[887] Some recent scholars have suggested that in the stories of Polycrates throwing his ring into the sea, and of Theseus proving his parentage by a like sacrifice, we should detect traces of an early custom, by which the maritime king married the sea-goddess—a custom perpetuated in the symbolical union between the Doges of Venice and the Adriatic. This ingenious hypothesis was first worked out by S. Reinach, “Le Mariage avec la mer,” in Revue archéologique (1905), ii. 1 ff. (= id. Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, Paris, (1906), ii. 266 ff.).
[888] The term Assyrian in this chapter usually includes the Sumerians and Babylonians.
[889] Lest Forlong’s sentence (Rivers of Life (London, 1883), II. 89), “A beautiful Assyrian cylinder exhibits the worship of the Fish God; there we see the mitred Man-God with Rod and basket,” etc., be quoted in opposition, I would point out that this so-called Rod is merely a cut sapling, like the one in the hands of Heracles, but without a sign of any line, which in the Greek vase in the British Museum is obviously attached. Cf. Élite des monuments Céramographiques, vol. III., Plate I.
[890] From the find (made during the war by a Sikh regiment on the Tigris above Samara) of an alabaster vase (now in the Ashmolean Museum), which from archæological reasons must be placed among the very earliest remnants of Sumerian civilisation, it is evident that—given the discovery was in situ—the frontiers of the Sumerian Empire must have extended much farther north than has been hitherto generally supposed. Owing to the deposits of the two rivers, the sea has receded some hundred and twenty miles.
[891] The Sumerians made extensive use of music, especially in their religious ceremonies; they were the founders, according to Langdon, of liturgical music, which unfortunately it is impossible to reconstruct, as the notes themselves have not survived.
[892] The Sumerian language was not well adapted to express peculiarly Semitic sounds.
[893] Petrie (Egypt and Israel (London, 1911), p. 15): “The Turanian race akin to the modern Mongols, known as Sumerians, had civilised the Euphrates valley for some thousands of years and produced a strong commercial and mathematical culture. The wandering Semite had at last been drawn into this settled system of life.”
[894] S. Langdon, Babylonian Magic, Bologna, 1914.
[895] The carved ivory handle of a flint knife in the Louvre proves (according to Petrie) that the art of slate-palettes in Egypt originated from Elamite civilisation, which flourished before its rise. It must be of prehistoric age, yet shows a well-developed art with Mesopotamian or Elamite affinities earlier than the sculptured slate-palettes and maceheads. M. G. Bénédite (Monuments Pict.) holds that in this knife-handle we have the most tangible evidence yet found of a connection in very early times between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations. King (Jour. Egypt. Archæology, vol. IV., p. 64) suggests that there was a connection with Babylonian-Elamite seals from Susa.
[896] Thus the general conception of pictographic writing might perhaps be borrowed from the Euphrates valley, but not a single sign taken from the Babylonian script can be found (W. Max Müller, Encly. Bibl., p. 1233). Dr. Alan Gardiner, on the origin of the Semitic and Greek alphabets, concludes that the evidence does point to the alphabet being Semitic in origin and based upon acrophonic picture signs (Journal of Egyptian Archæology, vol. III., p. 1).