United States or Burundi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


For some of the most effective of our urban elaborations we must go back to the first of city builders of whom we have knowledge. The Assyrians made terraces, nature teaching them. On the level plain building ground was raised forty feet for effect.

We should thus expect to find his emblem among those which the kings specially affected; and as all the other common emblems are assigned to distinct gods with tolerable certainty, the horned cap alone remaining doubtful, the most reasonable conjecture seems to be that it was Bel's symbol. It has been assumed in some quarters that the Bel of the Assyrians was identical with the Phoenician Dagon.

That when the Assyrians came into Judaea, the Jews were NOT given up to worshipping false gods. On the contrary, we find, both from the book of Kings and the book of Chronicles, that a great reform in religion had taken place among them a few years before. He trusted in the Lord God, and obeyed Him, more than any king of Judah.

During the most flourishing times of Sidon and Tyre the land of the Phoenicians was a perpetual apple of contention between the powers that ruled on the Euphrates and on the Nile, and was subject sometimes to the Assyrians, sometimes to the Egyptians.

We observe in these angry words of Jeremiah great directness and great minuteness, so that his meaning could not be mistaken; also that the instrument of punishment on the degenerate and godless city was to be the king of Babylon, a new power from whom Judah as yet had received no harm. The old enemies of the Hebrews were the Assyrians and Egyptians, not the Babylonians and Medes.

If, despite the changes that the religious doctrines underwent, despite the new interpretations given to old myths and legends, despite the profound changes introduced into the relationship of the gods to one another through the systematization of the pantheon, if, despite all this, the Babylonians and Assyrians leaders and people continued to feel that they were following the religion of their forefathers, it was due to the maintenance of the old sanctuaries.

The Babylonians had no such splendid alabaster as had the Assyrians, neither had they lime-stone; so they could not make fine sculptured slabs, such as are found at Nineveh and in other Assyrian ruins. But the Babylonians had a fine clay, and they learned how to use it to the best advantage.

The Greeks were only a part of the fifth Macedonian legion, and Trajan's second legion, which were stationed at Memphis, at Parembole, and at Apollinopolis; while from the names of the other cohorts we learn that they were Franks, Portuguese, Germans, Quadri, Spaniards, Britons, Moors, Vandals, Gauls, Sarmati, Assyrians, Galatians, Africans, Numid-ians, and others of less known and more remote places.

Nin-girsu is frequently termed the warrior of Bel, the one who in the service of the 'lord of the lower world, appears in the thick of the fight, to aid the subjects of Bel. In this rôle, he is identical with a solar deity who enjoys especial prominence among the warlike Assyrians, whose name is provisionally read Nin-ib, but whose real name may turn out to be Adar.

To some of the ancients the superficial resemblance between the Druidic doctrine of the soul's future and the teaching attributed to Pythagoras was the essential point, and this was enough to give the Druids a reputation for philosophy, so that a writer like Clement of Alexandria goes so far as to regard the Druids of the 'Galatae' along with the prophets of the Egyptians, the 'Chaldaeans' of the Assyrians, the 'philosophers of the Celts, and the Magi of the Persians as the pioneers of philosophy among the barbarians before it spread to the Greeks.