ate even the Egyptian; but
its monuments were less permanent, its rulers less anxious for the
future. The "appeal to posterity," the desire for a posthumous fame,
seems with them to have been slower of conception. True, the first
Babylonian monarchs of whom we have any record, in an era perhaps over
five thousand years before Christianity, stamped the royal signet on
every brick of their walls and temples. But common-sense suggests that
this was less to preserve their fame than to preserve their bricks.
Theft is no modern innovation.

They were a mathematical race, these Babylonians. In fact, Semite and
mathematician are names that have been closely allied through all the
course of history, and one cannot help but wish our Aryan race had
somewhere lived through an experience which would produce in them the
exactitude in balance and measurement of facts that has distinguished
the Arabs and the Jews. The Babylonians founded astronomy and
chronology; they recorded the movements of the stars, and divided their
year according to the sun and moon. They built a vast and intricate
network of canals to fertilize their land; and they arranged the
earliest system of legal government, the earliest code of laws, that has
come down to us.[4]

[Footnote 4: _Compilation of the Earliest Code_, page 14.]

The sciences, then, arise more truly here than with the Egyptians. Man
here began to take notice, to record and to classify the facts of
nature. We may count this the second visible step in his great progress.
Never again shall we find him in a childish attitude of idle wonder.
Always is his brain alert, striving to understand, self-conscious of its
own power over nature.

It may have been wealth and luxury that enfeebled the Babylonians as,
it did the Egyptians. At any rate, their empire was overturned by a
border colony of their own, the Assyrians, a rough and hardy folk who
had maintained themselves for centuries battling against tribes from the
surrounding mountains. It was like a return to barbarism when about B.C.
880 the Assyrians swept over the various Semite lands. Loud were the
laments of the Hebrews; terrible the tales of cruelty; deep the scorn
with which the Babylonians submitted to the rude conquerors. We approach
here a clearer historic period; we can trace with plainness the
devastating track of war;[5] we can read the boastful triumph of the
Assyrian chiefs, can watch them step by step as they adopt the culture
a