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During the same period there were three famous kingdoms of the
nations, in which the city of the earth-born, that is, the society
of men living according to man under the domination of the fallen
angels, chiefly flourished, namely, the three kingdoms of Sicyon,
Egypt, and Assyria. Of these, Assyria was much the most powerful
and sublime; for that king Ninus, son of Belus, had subdued the
people of all Asia except India. By Asia I now mean not that part
which is one province of this greater Asia, but what is called
Universal Asia, which some set down as the half, but most as the
third part of the whole world, the three being Asia, Europe, and
Africa, thereby making an unequal division. For the part called
Asia stretches from the south through the east even to the north;
Europe from the north even to the west; and Africa from the west even
to the south. Thus we see that two, Europe and Africa, contain one
half of the world, and Asia alone the other half. And these two
parts are made by the circumstance, that there enters tween them from
the ocean all the Mediterranean water, which makes this great sea of
ours. So that, if you divide the world into two parts, the east and
the west, Asia will be in the one, and Europe and Africa in the
other So that of the three kingdoms then famous, one, namely
Sicyon, was not under the Assyrians, because it was in Europe; but
as for Egypt, how could it fail to be subject to the empire which
ruled all Asia with the single exception of India?
In Assyria, therefore, the dominion of the impious city had the
pre-eminence.
Its head was Babylon,-an earth-born city, most fitly named, for
it means confusion. There Ninus reigned after the death of his father
Belus, who first had reigned there sixty-five years. His son
Ninus, who, on his father's death, succeeded to the kingdom,
reigned fifty-two years, and had been king forty-three years when
Abraham was born, which was about the 1200th year before Rome was
founded, as it were another Babylon in the west.
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