Besides the maritime range of Tyre and Sidon, their trade by land in the interior of Asia was of great value and importance. They were the speculative merchants who directed the march of the caravans laden with Assyrian and Egyptian products across the deserts which separated them from inner Asia,[549]—an operation which presented hardly less difficulties, considering the Arabian depredators whom they were obliged to conciliate and even to employ as carriers, than the longest coast-voyage. They seem to have stood alone in antiquity in their willingness to brave, and their ability to surmount, the perils of a distant land-traffic;[550] and their descendants at Carthage and Utica were not less active in pushing caravans far into the interior of Africa. [549] Herodot. i, 1. Φοίνικας—ἀπαγινέοντας φορτία Ἀσσύριά τε καὶ Αἰγύπτια. [550] See the valuable chapter in Heeren (Ueber den Verkehr der Alten Welt i, 2, Abschn. 4, p. 96) about the land trade of the Phenicians. The twenty-seventh chapter of the prophet Ezekiel presents a striking picture of the general commerce of Tyre. CHAPTER XIX. ASSYRIANS. — BABYLON. The name of the Assyrians, who formed one wing of this early system of intercourse and commerce, rests chiefly upon the great cities of Nineveh and Babylon. To the Assyrians of Nineveh (as has been already mentioned) is ascribed in early times a very extensive empire, covering much of Upper Asia, as well as Mesopotamia or the country between the Euphrates and the Tigris. Respecting this empire,—its commencement, its extent, or even the mode in which it was put down,—nothing certain can be affirmed; but it seems unquestionable that many great and flourishing cities,—and a population inferior in enterprise, but not in industry, to the Phenicians,—were to be found on the Euphrates and Tigris, in times anterior to the first Olympiad. Of these cities, Nineveh on the Tigris and Babylon on the Euphrates were the chief;[551] the latter being in some sort of dependence, probably, on the sovereigns of Nineveh, yet governed by kings or chiefs of its own, and comprehending an hereditary order of priests named Chaldæans, masters of all the science and literature as well as of the religious ceremonies current among the people, and devoted, from very early times, to that habit of astronomical observation which their brilliant sky so much favored. [551] Herodot. i, 178. Τῆς δὲ Ἀσσυρίης ἐστὶ μέν κου καὶ ἄλλα πολίσματα μεγάλα πολλά· τὸ δὲ ὀνομαστότατον καὶ ἰσχυρότατον, καὶ ἔνθα σφι, τῆς Νίνου ἀναστάτου γενομένης, τὰ βασιλήϊα κατεστήκεε, ἦν Βαβυλών. The existence of these and several other great cities is an important item to be taken in, in our conception of the old Assyria: Opis on the Tigris, and Sittakê on one of the canals very near the Tigris, can be identified (Xenoph. Anab. ii, 4, 13-25): compare Diodor. ii, 11.