models, the design itself is unmistakably of Mesopotamian origin.  This discovery intensifies the significance of other early parallels that have been noted between the civilizations of the Euphrates and the Nile, but its evidence, so far as it goes, does not point to Syria as the medium of prehistoric intercourse.  Yet then, as later, there can have been no physical barrier to the use of the river-route from Mesopotamia into Syria and of the tracks thence southward along the land-bridge to the Nile’s delta.

     (1) Op. cit., p. 32.

In the early historic periods we have definite evidence that the eastern coast of the Levant exercised a strong fascination upon the rulers of both Egypt and Babylonia.  It may be admitted that Syria had little to give in comparison to what she could borrow, but her local trade in wine and oil must have benefited by an increase in the through traffic which followed the working of copper in Cyprus and Sinai and of silver in the Taurus.  Moreover, in the cedar forests of Lebanon and the north she possessed a product which was highly valued both in Egypt and the treeless plains of Babylonia.  The cedars procured by Sneferu from Lebanon at the close of the IIIrd Dynasty were doubtless floated as rafts down the coast, and we may see in them evidence of a regular traffic in timber.  It has long been known that the early Babylonian king Sharru-kin, or Sargon of Akkad, had pressed up the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, and we now have information that he too was fired by a desire for precious wood and metal.  One of the recently published Nippur inscriptions contains copies of a number of his texts, collected by an ancient scribe from his statues at Nippur, and from these we gather additional details of his campaigns.  We learn that after his complete subjugation of Southern Babylonia he turned his attention to the west, and that Enlil gave him the lands “from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea”, i.e. from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.  Fortunately this rather vague phrase, which survived in later tradition, is restated in greater detail in one of the contemporary versions, which records that Enlil “gave him the upper land, Mari, Iarmuti, and Ibla, as far as the Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountains".(1)

     (1) See Poebel, Historical Texts (Univ. of Penns.  Mus. 
     Publ., Bab.  Sect., Vol.  IV, No. 1, 1914), pp. 177 f., 222
     ff.

Mari was a city on the middle Euphrates, but the name may here signify the district of Mari which lay in the upper course of Sargon’s march.  Now we know that the later Sumerian monarch Gudea obtained his cedar beams from the Amanus range, which he names Amanum and describes as the “cedar mountains".(1) Doubtless he felled his trees on the eastern slopes of the mountain.  But we may infer from his texts that Sargon actually reached the coast, and his “Cedar Forest” may have lain farther to the south, perhaps as far south as the Lebanon.  The “Silver