The Story of Mankind [14]
in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle.
In the same way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.}
and a fish changed from {illust.} into {illust.} The sun
was originally a plain circle {illust.} and became {illust.}
If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an
{illust.} 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. A thousand years later, the Akkadians
were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another
Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built himself
a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who
gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state
the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the
Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-
ran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not
carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers
of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians
and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast
and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and
Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until
the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when
the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and
made that city the most important capital of that day.
Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged
the study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy
and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which
were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a
crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and
overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years
later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great,
who turned the Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many
Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next came the Romans
and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the second
centre of the world's civilisation, became a vast wilderness
where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.
MOSES
THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE
JEWISH PEOPLE
SOME time during the twentieth century before our era,
a small and unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left
its old home, which was situated in the land of Ur on the mouth
of the Euphrates, and had tried to find new pastures