2 deur. by Hegel,'' 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 civilisation, 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 Its granexamples was Jerusalem on its mountain fastness, with 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 Europe, whether ancient or modern, but common in ancient Asia 3and adopted by the Greek and Roman conquerors when they 1 Philosophy of History, p. 93. * See Sinai and Palestine, c. ii. It has also been followed in the United States, and it is curious in this year of the centenary of Philadelphia to read the remarks of Dean Prideaux on the Babylonian aspect of one of the earliest of the great American cities then just founded. Much ac- Public buildings. The walls. 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 storeys high. But the prodigious scale of the place appeared chiefly in the enormous size, unparalleled before or since, of its 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 imagined in 'any other situation.'1 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 300 feet high; 2 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 80 feet broad.3 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 1 Ainsworth, 126. The Birs Nimrud, in its ruins, seemed to an English merchant who saw it in 1583, 'as high as the stonework of the 'steeple' of the old St. Paul's. (Rich, 2 This is nearly the height of the Victoria Tower of Westminster Palace -340 feet high. 3 i.e. the breadth of Victoriastreet, Westminster. ace. 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 Palace of the Kings was itself a city within the The palcity-seven miles round; and its gardens, expressly built to convey to a Median Princess1 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.' 3 But the most prodigious and unique of all was the The Temple of Bel-which may well have seemed to them the temple. completion of that proud tower whose top was to reach 'to heaven.' It was the central point of all; it gave its name to the whole place-Bab-el or Bab-bel, the gate of God 'or Bel,' which by the quaint humour of primitive times had been turned to the Hebrew word 'Babel,' or 'confusion.'5 6 6 It was the most remarkable of all those artificial mountains, or beacons, which, towering over the plains of Mesopotamia, 'guide the traveller's eye like giant pillars.' It rose like the Great Pyramid, square upon square; and was believed to have reached the height of 600 feet." Its base was a square of 200 yards. No other edifice consecrated to worship, not Carnac in Egyptian Thebes, nor Byzantine St. Sophia, nor Gothic Clugny, nor St. Peter's of Rome, have reached the grandeur of this primeval sanctuary, casting its shadow far and wide, over city and plain. Thither, as to the most sacred and impregnable fortress, were believed to have been transported the huge brazen laver, the precious brazen pillars, and all the lesser vessels of the Temple of Jerusalem, together doubtless with all the other like sacred spoils which Babylonian conquest had swept from Egypt, Tyre, Damascus, or Nineveh. And when from the silver shrine at the summit of this building, the whole mass of mingled verdure and habitation for miles and miles was overlooked, what was wanting in grace or proportion must have been compensated by the extraordinary richness of colour. Some faint conception of this may be given by the view of Moscow from the Kremlin over the blue, green, and gilded domes and towers springing from the gardens which fill up the vacant intervals of that most Oriental of European capitals. But neither that view nor any other can give a notion of the vastness of the variegated landscape of Babylon as seen from any of its elevated points. From the earliest times of the city, as we have seen, the two materials of its architecture were the bricks baked from the plains on which it stood, and the plaster fetched from the bitumen springs of Hit. But these homely materials were made to yield effects as bright and varied as porcelain or metal. The several stages of the Temple itself were black, orange, crimson, gold," deep yellow, brilliant blue, and silver. The white or pale brown of the houses, wherever the natural colour of the bricks was left, must have been 1 Milman, Hist. of Jews, i. 417. 2 Dan. i. 2; 2 Chr. xxxvi. 7; Jos. Ant. x. 11, § 1. See Lectures XLII., XLIII. Rawlinson, iii. 343. Rawlinson, iii. 385. • Rawlinson, iii. 382-385. Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, p. 517. strikingly contrasted with the rainbow hues with which most of them were painted, according to the fancy1 of their owners, whilst all the intervening spaces were filled with the variety of gigantic palms in the gardens, or the thick jungles or luxuriant groves by the silvery lines of the canals, or in the early spring the carpet of brilliant flowers that covered the illimitable plain without the walls, or the sea of waving corn, both within and without, which burst from the teeming soil with a produce so plentiful that the Grecian. traveller dared not risk his credit by stating its enormous magnitude. When from the outward show we descend to the The society. inner life of the place, Babylon may well indeed to the secluded Israelite have seemed to be that of which to all subsequent ages it has been taken as the type-'the World' itself. No doubt there was in Jerusalem and Samaria, especially since the days of Solomon, a little hierarchy and aristocracy and court, with its factions, feasts, and fashions. But nowhere else in Asia, hardly even in Egypt, could have been seen the magnificent cavalry careering through the streets, the chariots and four, chariots like whirlwinds,' 'horses swifter than eagles,'-horses, and chariots, and 'horsemen, and companies,' with spears' and burnished 'helmets.' Nowhere else could have been imagined the long muster-roll, as of a peerage, that passes in long procession before the eye of the Israelite captive—the satraps, 'captains, pachas, the chief judges, treasurers, judges, counsellors, and all the rulers of the provinces.' Their splendid costumes of scarlet-their variegated 6 sashes-'all of them princes to look to;' their elaborate armour 5 4 1 Rawlinson, iii. 342. 2 Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, p. 485. See Herod. i. 193, with Rawlinson's notes. Compare Grote, iii. 395. 4 Ezek. xxvi. 7; Jer. iv. 13, 29; vi. 23; xlvi. 4; 1. 37. (Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies, iii. 439.) 5 Dan. iii. 2, 3, 27 (Heb.). • Ezek. xxiii. 14, 15; ib. 24. |