Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/77

 THE CHALD.EAN RELIGION. 57 and ceremonies without discovering at least a part of the truth. It was not so with Chaldaea. Babylon was too far off. Until the time of Alexander's conquests the boldest travellers did no more than glance into its streets and monumental building's, and bv o o ' j that time Nineveh had long ceased to exist. It was only under the first of the Seleucidae, when a Macedonian kingdom was established in the centre of Mesopotamia, that the curiosity of the Greeks led them to make inquiries similar to those they had pursued for some three centuries in the valley of the Nile. We cannot doubt that this desire for information arose among the followers of those princes themselves ; many of them were very in- telligent men ; and when Berosus determined to write his history in Greek, he may have wished to answer the questions asked in his hearing by the Greek writers and philosophers ; by those Alexandrians who were not all at Alexandria. Unfortunately, nearly the whole of his work has been lost. At the end of a century and a half Babylon shook off Hellenism, and Mesopotamia fell into the hands of the Parthians. These people affected, in some degree, the poetry and arts of Greece, but at bottom they were nothing more than Oriental barbarians. Their capital, Ctesiphon, seems never to have attracted learned men, nor ever to have been a seat of those inquiries into the past of the older races in which the cultured cities of the Greek world took so great a pleasure. When Rome became the heir of Greece and the perpetuator of her traditions, we may believe that, under Trajan, she set about establishing herself in the country ; but she soon found it necessary to withdraw within the Euphrates, and it was her loss when the Parthians fell from power to be succeeded in the lordship of Mesopotamia by the Sassanids. 1 We see, then, that, with the exception of one short period, Chaldaea was what the Greeks called a barbarous country after the 1 The History of the Assyrians and Medes, which EUSF.BIUS {Preparation cvangelique, i, 12, and 41) attributes to the writer whom he calls ABYDENUS, dates perhaps from the period when the Roman Empire turned its attention to the basin of the Euphrates and attempted to regain possession of it. The few extant fragments of this author have been collected in Ch. MULLRR'S Fragmenta Historicorum GriEConan, vol. iv. p. 279. We know nothing as to when he lived, but he wrote in the Ionian dialect, as did ARRIAN in his book on India, and it would seem difficult to put him later than the second century. It is probable that his under- taking belonged to that movement towards research which began in the reign of Augustus and was prolonged to the last years of the Antonines. I