42 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Prehistoric Man and his Development. 



BY DR. LORENZO G. YATES, F. L. S. 



Honorary Member Southern Calitornia Academy of Sciences 

 President of the Santa Barbara Society of isatural History, Etc. 



Among the many interesting discoveries of late years in 

 Assyria is the Code of King Khammiirabi, giving the laws 

 which governed his people 4,000 years ago, and there are ample 

 evidences that many of the laws therein codified had been 

 brought down from much greater antiquity. 



This Code gives proof of the existence of the tradition of 

 the "mountain-given law" long before the ^Mosaic reception 

 on Sinai. 



At Xippur, the sacred city of the mountain god Bel, the 

 scientific explorations of the ruins of the oldest cities of dial- 

 dea by the party sent out by the University of Pennsylvania, 

 under the direction of Dr. Hilprecht, uncovered twenty-one 

 strata of successive towns and cities upon the site, extending 

 over a period from Arab times, about A. D. 900, to probably a 

 period of 5,000 years before the Christian era, and from the 

 evidence of vestiges of buildings, and the recovery and transla- 

 tions of ancient inscriptions the earliest settlement cannot be 

 placed later than 7,000 years ago. 



An important point in this discovery is that there was 

 absolutely no trace of any prehistoric, neolithic, nor paleo- 

 lithic age, and there was no period during the time of the occu- 

 pation of this site when writing was unknown, and there was 

 no Stone Age represented in that locality. 



This ancient civilization seems "to have been brought by 

 emigrants from some other region, among whom writing had 

 advanced beyond the pictorial stage. 



Copper and silver were worked by these people and a sil- 

 ver tariff had replaced a corn standard. 



Other discoveries to the east of the River Tigris indicate 

 older settlements showing three different stages of the Neo- 

 lithic or Later Stone Age, showing, either that the emigration 

 had been from the east, and that its advance had been very 

 slow, or that the people living in the Stone Age of the earlier 

 settlement had been driven out by a people who were already 

 ecpiipped with the first elements of civilization which must 

 have taken centuries to develop. 



'\\. W. Flinders Petrie judges, from the pictures of ancient 

 men with full foreheads and aquiline noses that in the early 



