tended to obscure in the national memory the part which both Babylon
and Egypt may have played in moulding the civilization of the smaller
nations with whom they came in contact. To such influence the races of
Syria were, by geographical position, peculiarly subject. The country
has often been compared to a bridge between the two great continents of
Asia and Africa, flanked by the sea on one side and the desert on the
other, a narrow causeway of highland and coastal plain connecting the
valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates.(1) For, except on the frontier of
Egypt, desert and sea do not meet. Farther north the Arabian plateau is
separated from the Mediterranean by a double mountain chain, which runs
south from the Taurus at varying elevations, and encloses in its lower
course the remarkable depression of the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, and
the 'Arabah. The Judaean hills and the mountains of Moab are merely
the southward prolongation of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, and their
neighbourhood to the sea endows this narrow tract of habitable country
with its moisture and fertility. It thus formed the natural channel of
intercourse between the two earliest centres of civilization, and was
later the battle-ground of their opposing empires.

(1) See G. A. Smith, _Historical Geography of the Holy
Land_, pp. 5 ff., 45 ff., and Myres, _Dawn of History_, pp.
137 ff.; and cf. Hogarth, _The Nearer East_, pp. 65 ff., and
Reclus, _Nouvelle Géographie universelle_, t. IX, pp. 685 ff.

The great trunk-roads of through communication run north and south,
across the eastern plateaus of the Haurân and Moab, and along the
coastal plains. The old highway from Egypt, which left the Delta at
Pelusium, at first follows the coast, then trends eastward across the
plain of Esdraelon, which breaks the coastal range, and passing under
Hermon runs northward through Damascus and reaches the Euphrates at its