While still held within the grip of the desert, there was never any prospect of his development or advance in civilization. The only great changes that have taken place in the life of the Arabian nomad have been due to the introduction of the horse and the camel. But these have merely increased his mobility, while leaving the man himself unchanged. The Arabs of the seventh century b.c., depicted in the reliefs from Nineveh as fleeing on their camels before the advance of the Assyrians, can have differed in no essential feature from their earliest predecessors, who made their way to the Euphrates valley on foot or with only the ass as a beast of burden. For, having once succeeded in domesticating his flocks and in living by their means upon the rolling steppes of pasture-land, the nomad's needs are fully satisfied, and his ways of life survive through succeeding generations. He cannot accumulate possessions, as he must be able to carry all his goods continually with him, and his knowledge of the uneventful past is derived entirely from oral tradition. The earliest inscriptions recovered in Arabia are probably not anterior to the sixth century b.c., and they were naturally not the work of nomads, but of Semitic tribes who had forsaken their wanderings for the settled life of village and township in the more hospitable regions of the south. [Illustration: FIG. 32. ARABS OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C. From a sculpture of the reign of Ashur-bani-pal in the Nineveh Gallery of the British Museum.] The Amurru, or Western Semites, to whose incursion into Babylonia the rise of Babylon itself was directly due, had long abandoned a nomadic existence, and in addition to the higher standards of the agriculturist had acquired a civilization which had been largely influenced by that of Babylonia. Thanks to the active policy of excavation, carried out during the last twenty-five years in Palestine, we are enabled to reconstruct the conditions of life which prevailed in that country from a very early period. It is, in fact, now possible to trace the successive stages of Canaanite civilization back to neolithic times. Rude flint implements of the palaeolithic or Older Stone Age have also been found on the surface of the plains of Palestine, where they had lain since the close of the glacial epoch. But at that time the climate and character of the Mediterranean lands were very different to their present condition; and a great break of unknown length then occurs in the cultural sequence, which separates that primæval period from the neolithic or Later Stone Age. It is to this second era that we may trace the real beginnings of Canaanite civilization. For, from that time onwards, there is no break in the continuity of culture, and each age was the direct heir of that which preceded it. [Illustration: FIG. 33. ARABS OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C. From a sculpture of the reign of Ashur-bani-pal in the Nineveh Gallery of the British Museum.]