ore southern must have been the first inhabited, or at
least, the first to invite and aid its inhabitants to make trial of
civilization.

In the north the two great rivers are far apart. The vast spaces which
separate them include many districts which have always been, and must ever
be, very difficult of irrigation, and consequently of cultivation. In the
south, on the other hand, below the thirty-fourth degree of latitude, the
Tigris and Euphrates approach each other until a day's march will carry the
traveller from one to the other; and for a distance of some eighty leagues,
ending but little short of the point of junction, their beds are almost
parallel. In spite of the heat, which is, of course, greater than in
northern Mesopotamia, nothing is easier than to carry the blessings of
irrigation over the whole of such a region. When the water in the rivers
and canals is low, it can be raised by the aid of simple machines, similar
in principle to those we described in speaking of Egypt.[28]

It is here, therefore, that we must look for the scene of the first
attempts in Asia to pass from the anxious and uncertain life of the
fisherman, the hunter, or the nomad shepherd, to that of the sedentary
husbandman, rooted to the soil by the pains he has taken to improve its
capabilities, and by the homestead he has reared at the border of his
fields. In the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis we have an echo of
the earliest traditions preserved by the Semitic race of their distant
origin. "And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they
found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there."[29] The _land_
of SHINAR is the Hebrew name of what we call Chaldaea. There is no room for
mistake. When the sacred writer wishes to tell us the origin of human
society, he transports us into Lower Mesopotamia. It is there that he
causes the posterity of Noah to build the first great city, Babel, the
prototype of the Babylon of history; it is there that he tells us the
confusion of tongues was accomplished, and that the common centre existed
from which men spread themselves over the whole surface of the earth, to
become different nations. The oldest cities known to the collector of these
traditions were those of Chaldaea, of the region bordering on the Persian
Gulf.

"And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

"He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, '_Even as
Nimrod, the