Rome borrowing from them. The naming of the days of the week after the sun and moon gods and the five planets known to them seems beyond dispute. It was they who divided the circle into 360 degrees in connection with their sexagesimal system of numerals, the day into 24 hours, and the hour into 60 minutes. The faces of our watches bear daily and hourly witness to our obligations to this old people of the land of Shinar. There are 24 hours in the day, but our time-pieces divide them into two periods of 12 hours each, just as the Babylonian day was reckoned as 12 _double_ hours. By what routes and means these transfers of scientific achievements were made from the mother-land of science to the peoples of Europe we are not yet able to decide. Further discoveries, however, will doubtless reveal still more clearly the historic connections of modern culture with the people of the Tigris and Euphrates valley who themselves speak of their cities as "ancient" before the deluge. All of this increase of knowledge hinted at in the preceding paragraphs, and all too briefly sketched in this work, is the acquisition of our own times. The Greeks, who in haughty disdain regarded all others as "barbarians," knew little of this ancient of days--nothing whatever of the great ruler Sargon I. or Hammurabi, imperialist and great law-giver fifteen hundred years before the enactment of the laws of Draco and Solon at Athens. Among the Greek writers Herodotus is the only one that can be considered as a direct source. He may have visited Babylon about the middle of the fifth century B.C. Much of what he has written, however, is clearly a matter of hearsay or romancing. The judgment passed on him by his contemporaries and successors was certainly not without foundation. His critics accused him, as the Arabian historians did Ibn Ishaq, the biographer of Mohammed, of direct falsification, and even a superficial study of his writings is sufficient to prove that the accusation was not without apparent warrant. One seeks in vain, for example, in the Babylonian literature for evidence of the custom, which he describes as one of the most beautiful and wisest of the Babylonians, of putting the marriageable girls once a year upon the market to be sold to the highest bidders! Naively he adds that this was an earlier custom that was no longer practised in his time. Of the history of Babylon he knew little--of its latest rulers and even of the great Nebuchadnezzar he had not an inkling as Tiele, the Dutch historian, has said. Ctesias, the Carian physician who lived for seventeen years at the Persian court of Artaxerxes Mnemon in the fourth century, did not know that Babylon had an independent existence. Those who followed were for the most part merely excerptors from those who preceded them. In view of the paucity and unreliability of the sources an impenetrable veil was drawn between us and the ancient orient. At last it has been lifted, and in the