'buckler, and shield, and helmet '—their breastplates,' their 6 2 bows and quivers, and battleaxes-marked out to every eye Its science. the power and grandeur of the army. Nowhere was science or art so visibly exalted, as in the magicians, and the as'trologers, and the sorcerers, and the wise Chaldæans,' who were expected to unravel all the secrets of nature, and who in point of fact from those wide level plains, where the ' entire celestial hemisphere is continually visible to every 6 ' eye, and where the clear transparent atmosphere shows night 'after night the heavens gemmed with countless stars of 'undimmed brilliancy,'' had laid the first foundations of astronomy, mingled as it was with the speculations, then deemed pregnant with yet deeper significance, of astrology. Far in advance of the philosophy, as yet unborn, of Greece, in advance even of the ancient philosophy of Egypt, the Chaldæans long represented to both those nations the highest flights of human intellect-even as the majestic Temples, which served to them at once as college and observatory, towered above the buildings of the then known world. Twice over in the Biblical history-once on the heights of Zophim, once beside the cradle of Bethlehem-do the stargazers of Chaldæa lay claim to be at once the precursors of Divine Revelation, and the representatives of superhuman science. Its music. 5 6 Returning to the ordinary life of the place, its gay scenes of luxury and pomp were stamped on the memory of the Israelites by the constant clash and concert, again and again resounding, of the musical instruments in which the Babylonians delighted, and of which the mingled Greek and Asiatic names are faintly indicated by the English catalogue of cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all 1 Jer. li. 3; Ezek. xxvi. 9. Rawlinson, iii. 415. Grote's Hist. of Greece, iii. 392. ii. 1. See an ingenious though fanciful book by Dr. Francis Upham, Who were the Wise Men? For the Babylonian love of music see Rawlinson, iii. 451. 'kinds of music.' 1 Nor could they forget how, like the Athenian exiles in later days at Syracuse, their artistical masters besought them to take their own harps and sing one of the songs of their distant mountain city;2 though, unlike those prisoners, who gladly recited to their kindred enemies the tragedies of their own Euripides, they could not bring themselves to waste on that foreign land the melody which belonged only to their Divine Master. Yet one more feature peculiar to Chaldæa, both natural and social, is recalled by the scene of that touching dialogue between the captors and the captives. The trees on which their harps were hung were unlike any that they knew in their own country. They called them by the name which seemed nearest to the willows of their own watercourses. But they were in fact the branching poplars 3 mingled with the tamarisks, which still cluster beside the streams of Mesopotamia, and of which one solitary and venerable specimen long survived on the ruins of Babylon, and in the gentle waving of its green boughs sent forth a melancholy, rustling sound, such as in after times chimed in with the universal desolation of the spot, such as in the ears of the Israelites might have seemed to echo their own mournful thoughts. The 'waters' by which they wept were the Its rivers. rivers of Babylon.' The river'-that word was of unknown or almost unknown sound to those who had seen only the scanty torrent beds of Judæa, or the narrow rapids of the 1 Dan. iii. 5, 7, 15. 2 Psalm lxxxvii. 1, 2. The weeping willow to which from this passage Linnæus gave the name of Salix Babylonica is not found in Babylonia. The weeping willow is indigenous in China and Japan, cultivated in Europe, but is neither indigenous nor cultivated in Babylonia. (Koch's Dendrologie, ii. 507.) It may be either the tamarisk (attlė) or the poplar (Populus Euphratica), to which the Arabs still give the name of ereb, the word used in this Psalm. It is by tradition the single tree preserved from the destruction of Babylon in order, in long subsequent ages, to offer to Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, a place to tie up his horse after the Battle of Hillah (Rich, 67; Layard, 507). What tree on earth has a more poetic story than this? I grieve to see since writing this that in these latest days the depredations of travellers and pilgrims have reduced this venerable relic to a mere trunk (Assyrian Discoveries, by Mr. George Smith, p. 56). Jordan. The river' in the mouth of an Israelite meant almost always the gigantic Euphrates the fourth river' of the primeval garden of the earth-the boundary of waters,2 from beyond which their forefathers had come. And now, after parting from it for many centuries, they once more found themselves on its banks-not one river only, but literally, as the Psalmist calls it, 'rivers;' for by the wonderful system of irrigation which was the life of the whole region it was diverted into separate canals, each of which was itself 'a river,' the source and support of the gardens and palaces which clustered along the water's edge. The country far and near