4a] but the food which
supports the life of man, and particularly wheat and barley, were
produced with inexhaustible fertility; and the husbandman, who committed
his seed to the earth, was frequently rewarded with an increase of two,
or even of three, hundred. The face of the country was interspersed
with groves of innumerable palm-trees; [55] and the diligent natives
celebrated, either in verse or prose, the three hundred and sixty uses
to which the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the juice, and the fruit,
were skilfully applied. Several manufactures, especially those of
leather and linen, employed the industry of a numerous people, and
afforded valuable materials for foreign trade; which appears, however,
to have been conducted by the hands of strangers. Babylon had been
converted into a royal park; but near the ruins of the ancient capital,
new cities had successively arisen, and the populousness of the country
was displayed in the multitude of towns and villages, which were built
of bricks dried in the sun, and strongly cemented with bitumen; the
natural and peculiar production of the Babylonian soil. While the
successors of Cyrus reigned over Asia, the province of Syria alone
maintained, during a third part of the year, the luxurious plenty of the
table and household of the Great King. Four considerable villages
were assigned for the subsistence of his Indian dogs; eight hundred
stallions, and sixteen thousand mares, were constantly kept, at the
expense of the country, for the royal stables; and as the daily tribute,
which was paid to the satrap, amounted to one English bushe of silver,
we may compute the annual revenue of Assyria at more than twelve hundred
thousand pounds sterling. [56]

[Footnote 52: The description of Assyria, is furnished by Herodotus, (l.
i. c. 192, &c.,) who sometimes writes for children, and sometimes
for philosophers; by Strabo, (l. xvi. p. 1070-1082,) and by Ammianus,
(l.xxiii. c. 6.) The most useful of the modern travellers are Tavernier,
(part i. l. ii. p. 226-258,) Otter, (tom. ii. p. 35-69, and 189-224,)
and Niebuhr, (tom. ii. p. 172-288.) Yet I much regret that the Irak
Arabi of Abulfeda has not been translated.]

[Footnote 53: Ammianus remarks, that the primitive Assyria, which
comprehended Ninus, (Nineveh,) and Arbela, had assumed the more recent
and peculiar appellation of Adiabene; and he seems to fix Teredon,
Vologesia, and Apollonia, as the extreme cities of the actual provin