-ground it stood, exactly crossing the line of traffic between the Mediterranean coasts and the Iranian mountains; just also on that point where the Euphrates, sinking into a deeper bed, changes from a vast expanse into a manageable river, not wider than the Thames of our own metropolis; where, also, out of the deep rich alluvial clay1 it was easy to dig the bricks which from its earliest date supplied the material for its immense buildings, cemented by the bitumen2 which from that same early date came floating

1 Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, 326, 529.

2 Gen. xi. 7. Chemar: the word translated "slime" in the A. V.;

"bitumen" by the Vulgate. See Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, 202208; Herod. i. 179.

down the river from the springs in its upper course. Babylon was the greatest of that class of cities which belong almost exclusively to the primeval history of mankind; "the cities," as they are called by Hegel,1

of the river plains," which have risen on the level banks of the mighty streams of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, and thus stand in the most striking contrast to the towns which belong to the second stage of human civilization, clustering each on its Acropolis or its Seven Hills, and thus contracted and concentrated by the necessities of their local position as obviously as those older capitals possessed from their situation an illimitable power of expansion. As of that second class one of the most striking examples Its granwas Jerusalem on its mountain fastness, with deur. the hills standing round it, as if with a Divine shelter, and fenced off by its deep ravines as by a natural fosse, so of that earlier class the most remarkable instance was the city to which the new comers suddenly found themselves transplanted. Far as the horizon itself, extended the circuit of the vast capital of the then known world. If the imperceptible circumference of our modern capitals has exceeded the limits of Babylon, yet none in ancient times or modern can be compared with its definite enclosure, which was on the lowest computation forty, on the highest sixty miles round. Like Nineveh or Ecbatana, it was, but on a still larger scale, a country or empire enclosed in a city. Forests, parks, gardens were intermingled with the houses so as to present rather the appearance of the suburbs of a great metropolis than the metropolis itself. Yet still the regularity and order of a city were preserved. The streets, according to a fashion rare in 1 Philosophy of History, 93 2 See Sinai and Palestine, ch. ii.

Europe, whether ancient or modern, but common in ancient Asia,1 — and adopted by the Greek and Roman conquerors when they penetrated into Asia, perhaps in imitation of Babylon, - -were straight, and at right angles to each other. The houses, unlike those of most ancient cities, except at Tyre, and afterwards in Rome, were three or four stories high. But the prodigious scale of the place appeared chiefly in the enormous size, unparalleled before or since, of its buildings. public buildings, and rendered more conspicuous by the flatness of the country from which they rose. Even in their decay, "their colossal piles, domi"neering over the monotonous plain, produce an effect "of grandeur and magnificence which cannot be imag"ined in any other situation." 2

Public

The walls.

The walls by which this Imperial city, or, as it might be called, this Civic Empire, rising out of a deep and wide moat, was screened and protected from the wandering tribes of the Desert, as the Celestial Empire by the Great Wall of China, as the extremities of the Roman Empire by the wall of Trajan in Dacia, or of Severus in Northumberland, were not like those famous bulwarks, mere mounds or ramparts, but lines as of towering hills, which must have met the distant gaze at the close of every vista, like the Alban range at Rome. They appeared, at

least to Herodotus, who saw them whilst in their unbroken magnificence, not less than three hundred feet high;1 and along their summit ran a vast terrace which admitted of the turning of chariots with four horses, and which may therefore well have been more than eighty feet broad.2

If to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who were accustomed to the precipitous descent of the walls overhanging the valley of the Kedron, the mere height of the Babylonian enclosure may not have seemed so startling as to us, yet to the size of the other buildings the puny dimensions whether of the Palace or Temple of Solomon bore no comparison. The Great The palace.

Palace of the Kings was itself a city within the city seven miles round; and its gardens, expressly built to convey to a Median princess some reminiscence of her native mountains, rose, one above another, to a height of more than seventy feet, on which stood forest trees of vast diameter, side by side with flowering shrubs. On the walls of the palace the Israelites might see painted those vast hunting-scenes which were still traceable two centuries later of which one characteristic fragment remains in sculpture. a lion trampling on a man — which would recall to them the description in their own early annals of "Nimrod the "mighty hunter." 5

But the most prodigious and unique of all was the Temple of Bel-which may well have seemed

The temple.

to them the completion of that proud tower "whose top was to reach to heaven." It was the cen

1 This is nearly the height of the Victoria Tower of Westminster Palace 340 feet high.

2 i. e. the breadth of Victoria Street, Westminster.

8 Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies iii. 345, 502.

Diod. Sic., ii. 8.

5 Gen. x. 9.