Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria

"I will tell thee, Izdubar, how I was saved from the flood," begins Hâsisadra, in answer to his descendant's question, "also will I impart to thee the decree of the great gods....

24. A great deal of additional interest in the elder Sargon of Agadê has lately been excited by an extraordinary discovery connected with him, which produced a startling revolut...

14. There is one feature in the Biblical narrative, which, at first sight, wears the appearance of mythical treatment: it is the familiar way in which God is represented as comi...

10. "In this dilemma," says Layard, "I ordered a recess to be cut into the bank of the river where it rose perpendicularly from the water's edge. By screening the front with ree...

1. In every child's life there comes a moment when it ceases to take the world and all it holds as a matter of course, when it begins to wonder and to question. The first, the g...

14. Things began greatly to change towards the end of the last century. Yet the mounds of Assyria and Babylonia were still suffered to keep their secret unrevealed. This want of...

8. That the genealogies of Chap. X. of Genesis should be understood in this sense, has long been admitted by scientists and churchmen. St. Augustine, one of the greatest among t...

1. Men, whatever their pursuit or business, can live only in one of two ways: they can stay where they are, or they can go from one place to another. In the present state of the...

5. The instinct of religion--"religiosity," as it has been called--is inborn to man; like the faculty of speech, it belongs to man, and to man only, of all living beings. So muc...

35. There are inscriptions of Hammurabi's son. But after him a new catastrophe seems to have overtaken Chaldea. He is succeeded by a line of foreign kings, who must have obtaine...

10. However that may be, 5000 B.C. is a moderate and probable date. But ancient nations were not content with such, when they tried to locate and classify their own beginnings....

3. Thus, in the traditions of every ancient nation, there is a vast and misty tract of time, expressed, if at all, in figures of appalling magnitude--hundreds of thousands, nay,...

17. The belief that certain words and imprecations could break the power of demons or sorcerers must have naturally led to the notion that to wear such imprecations, written on...

10. There is a distinction--the distinction of sex--which runs through the whole of animated nature, dividing all things that have life into two separate halves--male and female...

21. It is just the contrary in Babylonia. It can boast few handsome ruins or sculptures. The platforms and main walls of many palaces and temples have been known from the names...

29. Such is a not incomplete outline of this strange and primitive religion, the religion of a people whose existence was not suspected twenty-five years ago, yet which claims,...

6. Thus it is that on all the points of the globe where sometime great and flourishing nations have held their place, then yielded to other nations or to absolute devastation--i...

"The keeper went and opened the gate: 'Enter, O Lady, and may the halls of the Land whence there is no return be gladdened by thy presence.' At the first gate he bade her enter...

11. The temple is raised on a platform exceptionally low--only a few feet above the level of the plain; the entire height, including the platform, was 156 feet in a perpendicula...

10. Our imagination longs to reconstruct those gigantic piles as they must have struck the beholder in their towering hugeness, approached from the plain probably by several sta...

PAGE SHAMASH THE SUN-GOD. _From a tablet in the British Museum._ _Frontispiece._ 1. CUNEIFORM CHARACTERS _Ménant._ 10 2. TEMPLE OF ÊA AT ERIDHU _Hommel._ 23 3. VIEW OF EUPHRATES...

8. It must be confessed that, amidst the nations of Western Asia, this level was, on the whole, not a very lofty one. Both the Hamitic and Semitic races were, as a rule, of a na...

Arabs, their conquest and prosperous rule in Mesopotamia, 5; Baghdad, their capital, 5; nomads in Mesopotamia, 8; their superstitious horror of the ruins and sculptures, 11; the...

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 24654-h.htm or 24654-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/6/5/...

Temples of Êa and Meridug at Eridhu, 246; of the Moon-god at Ur, ib.; of Anu and Nana at Erech, ib.; of Shamash and Anunit at Sippar and Agadê, 247; of Bel Maruduk at Babylon an...