As yet there was no kingdom of Babylonia, and no city of Babylon. This region was situated in the northern portion of Sumir, south of Accad, and was at first designated by the Turanian name, “Gar Dunyash,” or “Kar Dunyash,” the “Garden of the god, Dunyash.”
The site of the future great capital was then called either by its more ancient Turanian name, “Tin-Tir-ki,” signifying The Tree of Life, or its later Accado-Sumerian name, “Ka-Dimmirra,” Gate of God. In later times this name translated into Semitic was Babilu—Babylon—which finally became the name of the whole of Sumir south to the Persian Gulf, as Babylonia.
At the date of Sargon, of Accad, Sumir, or southern Mesopotamia, was chiefly Turanian. The displacement of the Mongol peoples by the Semites in this region had not at this time obtained. That fusion of races which so distinctly distinguished the Babylonians of the later era from the more purely Semitic Assyrians had scarcely begun.
The Babylonians, as a distinct people under this name, do not make their appearance on the stage of history until over fourteen centuries later than Sargon, in the time or a little earlier than Hammurabi, or Khammuragas, about 2300 B. C., at the date accorded to Abraham.
It is probable that Semitic people had settled in this region long previous to the reign of Sargon, but it was not until the period of Hammurabi, who at first was simply king of Gar-Dunyash that the Semitic element dominated in Babylonia.
This powerful prince, who became in time master of all southern Mesopotamia, was the founder of the city of Babylon, from which the country and people received the names Babylonia and Babylonians.
Returning to Sargon, we find in the Ninevite remains that in this earlier time he had founded one of the most famous libraries of ancient Mesopotamia. This was at his new city of Agane, or Agade. The literature of this library was entirely based on that of ancient Sumir. It consisted completely of translations of these older books into what we may call Assyrian, or were copies of the older books in the old language of Sumir.
This older language was to these Semitic Assyrians the language of the learned, the classic tongue of the time, bearing the same relation to the Assyrian as do Greek and Latin to modern literature. It was then even more important to the Semitic student as it included all of learning which in Mesopotamia had as yet obtained literary form.
These ancient texts were copied on clay tablets with translations from the language of Sumir into Semitic, either between the lines or the text in the old language in one column and the translation opposite.
For further aids to students, vocabularies were compiled, giving the Accadian word and the Assyrian translation; also, syllabic forms, and it is by these wonderful literary aids, especially wonderful when we consider their antiquity, that scholars of to-day are able to read this ancient Turanian speech as readily as the Semitic Assyrian language of Sargon’s reign.