Page images
PDF
EPUB

They rise upon my fancy yet, vast, beautiful | That dream hath fled, that pageant passed : Unreal things and vain,

and grand,

As in past centuries they stood through all Why rise ye up so vividly, so brightly, to that radiant land.

[blocks in formation]

my brain?

The desert hath no palaces, the sands no fountain-stream,

And the brave and beautiful are frail and shadowy as my dream.

And urns of massive crystal bright stood on The palaces of Araby! Oh, there is not a each marble floor,

stone

Where odors of a thousand lands burned To mark the splendor and the pride for ever

brightly evermore.

The palaces of Araby! Vast mirrors shrined in gold

Gave back from every lofty wall splendor a

thousand fold,

crushed and gone;

The lonely traveller hears no more the sound of harp and lute,

And the fountain-voices glad and clear for

evermore are mute.

And the gleaming of uncounted geins and Lost Araby, lost Araby, the world's extinthe blaze of odorous light

guished light,

Streamed down from every fretted dome Thou liest dark and desolate, a thing of shame magnificently bright.

I see them now-" so fancy deems"-those bright Arabian girls. Binding with glittering gems and flowers

their dark and flowing curls,

Or sweeping with their long rich robes throughout those marble halls,

Or holding in their rose-clad bowers gay, gorgeous festivals.

I see them now-" so fancy deems"—those warriors high and bold

Draining their draughts of ruby wine from cups of massive gold,

Or dashing on their battle-steeds like meteors

to the war

With the dazzling gleam of helm and shield and jewelled scimitar.

and blight;

[blocks in formation]
[graphic]

DESCRIPTION AND CONQUEST OF BABYLON.

ABYLON, traversed in the middle by the Euphrates, was surrounded by walls three hundred feet in height, seventy-five feet in thickness, and composing a square of which each side was one hundred and twenty stadia, or nearly fifteen English miles, in length; around the outside of the walls was a broad and deep moat from whence the material for the bricks composing them had been excavated, while one hundred brazen gates served for ingress and egress. Besides, there was an interior wall less thick, but still very strong, and as a still farther obstruction to invaders from the north and north-east another high and thick wall was built at some miles from the city, across much of the space between the Euphrates and the Tigris-called the "wall of Media"-seemingly a little to the north of that point where the two rivers most nearly approach to each approach to each other, and joining the Tigris on its west bank. Of the houses many were three or four stories high, and the broad and straight streets, unknown in a Greek town until the distribution of the peiræceus by Hippodamus, near the time of the Peloponnesian war, were well calculated to heighten the astonishment raised by the whole spectacle in a visitor like Herodotus.

The royal palace, with its memorable terraces or hanging-gardens, formed the central and commanding edifice in one half of the

city, the temple of Belus in the other half. That celebrated temple, standing upon a basis of one square stadium and enclosed in a precinct two square stadia in dimensions, was composed of eight solid towers, built one above the other, and is alleged by Strabo to have been as much as a stadium or furlong high (the height is not specified by Herodotus); it was full of costly decorations and possessed an extensive landed property. Along the banks of the river, in its passage through the city, were built spacious quays, and a bridge on stone piles, for the placing of which, as Herodotus was told, Semiramis had caused the river Euphrates to be drained off into the large side reservoir and lake constructed higher up its

course.

Besides this great town of Babylon itself, there were throughout the neighborhood, between the canals which united the Euphrates and the Tigris, many rich and populous villages, while Borsippa and other considerable towns were situated lower down on the Euphrates itself. And the industry, agricultural as well as manufacturing, of the collective population was not less persevering than productive; their linen, cotton and woollen fabrics and their richly ornamented carpets were celebrated throughout all the Eastern regions. Their cotton was brought in part from islands in the Persian Gulf, while the flocks of sheep tended by the Arabian nomads supplied them with wool finer even than that of Miletus or Tarentum. Besides the Chaldæan order of priests,

there seem to have been among them certain other tribes with peculiar hereditary customs; thus there were three tribes, probably near the mouth of the river, who restricted themselves to the eating of fish alone, but have no evidences of a military caste like that in Egypt, nor any other hereditary profession.

