But we must quit this interesting field of research, and accompany our historian on his scientific pilgrimage. Babylon is the next place marked on our way-bill; but before we proceed thither let us stop a moment to notice the interesting fact that Herodotus was acquainted with the singular distribution of sand over a strip of country extending from the Sahara of Africa to Mooltan. The evidence of this in the historian's work is scattered over many places, and we have not room to quote them all. But our readers, we are sure, will be satisfied with the authority of Humboldt for this statement. This is what he says*: "The venerable father of history, Herodotus, so long insufficiently appreciated, has in the true spirit of a comprehensive observer of nature, described all the deserts of northern Africa, Yemen, Kerman, and Mekran, (the Jedroria of the Greeks) as far even as Mooltan in Western India, as one sole connected sea of sand."

Babylon lies on the edge of one of the divisions of this desert; our last paragraph, therefore, has not carried us far out of our way. The first thing that arrested our traveller's attention was the extreme fertility of the soil. There was little or no rain, he observed, to water the fields, nor did the river overflow its banks as in Egypt, but the want was supplied by artificial means of irrigation. The chief produce was corn, which yielded continually as much as two hundred fold; but there was no appearance of any trees except the palm. This description coincides exactly with that of Xenophon who visited the country about half a century after our historian; but so great an alteration has since taken place, through the destruction of the artificial appliances to which it owed its fertility, that it cannot now be verified. The industrious race that once occupied this plain and rendered it a fruitful garden, has been succeeded by wandering tribes of Arabs, who leave no vestige behind them but such as is left by fire, the mildew, or the sword.

The peculiar boat used for the conveyance of up-country produce down the Tigris and Euphrates has not altered since the time of Herodotus. He describes it as made of leather stretched on a frame-work of Armenian willows, as round as a shield, and having no distinction of shape in the prow and stern. The vessel was steered by two spars worked by two men standing upright, one of whom drew his spar in while the other thrust

his out.

His description of the mighty city itself cannot of course, at least in its details, be verified in the present day. "Babylon, the glory of kingdoms. The beauty of the Chaldee's excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It Views of Nature, p. 9.

shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces."*

The substantial accuracy, however, of his description, as to the position and extent of the city, is gradually being attested by modern research, and his statements regarding the building material, the place (Is, the modern Hit,) from which the bitumen was obtained, and the use of layers of reeds to give stability to the brick work, have been found to be perfectly correct.

But by far the most interesting part of his account is that of the great temple of Jupiter Belus. We give it in Mr. Wheeler's language:†

"In the other division of the city was the immense temple of Belus, or Baal, the deification of the sun as he was worshipped by the Babylonians. This temple was a square building, a quarter of a mile in length and breadth. In the midst of it rose a solid square tower, one-eighth of a mile in length and breadth, upon which were built seven towers, one upon the top of the other, so that there were eight in all. An ascent was on the outside, and ran spirally round all the towers. Halfway up there was a landing-place and seats for resting on. In the topmost tower was a spacious chapel, splendidly furnished, with a large couch and a golden table, but containing no images of the god. The Chaldeans who were priests of Belus, said that the god sometimes came down to earth, and slept on the couch in the chapel. Beneath this chapel there was another, and within it was a large golden statue of Belus in a sitting posture with a magnificent table of solid gold before it. The throne on which Belus was sitting and likewise the step to it were all made of pure gold. The Chaldeans told Herodotus that the gold altogether weighed eight hundred talents, which would be equal to 22 tons, and the present value of the metal calculating £4 to the ounce, would be £2,365,440 sterling. Outside the temple was an immense altar, upon which full-grown sheep were sacrificed, and on which the Chaldeans consumed every year, at the great annual festival in honour of Belus, a thousand talents' weight of frankincense, which was equivalent to about 25 tons. There was also another altar of gold, upon which only sucklings were sacrificed to the god. Herodotus was likewise told that there had been erected within the precincts of the temple an immense statue of solid gold. Darius, the son of Hystaspes, intended to carry it away, but was restrained by his superstitious Vol. ii. page 283-4.

MARCH, 1856.

Isaiah, xix.

D

fears. Xerxes, his son and successor, however, not only boldly carried it off, but killed the priest who forbade him to remove it.".

This last historical fact, which occurred about thirty years before Herodotus' visit, accounts for the ruinous state in which he found the temple. It has long been thought that the remarkable mount in the western part of the modern Hillah represents the remains of this famous temple. Heeren argues strenuously in support of this conclusion, although, when he wrote, only three of the eight stories mentioned by Herodotus had been discovered. The identification has since been satisfactorily completed. The following extract from a lecture by Colonel Rawlinson, delivered before the Bombay Asiatic Society, gives us the results of this important verification:

