ANCIENT EGYPT, ASIA MINOR, AND CRETE 
India a hitherto entirely unknown civilization with some 
close resemblances to that of the Sumerians. Again, they 
may have come from southern Arabia, where kingdoms 
now forgotten existed in ancient days. 
At all events, when they first become known to us, we 
find the Sumerians already in possession of domestic cattle, 
asses, sheep, and goats, but without horses. They had 
a well-developed agriculture, carried on with the aid of the 
plow, and they used carts, both with four and with two 
wheels, drawn by oxen and asses. 
Unlike their predecessors, the Painted Pottery People, 
the Sumerians seem to have made little or no use of the 
bow and arrow at first. They did wage wars, but on the 
whole they were a peaceful folk, engaged mainly in agri- 
culture, cultivating especially the date palm, which sup- 
plied them with many of their simple wants in addition to 
food. This most useful tree made possible, in the opinion 
of some, their rise to comparative civilization. They lived 
in mud villages scattered about over the wide alluvial 
plains, often built on artificial mounds to be out of the 
reach of floods; partly, too, perhaps, to escape the swarms 
of insect pests that the marshes harbored. In time these 
villages with their surrounding lands united, as in Egypt, 
to form a number of small city states, ruled over by priest- 
kings who were often themselves regarded as in some sense 
gods or descended from gods. Objects of adoration in life, 
at their funerals large numbers of their guards and servants 
were slain and buried with them. 
Owing to the total lack of stone in the alluvial plains of 
Babylonia, mud formed the great building material and 
came to be made into bricks, simply dried in the sun at first 
and only in later times baked in the fire. Sometimes in 
place of mortar, bitumen was used; a reference to this oc- 
curs in Genesis, xi, 3, where we are told that the builders of 
the Tower of Babel ‘‘had brick for stone, and slime had 
they for mortar.”’ The Sumerians also wrote upon tablets 
of soft clay and then baked them hard. 
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