Some of the songs have been preserved to us with which the Babylonian laborer beguiled his work in the fields. They probably formed part of the treatise on agriculture which has already been described; at any rate, we owe their preservation to the educational text-books, in which they have been embodied, along with Semitic translations of the original Sumerian text. Here is one which the peasants sang to the oxen as they returned from the field: My knees are marching, My feet are not resting; Taking no thought, Drive me home. In a similar strain the ploughman encouraged his team with the words: A heifer am I, To the mule I am yoked. Where is the cart? Go, look for grass; It is high, it is high! Or again, the oxen, while threshing, would be addressed with the refrain: Before the oxen, As they walk, Thresh out the grain. Ploughing, harrowing, sowing, reaping, and threshing constituted the chief events of the agricultural year. The winters were not cold, and the Babylonian peasant was consequently not obliged to spend a part of the year indoors shivering over a fire. In fact fuel was scarce in the country; few trees were grown in it except the palm, and the fruit of the palm was too valuable to allow it to be cut down. When the ordinary occupations of the farmer had come to an end, he was expected to look after his farm buildings and fences, to build walls and clean out the ditches. The ditches, indeed, were more important in Babylonia than in most other parts of the world. Irrigation was as necessary as in Egypt, though for a different reason. The Chaldean plain had originally been a marsh, and it required constant supervision to prevent it from being once more inundated by the waters and made uninhabitable. The embankments which hindered the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris and kept them within carefully regulated channels, the canals which carried off the surplus water and distributed it over the country, needed continual attention. Each year, after the rains of the winter, the banks had to be strengthened or re-made and the beds of the canals cleared out. The irrigator, moreover, was perpetually at work; the rainy season did not last long, and during the rest of the year the land was dependent on the water supplied by the rivers and canals. Irrigation, therefore, formed a large and important part of the farmers’ work, and the bucket of the irrigator must have been constantly swinging. Without the irrigator the labors of the farmer would have been of little avail. CHAPTER V. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS