stood, for we have seen their monuments, their arts, the figures of their gods, and even the remains of their buried dead. The greatest find of all was the royal library of the Assyrian king, Assur-bani-pal, containing many thousand volumes. Here, you will say, was the whole history of Assyria ready for us-and of Babylon as well. doubtless it was, if the books had been whole, and if any man could read them. Each is a clay tablet, like a flat stone, both sides stamped full of letters. The writings were put on while the clay was soft, with a stick something like our pen; and then the brick was baked. Assurbani-pal's books had met with rough usage. His palace had evidently been burned; and though the tablets, unlike our paper books, had safely withstood the fire, they met misfortune from another source, which paper might have defied. Apparently they were kept in a second story, and the floor burning beneath them precipitated the tablets to the ground. That was fatal to clay. Scarcely one in thousands remains whole, and many are shattered beyond all possibility of restoration."

Babylon (of the first Babylonian Empire) stood beside the Euphrates; huge canals connected various remote outlying quarters of the immense city. The banks of the river were embowered with groves of sycamores, or as the Bible says, with willows. The cliff-like walls Herodotus tells us, were 84 feet wide and 300 feet high, the bricks laid not in mortar but in asphaltum, "making the walls resemble one huge stone. The city proper was 15 miles square, and the gigantic walls were surrounded by a moat. The population, including suburbs, was said to number 20,000,000 inhabitants-unquestionably another myth. Entrance to Babylon was through 25 immense gates, each gate of brass; overlooking the city from the very skies, as it seemed, were 300 watch-towers, each 360 feet high. Diodorus reported a tunnel under the river, connecting the eastern and western sections of Babylon, which were in a sense separate cities, walled against each other on the river side.

In connection with the wonders of Babylon, the legendary woman-warrior, Semiramis, queen of Assyria, en

joys a mythical renown; she appears in history as a sort of Catherine of Russia. Queen Semiramis invaded India and made many foreign military conquests. While it is doubted by many careful commentators that such a woman ever lived, Herodotus tells of a queen by that name, in the 700's B. C. She is alleged to be the first conqueror who used the cross on which to punish her enemies. The accounts of her cruelties are as thrilling as a melodrama. We also read that the caste-system provided Semiramis with an army of 3,000,000 foot soldiers, 500,000 cavalry and 100,000 war chariots. Her husband, Ninus, king of Assyria, is usually represented as founder of Nineveh, and after his death Semiramis ruled as regent for her son.

Her magnificent construction work at Babylon has passed into a tradition. Semiramis conscripted 2,000,000 slaves to build walls, towers and canals. Modern experts who have checked the mechanical problems tell that even with modern machinery, the work represented by the brick piles of Babylon would require the diligence of 2,000,000 men working at least two years; whereas with the primitive tools of those ancient days, to get the work through must have taken several generations of time and man-power. One estimate has it that the walls of Babylon contained two hundred and forty-seven billion bricks (247,000,000,000).

The fierce warrior Nebuchadnezzar, carrying off multitudes of Jews to Babylon (500's B. C.); made them work to suit his royal pleasure. He shrewdly selected the artisan-class, and mighty Babylon was now enriched with still other great buildings, erected by unpaid Jewish labor. The Jews felt their humiliation keenly, or in the words of Habakkuk: "The stones shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall reply to it: Woe to him that buildeth a tower with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity!"

The Oriental system of plural wives brought a vast number of women to the Babylonian slave market, where

the women were sold into captivity. Women are seldom represented in ancient sculpture, unless as captives, or are seen in attitudes of despair, such as begging tyrants for mercy; or again, women are preferably shown under falling walls of cities. Speaking of women, the polygamous practices of the pagan Mylitta religion are set forth by Herodotus and need not be repeated here. The abject, degraded slavery of woman in Antiquity stands as a frightful parallel to the down-trodden condition of the Common Man; and if you are startled at the strange and brutalizing episodes through which the Common Man passed, in the long evolution toward securing liberty under law, then we will add at once that the story of woman's sufferings and sorrows, adequately set forth, would cry one to the very stars for justice. Her history has always been more bitter and blighted than that of the male of the species-which may in a measure explain the peculiar psychology of her loves and hates.

