Ancient Babylon Research Paper

In at least one branch of their descendants the Semitic peoples of Babylonia still live. Ancient Babylon has disappeared, and its land has become a waste, inhabited by a feeble folk bearing little or no kinship to the mighty race of earth's first empire builders. But the Hebrews of today are the living tree that has sprung from that marvelous root of Babylonian culture, character, and religion.

To the Hebrews, our modern world is indebted for the germ of its religious thought, the realization of the one almighty Power enfolding the universe, "the all-wise and the all-loving too." This thought, though not in its full clearness, the Hebrews carried with them in their departure from Babylonia. They carried also the Babylonian shrewdness at trade, and keenness at figures, and, as a less valuable inheritance, an instinctive leaning towards the unclean ritual of Ishtar, the nature goddess, or love goddess, of ancient Summer.
In the latter case, which is the one that recent research makes more probable, Abraham's own eyes and those of his kinsfolk rested often and familiarly on the sights of the great metropolis in the days of Sumu-abi and the first powerful Semitic kings. Amid these surroundings there came to the patriarch the impulse, God-given as are all high impulses, to leave the oppressive civilization for a freer, purer