Page 30 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

12 Bronze and Stone

leaner, with beards and long hair, and a speech which rolls out
fluid consonantal periods, by which we can recognize them as
Semites.
Just when the ancestors of each of the two races entered the
land they may themselves know. But we do not. We know that
more Semites have recently come in, Amorites from the deserts
to the west, but we know that there were already Semites in the
country more than five hundred years ago. There can be little
doubt that they, too, came from the west, from the great cradle
of the Semitic peoples in the Arabian peninsula. The Sumerians
may have been in the river country longer; at least the first writ­
ten documents, of baked clay and already buried beneath the

debris of fifteen hundred years of settlement, are written in
Sumerian. Moreover, the script used was clearly designed to fit
Sumerian, and now that Semitic-speaking scribes are using it to
write their own tongue they are finding not a few difficulties.
It may well be that the Sumerians were the first to settle the
swamplands of the lower rivers, though they do not make that
claim themselves. Modern researchers tend to believe that they
originally came from the north, for in their language “country”
and “mountain” are the same word. And they call themselves
“the black-headed,” presumably referring to their hair color,
which would suggest that they had at one time lived close to
fairer-haired peoples. All this would seem to indicate the Cau­
casus. .And yet they themselves say that their ancestors came by

water up the Persian Gulf. . . .
However this may be, the Sumerians have a long tradition
of dominance in lower Mesopotamia. The Semites were less in
number and politically negligible. The communistic temple rule
was Sumerian in language and its power is exercised by people
with Sumerian names. But then about four hundred fifty years
earlier, as long ago as the Union of England and Scotland for
us, a number of city-states arose in the northern part of the
lower land, identical in pattern with the more southerly Sumerian
states, but Semitic in language. The next hundred fifty years
are troubled times, with almost continuous wars and intrigues
between the cities, both Semitic and Sumerian, one after another
claiming, and in some cases even enforcing, a temporary leader­