You must please take all that for granted, as being true of the Babylonians as of the rest of the world. You may imagine, too, that the same puzzles beset them as beset the Egyptians when they began to wonder how things, including themselves, had happened—how the world had come into being and what the sun, moon, and stars were, and so on. They, like the Egyptians, wondered about the invisible forces by which they found themselves surrounded and more or less controlled. They made rather different answers to the puzzles, but the puzzles were the same.
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MACHINE FOR RAISING WATER
(PRESENT-DAY "SHADOOF").
And so a great deal of the life-story of the Egyptians, of their way of living and so on, may be considered to be the way that the Babylonians followed also. What will perhaps bring the life of the Babylonians most clearly before your eyes will be to see, so far as we can, the chief differences between their lives and the lives of those old Egyptians.
Water-raising
Both nations lived along river-courses—we have seen that. And both were very dependent on the overflow of the rivers for the fertilisation of their fields and for the growth of their crops. But, though this was in a measure true of both, the dependence of the Egyptians on the overflow of the Nile was much more complete than the dependence of these others on the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris. Those rivers were not so punctual in the date of the overflow, and the difference between their lowest and highest flow was not so great as in the Nile. Both countries, however, depended largely on irrigation, that is to say, on leading the water by canals from the main rivers to the fields where it was wanted. Egypt, even when it had more trees than it has now, had probably less rainfall than Babylonia; but in both countries the rivers were the sources and givers of their food supply.
We have seen the Egyptians living along a river which went down between desert country, barren country, on either side. The country on either side the courses of the Euphrates and Tigris was not nearly so barren and desert as that which lay about the Nile.
The neighbouring states
But now it becomes necessary to look at the map again. If you will do so you will see just how this Babylonia is situated in relation to the countries round about it. I speak of it as Babylonia, and speak of the "other countries," but you are not to suppose that even at the latest date to which we have brought down the story at present men had at all the same distinct idea that we have now about where one country ended and another began. You may have heard of "boundary commissions," meaning committees of men appointed to trace out the boundary line between two countries. The nations we are speaking of had no boundary commissions: they had no clear idea of boundaries, or of one nation having a right to live and to bear rule up to a certain point or line and no farther. It was all very shifting, and one nation took from another what it could get.