ant, a line traced in the first instance by nature and rendered more
rigid and ineffaceable by historical developments. Even when Chaldaea became
nominally a mere province of Assyria, the two nationalities remained
distinct. Chaldaea was older than Assyria. The centres of her civil life
were the cities built upon the alluvial lands between the thirty-first and
thirty-third degree of latitude. The most famous of these cities was
Babylon. Those whom we call Assyrians, a people who rose to power and glory
at a much more recent date, drew the seeds of their civilization from their
more precocious neighbour.

These expressions, Assyria and Chaldaea, are now employed in a sense far
more precise than they ever had in antiquity. For Herodotus Babylonia was a
mere district of Assyria;[9] in his time both States were comprised in the
Persian Empire, and had no distinct existence of their own. Pliny calls the
whole of Mesopotamia Assyria.[10] Strabo carries the western frontier of
Assyria as far as Syria.[11] To us these variations are of small
importance. The geographical and historical nomenclature of the ancients
was never clearly defined. It was always more or less of a floating
quantity, especially for those countries which to Herodotus or Diodorus, to
Pliny or to Tacitus, were dimly perceptible on the extreme limits of their
horizon.

It would, however, be easy to show that in assigning a more definite value
to the terms in question--a proceeding in which we have the countenance of
nearly every modern historian--we do not detach them from their original
acceptation; at most we give them more constancy and precision than the
colloquial language of the Greeks and Romans demanded.[12] The expressions
_Khasdim_ and _Chaldaei_ were used in the Bible and by classic authors
mainly to denote the inhabitants of Babylon and its neighbourhood; and we
find Strabo attaching with precision the name _Aturia_, which is nothing
but a variant upon Assyria, to that district watered and bounded by the
Tigris in which Nineveh was situated.[13] Our only aim is to adopt, once
for all, such terms as may be easily understood by our readers, and may
render all confusion impossible between the two kingdoms, between the
people of the north and those of the south.

In order to define Assyria exactly we should have to determine its
frontiers, and that we can only do approximately. As the nation grew its
territory extended in certain directions. To the e