'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎147v] (299/862)

CHAPTER V
HISTORY
I. SUMERIAN AND BABYLONIAN PERIOD
T he history of Iraq begins in the fourth millennium b.c. with the
settlements of Sumer and Akkad, the southern and northern
regions of the delta as it then was, and with the adjoining region and
people of Elam, which comprised the lowlands and foothills east of
the Tigris along the Karkheh and Karun valleys, now in Persian
Khuzistan. The Jazira and the upper Tigris valley with the Kurdish
foothills, a region originally known as Subartu, only begins to have
a political history in the second millennium with the kingdoms of
Mitanni and Assyria, though the northern rim of the Jazira, some
times called the Syrian Saddle, was the easiest link between Syria
and Mesopotamia. 1
Sumer and Akkad (fig. 49)
Much mystery surrounds the origin of the Sumerian people and
of their civilization, but it appears from archaeological excavation
that the Sumerians came westwards through the Iranian plateau to
Elam and the delta country, when settlement first became possible
at the edge of the drying marshlands. There they established a
primitive civilization, and from the simple ‘culture’ of their earliest
villages a complex civilization grew up, which is supposed to have
a certain likeness to the early Dravidian civilization of the Indus
valley. By the middle of the fourth millennium b.c. the Sumerians
were using copper and also bronze, possessed a primitive script
which developed into the later cuneiform (p. 221), and had an
established system of civil and religious government and law.
Racially, and in language, they were neither Semitic nor Indo-
European: some hold that they were directly or indirectly akin to
the Dravidians who still form a large part of the population of
1 The above terms have a varied application in time. For convenience Mesopo
tamia is used for the whole country down to the Arab conquest, Babylonia (which
is Sumer and Akkad) for the delta south of Jabal Hamrin, and Assyria for the
Tigris valley and the country to the east above Jabal Hamrin. There is no useful
classical name for the Jazira (Introduction, p. 5).
The chronology adopted in this account can be brought into agreement with the
system used in older books for Sumerian and Babylonian First Dynasty dates by
the addition of 300-350 years. The relative order of events is not affected, certain
great gaps have simply been closed up.