of the Sumerians has been that of a race employing an advanced system of
writing and possessed of a knowledge of metal. We have found, in short,
abundant remains of a bronze-age culture, but no traces of preceding
ages of development such as meet us on early Egyptian sites. It was
a natural inference that the advent of the Sumerians in the Euphrates
Valley was sudden, and that they had brought their highly developed
culture with them from some region of Central or Southern Asia.

(1) While the evidence of Herodotus is extraordinarily
valuable for the details he gives of the civilizations of
both Egypt and Babylonia, and is especially full in the case
of the former, it is of little practical use for the
chronology. In Egypt his report of the early history is
confused, and he hardly attempts one for Babylonia. It is
probable that on such subjects he sometimes misunderstood
his informants, the priests, whose traditions were more
accurately reproduced by the later native writers Manetho
and Berossus. For a detailed comparison of classical
authorities in relation to both countries, see Griffith in
Hogarth's _Authority and Archaeology_, pp. 161 ff.

(2) See _Comptes rendus_, 1911 (Oct.), pp. 606 ff., and
_Rev. d'Assyr._, IX (1912), p. 69.

The newly published Nippur documents will cause us to modify that view.
The lists of early kings were themselves drawn up under the Dynasty
of Nîsin in the twenty-second century B.C., and they give us traces of
possibly ten and at least eight other "kingdoms" before the earliest
dynasty of the known lists.(1) One of their novel features is that they
include summaries at the end, in which it is stated how often a city or