Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/33

 THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF THE POPULATION. 13 and uniformity of the vast plain which stretches away to all the points of the compass. In Assyria, except towards the south where the two rivers begin to draw in towards each other, the plains are varied by gentle undulations. As the traveller approaches the northern and eastern frontiers, chains of hills, and even snowy peaks, loom before him. In Chaldaea there is nothing of the kind. The only accidents of the ground are those due to human industry ; the dead level stretches away as far as the eye can follow it, and, like the sea, melts into the sky at the horizon. 3. The Primitive Elements of the Population. THE two great factors of all life and of all vegetable production are water and warmth, so that of the two oreat divisions of the o country we have just described, the more 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. 1 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 1 History of Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. i. p. 15 (London, 1883, Chapman and Hall). Upon the Chalda;an chadonfs see LAYARD, Discoveries, pp. 109, no.