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On the east were the Elamites, with Susa for their capital; to the north of these were the warlike Kassites. The Sumerians, who preceded the Semites in the occupancy of Babylonia, were of an unknown stock. They were the founders of Babylonian culture. Even by them the soil was skillfully cultivated with the help of dikes and canals. They were the inventors of the cuneiform writing.
But the existence of such a belief is in itself an index to the people's character, and we may take it that the record faithfully represents the relations of the Sumerians to their gods, and the important place which worship and ritual occupied in the national life.
The position on a lion is a well-known one of Hittite goddesses. They probably represent Ashtaroth. We may also here mention some theories about the foreign connections of the Egyptian gods. The early Sumerians of Babylonia worshipped Asari, 'the strong one, 'the prince who does good to men. This has a strong resemblance in name and character to Asar, Osiris, of Egypt.
The Babylonian civilisation, with which we are best acquainted, was the result of this amalgamation of Sumerian and Semitic elements. Out of this mixture of Sumerians and Semites there arose a mixed people, a mixed language, and a mixed religion. The language and race of Babylonia were thus like those of England, probably also like those of Egypt.
It will be seen that the influence of the Sumerians furnishes us with a key to much that would otherwise prove puzzling in the history of the early races of Western Asia. It is therefore all the more striking to recall the fact that but a few years ago the very existence of this ancient people was called in question.
The Sumerians were entirely ab-sorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of Babillli, or towers of Babel. In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered Mesopotamia.
In their new home, among the flat plains, there were no such rocks and it was impossible to construct their shrines in the old fashion. The Sumerians did not like this. All Asiatic people have a deep respect for tradition and the Sumerian tradition demanded that an altar be plainly visible for miles around.
Meanwhile the documents from Nippur had shown us what the early Sumerians themselves believed about their own origin, and we traced in their tradition the gradual blending of history with legend and myth. We saw that the new Dynastic List took us back in the legendary sequence at least to the beginning of the Post-diluvian period.
Although the meaning of the majority of these ideographs has not yet been identified, Père Scheil, who has edited the texts, has succeeded in making out the system of numeration. He has identified the signs for unity, 10, 100, and 1,000, and for certain fractions, and the signs for these figures are quite different from those employed by the Sumerians.
These Sumerians, in the fourth millennium B.C., lived on tells heaped up above flood-level, each tell a city-state with its separate government and gods, for centralisation was the one thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did not achieve. The centralisers were Semites from the Arabian plateau.
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