festival.

Sargon the Elder had lived in Babylon, and had built himself a palace
there: hence the tradition of later times attributed to this city the
glory of having been the capital of the great empire founded by the
Akkadian dynasties. The actual sway of Babylon, though arrested to the
south by the petty states of Lower Chaldæa, had not encountered to the
north or north-west any enemy to menace seriously its progress in that
semi-fabulous period of its history. The vast plain extending between
the Euphrates and the Tigris is as it were a continuation of the
Arabian desert, and is composed of a grey, or in parts a whitish, soil
impregnated with selenite and common salt, and irregularly superimposed
upon a bed of gypsum, from which asphalt oozes up here and there,
forming slimy pits. Frost is of rare occurrence in winter, and rain is
infrequent at any season; the sun soon burns up the scanty herbage
which the spring showers have encouraged, but fleshy plants successfully
resist its heat, such as the common salsola, the salsola soda, the
pallasia, a small mimosa, and a species of very fragrant wormwood,
forming together a vari-coloured vegetation which gives shelter to
the ostrich and the wild ass, and affords the flocks of the nomads a
grateful pasturage when the autumn has set in. The Euphrates bounds
these solitudes, but without watering them. The river flows, as far as
the eye can see, between two ranges of rock or bare hills, at the foot
of which a narrow strip of alluvial soil supports rows of date-palms
intermingled here and there with poplars, sumachs, and willows. Wherever
there is a break in the two cliffs, or where they recede from the river,
a series of shadufs takes possession of the bank, and every inch of the
soil is brought under cultivation. The aspect of the country remains
unchanged as far as the embouchure of the Khabur; but there a black
alluvial soil replaces the saliferous clay, and if only the water were