The shifting perhaps did not matter so much in those days, because people had not learnt to look on their homes as very settled, or lasting. A good many of those among whom the story is to take us now were, if not dwellers in tents themselves, at least the descendants of those who had dwelt in tents only a generation or two before.
But a look at the map will show you that this country, which we may call, in a general way of speaking, Babylonia, had its bounds, its limits, though it was not nearly as closely limited as Egypt was between the deserts. Babylonia, you will see, has the Mediterranean Sea on its west, but with Palestine and Syria between itself and that sea. On the south there is the Persian Gulf; and Arabia, which is largely desert and barren, also lies to the south and south-west. On the north, away up towards the sources of the great rivers, is a wild mountainous region whence, as we shall see, wild, fierce people were apt to come down to harass the dwellers in the rich plain.
So, on these three sides we find Babylonia bounded, though the boundaries are large as compared with the narrow boundaries of the people along the Nile; but on the fourth, the eastern side, away towards Persia and the heart of Asia, there seems no limit whatever, either of mountain or of desert or of sea. The possibilities of peoples coming in by that way seem without any limit. In this respect, then, the situations of the two ancient empires of the world were very different.
I am speaking of all this country as Babylonia, and it may occur to you to wonder at that because you will have heard so much from your Bibles of the Assyrians coming upon Palestine from this very country round about the Euphrates. And so they did; and at one period in the story the Assyrians became so powerful that they took possession of all this land, and just at that time it would be more correct to call the land Assyria instead of Babylonia. But this was for a period only. At the beginning of our knowledge of this region Assyria was only a province, a northern province, of Babylonia, and was ruled from Babylon. But the Assyrians became very strong and revolted, and conquered those who had been their masters, and it was during this victorious period that they made those incursions into Palestine of which the Bible tells us. But at length the Babylonians, their old masters, rose up against them and got the mastery over them again, and after this blaze of glory Assyria sinks back into its old place as a province of Babylon, in the northern part of the empire.
Now who were they, where did they come from—the earliest of the people whom we find to have lived in Babylonia? We do not quite know that. What it is quite useful to note, however, is that we do seem to know who they were not. They were not Semites—not a Semitic people. It is useful to know they were not this, because Semitic is just what most of the people whom we now meet in the human story were.
The name comes from Shem, the name of one of the sons of Noah in the book of Genesis; and the so-called Semites appear, coming into the story of mankind, out of Arabia, that strange desert country. They came up thence into Babylonia, and in Babylonia, when they came to it, there was already a people with a high civilisation, as we know by evidences that have been found. It was different from the civilisation of the Semitic people. The name given to that earlier people and that earlier civilisation is Sumerian, and I really do not think you need trouble to inquire precisely what is meant by that, for even the most learned have very little to tell us about it. It had to have a name. Let us call it Sumerian, and say it was different from the Semitic, probably older, and so leave it.
It is a curious thing about these Semites, who at a very early date came in and took possession of all Babylonia, that though they apparently came from Arabia and the south, they made their first appearance in history in the north of Babylonia. How that happened we cannot tell. Perhaps some records of a southern invasion have been lost. Or they may have skirted round on the eastern side. It is all guess-work. They appeared in the north, and they quickly overran the country—not only of Babylonia, but of Palestine and of Syria also—except, it may be, a strip of Syria along the Mediterranean shore which is called on the map Phœnicia. That is an exception which you will do well to bear in mind. It is important, because these Phœnicians belonged to one of the greatest civilisations of the old world, and because they too were great makers of history, as you shall see before very long.
"Ur of the Chaldees"
On their western border, therefore, the people of the powerful empire which began to be formed along the Tigris and Euphrates had tribes very closely akin to themselves. On the east and on the north they had neighbours of a different race from their own. It seems to have been in the south of Babylonia, near the outgoing of the great rivers, that the first capital of the empire was formed. Probably this southern Babylonia is that "Ur of the Chaldees" from which we are told that Abraham came and established himself in Palestine. He came, as we see, living with his family and his dependants in tents, with flocks and herds, easily moving on from one place to another when the sheep or oxen had eaten the grass or when water failed. He was the patriarch (pater=father, and arch=ruler), the father-ruler of the small tribe or large family that came with him. In your history books you will sometimes read that "society was in the patriarchal stage." That means that the people of whom the historian is writing were living in the way in which Abraham and his dependent people lived; and we may be sure that it was the way of life of the greater number of those Semites who came up from Arabia and took possession of Syria and Palestine at a very early date. They took possession of the country of Babylonia also, and as they settled along the fertile river-banks we may imagine that they would begin to unite together into a nation and become strong, with a feeling of union, in a way that it was not at all likely that the small tribes of patriarchs and their families, moving about with their flocks and herds, would unite. So the Babylonians and the Syrians and the dwellers in Palestine would easily fall into the way of regarding each other as of different nations, although really they were of the same race.
There would be this difference, then: the settlers along the rivers really would begin to lead settled lives, like the people who tilled the soil in Egypt, but beyond those limits there would be wanderers, with their cattle—wanderers for the most part of the same race as the settlers, but growing more and more distinct and divided from them in manners and feelings as time went on and they lived such different lives.