The gaiety of the people on such occasions was the more exuberant in proportion to the undisturbed monotony or misery of the days which preceded them. As soon, for instance, as Gudea had brought to completion Ininnu, the house of his patron Ningirsu, "he felt relieved from the strain and washed his hands. For seven days, no grain was bruised in the quern, the maid was the equal of her mistress, the servant walked in the same rank as his master, the strong and the weak rested side by side in the city." The world seemed topsy-turvy as during the Roman Saturnalia; the classes mingled together, and the inferiors were probably accustomed to abuse the unusual licence which they momentarily enjoyed: when the festival was over, social distinctions reasserted themselves, and each one fell back into his accustomed position. Life was not so pleasant in Chaldæa as in Egypt. The innumerable promissory notes, the receipted accounts, the contracts of sale and purchase--these cunningly drawn up deeds which have been deciphered by the hundred--reveal to us a people greedy of gain, exacting, litigious, of artisans in Egypt. This is taken from a source belonging to the XIIth or possibly the XIIIth dynasty. We may assume, from the fact that the two civilizations were about on the same level, that the information supplied in this respect by the Egyptian monuments is generally applicable to the condition of Chaldæan workmen of the same period.
(Unreadable) and almost exclusively absorbed by material concerns. The climate, too, variable and oppressive in summer and winter alike, imposed upon the Chaldæan painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of which the majority of Egyptians would not have felt themselves capable. The Chaldæan, 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.