Y cimer and the "lute. "And where the harp, the sackbut, and the psaltery, and other instruments of sweet sound had called the idolatrous Chaldean," and the superstitious populace, to bow down to Bel, or to prostrate themselves before Nebo; there was heard the shriek of the owl and the vulture, every one with his mate. At this period, however, the inner walls of the citus dill evant." At length they fell down' in different places, and being never repaired, varibei8-01 ous accidents completed their destruction. The bark of Tovaf game royaf game, which along adi bue d were comparatively paints, abandoned the place, and returned o the desert, and the mount mountains. Serpents and scorpions alone remained, so that it became unet no bazoga and the curious traveller could safe to visit it;* noble to only gratify his love of antiquarian research, at Maundeville who travelled in Asia in hemydue the tower of Babel. 19. thus to : 290 E -"Babylone is in the grete desertes of Arabye, upon the waye as men gon to warde the kyngdome of Chaldee. But it is fulle longe sithe ony man durste neyghe to the toure; for it is alle deserte, and fulle of dragons, and grete serpentes, and fulle of dyverse veneymous bestes alle abouten."-Quoted by Porter. the hazard of his life. The Euphrates, which formerly had flowed through the city, finding its course obstructed, and not meeting with an easy egress among the rubbish of dilapidated streets and palaces, its waters spread abroad among the ruins and fallen ramparts, until the whole demesne degenerated into a marsh. 10 Alexander, indeed, intending to fix the capital of his Asiatic conquests at Babylon, had attempt. ed to repair the old canals, and to open up the channel of the river, in the examination of which→ the last public work he was engaged in-he steered his own galley towards the Pollacopas. He had also ordered ten thousand men to remove the debris of the tower of Belus, with the view of re-building it. But to prove the impotency of human purposes, when they run counter to the decrees of God, this prince was cut off in the midst of his labours; and after vainly seeking, in the cooling waves of Euphrates, day after day, some relief from the fever which consumed him, •he was carried back again over the river from the garden-house to the palace, where, on the evening of the eleventh day of his illness, "the king ali B expired." After his death the undertaking was abandoned. But the Parthian and the Sassanian dynasties had succeeded the Macedonian; and, as we have already related, Ctesiphon and Seleucia had received into their splendid cities the whole of the remaining population of Babylon. These again have fallen in their turn; and of the former little more now remains than a part of the arch of Chosroes, which, seen from afar on the plain, presents a melancholy emblem of the glory of its master. The splendour of the court of this monarch is still the perpetual theme of oriental romance and to give the young reader some idea of the hereditary taste for magnificence preserved by the inhabitants of Ctesiphon,—which even twelve centuries after the fall of Babylon prove her to have been a lineal descendant of the As there is something in the circumstances of his death not dissimilar to those which preceded the last moments of Belshazzar, inasmuch as the banqueting room seemed, in both instances, to have been the anti-chamber to the grave, -- we have given the account of it in the Appendix, see note H. + Kinneir.groll ༣༣༩༩ lady of kingdoms, we quote, in the Appendix, a description of the favourite residence of her monarch after the sack of his royal city.* But to resume our subject,—Babylon thus depopulated, ruined, and deserted, and overflowed by the river, became literally pools of water, and a haunt of those wild birds who live in the solitary places of the earth, and build their nests amid the reeds of swamps and marshes. The very spot which this celebrated city once occupied upon the earth's surface, has long been matter of inquiry and conjecture; and perhaps, even at this moment, it is not altogether satisfactorily ascertained.† Jehovah has watched over it to destroy it, and it has indeed been swept with the besom of destruction; and as a traveller in Lacedæmon, who had crossed an unknown stream, afterwards exclaimed, in all the pensiveness of classic recollection, "C'etoit l'Eurotas que je passois ainsi, sans See Note I. + Niebuhr trod the ground of Babylon almost without knowing it; he mentions hollow tumuli for three or four miles, and some trees growing there not natives of Babylon.-Vincent's Notes to Nearchus, p. 465. stoup 94-¿mobymad to yb le, connoitre!"-so the voyager, in the days that are past, has often perhaps, on some rude raft, sailed over the site of the " golden city," unconscious that mighty Babylon slept bedagog low.* " Whether all the uncertainty so long experienced regarding the actual locality of Babylon has been removed by modern geographers and travellers, it is hardly possible to determine. We shall first endeavour to notice a few of their remarks where they are contradictory, and then shew how DOOR 95 bus far they agree. D'Ainville observes, "that this superb city was fallen into such a state of decay under the Parthians, that what its walls contained was only a large park, serving for their kings taking the In the middle of winter the Euphrates rises a little, but falls again soon after, and in April is at at the full. It overflows the country, and fills all the canals; the ruins of Babylon are inundated. At Felujiah, twelve miles west of Bagdad, they sail flat bottomed boats and rafts as far as within a few hundred yards of the Imaun Mousa gate.—Rich's Memoir of the Ruins of Babylon. |