350 NO ROD— CLOSE INTERCOURSE WITH EGYPT 



and fishing, often finds place in their, and Israehtish, metaphors. 

 Examples occur in the story of the defeat of Marduk and 

 Tiamat, "They (the enemies) were cast into the net," and in 

 the prayer of Eannatum to the god Enki that, if the citizens 

 of Umma in future break the recent treaty, he will destroy them 

 in his net. But in the legend of the taking of Zu, the stealer 

 of the destiny-tablets, the net of the Sun-god is certainly a 

 fowling one : 



(e) Did possess near at hand, and had not to import (as the 

 Romans from Africa) ample material for the Rod in reeds, 

 which were abundant near Babylon and were utilised in the 

 construction of furniture, light boats, and fences. In the lists 

 of private property these reeds — employed for household not 

 angling purposes — figure not infrequently : 



(/) Were for hundreds of years closely associated in inter- 

 course and trade with the Egyptians, whose use of the Rod 

 can be carried back to about the Xllth Dynasty, c. 2000, or, 

 according to Petrie's chronology, c. 3500 B.C. 



Before discussing the date of the first contact or connection 

 between the two countries, it is advisable shortly to distinguish 

 between the three peoples whom I group under the term 

 Assyrians, and roughly apportion the periods of the four 

 thousand odd years of Assyrian history during which each 

 was predominant. 



The first, the Sumerians, occupied before — perhaps long 

 before — the close of the fourth millennium the land on the 

 lower plain of the Tigris and Euphrates and on the sea coast, 

 as it then was.i They possessed an advanced civilisation, 

 with an organised government, many large cities, and con- 

 siderable agricultural and industrial development. 



Whence their emigration, to what family, Mongol or other, 

 they belong, is not clear. It is settled they were not Semites, 

 like the Babylonians and Assyrians. Their language (preserved 



1 From the find (made during the war by a Sikh regiment on the Tigris 

 above Samara) of an alabaster vase (now in the Ashmolean Museum), which 

 from archaeological reasons must be placed among the very earliest remnants 

 of Sumerian civiUsation, it is evident that — given the discovery was in situ — 

 the frontiers of the Sumerian Empire must have extended much farther north 

 than has been hitherto generally supposed. Owing to the deposits of the 

 two rivers, the sea has receded some hundred and twenty miles. 



