On the other hand, if the elements of Babylonian civilization were Sumerian, the superstructure was Semitic. When the Semites entered into the heritage of Sumerian culture, the cuneiform script must have still been in a very inchoate and immature state. Its pictorial ancestry must still have been clear, and no scruples were felt about altering or adding to the characters. The phonetic application of the characters, which was still in its initial stage in the Sumerian period, was developed and carried to perfection by the Semitic scribes, and a very considerable proportion of their values and ideographic meanings is of Semitic derivation. The theological system was transformed, and a new literature and a new art came into existence. As Sumerian words had been borrowed by the Semites, so, too, Semitic words were borrowed by the Sumerians, and it is possible that examples of them may occur in some of the oldest Sumerian texts known to us.[84] The Babylonians of history, in short, were a mixed people; and their culture and language were mixed like our own. This, then, is one main fact. A second is that the Semitic element first comes to the front in the northern part of Babylonia. It is in Akkad, and not in Sumer, that the first Semitic Empire--that of Sargon the Elder, B.C. 3800--had its seat, and old as that empire is, it presupposes a long preceding period of Semitic settlement and advance in power and civilization. The cuneiform system of writing is already complete and has ceased to be Sumerian, archive-chambers of Semitic literature are founded, and Semitic authority is firmly established from Susa in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. Art is no longer Sumerian, and in the hands of the Semitic subjects of Sargon and his son Naram-Sin has reached a perfection which in certain directions was never afterwards surpassed. The engraved seal-cylinders of the period are the finest that we possess. Naturally the Semitic language has superseded the Sumerian in official documents, and the physical type as represented on the monuments is also distinctly Semitic. At the beginning of the fourth millennium before our era, the civilization and culture of Northern Babylonia have thus ceased to be Sumerian, and the sceptre has fallen into the hands of a Semitic race.