The neighbours of Egypt on the east were the Syrians and Arabians. Herodotus gives the name of Syrians to the inhabitants of the Syrian coasts and Mount Lebanon, the settlers on the Euphrates and Tigris, and the population of the eastern districts of Asia Minor. In Xenophon the Babylonians speak Syriac. Strabo remarks that the Syrians and Arabians are closely related in language, mode of life, and physique--that Syrians dwelt on both sides of the Taurus--that the same language was spoken on both sides of the Euphrates--that Babylon and Nineveh were cities of the Syrians--that the Assyrian kingdom was a kingdom of Syrians, and that the inhabitants of the kingdom of Babylon and Nineveh were called Syrians by their own historians.[306] As a fact tribes closely related in language and nature--which we denote by the general term Semitic--invaded with their armies the broad steppes of Arabia, and the Syrian desert, occupied the coasts of Syria and a part of Asia Minor, and inhabited the district of the Euphrates and Tigris, from the mountains of Armenia to the Persian Gulf on the south, and the tableland of Iran on the east. The languages of the Arabians, the Semitic tribes of the south, the Aramæans and Canaanites in the west, and the Babylonians and Assyrians in the east, are three ramifications springing from one and the same stem of language, which spreads from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to the Arabian and Persian Gulfs. Living under different conditions, the Semitic nations attained to different degrees of civilization. The tribes of the desert did not go beyond the simplest and most primitive forms, at which point a considerable portion of them still remain; but the inhabitants of more favoured districts developed independently, and in the course of time these developments operated on each other, and thus led to a far more varied, and, in certain directions, far more vigorous culture, than the isolated, exclusive, and self-concentrated civilization of Egypt.