The Semitic tradition which made the first man a tiller of the ground may also have been borrowed from the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia. At all events it is significant that the garden in which he was placed was in the land of Eden, and that the picture of a garden or plantation is one of the primitive hieroglyphs of Sumer. The beginnings of Babylonian civilization were bound up with the cultivation of the Babylonian soil; the reclamation of the great alluvial plain was at once the effect and the cause of Sumerian culture. Sumerian culture, in fact, was at the outset essentially that of an agricultural people. Trade would have come later, when Eridu had become a seaport, and ships ventured on the waters of the Persian Gulf. It grew up under the shelter of the great sanctuaries. Supported at first by the labour of their serfs, the priests in time came to exchange their surplus revenues--the wool of their sheep, the wheat and sesame of their fields, or the wine yielded by their palms--for other commodities, and the temples themselves formed safe and capacious store-houses in which such goods could be kept. In the historical period Babylonia is already a great trading community, and as the centuries passed trade absorbed more and more the energies of its population, agriculture fell into the background, and the Babylonia conquered by Cyrus could be described with truth as “a nation of shopkeepers.” Even the crown prince was a merchant who dealt in wool.[88] The increasing preponderance of trade goes along with the increasing preponderance of the Semitic element in the country, and it is tempting to suppose that there was a connection between the two. At present, however, there is no positive evidence that such was the case. Nor is there any positive evidence that the Semites who settled in Babylonia were not already agriculturists. The circumstances in which a people lives are mainly responsible for its being agricultural or pastoral, and the fact that the Bedâwîn neighbours of the Babylonians on the western side of the Euphrates remained a pastoral race does not exclude the possibility that there were other branches of the Semitic family who had already passed out of the pastoral into the agricultural stage before coming into contact with the Sumerians. On the other hand, it is at least noticeable that in Semitic Babylonian the usual word for “city” continued to be one which properly meant a “tent”--the home of the pastoral nomad--and that no Semitic traditions have come down to us of the beginnings of agricultural life outside the limits of the Babylonian “Plain.” The title of “Shepherd,” moreover, was at times given to the Babylonian kings in days subsequent to the Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to judge, city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive Semitic nomad.[89]