caravan camping in the desert at
the present day.

[Illustration: 283.jpg A CAMPING-GROUND IN THE DESERT, BETWEEN BIREJIK
AND URFA.]

The rough tracks beaten by the feet of men and beasts are the same
to-day as they were in that remote period. We can imagine a body of
these early travellers approaching a walled city at dusk and hastening
their pace to get there before the gates were shut. Such a picture as
that of the approach to the city of Samarra, with its mediaeval walls,
may be taken as having had its counterpart in many a city of the early
Babylonians. The caravan route leads through the desert to the city
gate, and if we substitute two massive temple towers for the domes of
the mosques that rise above the wall, little else in the picture need be
changed.

[Illustration: 284.jpg APPROACH TO THE CITY OF SAMARRA, SITUATED ON THE
LEFT BANK OF THE TIGRIS.]

A small caravan is here seen approaching the city at sunset
before the gates are shut. Samarra was only founded in A. D.
834, by the Khalif el-Motasim, the son of Harun er-Rashid,
but customs in the East do not change, and the photograph
may be used to illustrate the approach of an early
Babylonian caravan to a walled city of the period.

The houses, too, at this period must have resembled the structures of
unburnt brick of the present day, with their flat mud tops, on which
the inmates sleep at night during the hot season, supported on poles
and brushwood. The code furnishes evidence that at that time, also, the
houses were not particularly well built and were liable to fall, and,
in the event of their doing so, it very justly fixes the responsibility
upon the builder. It is clear from the penalties for bad workmanship
enforced upon the builder that considerable abuses had existed in the
trade before the time of Hammurabi, and it is not improbable that the
enforcement of the penalties succeeded in stamping them out. Thus, if
a builder built a house for a man, and his work was not sound and the
house fell and crushed the owner so that he died, it was enacted that
the builder himself should be put to death. If the fall of the house
killed the owner's son, the builder's own son was to be put to death.

[Illustration: 285.jpg A SMALL CARAVAN IN THE MOUNTAINS OF KURDISTAN.]

If one or more of the owner's slaves were killed, the builder had to
restore him slave for slave. Any damage which the owner's goods might
have suffered from