Eridu lay five miles southward of Ur,[83] that “Ur of the Chaldees” from which Hebrew history affirmed the ancestor of the nation had come. Ur was never a maritime port like Eridu; it stood on the Arabian plateau and looked towards the west. Its face was turned to the Semitic rather than to the Sumerian world. From the first, therefore, it must have been in touch with Semitic tribes. And a curious reminiscence of the fact survived in the western Semitic languages, Ur or Uru signifies “the city”; it was a Sumerian word, another form of which was _eri_. The word was borrowed by the Semites, and in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, accordingly, the idea of “city” is expressed by _’îr_. The Assyrians of the north, whose vocabulary was otherwise so full of Sumerian loan-words, preferred the native _âlu_, “a tent,” to which the meaning of “city” was assigned when Sumerian culture had been passed on to the Semitic race and the tent had been exchanged for the city. The history of the word is a history of early culture as well. But I am far from saying that it was through Ur that the civilization of Sumer came to be handed on to its Semitic neighbours. On the contrary, such facts as there are point in a different direction. Western Semites, whom linguistically we may call Arabs or Aramæans, or Canaanites or Hebrews, doubtless mingled with the Sumerian population of Ur, and adopted more or less of its manners and civilization, but it was further north, in the Babylonian Eden itself, that the Semite first came under the influence of the higher culture, and soon outstripped his masters in the arts of life. The entrance of the Semitic element into Babylonia is at present one of the most obscure of problems. All we can be sure of are certain main facts. First of all, as we have seen, the early culture of Babylonia, including so integral a part of it as the script, was of Sumerian origin. So, too, were the great cities and sanctuaries of the country, as well as the system of irrigation engineering which first made it habitable. Sumerian long continued to be the language of theology and law; indeed a large part of the Babylonian pantheon of later days was frankly non-Semitic. As was inevitable under such conditions, the Assyrian language contained an immense number of words--many of them compound--which were borrowed from the older language, and its idioms and grammar equally showed signs of Sumerian influence. I have sometimes been tempted, from a scientific point of view, to speak of Semitic Babylonian as a mixed language.