Lecture I. Introductory. 239
immediately adjoining the Babylonian plain, but over the whole
of Western Asia as well. Long before the days of Abraham,
Canaan was a Babylonian province, obeying Babylonian law,
reading Babylonian books, and writing in Babylonian characters.
Along with Babylonian culture necessarily came also the religion [260]
of Babylonia and the theological or cosmogonic dogmas which
accompanied it. Abraham himself was born in a Babylonian city,
and the religion of his descendants was nurtured in an atmosphere
of Babylonian thought. The Mosaic Law shows almost as clear
evidences of Babylonian influence as do the earlier chapters of
Genesis.
Recent discoveries have gone far towards lifting the veil that
has hitherto covered the beginnings of Babylonian history. We
have been carried back to a time when the Edin or“plain”of
Babylonia was still in great measure a marsh, and the waters
of the Persian Gulf extended 120 miles farther inland than they
do to-day. If we take the rate at which the land has grown
since the days of Alexander the Great as a basis of measurement,
this would have been from eight to nine thousand years ago.
At this time there were already two great sanctuaries in the
country, around each of which a settlement or city had sprung
up. One of these was Nippur in the north, the modern Niffer;
the other was Eridu,“the good city,”^205 now marked by the
mounds of Nowâwis or Abu-Shahrain, which stood on what was
then the shore of the Persian Gulf. Now its site is more than a
hundred miles distant from the sea. But it was once the seaport of
Babylonia, whose inhabitants caught fish in the waters of the Gulf
or traded with the populations of the Arabian coast. Nippur, on
the other hand, was inland and agricultural. It was the primitive
centre of those engineering works which gradually converted the
pestiferous marshes of Babylonia into a fruitful plain, watered by
canals and rivers, and protected from inundation by lofty dykes.
(^205) Eridû is a Semitised abbreviation of the Sumerian Eri-dugga,“good city.”