Note 69 — Chapter III · THE SUMERIANS

It is noticeable that the script of the other people whose civilization grew up on the banks of a river, the Egyptians namely, contains no special ideograph for “river.” The word is expressed by the phonetically-written atur, with the determinative of “water” or “irrigation basin.” As in the primitive hieroglyphs of Babylonia, “the sea” was a “circle.”