Beyond this, on the outskirts, extended gardens and fields, finding at length their limit at the territorial boundaries of two other towns, Kutha and Borsippa, whose black outlines are visible to the east and south-west respectively, standing isolated above the plain.  Sippara on the north, Nippur on the south, and the mysterious Agade, completed the circle of sovereign states which so closely hemmed in the city of Bel.  We may surmise with all probability that the history of Babylon in early times resembled in the main that of the Egyptian Thebes.  It was a small seigneury in the hands of petty princes ceaselessly at war with petty neighbours:  bloody struggles, with alternating successes and reverses, were carried on for centuries with no decisive results, until the day came when some more energetic or fortunate dynasty at length crushed its rivals, and united under one rule first all the kingdoms of Northern and finally those of Southern Chaldaea.

The lords of Babylon had, ordinarily, a twofold function, religious and military, the priest at first taking precedence of the soldier, but gradually yielding to the latter as the town increased in power.  They were merely the priestly representatives or administrators of Babel—­shakannaku Babili—­and their authority was not considered legitimate until officially confirmed by the god.  Each ruler was obliged to go in state to the temple of Bel Merodach within a year of his accession:  there he had to take the hands of the divine statue, just as a vassal would do homage to his liege, and those only of the native sovereigns or the foreign conquerors could legally call themselves Kings of Babylon—­sharru Babili—­who had not only performed this rite, but renewed it annually.*

* The meaning of the ceremony in which the kings of Babylon “took the hands of Bel” has been given by Winckler; Tiele compares it very aptly with the rite performed by the Egyptian kings—­at Heliopolis, for example, when they entered alone the sanctuary of Ra, and there contemplated the god face to face.  The rite was probably repeated annually, at the time of the Zakmuku, that is, the New Year festival.

Sargon the Elder had lived in Babylon, and had built himself a palace there:  hence the tradition of later times attributed to this city the glory of having been the capital of the great empire founded by the Akkadian dynasties.  The actual sway of Babylon, though arrested to the south by the petty states of Lower Chaldaea, had not encountered to the north or north-west any enemy to menace seriously its progress in that semi-fabulous period of its history.  The vast plain extending between the Euphrates and the Tigris is as it were a continuation of the Arabian desert, and is composed of a grey, or in parts a whitish, soil impregnated with selenite and common salt, and irregularly superimposed upon a bed of gypsum, from which asphalt oozes up here and there, forming slimy