for the extent of its dominions. Less ancient than the
Egyptian, it claims the advantage of priority over every empire or
kingdom which has grown up upon the soil of Asia. The Arian, Turanian,
and even the Semitic tribes, appear to have been in the nomadic
condition, when the Cushite settlers in Lower Babylonia betook themselves
to agriculture, erected temples, built cities, and established a strong
and settled government. The leaven which was to spread by degrees
through the Asiatic peoples was first deposited on the shores of the
Persian Gulf at the mouth of the Great River; and hence civilization,
science, letters, art, extended themselves northward, and eastward, and
westward. Assyria, Media, Semitic Babylonia, Persia, as they derived
from Chaldaea the character of their writing, so were they indebted to
the same country for their general notions of government and
administration, for their architecture, their decorative art, and still
more for their science and literature. Each people no doubt modified in
some measure the boon received, adding more or less of its own to the
common inheritance. But Chaldaea stands forth as the great parent and
original inventress of Asiatic civilization, without any rival that can
reasonably dispute her claims. The great men of the Empire are Nimrod,
Urukh, and Che-dor-laomer. Nimrod, the founder, has the testimony of
Scripture that he was "a mighty one in the earth;" "a mighty hunter;"
the establisher of a "kingdom," when kingdoms had scarcely begun to be
known; the builder of four great and famous cities, "Babel, and Erech,
and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar," or Mesopotamia. To him
belong the merit of selecting a site peculiarly fitted for the
development of a great power in the early ages of the world, and of
binding men together into a community which events proved to possess
within it the elements of prosperity and permanence. Whether he had,
indeed, the rebellious and apostate character which numerous traditions,
Jewish, Arabian, and Armenian, assign to him; whether he was in reality
concerned in the building of the tower related in the eleventh chapter of
the Book of Genesis, we have no means of positively determining. The
language of Scripture with regard to Nimrod is laudatory rather than the
contrary; and it would seem to have been from a misapprehension of the
_nexus_ of the Mosaic narrative that the traditions above mentioned
originated. Nimrod, "the mi