Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/95

XV SuMERiA, Early Egypt and Writing THE old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000 or 7000 B.C. there were already qiiasi-civilized com- munities almost at the Peruvian level, appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile Valley. At that time north Persia and western Turkestan and South Arabia were all more fertile than they are now, and there are traces of very early communities in these regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia however and in Egypt that there first appear cities, temples, systematic irrigation, and evidences of a social organization rising above the level of a mere barbaric village-town. In those days the Euphrates and Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf, and it was in the country between them that the Sumerians built their first cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the great history of Egypt was beginning. These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with prominent noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been deciphered, and their language is now known. They had discovered the use of bronze and they built great tower-like temples of sun-dried brick. The clay of this country is very fine ; they used it to write upon, and so it is that their inscriptions have been preserved to us. They had cattle, sheep, goats and asses, but no horses. They fought on foot, in close formation, carrying spears and shields of skin. Their clothing was of wool and they shaved their heads. Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been an inde- pendent state with a god of its own and priests of its own. But some- times one city would establish an ascendancy over others and exact tribute from their population. A very ancient inscription at Nippur records the " empire," the first recorded empire, of the Sumerian city of Erech. Its god and its priest-king claimed an authority from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. 75