In order to present any conception of what Assyria was in the early days of Grecian history and during the two centuries preceding the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, in 536 B. C., we unfortunately have no witness earlier than Herodotus, who did not see Babylon until near until near a century after that event; about seventy years after its still more disastrous revolt and second subjugation by Darius, Babylonia had become one of the twenty satrapies of the Persian empire, and, besides paying a larger regular tribute than any of the other nineteen, supplied from its exuberant soil provision for the great king and his countless host of attendants during one third part of the year. Yet it was then in a state of comparative degradation, having had its immense walls breached by Darius, and having afterward undergone the ill-usage of Xerxes, who, since he stripped its temples, and especially the venerated temple of Belus, of some of their richest ornaments, would probably be still more reckless in his mode of dealing with the civil edifices. If, in spite of such inflictions, and in spite of that manifest evidence of poverty and suffering in the people which Herodotus expressly notices, it continued to be what he describes, still counted as almost the chief city of the Persian empire, both in the time of the younger Cyrus and in that

of Alexander, we may judge what it must once have been, without either foreign satrap or foreign tribute, under its Assyrian kings and Chaldæan priests, during the last of the two centuries which intervened between the era of Nabonassar and the capture of the city by Cyrus the Great. Though several of the kings during the first of these two centuries had contributed much to the great works of Babylon, yet it was during the second century of the two, after the capture of Nineveh by the Medes, and under Nebuchadnezzar and Nitokris, that the kings attained the maximum of their power and the city its greatest enlargement. It was Nebuchadnezzar who constructed the seaport Teredon at the mouth of the Euphrates, and who probably excavated the long ship-canal of near four hundred miles which joined it, which was perhaps formed partly from a natural western branch of the Euphrates. The brother of the poet Alkæus-Antimenidas, who served in the Babylonian army and distinguished himself by his personal valor (600-580 B. c.)-would have seen it in its full glory; he is the earliest Greek of whom we hear individually in connection with the Babylonians. It marks strikingly the contrast between the Persian kings and the Babylonian kings on whose ruin they rose that, while the latter incurred immense expense to facilitate the communication between Babylon and the sea, the former artificially impeded the lower course of the Tigris in order that their residence at Susa might be out of the reach of assailants.

That which strikes us most, and which must have struck the first Grecian visitors much more, both in Assyria and Egypt, is the unbounded command of naked human

strength possessed by these early kings, and the effect of mere mass and indefatigable perseverance, unaided either by theory or by artifice, in the accomplishment of gigantic results. In Assyria the results were in great part exaggerations of enterprises in themselves useful to the people for irrigation and defence; religious worship was ministered to in the like manner, as well as the personal fancies and pomp of their kings, while in Egypt the latter class predominates more over the former. We scarcely trace in either of them the higher sentiment of art which owes its first marked development to Grecian susceptibility and genius. But the human mind is in every stage of its progress, and most of all in its rude and unreflecting period, strongly impressed by visible and tangible magnitude and awe-struck by the evidences of great power. To this feeling for what exceeded the demands of practical convenience and security the wonders both in Egypt and Assyria chiefly appealed, while the execution of such colossal works demonstrates habits of regular industry, a concentrated population under one government, and, above all, an implicit submission to the regal and priestly sway, contrasting forcibly with the small autonomous communities of Greece and Western Europe, wherein the will of the individual citizen was so much more energetic and uncontrolled. The acquisition of habits of regular industry, so foreign to the natural temper of man, was brought about in Egypt and Assyria, in China and Hindostan, before it had acquired any footing in Europe; but it was purchased either by prostrate obedience to a despotic rule or by imprisonment within the chain of a consecrated institution

