CHAPTER II. BABYLON. With these came they, who from the bordering flood Egypt from Syrian ground, had general names Of Baalim, and Ashtaroth; those male, MILTON. We are left in no doubt, from the records of sacred history, as to who was the first founder of empires, or which was the earliest of the world's cities, reared by the subjects of the mighty hunter, Nimrod. The narrative is most concise and distinct. "Nimrod began to be a mighty one in the earth; and the beginning of his kingdom was Babel." This ancient city, Babel, or Babylon, occupies a most important place among the great capitals of the older Asiatic kingdoms. We learn of it in connexion with the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Persian, the Hebrew, and the Macedonian Empires. It figures in the pages of sacred history, as a mighty city influencing the fate of other nations, and becoming the instrument for the accomplishment of God's primitive purposes on his chosen people, and when, at length, its own doom is pronounced, and it is hurled to destruction by the judgments of God, it becomes a monument of divine wrath, to which the closing revelations of the Apocalypse refer as the fittest emblem of the most dreadful manifestations of God's anger. It is a subject of the liveliest interest to inquire whether the celebrated Birs Nimroud be, indeed, the ancient Temple of Belus, and the still older Tower of Babel, the first great architectural structure of the human race. Mr. Rich, to whom we owe the first accurate and trustworthy account both of the Birs Nimroud and of the whole extensive group of surrounding ruins on the east bank of the Euphrates, thus describes his impressions on obtaining sight of the remarkable ruin, under an exceedingly advantageous aspect for appreciating its imposing mass, and its interesting associations: "I visited the Birs under circumstances peculiarly favourable to the grandeur of its effect. The morning was at first stormy, and threatened a severe fall of rain; but as we approached the object of our journey, the heavy clouds separating discovered the Birs frowning over the plain, and presenting the appearance of a circular hill crowned by a tower with a high ridge extending along the foot of it. Its being entirely concealed from our view during the first part of our ride prevented our acquiring the gradual idea, in general so prejudicial to effect, and so particularly lamented by those who visit the Pyramids. Just as we were within the proper distance, it burst at once upon our sight in the midst of rolling masses of thick black clouds, partially obscured by that kind of haze whose indistinctness is one great cause of sublimity, whilst a few strong catches of stormy light, thrown upon the desert in the back ground, served to give some idea of the immense extent, and dreary solitude, of the wastes in which this venerable ruin stands. "The Birs Nimroud is a mound of an oblong figure, the total circumference of which is seven hundred and sixty-two yards. At the eastern side it is cloven by a deep furrow, and is not more than fifty or sixty feet high, but at the western it rises in a conical figure to the ele |