The method of decipherment was nevertheless a sound one, and the result, which seemed so incredible and impossible when first announced, is now one of the assured facts of science. The first civilized occupants of the alluvial plain of Babylonia were neither Semites nor Aryans, but the speakers of an agglutinative language, and to them were due all the elements of the Babylonian culture of later days. It was they who first drained the marshes, and regulated the course of the rivers by canals, thereby transforming what had been a pestiferous swamp into the most fertile of lands; it was they who founded the great cities of the country, and invented the pictorial characters, the cursive forms of which became what we term cuneiform. The theology and law of later Babylonia went back to them, and long after Semitic Babylonian had become the language of the country, legal judgments were still written in the old language and the theological literature was still studied in it. The Church and the Law were as loth to give up the dead language of Sumer as they were in modern Europe to give up the use of Latin. This dead agglutinative language has been called sometimes Akkadian, sometimes Sumerian, but Sumerian is the name which has been finally selected. In fact, this was the name applied to it by the Semitic Babylonians themselves, who included in the term the two dialects--or rather the two forms of the language at different periods of its development--which have been preserved to us in the cuneiform tablets. Strictly speaking, the dialect which had been most affected by contact with the Semites, and had in consequence suffered most from phonetic decay, was known as the language of Akkad, but this was because Akkad represented Northern Babylonia, which had become Semitic at an earlier date than the south and had been the seat of the first great Semitic Empire.[66] Both names, Akkadian and Sumerian, are correct as applied to the primitive language of Chaldæa, but of the two Sumerian is preferable, not only because it was used by the Babylonian scribes themselves, but also because it denoted the oldest and purest form of the language before it had passed under foreign influence.