waiting till they had saved up the necessary money or goods for their enfranchisement:  in such cases they remained his dependants, and continued in his service as freemen to perform the services they had formerly rendered as slaves.  They then enjoyed the same rights and advantages as the old native race; they could leave legacies, inherit property, claim legal rights, and acquire and possess houses and lands.  Their sons could make good matches among the daughters of the middle classes, according to their education and fortune; when they were intelligent, active, and industrious, there was nothing to prevent them from rising to the highest offices about the person of the sovereign.

[Illustration:  294.jpg AN EGYPTIAN SLAVE MERCHANT]

[Illustration:  294-text.jpg]

If we knew more of the internal history of the great Chaldaean cities, we should no doubt come to see what an important part the servile element played in them; and could we trace it back for a few generations, we should probably discover that there were few great families who did not reckon a slave or a freedman among their ancestors.  It would be interesting to follow this people, made up of such complex elements, in all their daily work and recreation, as we are able to do in the case of contemporary Egyptians; but the monuments which might furnish us with the necessary materials are scarce, and the positive information to be gleaned from them amounts to but little.  We are tolerably safe, however, in supposing the more wealthy cities to have been, as a whole, very similar in appearance to those existing at the present day in the regions which as yet have been scarcely touched by the advent of European civilization.  Sinuous, narrow, muddy streets, littered with domestic refuse and organic detritus, in which flocks of ravens and wandering packs of dogs perform with more or less efficiency the duties of sanitary officers; whole quarters of the town composed of huts made of reeds and puddled clay, low houses of crude brick, surmounted perhaps even in those times with the conical domes we find later on the Assyrian bas-reliefs; crowded and noisy bazaars, where each trade is located in its special lanes and blind alleys; silent and desolate spaces occupied by palaces and gardens, in which the private life of the wealthy was concealed from public gaze; and looking down upon this medley of individual dwellings, the palaces and temples with their ziggurats crowned with gilded and painted sanctuaries.  In the ruins of Uru, Eridu, and Uruk, the remains of houses belonging doubtless to well-to-do families have been brought to light.  They are built of fine bricks, whose courses are cemented together with a thin layer of bitumen, but they they are only lighted internally by small appertures pierced at irregular distances in the upper part of the walls:  the low arched doorway, closed by a heavy two-leaved door, leads into a blind passage, which opens as a rule on the courtyard in the centre of the building.