[16] Epping and Strassmeier, _Astronomisches aus Babylon_, Kugler’s _Babylonische Mondrechnung_, and _Babylonische Sternkunde_. Schiaparelli’s two monographs on Babylonian Astronomy, from which much of the information here given is derived, are chiefly based on these works. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This star-worship and star-study seems to have been learned by the Semitic Babylonians, and their descendants and rivals the Assyrians, from a race with whom they met and mingled in the grey dawn of history, but whose existence was unknown to us before the middle of last century. [Illustration: The Moon-God of Ur. [_To face p. 36._ From a cylinder-seal in the British Museum, dated about B.C. 2400. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees.] [Illustration: Fig. 6. The triple star-sign of the Babylonians.] This people, who belonged to a totally distinct family of nations, and are known to us now as Sumerians, had settled near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, when it ran further inland than it does now, and more than five thousand years ago used a kind of writing on soft stones (later, on bricks) which had obviously arisen from some form of picture writing, and ultimately developed into cuneiform. Their reverence for the heavenly bodies is shown by the fact that the familiar star sign, [star sign] which appears on very early Sumerian inscriptions, denotes their word for god or lord, and on the monuments of Babylonia and Assyria we meet constantly the triple sign This, we learn from the inscriptions, stood for three great deities, the Moon-god, the Sun-god, and the goddess of the planet Venus. Our illustration shows an inscription in early Babylonian script, and a scene which represents the vassal of a king of Ur (Abraham’s “Ur of the Chaldees”) being led into the presence of the Moon-god.[17] It is believed to date from about B.C. 2400. The Babylonians were an intensely superstitious people, and a large part of their omens were drawn from observations of the skies. Every city from this period onward had its ziggurat or great tower formed of several superimposed cubes, usually seven in number, diminishing in size and probably crowned by the shrine of the local deity. It is not certain what purposes were served by these towers, but the successive platforms may well have been the observatories from which the Babylonian priests, gazing through the clear air and over the level plains, watched, year after year, and century after century, eclipses of sun and moon, risings and settings of stars and planets, and all the changing pageant of the skies, which to them were eloquent of peace and prosperity, or of war and misfortunes in their land. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [17] King, History of Sumer and Akkad, p. 246. ------------------------------------------------------------------------