Various aspects of Babylonian life and culture are dealt with throughout this volume, and it is shown that the growth of science and art was stimulated by unwholesome and crude superstitions.  Many rank weeds flourished beside the brightest blossoms of the human intellect that wooed the sun in that fertile valley of rivers.  As in Egypt, civilization made progress when wealth was accumulated in sufficient abundance to permit of a leisured class devoting time to study and research.  The endowed priests, who performed temple ceremonies, were the teachers of the people and the patrons of culture.  We may think little of their religious beliefs, regarding which after all we have only a superficial knowledge, for we have yet discovered little more than the fragments of the shell which held the pearl, the faded petals that were once a rose, but we must recognize that they provided inspiration for the artists and sculptors whose achievements compel our wonder and admiration, moved statesmen to inaugurate and administer humanitarian laws, and exalted Right above Might.

These civilizations of the old world, among which the Mesopotamian and the Nilotic were the earliest, were built on no unsound foundations.  They made possible “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”, and it is only within recent years that we have begun to realize how incalculable is the debt which the modern world owes to them.

CHAPTER I.

THE RACES AND EARLY CIVILIZATION OF BABYLONIA

  Prehistoric Babylonia—­The Confederacies of Sumer and
  Akkad—­Sumerian Racial Affinities—­Theories of Mongolian and
  Ural-Altaic Origins—­Evidence of Russian Turkestan—­Beginnings of
  Agriculture—­Remarkable Proofs from Prehistoric Egyptian
  Graves—­Sumerians and the Mediterranean Race—­Present-day Types in
  Western Asia—­The Evidence of Crania—­Origin of the Akkadians—­The
  Semitic Blend—­Races in Ancient Palestine—­Southward Drift of
  Armenoid Peoples—­The Rephaims of the Bible—­Akkadians attain
  Political Supremacy in Northern Babylonia—­Influence of Sumerian
  Culture—­Beginnings of Civilization—­Progress in the Neolithic
  Age—­Position of Women in Early Communities—­Their Legal Status in
  Ancient Babylonia—­Influence in Social and Religious Life—­The
  “Woman’s Language”—­Goddess who inspired Poets.

Before the dawn of the historical period Ancient Babylonia was divided into a number of independent city states similar to those which existed in pre-Dynastic Egypt.  Ultimately these were grouped into loose confederacies.  The northern cities were embraced in the territory known as Akkad, and the southern in the land of Sumer, or Shumer.  This division had a racial as well as a geographical significance.  The Akkadians were “late comers” who had achieved political ascendency in the north when the area they occupied