A thousand years later, the Akkadians
were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another
Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built himself
a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who
gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state
the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the
Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-
ran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not
carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers
of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians
and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast
and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and
Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until
the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when
the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and
made that city the most important capital of that day.
Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged
the study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy
and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which
were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a
crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and
overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years
later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great,
who turned the Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many
Semitic races, into a Greek province.
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