In your youth, do not let conceit shut your mind to the acquisition of wisdom. Do not think that the world was in darkness until you were born. Old age will shatter hope and you will lose confidence in your generation and become an ancestor worshiper, because you are birth-marked mentally and physically by your ancestors; because old age loves youth, and the present the past, and contrasts the joys and sports of childhood with the toil and pain and poverty of old age; because the evil days have come, the clouds return after the rain, the house you live in trembles, your grinders cease because they are few, your windows are darkened; and having eaten, you know you are naked and are ashamed and afraid. Solomon the Wise, philosopher and preacher, says: “All is vanity * * * one generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. * * * Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” The Story. More than five thousand years before the birth of our prophet Muhammed, The Praised One; even before Ur was; the ancestors of King Surgulla, who belonged to a Turanian tribe, came down from the Heights of Elam on the east, into the plain country and finally settled near Nun-ki, that is, the place of the first water, on the left bank of the Euphrates. Here was the temple of Hea, the water god; here the palm trees grew in a great garden watered by crystal springs; which place the Jews, a modern people, call the Garden of Eden. Here sat the fathers in judgment under a great palm tree and the chief mufti read from the tablets: “When the upper region was not yet called heaven, And the lower region was not yet called earth, And the abyss of Hades had not yet opened its arms, Then the chaos of waters gave birth to all of them And the waters were gathered together into one place.” The first settlement of tents grew into a city and was called the City of The Good God, Urugudda, which in time was shortened to Eridu. Eridu enjoying several centuries of peace and prosperity, became the capital of a great nation; a seat of learning, philosophy and religion and architecturally beautiful. Its many white public buildings, palaces and temples of fretted marble and porphyry with their red and green tiled roofs and cupolas and gold crescent-crowned minarets, resplendent under a tropic sun, excited the cupidity of every bold robber, who, riding from the desert, viewed its greatness from the distant sand hills.