ed so favourite a
subject upon early Sumerian and Babylonian seals. His garment is
Sumerian or Semitic rather than Egyptian, and the mixture of human and
bird elements in the figure, though not precisely paralleled at
this early period, is not out of harmony with Mesopotamian or Susan
tradition. His beard, too, is quite different from that of the Libyan
desert tribes which the early Egyptian kings adopted. Though the
treatment of the lions is suggestive of proto-Elamite rather than
of early Babylonian models, the design itself is unmistakably of
Mesopotamian origin. This discovery intensifies the significance of
other early parallels that have been noted between the civilizations of
the Euphrates and the Nile, but its evidence, so far as it goes, does
not point to Syria as the medium of prehistoric intercourse. Yet then,
as later, there can have been no physical barrier to the use of the
river-route from Mesopotamia into Syria and of the tracks thence
southward along the land-bridge to the Nile's delta.

(1) Op. cit., p. 32.

In the early historic periods we have definite evidence that the eastern
coast of the Levant exercised a strong fascination upon the rulers of
both Egypt and Babylonia. It may be admitted that Syria had little to
give in comparison to what she could borrow, but her local trade in wine
and oil must have benefited by an increase in the through traffic which
followed the working of copper in Cyprus and Sinai and of silver in
the Taurus. Moreover, in the cedar forests of Lebanon and the north
she possessed a product which was highly valued both in Egypt and
the treeless plains of Babylonia. The cedars procured by Sneferu from
Lebanon at the close of the IIIrd Dynasty were doubtless floated as
rafts down the coast, and we may see in them evidence of a regular
traffic in timber. It has long been known that the early Babylonian
king Sharru-kin, or Sargon of Akkad, had pressed up the Euphrates to the
Mediterranean, and we now have information that he too was fired by a
desire for precious wood and metal. One of the recently published Nippur
inscriptions contains copies of a number of his texts, collected by
an ancient scribe from his statues at Nippur, and from these we gather
additional details of his campaigns. We learn that after his complete
subjugation of Southern Babylonia he turned his attention to the west,
and that Enlil gave him the lands "from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea",
i.e. from th