ourable to the
advancement of knowledge and the growth of culture. The invaders who
absorbed Sumerian civilization may have secured more settled
conditions by welding together political units, but seem to have
exercised a retrogressive influence on the growth of local culture.
"Babylonian religion", writes Dr. Langdon, "appears to have reached
its highest level in the Sumerian period, or at least not later than
2000 B.C. From that period onward to the first century B.C. popular
religion maintained with great difficulty the sacred standards of the
past." Although it has been customary to characterize Mesopotamian
civilization as Semitic, modern research tends to show that the
indigenous inhabitants, who were non-Semitic, were its originators.
Like the proto-Egyptians, the early Cretans, and the Pelasgians in
southern Europe and Asia Minor, they invariably achieved the
intellectual conquest of their conquerors, as in the earliest times
they had won victories over the antagonistic forces of nature. If the
modern view is accepted that these ancient agriculturists of the
goddess cult were of common racial origin, it is to the most
representative communities of the widespread Mediterranean race that
the credit belongs of laying the foundations of the brilliant
civilizations of the ancient world in southern Europe, and Egypt, and
the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.

INTRODUCTION

Ancient Babylonia has made stronger appeal to the imagination of
Christendom than even Ancient Egypt, because of its association with
the captivity of the Hebrews, whose sorrows are enshrined in the
familiar psalm:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down;
Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows....

In sacred literature proud Babylon became the city of the anti-Christ,
the symbol of wickedness and cruelty and human vanity. Early
Christians who suffered persecution compared their worldly state to
that of the oppressed and disconsolate Hebrews, and, like them, they
sighed for Jerusalem--the new Jerusalem. When St. John the Divine had
visions of the ultimate triumph of Christianity, he referred to its
enemies--the unbelievers and persecutors--as the citizens of the
earthly Babylon, the doom of which he pronounced in stately and
memorable phrases:

Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen,
And is become the habitation of devils,
And the hold of every foul spirit,
And