The earliest cemetery found at Ur, with its royal graves and wonderfully rich furniture, has been assigned to a date of, in round figures, 3500 B.C. The date is admittedly vague, based on the lowest estimate for that of the First Dynasty of Ur, 3100 B.C., and allowing for a reasonable lapse of time during which the existence of these royal graves, sanctified as they were by the wholesale slaughter of human victims and by the deificiation of their occupants, could be forgotten and their site violated by the intrusion of fresh interments. To this theoretical argument has to be added that of succession in the graves themselves and the development of fashions in their structure and contents, and even if it be supposed that the graves form a continuous series coming down to the beginning of the First Dynasty, the earliest of them must none the less be more ancient by wellnigh four hundred years.
Now this means that the earliest graves of Ur are somewhat older than the First Dynasty of Egypt. Egyptian chronology has been a subject of much dispute and very different conclusions have been reached for the date of the unification of the two prehistoric kingdoms under Menes; the most conservative view, which also is that held by the majority of scholars, would put this about 3300 B.C.; but whether this be accepted or not, the fact remains that the chronologies of Egypt and of Mesopotamia are so far interdependent that if Menes be placed further back in time the same thing must be done for Sumerian history and the relation between the two countries must be left unaltered: here the shorter chronology is adoped for both countries, but the positive date is for the purposes of the argument of little importance and the essential point is the relation between the two whereby the graves of Ur are as old as or older than Menes.
Three things have to be compared: the contents of the Ur graves, the contents of the royal graves of the First Egyptian Dynasty discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie at Abydos, and the character of the predynastic civilization of the Nile Valley. The prehistoric civilization of Egypt and that of Sumer have nothing in common. Between the prehistoric art of Egypt and that of its First Dynasty there is a very great difference, not so complete as to amount to a breach of continuity but enough to mark an epoch; the changes are coming in towards the end of the predynastic period and by the time of 'Menes' we have what is virtually a new culture. It has long been recognized that this rapid development, which laid the foundations of what we know as Egyptian civilization, was due to some foreign influence, and it has long been remarked that the developed civilization presents in its early stages certain features common to the Euphrates valley, for instance, cylinder seals, pear-shaped mace-heads of stone, a panelled construction in building, features which appear suddenly with no apparent antecedents and subsequently disappear altogether, whereas in Mesopotamia they would seem to be native and persist in history. To these common features we can now add more, the use of the sistrum, a musical instrument too peculiar to have originated independently in two places, certain types of stone vases, grotesque animal drawings, and over and above such material resemblances there are elements in the religion of Egypt which would seem to be derived from Sumerian mythology. Even if the character of the borrowings left any doubt as to which country was indebted to the other, which indeed they do not, the argument of priority in date would be decisive. The Egyptians traced back the beginnings of their history to Menes, before whom came darkness and the demi-gods, and the discoveries of archaeology have justified their belief; for the Sumerians the First Dynasty of Ur came at the end of a period of civilization whose duration was to be reckoned in thousands of years, and though recent excavations have carried us back but a little way into that legendary period, yet they do substantiate in principle the Sumerian contention. Nobody looking at the contents of the graves, themselves older than Menes, can fail to see that they belong to a civilization already old if not actually decadent. Nothing is in an experimental state; on the contrary, art is subject to conventions so stereotyped that it is hard to distinguish between objects which are demonstrably hundreds of years apart in age, there is a technique, especially in metallurgy, which could only result from centuries of apprenticeship--the Egyptians never in their best periods produced weapons as good as the socketed axes and adzes of early Sumer,--and the potter's wheel, introduced into Egypt well on in the Old Kingdom, had been used by the Sumerians for long ages. In the time of 'Menes' not only was the cultural level of Mesopotamia far higher than that of Egypt, but whereas the civilization of Egypt was a novelty, that of Sumer was ancient; Sumerian civilization, whatever its ultimate origin, had developed in its own country and on its own lines for so long that it could fairly by now be called endemic, while that of Egypt was inspired and made possible by the introduction of foreign models and foreign blood. The character of the borrowings and the proximity of the superior culture leave no altenative source for the influence which affected Egypt at the close of its predynastic age; directly or indirectly that came from southern Mesopotamia.
In the course of this history emphasis has been laid upon the fact that Sumerian arms and Sumerian commerce not only spread up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates but obtained a firm foothold in Syria and penetrated into Asia beyond the Taurus, so that from the very outset there was imposed upon these more backward countries at least a veneer of Sumerian civilization. Had that civilization died with the race which originated it the early conquests might have had but an ephemeral effect, but such was not the case. In Mesopotamia the political extinction of the Sumerians made astonishingly little difference to culture. The old laws of Sumer became with very slight modifications the code of Bablylon: religion was unaffected, and though the gods preferred to be called by Semitic names, they were the old Sumerian gods and no Semitic deity could obtain official recognition: the Sumerian language fell into disuse, but its literature was translated for the benefit of the Semitic reader: the arts maintained their old traditions so well that even the wall sculputres of eighth-century Assyria, individual as they appear, betray their parentage with works of the Third Dynasty of Ur and of the fourth millennium B.C The whole civilization of Babylon, and in a scarcely less degree that of Assyria, are rooted in the alien past, as their own istorians of the decadence confessed.
Berossus, writing in the fourth or third century before Christ, describes a race of monsters half man and half fish which, led by one Oannes, came out of the Persian Gulf and settling in the coast towns of Sumer introduced the arts of writing, agriculture, and working in metal; "in a word,' he declares, 'all the things that make for the amelioration of life were bequeathed to men by Oannes, and since that time no further inventions have been made.'
Sumerian genius evolved a civilization which persisted for nearly fifteen hundred years after its authors had vanised, and Babylon and Nineveh did not keep this heritage to themselves; they also were imperial peoples, and their dominion over or their intercourse with the west fostered in those lands the seed which earlier Sumerian conquerors had planted. The Hittites of Asia Minor adopted the cuneiform script which was one of the greatest of the Sumerian inventions; Babylonian became the diplomatic language of the courts of Syria and even of Egypt; the cylinder seals of Syria and Cappadocia are both in form and in style derived from Mesopotamia; the sculptures of Carchemish trace their descent through Assyria to S7umer; the eclectic art of the Phoenicians in so far as it drew from Oriental models was in the same indirect way an offshoot of the Sumerian.