With the revival of agriculture will come the revival of commerce.  Ancient trade routes will then be reopened, and the slow-travelling caravans supplanted by speedy trains.  A beginning has already been made in this direction.  The first modern commercial highway which is crossing the threshold of Babylonia’s new Age is the German railway through Asia Minor, North Syria, and Mesopotamia to Baghdad.[407] It brings the land of Hammurabi into close touch with Europe, and will solve problems which engaged the attention of many rival monarchs for long centuries before the world knew aught of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”.

These sudden and dramatic changes are causing history to repeat itself.  Once again the great World Powers are evincing much concern regarding their respective “spheres of influence” in Western Asia, and pressing together around the ancient land of Babylon.  On the east, where the aggressive Elamites and Kassites were followed by the triumphant Persians and Medes, Russia and Britain have asserted themselves as protectors of Persian territory, and the influence of Britain is supreme in the Persian Gulf.  Turkey controls the land of the Hittites, while Russia looms like a giant across the Armenian highlands; Turkey is also the governing power in Syria and Mesopotamia, which are being crossed by Germany’s Baghdad railway.  France is constructing railways in Syria, and will control the ancient “way of the Philistines”.  Britain occupies Cyprus on the Mediterranean coast, and presides over the destinies of the ancient land of Egypt, which, during the brilliant Eighteenth Dynasty, extended its sphere of influence to the borders of Asia Minor.  Once again, after the lapse of many centuries, international politics is being strongly influenced by the problems connected with the development of trade in Babylonia and its vicinity.

The history of the ancient rival States, which is being pieced together by modern excavators, is, in view of present-day political developments, invested with special interest to us.  We have seen Assyria rising into prominence.  It began to be a great Power when Egypt was supreme in the “Western Land” (the land of the Amorites) as far north as the frontiers of Cappadocia.  Under the Kassite regime Babylonia’s political influence had declined in Mesopotamia, but its cultural influence remained, for its language and script continued in use among traders and diplomatists.

At the beginning of the Pharaoh Akhenaton period, the supreme power in Mesopotamia was Mitanni.  As the ally of Egypt it constituted a buffer state on the borders of North Syria, which prevented the southern expansion from Asia Minor of the Hittite confederacy and the western expansion of aggressive Assyria, while it also held in check the ambitions of Babylonia, which still claimed the “land of the Amorites”.  So long as Mitanni was maintained as a powerful kingdom the Syrian possessions of Egypt were easily held in control, and the Egyptian merchants enjoyed preferential treatment compared with those of Babylonia.  But when Mitanni was overcome, and its territories were divided between the Assyrians and the Hittites, the North Syrian Empire of Egypt went to pieces.  A great struggle then ensued between the nations of western Asia for political supremacy in the “land of the Amorites”.