Sumerian civilization had profoundly influenced the
Semitic tribes for centuries before the Semitic conquest of Babylonia,
and when the Sumerians became more and more a conquered race, finally
amalgamating with their conquerors and losing their racial and
linguistic individuality, they were conquered by an alien race but not
by an alien culture. For the culture of the Semites was Sumerian, the
Semitic races owing their civilization to the Sumerians. That is as
much as to say that a great deal of what we call Semitic culture is
fundamentally non-Semitic.
In the earliest days, then, Egypt received elements of Sumerian culture
through a Semitic medium, which introduced Semitic elements into the
language of the people, and a Semitic racial strain. It is possible.
that both theories as to the routes of these primeval conquerors are
true, and that two waves of Semites entered the Nile valley towards
the close of the Neolithic period, one by way of the Upper Nile or Wadi
Hammamat, the other by way of Heliopolis.
After the reconsolidation of the Egyptian people, with perhaps an
autocratic class of Semitic origin and a populace of indigenous Nilotic
race, we have no trace of further connection with the far-away centre of
Semitic culture in Babylonia till the time of the Theban hegemony.
Under the XIIth Dynasty we see Egyptians in friendly relations with the
Bedawin of Idumsea and Southern Palestine.
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