FIG. 35. FIG. 36.
HEADS OF ARCHAIC MALE FIGURES FROM ASHUR AND TELLO.
A marked feature of both heads is the shaven scalp, exhibiting a characteristic Sumerian practice. Fig. 35 is from Ashur, Fig. 36 from Tello. (After M.D.O.G., No. 54, p. 12, and De Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, pl. 6, No. 1.)
In other limestone figures, of which the bodies have been preserved, the treatment of the garments corresponds precisely to that in archaic Sumerian sculpture. The figures wear the same rough woollen garments, and the conventionalized treatment of the separate flocks of wool is identical in both sets of examples.[41] The evidence is not yet fully published, but, so far as it is available, it suggests that the Sumerians, whose presence has hitherto been traced only upon sites in Southern Babylonia, were also at a very early period in occupation of Assyria.
The violent termination of their settlement at Ashur is attested by an abundance of charred remains, which separate the Sumerian stratum from that immediately above it. Had we no evidence to the contrary, it might have been assumed that their successors were of the same stock as those early Semitic invaders who dominated Northern Babylonia early in the third millennium b.c., and pushed eastward across the Tigris into Gutium. But it is recognized that the founders of the historic city of Ashur, records of whose achievements have been recovered in the early building-inscriptions, bear names which are quite un-Semitic in character. There is a good deal to be said for regarding Ushpia, or Aushpia, the traditional founder of the great temple of the god Ashir,[42] and Kikia, the earliest builder of the city's wall,[43] as representing the first arrival of the Mitannian race, which in the fourteenth century played, under new leadership, so dominant a part in the politics of Western Asia.[44] Not only have their names a Mitannian sound, but we have undoubted evidence of the worship of the Mitannian and Hittite god Teshub as early as the period of the First Dynasty of Babylon; and the fact that the Mitannian name, which incorporates that of the deity, is borne by a witness on a Babylonian contract, suggests that he came of a civilized and settled race.[45]
It is true that the name Mitanni is not met with at this period, but the geographical term Subartu is,[46] and in later tradition was regarded as having ranked with Akkad, Elam and Amurru as one of the four quarters of the ancient civilized world.
