ORIGINAL PEOPLES OF BABYLON: THE SUMERIANS
It is coming to be a common agreement among Assyriologists that the original peoples of Babylon were of a race that was not Semitic. Just what it was these scholars are not yet prepared to say; although the inclination of belief is that it was an Indo-European race and most likely of the Turanian family. An attempt has recently been made to connect the aborigines with the Ugro-Finnish branch of the Ural-Altaic family, but with what success it is still too soon to say. But whatever these people, the Sumerians, may have been, they occupied the land of Babylonia until dislodged by a great wave of Semitic migration. This fact has not gone unchallenged, and from the ranks of Philology there has come a strong contention for a Semitic origin of the Babylonians, and the assertion that the Sumerian texts “do not represent a real language, but a kind of cipher written according to an artificial system of grammar.” And throughout the following discussion, written by Professor Hommel, it must not be forgotten that Professor Halévy, the originator of the theory of the Sumerian texts summarised above, still champions his contention and adduces evidence for it that seems to him conclusive.[a]
It has often been observed that southern Babylonia was originally the proper home of the Sumerians, while as early as the beginning of the fourth millennium before the Christian era the Semitic Babylonians were already settled in northern Babylonia, and, as is proved by the Naram-Sin inscription and several dating from the time of Sargon, his father (circa 3800 B.C.) had already acquired the Sumerian character (and, by inference, the Sumerian civilisation). In the case of southern Babylonia, the discoveries at Telloh have put us in possession of a number of sculptures—some of them in relief, others severed heads of statues, dating from the period between circa 4000 B.C., or earlier, and circa 3000. These present two different types. One is characterised by a rounded head with slightly prominent cheek bones, always beardless, and usually with clean-shaven crown. To this type certainly belong the representations of vanquished foes on the archaic sculpture, known as the Vulture stele, though the primitive method of representing the brow and nose by a single slightly curved line gives a merely superficial resemblance to the Semitic cast of countenance. The other is a longer-skulled (dolichocephalous) type, with thick, black hair and long, flowing beard.
It is certainly by no mere accident that the heads of the Telloh statues, most of which are supposed to represent kings, are of the first-mentioned (Sumerian) type, while the bronze votive offerings, which likewise bear the name of Gudea, are carried, as is evident at a glance, by Semites. And as there were Semites among the subjects of Gudea, where the Sumerians were the dominant race, so we find the same Semitic type clearly marked in the figures round the stem of a vase; while the party of musicians, who are seen approaching with submissive gestures on the fragment of a bas-relief, which probably also dates from the reign of Gudea, must likewise be of Semitico-Babylonian descent.
Fortunately, ancient Babylonian art gives us the opportunity, not merely of studying the wholly non-Semitic language of the earliest inhabitants of Babylonia in lengthy bilingual original inscriptions such as many of the statues of Gudea bear, but of seeing with our own eyes the bodily semblance of this singular people, and so observing the striking correspondence of non-Semitic elements in speech and facial type. In this connection we would draw attention to an ancient Babylonian statue of a female figure, now in the Louvre at Paris. We may confidently assume that the woman represented is a Sumerian and not a Semitic Babylonian; and it may thus be regarded as a splendid counterpart to the Gudea statues, which by the whole character of workmanship it calls to mind. Whether we have here a queen or some other lady of high rank (the supposition that she is a goddess appears to be excluded by the absence of the head-dress goddesses are wont to wear) cannot, of course, be determined with certainty. It is only natural that various mixed types should have developed in course of time, especially in northern Babylonia; and many of the faces we meet with—on the seal-cylinders more particularly—may be representations of such.
That the Sumerians, like the Semites, were not an autochthonous race in Babylonia follows from the condition of the soil, which had to be rendered fit for agriculture, and indeed, for human habitation, by a system of canals. Whence, then, did the Sumerians originally come, before they took possession of the swampy Euphrates valley and settled there?
There is a word in Sumerian, “Kar” (Turkish yer), which means “country” (as does the Turkish word). But in Sumerian it has also come to signify “mountain” and likewise “east” (since the mountains lie only in the east of Babylonia)—meanings which the Turkish word does not bear. This is, therefore, a clear indication that, even after the Sumerians had settled in Babylonia, the range on the Median frontier and what lay behind it always passed with them for their true country, the original home whence they had come. There is also extreme significance in the fact that they were originally unacquainted with both the lion and the horse, as also with wine (and consequently with the vine) and the palm tree; for they had no names for them, and called the lion “great dog” (nug magh), the horse “ass of the mountains” or “of the east,” wine the “drink of life” (gish-tin, from gash-tin), and the palm “tree of Magan” (mis-magan), or “the upright” (ügin, in its Semitic form mus-ukannu).
THE SEMITIC BABYLONIANS
By far the greater part of Babylonian literature, as well as the many official documents of the kings of Babylon (in the more restricted sense of the term) and Asshur is written in a language which was clearly perceived, as early as 1849, to be intimately related to the so-called Semitic languages of Anterior Asia. The relationship is but confirmed by the type presented to us in various statues and sculptures in relief, apart, of course, from the Sumerian sculptures of the very oldest period; though in Babylonia we frequently meet with a hybrid type, yet even in this the Semitic element is unmistakable. In the heads of Assyrian figures the Semitic characteristics are very strikingly marked. But since the Babylonians and Assyrians were a single nation as far as language is concerned, and differed in blood only by the fact that there seems to have been a strong admixture of some foreign element in the former, while the latter presents a strongly marked and far purer racial type, it may be taken as proved that this type is that of the Semitic races, a conclusion which is doubly vouched for by language and by facial conformation. It has already been remarked in the foregoing chapter, that (unlike the Sumerians) the Semitic population of Babylonia, which we meet with in northern Babylonia as early as 3800 B.C., and which predominated there from 2500 B.C. (or even earlier) onwards, was distinguished by an abundant growth of black hair and long beards.
