The Sibyl · a new plain-English translation from the original language
He stood and bade me prophesy across all
the earth, and set before kings the things that are to be.
And this God first put into my mind to tell,
how many grim sorrows he devised for Babylon,
the Immortal, because she laid waste his great temple.
Woe to you, Babylon, and the race of Assyrian men,
a roaring blast comes at last upon the whole land of sinners,
and a great cry will destroy every country of mortal men
and the stroke of the great God, the leader of hymns.
For upon you, Babylon, a fiery doom will come from on high
[yea, it will descend from heaven upon you, from the holy ones]
and everlasting destruction for the children of your wrath.
And then you will be as you were before, as though you had never been;
and then you will be sated with blood, as you yourself once
poured out — of good men and of righteous men,
whose blood even now cries out to the long heavens.
A great blow shall come upon your houses, Egypt,
terrible, one you never hoped would come upon you.
For the sword shall pass through your very midst,
and scattering and death and famine shall hold you fast
in the seventh generation of kings, and then it shall cease.
Woe to you, land of Gog and Magog, lying between
the rivers of Ethiopia, how great a flood of blood you shall receive,
and you shall be called the dwelling-place of judgment among men,
and your dew-drenched earth shall drink your own dark blood.
Woe to you, Libya; woe to sea and land alike;
daughters of the west, how bitter the day you shall come to.
You shall come, driven too by harsh strife,
terrible and harsh; a dreadful judgment shall come again,
and by necessity all of you shall go down into ruin,
in payment for how greatly you defiled the Immortal's
great house, and gnawed it fearfully with teeth of iron.
Therefore you shall see your own land filled with corpses,
some slain by war and every onslaught of divine wrath,
by famine and plague, and by savage-hearted enemies.
And your whole land shall lie desolate, and your cities desolate.
And in the west a star shall blaze, one men shall call a comet,
a sign to mortals of the sword, of famine, and of death,
and of the ruin of rulers and of great and eminent men.
And there shall be still greater signs among mankind:
for the deep-eddying Tanais shall abandon
the Maeotian lake, and in place of its deep stream there shall be the furrow's course
of fruitful land, and its once boundless flood shall block a narrow strait.
There shall be chasms and yawning pits; and many cities
shall fall with all their men; in Asia, Iassus,
Cebren, Pandonia, Colophon, Ephesus, Nicaea,
Antioch, Tanagra, Sinope, Smyrna, Maros,
Gaza most blessed, Hierapolis, Astypalaea,
and of Europe, Cyagra of great renown, the royal city Meropeia,
Antigone, Magnesia, Mycenae the all-divine.