THE PRINCIPLES OF WORI.D-EM PIEB. 



13 



the control and distribution of its waters, Egypt, Mesopotamia, 

 and China became countries of enormous productiveness ; Egypt 

 in particular supported not only an immense resident population, 

 but had food enough to spare for barter with its neighbours. 



These river valleys became the sites of the chief primitive 

 states. The government was simple and necessarily despotic, 

 for otherwise the great engineering works upon which they 

 depended could not have been carried out. These states were 

 populous, because food was abundant ; they were wealthy, 

 because the type of food which they produced was capable of 

 storage, so that the abundant harvest of one year could be laid 

 up for the future and drawn upon at pleasure. Further, in 

 general the supply of food exceeded the requirements of the 

 country itself. " The economy of ancient Egypt may be summed 

 up in two words : forced-labour and subsistence-wages."* 



The type of population composing such a state must neces- 

 sarily be submissive, patient, industrious, and therefore neither 

 warlike nor aggressive, but on the borders of Egypt and much 

 more on those of Mesopotamia, there were races of a very 

 different type : desert wanderers, moving rapidly from place to 

 place ; mountaineers, living by raids upon their richer neighbours. 

 Such tribes were accustomed to war and danger, and loved 

 change and excitement rather than monotonous industry, and to 

 them the dwellers in the river valley appeared to invite attack. 

 So from one quarter or another, the river civilizations, and 

 especially those of the country of the Euphrates and Tigris, were 

 continually exposed to invasion, and frequently passed into the 

 hands of new lords. The tide of war was ever ebbing and flow- 

 ing over it, and the periodic inundations of the rivers became, 

 as it were, types of the succession of its political changes. 



The defence of the river states must therefore have early 

 become an urgent problem for their rulers, whether those rulers 

 were natives or foreign conquerers, and it was found necessary 

 to establish a regular army in order to keep raiders at a distance. 

 The best defence was seen to lie in the counter attack, and in 

 the subjugation of the regions from which the invaders came. 

 Here, then, in essence, we find the explanation of the first effort 

 to establish world-empire — an authority which should extend 

 over the whole of the inhabited earth as it was then known. 



There was something not quite ignoble or unreasonable in 

 these efforts to bring the whole world under a single authority. 



* Simcox, Primitive Civilization.% vol. i, p. 67. 



