ood how to make bricks and set them, must
soon have come into use. These towers were built upon artificial mounds
which were in themselves higher than the highest house or palm. The
platforms on their summits gave therefore the most favourable conditions
possible for the interrogation of the heavens before the invention of the
telescope.[91]

Thanks to the climate and to these great observatories which rose very
early in Chaldaean history all over the plain, the skies could be read like
an open book; and the Chaldaeans were fond of such reading, because it
afforded them, as they thought, a sure means of predicting the future. They
had no great belief in the power of their most formidable conjurations to
affect the majestic regularity of the heavenly movements--a regularity
which must have impressed each generation more strongly than the last, as
it compared its own experience with the registered observations of those
that had gone before it. But they could not persuade themselves that the
powerful genii who guided those great bodies on their unending voyage could
be indifferent to the destinies of man, and that there was no bond of
union, no mysterious connection, between him and them. They pretended to
discover this hidden bond. When a child uttered its first cry, an intimate
relation, they declared, was established between the new life and some one
of the countless bodies that people space. The impassive star, they said,
governed the life and fortune of the mortal who, perhaps, ignorantly looked
upon himself as his own master and the master of some of those about him.
The future of each man was decided by the character of the star that
presided at his birth, and according to the position occupied by it in the
sky at the time of any important action of his life, that action would be
fortunate in its issue or the reverse.[92] These statements contain the
germ of all the future developments of astrology. Among all civilized
peoples this imaginary science has at last fallen from its former repute.
From the remotest antiquity down to the end of the sixteenth century, and,
in some places, to a much later date, it enjoyed a rare power and prestige.
Traces of these are yet to be found in more than one familiar expression
recalling the beliefs and ideas that took shape in the plains of
Mesopotamia long before the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh were raised upon
the banks of its two great rivers.

Astrology could not fail to smo