The abundance of produce rendering subsistence easy, population was
rapid and numerous, and states attained quickly the term of their
plenitude.

Productions increasing beyond consumption, the necessity of commerce
arose; and exchanges took place between people and people; which
augmented their activity and reciprocal advantages.

In fine, certain countries, at certain times, uniting the advantages
of good government with a position on the route of the most active
circulation, they became emporiums of flourishing commerce and seats of
powerful domination. And on the shores of the Nile and Mediterranean, of
the Tygris and Euphrates, the accumulated riches of India and of Europe
raised in successive splendor a hundred different cities.

The people, growing rich, applied their superfluity to works of common
and public use; and this was in every state, the epoch of those works
whose grandeur astonishes the mind; of those wells of Tyre, of those
dykes of the Euphrates, of those subterranean conduits of Media,* of
those fortresses of the desert, of those aqueducts of Palmyra, of those
temples, of those porticoes. And such labors might be immense, without
oppressing the nations; because they were the effect of an equal and
common contribution of the force of individuals animated and free.

* See respecting these monuments my Travels into Syria, vol.
ii. p. 214.

From the town or village of Samouat the course of the Euphrates is
accompanied with a double bank, which descends as far as its junction