The same verdict must be given in the case of another point, not only of resemblance, but of identity, between ancient Egypt and Babylonia. This is the shadûf or contrivance for drawing water from a falling river for the sake of irrigation. The shadûf, which is still used in Upper Egypt, can be traced back pictorially to the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, but the basin system of irrigation with which it was connected was already of immemorial antiquity. It is a simple yet most effective invention, and on that account perhaps the less likely to have been independently invented, for it is always the obvious which remains longest unnoticed. In the modern shadûf a long pole is laid across a beam which is supported at either end upon other poles or on pillars of brick or mud; it is kept in place by thongs and is heavily weighted at one end, while at the other end a bucket or skin is attached to it by means of a rope. The shadûf of the Eighteenth dynasty was supported sometimes, as to-day, on a cross-beam, sometimes on a column of mud, and the bucket was of triangular form with two handles to which the rope was tied. Representations of it from Theban tombs will be found in Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilization_, p. 764, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s _Ancient Egyptians_, plates 38 and 356. Precisely the same machine is represented on a bas-relief found by Layard in the palace of Kûyunjik at Nineveh,[112] the only difference being that the shadûf-worker stands upon a platform of brick instead of on the bank itself, and that the pillar upon which the pole is supported seems to be built of bricks rather than of mud. The machine, however, is identical in both its Egyptian and its Assyrian form. That the bas-relief should have been found in Assyria and not in Babylonia is a mere accident. Like almost everything else in Assyrian culture, the invention was of Babylonian origin, and, in fact, formed part of the system of irrigation which made the plain of Babylonia habitable. Herodotus, who calls the machine a κηλωνεῖον, describes it as being used as in Egypt, and for the same reason, since the river did not rise to the actual level of the cultivated ground, which, like that of Egypt, was divided into a number of basins.[113]