Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/125

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THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW
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course between two States which had grown up on the alluvial flats of the Lower Euphrates and Lower Nile; the maintenance of dykes to keep out the water, and of canals to distribute water, inevitably gives an impulse to social order and discipline. There was a

Fig. 20.—The mobile conquerors of the ploughed lands.

Fig. 20.—The mobile conquerors of the ploughed lands.

certain difference in the two civilisations which may well have been the basis of interchange between them. In Egypt the rocky sides of the relatively narrow valley offered stone for building, and the papyrus reed afforded a material for writing; whereas building was of brick in the broad plain of Babylonia, and