t beyond saying
that the writing is a direct development from picture writing, there is
little of any definite character that can be maintained. We do not know
when the writing originated, we only know that in the oldest
inscriptions it is already fully developed.

We do not know who originated it; nor can the question be as yet
definitely answered, whether those who originated it spoke the
Babylonian language, or whether they were Semites at all. Until about
fifteen years ago, it was generally supposed that the cuneiform writing
was without doubt the invention of a non-Semitic race inhabiting
Babylonia at an early age, from whom the Semitic Babylonians adopted it,
together with the culture that this non-Semitic race had produced. These
inventors, called Sumerians by some and Akkadians by others, and
Sumero-Akkadians by a third group of scholars, it was supposed, used the
"cuneiform" as a picture or 'ideographic' script exclusively; and the
language they spoke being agglutinative and largely monosyllabic in
character, it was possible for them to stop short at this point of
development. The Babylonians however, in order to adapt the writing to
their language, did not content themselves with the 'picture' method,
but using the non-Semitic equivalent for their own words, employed the
former as syllables, while retaining, at the same time, the sign as an
ideograph. To make this clearer by an example, the numeral '1' would
represent the word 'one' in their own language, while the non-Semitic
word for 'one,' which let us suppose was "_ash_," they used as the
phonetic value of the sign, in writing a word in which this sound
occurred, as _e.g._, _ash-es_. Since each sign, in Sumero-Akkadian as
well as in Babylonian, represented some general idea, it could stand for
an entire series of words, grouped about this idea and associated with
it, 'day,' for example, being used for 'light,' 'brilliancy,' 'pure,'
and so forth. The variety of syllabic and ideographic values which the
cuneiform characters show could thus be accounted for.

This theory, however, tempting as it is by its simplicity, cannot be
accepted in this unqualified form. Advancing knowledge has made it
certain that the ancient civilization, including the religion, is
Semitic in character. The assumption therefore of a purely non-Semitic
culture for southern Babylonia is untenable. Secondly, even in the
oldest inscriptions found, there occur Semitic words and Semitic