derground.
Eridu, on the other hand, was the home of the culture-god Ea, the god of
light and beneficence, who employed his divine wisdom in healing the sick
and restoring the dead to life. Rising each morning from his palace in the
deep, he had given man the arts and sciences, the industries and manners of
civilization. To him was due the invention of writing, and the first
law-book was his creation. Eridu had once been a seaport, and it was
doubtless its foreign trade and intercourse with other lands which
influenced the development of its culture. Its cosmology was the result of
its geographical position: the earth, it was believed, had grown out of the
waters of the deep, like the ever-widening coast at the mouth of the
Euphrates. Long before history begins, however, the cultures of Eridu and
Nippur had coalesced. While Babylon seems to have been a colony of Eridu,
Ur, the immediate neighbour of Eridu, must have been colonized from Nippur,
since its moon-god was the son of El-lil of Nippur. But in the admixture of
the two cultures the influence of Eridu was predominant.

We may call the early civilization of Babylonia Sumerian. The race who
first developed it spoke an agglutinative language, and to them was due the
invention of the pictorial hieroglyphs which became the running-hand or
cuneiform characters of later days, as well as the foundation of the chief
cities of the country and the elements of its civilization. The great
engineering works by means of which the marshes were drained and the
overflow of the rivers regulated by canals went back to Sumerian times,
like a considerable part of later Babylonian religion and the beginnings of
Babylonian law. Indeed Sumerian continued to be the language of religion
and law long after the Semites had become the ruling race.

[Sidenote: Semitic Influence.]

_Arrival of the Semites_.--When the Semites first entered the Edin or plain
of Babylonia is uncertain, but it must have been at a remote period. The
cuneiform system of writing was still in process of growth when it was
borrowed and adapted by the new comers, and the Semitic Babylonian language
was profoundly influenced by the older language of the country, borrowing
its words and even its grammatical usages. Sumerian in its turn borrowed
from Semitic Babylonian, and traces of Semitic influence in some of the
earliest Sumerian texts indicate that the Semite was already on the
Babylonian border. His native home was pr