By its simple structure and the absence of any internal limitations, this low-lying land on the Euphrates and Tigris was favourable to the development of great kingdoms, and was hardly behind the Nile in incentives and instigations to a civilised life. The writers of antiquity celebrate the fruitfulness and natural wealth of these flats. While on the other side of the Euphrates, so writes a Babylonian historian of his own home, the land as far as Arabia is without water and fruits, and on the other side of the Tigris the land is indeed fruitful but rocky; in the land between the streams wheat and barley, linseed beans and sesame grow wild; both in the marshes and the reeds of the river nourishing roots are found in abundance, as valuable for food as barley. Besides these there are dates, and apples, and other different fruits, and abundance of fish and birds in the marsh and on the land. Herodotus commends the wealth of the land in wheat and palms in the strongest terms; Xenophon speaks in admiration of the size and beauty of the dates.[308] Even now the palm-forests which run without interruption along the lower course of both rivers produce dates in abundance, and with their slender forms and lofty tops give a picturesqueness to the otherwise uniform landscape. This vigorous vegetation, together with the peculiar character of the land, must have early incited a capable population to a regular cultivation and a higher civilization. The protection of the land against the rapid overflow, the conducting of the water to the higher districts, and the removal of water from the marshes, must have led to measures calculated to produce and develop a fertility of technical resources. Basins were required of more considerable extent, longer canals, and stronger dams against the violent inundations, and more extensive conduits, in order to convey the water into the middle of the land, than were necessary in Egypt. Long before Egypt had reached the height of her power and prosperity under the Tuthmosis and Amenophis and the early Ramessids, the inhabitants of this plain had attained to a peculiar culture and civilisation.