Quintus Curtius asserts positively “that the enclosure contained sufficient pasture and arable land to support the whole population during a long siege.”[511]
If such was the case we should be forced to conclude that the population of the city was out of all proportion to its size. The English geographer, Rennell,[512] is disposed to allow to Babylon during its most flourishing period a population of a million and a quarter, but this is but a surmise, and all estimates of the number of inhabitants in the great city are, at best, the merest conjectures.
For nearly twenty-five centuries the accounts of Ctesias, Strabo, Herodotus, and the writers who accompanied Alexander the Great to the East were our sole authorities respecting the size and the magnificence of the great capital on the Euphrates. Since, however, the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have begun to publish the results of their carefully conducted excavations we find that we must greatly modify many of our views concerning the city about which there has been so much legend and romance, and envisage it in the light of the cold, scientific facts which have been submitted to us, as the results of long research, by Dr. Koldewey and his scholarly associates. While many of the descriptions of Herodotus and other early writers are found to be accurate, it is now clear that many of their measurements require very considerable revision. Thus, in lieu of the fifty-three miles which Herodotus has given as the circuit of the city and the forty miles at which Ctesias has estimated it, Dr. Koldewey finds that these figures must be reduced to eleven miles. The learned investigator noting that the circumference given by Ctesias approximates closely to four times the correct measurement is lead to suspect that the Greek writer “mistook the figures representing the whole circumference for the measure of one side of the square.”[513]
The excavations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” seem, therefore, to prove conclusively that Babylon, far from covering an area so large that both Paris and London could find place within it, side by side, was in reality, as Delitzsch declares, no larger than Munich or Dresden.[514]
But in spite of the great reduction that Koldewey found himself compelled to make in the measurements of the classical writers he does not hesitate to declare “that, in any case, the city, even in circumference, was the greatest of any in the ancient East, Nineveh, which in other respects rivalled Babylon, not excepted.” He also pertinently observes that “it must always be remembered that an ancient city was primarily a fortress of which the inhabited part was surrounded and protected by the encircling girdle of the walls. Our modern cities are of an entirely different character; they are inhabited spaces open on all sides. A reasonable comparison can, therefore, only be made between Babylon and other walled cities and, when compared with them, Babylon takes the first place, as regards the extent of its enclosed and inhabited area, not only for ancient but also for modern times.”[515]
After spending some time on and round about the mound of Babil we proceeded to explore the ruins in the southern part of the city. On our way thither we strolled along the east bank of the Euphrates which, in places, is fringed with stately palms whose feathery crowns are always a delight to the eye. Indeed, the palm is so indispensable a feature of an eastern landscape that no picture of a town or a river seems complete without groves and clumps of this most picturesque of oriental trees. I was glad to find so many of them bordering the Euphrates and the western ruins of Babylon, as I had always imagined that they must here, more than anywhere else, be an essential part of the environment. But, although I was delighted to find so many of these noble trees, it was not for them that I was then specially looking. I was seeking rather a specimen of the weeping willow—the graceful Salix Babylonica—which, in my mind, has always been associated with what is the most pathetic threnody ever written in any language. I refer to the plaintive elegy of the Children of Israel during their captivity in Babylon. Seating myself under an umbrageous palm near a cluster of delicate weeping willows, I said to myself: “This is the one place in the world where one can best appreciate the overmastering sadness of the homesick exiles when their captors asked them to sing the songs of their native land.” And, taking my breviary from my pocket, I read again and again what then seemed to me the most affecting lines ever composed. Put yourself, in fancy, gentle reader, on the bank of the Euphrates in sight of the ruined palace of Nebuchadnezzar and read aloud the lamentation of the disconsolate Hebrews, as given in Psalm 137:
Upon the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion:
On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments. For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs.
And they that carried us away said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion.
How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?