5.  In what way do the oral traditions of a people throw light on the ideals and relationships they most valued?

6.  Compare the dietary available to Americans with that of the ancient Hebrews.

CHAPTER III

DESERT PILGRIMS

According to one of the Hebrew traditions recorded in the book of Genesis, the earliest home of their ancestors was Ur of the Chaldees.  This was one of the leading cities of ancient Babylonia.  It was situated southwest of the Euphrates River, near the plains which were the nation’s chief grazing grounds.  And it is possible that of the shepherds who brought their sheep to market in Ur some were, indeed, among the ancestors of the Hebrews.

BABYLONIAN CIVILIZATION

Babylonia is one of the two lands (Egypt being the other) where human civilization began.  This rich alluvial plain, lying between the lower Tigris and the lower Euphrates Rivers, became the home of a gifted race which at least in its later history through intermarriage was in part Semitic and thus related to the Hebrews.  Several thousand years before Christ the people of this land began to till the soil, to control the floods in the rivers by means of irrigating canals, to make bricks out of the abundant clay and with them to build houses and cities.  They also invented a system of writing upon clay tablets.  These were baked in the sun after the letters were inscribed.  Commercial records and written laws and histories were thus made possible and in time a varied literature was created.  Whole libraries of these baked clay tablets have been unearthed and deciphered by modern investigators.

=Evidences of ancient culture.=—­By B.C. 4000 there flourished on the plains of Babylonia a splendid civilization in many ways similar to ours to-day.  The people raised enormous crops of grain and exported it by ship and caravan to distant lands.  They had developed to a high point the arts of the weaver, the dyer, the potter, the metal worker, and the carpenter.  They had devised a system of geometry for the measuring of their wheat fields and city streets.  Through astronomy they had worked out the calendar of days, weeks, months, and years which with modifications we still use.  They had erected magnificent temples to their gods.  From translations of the inscriptions on their clay tablets we can gain a clear knowledge of their life and customs.  Here, for example, is a translation of part of a letter from a son to a father asking for more money:  “My father, you said, ’When I shall go to Dur-Ammi-Zaduga, I will send you a sheep and five minas of silver.’  But you have not sent.  Let my father send and let not my heart be vexed....  To the gods Shamash and Marduk I pray for my father.”  If we forget the outlandish-sounding names, how natural this seems!  How like our boys was this boy who wrote the queer-looking characters on this bit of clay which we may hold in our hand!