The Greatest Story in the World, Period 1 by Horace G. Hutchinson

If you will look at the map once more you will see that the Euphrates / and the Tigris draw together near their outgoing into the Persian / Gulf and flow together as one stream. It was not always so, however. / At the earliest times of which we have any knowledge at all the sea / stretched up northward into the land to a point at which the two / rivers ran in separate channels, so that each went out by its own / mouth into the gulf.

I told you that I did not mean to make this story about the eastern / rivers nearly as long as that about the Nile. There are two reasons / for this. In the first place there is not so much to tell. The / records are not so many nor so full. The cause of that is plain. / Egypt is a land well furnished with hard stone, granite, and the / like. In the land which we will call Babylonia there is very little / stone. Therefore the builders built with brick. The inscriptions / were engraven on brick. And brick is not so long lasting a material / as stone. It does not take the mark of the graving tool as sharply / at the first cutting, and it is more liable to wear away in the / course of years. Moreover, the climate of Egypt, in its upper part / at least, is so dry that it is probably the best preserving climate / in the world -- the climate in which inscriptions on stone or papyrus / would last and keep fresh longer than in any other. For these {50} / reasons we have more records from Egypt than from Babylonia.