known in Chaldaea, it was used to draw the chariot.  The original habitat of the horse was the great table-lands of Central Asia:  it is doubtful whether it was brought suddenly into the region of the Tigrus and Euphrates by some barbaric invasion, or whether it was passed on from tribe to tribe, and thus gradually reached that country.  It soon became acclimatized, and its cross-breeding with the ass led for centuries to the production of magnificent mules.  The horse was known to the kings of Lagash, who used it in harness.  The sovereigns of neighbouring cities were also acquainted with it, but it seems to have been employed solely by the upper classes of society, and never to have been generally used in the war-chariot or as a charger in cavalry operations.

[Illustration:  332.jpg CHALDAEAN CARRYING A FISH. (left)]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the terra-cotta tablets
     discovered by Loftus.

The Chaldaeans carried agriculture to a high degree of perfection, and succeeded in obtaining from the soil everything it could be made to yield.

[Illustration:  333.jpg THE ONAGER TAKEN WITH THE LASSO.]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the Assyrian bas-relief of
     Nimrud.  See p. 35 of the present work for an illustration of
     onagers pierced by arrows in the chase.

Their methods, transmitted in the first place to the Greeks, and afterwards to the Arabs, were perpetuated long after their civilization had disappeared, and were even practised by the people of Iraq under the Abbasside Caliphs.  Agricultural treatises on clay, which contained an account of these matters, were deposited in one or other of the sacred libraries in which the priests of each city were long accustomed to collect together documents from every source on which they could lay their hands.  There were to be found in each of these collections a certain number of works which were unique, either because the authors were natives of the city, or because all copies of them had been destroyed in the course of centuries—­the Epic of Grilgames, for instance, at Uruk; a history of the Creation, and of the battles of the gods with the monsters at Kutha:  all of them had their special collections of hymns or psalms, religious and magical formulas, their lists of words and grammatical phraseology, their glossaries and syllabaries, which enabled them to understand and translate texts drawn up in Sumerian, or to decipher those whose writing presented more than ordinary difficulty.  In these libraries there was, we find, as in the inscriptions of Egypt, a complete literature, of which only some shattered fragments have come down to us.  The little we are able to examine has produced upon our modern investigators a complex impression, in which astonishment rather than admiration contends with a sense of tedious-ness.  There may be recognized here and there, among the wearisome successions of phrases, with their rugged