with other nations of antiquity, it is absolutely necessary that we should pay some attention to the history of Babylon, Nineveh, Phoenicia, and Persia. These may seem distant countries and forgotten people, and many might feel inclined to say, 'Let the dead bury their dead; what are those mummies to us?' Still, such is the marvellous continuity of history, that I could easily show you many things which we, even we who are here assembled, owe to Babylon, to Nineveh, to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia.
Every one who carries a watch, owes to the Babylonians the division of the hour into sixty minutes. It may be a very bad division, yet such as it is, it has come to us from the Greeks and Romans, and it came to them from Babylon. The sexagesimal division is peculiarly Babylonian. Hipparchos, 150 B. c., adopted it from Babylon, Ptolemy, 150 A. D., gave it wider currency, and the French, when they decimated everything else, respected the dial plates of our watches, and left them with their sixty Babylonian minutes.
Every one who writes a letter, owes his alphabet to the Romans and Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learnt it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect alphabet as all the students of phonetics will tell you ; yet, such as it is, and has been, we owe it to the old Phoenicians and Egyptians, and in every letter we trace, there lies imbedded the mummy of an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic.
What do we owe to the Persians? It does not seem to be much, for they were not a very inventive race, and what they knew, they had chiefly learnt from their neighbours, the Babylonians and Assyrians.
