reduced
their system of agriculture to a science, intersecting their country
with canals for purposes of irrigation and to ensure a good supply of
water to their cities. Their sculpture and pottery furnish abundant
evidence that they have already attained a comparatively high level in
the practice of the arts, and finally they have evolved a complicated
system of writing which originally had its origin in picture-characters,
but afterwards had been developed along phonetic lines. To have attained
to this pitch of culture argues long periods of previous development,
and we must conclude that they had been settled in Southern Babylonia
many centuries before the period to which we must assign the earliest of
their remains at present discovered.

That this people were not indigenous to Babylonia is highly probable,
but we have little data by which to determine the region from which
they originally came. Prom the fact that they built their ziggurats, or
temple towers, of huge masses of unburnt brick which rose high above
the surrounding plain, and that their ideal was to make each "like a
mountain," it has been argued that they were a mountain race, and the
home from which they sprang has been sought in Central Asia. Other
scholars have detected signs of their origin in their language and
system of writing, and, from the fact that they spoke an agglutinative
tongue and at the earliest period arranged the characters of their
script in vertical lines like the Chinese, it has been urged that
they were of Mongol extraction. Though a case may be made out for this
hypothesis, it would be rash to dogmatize for or against it, and it is
wiser to await the discovery of further material on which a more certain
decision may be based. But whatever their origin, it is certain that the
Sumerians exercised an extraordinary influence on all races with
which, either directly or indirectly, they came in contact. The ancient
inhabitants of Elam at a very early period adopted in principle
their method of writing, and afterwards, living in isolation in the
mountainous districts of Persia, developed it on lines of their own. [*
See Chap. V, and note.] On their invasion of Babylonia the Semites
fell absolutely under Sumerian influence, and, although they eventually
conquered and absorbed the Sumerians, their civilization remained
Sumerian to the core. Moreover, by means of the Semitic inhabitants of
Babylonia Sumerian culture continued to exert it