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 BABYLONIA

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still lived in 1901. Bahd died at Acre on 16tli May 1892, and was succeeded by his son 'Abbas Efendi, whose claims, however, were contested by another son named Muhammad ’AH. The followers of the latter do not appear to be numerous, but in Acre itself they are said to have succeeded in retaining the custody of Bah&’s tomb. Full particulars of this latest schism are still lacking. During the last five or six years the doctrine of Bahd has been preached with considerable success by a certain Ibrahim Khayru’llah in the United States, where there are now some 3000American converts. The tenets of the older Babls (now represented by the Ezells) included, besides a belief in the divine mission of the Bab and the plenary inspiration of all his numerous writings, a denial of the finality of any revelation, and of the resurrection of the body. Great importance was attached to the mystical values of letters and numbers, especially the numbers 18 and 19 (“the number of the unity”) and 192='361 (“the number of all things”). In general, the Bab’s doctrines most closely resembled those of the Isma'llls and Hurufis. In the hands of Baha the aims of the sect became much more practical and ethical, and the wilder pantheistic tendencies and metaphysical hair-splittings of the early Babis almost disappeared. The intelligence, integrity and morality of the present Babis (whose numbers appear to be rapidly increasing) are high, but their efforts to improve the social position of woman have been much exaggerated. They were in no way concerned (as was at the time falsely alleged) in the assassination of Nasiru’d-Din BABYLONIA

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Shah in May 1896. Since the persecution at Yezd in May 1891 they have been comparatively unmolested. Literature.—The literature of the sect is very voluminous, but mostly in manuscript. The most valuable public collections in Europe are at St Petersburg, London (British Museum), and Paris (Bibliotheque Nationale), where two or three very rare MSS. collected by Gobineau, including the precious history of the Bab’s contemporary, Haji Mirza Jani of Kashan, are preserved. For the bibliography up to 1889, see vol. ii. pp. 173-211 of the Traveller s Narrative, written to illustrate the Episode of the Bah, a Persian work composed by Baha’s son, 'Abbas Efendi, edited, translated and annotated by E. G. Browne (Cambridge, 1891). More recent works are :—Browne. The New History of the Bdb. Cambridge, 1893 ; and “ Catalogue and Description of the 27 Babi Manuscripts,” Journal of R. Asiat. Soc., July and October 1892.— Andreas. Die Bahi’s in Persien. 1896.—Baron Victor Rosen. Collections Scientifiques de VInstitut des Langues Orientales, vol. i. (1877), pp. 179-2P2 ; vol. iii. (1886), pp. 1-51 ; vol. vi. (1891), pp. 141-255. “Manuscrits Babys ” ; and other important articles in Russian by the same scholar, and by Captain A. G. Toumansky, in the Zapiski vostochnava otdyeleniya Imperatorskava Russkava Archeologicheskava Obshchestva (St Petersburg, 1890-1900, vols. iv.xii.).—Also an excellent edition by Toumansky, with Russian translation, notes and introduction, of the Kitdb-i-Aqdas (the most important of Baha’s works), &c. (St. Petersburg, 1899).—Of the works composed in English for the American converts the most important is entitled Behd'u'lldh (The Glory of God), by Ibrahim Khayru’llah, assisted by Howard MacNutt (Chicago, 1900). (e. g. b.)

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SINCE the publication of the article on Babylonia in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, excavations in that country have been carried on so actively, while so largely increasing a number of Assyrian students has been engaged in deciphering the thousands of inscribed tablets which have been brought to Europe and America, that the account given of its history and culture requires to be considerably supplemented and Recent ex- revised. Though little has been done towards phrations the excavation of Assyrian sites, Babylonia has and dis- been explored by expedition after expedition, and coveries. some 0f earliest records of civilization have been brought to light. After the death, however, of Mr George Smith at Aleppo in 1876, the first expedition—that sent out by the British Government in 1877-79 under the conduct of Mr Hormuzd Rassam—confined its operations to Assyria. Excavations in the mounds of Balawat (called Imgur-Bel by the Assyrians), 15 miles east of Mosul, resulted in the discovery of a small temple dedicated to the god of dreams by Assur-nazir-pal II. (885 b.c.), and containing a stone coffer or ark, in which were two inscribed tables of alabaster of rectangular shape, as well as of a palace which had been destroyed by the Babylonians, but rebuilt by Shalmaneser II. From the latter came the bronze gates with hammered reliefs which are now in the British Museum. The remains of a palace of Assur-nazir-pal II. at Nimroud (Calah) were also excavated by Mr Rassam, and hundreds of enamelled tiles were disinterred. Two years later (1880-81) Mr Rassam was sent to Babylonia, where he discovered the site of the temple of the Sun-god of Sippara at Abu-Habba, and so fixed the position of the two Sipparas or Sepharvaim. Abu-Habba lies south of Baghdad, midway between the Euphrates and Tigris, on the south side of an ancient canal, on the opposite bank of which was Sippara of the goddess Anunit, now Der. Meanwhile (1877-81) the French consul, de Sarzec, had been excavating at Tello, the ancient Lagas, in Southern Babylonia, and bringing to light monuments of the Sumerian or pre - Semitic age, which included the diorite statues of the High-priest Gudea, now in the Louvre, the stone of which, according to the inscriptions upon them, had been fetched from Magan, the Sinaitic

ASSYRIA

ASSYRIA.

peninsula. The subsequent excavations of M. de Sarzec in Tello and its neighbourhood have carried the history of the city back to at least 4000 b.c., and a library of more than 30,000 tablets has been found, which were arranged on shelves in the time of Gudea (in 2700 B.c.). In 1886-87 a German expedition under Koldewey explored the cemetery of El-Hibba (immediately to the south of Tello), and for the first time made us accurately acquainted with the burial customs of ancient Babylonia. Another German expedition, on a large scale, has been despatched in 1899 with the object of thoroughly exploring the site of Babylon, the palaces and temples of which still remain for the most part unidentified. Its first result has been the identification of the mound called El-Qasr with the palace of Nebuchadrezzar, and that of Amran with the temple of Bel. But thus far the most important and most systematic work done in Babylonia has been that of the American expedition of the university of Pennsylvania, which has been (since 1889) patiently and scientifically excavating the great temple of El-lil or Bel at Niffer, the ancient Nippur, in Northern Babylonia. Here Mr Haynes has been working winter and summer, steadily removing stratum after stratum of debris and cutting sections in the ruins down to the virgin soil. Midway in the mound is a platform of huge bricks stamped with the names of Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin (3800 b.c.) ; and as the debris above them is eleven metres thick, the topmost layer being not later than the Christian era (Hilprecht, The Babylonian Expedition, i. 2. p. 23), it is calculated that the debris underneath the pavement, 9'25 metres thick, must represent a period of about 3000 years, more especially as older constructions had to be levelled before the pavement was laid. In the deepest part of the excavations, however, inscribed clay tablets and fragments of stone vases are still found, though the cuneiform characters upon them are of a very archaic type, and sometimes even retain their primitive pictorial forms. The temple of Nippur was one of the oldest sanctuaries in Babylonia, and one of the two centres from which the early culture of the country radiated. The other centre was Eridu, now represented by Abu-Shahrein (or Nowa-