This, then, was the great archæological fact which resulted from the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. The earliest civilized inhabitants of Babylonia did not speak a Semitic language, and therefore presumably they were not Semites. It is perfectly true that language and race are not synonymous terms, and that we are seldom justified in arguing from the one to the other. But the Sumerian language is one of the exceptions which proves the rule. Those who spoke it were the first civilizers of Western Asia, the inventors and perfecters of a system of writing which was destined to be one of the chief humanizing agents of the ancient world, the authors of the irrigation engineering of the Babylonian plain, and the builders of its many cities. The language they spoke, accordingly, could not have been forced upon them by conquerors who have otherwise left no trace behind them, and they certainly would not have exchanged it of their own accord for their native tongue. The Semitic languages have always been conspicuous for the tenacity with which they have held their own, and the conservatism with which they have resisted change. We may still hear in the Egyptian Arabic of to-day the very words which were written by Semitic Babylonian scribes upon their tablets some four or five thousand years ago. A Semitic people would have been the last to borrow the language of its less-civilized neighbours without any assignable reason. The fact, consequently, that the pioneers of Babylonian culture spoke an agglutinative language fully justifies us in concluding that they belonged to a race that was not Semitic. Sumerian, however, was not the only language in the neighbourhood of the Babylonian plain which was agglutinative. Further to the east, in the highlands of Elam, other agglutinative languages were spoken, monuments of one or more of which have been preserved to us. Whether or not the agglutinative languages of Elam were related to the Sumerian of Babylonia, I cannot tell; so far as our materials go at present they do not warrant us in saying more than that, like Sumerian, they were of the agglutinative type. It is only rarely that the scientific philologist is able to separate some of the multitudinous languages of the globe into genealogically related groups; for the most part they stand isolated and apart from one another, and, however much we may wish to group them together, it is seldom that we find such proofs of a common descent as will satisfy the requirements of science. Families of speech--or at all events such as can be scientifically proved to be so--are the exception and not the rule.