Western Asia : Babylonia^ Assyria, and Chaldea 69 story as we read among the monuments on our voyage up the Nile. To-day the Babylon of Hammurapi has perished utterly. The meager remains of his age do not reveal a bright and sunny outlook upon life, which felt deeply the beauty of the world and clothed with that beauty all the surroundings of house, furniture, and garden (Fig. 38). There is no painting; the sculpture of Art the Semites is in one instance (Fig. 40) powerful and dramatic, but portraiture is scarcely able to distinguish one individual from another. Of architecture little remains. There were no colon- nades and no columns, though brick supports were employed. . The chief architectural creation is the temple tower (as in Fig. 43), but of the temples no example has survived. The beauti- ful art of gem-cutting, as we find it in their seals, was the great- est art of the Babylonians (Fig. 41). We may summarize the history of Babylonia as a thousand Summary of years of developing civilization and of struggle, during which history"'^" Sumerian and Semite each rose and fell twice — a thousand years reaching its highest point and its end in the reign of Hammurapi. Thenceforth the barbarians from the mountains poured into the Babylonian plain. They brought with them the horse} which now appears for the first time in Babylonia. They divided and then destroyed the kingdom of Hammurapi. After him there followed more than a thousand years of complete stag- nation. Henceforth Babylonia plays but a minor part in the history of the East, until in the seventh century B.C. a new line of desert nomads, the Chaldeans (see p. 80), established that Empire made famous by the name of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews. The influence of the ven- erable Babylonian civilization lived on, especially in writing, re- ligion, and literature. The old Sumerian tongue — though no longer spoken — was employed in religious documents as a sacred language, which only the priests understood, as Latin has survived in the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. 1 It was a few centuries later that the horse entered Egypt, as we have seen (p. 45). We shall soon learn (p. 90) whence these Babylonian horses came.
