Want of space caused the tombs of the dead to be built one upon the other, as generations passed away and the older sepulchres crumbled into dust. The cemetery thus resembled the city; here, too, one generation built upon the ruins of its predecessor. The houses and tombs were alike constructed of sun-dried bricks, which soon disintegrate and form a mound of dust. The age of a cemetery, like the age of a city, may accordingly be measured by the number of successive layers of building of which its mound or platform is composed. In Babylonia they are numerous, for the history of the country goes back to a remote past. Each city clustered round a temple, venerable for its antiquity as well as for its sanctity, and the cemetery which stood near it was consequently under the protection of its god. At Cutha the necropolis was so vast that Nergal, the god of the town, came to be known as the “lord of the dead.” But the cemeteries of other towns were also of enormous size. Western Asia had received its culture and the elements of its theology from Babylonia, and Babylonia consequently was a sacred land not only to the Babylonians themselves, but to all those who shared their civilization. The very soil was holy ground; Assyrians as well as Babylonians desired that their bodies should rest in it. Here they were in the charge, as it were, of Bel of Nippur or Merodach of Babylon, and within sight of the ancient sanctuaries in which those gods were worshipped. This explains in part the size of the cemeteries; the length of time during which they were used will explain the rest. As Dr. Peters says of each:(4) “It is difficult to convey anything like a correct notion of the piles upon piles of human relics which there utterly astound the spectator. Excepting only the triangular space between the three principal ruins, the whole remainder of the platform, the whole space between the walls, and an unknown extent of desert beyond them, are everywhere filled with the bones and sepulchres of the dead. There is probably no other site in the world which can compare with Warka in this respect.” Babylonia is still a holy land to the people of Western Asia. The old feeling in regard to it still survives, and the bodies of the dead are still carried, sometimes for hundreds of miles, to be buried in its sacred soil. Mohammedan saints have taken the place of the old gods, and a Moslem chapel represents the temple of the past, but it is still to Babylonia that the corpse is borne, often covered by costly rugs which find their way in time to an American or European drawing-room. “The old order changes, giving place to new,” but the influence of Chaldean culture and religion is not yet past. CHAPTER IV. SLAVERY AND THE FREE LABORER