Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/50

CHAPTER III WESTERN ASIA : BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA, THE PERSIANS, AND THE HEBREWS I. BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA 34. The Sumerians. During the period when the Egyptians were building the pyramids, about 3000 B.C., early civilization was also developing in the valley of the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. A people called the Sumerians had long before wandered down from the eastern mountains into the plain just above the Persian Gulf, the region later called Babylonia. Here they learned to dig irrigation trenches and raise large harvests of barley and wheat. They already possessed cattle, sheep, and goats. The ox drew the plow ; the donkey pulled wheeled carts and chariots, for the wheel as a burden-bearing device appeared here for the first time. 1 But the horse was still unknown. The smith had learned to fashion utensils of copper, but he did not at first know how to harden the copper into bronze by an admixture of tin (see 26 and n.). The Sumerians built towns of sun-dried mud bricks. Each town with the land about it formed a little kingdom, which seems to have been generally fighting with its neighbors. 35. Cuneiform Writing ; Numerals. The people began to keep their business accounts by making pictures on soft clay with the tip of a reed. Later, the outlines of these rude pictures were simplified into groups of wedge-shaped marks. Hence these signs are called cuneiform (Latin, cuneus, meaning "wedge"), or wedge-form, writing. The Sumerian system of numerals was not based on tens but sixties. A large number was given as so many sixties, just as 1 Probably earlier than the wheel in the Swiss lake-villages of the Late Stone Age. 24