lack of
repairs, though the famous hanging gardens in the citadel were still
shown to strangers. The guides, of course, gave them out to be a device
of Semiramis, but the well-informed knew that they had been constructed
by Nebuchadrezzar for one of his wives the daughter of Oyaxares, who
pined for the verdure of her native mountains. "They were square in
shape, each side being four hundred feet long; one approached them by
steps leading to terraces placed one above the other, the arrangement
of the whole, resembling that of an amphitheatre. Each terrace rested on
pillars which, gradually increasing in size, supported the weight of
the soil and its produce. The loftiest pillar attained a height of fifty
feet; it reached to the upper part of the garden, its capital being on
a level with the balustrades of the boundary wall. The terraces were
covered with a layer of soil of sufficient depth for the roots of the
largest trees; plants of all kinds that delight the eye by their shape
or beauty were grown there. One of the columns was hollowed from top
to bottom; it contained hydraulic engines which pumped up quantities of
water, no part of the mechanism being visible from the outside."
Many travellers were content to note down only such marvels as they
considered likely to make their narratives more amusing, but others took
pains to collect information of a more solid character, and before
they had carried their researches very far, were at once astounded and
delighted with the glimpses they obtained of Chaldaean genius. No doubt,
they exaggerated when they went so far as to maintain that all their
learning came to them originally from Babylon, and that the most famous
scholars of Greece, Pherecydes of Scyros, Democritus of Abdera, and
Pythagoras,* owed the rudiments of philosophy, mathematics, physics, and
astrology to the school of the _Magi_.

* The story which asserts that Pythagoras served under
Nergilos, King of Assyria, is probably based on some
similarity of names: thus among the Greek kings of Cyprus,
and in the time of Assur-bani-pal, we find one whose name
would recall that of Pythagoras, if the accuracy of the
reading were beyond question.

Yet it is not surprising that they should have believed this to be the
case, when increasing familiarity with the priestly seminaries revealed
to them the existence of those libraries of clay tablets in which, side
by side with theoretic treati