Each contributor to the Series presents his contribution subject to no change by the Editor. In cases where it may be deemed of sufficient importance to notice a divergent view this will be done in a foot-note. The authors, however, will aim to make their several contributions consistent with the latest discoveries. James Alexander Craig. University of Michigan, _September, 1899._ CHAPTER I. BABYLONIA AND ITS INHABITANTS Babylonia was the gathering-place of the nations. Berossus, the Chaldean historian, tells us that after the creation it was peopled by a mixture of races, and we read in the book of Genesis that Babel, or Babylon, was the first home of the manifold languages of mankind. The country for the most part had been won from the sea; it was the gift of the two great rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, which once flowed separately into the Persian Gulf. Its first settlers must have established themselves on the desert plateau which fringes the Babylonian plain rather than in the plain itself. The plain is formed of the silt deposited each year by the rivers that flow through it. It is, in fact, as much a delta as Northern Egypt, and is correspondingly fertile. Materials exist for determining approximately the rate at which this delta has been formed. The waters of the Persian Gulf are continually receding from the shore, and Ainsworth(1) calculates that about ninety feet of land are added annually to the coast-line. But the rate of deposit seems to have been somewhat more rapid in the past. At all events, Mohammerah, which in 1835 was forty-seven miles distant from the Gulf, stands on the site of Spasinus Charax, which, in the time of Alexander the Great, was not quite a mile from the sea. In 2,160 years, therefore, no less than forty-six miles of land have been formed at the head of the Persian Gulf, or nearly one hundred and fifteen feet each year.