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You have read in fairy tales of a land where cakes and candy and sugarplums grow on trees, where everything you want to eat or to play with can be had just by picking it. Well, long, long ago people used to think there had been really such a country, and where do you suppose they said it was? Somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—those rivers with the strange names I asked you to learn—and they called this spot the Garden of Eden. We do not know exactly where it was, for there is no such place now quite as wonderful as the Garden of Eden was supposed to be.
Egypt was a land of one river, the Nile. The land of the Two Rivers had several names.
Let us suppose we are flying over the country in an airplane and looking down at the land between these two rivers. It is called Mesopotamia, which is two Greek words simply meaning between the rivers .
See the land over there by the upper Tigris. It is called Assyria.
The ancient Mediterranean world
See the land near where the rivers join each other. That is called Babylonia. See the land near where they empty. That is called Chaldea.
And see over there is Mount Ararat, where it is supposed Noah’s Ark rested after the flood.
Here are a lot of new names. A young friend of mine had a train of toy cars. He had noticed that the cars on which he had ridden had names, and so he gave his toy cars names also. He called them:
ASSYRIA MESOPOTAMIA
BABYLONIA ARARAT
CHALDEA EUPHRATES
Babylonia was a very rich country, for the two rivers brought down and dropped great quantities of earth just as the Nile did in Egypt, and this made very rich soil. Wheat, from which we make bread, is called the staff of life. It is the most valuable of all foods which grow. It is supposed that wheat first grew in Babylonia. Dates in that part of the world are almost as important a food as wheat. Dates, too, grow there very plentifully. Now, you may think dates are something to be eaten almost like candy, but in Babylonia dates took the place of oatmeal. In the rivers there were quantities of good fish, and as fishing was just fun, you see that the people who lived in Babylonia—the Babylonians, as they were called—had plenty of good food. No one had any money in those days; people had pigs and sheep and goats, and a man was rich who had much of these goods. Early on, if a man wanted to buy or sell, he had to buy or sell by trading something he had for something he wanted.
Somewhere in Babylonia the people built a great tower called the Tower of Babel , which you have probably heard about. It was more like a mountain than a tower. They built other towers, too. Some say the Tower of Babel and towers like it were built so that the people might have a high place to which they could climb in case of another flood. Others give a different reason. They say that the people who built these towers came to Babylonia from farther north where there were mountains. In this northern land they had always placed their altars on the top of a mountain, to be close to heaven. So when they moved to a flat country like Mesopotamia and Babylonia, where there were not mountains, they built mountains in order to have a high place for the altar on top. To reach the top of these mountains or towers, they made, instead of a staircase on the inside, a slanting roadway that wound around the outside in somewhat the way a road winds around a mountain.
There was hardly any stone either in or near Babylonia as there was in Egypt, and so the Babylonians built their buildings of bricks, which were made of mud formed into blocks and dried in the sun. In the course of time, bricks of this sort crumble and turn back into dust again, just as mud pies that you might make would do. This is the reason why all that is left of the towers and the other buildings that were put up so long ago are now simply hills of clay into which the brick has turned.
The Egyptians wrote on papyrus or carved their history in stone, but the Babylonians had neither papyrus nor stone. All they had were bricks. So they wrote on bricks before they were dried, while they were still soft clay. This writing was made by punching marks into the clay with the end of a stick. It was called cuneiform , which means wedge-shaped, for it looked like little groups of wedge-shaped marks, like chicken-tracks, made in the mud. I have seen boys’ writing that looked more like cuneiform than it did like English.
As the Babylonians watched their flocks by day and night, they watched also the sun and the moon and the stars moving across the sky. So they came to know a great deal about these heavenly bodies.
Did you ever see the moon in the daytime?
Oh, yes, you can.
Well, every once in a great while the moon as it moves across the sky gets in front of the sun and shuts out its light—just as, if you should put a plate in front of an electric lamp, the plate would block the light from the lamp. It may be ten o’clock in the morning and broad daylight, when suddenly the sun is covered up by the moon, and it becomes night and the stars shine out, and chickens, thinking it is night, go to roost. But in a few moments the moon passes by and the sun shines out once again. This is called an eclipse of the sun.
Now you may never have seen an eclipse of the sun, but some day you may. If you do, I hope you do not think the way ignorant people always have: they think that something dreadful is going to happen—the end of the world, perhaps, just because they have never seen such a strange sight before and do not know that it is a thing that happens regularly and that no harm comes from it.
Babylonians watching eclipse
Well, nearly twenty-three hundred years before Christ, in 2300 B.C., the Babylonians told before-hand just when there was going to be an eclipse of the sun. They had watched the moon moving across the sky and they had figured out how long it would be before it would catch up with the sun and cross directly over it. You see how much the old Babylonians knew about such things. Men who study the stars and other heavenly bodies are called astronomers , and the Babylonians, therefore, were famous astronomers. The Babylonians worshiped these wonderful heavenly bodies the sun, moon, and stars—that they knew so well.
The first king of Babylonia whom we know much about—and that much is very little—was Sargon I, who may have lived about the same time that the pyramids were built in Egypt.
About 1770 B.C. Babylonia had a king known far and wide for the laws he made. His name was Hammurabi, and we still have the code of laws he made though we no longer obey them. They were carved into a stone in cuneiform, and we have the stone. Sargon and Hammurabi are strange names like no one’s name you ever heard before, yet they are real names of real kings who ruled over real people.
