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The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They were a white People who had lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars.
It has often been said that the inscriptions of the ancient Sumerians are without much intrinsic value, that they mainly consist of dull votive formulæ, and that for general interest the best of them cannot be compared with the later inscriptions of the Semitic inhabitants of Mesopotamia.
We have already noted that, according to the traditions the records embody, the Sumerians looked back to a time when gods lived upon the earth with men, and we have seen such deities as Tammuz and Lugalbanda figuring as rulers of cities in the dynastic sequence. As in later periods, their names are there preceded by the determinative for divinity.
"Whoever compared the most advanced nation to the Aztecs was accurate, except for the fact that they base themselves along a river rather than on a mountain plateau." Plekhanov said, "Similarities to the Egyptians and Sumerians." He looked over his beefy shoulder at the technician who was photographing the areas over which they passed. "How does our geographer progress, Roberts?"
That such conceptions existed among the Sumerians is a most interesting fact, and although the theory of independent origin is possible, their existence may well have influenced later Semitic beliefs.
Whether they were Sumerians, or Semites, is not certain; their inscriptions do not settle the question. It was probably not far from this time, however, that the one race supplanted the other. A Semitic people coming either directly from the ancestral home, Arabia, or from a previous settlement in Mesopotamia, north-west of Babylonia invaded the land and conquered the Sumerians.
As in the case of Egypt, again, more tribes were attracted to the fertile region, and by about 4000 B.C. we find that Semitic tribes from the north have superseded the Sumerians, and taken over their civilisation.
But in spite of these discrepancies, the general resemblance presented by the huge totals in the variant copies of the list to the alternative figures of Berossus, if we ignore his mythical period, is remarkable. They indicate a far closer correspondence of the Greek tradition with that of the early Sumerians themselves than was formerly suspected. No. 4. No. 2.
The elaborate system of nail-writing of the ancient Sumerians was too involved for the Aramaean business man. He invented a new alphabet which could be written much faster than the old wedge-shaped figures of Babylon. The spoken language of the Aramaeans followed their business correspondence. Aramaean became the English of the ancient world.
In them we have recovered some of the material from which Berossus derived his dynasty of Antediluvian kings, and we are thus enabled to test the accuracy of the Greek tradition by that of the Sumerians themselves. So far then as Babylonia is concerned, these documents will necessitate a re-examination of more than one problem.
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