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In both cases we should have Semites bringing Babylonian culture to Egypt. This, as we may remind the reader, was not itself of Semitic origin, but was a development due to a non-Semitic people, the Sumerians as they are called, who, so far as we know, were the aboriginal inhabitants of Babylonia.
In these mounds, which mark the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Shirpurla, were found thousands of clay tablets inscribed in archaic characters and in the Sumerian language, proving that it had actually been the language of the early inhabitants of Babylonia; while the examples of their art and the representations of their form and features, which were also afforded by the diggings at Telloh, proved once for all that the Sumerians were a race of strongly marked characteristics and could not be ascribed to a Semitic stock.
There are ample grounds, then, for assuming the independent existence of the Babylonian Dragon-myth, and though both the versions recovered have come to us in Semitic form, there is no doubt that the myth itself existed among the Sumerians.
Professor Hommel goes so far as to declare that in the types found on statues and monuments of the oldest period of Babylonian history the monuments coming from the mound Telloh we have actual representations of these Sumerians, who are thus made out to be a smooth-faced race with rather prominent cheek-bones, round faces, and shaven heads.
It belonged to the civilization of which the Sumerians of Chaldæa, with their agglutinative language, were the pioneers. The borrowing, however, was not altogether one-sided. Palestine enriched the literary language of Babylonia with certain words, though these do not seem to have made their way into the language of the people.
The cities of these Semites and Sumerians were divided into two groups, one in the south, near the sea, the other more to the north, where the Euphrates and the Tigris are separated by a narrow strip of land. The southern group consisted of seven, Eridu lying nearest the coast. Uru was the most important. Lagash was to the north of Eridu.
But the reappearance of the Sumerians in the rôle of leading race in Western Asia was destined not to last long, and was little more than the last flicker of vitality exhibited by this ancient and exhausted race.
It would seem, therefore, that even accepting the hypothesis of a non-Semitic type existing in Babylonia at this time, the Semitic settlers are just as old as the supposed Sumerians; and since it is admitted that the language found on these statues and figures contains Semitic constructions and Semitic words, it is, to say the least, hazardous to give the Sumerians the preference over the Semites so far as the period of settlement and origin of the Euphratean culture is concerned.
When the Sumerians first settled by the banks of the Euphrates it must have been on the sandy plateau to the west of the river where the city of Ur, the modern Mugheir, was afterwards built. At that time the future Babylonia was a pestiferous marsh, inundated by the unchecked overflow of the rivers which flowed through it. The reclamation of the marsh was the first work of the new-comers.
This is particularly the case in respect of the Sumerians, who, so far as we know at present, were the earliest inhabitants of the fertile plains of Mesopotamia. The beginnings of this ancient people stretch back into the remote past, and their origin is still shrouded in the mists of antiquity. When first we come across them they have already attained a high level of civilization.
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