It was quite independent of that in Egypt, and consequently differed from the Egyptian in many respects. Unlike Egypt, Babylonia had a rainy season; nevertheless she was mainly dependent upon the overflow of the rivers for her irrigation and her fertility. As she possessed two rivers, her breadth was greater than that of Egypt, but she lacked the contiguity of protecting deserts, such as Egypt possessed. All through her history her fertile plains attracted the mountain dwellers of the East and the peoples of the West. Subject to frequent invasion by these, Babylonia had no long peaceful development such as Egypt enjoyed before the Hyksos invasion. From before the beginning of written history race mingled with race in this great valley, invasions were frequent, and the construction of permanent empires difficult.

The breadth of the Mesopotamian Valley affected also the building materials and the character of the art. Stone was much more difficult to obtain than in Egypt. Clay only was abundant. All buildings were consequently of brick. These structures were far less enduring than those in Egypt; their upper parts have disintegrated and buried the lower portions. Babylonian ruins are accordingly all under ground. The abundant clay was also used by the Babylonians as writing material. When baked, it proved far more enduring than the Egyptian papyrus. Thus, notwithstanding the general similarities which the Mesopotamian Valley presents to Egypt, its differences profoundly affected Babylonian history and Babylonian art.

2. The Preservation of Antiquities. Babylonian cities were usually built on terraces of brick. The walls of the cities and their buildings were constructed of the same material. Refuse from the houses in these towns was always thrown out into the streets, so that, as the centuries passed, the streets were gradually elevated. The walls of the brick houses gradually became unstable in the lapse of time, and as the houses were repaired they were brought up to the level of the street. Consequently even in peaceful times the mounds on which the cities were built gradually grew higher. Most of these cities were at various times destroyed in warfare. Sometimes all the houses would be partially demolished and the site would be for a time practically uninhabited. When at length the place was repeopled, the top of the mound would be smoothed off and taken as the base of a new city. In this way through the many centuries of Babylonian history the sites of her

cities have become great mounds. When these cities finally fell into ruin, the clay of the upper part of the walls gradually disintegrated in the weather and formed a coating of earth over the whole, which preserved the foundations of the walls both of cities. and houses, as well as the inscribed clay, stone tablets, and the works of art buried underneath.

Connected with each Babylonian and Assyrian temple was a kind of staged tower, shaped in a general way like the stepped pyramid of Zoser at Sakkarah in Egypt. The Babylonians called these towers Ziggurats. As the bricks of these towers decayed, they formed in connection with the city mound a kind of hillock or peak, which varied in accordance with the height of the tower. The ruin of the Ziggurat at Birs Nimrûd, the ancient Borsippa, is one of the most imposing to be seen in ancient Babylonia; it was long thought to be the original of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:9). It thus came about that no ancient temple of Babylonia, like some of those in Egypt, has remained above ground. Explorers have had to dig to discover antiquities; (see Fig. 22).

3. The Discovery of Antiquities: By Benjamin of Tudela.The first man from western Europe who traveled through Babylonia and Assyria and noted their ruins was a Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, in the kingdom of Navarre. Leaving home about 1160 A. D., he traveled through Palestine, crossed the desert by way of Tadmor, visited Mosul opposite ancient Nineveh, and went southward to the site of Babylon. He also saw the ruin of Birs Nimrûd, and believed it to be the Tower of Babel. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries many other travelers visited the Mesopotamian Valley and described what they saw. Some of these, toward the close of the eighteenth century, described curious inscriptions which they had seen there on bricks. This information led the British East India Company in 1797 to instruct its resident at Bussorah, in southern Babylonia, to try to secure some of these inscriptions. This he did, and early in 1801 the first case of inscribed bricks arrived at the East India House in London, where they are still preserved.

By Rich.-Early in the nineteenth century Claude James Rich became resident of the East India Company at Bagdad. In his travels through the region he visited the mounds of Hillah (Babylon), Kouyunjik (Nineveh), and others, where he made some slight excavations, and found many inscriptions. The smaller ones he

added to his collection, but many of them were of too monumental a character to be removed. Through these efforts a wide-spread interest was aroused.

By Botta and Place.-In 1842 the French government created a vice-consulate at Mosul, opposite the site of ancient Nineveh, and appointed to the position Paul Emil Botta, who had served as French consul at Alexandria in Egypt. Botta's mission was made in part archæological. In December, 1842, Botta began digging in the mound of Kouyunjik, the site of ancient Nineveh. Here he worked for three months. As he found only a few inscribed bricks and the fragments of some bas-reliefs, he became discouraged, and changed the field of his operations to a mound called Khorsabad, situated about fourteen miles to the northeast of Kouyunjik. Here he discovered a palace filled with interesting inscribed basreliefs made of alabaster, as well as a city about a mile in circumference. Under the corners of the palace and under the city gates were many inscribed cylinders of clay. This proved to be the palace and city built by Sargon, King of Assyria (722-705 B. C.), as his new capital. He named it Dur-Sharrukin, or Sargonsburgh. His name had so entirely disappeared from ancient literature that only one reference to him has survived, that in Isaiah 20:1, but here was his palace arising from the dust together with abundant annals of his reign. (See Part II, p. 369, ff.)

Botta and his successor, Victor Place, excavated intermittently at Khorsabad for ten years, uncovering the palace and making a plan of it, excavating the city walls and gates, studying the drainage of the ancient town, and fully describing the whole. Although a part of the antiquities found were lost in the Tigris by the wreck of a raft on which they were being floated down the river, a large collection reached France, where they are preserved in the Louvre.

By Layard. The success of Botta fired the enthusiasm of Austen Henry Layard, a young Englishman of Huguenot descent, who began to excavate in 1845 at Nimrûd, a mound further down the Tigris than Mosul, and the site of the Biblical Calah (Gen. 10:11). His money was at first furnished by a few friends, but as he soon discovered a royal palace there similar to the one Botta had unearthed at Khorsabad, the trustees of the British Museum commissioned him to excavate for them. He thus continued the work intermittently until 1849. During this time he spent most of his energy upon the mound of Kouyunjik, where he discovered