utilized to drive all
the vital forces of the kingdom into the practice of war and preparation
for it.

On the other hand, Babylon enjoyed certain elements of prosperity and
guarantees of a long national existence which were wanting to those rivals
under whose yoke she had more than once to pass. The ruling classes in
Chaldaea were quicker in intellect and far better educated than elsewhere.
Their country lent itself to a wide and well-organised system of
cultivation better than the hilly districts of Assyria or the narrow
valleys and sterile plains of Iran. Communication was more prompt and easy
than among the terraces which rise one above another from the left bank of
the Euphrates up to the high lands of Persia and Media: in order to pass
from one of these terraces to another, the bare rock has to be climbed in a
fashion that brings no little danger to the traveller and his patient
beasts of burden.[119] In Chaldaea, on the other hand, the proximity of the
two rivers to each other, and the perfect horizontality of the soil, make
the work of irrigation very easy. The agriculturists were not exposed to
the danger of a complete failure of crops, a misfortune which overtook the
upper regions of Mesopotamia often enough. There the Euphrates and Tigris
are wide apart, and the land between them is far from being a dead level.
Many districts had to depend almost entirely upon the rainfall for
irrigation. Again, when it was a question of journeying from one city to
another or transporting the produce of the fields, the Chaldaean could
choose between the land routes that lay along the banks of the canals, or
the waterways that intersected each other over the whole surface of the
country. In these days the journey between Bagdad and Bassorah, a distance
of some three hundred miles, involves a long detour to the east along the
foot of the mountains, in order to avoid impassable marshes and bands of
wandering Arabs devoted to murder and pillage. The flat country is infested
with mounted brigands who strip unprotected travellers, but in ancient
times it swarmed with traffic, every road was encumbered with the movements
of merchandise and the march of caravans, the fields were crossed in every
direction by canals, and the tall sails of the boats that moved between
their banks rose over the waving crops as they do to-day in the deltas of
the Meuse and the Rhine, for Chaldaea was a southern Holland.

The incomparable situation of Bab