negritos are represented on the monuments of Naram-Sin as serving in the army of Akkad.[68] We may conclude, therefore, that they still formed a part of the population of Northern Babylonia even in the age when it had passed completely under Semitic rule. Indeed, Dr. Pinches has shown that the pure Semitic type is not depicted in Babylonian art, outside the kingdom of Akkad, “before the time of the First dynasty of Babylon, which began to reign about B.C. 2300.” It has often been maintained that the Sumerians themselves were an immigrant people, who had descended from the mountains of Elam. There is nothing unreasonable in the supposition; it was always difficult to prevent the mountaineers of Elam from making raids in Babylonia, and one of their tribes succeeded in settling in the country and establishing at Babylon one of the longest-lived of its dynasties. But the supposition mainly rests upon two facts. The pictorial hieroglyphs out of which the cuneiform characters have developed had no special sign for “river,” while the same character represented both “mountain” and “country.” It would seem, therefore, that the land in which the cuneiform system of writing was first invented was just the converse of the Babylonian plain, being at once mountainous and riverless. That the same character means both “mountain” and “country” is no doubt a strong argument in favour of the Elamite origin of Babylonian civilization. That the use of the primitive hieroglyphs should have survived in Elam while it was lost in Babylonia, as M. de Morgan’s discoveries have shown to be the case, is also another fact which may perhaps be claimed on the same side; at any rate it indicates that they were known to the Elamites before the cursive cuneiform had developed out of them. But the want of a special character for “river” is not so decisive as it appears at first sight to be. The word “river” is represented by two ideographic signs which literally signify “the watery deep,” and so point to the fact that those who originally invented them lived not in the highlands of the East, but on the shores of that Persian Gulf which the Babylonians of the historic period still called “the deep.” As it was also known as “the salt river,” it is not difficult to understand how, to those whose experience of navigable water had been confined to the Persian Gulf, the Tigris and Euphrates would have seemed but repetitions of the Gulf on a smaller scale.[69]