Ethiopia, partly by commerce but still more by military invasion; so too
Chaldaic civilization made itself felt at vast distances from its
birthplace, even in the cold valleys and snowy plateaux of Armenia, in
districts which are separated by ten degrees of latitude from the burning
shores where the fish god Oannes showed himself to the rude fathers of the
race, and taught them "such things as contribute to the softening of
life."[1] In Egypt progressive development took place from north to south,
while in Chaldaea its direction was reversed. The apparent contrast is,
however, but a resemblance the more. The orientation, if such a term may be
used, of the two basins, is in opposite directions, but in each the spread
of religion with its rites and symbols, of written characters with their
adaptation to different languages, and of all those arts and processes
which, when taken together, make up what we call civilization, advanced
from the seaboard to the river springs.

In these two countries the conscience of man seems to have been first
awakened to his innate power of bettering his own condition by well
directed observation, by the elaboration of laws, and by forethought for
the future. Between Egypt on the one hand, and Chaldaea with that Assyria
which was no more than its offshoot and prolongation, on the other, there
are strong analogies, as will be clearly seen in the course of our study,
but there are also differences that are not less appreciable. Professor
Rawlinson shows this very clearly in a page of descriptive geography which
he will allow us to quote as it stands. It will not be the last of our
borrowings from his excellent work, _The Five Great Monarchies of the
Ancient Eastern World_, a book that has done so much to popularize the
discoveries of modern scholars.[2]

"The broad belt of desert which traverses the eastern hemisphere, in a
general direction from west to east (or, speaking more exactly, of W.S.W.
to N.E.E.) reaching from the Atlantic on the one hand nearly to the Yellow
Sea on the other, is interrupted about its centre by a strip of rich
vegetation, which at once breaks the continuity of the arid region, and
serves also to mark the point where the desert changes its character from
that of a plain at a low level to that of an elevated plateau or
table-land. West of the favoured district, the Arabian and African wastes
are seas of land seldom raised much above, often sinking below the level of
th