rce of income to their
proprietors. If they followed a lucrative profession and were successful
in it, their savings sometimes permitted them to buy their own freedom,
and, if they were married, to pay the ransom of their wife and children.
At times, their master, desirous of rewarding long and faithful service,
liberated them of his own accord, without waiting till they had saved
up the necessary money or goods for their enfranchisement: in such cases
they remained his dependants, and continued in his service as freemen
to perform the services they had formerly rendered as slaves. They then
enjoyed the same rights and advantages as the old native race; they
could leave legacies, inherit property, claim legal rights, and acquire
and possess houses and lands. Their sons could make good matches among
the daughters of the middle classes, according to their education and
fortune; when they were intelligent, active, and industrious, there was
nothing to prevent them from rising to the highest offices about the
person of the sovereign.

[Illustration: 294.jpg AN EGYPTIAN SLAVE MERCHANT]

[Illustration: 294-text.jpg]

If we knew more of the internal history of the great Chaldaean cities, we
should no doubt come to see what an important part the servile element
played in them; and could we trace it back for a few generations, we
should probably discover that there were few great families who did
not reckon a slave or a freedman among their ancestors. It would be
interesting to follow this people, made up of such complex elements, in
all their daily work and recreation, as we are able to do in the case
of contemporary Egyptians; but the monuments which might furnish us with
the necessary materials are scarce, and the positive information to be
gleaned from them amounts to but little. We are tolerably safe, however,
in supposing the more wealthy cities to have been, as a whole, very
similar in appearance to those existing at the present day in the
regions which as yet have been scarcely touched by the advent of
European civilization. Sinuous, narrow, muddy streets, littered with
domestic refuse and organic detritus, in which flocks of ravens and
wandering packs of dogs perform with more or less efficiency the duties
of sanitary officers; whole quarters of the town composed of huts made
of reeds and puddled clay, low houses of crude brick, surmounted perhaps
even in those times with the conical domes we find later on the Assyria