Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/437

Comparison between Egypt and Ciiald.ka. 399 of the first temples erected to her on the Grecian coasts and of the peculiar character of her rites and attributes — does not all this justify us in making her a lineal descendant of Zarpanitu, of Mylitta and I star, of all those goddesses of love and motherhood created by the imagination and worshipped by the piety of the Semites of Chaldaea ? On the other hand the more we know of Egypt the less inclined are we to think that any of the gods of her Pantheon were transported to Greece and Italy, at least in the early days of antiquity. Incomplete as they cannoi help being, these remarks had to be made. They will explain why in the scheme of our work we have given similar places to Chaldaea and Egypt. The artist will always have a predilection for the latter country, a preference he will find no difficulty in justifying ; but the historian cannot take quite the same view. It is his special business to weigh the contributions of each nation to the common patrimony of civilization, and he will understand how it is that Chaldaea, in spite of the deficiencies of its plastic art, worked more for others than Egypt and gave more of its substance and life. Hidden among surrounding deserts the valley of the Nile only opened upon the rest of the world by the ports on a single short line of frontier. The basin of the Euphrates was much more easily accessible. It had no frontier washed by the Mediterranean, but it communicated with that sea by more numerous routes than Egypt, and by routes whose diversity enhanced the effect of the examples they were the means of conveying to the outer world. It is, to all appearance, to the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia that humanity owes the cultivation of wheat, its chief alimentary plant. 1 This precious cereal seems to have been a native of the valleys of the Indus and Euphrates; nowhere else is it found in a wild state. From those two regions it must have spread eastwards across India to China, and westwards across Syria into Egypt and afterwards on to the European continent. From the rich plains where the Hebrew tradition set the cradle of the human race, the winds carried many seeds besides those by which men's bodies have so long been nourished ; the germs of all useful arts and of all mental activities were borne on their breath like a fertilizing dust. Among those distant ancestors of 1 A. de Candolle, Origine des Plantes cultivées, pp. 285, et. seq.