} look like {illust.}. This system of writing down our
ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries
it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and
the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races
which forced their way into the fertile valley.
The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and
conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They
were a white People who had lived in the mountains. They
had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of
hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed artificial
little hills on top of which they built their altars. They
did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded
their towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers
have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad
stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to another.
We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumerians
but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-
sorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later
date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of
Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile
in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of BabIlli,
or towers of Babel.
In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had
entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-
powered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the
desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are
known as the ``Semites,'' because in the olden days people believed
them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the
three sons of Noah.
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