before our era the fore-shore came from about ten to twelve German miles (47 to 56 English) higher up than the present fore-shore.  G. Rawlinson estimates on his part that between the thirtieth and twentieth centuries B.C., a period in which he places the establishment of the first Chaldaean Empire, the fore-shore was more than 120 miles above the mouth of Shatt-el-Arab, to the north of the present village of Kornah.

*** Fr. Lenormant has energetically defended this hypothesis in the majority of his works:  it is set forth at some length in his work on La Langue primitive de la Chaldee.  Hommel, on the other hand, maintains and strives to demonstrate scientifically the relationship of the non-Semitic tongue with Turkish.

The traveller Olivier noticed this, and writes as follows:  “The land there is rather less fertile [than in Egypt], because it does not receive the alluvial deposits of the rivers with the same regularity as that of the Delta.  It is necessary to irrigate it in order to render it productive, and to protect it sedulously from the inundations which are too destructive in their action and too irregular.”

The first races to colonize this country of rivers, or at any rate the first of which we can find traces, seem to have belonged to three different types.  The most important were the Semites, who spoke a dialect akin to Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenician.  It was for a long time supposed that they came down from the north, and traces of their occupation have been pointed out in Armenia in the vicinity of Ararat, or halfway down the course of the Tigris, at the foot of the Gordysean mountains.  It has recently been suggested that we ought rather to seek for their place of origin in Southern Arabia, and this view is gaining ground among the learned.  Side by side with these Semites, the monuments give evidence of a race of ill-defined character, which some have sought, without much success, to connect with the tribes of the Urall or Altai; these people are for the present provisionally called Sumerians.* They came, it would appear, from some northern country; they brought with them from their original home a curious system of writing, which, modified, transformed, and adopted by ten different nations, has preserved for us all that we know in regard to the majority of the empires which rose and fell in Western Asia before the Persian conquest.  Semite or Sumerian, it is still doubtful which preceded the other at the mouths of the Euphrates.  The Sumerians, who were for a time all-powerful in the centuries before the dawn of history, had already mingled closely with the Semites when we first hear of them.  Their language gave way to the Semitic, and tended gradually to become a language of ceremony and ritual, which was at last learnt less for everyday use, than for the drawing up of certain royal inscriptions, or for the interpretation of very ancient texts of a legal or sacred character.  Their religion became