Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/96

 64 Outlines of European History The Sumerian city-state Wars of the city-states The desert Semites Uke- wise invade the plain Sargon of Akkad — earhest Semitic supremacy Semites receive Sumerian civilization Hence we cannot visit the country and make its monuments tell us its story as we have done in Egypt. The Sumerians built no such tombs, nor had they any belief in a blessed here- after. Their business documents, written on clay tablets, reveal to us a class of free, landholding citizens, working their lands with slaves, who form a large part of the population, and trad- ing with caravans and small boats up and down the river. Over both these classes, free and slave, there is a numerous body of officials and priests — the aristocrats of the town. They are ruled, along with all the rest, by a priest-king. Such a com- munity, forming a town or city kingdom and owning the lands for a few miles round about the town, is the political unit, or state. Babylonia as a whole consisted of a number of such small city-kingdoms, and this earliest Sumerian period may be called the Age of the City-States. These early city-states were more skilled in war (Fig. 39) than the Egyptians and were con- stantly fighting each with its neighbors. Such struggles among themselves seriously weakened the Sumerians and made them less able to resist the incoming men of the desert. The tribesmen from the desert had early begun to filter into the Euphrates valley. They were finally settled in such numbers along the narrow strip of land where the two rivers approach each other most closely that they took possession of northern Babylonia. By the middle of the twenty-eighth century B.C. they had established a kingdom there known as Akkad. These Akkadians, under a bold and able leader named Sargon, de- scended the Euphrates and overthrew the Sumerians far and wide. Thus arose the first Semitic kingdom of importance in history, and Sargon I, its founder, is the first great name in the history of the Semitic race. These one-time wanderers of the desert learned to write the Sumerian wedge-writing, and it was now that a Semitic language was written for the first time. Sargon and his people gained Sumerian civilization. Their own vigorous life, fresh as the breath of the desert, also contributed much, especially in art (Fig. 40),