Mexico Missouri message. (Mexico, Audrain County, Mo.) 1899-1918, 1909-11-25
TELLS OF BABYLON
LIFE IN OLD LAND DESCRIBED BY
MAN or SCIENCE.
Prof. DeIItzseh Has Delved Deeply In.
TO Matter, and Graphically Por-
trays the Habits and Gus
toma Of Ancient Empire.

Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch, whom the
kaiser, in an access of Just enthusi-
asm, once described as knowing
more about Biblical culture than the
Biblical chroniclers themselves" has
just delivered a remarkable lecture
on Old Babylon before the German
Orient society. The records of Baby.
Ion, said the professor. are OF espe-
cial interest now, for the destruction
Of the city seems to have been an ex-
act parallel with the overwhelming
of Messina. The GODDESS Istar, mother
OF all mankind, was much enraged
after Babylon's destruction to find
that Bel, the god of the earth, had
been granted so much power, and the
result was that for a thousand years
there was not another earthquake.
Old Babylon in those days was
smaller In extent than northern Italy.
IL was a fiat, rainless land, intersect-
ed by hundreds of canals; and the I'll.
girls and Euphrates, which then issued
into the sea, were united by a big ca
nal. Thousands Of rowing and sail
Ing boats, and of wicker canoes
crowded the waterways. Everywhere
was active life and a genuine Gull
ture. The whole country was crowd
ed with small villages, built chiefly of
reeds. but bricks and stone were used
for important edifices. From rs cents
to SO annually was the rent of the av.
erage house. Every girl found hus-
band. Severe winter frosts and ter
rife summer heat made life disagree
able, and the country was overrun
with lions and swarmed with myriads
of flies, while parts were periodically
swept by sandstorms.
The original civilized race of south
and central Babylonia was the Sumo
rian, a tremendously gifted people,
whose women for beauty rivaled the
statues Of ancient Greece. In north
Babylonia the people were Semites.
The later civilization was the result
Of union of the two. Afterward fol-
lowed the Chaldeans, whose king, Ne
buchadnezzar, lived 900 years before
Christ. 1t was the original Sumerians
who invented cuneiform writing, They
were great mathematician, and had
a sexagesimal system of counting,
with separate signs for l and 10, but
no zero. Prof. Delitzsch said he had
himself found their clay tablets with
multiplication and division tables, and
their methods of calculating cubes
and quadrates. The Sumerians went
clean shaved, whereas the Semites al
ways wore long boards and long hair.
In the third millennium before
Christ the Babylonians were using
gold and silver as a medium of ex-
change. This was an inevitable de-
velopment, as trade ana industry we're
already highly developed, and bust
ness was even carried on by COM
panies and corporations. One of the
oldest institutions of old Babylon was
the banking firm of Egbi & Sons.
Dealing in stocks on margins must
have been a profitless business, as
the Babylonian rate of interest for
loans was usually 20 per cent.
The Babylonians had no standing
army, but they had a strong militia
Their ideas on sorcery and witch
craft are largely responsible for the
superstitions on these subjects of
western countries. 1t is possible, said
the professor, that Christianity is al
so indebted to their heather temples
for the towers and steeples of its
churches.