towers of Babillli, or towers of Babel.

In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered
Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-powered by the Akkadians,
one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common
dialect and who are known as the "Semites," because in the olden days
people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the
three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced to
submit to the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe whose
great King Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy
city of Babylon and who gave his people a set of laws which made the
Babylonian state the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next
the Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-ran the
Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not carry away. They
in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert God, Ashur,
who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the
center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia
and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until the end
of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans,
also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and made that city the most
important capital of that day. Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their
Kings, encouraged the study of science, and our modern knowledge of
astronomy and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles
which were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a crude
tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and overthrew the
empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years later, they in turn were
overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the Fertile Valley, the
old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next
came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the
second centre of the world's civilisation, became a vast wilderness
where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.

MOSES

THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE

SOME time during the twentieth century before our era, a small and
unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left its old home, which was
situated in the land of Ur on the mouth of the Euphrates, and had tried
to find new pastures within the domain of the Kings of Babylonia. They
had been driven away by the royal soldiers and t