was intersected with these branches of the mighty stream. One of them was so vast as to bear then the name, which it bears even to this day, of the Egyptian Nile.3 On the banks of the main channel of the 'river' all the streets abutted, all the gates opened; and immediately on leaving the city it opened into that vast lake or estuary which made the surrounding tract itself the desert 5 of the 'sea-the great sea, tossed by the four winds of heaven, and teeming with the monster shapes of earth-the sea on which floated innumerable ships or boats, as the junks at Canton, or the gondolas at Venice, or even as the vast shipping at our own renowned seaports. Of the great waters,' such is the monumental inscription of Nebuchadnezzar like the waters of the ocean, I made use abundantly. Their depths were like the depths of the vast ocean.' The inland city was thus converted into a city of mer'chants'-the magnificent empire into a land of traffic.' 1 Sinai and Palestine, Appendix, $ 34. 2 See Lecture I. p. 10. The word Ior, in Dan. xii. 5, is elsewhere only used for the Nile. Sinai and Palestine, Appendix, § 35. There is a canal to this day called 'the Nile' (Bahr-el-Nil) between the Euphrates and the Tigris. This is a retention of local colour in the Book of Daniel which I owe to Captain Felix Jones, and which has escaped even the vigilant research of Dr. Pusey. Rawlinson, iii. 342. 5 Isa. xxi. 1. Dan. vii. 2, 3. Rawlinson's Herod., vol. iii. p. 586. 'The cry,' the stir, the gaiety of the Chaldæans was not in the streets or gardens of Babylon, but in their ships.'1 Down the Euphrates came floating from the bitumen pits of Hit the cement with which its foundations were covered,2 and from Kurdistan and Armenia huge blocks of basalt, from Phoenicia gems and wine, perhaps its tin from Cornwall; up its course came from Arabia and from India the dogs for their sports, the costly wood for their stately walking-staves, the frankincense for their worship.3 When in far later days the name of Babylon was transferred to the West to indicate the Imperial city which had taken its place in the eyes of the Jewish exiles of that time, the recollection of the traffic of the Euphrates had lived on with so fresh a memory that this characteristic feature of the Mesopotamian city was transplanted to its Italian substitute, Rome. Nothing could be less applicable to the inland capital on the banks of the narrow Tiber; but so deeply had this imagery of the ancient Babylon become a part of the idea of secular grandeur that it was transferred without a shock to that new representative of the world. 'The 'merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and 'of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all wood of incense, and all manner of vessels of ivory, ' and all manner of vessels of most precious wood, and of 'brass, and of iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, ' and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and 'fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men; the shipmasters, 'and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as 'trade by sea, and the craftsmen, and the merchants who 'were the great men of the earth.'* And over this vast world of power, splendour, science, 1 Isa. xliii. 14 (Heb.). 2 Rawlinson, Monarchies, iii. 441. Layard, Nin. and Bab., i. 526. 4 Rev. xviii. 11, 12, 13, 17, 23. nezzar. art, and commerce, presided a genius worthy of it (so at least the Israelite tradition represented him)-' the Head of 'Gold,'-' whose brightness was excellent '-the Tree whose Nebuchad- height reached to heaven, and the sight thereof to the end ' of all the earth'-'whose leaves were fair, and the fruit 'thereof much, and in it meat for all-under which the 'beasts of the field dwelt, and upon whose branches the fowls ' of the air had their habitation.' He whose reign reached over one half of the whole period of the Empire 2—he who was the last conqueror amongst the primeval monarchies, as Nimrod had been the first-the Lord of the then known historical world from Greece to India-was the favourite of Nebo who when he looked on his vast constructions might truly say, 'Is not this Great Babylon 'that I have built for the house of my kingdom, by the 'might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty ?' 4 3 'Hardly any other name than Nebuchadnezzar's is found ' on the bricks" of Babylon.' Palace and Temple were both rebuilt by him; and not only in Babylon, but throughout the country. The representations of him in the Book of Daniel may belong to a later epoch; but they agree in their general outline with the few fragments preserved to us of ancient annals or inscriptions; and they have a peculiar interest of their own, from the fact that the combination which they exhibit of savage power with bursts of devotion and tenderness are not found elsewhere amongst the Hebrew portraitures of any Gentile potentate. It is loftier and more generous than their conception of the Egyptian Pharaoh, the Assyrian Sennacherib, or the Greek Antiochus; it is wilder and fiercer than the adumbrations of the Persian Cyrus or the Roman Cæsar. |