Life was not so pleasant in Chaldaea as in Egypt.  The innumerable promissory notes, the receipted accounts, the contracts of sale and purchase—­these cunningly drawn-up deeds which have been deciphered by the hundred, reveal to us a people greedy of gain, exacting, litigious, and almost exclusively absorbed in material concerns.  The climate, too, variable and oppressive in summer and winter alike, imposed on the Chaldaean painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of which the majority of Egyptians would not have felt themselves capable.  And the plague of usury raged with equal violence in city and country.

In proportion, however, as we are able to bring this wonderful civilisation to light we become more and more conscious that we have indeed little or nothing in common with it.  Its laws, customs, habits and character, its methods of action and its modes of thought, are so far apart from those of the present day that they seem to belong to a humanity utterly different from our own.  It thus happens that while we understand to a shade the classical language of the Greeks and of the Romans, and can read their works almost without effort, the great primitive literatures of the world, the Egyptian and Chaldaean, have nothing to offer us for the most part but a sequence of problems to solve or of enigmas to unriddle with patience.

* * * * *

The Struggle of the Nations

Maspero in this work gives us the second volume of his great historical trilogy.  He shows in parallel views the part played in the history of the ancient world by the first Chaldaean Empire, by Syria, by the Hyksos, or shepherd kings, of Egypt, and by the first Cossaean kings who established the greatness of Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire.  The great Theban dynasty is then exhibited in its romantic rise under the Pharaohs.  Maspero writes not as a mere chronicler or reciter of events, but as a philosophical historian.  He makes the reader understand how fatally the chronic militarism of these competing empires drained each of its manhood and brought Babylon and Assyria simultaneously into a hopeless condition of national anaemia.  Equally pathetic is the picture drawn of the gradual but sure decay of the grand empire of the Pharaohs.  Maspero, with masterly skill, passes a processional of these despots before our eyes.

I.—­The Chaldaean Empire and the Hyksos

Some countries seem destined from their origin to become the battlefields of the contending nations which environ them.  Into such regions neighbouring peoples come to settle their quarrels, and bit by bit they appropriate it, so that at best the only course open to the inhabitants is to join forces with one of the invaders.  From remote antiquity this was the experience of Syria, which was thus destined to become subject to foreign rule.  Chaldaea, Egypt, Assyria and Persia in turn presided over its destinies.  Semites dwelt in the south and the centre, while colonies from beyond the Taurus occupied the north.  The influence of Egypt never penetrated beyond the provinces lying nearest the Dead Sea.  The remaining populations looked rather to Chaldaea, and received the continuous impress of the kingdoms of the Euphrates.