CHAPTER LXXI. 
ORIGIN OF THE BABYLONIAN CIVILIZATION, FROM ARCHZOLOGY. 
For many years there was an inclination among scholars to regard Egypt as 
the home of the oldest civilization. Such was the Greek and Roman idea, and it 
was accepted among modern scholars whose first explorations in the field of primi- 
tive culture and history were made in Egypt. About 1890 a number of adventurous 
scholars in the field of Babylonian antiquity began to suggest that certain common 
characters in the mythology of the two peoples, and certain common points in 
their culture, pointed to a common origin at a very early period, and even that the 
Babylonian culture was the source of that of the earliest Egyptian dynasty. ‘This 
conclusion, at first stoutly resisted, has now come to be very widely held among 
Egyptologists, especially as the remains of the autochthonous population of Egypt 
begin to be known and distinguished from that culture which was superposed by 
the first Egyptian dynasty, which we now find to be historical. 
But the question must now be carried a step further. What is the source of 
the Babylonian culture? Is it truly autochthonous? Such has been the usual 
supposition, based on the supposed earliest traditions of Genesis and other sources, 
and we knew nothing back of it. Further, it has seemed plausible that a civiliza- 
tion was most likely to begin in a river-bottom, where agriculture would be first 
developed, and where cereal grains could be best cultivated, and population become 
dense, and a division of labor would result, with the consequent division of property. 
To be sure there are many such river-bottoms of various extent, but the valley of 
the Tigris and Euphrates, like that of the Nile, is one of the largest in the Old World 
and supplies ideal conditions for such a development; and, besides, it has the 
advantage of old tradition. . 
At an extremely early period in Babylonian history two races, with two differ- 
ent languages, occupied the land, the Sumerians and the Semites. The Semites 
are supposed to be of a later invasion and to have come from Arabia. The Sumer- 
ians were of a Mongol or Turanian stock, and would seem to have extended far 
to the east of Babylonia. The question before us is whether they developed their 
civilization in Babylonia, or whether they brought it with them. 
In favor of their being the original autochthonous stock is the fact that we know 
of no antecedent population. There may, very likely, have been an original inferior 
negrito population, who lived by hunting, but the only evidence we have of it is 
in an occasionally discovered stone arrow-head. ‘The Sumerians were acquainted 
with bronze as well as gold and silver, but with them the use of stone implements 
survived, and they may have used stone arrow-heads. The dense bottom-lands 
of the Tigris and Euphrates were hardly adapted for the residence of hunters, 
where there were no trees or rocks or caves for refuge and residence. Such a region 
belongs to an agricultural people. As to the native origin of Babylonian culture 
we are confined mainly to the evidence of Babylonian art, and that the oldest. 
We must go back to the most archaic period, and see what were the ideas of the 
424 
