BABUYA'NTES ISLANDS, in the Pacific between the Loo Choo islands and For mosa; Calavan and Babuyan arc the most important. They are fertile, and furnish a large quantity of sulphur. Batan is the largest town. Pop. of the islands est. 8,000.
BAB'YLON—BAnyeostA. Babylonia was the name given in ancient times to the flat country about the lower course of the Euphrates, called in modern times Irak-Arabi. In the Old Testament, it is call Shinar, Babel, and also " land of the Chaldees;" and by the later Greek and Roman writers, occasionally Chaldea. Its proper boundaries were: on the n., towards Mesopotamia, the Euphrates and the Median Wall, which extended from the junction of the Chabur with the Euphrates to the Tigris; on the e., towards Assyria and Susiana, the Tigris; on the s., the gulf of Persia; and on the w., the desert of Arabia. During the wider extension of the Babylonian dominion, the name compre hended also Assyria and Mesopotamia. The country forms a perfect plain, which is a continuation of that of Assyria. The two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, here approach each other most nearly, until their blended waters fall into the Persian gulf. The country was once protected from flooding by numerous canals and embankments, and several artificial lakes, which are now mostly in ruin. The most important canal was that now known as Nahr-el-Melik, which is undoubtedly the ancient royal canal that joined the two great rivers. It was kept in repair by the Roman emperors, and was serv iceable as late as the 7th century. The soil, naturally fertile, was rendered more so by the garden-like way in which it was cultivated, and yielded abundant crops. especially of wheat, barley, and dates. The want of stone and wood was more severely felt dine in Assyria. The only building material was brick, for which the soil afforded abund ance of clay. The bricks were either dried in the sun or biirnt, and were very dunilde, resisting,' in the ruins, the effects of the weather to this day. Mineral bitumen, spring ing up everywhere in abundance, served as mortar. In this favored plain, the htiman race attained early a state of social and political organization, the oldest, indeed, that antiquity gives us any account of.
Until recently, the early history of Babylonia was doubtful and dark. The only sources were a few incidental notices in the Bible; some fragments derived at third hand from the perished writings of Berosus, a Babylonian priest, who had translated the annals of his country into Greek; and lastly, the notices of Greek writers, chiefly Herod otus. But the whole is confused and contradictory, and history and mythology were jumbled together.
But light is now breaking in upon the darkness. In recent years, multitudes of brick tablets, stamped with cuneiform (see CmiErronm) characters, have been dug up from the ruins of the great cities that once studded the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates; and in these we find ourselves in possession of contemporaneous records of events reaching back 30 c. before the Christian era, and restoring a page of human history that was appa rently lost.
At the earliest period to which the records carry us back, the population of the whole valley of the Tigris and Euphrates consisted mainly of tribes of Turanian origin, their language having remarkable affinities with those of the Ural-Altaic „rrotip of the Turanian nations, e.g. the Finns, the Magyars, and Turks. Closely allied tribes occu pied the whole region s.w. of the Caspian sea—Media, Armenia, Elam, Susiana. In that region lies Ararat, the " Mountain of the World," and to that region the traditions of those Turanians pointed as the cradle of their race. But the earliest records reveal the existence of a Semitic element in the population of the Euphrates valley, coming in apparently from the s w.—Arabia and Egypt. The infiltration of this foreign element wept on increasing for centuries, until at last it got the upper hand, and the Babylo nians and Assyrians, when they became known to the historians of the west, were essen tially Semitic peoples. Their civilization, however, was merely a development of what they took up from the original inhabitants.