ANTIQUITY OF MAN — SAYCE 523 



at Ur have revolutionized our judgment on this matter. The gold 

 and silver work, the inlaid designs in shell and ivory, have revealed 

 an art of the first order. To those of us who have been devoting a 

 lifetime to the study of Babylonian antiquity the revelation has, 

 indeed, been startling. Some of the inlaid designs, with their touches 

 of modern humor, seem to belong to the European world of to-day 

 rather than to the oriental world of the past. And yet the tombs 

 and their contents actually belong to Babylonian prehistory rather 

 than history. The few inscriptions found with them are not yet 

 in the fully developed cuneiform or linear script, which already had 

 a long history behind it when Sargon of Akkad founded the first 

 Babylonian empire in 2750 B. C. They are, in fact, still the picto- 

 graphic signs out of which first the semilinear and then the cunei- 

 form characters slowly developed. And along with these early semi- 

 pictographic forms goes another remarkable fact. The advanced art 

 and culture exhibited by the objects found in the tombs is accom- 

 panied by evidence of human sacrifice on a vast scale which reminds 

 us of Dahomey rather than of the Near East. Human sacrifice, how- 

 ever, was not only unknown in historical Babylonia, but its very ex- 

 istence at any period in the past history of the country was ignored. 

 In the multitudinous religious texts which w^e now possess I can find 

 no specific reference to it. The references which I thought I had 

 discovered some 55 years ago have since proved to be mistaken. 

 When Babylonian history begins the past existence of human sacri- 

 fice is even less known to its records than it is to the beginnings of 

 Anglo-Saxon history. 



And yet the royal tombs of Ur by no means belong to what, it 

 is now clear, was the earliest period of Babylonian history. "Above 

 the graves," Mr. Woolley tells us, " there runs, virtually unbroken, 

 a stratum dated (by written tablets or clay jar stoppers) to the First 

 Dynasty of Ur, about 3100 B. C, and a little below is (another) the 

 seals from which seem to be rather earlier. Then comes (No. 3) a 

 deep zone in which lie nearly all the graves. Below it the stratifi- 

 cation continues, and in five further layers more tablets and seal 

 impressions occur freely. All these are necessarily older than the 

 " cemetery " into which the '• royal tombs " were sunk. The stratifi- 

 cation of the city itself, where house has been built over house, 

 agrees with that of the cemetery. Here, too, there are eight succes- 

 sive layers, each distinguished by the remains found in it, which 

 include inscribed objects. In one of the strata (the sixth) " which 

 was more than 20 feet underground when the first of the royal tombs 

 was made," four bulls' hooves of hammered copper were discovered 

 which had belonged to a life-size statute, and in the eighth layer 

 " the painted pottery resembling that of aeneolithic Susa and even 



