But now it becomes necessary to look at the map again. If you will do so you will see just how this Babylonia is situated in relation to the countries round about it. I speak of it as Babylonia, and speak of the "other countries," but you are not to suppose that even at the latest date to which we have brought down the story at present men had at all the same distinct idea that we have now about where one country ended and another began. You may have heard of "boundary commissions," meaning committees of men appointed to trace out the boundary line between two countries. The nations we are speaking of had no boundary commissions: they had no clear idea of boundaries, or of one nation having a right to live and to bear rule up to a certain point or line and no farther. It was all very shifting, and one nation took from another what it could get. The shifting perhaps did not matter so much in {53} those days, because people had not learnt to look on their homes as very settled, or lasting. A good many of those among whom the story is to take us now were, if not dwellers in tents themselves, at least the descendants of those who had dwelt in tents only a generation or two before. But a look at the map will show you that this country, which we may call, in a general way of speaking, Babylonia, had its bounds, its limits, though it was not nearly as closely limited as Egypt was between the deserts. Babylonia, you will see, has the Mediterranean Sea on its west, but with Palestine and Syria between itself and that sea. On the south there is the Persian Gulf; and Arabia, which is largely desert and barren, also lies to the south and south-west. On the north, away up towards the sources of the great rivers, is a wild mountainous region whence, as we shall see, wild, fierce people were apt to come down to harass the dwellers in the rich plain. So, on these three sides we find Babylonia bounded, though the boundaries are large as compared with the narrow boundaries of the people along the Nile; but on the fourth, the eastern side, away towards Persia and the heart of Asia, there seems no limit whatever, either of mountain or of desert or of sea. The possibilities of peoples coming in by that way seem without any limit. In this respect, then, the situations of the two ancient empires of the world were very different.