Incomplete as they cannot help being, these remarks had to be made. They will explain why in the scheme of our work we have given similar places to Chaldæa and Egypt. The artist will always have a predilection for the latter country, a preference he will find no difficulty in justifying; but the historian cannot take quite the same view. It is his special business to weigh the contributions of each nation to the common patrimony of civilization, and he will understand how it is that Chaldæa, in spite of the deficiencies of its plastic art, worked more for others than Egypt and gave more of its substance and life. Hidden among surrounding deserts the valley of the Nile only opened upon the rest of the world by the ports on a single short line of frontier. The basin of the Euphrates was much more easily accessible. It had no frontier washed by the Mediterranean, but it communicated with that sea by more numerous routes than Egypt, and by routes whose diversity enhanced the effect of the examples they were the means of conveying to the outer world. It is, to all appearance, to the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia that humanity owes the cultivation of wheat, its chief alimentary plant.[467] This precious cereal seems to have been a native of the valleys of the Indus and Euphrates; nowhere else is it found in a wild state. From those two regions it must have spread eastwards across India to China, and westwards across Syria into Egypt and afterwards on to the European continent. From the rich plains where the Hebrew tradition set the cradle of the human race, the winds carried many seeds besides those by which men’s bodies have so long been nourished; the germs of all useful arts and of all mental activities were borne on their breath like a fertilizing dust. Among those distant ancestors of whom we are the direct heirs, those ancestors who have left us that heritage of civilization which grows with every year that passes, there are none, perhaps, to whom our respect and our filial gratitude are more justly due than to the ancient inhabitants of Chaldæa. [Illustration] ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. VOL I. P. 155.--It was not only as mortar that bitumen was used. Mr. RASSAM tells us that he found at Abou-Abba (Sippara), in Chaldæa, a chamber paved with asphalte much in the same fashion as a modern street in London or Paris (_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_). P. 200.--From a late communication to the _Society of Biblical Archæology_ we learn that Mr. RASSAM found the Sippara tablet in the corner of a room, under the floor; it was inclosed in an inscribed earthenware box. P. 242, line 12; for Shalmaneser III. _read_ Shalmaneser II. P. 266, line 8 from foot: for Plate X. _read_ Plate IX.