of caste. Even during the Homeric period of Greece these countries had attained a certain civilization in mass without the acquisition of any high mental qualities or the development of any individual genius; the religious and political sanction, sometimes combined and sometimes separate, determined for every one his mode of life, his creed, his duties and his place in society, without leaving any scope for the will or reason of the agent himself. Now, the Phenicians and Carthaginians manifest a degree of individual impulse and energy which puts them greatly above this type of civilization, though in their tastes, social feelings and religion they are still Asiatic. And even the Babylonian community, though their Chaldæan priests are the parallel of the Egyptian priests with a less measure of ascendency, combine with their industrial aptitude and constancy of purpose something of that strenuous ferocity of character which marks so many people of the Semitic race, Jews, Phenicians and Carthaginians. These Semitic people stand distinguished as well from the Egyptian life-enslaved by childish caprices and antipathies and by endless frivolities of ceremonial detail-as from the flexible, many-sided and self-organizing Greek, not only capable of opening both for himself and for the human race the highest walks of intellect and the full creative agency of art, but also gentler by far in his private sympathies and dealings than his contemporaries on the Euphrates, the Jordan or the Nile; for we are not, of course, to compare him with the exigences of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Both in Babylonia and in Egypt the vast

monuments, embankments and canals executed by collective industry appeared the more remarkable to an ancient traveller by contrast with the desert regions and predatory tribes immediately surrounding them. West of the Euphrates the sands of Arabia extended northward with little interruption to the latitude of the Gulf of Issus; they even covered the greater part of Mesopotamia, or the country between the Euphrates and the Tigris, beginning a few days' journey northward of the wall called the wall of Media, above mentioned, which, extending westward from the Tigris to one of the canals joining the Euphrates, had been erected to protect Babylon against the incursion of the Medes. Eastward of the Tigris, again, along the range of Mount Zagros, but at no great distance from the river, were found the Elymai, Kossæi, Uxii, Parætakeni, etc. -tribes which, to use the expression of Strabo, "as inhabiting a poor country, were under the necessity of living by the plunder of their neighbors." Such rude bands of depredators on the one side, and such wide tracts of sand on the two others, without vegetation or water, contrasted powerfully with the industry and productiveness of Babylonia. Babylon itself is to be considered, not as one continuous city, but as a city together with its surrounding district. enclosed within immense walls, the height and thickness of which were in themselves a sufficient defence; so that the place was assailable only at its gates. In case of need it would serve as shelter for the persons and property of the village inhabitants in Babylonia. Spacious as Babylon was, however, it is affirmed by Strabo that Ninus or Nineveh was considerably larger.

CAPTURE OF BABYLON BY CYRUS.

Herodotus informs us that the Babylonian queen Nitokris-mother of that very Labynetus who was king when Cyrus attacked the place-had been apprehensive of invasion from the Medes after their capture of Nineveh, and had executed many laborious works near the Euphrates for the purpose of obstructing their approach. Moreover, there existed what was called the "wall of Media"-probably built by her, but certainly built prior to the Persian conquest-one hundred feet high and twenty feet thick, across the entire space of seventyfive miles which joined the Tigris with one of the canals of the Euphrates. And the canals themselves, as we may see by the march of the Ten Thousand Greeks after the battle of Kunaxa, presented means of defence altogether insuperable by a rude army such as that of the Persians. On the east the territory of Babylonia was defended by the Tigris, which cannot be forded lower than the ancient Nineveh or the modern Mosul. In addition to these ramparts, natural as well as artificial, to protect the territory-populous, cultivated, productive and offering every motive to its inhabitants to resist even the entrance of an enemy we are told that the Babylonians were so thoroughly prepared for the inroad of Cyrus that they had accumulated a store of provisions within the city walls for many years.

Strange as it may seem, we must suppose that the king of Babylon, after all the cost and labor spent in providing defences for the territory, voluntarily neglected to avail himself of them, suffered the invader to tread down the fertile Babylonia without resist

« PreviousContinue »