The changeless People of the Nile. ‘er 
sea, while the want of timber suitable for ships prevented them 
from becoming a maritime nation. Herodotus says, “ Egypt is 
the gift of the Nile.” Its valley is so level that it is enriched 
by each inundation of the Nile throughout its entire length of 
600 miles and breadth of from 12 to 15 miles, a little regular 
labor thus securing large returns. The houses were built of dried 
mud, as there are neither trees nor stone, and adobe houses an- 
swered in a country where rain seldom falls. The pyramids 
were built of stone brought from several hundred miles up the 
Nile. The king was the first soldier and the high-priest, the rep- 
resentative of the gods before the nation. The pyramids were 
constructed by the descendants of those who had even then long 
occupied the land—the ancestors of the present fellahin. Egypt 
was conquered by the Hyksos or shepherd kings, by Cambyses, 
Alexander, and others in turn; foreign rulers usurped the throne, 
but the people remained unchanged. If a mummy should 
awake from his sleep of three thousand years he would today 
see the same sky above him, the same river overflowing its bank, 
the same deserts; the same people living in similar houses, cul- 
tivating the ground with the same kind of plow, irrigating with 
the same shadoof—a people as changeless as the sky, the river 
and the desert. 
Architecture has never reached such vast proportions else- 
where, but art, swathed in bands like the mummies, was forced 
into the same cold rigidity and remained unchanged as the 
monuments erected by despotic sovereigns under a sky as un- 
changeable as themselves. 
To the Egyptians we owe the development of agriculture and 
architecture. 
Mesopotamia. 
Mesopotamia, or “ The land between the rivers” (Euphrates 
and Tigris), was formerly called Assyria and Babylonia.  As- 
syria occupied the upper portion, 500 miles long and from 100 
to 300 miles wide, a well watered, rich country. Its capital was 
Nineveh. 
The lower part of the valley, Babylonia, was the seat of the 
earliest civilization. It was 400 miles long and about 100 
miles wide, a rainless country watered by the overflow of the 
Euphrates and the Tigris from April to June, formerly irri- 
gated by numerous canals connecting the Tigris and Euphrates, 
