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It was possible, therefore, in approaching the Mesopotamian style of cuneiform, which, as occupying the third place, may be designated as No. 3, to use No. 1 as a guide, since it was only legitimate to conclude that Nos. 2 and 3 represented translations of No. 1 into two languages, which, by the side of Old Persian, were spoken by the subjects of the Achaemenian kings.
It is a somewhat chastening reflection that the creation of the one great metallurgical industry in India has been due not to British but to Indian capital and enterprise, assisted in the earliest and most critical stages not by British but by American skill, and that, had it not been created when it was, our Syrian and Mesopotamian campaigns could never have been fought to their victorious issue, as Jamsheedpur produced and could alone at that juncture supply the rails for the construction of the railways essential to the rapid success of those great military operations.
Under the Parthians, it would seem that the Mesopotamian Jews enjoyed generally the same sort of toleration, and the same permission to exercise a species of self-government, which Jews and Christians enjoy now in many parts of Turkey.
But about the people who had invented this clever way of writing, we have never been able to learn very much. They were a white race and they were called the Sumerians. They lived in a land which we call Shomer and which they themselves called Kengi, which means the "country of the reeds" and which shows us that they had dwelt among the marshy parts of the Mesopotamian valley.
In galleys of this kind the naval architecture of the Assyrians seems to have culminated. They never, so far as appears, adopted for their boats the inventions with which their intercourse with Phoenicia had rendered them perfectly familiar, of masts, and sails. This is probably to be explained from the extreme rapidity of the Mesopotamian rivers, on which sailing boats are still uncommon.
Two great Roman officials, Cassianus, duke of Mesopotamia, and Musonianus, Praetorian prefect, understanding that Sapor was entangled in a bloody and difficult war at the eastern extremity of his empire, and knowing that Constantius was fully occupied with the troubles caused by the inroads of the barbarians into the more western of the Roman provinces, had thought that the time was favorable for terminating the provisional state of affairs in the Mesopotamian region by an actual treaty.
The rebel governors, however, were in the land of Ube, the Aup of the hieroglyphics, which they were urging Aidhu-gama to invade. Another letter brings Aziru upon the scene. He is accused of having invaded the land of Nukhasse, and made prisoners of the people of Qatna. The Pharaoh is prayed to rescue or ransom them, and to send chariots and soldiers to the help of his Mesopotamian subjects.
Under ordinary circumstances, where towns have to be defended and difficulties of the ground have to be considered, such tactics operating merely with cavalry against infantry could never be completely carried out; but in the Mesopotamian desert, where the army, almost like a ship on the high seas, neither encountered an obstacle nor met with a basis for strategic dispositions during many days' march, this mode of warfare was irresistible for the very reason that circumstances allowed it to be developed there in all its purity and therefore in all its power.
A lens, it must be remembered, with a fair magnifying power, has been discovered among the Mesopotamian ruins. A people ingenious enough to discover the magnifying-glass would be naturally led on to the invention of its opposite. When once lenses of the two contrary kinds existed, the elements of a telescope were in being.
But the Mesopotamian plain slopes gently, from an elevation of 500 or 600 feet at its northern end, to the sea, at its southern end, with hardly so much as a notable ridge to break its uniform flatness, for 300 to 400 miles.
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