Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/320

 304 HISTORY OF GREECE And even the Babylonian community, though their Chaldzean priests are the parallel of the Egyptian priests, with a less meas- ure of ascendency, combine with their industrial aptitude and constancy of purpose something of that strenuous ferocity of character which marks so many people of the Semitic race, Jews, Phenicians, and Carthaginians. These Semitic people stand distinguished as well from the Egyptian life, enslaved by childish caprices and antipathies, and by endless frivolities of ceremonial detail, as from the flexible, many-sided, and self- organizing Greek ; not only capable of opening both for himself and for the human race the highest walks of intellect, and the full creative agency of art, but also gentler by far in his private sympathies and dealings than his contemporaries on the Euphra- tes, the Jordan, or the Nile, for we are not of course to com- pare him with the exigencies of western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both in Babylonia and in Egypt, the vast monuments, em- bankments, and canals, executed by collective industry, appeared the more remarkable to an ancient traveller by contrast with the desert regions and predatory tribes immediately surrounding them. West of the Euphrates, the sands of Arabia extended northward, with little interruption, to the latitude of the gulf of Issus ; they even covered the greater part of Mesopotamia, 1 or the country between the Euphrates and the Tigris, beginning a few days' journey northward of the wall called the wall of Media above mentioned, which extending westward from the Tigris to one of the canals joining the Euphrates had been erected to protect Babylon, against the incursion of the Medes. 3 1 See the description of this desert in Xenoph. Anah. i, 5, 1-8. 9 The Ten Thousand Greeks passed from the outside to the inside of the wall of Media : it was one hundred feet high, twenty feet wide, and was re- ported to them as extending twenty parasangs or six hundred stadia (= sev- enty miles) in length (Xenoph. Anab. ii, 4, 12). Eratosthenes called it r<) Zefufjapidof Siareixiofia (Strabo, ii, p. 80) : it was seemingly about twen- ty-five miles north of Bagdad. There is some confusion about the wall of Media : Mannert (Geogr. der G. und R. v, 2, p. 280) and Forbiger also (Alte Georg. sect 97, p. 616, note 94) appear to have confounded the ditch dug by special order of Artaxerxfia to opjxjsc the march of the younger Cyru^, with the Nahar-Malcha or B*^