Note 12 — Chapter II

Recent discoveries at Shergât prove that a Sumerian occupation of the site of Ashur preceded the first settlement of the Semitic Assyrians. In a stratum below the first Ishtar-temple (the earliest Assyrian temple yet recovered, dating as it does from the close of the third millennium b.c.), several examples of Sumerian sculpture were found which bear an unmistakably close relationship to the earliest Sumerian work at Tello and Bismâya. The racial type represented by the sculptures is also that of the south, and suggests a Sumerian occupation of Assyria before the advent of the Semites. The termination of their settlement at Ashur was probably not the work of the Semitic conquerors of Assyria, but of another non-Semitic race akin to the Mitannian people of Northern Mesopotamia (on this subject see further Chap. IV., pp. 137 ff.). But the Semites were at least indirect heirs of the Sumerian inhabitants and derived their culture in part from them; and the growth of such elements in their acquired civilization would have been fostered as intercourse with the south increased. For a summary account of the new discoveries at Ashur, see the "Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft," No. 54 (June, 1914).