Such cities as Babylon and Borsippa and Nineveh were of later growth. While civilization was beginning in Babylon a it was doubtless also rising on the banks of the Nile, but northwest of Kengi were only nomadic tribes, while the Bedouin roamed in the west. Primitive Neolithic settlements were to the north, and to the east was Elam, overshadowing and often interfering with the citystates of the valley. It is perhaps from Elam that the early Sumerian settlers came, and it was probably from Arabia that the brown-white Semites arrived. At the time when history begins her story civilization is well advanced and organized in Kengi. The marvelously fertile soil of the valley, famous for the amount of potash and phosphorus and nitrogen that the overflowing waters of the two great rivers had deposited annually for many centuries, was doubtless occupied originally because it furnished so richly the necessaries of life to early man. There were grass for the cattle and water and wild grain and multitudinous animals and birds and fish. After a while the settlers learned to control the annual inundations by building a complete system of dams and dykes parts of which have lasted until this day. When we come upon these men they are no longer hunters and trappers with only a few chipped flints, with no domesticated animals, and no agriculture, nor are they merely in the first stages of the Neolithic culture, but they are busy building cities, codifying laws, surveying garden plats, irrigating farm land, leasing properties, establishing courts of justice, building temples, and worshipping their gods. For the great part, they are engaged in agriculture. There are many gardeners raising fruits and vegetables for the market. Some of them are shepherds, others are herdsmen. They have carpenters and metal workers, smiths and dyers, weavers and brick-makers, vintners and leather-workers. Woollen clothes have supplanted the raiment of skins. They are trading with their neighbors not only, but at the very beginning of the record their priestkings are importing rare products from far distant places, such as cedars from Lebanon, great building stones, rare spices, with gold and copper from Egypt and Sinai. In their earliest hour they have slaves, though the free laborer and the tenant farmer are also present. We read of properties passing from generation to generation of the more prominent families, showing that they had already developed a firm respect for the rights of private property. In their houses which are built of brick they have learned to use furniture; chairs and stools and rugs are on the floors. Their bed is a mat, and while the flint knife is still to be found, the metal knife is supplanting it. Beautiful pottery is universal and their principal food is grain and meat. The principal person in the city is the patesi, the priest - ruler. So early is religion associated with government. Indeed, even in the earliest time, these. priests kings claimed to be gods and prefixed the divine symbol to their names. Verily, the distinction between gods and animals and men grows dimmer and dimmer as we go back into the past. And this earliest civilization had already begun to express itself in its distinctive architecture not only, but in literature as well. First came poetry both narrative and lyric with stories of gods and heroes expressed in rhythmic measure and strophic arrange ment. Step by step some of these stories were woven into the great national epic of Gilgamish with its twelve books, the Babylonian Odyssey. As our readers will later see, the thoughts and ideas of this national epos and its mythological conceptions lay at the foundation of the religious lore of the Greeks and the religious beliefs of the Hebrews. Babylonian map of the world showing the ocean around the world (The Bitter River) and marking the position of Babylon on the Euphrates as its center (the rectangle lying across these lines near the large central black dot.) It also shows the mountains at the source of the river, the land of Assyria and the swamps at the mouth of the Euphrates. One of the districts is marked "The Sun cannot be seen." (Courtesy of the British Musuem.) And even at their earliest hour we find that they have laid a tentative foundation for medicine by prescribing cer tain medical herbs upon occasion, though the great mass of their medical lore consisted of exorcisms and magic formulae. They had made a start in mathematics and had written for us our fundamental tables of weights and measures and distances, using the hand breadth as the basis. They had put into use the duodecimal and sexagesimal system, counting by sixes and dozens. Their year had twelve months of thirty days each, with an extra month intercalated as needed. Their day had twelve double hours and each hour had sixty minutes. Their circle had 360 degrees, and the path of the sun through their heavens was divided into twelve compartments or Signs of the Zodiac, the whole circle being divided into six parts of sixty degrees each. As we shall see, they had twelve principal gods which have come down to us under another sky as the twelve gods of Olympus. Twelve was the foundation of their arithmetic. Their ner consisted of six hundred dozen. Their century was therefore like that of the Chinese, a period of sixty years. Thus they had already taught us to buy our eggs by the dogen and to expect twelve ounces in our pound, and in accordance therewith we still have twelve pennies in our shilling and sixty seconds in our minute. Their week they divided into seven days, each named for one of the principal gods. Sunday was the day of Shamash, the sun; Monday of Sin, the moon; Tuesday of Nergal, the planet Mars; Wednesday of Nebo, the planet Mercury; Thursday of Marduk, the planet Jupiter; Friday of Ishtar, the planet Venus; and Saturday of Ninib, the planet Saturn. They had written tables of stars and eclipses and had learned to begin their year at the Vernal Equinox. Their day began at sunrise and they marked its hours by means of the sun and the clepsydra. They had already established a Sabbath, or Shabattu, which they observed "to assuage the wrath of the gods," and they paid especial attention to their list of lucky and unlucky days. This Shabattu, or seventh day, quite clearly was associated with the changes of the moon which, though imaginary, still influence the more superstitious of mankind, advising the farming class of all nations when to reap and sow. On the Shabattu, as on Friday, 13th, of today, men feared to begin important matters or to undertake work or to offend the gods. Nor were these people of 8-10,000 years ago unacquainted with art or agriculture. They were also makers of excellent brick with which they constructed hut and palace and temple. They had invented the keyed arch and they used tile for excellent systems of sewerage. They had learn ed to decorate their walls and build slender columns. They were expert designers and builders of temple-towers, ziggurats. Their art was as art should be, realistic and forceful. Their animals were real animals and their gods were real gods, depicted in the form of the highest known type of animal, the human being, in which form they were destined to continue to exist until the Hebrews and Zoroastrians and the Buddhists and the Christians taught the world better. Their kings were liberal patrons of libraries. Sargon of Agade made Erech the "city of books" by his liberality to the library of her priestly college nearly 4,000 years B. C. And 3,000 years later Asshurbanipal followed his example in the creation of the royal library of Nineveh. It was this same Sargon of Agade who perhaps first told of himself the story that has adorned the childhood of many great kings and leaders of the earth. For among the cuneiform texts of the British Museum is the following legend of his birth: Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade am I, My mother was lowly; my father I did not know; The brother of my father dwelt in the mountain. My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the bank of the Euphrates. My lowly mother conceived me, in secret she brought me forth. She placed me in a basket of reeds, she closed the entrance with bitumen, She cast me upon the river, which did not overflow me. Akki, the irrigator, as his gardener appointed me, Such were the social and political organizations and such the intellectual life of the Tigro-Euphrates valley, this mixed race of Accadians (highlanders) or Semites and Sumerians probably of Mongolian race, who like mixed races in all ages, where the types are not too divergent, have developed the highest cultures. But the thing that fascinates us about these people is not their art nor their architecture nor their libraries of baked brick, nor their irrigation canals, nor their kings of Shumer and Accad, but the fact that they, of all men whom history knows, stand farthest away from us and nearest the unlighted gloom of that remote past through which, by his interminable pathway of struggle, mankind staggered up out of the night. On their right was history, on their left were the vast tracts of time comprising the territory of anthropology. As we have records of them, so they had records |