Recent discoveries have gone far towards lifting the veil that has hitherto covered the beginnings of Babylonian history. We have been carried back to a time when the Edin or “plain” of Babylonia was still in great measure a marsh, and the waters of the Persian Gulf extended 120 miles farther inland than they do to-day. If we take the rate at which the land has grown since the days of Alexander the Great as a basis of measurement, this would have been from eight to nine thousand years ago. At this time there were already two great sanctuaries in the country, around each of which a settlement or city had sprung up. One of these was Nippur in the north, the modern Niffer; the other was Eridu, “the good city,”(205) now marked by the mounds of Nowâwis or Abu-Shahrain, which stood on what was then the shore of the Persian Gulf. Now its site is more than a hundred miles distant from the sea. But it was once the seaport of Babylonia, whose inhabitants caught fish in the waters of the Gulf or traded with the populations of the Arabian coast. Nippur, on the other hand, was inland and agricultural. It was the primitive centre of those engineering works which gradually converted the pestiferous marshes of Babylonia into a fruitful plain, watered by canals and rivers, and protected from inundation by lofty dykes. While Eridu looked seaward, Nippur looked landward, and the influences that emanated from each were accordingly diverse from the very outset. As I pointed out in my Hibbert Lectures, Babylon must have been a colony of Eridu. Its tutelary god was a son of Ea of Eridu, and had been worshipped at Eridu long before his cult was carried northward to Babylon. Dr. Peters has since suggested that Ur was similarly a colony of Nippur. The moon-god of Ur was the son of the god of Nippur, and though Ur lay but a few miles from Eridu, it was an inland and not a maritime town. It stood on the desert plateau to the west of the Euphrates, overlooking the Babylonian plain, which at the time of its foundation had doubtless not as yet been reclaimed. But its situation exposed it to Arabian influences. Unlike the other great cities of Babylonia, it was in Arabia rather than in Babylonia, and its population from the outset must have contained a considerable Arabian element. Semitic settlers from Southern Arabia and Canaan occupied it, and it was known to them as Uru, “the city” _par excellence_.(206)