To the north of Egypt, across the Mediterranean, a race had grown to civilisation that had a very different tradition in regard to the treatment of its women. The Greek held his wife in subjection, and when his commercial affairs brought him into Egypt he could not but express his astonishment at the way in which men were ruled by their weaker wives. By this time, the contracts show, women were pressing too far with their marriage-stipulations and their property. One writer makes the last grievance of the men consist in the fact that they had to borrow money from their wives at exorbitant interest. At all events, the decay of Egypt set in once more after 530 B.C., and the Greek ideas grew more familiar. The fine old Egyptian ideal of equality took long to die, but at last a Greek ruler came to the throne and made an end of it. He passed a law that no woman could part with property except by the consent of her husband, and substituted the father for the mother in inheritance. She sank slowly into a condition of economic dependence; and the downtrodden slave of the fellah of modern Egypt, or the veiled and imprisoned wife of the merchant, are no less eloquent ruins of the old civilisation than are the pyramids of Gizeh. * * * * * * When we turn to the second great civilisation, whose history we can trace to nearly 5,000 years before Christ, we find that neither was the rise so high, nor the fall so low. Somewhere before 4500 B.C. we get our first glimpse of the pioneers of civilisation on the Babylonian plain. A strange people, with language and ways more akin to Chinese or Turks than to the surrounding Semites, descends into the valley, and founds the cities that went before Babylon and Nineveh. It is useless to inquire into the position of woman among these Sumerians or Akkadians. By 4500 B.C. the Semites from the Syrian highlands (some say from Arabia) mingle with them, and a mixed civilisation rises. Many authorities think the older race had the maternal type of family, and that the Semites modified the woman's position. However that may be, woman enjoyed an independence in ancient Assyria only second to that of the Egyptian and Ethiopian women. The wife of the worker had the same busy round of labour, the same freedom to roam the streets unveiled for her purchases of fish and vegetables. In the law-courts men and women were, as in Egypt, on a perfectly equal footing. The recently discovered Hammurabi Code (dating back to more than 2000 B.C.) contains many remarkable provisions, in the most striking moral contrast to the Hebrew code. There are whole pages regulating the relations of men and women with a general sense of justice that has no parallel in legislation until the most recent times--if even now.