When first we come across them they have already
attained a high level of civilization. They have built temples and
palaces and houses of burnt and unburnt brick, and they have reduced
their system of agriculture to a science, intersecting their country
with canals for purposes of irrigation and to ensure a good supply of
water to their cities. Their sculpture and pottery furnish abundant
evidence that they have already attained a comparatively high level in
the practice of the arts, and finally they have evolved a complicated
system of writing which originally had its origin in picture-characters,
but afterwards had been developed along phonetic lines. To have attained
to this pitch of culture argues long periods of previous development,
and we must conclude that they had been settled in Southern Babylonia
many centuries before the period to which we must assign the earliest of
their remains at present discovered.
That this people were not indigenous to Babylonia is highly probable,
but we have little data by which to determine the region from which
they originally came. Prom the fact that they built their ziggurats, or
temple towers, of huge masses of unburnt brick which rose high above
the surrounding plain, and that their ideal was to make each "like a
mountain," it has been argued that they were a mountain race, and the
home from which they sprang has been sought in Central Asia.
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