e troubled themselves to make such an invention and afterwards
have stultified themselves by carefully appending Assyrian translations
to the majority of the Sumerian compositions which they copied out.
Moreover, the nature of these compositions is not such as we should
expect to find recorded in a cabalistic method of writing. They contain
no secret lore of the Babylonian priests, but are merely hymns and
prayers and religious compositions similar to those employed by the
Babylonians and Assyrians themselves.

But in spite of its inherent improbabilities, M. Halevy succeeded in
making many converts to his theory, including Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch
and a number of the younger school of German Assyriologists. More
conservative scholars, such as Sir Henry Rawlinson, M. Oppert, and Prof.
Schrader, stoutly opposed the theory, maintaining that Sumerian was a
real language and had been spoken by an earlier race whom the Semitic
Babylonians had conquered; and they explained the resemblance of some of
the Sumerian values to Semitic roots by supposing that Sumerian had
not been suddenly superseded by the language of the Semitic invaders
of Babylonia, but that the two tongues had been spoken for long periods
side by side and that each had been strongly influenced by the other.
This very probable and sane explanation has been fully corroborated
by subsequent excavations, particularly those that were carried out at
Telloh in Southern Babylonia by the late M. de Sarzec. In these mounds,
which mark the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Shirpurla, were
found thousands of clay tablets inscribed in archaic characters and in
the Sumerian language, proving that it had actually been the language of
the early inhabitants of Babylonia; while the examples of their art and
the representations of their form and features, which were also afforded
by the diggings at Telloh, proved once for all that the Sumerians were
a race of strongly marked characteristics and could not be ascribed to a
Semitic stock.

The system of writing invented by the ancient Sumerians was adopted by
the Semitic Babylonians, who modified it to suit their own language.
Moreover, the archaic forms of the characters, many of which under the
Sumerians still retained resemblances to the pictures of objects from
which they were descended, were considerably changed. The lines, of
which they were originally composed, gave way to wedges, and the number
of the wedges of which e