ire had come to an end, mentions casually that "Assyrian
wares" had in very ancient times been conveyed by the Phoenicians to
Greece, and there sold to the inhabitants. He speaks also of a river
traffic in his own day between Armenia and Babylon along the course of
the Euphrates, a fact which indirectly throws light upon the habits of
earlier ages. Diodorus, following Ctesias, declares that a number of
cities were established from very ancient times on the banks of both the
Tigris and the Euphrates, to serve as marts of trade to the merchants
who imported into Assyria the commodities of Media and Paraetacene.
Among the most important of these marts, as we learn from Strabo, were
Tiphsach or Thapsacus on the Euphrates, and Opis upon the Tigris.

It is from notices thus scanty, partial, and incidental, eked out by
probability, and further helped by a certain number of important facts
with respect to the commodities actually used in the country, whereof
evidence has been furnished to us by the recent discoveries, that we
have to form our estimate of the ancient commerce of the Assyrians. The
Inscriptions throw little or no light upon the subject. They record the
march of armies against foreign enemies, and their triumphant return
laden with plunder and tribute, sometimes showing incidentally what
products of a country were most in request among the Assyrians; but they
contain no accounts of the journeys of merchants, or of the commodities
which entered or quitted the country in the common course of trade.

The favorable situation of Assyria for trade has often attracted remark.
Lying on the middle courses of two great navigable streams, it was
readily approached by water both from the north-west and from the
south-east. The communication between the Mediterranean and the Southern
or Indian Ocean naturally--almost necessarily--followed this route. If
Europe wanted the wares and products of India, or if India required the
commodities of Europe, by far the shortest and easiest course was the
line from the eastern Mediterranean across Northern Syria, and thence by
one or other of the two great streams to the innermost recess of the
Persian Gulf. The route by the Nile, the canal of Neco, and the Red Sea,
was decidedly inferior, more especially on account of the dangerous
navigation of that sea, but also because it was circuitous, and involved
a voyage in the open ocean of at least twice the length of the other.

Again, Assyria