In that way, or in some ways like that, they attacked the walled cities. You may have read words in the Bible that puzzled you about "bringing a tower" against a city, or "casting up a bank" against it, or some such words, and you may now know what they mean. They mean the making of these movable towers for the attack, and throwing up the mounds to bring the attackers to the same height as the defenders. It must have been a much more exciting kind of warfare than the pounding away with artillery at long range of many miles, as is done in war now. It was more like the modern trench war, with bombs and hand-grenades, when the trenches are close up to one another. That is a kind of general picture of the way in which you may imagine these people making war on each other, constantly making war, in Mesopotamia and in Syria and in Palestine, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I would remind you yet again that, except when the Egyptians were taking a hand in it, it was warfare among nations that were nearly all of the same original stock or race. The Hittites, from the north, were a different people; but most of them had very much the same ideas and the same ways of life; probably they could understand each other's language, so that {95} really when the war had passed over them for the time being the people who were left in the country, looking after their flocks and their herds and their crops, would not see much difference between living under one power or under another. Probably it made very little change in their lives. And that may explain, what otherwise seems almost impossible to understand, how they could survive, how they could go on living at all, in the midst of this perpetual fighting. We know that the conquerors showed very little mercy. Women and children were massacred or carried off into captivity, to be kept as slaves. But after all that dreadful misery had passed over the land the remnant that remained would go on much as before. Nothing in the whole story is much more wonderful than the way in which the Syrians, for instance, revolted again, very soon after being conquered and subjugated by the first Thothmes; and the endurance of the Jews under the repeated conquest of their country is one of the marvels of history. It is difficult to understand how it was that they were not entirely destroyed as a nation, and that they are among us, and in every country of the world, as people of a very distinct character and nationality to-day. This tenacity and endurance of the Jews has had a very great effect in making the world such as it is now that we are living in it. [Sidenote: The Philistines]