. Words which the Semites of Babylonia had borrowed from the older
Sumerian population of the country were handed on to the peoples of
Palestine. The "city" had been a Sumerian creation; until brought under
the influence of Sumerian culture, the Semite had been contented to live
in tents. Indeed in Babylonian or Assyrian--the language of the Semitic
inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria--the word which signified "tent"
was adopted to express the idea of "city" when the tent had been
exchanged for city-life. In Canaan, on the other hand, the Sumerian word
itself was adopted in a Semitic form, _'Ir_, _'ar_, or _uru_, "city,"
was originally the Sumerian _eri_.

The Canaanitish _hekal_, "a palace," again, came from a Sumerian source.
This was _e-gal_, or "great house." But it had passed to the West
through the Semitic Babylonians, who had first borrowed the compound
word under the form of _ekallu_. Like the city, the palace also was
unknown to the primitive Semitic nomads. It belonged to the civilization
of which the Sumerians of Chaldaea, with their agglutinative language,
were the pioneers.

The borrowing, however, was not altogether one-sided. Palestine enriched
the literary language of Babylonia with certain words, though these do
not seem to have made their way into the language of the people. Thus we
find words like _bin-bini_, "grandson," and _inu_, "wine," recorded in
the lexical tablets of Babylonia and Assyria. Doubtless there were
writers on the banks of the Euphrates who were as anxious to exhibit
their knowledge of the language of Canaan as were the Egyptian scribes
of the nineteenth dynasty, though their literary works have not yet been
discovered.

The adoption of the Babylonian system of writing must have worked
powerfully on the side of tincturing the Canaanitish language with
Babylonian words. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets there is no
sign that any other system was known in the West. It is true that the
letters sent to the Pharaoh from Palestine were written in the
Babylonian language as well as in the Babylonian script, but we have
evidence that the cuneiform characters were also used for the native
language of the country. M. de Clercq possesses two seal-cylinders of
the same date as the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, on one of which is
the cuneiform inscription--"Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon, the crown
of the gods," while on the other is "Anniy, the son of Hadad-sum, the
citizen of Sidon."