as it were, face to face with Sennacherib, with Nebuchadnezzar,
and with Cyrus, with those whose names have been familiar to us from
childhood, but who have hitherto been to us mere names, mere shadowy
occupants of an unreal world. Thanks to the research of the last
half-century, we can now penetrate into the details of their daily life,
can examine their religious ideas, can listen to them as they themselves
recount the events of their own time or the traditions of the past which
had been handed down to them.

It is more especially in Babylonia and Assyria that we find illustrations
of the earlier chapters of Genesis, as, indeed, is only natural. The
Semitic language spoken in these two countries was closely allied to that
of the Old Testament, as closely, in fact, as two modern English dialects
are allied to each other; and it was from Babylonia, from Ur of the
Chaldees, now represented by the mounds of Mugheir, that Abraham made his
way to the future home of his descendants in the west. It is to Babylonia
that the Biblical accounts of the Fall, of the Deluge, and of the
Confusion of Tongues particularly look: two of the rivers of Paradise were
the Tigris and Euphrates, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, and
the city built around the Tower which men designed should reach to heaven
was Babel or Babylon. Babylonia was an older kingdom than Assyria, which
took its name from the city of Assur, now Kalah Sherghat, on the Tigris,
the original capital of the country. It was divided into two halves, Accad
(Gen. x. 10) being Northern Babylonia, and Sumir, the Shinar of the Old
Testament, Southern Babylonia. The primitive populations of both Sumir and
Accad were related, not to the Semitic race, but to the tribes which
continued to maintain themselves in the mountains of Elam down to a late
day. They spoke two cognate dialects, which were agglutinative in
character, like the languages of the modern Turks and Fins; that is to
say, the relations of grammar were expressed by coupling words together,
each of which retained an independent meaning of its own. Thus
_in-nin-sun_ is "he gave it," literally "he-it-gave," _e-mes-na_ is "of
houses," literally "house-many-of." At an early date, which cannot yet,
however, be exactly determined, the Sumirians and Accadians were overrun
and conquered by the Semitic Babylonians of later history, Accad being
apparently the first half of the country to fall under the sway of the
new-comer