"A remarkable ruin, named Birs Nimrud, and situated on a mound in the vicinity of Babylon, had long been an object of curiosity to all travellers and antiquaries. The great height of the mound, its prodigious extent, and its state of tolerable preservation, contrasting so favorably with the shapeless heaps in the neighbourhood, had very generally suggested the identity of the ruin with the temple of Belus, so minutely described by Herodotus, and as there were large vitrified masses of brickwork on the summit of the mound, which presented the appearance of having been subjected to the influence of intense heat, conjectures that the Birs might even represent the ruins of the tower of Babel, destroyed by lightning from heaven, had been not unfrequently hazarded and believed. To resolve the many interesting questions connected with this ruin, Colonel Rawlinson undertook last autumn its systematic examination. Experimental trenches were opened in vertical lines from the summit to the base, and wherever walls were met with, they were laid bare by horizontal galleries being run along them. After two months of preliminary excavation, Colonel Rawlinson visited the works, and profiting by the experience acquired in his previous researches, he was able in the course of half an hour's examination to detect the spots where the commemorative records were deposited, and to extract, to the utter astonishment of the Arabs, from concealed cavities in the walls, the two large inscribed cylinders of baked clay which were exhibited to the meeting, and which were now in as fine a state of preservation as when they were deposited in their hiding place by Nebuchadnezzar above twenty-five centuries ago. From these cylinders it appeared that the temple had been originally built by the king Merodach-adanakhi, at the close of the twelfth century B. C., and probably in celebration of his victory over Tiglath-Pileser I.; that it had subsequently fallen into ruin, and had been in consequence subjected to a thorough repair by Nebuchadnezzar in about B. C., 580. The curious fact was further elicited, that it was named the "Temple of the seven Spheres," and that it had been laid out in conformity with the Chaldean planetary system, seven stages being erected one above the other, according to the order of the seven planets, and their stages being

colored after the hue of the planets to which they were respectively dedicated. Thus, the lower stage belonging to Saturn, was black; the second, sacred to Jupiter, was orange; the third, or that of Mars, was red; the fourth, of the Sun, golden; the fifth, of Venus, white; the sixth, of Mercury, blue; and the seventh, of the Moon, a silvery green. In several cases these colors were still clearly to be distinguished, the appropriate hue being obtained by the quality and burning of the bricks, and it was thus ascertained that the vitrified masses at the summit were the result of design and not of accident-the sixth stage, sacred to Mercury, having been subjected to an intense and prolonged fire, in order to produce the blue slag color, which was emblematic of that planet. It further appeared that we were indebted to this peculiarity of construction for the preservation of the monument, when so many of its sister temples had utterly perished, the blue slag cap at the summit of the pile resisting the action of the weather, and holding together the lower stages which would otherwise have crumbled, while it also afforded an immovable pedestal for the upper stage and for the shrine which probably crowned the pile. The only other point of interest which was ascertained from the cylinders was that the temple in question did not belong to Babylon, but to the neighbouring city of Borsipa, the title of Birs by which it is now known being a mere abbreviation of the ancient name of the city."

Colonel Rawlinson, it will be observed, has proved that the repair and embellishment of the temple, not its construction, is to be attributed to Nebuchadnezzar. This distinction, if we mistake not, is preserved by Herodotus. He says nothing about the builder of the temple, nor indeed does he tell us expressly to what monarch it owed its magnificence. But he speaks of palaces and temples having been beautified in a very splendid manner by Nitocris, among which no doubt the temple of Belus is to be reckoned. It has been objected to Herodotus' account of Babylon that he does not mention the name of Nebuchadnezzar, but attributes all the great works to Semiramis and Nitocris. This silence may probably be accounted for by his having reserved what he had to say of the Babylonian kings for his promised Assyrian history,-which has not come down to our times. It is impossible that he should have been ignorant of Nebuchadnezzar. He was perfectly acquainted with the relative historical positions of Nineveh and Babylon, for he tells us that the seat of government of the Assyrian empire was transferred to the latter city after the destruction of Nineveh, which event, it will be remembered, immediately preceded the accession of Nebuchadnezzar to

It is worth observing that a variety of colours was also exhibited on the seven circles of walls which environed the king's palace and treasury at Ecbatana, although the colours agree neither in nature nor order with those discovered on the temple of Belus. Herod. i. 98.

the throne of his new kingdom. A passage in Diodorus, who speaks of Nebuchadnezzar's having constructed hanging gardens and laid out spacious parks to please his consort, (supposed with good reason to be Nitocris), is appealed to as explaining Herodotus' substitution of her name for that of her renowned husband. While we admit that this explanation is probable, we think it more likely, as well as more in accordance with Herodotus' language, to suppose that Nitocris personally superintended these embellishments while Nebuchadnezzar was absent from his capital during the prosecution of his numerous wars.

Our notice of the Persian empire, the conqueror and successor of the Babylonian, must be brief. Early Persian history is as yet in its infancy. Partly owing to the comparatively late periodthe sixth century before Christ-when this empire took its place among the ruling powers of the world, partly also perhaps on account of its greater distance from Greece, the source of all our early historical information, our notices of the original state of the country and its inhabitants are but scanty. We shall touch on one or two salient points in Herodotus' account. His description of the Persians, as being originally the occupants of a small mountainous tract lying to the north east of the Persian gulf, is highly probable. The peculiar virtues and the military pursuits which he attributes to them are precisely such as would be most readily developed at such a period and in such a locality. He particularly notices their love of truth and rigid self-denial,-qualities, we very much fear, which not only do not distinguish their modern representatives, but which have given place to the opposite vices of extreme luxuriousness and the most unblushing disregard of truth. The records of the people themselves point to the same locality and the same habits of life. When they left their original abodes, these records tell us, they were shepherds and herdsmen with no property but their cattle. As they increased in number, the exigencies of their position required that they should divide their pursuits, one part following pastoral and agricultural pursuits as far as the nature of the country would permit, while the other part were compelled to follow their original half-savage and military occupations.

The fullest verification, however, of Herodotus' statements in this portion of his history has been supplied within the last few years by the decipherment of a cuneiform inscription on a rock at Behistan in Persia. This rock, our readers are probably aware, is situated on the highway that leads from Babylon to the east, and rises abruptly from the plain to the height of seventeen hundred feet. The surface of the rock, it appears, was first carefully smoothed and then coated with a silicious