The age-herald., 1897-09-12
 } THE WORLDS ; , OLDEST CITY J


 which are promised as a result of the excavations now being made on the site of ancient Babylon by the University of Pennsylvania promise to be more so. Babylon was a splendid city, perhaps more extensive than any now in exist ence when Troy, the oldest city we know of from "profane" literature, was a mere shepherds hamlet.
 In the old world, a tribe here and there would separate itself from the. rest, settle in some fertile river valley or by some convenient harbor, and begin to develop toward the ultimate destiny of the racs--a higher and higher civili- zation. But under the law of develop ment apparent through all human his- tory, apparent in ruins and ashes which antedate written history by many cen- turies, no one tribe or nation is allowed to push forward and leave the rest bs- hind. There is no stsrner law than this, that if the highest do not raise the low est, the lowest will drag the highest down. So at Troy, at Babylon, at every place where the earliest civilization be- gan and f1ourished for time with splendor which promised soon to reach the highest possibilities of intellectual achievement the pick-ax and the spade of the explorer go through one layer after another of ruins and ashes. There was not one but many Troys-not one but many Babylons. No sooner would one of these splendid cities grow up in a world of savages than the outside pressure of barbarism on it's civiliza- ton would begin to threaten it's destruc- tion. Walls would be raised and thick enad in vain. Those of Babylon came finally to be the wonder of the world, but finally they could not fence out the inevitable. Over and over again the in- evitable came to every such city in the destruction which it's splendor invited. In these old cities, order and progress, strikingly like our own, grew out of barbarism, but as the superiority thus achieved was ussd not to elevate the world but to enslave it, the time came over and over agin for Troy and Baby lon in the oldest time as for Rome in the beginning of our own era, when the highest forces of an isolated civilza- ton were weak and ineffctual against the overwhelming strength of bar barrie world asserting it's right to pro- gress in the only way in which it had been taught-that of superior force and of more ruthless brutality.
 Babylon, within it's walls, at the height of its splendor, was larger city than any of modern times. It covered hundred square miles, and was nearly five times the size of London. Though much of this space was devoted to gar dens and parks, its population was enormous. In that era, however, there was hardly a greater promise of per manency in the civilization of such city than if it had been a collection of tents pitched by some wandering tribe in the desert. Babylon was taken, plum dered and burned oftener than we know of from it's paper histories, but as the brick libraries of the Euphrates Valley are dug up and deciphered we learn the vicissitudes of this typical leader of an- cent civilization. Thus from the boasts of Sennaeherib we learn that he pulled down, dug up and burned with fire the town and the palaces, root and branch, destroyed the fortress and the double wall, the temples of the gods and the towers of brick, and threw the rubbish into the River Araxes."
 This happened only a little over 2,5o0 years ago, in comparatively modern times The American explorers have dug through the layer of ruins left by Sennacherib, and through similar lay CTS left by his predecessors in destruc- tiveness, and they are now doing their best to bring into the light of the nine tsenth century the oldest Babylon without doubt the oldest city of the earth. They are digging into the very subcellar of human history.
 It was thought for long time that ths Egyptian civilization was older than that of the Euphrates Valley, but it is conceded now that the first civilization the modern world knows of was born and cradled in the vicinity of Babylon. The methods by which the history of this civilization are being painfully but cer- tainly learned ara almost miracle The recovery of the old Assyrian language is one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect, yet it would not have been possible without what ssems to some the chance of an inscription writ ten in the arrowhead characters of As syria and repeated in Greek. Slowly and by the same methods us:d in work ing out a cipher, the words of the dead language are worked out from what had been for centuries the meaningless marks on the broken pieces of brick and stone scattered among the ruins into which the worlds barbarian had precipitated these old triumphs of the selfish intellect. As the language is re- coversd the history of the race, of its earliest struggles, of it's hopes, fears, triumphs and vainglorious imagirings, is slowly developed out of the forgot ten past, as the chemicals in photo- grapher's bath develop the picture from his negative
 It is said that articles now being dug up at Babylon have an antiquity of more than ten thousand years. This is not impossible, though of course such estimates of time can never be so near ly exact that a thousand years. more or lsss, are material to them. We have fragments of a written history of Baby lon carrying it back "432 ,000," far be- yond the flood. These were translated from its written record by Berosus, a ,,r;aet of tha o.nd Rel af Rahv1on n inc