ghty hunter _before the Lord_," had not in
the days of Moses that ill reputation which attached to him in later
ages, when he was regarded as the great Titan or Giant, who made war
upon the gods, and who was at once the builder of the tower, and the
persecutor who forced Abraham to quit his original country. It is at
least doubtful whether we ought to allow any weight at all to the
additions and embellishments with which later writers, so much wiser
than Moses, have overlaid the simplicity of his narrative.

Urukh, whose fame may possibly have reached the Romans, was the great
Chaldaean architect. To him belongs, apparently, the conception of the
Babylonian temple, with its rectangular base, carefully placed so as to
present its angles to the four cardinal points, its receding stages, its
buttresses, its drains, its sloped walls, its external staircases for
ascent, and its ornamental shrine crowning the whole. At any rate, if he
was not the first to conceive and erect such structures, he set the
example of building them on such a scale and with such solidity as to
secure their long continuance, and render them well-nigh imperishable.
There is no appearance in all Chaldaea, so far as it has been explored,
of any building which can be even probably assigned to a date anterior to
Urukh. The attempted tower was no doubt earlier; and it may have been a
building of the same type, but there is no reason to believe that any
remnant, or indeed any trace, of this primitive edifice, has continued to
exist to our day. The structures of the most archaic character
throughout Chaldaea are, one and all, the work of King Urukh, who was not
content to adorn his metropolitan city only with one of the new edifices,
but added a similar ornament to each of the great cities within his
empire.

The great builder was followed shortly by the great conqueror.
Kudur-Lagamer, the Elamitic prince, who, more than twenty centuries
before our era, having extended his dominion over Babylonia and the
adjoining regions, marched an army a distance of 1200 miles from the
shores of the Persian Gulf to the Dead Sea, and held Palestine and Syria
in subjection for twelve years, thus effecting conquests which were not
again made from the same quarter till the time of Nebuchadnezzar,
fifteen or sixteen hundred years afterward, has a good claim to be
regarded as one of the most remarkable personages in the world's
history-being, as he is, the forerunner and