(Unreadable) and almost exclusively absorbed by material concerns.  The climate, too, variable and oppressive in summer and winter alike, imposed upon the Chaldaean painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of which the majority of Egyptians would not have felt themselves capable.  The Chaldaean, suffering greater and more prolonged hardships, earned more doubtless, but was not on this account the happier.  However lucrative his calling might be, it was not sufficiently so to supply him always with domestic necessities, and both tradespeople and operatives were obliged to run into debt to supplement their straitened means.  When they had once fallen into the hands of the usurer, the exorbitant interest which they had to pay kept them a long time in his power.  If when the bill fell due there was nothing to meet it, it had to be renewed under still more disastrous conditions; as the pledge given was usually the homestead, or the slave who assisted in the trade, or the garden which supplied food for the family, the mortgagor was reduced to the extreme of misery if he could not satisfy his creditors, This plague of usury was not, moreover, confined to the towns; it raged with equal violence in the country, and the farmers also became its victims.

If, theoretically, the earth belonged to the gods, and under them to the kings, the latter had made, and continued daily to make, such large concessions of it to their vassals, that the greater part of their domains were always in the hands of the nobles or private individuals.  These could dispose of their landed property at pleasure, farm it out, sell it or distribute it among their heirs and friends.

They paid on account of it a tax which varied at different epochs, but which was always burthensome; but when they had once satisfied this exaction, and paid the dues which the temples might claim on behalf of the gods, neither the State nor any individual had the right to interfere in their administration of it, or put any restrictions upon them.  Some proprietors cultivated their lands themselves—­the poor by their own labour, the rich by the aid of some trustworthy slave whom they interested in the success of his farming by assigning him a certain percentage on the net return.  Sometimes the lands were leased out in whole or in part to free peasants who relieved the proprietors of all the worry and risks of managing it themselves.  A survey of the area of each state had been made at an early age, and the lots into which it had been divided were registered on clay tablets containing the name of the proprietor as well as those of his neighbours, together with such indications of the features of the land, dykes, canals, rivers, and buildings as would serve to define its boundaries:  rough plans accompanied the description, and in the most complicated instances interpreted it to the eye.  This survey was frequently repeated, and enabled the sovereign to arrange his scheme of taxation on a solid