The date is so remote and so contrary to all our preconceived ideas regarding the antiquity of the Babylonian monarchy, that it was not received without hesitation; but it appears to be supported by other evidence, and is now generally accepted. It is believed, indeed, that the monuments found at _Tell-lo_, including statues of diorite, a material foreign to Babylonia, are earlier still, and must be regarded as pre-Semitic. It may be asked, what interest can we have in people and things so remote? the Babylonians and their religion have long since perished, and have no influence upon the world of to-day. To this it is replied that through the providential circumstances of the Captivity the Jews were brought into contact with the Babylonians; the Jewish religion in its turn influenced Christianity, and all Christians should be concerned to know what the Jews learned in their exile. In the view of Hebrew prophets the Jews were “sent into foreign countries” to receive education and discipline; the Assyrian conqueror was the rod of God’s anger (Isaiah x. 5), and the Babylonish exile was the punishment meted out to Judah for its sins. The captives who returned again to their own land came back with changed hearts and purified minds, intent upon re-establishing Jerusalem as the home of a righteous people. And they had done something more than learn to abominate idolatry, they had been led to weigh the value of the religious beliefs and practices of the nations they had lived with during seventy years. But it was not only through the Babylonian exile that the religious ideas of the Babylonian and the Jew came into contact with each other. “It was then, indeed” (says Dr Sayce), “that the ideas of the conquering race were likely to make their deepest and most enduring impression; it was then, too, that the Jew for the first time found the libraries and ancient literature of Chaldea open to his study and use.” But old tradition had already pointed to the valley of the Euphrates as the primeval cradle of his race. We all remember how Abraham, it is said, was born in Ur of the Chaldees, and how the earlier chapters of Genesis make the Euphrates and Tigris two of the rivers of Paradise, and describe the building of the tower of Babylon as the cause of the dispersion of mankind. Now the Hebrew language was the language not only of the Israelites, but also of those earlier inhabitants of the country whom the Jews called Canaanites and the Greeks Phœnicians. Like the Israelites, the Phœnicians held that their ancestors had come from the Persian Gulf and the alluvial Plain of Babylonia. The tradition is confirmed by the researches of comparative philology. Their first home appears to have been in the low-lying desert which stretches eastward to Chaldea--in the very region, in fact, in which stood the great city of Ur, the modern Mugheir.