Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/766

756 balance of power, how they might have anticipated the Phoenician aristocracy or even the democracy of the Greeks. Perhaps the times were too early and too rude, certain it is that before such a stage could be reached, the victorious city-state had become imperialistic and the day of the city-state was done.

This imperialism was not developed without a struggle. Against it were ranged the forces of geography and of racial temperament. In the case of Egypt, it needs no proof that the long thin line of civilization along the Nile, where city-state bounded city-state on but two sides, up stream and down, was not conducive to unity, and that such a condition bred a localism which broke up Egypt into its constituent parts every time that the central power weakened. In spite of this difficulty, the dawn of history finds the process virtually complete, and the intermediate stage, when north and south were separate units, was important in later times only in so far as it furnished the ruler with separate crowns, separate titularies, and a separate administration. North or south might in turn furnish that ruler. Re or Amon might be the supreme god, the dream of a united Egypt was never forgotten.

Babylonia seemed more favorable to unity, with its lack of frontiers in its dead level, its easy communication by river and by canal, the need of a common irrigation system, yet unity came late. We must attribute this not so much to the location of the leading states along the ancient bed of the Euphrates as to the ingrained particularism of the individual city-state, the result, we may conjecture, of unnumbered generations of Shumerians who had led an isolated life in the mountain valleys to the east. The pages of a detailed history, then, must be burdened by the names of dozens of village chiefs whose battles have scores of casualties. From all this welter of meaningless names, states of a larger importance gradually emerge, under a true king but still with no real unity. If the patesi of the conquered city paid his tribute, he was retained, otherwise another took his place. The average citizen had his status changed not a whit, he retained his local customs, and worshipped his city god as before. These kingdoms, likewise, found their centre in a single state: for example, the possession of Kutu permitted the bearing of the title "King of the Four World Regions". Significant is the fact that to the end there was no single title which unqualifiedly gave its possessor the rule of all Babylonia.

The first Semites, the Sargonids, extended the empire outside the alluvium, but no change of policy or of administration is marked thereby. First under the kings of Ur, representing the Shumerian