Note 555 — Chapter XI

“The people of Babylon, the Accadians, had a written literature and a civilization superior to that of the conquering Assyrians, who borrowed their art of writing, and probably their culture, which may have been the centre and starting-point of the western civilization of Asia, and therefore the origin of our own. Accadian civilization was anterior to that of the Phœnicians and the Greeks, and is now received in these later years as the original form, and become again the heritage of mankind. It has been said that Assyrian art was destitute of originality, and to that of the Accadians, which they adopted, we ourselves owe our first customs and ideas. Four thousand years ago these people possessed a culture which in many of its details resembles that of our country and time.”—“Assyrian Life and History,” p. 66, by M. Harkness and Stuart Poole.