e Euphrates during the annual inundation. Upon these works his
prisoners of war, Syrians and Egyptians, Jews and Arabs, were employed in
vast numbers. The great wall of Babylon was set up anew; so was the temple
of Nebo at Borsippa; the reservoir at Sippara, the royal canal, and a part
at least of Lake Pallacopas, were excavated; Kouti, Sippara, Borsippa,
Babel, rose upon their own ruins. Nebuchadnezzar was to Chaldaea what
Rameses II. was to Egypt, and there is not a place in Babylon or about it
where his name and the signs of his marvellous activity cannot be
found."[80]

Nebuchadnezzar reigned forty-three years (604-561), and left Babylon the
largest and finest city of Asia. After his death the decadence was rapid. A
few years saw several kings succeed one another upon the throne, while a
revolution was being accomplished upon the plateau of Iran which was
destined to be fatal to Chaldaea. The supremacy in that region passed from
the feeble and exhausted Medes into the hands of the Persians, another
people of the same stock. The latter were a tribe of mountaineers teeming
with native energy, and their strength had been systematically organized by
a young and valiant chief, in whom they had full confidence because he had
given them confidence in themselves. CYRUS began by leading them to the
conquest of Media, Assyria, and Asia Minor, and by forcing the nations who
dwelt between the southern confines of Persia and the mountains of Upper
India to acknowledge his supremacy. Finally, he collected his forces for an
attack upon Chaldaea, and, in 536, Babylon fell before his arms.

* * * * *

And yet Babylon did not disappear from history in a day; she was not
destroyed, like Nineveh, by a single blow. Cyrus does not appear to have
injured her. She remained, under the Persian kings, one of the chief cities
of the empire. But she did not give up her habit of revolting whenever she
had a chance, and DARIUS, the son of Hystaspes, tired of besieging her,
ended by dismantling her fortifications, while XERXES went farther, and
pillaged her temples. But the chief buildings remained standing. Towards
the middle of the fifth century they excited the admiration of Herodotus,
and, fifty years later, that of Ctesias. Strabo, on the other hand, found
the place almost a desert.[81] Babylon had been ruined by the foundation of
Seleucia, on the Tigris, at a distance of rather more than thirty miles
from the