them by any tie of blood, or traced their origin in some distant manner
to the Sumerian branch. They got quickly rid of a portion of these
superfluous elements, and absorbed or assimilated the rest; like
the Egyptians, they seem to have been one of those races which, once
established, were incapable of ever undergoing modification, and
remained unchanged from one end of their existence to the other.

* The name _Accadian_ proposed by H. Rawlinson and by Hincks, and
adopted by Sayce, seems to have given way to _Sumerian_, the title put
forward by Oppert. The existence of the Sumerian or Sumero-Accadian
has been contested by Halévy in a number of noteworthy works. M. Halévy
wishes to recognize in the so-called Sumerian documents the Semitic
tongue of the ordinary inscriptions, but written in a priestly syllabic
character subject to certain rules; this would be practically a
_cryptogram_, or rather an _allogram_. M. Halévy won over Messrs. Guyard
and Pognon in France, Delitzsch and a part of the Delitzsch school
in Germany, to his view of the facts. The controversy, which has been
carried on on both sides with a somewhat unnecessary vehemence, still
rages; it has been simplified quite recently by Delitzcsh's return to
the Sumerian theory. Without reviewing the arguments in detail, and
while doing full justice to the profound learning displayed by M.
Halévy, I feel forced to declare with Tiele that his criticisms "oblige
scholars to carefully reconsider all that has been taken as proved in
these matters, but that they do not warrant us in rejecting as untenable
the hypothesis, still a very probable one, according to which the
difference in the graphic systems corresponds to a real difference in.
idiom."

Their country must have presented at the beginning very much the same
aspect of disorder and neglect which it offers to modern eyes. It was