Western Asia: Babylonia, Assyria, and Chaldea 6i Rarely more than forty miles wide, this plain contained prob- Area of the ably less than eight thousand square miles of cultivable soil — plain °"*^" roughly equal to the state of New Jersey or the territory of Wales. It lies in the Mediterranean belt of rainy winter and dry summer, but the rainfall is so scanty (less than three inches a year) that irrigation of the fields is required in order to ripen the grain. When properly irrigated the plain is prodigiously its fertility fertile, and the chief source of wealth in Babylonia was agri- culture. This plain was the scene of the most important and long-continued of those frequent struggles between the moun- taineer and the nomad, of which we have spoken. Section i i . The Earliest Babylonians The mountaineers were not Semitic and show no relationship Race of the to the Semitic nomads of the Arabian desert.-^ We are indeed Jans "™^" unable to connect the earliest of these mountain peoples with any of the great racial groups known to us. We find them shown on monuments of stone, as having shaven heads and wearing heavy woolen kilts (Fig. 41). While they were still using Sumerians stone implements, some of these mountaineers, now known as Babylonian Sumerians, pushed through the passes of the eastern mountains P^^^"^ at a very early date. Long before 3000 B.C. they had reclaimed the marshes around the mouths of the two rivers of Babylonia. Their settlements of low mud-brick huts soon creep northward Their along the river banks. They learn to control the spring freshets civilization with dikes and to distribute the waters in irrigation trenches. They already possess cattle, sheep, and goats. The ox draws the plow, and the ass pulls wheeled cdcrts and chariots, and the wheel as a burden-bearing device emerges here for the first time.^ But 1 On the other hand, although they were certainly white races, the moun- taineers exhibited no relationship to the Indo-European group of peoples who were already spreading through the country north and east of the Caspian at a very early date. The Indo-European peoples, from whom we ourselves have descended, are discussed in section i6. 2 Probably earlier than the wheel in the Swiss lake-villages of the Late Stone Age (p. 12).
