retation of
very ancient texts of a legal or sacred character. Their religion became
assimilated to the religion, and their gods identified with the gods, of
the Semites. The process of fusion commenced at such an early date, that
nothing has really come down to us from the time when the two races were
strangers to each other. We are, therefore, unable to say with certainty
how much each borrowed from the other, what each gave, or relinquished
of its individual instincts and customs. We must take and judge them as
they come before us, as forming one single nation, imbued with the
same ideas, influenced in all their acts by the same civilization, and
possessed of such strongly marked characteristics that only in the last
days of their existence do we find any appreciable change. In the course
of the ages they had to submit to the invasions and domination of some
dozen different races, of whom some--Assyrians and Chaldaeans--were
descended from a Semitic stock, while the others--Elamites, Cossaaans,
Persians, Macedonians, and Parthians--either were not connected with
them by any tie of blood, or traced their origin in some distant manner
to the Sumerian branch. They got quickly rid of a portion of these
superfluous elements, and absorbed or assimilated the rest; like
the Egyptians, they seem to have been one of those races which, once
established, were incapable of ever undergoing modification, and
remained unchanged from one end of their existence to the other.

* The name _Accadian_ proposed by H. Rawlinson and by Hincks, and
adopted by Sayce, seems to have given way to _Sumerian_, the title put
forward by Oppert. The existence of the Sumerian or Sumero-Accadian
has been contested by Halevy in a number of noteworthy works. M. Halevy
wishes to recognize in the so-called Sumerian documents the Semitic
tongue of the ordinary inscriptions, but written in a priestly syllabic
character subject to certain rules; this would be practically a
_cryptogram_, or rather an _allogram_. M. Halevy won over Messrs. Guyard
and Pognon in France, Delitzsch and a part of the Delitzsch school
in Germany, to his view of the facts. The controversy, which has been
carried on on both sides with a somewhat unnecessary vehemence, still
rages; it has been simplified quite recently by Delitzcsh's return to
the Sumerian theory. Without reviewing the arguments in detail, and
while doing full justice to the profound learning displayed by M.
Halevy, I fe