We do not know a great deal about their laws, but it is singular that all we do know shows that they had very much the same ideas as to what was right or wrong as we have. The king issued decrees. We find decrees against the oppression of the poor by the large landowners. Crime was punished by death, by fines, by mutilation, such as by cutting off the nose or by the infliction of other wounds, and by banishment out of the kingdom. They had their codes of laws, for they are referred to in inscriptions, but the codes themselves have not been found. I do not know whether this short account will help you to get a picture into your minds of the life of the ancient Egyptians. A large part of the picture should be filled by the religious ceremonies, by the worship of the gods and by the offerings which had to be made, at stated times, to the souls of dead relations. The power and the number of the priesthood became so great as to rival that of the king, and actually one of the ruling dynasties was set up by the priest class itself. {48} So now, with that picture, such as I have been able to set it before your minds, of the people living along the Nile, let us go eastward and see what was being done all that while along the courses of the Tigris and Euphrates. {49} CHAPTER IV BABYLONIA. If you will look at the map once more you will see that the Euphrates and the Tigris draw together near their outgoing into the Persian Gulf and flow together as one stream. It was not always so, however. At the earliest times of which we have any knowledge at all the sea stretched up northward into the land to a point at which the two rivers ran in separate channels, so that each went out by its own mouth into the gulf. I told you that I did not mean to make this story about the eastern rivers nearly as long as that about the Nile. There are two reasons for this. In the first place there is not so much to tell. The records are not so many nor so full. The cause of that is plain. Egypt is a land well furnished with hard stone, granite, and the like. In the land which we will call Babylonia there is very little stone. Therefore the builders built with brick. The inscriptions were engraven on brick. And brick is not so long lasting a material as stone. It does not take the mark of the graving tool as sharply at the first cutting, and it is more liable to wear away in the course of years. Moreover, the climate of Egypt, in its upper part at least, is so dry that it is probably the best preserving climate in the world--the climate in which inscriptions on stone or papyrus would last and keep fresh longer than in any other. For these {50} reasons we have more records from Egypt than from Babylonia.