praise. But, alas! the improvement seems most marked where it was most
distant. Perhaps the material prosperity of the land was too great, the
conditions of life too easy; there was no stimulus to effort, to
endeavor. By about the year 2200 B.C. we find Egypt fallen into the grip
of a cold and lifeless formalism. Everything was fixed by law; even
pictures must be drawn in a certain way, thoughts must be expressed by
stated and unvariable symbols. Advance became well-nigh impossible.
Everything lay in the hands of a priestly caste the completeness of
whose dominion has perhaps never been matched in history. The leaders
lived lives of luxurious pleasure enlightened by scientific study; but
the people scarce existed except as automatons. The race was dead; its
true life, the vigor of its masses, was exhausted, and the land soon
fell an easy prey to every spirited invader.

Meanwhile a rougher, stronger civilization was growing in the river
valleys eastward from the Nile. The Semitic tribes, who seem to have had
their early seat and centre of dispersion somewhere in this region, were
coalescing into nations, Babylonians along the lower Tigris and
Euphrates, Assyrians later along the upper rivers, Hebrews under David
and Solomon[3] by the Jordan, Phoenicians on the Mediterranean coast.

[Footnote 3: See _Accession of Solomon_, page 92.]

The early Babylonian civilization may antedate even the Egyptian; but
its monuments were less permanent, its rulers less anxious for the
future. The "appeal to posterity," the desire for a posthumous fame,
seems with them to have been slower of conception. True, the first
Babylonian monarchs of whom we have any record, in an era perhaps over
five thousand years before Christianity, stamped the royal signet on
every brick of their walls and temples. But common-sense suggests that