an early and abundant supply of water, to the detriment of his poorer neighbours.

There is still an opening for the capitalist, as a middleman, if he will reside in the district, and attend personally to his business, by renting land in considerable areas at £4 per acre, and letting it out in small plots of a few acres to the working fellahin, at £5 per acre. The difference in the two rents named, is not pocketed by the one party to the contract at the expense of the other, because very considerable advantages can be secured when one man possesses command over a large tract of country, by arranging the areas to grow certain crops, so that no land is injured by soakage of water coming from the land occupied by a crop requiring much water, to that bearing a crop which demands little moisture.

It is open for the development in Egyptian agriculture to proceed on a number of lines :

Better returns could be made than at present, from many small areas growing a great variety of crops as above indicated, under some general district supervision, such as could be exercised by a large owner over his own property, or by a representative board in the case of a community.

2. The area of cultivation now generally stated at five million feddans is capable of very considerable extension by reclamation, variously estimated at one million to two million feddans.

3. An increased supply of water all the year round will enable the cultivators of immense areas to grow two and three crops annually in place of one crop.

4. There is considerable room for improvement and for the development of new varieties by selection of superior plants, for example, in the case of cotton, by far the most important revenue paying product of the

country; but there is no great call for the importation of new kinds of crops.

5. Much is possible in the way of combating fungoid and insect crop-pests.

6. Soil fertility is to be maintained by the use of artificial manures, and by increasing the numbers of live stock in the country.

7. The Tewfikieh College of Agriculture at Ghizeh will be the means of imparting instruction to the sons of landowners and to youths of the working fellahin class who desire to become "holys" (bailiffs), and in this way a knowledge will be disseminated of the best native practices, the best varieties of crops to grow, the best rotations to adopt, the best manures to apply, the best stock to keep, and the best systems of dairy management under prevailing Egyptian conditions.

ROBERT WALLACE.

CHAPTER XCI.

ANCIENT LANDS (BABYLONIAN, &c.).

By REV. A. H. SAYCE, M.A.,

Professor of Assyriology, Oxford; Hon. LL.D., Dublin, etc.; Decipherer of the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Van; Author of "Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments"; * Assyria—Its Princes, Priests, and People"; " An Introduction to Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther"; etc., etc.

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RECENT discovery has given us an insight into the character and tenure of landed property in ancient Babylonia and Assyria, such as could not have been dreamed of a few years ago. A vast number of contracts have been found in Babylonia, dating from the period of Nebuchadnezzar to that of the later Persian kings, which afford us a perfect mine of information on the laws, commercial habits, and economic conditions of the ancient population of Chaldæa. Other contracts of a similar nature, though far less numerous, have been discovered which belong to a much earlier time (about 2300 B.C.), while the library of Nineveh also has furnished contracts and leases dated in the reigns of the later Assyrian kings.

The earliest document yet met with relating to landtenure in Babylonia is one which was originally written in the pre-Semitic language of Chaldæa, and to which, therefore, a translation into Semitic Babylonian has been subsequently added. It seems to be a collection of extracts from a work which was intended to be a guide to

the professional classes of the country, and its language has the proverb-like form characteristic of primitive literary productions. We learn from it that in the case. of simple tenure the legal occupation of a farm was held to begin in the sixth month of the year. After settling with his landlord about the terms of his lease, the farmer was required to pay a tax to the Government and thereby acquire a title to his holding. He was next called upon to surround the farm with fences, beyond which his cattle and poultry were forbidden to stray. For every sixty measures of produce he was allowed to keep eight; the rest went to the landlord as rent. But there were various kinds of tenure. In one called "half-tenure" the tenant was required to work the farm under the control of the landlord's agent, the live stock, seeds, and manure, however, being regarded as his property. The idea seems to have been that while the land belonged to the lessor, the lessee contributed, by way of rent, his labour and stock.

At other times the tenure was that of "partnership." The "landlord" and the "farmer" were placed on footing of equality; the farmer contributed his labour, the landlord the house, carts, oxen, utensils, grain, seed, and the like. It would appear that as long as the contract lasted landlord and tenant were regarded as having equal rights in the land.

Partnership in land doubtless rested on the same principles as partnership in trade, about which the later contracts give us plenty of information. A partnership was formed for a certain number of years, and during this period the partners put their property, "both in the town and in the country," into a common stock, and divided the profits proportionally to the amount contributed by each. When the partnership was dissolved

each party similarly received a proportionate amount of the existing capital.

Rent, which was paid in kind, depended on the agreement made between the landlord and his tenant in what we should call the "lease." The farmer might take either the third, fourth, fifth, or only the tenth part of the produce. In every case, however, he was required to pay the "tithe" levied for the support of the temples.

In a lease given as a type of the rest it is agreed that the tenant shall plant date-palms, repair the walls and fences, and build lodgings for the farm-servants. This last, indeed, is to be done before he sets about building a house for himself. His own house must be erected and fitted in a durable and "proper" manner, under penalty of a fine of ten shekels. On the last day of the eighth month, when the dates are gathered, twothirds of them are to be delivered to the landlord. Finally, the landlord has power to dismiss the tenant and to terminate the lease.

The remote age to which these stipulations belong give to them a special interest. They illustrate the antiquity to which the rights of individual possession of landed property mount back, as well as the relations between landlord and tenant. Already, in the preSemitic age of Babylonia, five thousand years ago, payment of rent was as fixed an institution as it is to-day.

In the later period of Babylonian history, though payment in kind was still common, it was being superseded by payment in currency. The currency usually consisted of bars of the precious metals, each stamped with their legal weight. Coins, in the modern sense of the word, however, were already becoming known in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and it is probable that a century later they had altogether taken the place of the older and