ded by a race which spoke an
agglutinative language, like that of the modern Finns or Turks, and
which scholars have now agreed to call Sumerian. The Sumerians had been
the builders of the cities, the reclaimers of the marshy plain, the
inventors of the picture-writing which developed into the cuneiform or
wedge-shaped characters, and the pioneers of a culture which profoundly
affected the whole of western Asia. The Semites entered upon the
inheritance, adopting, modifying, and improving upon it. The Babylonian
civilisation, with which we are best acquainted, was the result of this
amalgamation of Sumerian and Semitic elements.

Out of this mixture of Sumerians and Semites there arose a mixed people,
a mixed language, and a mixed religion. The language and race of
Babylonia were thus like those of England, probably also like those of
Egypt. Mixed races are invariably the best; it is the more pure-blooded
peoples who fall behind in the struggle for existence.

Recent excavations have thrown light on the early beginnings of
Babylonia. The country itself was an alluvial plain, formed by the silt
deposited each year by the Tigris and Euphrates. The land grows at the
rate of about ninety feet a year, or less than two miles in a century;
since the age of Alexander the Great the waters of the Persian Gulf have
receded more than forty-six miles from the shore. When the Sumerians
first settled by the banks of the Euphrates it must have been on the
sandy plateau to the west of the river where the city of Ur, the modern
Mugheir, was afterwards built. At that time the future Babylonia was a
pestiferous marsh, inundated by the unchecked overflow of the rivers
which flowed through it. The reclamation of the marsh was the first work
of the new-comers. The rivers were banked out and the inundation
regulated by means of canals. All this demanded no little engineering
skill; in fact, the creation of Babylonia was the birth of the science
of engineering.

Settlements were made in the fertile plain which had thus been won, and
which, along with the adjoining desert, was called by the Sumerians the
_Edin_, or "Plain." On the southern edge of this plain, and on what was
then the coast-line of the Persian Gulf, the town of Eridu was built,
which soon became a centre of maritime trade. Its site is now marked by
the mounds of Abu Shahrein or Nowawis, nearly 150 miles from the sea;
its foundation, therefore, must go back to about 7500 years, o