well kept records are of great value as a chronological index of the times[8] in which they were written. The literature of the Babylonians, like that of the Hindūs, claims a fabulous antiquity. They enumerated ten kings who lived before the flood, whose reigns occupied four hundred and thirty-two thousand years, or more than forty-three centuries each, and during this immense cycle of time, there were strange creatures, half man and half fish, who ascended from the ocean and taught the tribes of Babylonia the rudiments of civilization. There were men with the bodies of birds and the tails of fishes, and men also with the beaks and faces of birds who in other respects wore the form of humanity. But their literature was not all fable, though they really cared very little what the condition of their country had been before the deluge, for they were engaged in recounting the conquests of their own kings, and the power and splendor of their idols. Babylon, the Queen of the East, with her arts and sciences, with her painting and sculpture, was like other Asiatic cities, a hot-bed of moral corruption; even her religion was a craze of sorcery and enchantments—of witchcraft and horrible sensuality. Her high priests were astrologers and soothsayers, while her gods were the personification of evil. “Moloch demanded the best and dearest that the worshipper could grant him, and the parent was required to offer his eldest or only son as a sacrifice, while the victim’s cries were drowned by the noise of drums and flutes. When Agathokles defeated the Carthaginians, the noblest of the citizens offered in expiation three hundred of their children to Baal-Moloch.”[9] The worship of Ishtar[10] demanded that every female devotee should begin her womanhood by public prostitution in the temple of the goddess, and young girls were often burned upon her altars, while young men were either burned or mutilated. Abominations even more revolting than these were practiced in connection with the worship of Bel, and the nations around her drank of her wine and were maddened with the frenzy of her corruption. What wonder, then, that even before the “Lady of Kingdoms” reached the zenith of her glory, the cry of the prophets had rung out in unmeasured denunciation of her crimes? “Therefore I will execute judgment upon the graven images of Babylon ... and all her slain shall fall in the midst of her ... the treacherous dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth. Go up, O Elam, besiege, O Media.... Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.”[11]