Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of AssyriaRagozin, Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna)
History
Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria
Ragozin, Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna)
Babylonia -- History
5. This stage of culture, in its higher development, combines with the
fourth and last--city-building, and city-life, when men of the same
race, and conscious of a common origin, but practically strangers to
each other, form settlements on a large scale, which, being enclosed in
walls, become places of refuge and defence, centres of commerce,
industry and government. For, when a community has become very numerous,
with wants multiplied by continual improvements and increasing culture,
each family can no longer make all the things it needs, and a portion of
the population devotes itself to manufacture and arts, occupations best
pursued in cities, while the other goes on cultivating the land and
raising cattle, the two sets of produces--those of nature and those of
the cunning hand and brain--being bartered one for the other, or, when
coin is invented, exchanged through that more convenient medium. In the
same manner, the task of government having become too manifold and
complicated for one man, the former Patriarch, now King, is obliged to
surround himself with assistants--either the elders of the race, or
persons of his own choice,--and send others to different places, to rule
in his name and under his authority. The city in which the King and his
immediate ministers and officers reside, naturally becomes the most
important one--the Capital of the State.
6. It does not follow by any means that a people, once settled, never
stirred from its adopted country. The migratory or wandering instinct
never quite died out--our own love of travelling sufficiently proves
that--and it was no unfrequent occurrence in very ancient times for
large tribes, even portions of nations, to start off again in search of
new homes and to found new cities, compelled thereto either by the
gradual overcrowding of the old country, or by intestine discords, or by
the invasion of new nomadic tribes of a different race who drove the old
settlers before them to take possession of their settlements, massacred
them if they resisted and reduced those who remained to an irksome
subjection. Such invasions, of course, might also be perpetrated with
the same results by regular armies, led by kings and generals from some
other settled and organized country. The alternative between bondage
and emigration must have been frequently offered, and the choice in
favor of the latter was helped not a little by the spirit of adventure
inborn in man, tempted by so many unexplored regions as there were in
those remote ages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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