X. EPITAPH

Tradition and the Book of Daniel, unverified by any document known to us, tell how Nebuchadrezzar, after a long reign of uninterrupted victory and prosperity, after beautifying his city with roads and palaces, and erecting fifty-four temples to the gods, fell into a strange insanity, thought himself a beast, walked on all fours, and ate grass.¹⁶⁷ For four years his name disappears from the history and governmental records of Babylonia;¹⁶⁸ it reappears for a moment, and then, in 562 B.C., he passes away.

Within thirty years after his death his empire crumbled to pieces. Nabonidus, who held the throne for seventeen years, preferred archeology to government, and devoted himself to excavating the antiquities of Sumeria while his own realm was going to ruin.¹⁶⁹The army fell into disorder; business men forgot love of country in the sublime internationalism of finance; the people, busy with trade and pleasure, unlearned the arts of war. The priests usurped more and more of the royal power, and fattened their treasuries with wealth that tempted invasion and conquest. When Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates, the anticlericals of Babylon connived to open the city to him, and welcomed his enlightened domination.¹⁷⁰ For two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as part of the greatest empire that history had yet known. Then the exuberant Alexander came, captured the unresisting capital, conquered all the Near East, and drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar.¹⁷¹

The civilization of Babylonia was not as fruitful for humanity as Egypt’s, not as varied and profound as India’s, not as subtle and mature as China’s. And yet it was from Babylonia that those fascinating legends came which, through the literary artistry of the Jews, became an inseparable portion of Europe’s religious lore; it was from Babylonia, rather than from Egypt, that the roving Greeks brought to their city-states and thence to Rome and ourselves, the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, grammar, lexicography, archeology, history, and philosophy. The Greek names for the metals and the constellations, for weights and measures, for musical instruments and many drugs, are translations, sometimes mere transliterations, of Babylonian names.¹⁷² While Greek architecture derived its forms and inspiration from Egypt and Crete, Babylonian architecture, through the ziggurat, led to the towers of Moslem mosques, the steeples and campaniles of medieval art, and the “setback” style of contemporary architecture in America. The laws of Hammurabi became for all ancient societies a legacy comparable to Rome’s gift of order and government to the modern world. Through Assyria’s conquest of Babylon, her appropriation of the ancient city’s culture, and her dissemination of that culture throughout her wide empire; through the long Captivity of the Jews, and the great influence upon them of Babylonian life and thought; through the Persian and Greek conquests, which opened with unprecedented fulness and freedom all the roads of communication and trade between Babylon and the rising cities of Ionia, Asia Minor and Greece—through these and many other ways the civilization of the Land between the Rivers passed down into the cultural endowment of our race. In the end nothing is lost; for good or evil every event has effects forever.