The shirt had no sleeves, and the fringed garment which covered it left half of the arm exposed.  Children of tender years had their heads shaved, as a head-dress, and rejoiced in no more clothing than the little ones among the Egyptians.  With the exception of bracelets, anklets, rings on the fingers, and occasionally necklaces and earrings, the Syrians, both men and women, wore little jewellery.  The Chaldaea women furnished them with models of fashion to which they accommodated themselves in the choice of stuffs, colours, cut of their mantles or petticoats, arrangement of the hair, and the use of cosmetics for the eyes and cheeks.  In spite of distance, the modes of Babylon reigned supreme.  The Syrians would have continued to expose their right shoulder to the weather as long as it pleased the people of the Lower Euphrates to do the same; but as soon as the fashion changed in the latter region, and it became customary to cover the shoulder, and to wrap the upper part of the person in two or three thicknesses of heavy wool, they at once accommodated themselves to the new mode, although it served to restrain the free motion of the body.  Among the upper classes, at least, domestic arrangements were modelled upon the fashions observed in the palaces of the nobles of Car-chemish or Assur:  the same articles of toilet, the same ranks of servants and scribes, the same luxurious habits, and the same use of perfumes were to be found among both.*

* An example of the fashion of leaving the shoulder bare is found even in the XXth dynasty.  The Tel el-Amarna tablets prove that, as far as the scribes were concerned, the customs and training of Syria and Chaldaea were identical.  The Syrian princes are there represented as employing the cuneiform character in their correspondence, being accompanied by scribes brought up after the Chaldaean manner.  We shall see later on that the king of the Khati, who represented in the time of Ramses II. the type of an accomplished Syrian, had attendants similar to those of the Chaldaean kings.

From all that we can gather, in short, from the silence as well as from the misunderstandings of the Egyptian chroniclers, Syria stands before us as a fruitful and civilized country, of which one might be thankful to be a native, in spite of continual wars and frequent revolutions.

The religion of the Syrians was subject to the same influences as their customs; we are, as yet, far from being able to draw a complete picture of their theology, but such knowledge as we do possess recalls the same names and the same elements as are found in the religious systems of Chaldaea.  The myths, it is true, are still vague and misty, at least to our modern ideas:  the general characteristics of the principal divinities alone stand out, and seem fairly well defined.  As with the other Semitic races, the deity in a general sense, the primordial type of the godhead, was called El or Ilu, and his feminine counterpart