242. The Sumerian Development
The story of Babylonia is less completely known than that of Egypt because as a rockless land it was forced to depend on sun-dried brick, because the climate is less arid, and also because of its position. Egypt was isolated by deserts, Babylonia open to many neighbors, and so was invaded, fought over, and never unified as long as Egypt. The civilization was therefore never so nationally specific, so concentrated; and its records, though abundant, are patchy. Babylonia, the region of the lower Euphrates and Tigris, was the leading culture center of Asia in the third and second millenia before Christ; and while mostly a Semitic land in this period, its civilization was the product of another people, the Sumerians, established near the mouth of the two rivers in the fourth millenium. It was the Sumerians who in this thousand years worked out the Cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing—mixedly phonetic and ideographic like the Egyptian, but of wholly different values, so far as can be told to-day, and executed in straight strokes instead of the pictorial forms of Hieroglyphic or the cursive ones of its derivative Hieratic. It was the Semites who, coming in from the Arabian region, took over this writing, together with the culture that accompanied it. Their dependence is shown by the fact that they used characters with Sumerian phonetic values as well as by their retention of Sumerian as a sacred language, for which, as time went on, they were compelled to compile dictionaries, to the easement of modern archæologists.
Of the local origins of this Sumerian city-state civilization with its irrigation and intensive agriculture, nothing is known. It kept substantially abreast of Egypt, or at most a few centuries in arrears. In certain features, as the use of metals, it seems to have been in advance. Egypt is a long-drawn oasis stretched through a great desert. Babylonia lies adjacent to desert and highland, steppe and mountains. Within a range of a few hundred miles, its environment is far more varied. Not only copper but tin is said to have been available among neighboring peoples. So, too, Babylonia is likely to have had the early domestic animals—except perhaps cattle—earlier than Egypt, because it lay nearer to what seem to have been their native habitats. The result is that whereas Egyptian culture makes the superficial impression of having been largely evolved on the spot by the Egyptians, Sumerian culture already promises to resolve, when we shall know it better, into a blend to which a series of peoples contributed measurably. The rôle of the Sumerians, like that of their Semitic successors, was perhaps primarily that of organizers.