own in Chaldaea, it was used to draw the chariot. The original habitat
of the horse was the great table-lands of Central Asia: it is doubtful
whether it was brought suddenly into the region of the Tigrus and
Euphrates by some barbaric invasion, or whether it was passed on from
tribe to tribe, and thus gradually reached that country. It soon became
acclimatized, and its cross-breeding with the ass led for centuries to
the production of magnificent mules. The horse was known to the kings
of Lagash, who used it in harness. The sovereigns of neighbouring cities
were also acquainted with it, but it seems to have been employed solely
by the upper classes of society, and never to have been generally used
in the war-chariot or as a charger in cavalry operations.

[Illustration: 332.jpg CHALDAEAN CARRYING A FISH. (left)]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the terra-cotta tablets
discovered by Loftus.

The Chaldaeans carried agriculture to a high degree of perfection, and
succeeded in obtaining from the soil everything it could be made to
yield.

[Illustration: 333.jpg THE ONAGER TAKEN WITH THE LASSO.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the Assyrian bas-relief of
Nimrud. See p. 35 of the present work for an illustration of
onagers pierced by arrows in the chase.

Their methods, transmitted in the first place to the Greeks, and
afterwards to the Arabs, were perpetuated long after their civilization
had disappeared, and were even practised by the people of Iraq under the
Abbasside Caliphs. Agricultural treatises on clay, which contained an
account of these matters, were deposited in one or other of the sacred
libraries in which the priests of each city were long accustomed to
collect together documents from every source on which they could lay
their hands. There were to be found in each of these collections a
certain number of works which were unique, either because the authors
were natives of the city, or because all copies of them had been
destroyed in the course of centuries--the Epic of Grilgames, for
instance, at Uruk; a history of the Creation, and of the battles of
the gods with the monsters at Kutha: all of them had their special
collections of hymns or psalms, religious and magical formulas, their
lists of words and grammatical phraseology, their glossaries and
syllabaries, which enabled them to understand and translate texts drawn
up in Sumerian, or to decipher those whose writing presented mor