amount of valuable material, for it gave us the name of the city in which we were excavating. The signs Ud-nun-ki are explained by an Assyrian inscription as standing for a city called Adab which

was also mentioned upon the stele of Hammurabi. The curiosity of archæologists as to its location was satisfied; the identification

of Bismya with Ud-nun-ki was confirmed dozens of times in the subsequent excavations. The appearance of the inscribed statue therefore not only restored to history the long lost temple of Emach and the important city of Adab, but it added another name to the small list of early Babylonian kings, and settled the controversy as to the derivation of the Biblical name David.

It would at first seem difficult to fix the date of the statue of

David, yet the difficulty was not so great as it might appear. The general archaic appearance of the inscription, the linear characters employed before the wedges of later times had developed, the signs which were joined together, and the separation of the words by dividing lines, all indicated an extreme age.

Early during the excavations there was discovered in an upper stratum of the temple a short inscription of Naram Sin upon gold;

his date is given as 3750 B. C. At the bottom of the stratum in which the gold was found were bricks measuring nearly half a meter square; these bricks are peculiar to Sargon, the father of Naram Sin, of 3800 B. C. Beneath them we came upon various strata containing long thin bricks marked with grooves varying in number from one to five. These grooves I discovered to be the markings of the royal builders previous to the time of Sargon. The names of the rulers are entirely lost, nor do we even know their number;

we can only distinguish the work of each king by the number and direction of the grooves upon the bricks. At Bismya were traces of at least fifteen kings who used the long thin bricks previous to the time of Sargon. Below the strata of grooved bricks of this long line of kings we discovered the foundation of a temple constructed of small bricks plano-convex in shape, or flat upon the bottom and

rounded upon the top. Similar bricks discovered in the lowest strata of Nippur and Telloh by other explorers have been assigned by them to the date of 4500 B. C. Therefore, since between the age of the plano-convex brick temple and Sargon of 3800 B. C. at least fifteen kings ruled at Bismya, one may be justified in placing the date of the temple not far from 4500 B. C. It was to adorn this temple that the statue of David was sculptured, and in its ruins it was found.

The art represented by the statue is still another indication of its great antiquity. The almond-shaped eyes, the nose on a line with the forehead, the short pleated skirt suspended from the waist, are all peculiarities of the earliest Babylonian art. In the Louvre is a fragment of a bas relief from Telloh representing a number of small figures with the same peculiarities. When the relief was found several years ago it was assigned to the very earliest Babylonian period, and has since been regarded as one of the rarest of the treasures of antiquity.

The statue of David, therefore, not only presented in its short inscription the mass of information given above; it has the distinction of being the oldest statue in the world. It is the only perfect Babylonian statue and the only one in the round with the arms free from the body. Its execution testifies to the advance of civilization during the fifth millennium B. C.; the art of that age in Babylonia seems to have equaled the art of any other. It shows that the costume of the time was little more than a rag about the loins, yet the art of braiding or weaving was known, and a highly developed written language existed. The civilization of 4500 B. C. was never surpassed in Babylonia unless perhaps during the very last days of the empire.

THE HARMONY OF THE SPHERES.

BY THE EDITOR.

W

HILE pondering over the problem of man's moral aspirations and the various forms which they assume in different religions, I was deeply impressed with the similarity of sentiment in the utterances of the several religious leaders who had attained the loftiest heights of moral truth, and if they have reached their conclusions (as we must assume) in perfect independence, we cannot deny that their agreement indicates a remarkable harmony in the spiritual spheres, and the dominant keynote of this celestial music may be characterized in Christ's noble word:

"But I say unto you, love your enemies." Matt. v. 44.

Nor is this word without resonance in the sacred writings of other countries. The venerable Lao-Tze proclaimed the same great maxim in these sentences:

And

"Requite hatred with goodness."-Lao-Tze, ch. 63.

"The good I meet with goodness.

The bad I also meet with goodness.

Thus I actualize goodness.

The faithful I meet with faith.

The faithless I also meet with faith.

Thus I actualize faith."-Lao-Tze, ch. 49.

The Buddhist distinguishes as clearly as St. Paul between "love" and "lovingkindness." The former in the sense of sexual love is kâmo (in both Pali and Sanskrit), corresponding exactly to the Greek pws, but there are two words for "lovingkindness"; first there is the natural affection and friendliness, such as exists between brother and sister, or parents and children, which is called pemam, and then the highest ideal of "lovingkindness" in the sublimest religious sense, called mettâ. The Dhammapada warns the disciples