p. 11 | About Babylon

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 31, 1907

About Babylon

If ever there was a city that seemed to bid defiance to any predictions of its fall, that city was Babylon. It was for a long time the most famous city in the world. Its walls, which were reckoned among the wonders of the world, appeared rather like the bulwarks of nature than the workmanship of man. The temple of Belus, half a mile in circumference and a furlong in height; the hanging gardens, which, piled in successive terraces, towered as high as the walls; the embankments which restrained the Euphrates; the hundred brazen gates; and the adjoining artificial lake,—all displayed many of the mightiest works of mortals concentrated in a single point. Yet, while in the plenitude of its power, and according to the most accurate chronologers, one hundred sixty years before the foot of an enemy had entered it, the voice of prophecy pronounced the doom of the mighty and unconquered Babylon. A succession of ages brought it gradually to the dust; and the gradation of its fall is marked till it sank at last into utter desolation. At the time when nothing but magnificence was around Babylon the great, fallen Babylon was delineated exactly as every traveler now describes its ruins. And the prophecies concerning it may be viewed connectedly from the period of their earliest to that of their latest fulfilment.

The immense fertility of Chaldea, which retained also the name of Babylonia till after the Christian era, corresponded, if that of any country could vie, with the greatness of Babylon. It was the most fertile region of the whole East. Babylonia was one vast plain, adorned and enriched by the Euphrates and the Tigris, from which, and from the numerous canals that intersected the country from the one river to the other, was distributed over the fields by manual labor and by hydraulic machines, giving rise, in that warm climate and rich, exhaustless soil, to an exuberance of produce without a known parallel, over so extensive a region, either in ancient or in modern times. Herodotus states that he knew not how to speak of its wonderful fertility, which none but eye-witnesses would credit; and, though writing in the language of Greece, itself a fertile country, he expresses his own consciousness that his description of what he actually saw would appear to be improbable, and to exceed belief. In his estimation, as well as that of Strabo and Pliny (the three best ancient authorities that can be given), Babylonia was of all countries the most fertile in corn [wheat], the soil never producing less, as he relates, than two hundredfold, an amount, in our colder regions, scarcely credible; though Strabo, the first of ancient geographers, agrees with “the father of history” in recording that it reached even to three hundred, the grain, too, being of prodigious size. After being subjected to Persia, the government of Chaldea was accounted the noblest in the Persian empire. Besides supplying horses for military service, it maintained about seventeen thousand horses for the sovereign’s use. And, exclusive of monthly subsidies, the supply from Chaldea (including perhaps Syria) for the subsistence of the king and of his army, amounted to a third part of all that was levied from the whole of the Persian dominions.

Such was “the Chaldees’ excellency,” that it departed not on the first conquest, nor on the final extinction of its capital, but one metropolis of Assyria arose after another in the land of Chaldea, when Babylon had ceased to be “the glory of kingdoms.” The celebrated city of Seleucia, whose ruins attest its former greatness, was founded and built by Seleucus Nicator, king of Assyria, one of the successors of Alexander the Great, in the year 293 B. C.,—three centuries after Jeremiah prophesied. In the first century of the Christian era it contained six hundred thousand inhabitants. The Parthian kings transferred the seat of empire to Ctesiphon, on the opposite bank of the Tigris, where they resided in winter; and that city, formerly a village, became great and powerful. Six centuries after the latest of the predictions, Chaldea could also boast of other great cities, such as Artemita and Sitacene, besides many towns. When invaded by Julian, it was, as described by Gibbon, a “fruitful and pleasant country.” And, at a time equally distant from the time of the prophets and from the present day, in the seventh century, Chaldea was the scene of vast magnificence, in the reign of Chosroes. “His favorite residence of Artemita or Destagered, was situated beyond the Tigris, about sixty miles to the north of the capital [Ctesiphon]. The adjacent pastures,” in the words of Gibbon, “were covered with flocks and herds; the paradise, or park, was replenished with pheasants, peacocks, ostriches, roebucks, and wild boars; and the noble game of lions and tigers was sometimes turned loose for the golden pleasure of the chase. Nine hundred and sixty elephants were maintained for the use and splendor of the great king; his tents and baggage were carried into the field by twelve thousand great camels, and eight thousand of a smaller size; and the royal stables were filled with six thousand mules and horses. Six thousand guards successively mounted before the palace gate, and the service of the interior apartments was performed by twelve thousand slaves. The various treasures of gold, silver, gems, silk, and aromatics, were deposited in an hundred subterranean vaults.” In the eighth century the towns of Samarah, Horounieh, and Djasserik formed, so to speak, one street of twenty-eight miles. Chaldea, with its rich soil and warm climate, and intersected by the Tigris and Euphrates, was one of the last countries in the world, of which the desolation could have been thought of by man. For to this day “there can not be a doubt, that, if proper means were taken, the country would with ease be brought into a high state of cultivation.”—‘The Evidence of Prophecy,’ by Dr. Alexander Keith, published by William Whyte and Co., Edinburgh, 1848, pages 396–400.