The profits
of a successful journey would also include a fair return to the agent
for the trouble and time involved in his undertaking. Many of the
contract tablets of this early period relate to such commercial
journeys, which show that various bargains were made between the
different parties interested, and sometimes such contracts, or
partnerships, were entered into, not for a single journey only, but for
long periods. We may therefore conclude that at the time of the First
Dynasty of Babylon, and probably for long centuries before that period,
the great trade-routes of the East were crowded with traffic. With the
exception that donkeys and asses were employed for beasts of burden and
were not supplemented by horses and camels until a much later period, a
camping-ground in the desert on one of the great trade-routes must have
presented a scene similar to that of a caravan camping in the desert at
the present day.
[Illustration: 283.jpg A CAMPING-GROUND IN THE DESERT, BETWEEN BIREJIK
AND URFA.]
The rough tracks beaten by the feet of men and beasts are the same
to-day as they were in that remote period. We can imagine a body of
these early travellers approaching a walled city at dusk and hastening
their pace to get there before the gates were shut. Such a picture as
that of the approach to the city of Samarra, with its mediaeval walls,
may be taken as having had its counterpart in many a city of the early
Babylonians.
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