CHAPTER III.
Prehistoric Chaldea.
We have already noted that prehistoric periods are those preceding written records. Uncertainty enters into all attempts to reconstruct such a period for any people, and especially has this been true of Babylonia. However, when the library of Nineveh was unearthed, tablets were discovered which shed some light on those remote ages.
The land we call Babylonia was once called Chaldea. So we shall call it during its prehistoric age—as we call the British Island Britain in the beginning of its history, and later, England. By the term Chaldea we are to understand that portion of the valleys which extended around the Persian Gulf. It was inhabited at the earliest period known. Probably its first settlers were a branch of the Turanian or Yellow Race, to which the Chinese, Japanese, Monguls and present-day Turks belong. That the Chaldeans came from some other locality into this land is not doubted, but from whence they came is not known.
The southern part of Chaldea was called Shumir—the Hebrews writing it Shinar; the land immediately north they called Accad. The dwellers in both districts came from the same stock and spoke practically the same language. The name Accad means mountains, or highlands, and it has been surmised that it may have attached to the inhabitants from some earlier home.
These early people may have migrated to Chaldea five or six thousand years before the Christian era. Of their coming and first settlements, nothing is known. When we first learn of them, they had reached quite a degree of civilization, having canals for irrigating the lands unreached by the river; they had also devised the cuneiform system of writing—an advance on the picture system, earlier in use.
The history of their strange symbols was probably this: in ages bygone they had invented a system of picture writing, as all primitive people seem to have done. As they advanced, too much time was required to copy the elaborate pictures in their entirety, and so the principal outlines were used to represent the pictures themselves. When these people migrated to Chaldea, and were reduced to clay tablets on which to write, it was easier to make straight lines than curved ones. In this way the written language continued to undergo changes until it was eventually made up of wedge-shaped symbols, one of the clear results of the use of the clay tablets.
Our principal knowledge concerning the Chaldeans pertains to their religion, which is believed to have been one of the earliest religions of the world.