In the temple, according to Herodotus, there was a sitting statue of Zeus—the name he gives to the god Merodach—all of gold. “Before the figure stands a large golden table and the throne whereon it sits and the base on which the throne is placed are likewise of gold”—the weight of the gold of these divers objects aggregating eight hundred talents.
Nebuchadnezzar, speaking of this temple, of which he calls himself “the fosterer,” says he adorned it with the wealth of the sea and the mountains and all conceivable valuables,—gold and silver and precious stones. The shrine of Merodach, he declares, “I made to gleam as the sun. The best of my cedars that I brought from Lebanon, the noble forest, I sought out for the roofing of the chamber of his lordship, which cedars I covered with gleaming gold. For the restoration of this temple I make supplication every morning to Merodach, the king of the gods, the lord of lords.” To judge from his inscriptions, it would be difficult to find a pagan king who was more prayerful or who exhibited greater devotion to his gods than did this proud ruler of old Babylonia.
It was in one of the sanctuaries of this temple, apparently in that of the god Ea, lord of wisdom and life and healer of the sick—whom the Greeks identified with Serapis—that the generals of Alexander the Great “asked the god whether it would be better and more desirable for Alexander,” who was then lying critically ill in a palace but a bowshot away, “to be carried into his temple in order as a suppliant to be cured by him. A voice issued from the god saying that he was not to be carried into the temple but that it would be better form to remain where he was. This answer was reported by the Companions and soon after Alexander died as if, forsooth, this were now the better thing.”[518]
Alexander had planned to make Babylon the capital of his world empire, but, shortly after taking possession of the city, his meteoric career in the prime of youthful manhood, was cut short by death, the only invincible foe he had ever encountered. His death was the downfall of the city whence he purposed to rule both Asia and Europe. One of his generals, Seleucus Nicator, succeeded him as ruler of Babylonia and soon thereafter transferred his capital from the banks of the sluggish Euphrates[519] to a new city, Seleucia, named after himself, which he had founded on the banks of the swift-flowing Tigris. And it was not long after this that the great metropolis of Babylonia, which for nearly two thousand years had been the leading capital of the ancient world and which had so long been “the glory of the kingdoms and the beauty of the Chaldees excellency” had literally, in the words of Isaiah, become the habitation of the wild beasts of the desert and was reduced to such a state of decay that, according to St. Jerome,[520] its walls, once the marvel of the world, served only to enclose a hunting park for the diversion of the Parthian Kings.
A furlong to the north of the temple of Merodach is the ruin of the famous tower of Babylon, which by many has been considered identical with the Tower of Babil. So colossal was it that the Babylonians called it “the foundation stone of heaven and earth,” and Nebuchadnezzar, who contributed materially towards its restoration and enlargement, declared in an inscription that he had raised the top of the tower “to rival heaven,” but this was a form of oriental exaggeration in which this monarch frequently indulged. Herodotus tells us that it was a stadium—six hundred feet “in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower and on that a third, and so on up to the eighth, above which there is a great temple.”[521] According to Strabo,[522] this quadrangular pyramid was “five hundred feet high”—nineteen feet higher than the great pyramid of Gizeh. As, however, the existing ruin of the tower of Babylon has not yet been excavated it is impossible, by actual measurements, to control the statements of ancient writers regarding its magnitude. But, from an old inscribed tablet which has been translated by the noted Orientalist, G. Smith, and more recently by Father Scheil, the distinguished French Dominican, we gather that the estimates of the Greek writers were probably excessive, for, according to the tablet in question, the summit of the tower was only three hundred feet above the surrounding plain.
Diodorus[523] informs us that this tower was used by the Chaldeans as an astronomical observatory. In the thick, dust-laden atmosphere of Babylonia, where sand storms are so frequent, such a lofty structure would be quite a necessity for the successful observations of the priest astronomers of Babylonia. “The greatly renowned clearness of the Babylonian sky,” as Koldewey truly observes, “is largely a fiction of European travelers who are rarely accustomed to observe the night sky of Europe without the intervention of city lights.”[524] Cicero, therefore, was quite as mistaken as modern travelers when he thought that the broad plains of Chaldea, where the sky was visible on all sides,[525] were specially favorable to star-gazing and the cultivation of astronomy. Equally misled was the poet who sang of Chaldean shepherds who
Watched from the centre of their sleeping flocks
Those radiant Mercuries that seemed to move,
Carrying through ether, in perpetual round,
Decrees and resolutions of the gods;