276 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



non-Semitic language, and other not very convincing reasons 

 are advanced to make him out an " Aryan " of the North 

 European type. That men of this type may have penetrated 

 into Mesopotamia at an early date is possible ; but if so, a shorter 

 route than North Europe would have been the Eurasian steppe, 

 and they would have come, not as settlers, but as conquerors 

 who, as in so many other places (France, Lombardy, the Deccan), 

 became assimilated in speech and culture to their Akkado- 

 Sumerian subjects. But there are no records of such a conquest, 

 and Enshagsagana was far more probably a proto-Semite than a 

 North European "Aryan." 



There is, however, nothing improbable in the early date 

 assigned to this ruler. "We found," writes Dr J. P. Peters, 

 "that Nippur was a great and flourishing city, and its temple, 

 the temple of Bel, the religious centre of the dominant people 

 of the world at a period as much prior to the time of Abraham as 

 the time of Abraham is prior to our day. We discovered written 

 records no less than 6000 years old, and proved that writing and 

 civilisation were then by no means in their infancy. Further 

 than that, our explorations have shown that Nippur possessed a 

 history extending backward of the earliest written documents 

 found by us, at least 2000 years 1 ." 



These discoveries long antedate the time of Sargon I. and his 

 son Naram-Sin, whose chronology was the earliest hitherto deter- 

 mined (about 3800 B.C.). Despite the legendary matter asso- 

 ciated with his memory, Sargon, the Semite, was beyond question 

 a historical person. At Agade were found not only his statue, 

 but also his cylinder, with an inscription beginning : " Sharrukin 

 the mighty king am I," and recording how his mother, a royal 

 princess, concealed his birth by placing him in a rush basket 

 closed with bitumen and sending him adrift on the stream, from 

 which he was rescued by Akki the water-carrier, who brought him 

 up as his own child. The incident, about which there is nothing 

 miraculous, presents a curious parallel, if it be not the source of, 

 similar tales related of Moses, Cyrus, and other ancient leaders of 

 men. Sargon also tells us that he ruled from his capital, Agade, 



1 Nippur, The Narrative of the University of Pennsylvania's Expedition to 

 Babylonia in the years 1888-96, Philadelphia, 1896-8. 



