grave, became prominent among them; and in
the absence of clearer knowledge we may well take this idea as the
groundwork, the starting-point, of all man's later and more striking
progress.

Since the Egyptians believed in a future life they strove to preserve
the body for it, and built ever stronger and more gigantic tombs. They
strove to fit the mind for it, and cultivated virtues, not wholly animal
such as physical strength, nor wholly commercial such as cunning. They
even carved around the sepulchre of the departed a record of his doings,
lest they--and perhaps he too in that next life--forget. There were
elements of intellectual growth in all this, conditions to stimulate the
mind beyond the body.

And the Egyptians did develop. If one reads the tales, the romances,
that have survived from their remoter periods, he finds few emotions
higher than childish curiosity or mere animal rage and fear. Amid their
latest stories, on the contrary, we encounter touches of sentiment, of
pity and self-sacrifice, such as would even now be not unworthy of
praise. But, alas! the improvement seems most marked where it was most
distant. Perhaps the material prosperity of the land was too great, the
conditions of life too easy; there was no stimulus to effort, to
endeavor. By about the year 2200 B.C. we find Egypt fallen into the grip
of a cold and lifeless formalism. Everything was fixed by law; even
pictures must be drawn in a certain way, thoughts must be expressed by
stated and unvariable symbols. Advance became well-nigh impossible.
Everything lay in the hands of a priestly caste the completeness of
whose dominion has perhaps never been matched in history. The leaders
lived lives of luxurious pleasure enlightened by scientific study; but
the people scarce existed except as automatons. The race was dead; its
true life, the vigor of its masses, was exhausted, and the land soon
fell an easy prey to every spirited invader.

Meanwhile a rougher, stronger civilization was growing in the river
valleys eastward from the Nile. The Semitic tribes, who seem to have had
their early seat and centre of dispersion somewhere in this region, were
coalescing into nations, Babylonians along the lower Tigris and
Euphrates, Assyrians later along the upper rivers, Hebrews under David
and Solomon[3] by the Jordan, Phoenicians on the Mediterranean coast.

[Footnote 3: See _Accession of Solomon_, page 92.]

The early Babylonian civilization may anted