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The Sumerians had called it "the land whence none return," though in the theology of Eridu and Babylon Asari or Merodach was already a god who, through the wisdom of his father Ea, "restored the dead to life." But as the centuries passed, new and less gloomy ideas grew up in regard to the future life.
* It is, of course, also possible that the system of writing had no connection in its origin with that of the Sumerians, and was invented independently of the system employed in Babylonia. In that case, the signs which resemble certain of the Sumerian characters must have been adopted in a later stage of its development.
For the culture of the Semites was Sumerian, the Semitic races owing their civilization to the Sumerians. That is as much as to say that a great deal of what we call Semitic culture is fundamentally non-Semitic.
When overrunning the plains and cities of the Sumerians, the Semites were comparatively uncivilized, and, so far as we know, without a system of writing of their own. The incursions into Elam must have taken place under the great Semitic conquerors, such as Sar-gon and Narâm-Sin and Alu-usharshid.
They are, in fact, very remarkable compositions, and in themselves justify the claim that the Sumerians were possessed of a literature in the proper sense of the term. But that is not their only value, for they give a vivid picture of ancient Sumerian life and of the ideals and aims which actuated the people and their rulers. The Sumerians were essentially an unmilitary race.
+342+. It may be doubted whether the Babylonian usage can properly be called Semitic. There is, to be sure, no proof, except from the inscriptions, that the practice was Sumerian; but, as it is found in some Asiatic non-Semitic lands, there is the possibility that it existed among the Sumerians, of whose history, however, we unfortunately know little.
The following chapters will therefore deal chiefly with modern discoveries which have told us new facts with regard to the history of the ancient Sumerians themselves, and of the Babylonians, Elamites, Kassites, and Assyrians, the inheritors of the ancient Sumerian civilization, which was older than that of Egypt, and which, as we have seen, probably contributed somewhat to its formation.
The Tower of Babel of which we hear so much in the Old Testament was nothing but the ruin of an artificial peak, built hundreds of years before by a band of devout Sumerians. It was a curious contraption. The Sumerians had not known how to construct stairs. They had surrounded their tower with a sloping gallery which slowly carried people from the bottom to the top.
As the area of the excavations marks the site of the chief city of the Sumerians, the diggings there have yielded and are yielding material of the greatest interest and value for the reconstruction of the early history of Chaldæa.
They were good fighters and for a long time they were able to hold their own against all invaders. But four thousand years ago a tribe of Semitic desert people called the Akkadians left Arabia, defeated the Sumerians and conquered Mesopotamia. The most famous king of these Akkadians was called Sargon.
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