[81] The American excavations at Askabad have shown that the domestication of animals, including the camel, took place during the neolithic age, the goat being one of the last to be tamed. [82] This, however, is not absolutely certain, since the ideograph which, denotes an “ass” originally signified merely “a yoked beast.” [83] Peters, _Nippur_, ii. p. 299. [84] Thus in the great historical inscription of Entemena, King of Lagas (B.C. 4000), M. Thureau Dangin is probably right in seeing in _dam-kha-ra_ (col. i. 26) a Semitic word. In fact where a word is written syllabically, that is to say phonetically, in a Sumerian text there is an _a priori_ probability that it is a loan-word. [85] This may of course have been only a literary archaism. But if the kings were really of Semitic origin, it is difficult to understand why they should have been ashamed of being called by their native Semitic names. [86] See Hommel, _Grundriss der Geographie und Geschichte des Alten Orients_, i. pp. 79–82. [87] Hitherto read A-da-pa. But the character =PA= had the value of _mu_ when it signified “man,” according to a tablet quoted by Fossey, _Contribution au Dictionnaire Sumérien-assyrienne_, No. 2666, and in writing early Babylonian names or words the characters with the requisite phonetic values were selected which harmonized ideographically with the sense of the words. Thus out of the various characters which had the phonetic value of _mu_ that was chosen which denoted “man” when the name of the first man was needed to be written. The Semitic Adamu, which M. Thureau Dangin has found used as a proper name in tablets from Tello of the age of Sargon of Akkad, was borrowed from the Sumerian _adam_, which signified “animal,” and then, more specifically “man.” Thus in the bilingual story of the creation we have (l. 9) _uru nu-dim adam nu-mun-ya_, “a city was not built, a man was not made to stand upright,” and a list of slaves published by Dr. Scheil (_Recueil de Travaux_, etc., xx. p. 65) is dated in “the year when Rim-Anum the king (conquered) the land of ... bi and its inhabitants” (_adam-bi_). See above, p. 76. [88] _Records of the Past_, New Series, iii. pp. 124–7. [89] Erech was one of the earliest of the Semitic settlements in the Babylonian plain, and Erech was known later as _’supuru_, “the sheepfold,” as is shown by its ideographic equivalent. [90] _The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, pp. 276–80. [91] See my _Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_, pp. 276–89, 348–61. [92] If, however, the Sumerian pictograph for “city” represents a tower on a mound, as seems to be the case, the identity in form of the Egyptian hieroglyph cannot be an accident, since both the tower and the artificial platform were essentially Babylonian. In the cursive cuneiform two separate pictographs have coalesced, one representing a seat, the other what appears to be a tower on a mound.