*

Each bright night you can see El Jabbar,
the Chaldean giant, in his distant home in
what we today call the Constellation of
Orion; and El Jabbar is really Nimrod, of
the Mother Land.

We spoke of Nimrod, one of the ancestral monarchs of the Mother Land. They made gods out of strong men, as we have shown; and Nimrod, because he killed off the wild beasts that roamed over Chaldea, made the land safer for the living. Nimrod, therefore, earned the gratitude of his countrymen, who named him Bilu-Nipra, or the god of the chase.

What has become of the old Egyptian gods? Osiris lives in the Dog-star, Nimrod looks down upon us from the eternal security of Orion. Nimrod was certified a "mighty hunter before the Lord," as the Biblical phrase has it; and when, after many years of strenuous fighting of wild animals, Nimrod came to die, Chaldean astrologers found him a place in the sky; and we read that, transformed into that bright particular star, El Jabbar,

today known to us as Orion, whose magical belt of stars we see clearly on bright evenings, Nimrod lives forever more, enthroned with the immortals.

For Nimrod, like other strong men of the Ancient regime, was not a man at all, don't you see, but was really a god; even while he was still walking this earth engaged in mighty hunting expeditions. We shall have much to say of god-man or rulers who became gods in Greece and Rome, but Nimrod's legendary fame in this respect leads all the rest.

However, were the mummy-pits to give up their dead, as the Ancient wisdom taught, the men of primitive times would find themselves in a strange, unknown world.

Time has turned the temples into broken brick piles, and proud Nineveh and Babylon and other cities of the plain are long since but shapeless mounds. The only thing not changed is the sky, and that at least the people of Nimrod's distant day, should they ever be released from their mummy-pits, would understand. For the glory of their matchless monarch Nimrod still shines in the undiminished splendor of immortal youth, as El Jabbar the Giant.

And this will still be true, too, when you come back. Let us say that after thousands of years have rolled away, should you be permitted to burst your prison house and return to earth, the only thing you will recognize amidst the wreck of Time and Chance will be the Great Bear-otherwise the familiar constellation known to your childhood's fancy as the Dipper, while you were here. on earth.

CHAPTER IV

THE MYTH OF THE GOD-MAN

Superman Hammurabi speaks directly to
the gods for he was their vice-regent on
earth; era of eagle's beak and curved talons.

When we talk of types of man-gods or rulers so regarded, we must dwell particularly on the renowned Hammurabi, the fierce Arab that came out of the desert and gave the law of eagle's beak and curved talons. This celebrated soldier was head of the Babylonian power, 2250 B. C., but part of his laws in one way or another, came down to comparatively modern times. No study of the evolution of history, affecting the rise of the Common Man, should neglect Hammurabi's despotic contribution. His conception of justice will help us to understand subsequent shaping of events, for very many centuries. The world is old, very old; and still it is of yesterday. The darkness that covers the beginnings of man's life on this Earth lifts from the Euphrates Valley, now and then, over long centuries, disclosing always that man is man, and that after all is said History is merely human nature in action. Comes now that ancient Khammurabi, or Hammurabi, in his hand his Code of Laws.

There has been a long period of development in the Valley of the Tigris-Euphrates, and mighty fighting men under war-lords seized for themselves and their successors the southern portion called Babylonia. These fighting men were a round-headed, clean-shaven race, who battled with the fury of tigers; they had a peculiar culture, impressed on brick cylinders their odd-looking pothooks that expressed ideas quite as well as do our modern letter-style of saying things; and pictures filled in the gaps; pictures of mythological beings, half-men, halfanimals, usually shown as engaged in desperate fighting; all these records in broken pieces of pottery, to be sure,