ses dating from two thousand years back
and more, were to be found examples of applied mechanics, observations,
reckonings, and novel solutions of problems, which generations
of scribes had accumulated in the course of centuries. The Greek
astronomers took full advantage of these documents, but it was their
astrologers and soothsayers who were specially indebted to them. The
latter acknowledged their own inferiority the moment they came into
contact with their Euphratean colleagues, and endeavoured to make good
their deficiencies by taking lessons from the latter or persuading them
to migrate to Greece. A hundred years later saw the Babylonian Berosus
opening at Cos a public school of divination by the stars. From
thenceforward "Chaldaean" came to be synonymous with "astrologer" or
"sorcerer," and Chaldaean magic became supreme throughout the world at
the very moment when Chaldaea itself was in its death-throes.

Nor was its unquestioned supremacy in the black art the sole legacy that
Chaldaea bequeathed to the coming generations: its language survived, and
reigned for centuries afterwards in the regions subjugated by its arms.
The cultivated tongue employed by the scribes of Nineve and Babylon
in the palmy days of their race, had long become a sort of literary
dialect, used in writings of a lofty character and understood by a
select few, but unintelligible to the common people. The populace in
town or country talked an Aramaic jargon, clumsier and more prolix
than Assyrian, but easier to understand. We know how successfully the
Aramaeans had managed to push their way along the Euphrates and into
Syria towards the close of the Hittite supremacy: their successive
encroachments had been favoured, first by the Assyrian, later by the
Chaldaean conquests, and now they had become sole possessors of the
ancient Naharaina, the plains of Cilicia, the basin of the Orontes, and
the country round Damascus; but the true home of the Aramaeans was in
Syria rather than in the districts of the Lower Euphrates. Even in the
time of the Sargonids their alphabet had made so much headway that at
Nineveh itself and at Calah it had come into everyday use; when Chaldaean
supremacy gave way to that of the Persians, its triumph--in the western
provinces, at any rate--was complete, and it became the recognised
vehicle of the royal decrees: we come upon it in every direction, on
the coins issued by the satraps of Asia Minor, on the seals of local
g