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Moreover, by means of the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia Sumerian culture continued to exert its influence on other and more distant races. We have already seen how a Babylonian element probably enters into Egyptian civilization through Semitic infiltration across the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb or by way of the Isthmus of Suez, and it was Sumerian culture which these Semites brought with them.
Dates, the principal support of the inhabitants of Chaldaea, or Babylonia, both in ancient and in modern times, were no doubt also an article of food in Assyria, though scarcely to any great extent. The date-palm does not bear well above the alluvium, and such fruit as it produces in the upper country is very little esteemed.
Why the Semites, in marked contrast with the Indo-Europeans and the Chinese, have shown a relatively feeble recognition of the physical heaven we are not able to say; possibly the tribal feeling referred to above may have led to a centering of devotion on those deities that lay nearer to everyday life, or in the case of Babylonia it may be that the city with which Anu was particularly connected lost its early importance, and its deity in consequence yielded to others.
The doctrine thus arose that the great gods dwell in the 'heaven of Anu. A doctrine of this kind would be intelligible to the general populace, but it is doubtful whether a belief which involved the establishment of a direct connection between the most prominent stars the planets with the chief gods ever enjoyed popular favor in Babylonia.
Gaga comes to Lakhmu and Lakhamu and delivers the message verbatim, so that altogether this portion of the narrative is repeated no less than four times. The same tendency towards repetition is met with in the Gilgamesh epic and in the best of the literary productions of Babylonia.
The political situation presupposed in it however unlikely it seemed to the historian but a few years ago has turned out to be in strict harmony with fact; the names of the chief actors in it have come down to us with scarcely any alteration, and a fragment of old-world history, which could not be fitted into the scheme of the modern historian, has proved to be part of a larger story which the clay books of Babylonia are gradually unfolding before our eyes.
Again, it has recently been made probable that as early at least as 2000, or even 2500 B.C., Semitic invaders entering Babylonia from the side of Arabia drove the native Babylonian rulers from the throne; and at a still earlier period intercourse between Babylonia and distant nations to the northeast and northwest was established, which left its traces on the political and social conditions.
As regards the political situation there, even at the beginning of the Kassite Dynasty—a change probably attended by long internecine struggles—Babylonia seems to have lost its western possessions on the Mediterranean, and we may rather suppose that it was the kings of Mitani who ruled these territories in the time of Thutmosis III.
The tombs and temples of Egypt, and the papyri which have been preserved in the sandy soil of a land where frost and rain are hardly known, have made the old world of the Egyptians live again before our eyes, while the clay books of Babylonia and Assyria are giving us a knowledge of the people who wrote and read them fully equal to that which we have of Greece or Rome.
Pyramus was the handsomest youth, and Thisbe the fairest maiden, in all Babylonia, where Semiramis reigned. Their parents occupied adjoining houses; and neighborhood brought the young people together, and acquaintance ripened into love. They would gladly have married, but their parents forbade. One thing, however, they could not forbid that love should glow with equal ardor in the bosoms of both.
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