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The author surveys the peoples, geography, and institutions of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, contrasting northern Assyrian and southern Babylonian character and origins, including Sumerian, Semitic, Kassite, and Chaldean elements. Chapters describe settlement patterns, agriculture and irrigation, urban trade and maritime commerce, education, marriage and funerary customs, markets, money-lending, tenancy, slavery, labour, crafts, professions, and popular religion. The account draws on inscriptions and monuments to reconstruct social structure, daily occupations, legal and economic relations, and religious practices, emphasizing how environment and ethnic mixture shaped community life and administrative organization.
The chapters composing this little volume originally appeared in the Sunday at Home. It was my intention on their republication to add translations of the chief original documents referred to. But on further consideration, bearing in mind the general scope of the ‘By-Path’ Series, I have decided that it is better to print them exactly as they were written.