EGYPT AND BABYLON.
108
huts cling about the pillars of the great temples at Luxo* and Karnak ; the village of Nebbi Yunus crowns the hill formed by the ruins of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh Memphis hears the hum of the great city of Cairo Tanis, the capital of Rameses II. and his successor, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, lives on in the mud hovels of San Damascus, ;
;
;
Athens, Rome, Antioch, Byzantium, Alexandria, have remained continuously from the time of their foundation towns But Babylon soon became, and has for ages of consequence. Strabo, writing in the reign of been, an absolute desert. " Augustus' could say of it that the great city had become a * us that the Persian kings Jerome tails solitude." great had made it into one of their " paradises," or hunting parks. f Seleucia, Ctesiphon, Bagdad, successively took its place, and were built out of its ruins. There was " no healing of its
bruise." When European travelers began to make their way to the far"East, the report which they brought home was as follows Babylon is in the grete desertes of Arabye, the as upon way men gone towards the kyngdome of Caldee. But it is fulle longe sithe ony man neyhe to the towne ; for it is alle deserte, and fulle of dragons and grete serThe accounts of modern explorers are similar. pentes." $ " They tell us that the site of Babylon is a naked and hideous waste." "All around," says one of the latest, "is a blank ' Her cities are a waste, recalling the words of Jeremiah desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereNo village crowns any of the great mounds which by.' "|| mark the situations of the principal buildings ; no huts nestle :
A
among
the
shows
itself
lower eminences. single modern building on the summit of the largest tumulus it is a ;
tomb, empty and
silent.
Isaiah intensifies his description of the solitude by the " Neither shall the Arabian statement, pitch tent there, nei" ther shall the shepherds make their fold there (ch. xiii. 20). If the entire space contained within the circuit of the ancient walls be viewed as " Babylon," the words of the prophet will not be literally true. The black tents of the Zobeide * * J
'H peydA? ir6?u<; fityakr) 'OTIV 5: Esaiam," vol. v., p. 25, C. Maundeville's Travels (1322), quoted by Ker Porter,
Strab., xvi.
"
1,
Comment,
in
vol.
ii.,
336.
Layard,
1.
s.c.
||
" Chaldaea and Susiana," p. 20. Loftus,
p.