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and possibly China on the E., and with Euboea on the West.

(f) New Babylonian Empire. — The new Babylonian dynasty was that of Pashe, or Isin, a native dynasty. Nebuchadrezzar i. was apparently its founder. He defeated the Elamites and wrested from them the provinces already occupied by them, and brought back the statue of BSl which they had captured. He also reconquered the West, and left his name on the rocks of the Nahr el-Kelb. His attempts upon Assyria were unsuccessful. Henceforth Babylonia was pent up by Assyria and Elam, and merely held its own. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth dynasties yield but a few names, of whose exploits we know next to nothing. The Aramsean migration swallowed up Mesopotamia and drove back both Assyria and Babylonia. The Chaldseans followed the old route from Arabia by Ur, and estab-lished themselves firmly in the S. of Babylonia. Akkad was plundered by the Suti. Thus cut off from the West, the absence of Babylonian power allowed the rise of Fhilistia; Israel consolidated, Phoenicia grew into power. Hamath, Aleppo, Patin, Samal became independent States. Damascus became an Aramaean power. Egypt also was split up, and could infiuence Palestine but little. When Assyria revived under Adad-nirari, the whole W. was a new country and had to be reconquered. Baby-lonia had no hand in it. She was occupied in suppressing the Chaidseans and Aramsans on her borders; and had to call for Assyrian assistance in the time of Shalmaneser. Finally, Tiglath-pileser iii. became master of Babylonia, and after him it fell into the hands of the Chaidaean Merodach-baladan, till Sargon drove him out. Under Sennacherib it was a mere dependency of Assyria, till he destroyed Babylon. Under Esarhaddon and Ashur-banipal Babylonia revived somewhat, and under Nabo-polassar found in the weakness of Assyria and the fall of Nineveh a chance to recover.

Nabopolassar reckoned his reign from B.C. 625, but during the early years of his rule some Southern Baby-lonian cities such as Erech continued to acknowledge Sin-shar-ishkun. According to classical writers, he allied himself with the Medo-Scythian hordes, who devastated Mesopotamia and captured Nineveh. He claims to have chased from Akkad the Assyrians, who from the days of old rilled over all peoples and with their heavy yoke wore out the nations, and to have broken their yoke. The Medes seem to have made no attempt to hold Mesopotamia, and Pharaoh Necho, who was advancing from Egypt to take Syria, was defeated at Carchemish B.C. 605 by Nebuchadrezzar. So Babylonia succeeded to the W. part of the Assyrian Empire. Beyond a few building inscriptions we know little of this reign.

Nebuchadrezzar's inscriptions hardly mention any-thing but his buildings. He fortified Babylon, enriched it with temples and palaces; restored temples at Sippara, Larsa, Ur, Dilbat, Baz, Erech, Borsa, Kutha, Marad; cleaned out and walled with quays the Arahtu canal which ran through Babylon, and dug acanal N. of Sippara. He left an inscription on the rocks at Wady Brissa, a valley N. of the Lebanon Mountains and W. of the upper part of the Orontes; another on a rock N. of the Nahr el-Kelb, where the old road from Arvad passes S. to the cities of the coast. A fragment of his annals states that in his 37th year he fought in Egypt against Amasis.

Amel-Marduk (Evil-Merodach), his son, was not acceptable to the priests, and was murdered by his brother-in-law Neriglissar, who had married a daughter of Nebuchadrezzar, and was son of BSl-shum-ishkun, the rubu-imga. He, too, was occupied chiefly with the temples of his land. Neriglissar was succeeded by his son Labashi-Marduk, a 'bad character,' whom the priests deposed, setting up Nabonidus, a Babylonian. He was an antiquary rather than a king. He rebuilt many of the oldest Babylonian temples, and in exploring their ruins found records which have helped to date early kings, as quoted above. For some reason he avoided

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Babylon and left the command of the army to his son Belshazzar. The Manda king, Astyages, invaded Mesopotamia, and was repelled only by the aid of Cyrus, king of Anshan, who a little later by his overthrow of Astyages became king of Persia, and then conquered Croesus of Lydia. On the 16th of Tammuz B.C. 539 Cyrus entered Babylon without resistance. Nabonidus was spared and sent to Karmania. Belshazzar was killed. Cyrus was acceptable to the Babylonians, worshipped at the ancient shrines, glorified the gods who had given him leadership over their land and people, made Babylon a royal city, and took the old native titles, but the sceptre had departed from the Semitic world for ever.

2 . Literature .^Babyloniawas very early in possession of a form of writing. The earliest specimens of which we know are little removed from pictorial writing; but the use of fiat pieces of soft clay, afterwards dried in the sun or baked hard in a furnace, as writing material, and strokes of a triangular reed, soon led to conventional forms of characters in which the curved lines of a picture were replaced by one or more short marks on the line. These were gradually reduced in number until the resultant group of strokes bore little resemblance to the original. The short pointed wedge-shaped 'dabs' of the reed have given rise to the name 'cuneiform.' The necessities of the engraver on stone led him to reproduce these wedges with an emphasized head that gives the appearance of nails, but all such graphic varieties make no essential difference. The signs denoted primarily ideas: thus the picture of a bull, or a bull's head, would symbolize 'power,' and all the words derived from the root 'to be powerful,' then from the word 'powerful' a syllabic value would be derived which might be used in spelling words. Thus the picture of a star might signify ' heaven,' the supreme god Anu, the idea ' above,' and be used to denote all things ' high, lofty, or divine ' ; its syllabic value being an it would be used in spelling wherever an had to be written. But, again, as ' god ' was ilu, it might be used in spelling for il. Thus many signs have more than one value, even as syllables; they may also denote ideas. The scribes, however, used not far short of 500 signs, and there is rarely any doubt of their meaning. The values attached to the signs in many cases are not derivable from the words which denote their ideas, and it has been concluded that the signs were adopted from a non-Semitic people called the Suznerians. Many Inscriptions cannot be read as Semitic, except by regarding them as a sort of halfway development of pictorial writing, and when read syllab-ically are supposed to be in the Sumerian language, which continued to be used, at any rate in certain phrases, to the last, much as Latin words and abbreviations (like £. s. d.) are used by us. There is still great obscurity about this subject, which can be solved only by the discovery of earlier or intermediate inscriptions.

At any rate, we are now able to read with certainty, except for a few obscure expressions, inscriptions which possibly date back to b.c. 6000. The earliest inscriptions hitherto recovered have been from temple archives, and naturally relate to offerings to the gods or gifts to the temples. From very early times, however, contracts such as deeds of sale, dispositions of property, marriage settlements, etc., were preserved in the archives, and many families preserved large quantities of deeds, letters, business accounts, etc. Writing and reading were very widely diffused, even women being well educated in these respects, and we have enormous collections in our museums of material relating to the private life and customs of the people at almost all periods of the history.

The Babylonians early drew up codes of laws, hymns, ritual texts, mythology, and made records of observa-tions in all directions of natural history. The supposed infiuence of the heavenly bodies led to works associating celestial phenomena with terrestrial events — the so-called astrological texts which recorded astronomical observa-tions from very early dates. A wonderful collection of