imposed on the
Chaldaean painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of
which the majority of Egyptians would not have felt themselves capable.
And the plague of usury raged with equal violence in city and country.

In proportion, however, as we are able to bring this wonderful
civilisation to light we become more and more conscious that we have
indeed little or nothing in common with it. Its laws, customs, habits
and character, its methods of action and its modes of thought, are so
far apart from those of the present day that they seem to belong to a
humanity utterly different from our own. It thus happens that while we
understand to a shade the classical language of the Greeks and of the
Romans, and can read their works almost without effort, the great
primitive literatures of the world, the Egyptian and Chaldaean, have
nothing to offer us for the most part but a sequence of problems to
solve or of enigmas to unriddle with patience.

* * * * *

The Struggle of the Nations

Maspero in this work gives us the second volume of his great
historical trilogy. He shows in parallel views the part played
in the history of the ancient world by the first Chaldaean
Empire, by Syria, by the Hyksos, or shepherd kings, of Egypt,
and by the first Cossaean kings who established the greatness
of Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire. The great Theban dynasty
is then exhibited in its romantic rise under the Pharaohs.
Maspero writes not as a mere chronicler or reciter of events,
but as a philosophical historian. He makes the reader
understand how fatally the chronic militarism of these
competing empires drained each of its manhood and brought
Babylon and Assyria simultaneously into a hopeless condition
of national anaemia. Equally pathetic is the picture drawn of
the gradual but sure decay of the grand empire of the
Pharaohs. Maspero, with masterly skill, passes a processional
of these despots before our eyes.

_I.--The Chaldaean Empire and the Hyksos_

Some countries seem destined from their origin to become the
battlefields of the contending nations which environ them. Into such
regions neighbouring peoples come to settle their quarrels, and bit by
bit they appropriate it, so that at best the only course open to the
inhabitants is to join forces with one of the invaders. From remote
antiquity this wa