"The kings of Lagas represent the closing days of Sumerian supremacy. With Sargon and his empire the Semitic age begins. The culture of Chaldæa is still Sumerian, the educated classes are for the most part of Sumerian origin, and the literature of the country is Sumerian also. But the king and his court are Semites, and the older culture which they borrow and adopt becomes Semitised in the process. … For many generations Sumerians and Semites lived side by side, each borrowing from the other, and mutually adapting and modifying their own forms of expression. … Sumerian continued to be the language of religion and law—the two most conservative branches of human study—down to the age of Abraham. … The new facts that have been disinterred from the grave of the past furnish a striking confirmation of Professor Hommel's theory, which connects the culture of primitive Egypt with that of primitive Chaldæa, and derives the language of the Egyptians, at all events in part, from a mixed Babylonian language in which Semitic and Sumerian elements alike claimed a share. We now know that such a mixed language did once exist, and we also know that this language and the written characters by which it was expressed were brought to the shores of the Mediterranean and the frontiers of Egypt in the earliest age of Egyptian history." _A. H. Sayce, Recent Discoveries in Babylonia (Contemporary Review, January, 1897)._ {15}