he A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius.
And another twenty years had to go by until a British officer, Henry
Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a
workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of
Champollion had been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the
Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon
the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded
pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been
developed. A few examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning a
star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows: {illust.}
This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the
meaning of "heaven" was added to that of star the picture was simplified
in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same
way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.} and a fish changed from
{illust.} into {illust.} The sun was originally a plain circle {illust.}
and became {illust.} If we were using the Sumerian script today we would
make an {illust.} look like {illust.}. This system of writing down our
ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries it
was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the
Persians and all the different races which forced their way into the
fertile valley.

The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First
the Sumerians came from the North. They were a white People who had
lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods
on the tops of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed
artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They
did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their
towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea, as
you may see in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries lead
from one floor to another. We may have borrowed other ideas from the
Sumerians but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-sorbed
by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later date. Their
towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw
them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and they called
them