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These, however, had to fear not only the imperfect sympathy of their own aboriginal subjects, who again and again gathered their sullen forces in the "Sea Land" at the head of the Persian Gulf and attacked the dominant Semites in the rear, but also incursions of fresh strangers; for Babylonia is singularly open on all sides.
The city must have been one of those centres of Canaanitish learning, where, as in the libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, a large body of scribes was kept constantly at work. The language employed in the cuneiform documents was almost always that of Babylonia, which had become the common speech of diplomacy and educated society.
W. Max Müller has pointed out that the determinative of "writing" has been attached to the word Sopher, showing that the writer was fully acquainted with its meaning. Kirjath-Sannah, "the city of instruction," as it was also called, was but another way of emphasizing the fact that here was the site of a library and school such as existed in the towns of Babylonia and Assyria.
In the religion of Babylonia, an important part was played by the mystery of sleep, and the interpretation of dreams; and no doubt from the East the Greeks took over the practice of divination in sleep, for in the AEsculapian cult also, the incubation sleep played a most important role.
Frequent allusion has been made, in the course of this description of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the fact of their having each a flood season. Herodotus is scarcely correct when he says that in Babylonia "the river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the corn-lands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the help of engines."
From time immemorial the Hebrew race, with all its conservative tendencies in religious matters, has been amenable to the influence of foreign culture and civilian. Egypt and Phoenicia, Babylonia and Assyria, Hellas and Rome have exercised an immense influence over it.
Assyria, Media, Semitic Babylonia, Persia, as they derived from Chaldaea the character of their writing, so were they indebted to the same country for their general notions of government and administration, for their architecture, their decorative art, and still more for their science and literature.
The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed by characters needlessly complicated.
Cyrus, the Persian King, buried the child with great honor and then proclaimed himself the legitimate successor of the old rulers of Babylonia. Mesopotamia ceased to be an independent State. It became a Persian province ruled by a Persian "Satrap" or Governor. As for Babylon, when the Kings no longer used the city as their residence it soon lost all importance and became a mere country village.
The early Egyptian mace-head is of exactly the same type as the early Babylonian one. The Egyptian art of the earliest dynasties bears again a remarkable resemblance to that of early Babylonia. It is not till the time of the IId Dynasty that Egyptian art begins to take upon itself the regular form which we know so well, and not till that of the IVth that this form was finally crystallized.
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