With these two inferences we have to be content. Upon the first home of the Semitic race or its affinities with other branches of the white race, Babylonia can naturally throw no light. The earliest glimpses we catch of the Semites of Babylonia are those of a people who have already come under the influences of Sumerian civilization, who are mingling with their teachers and helping with them to build up the stately edifice of historical Babylonia. There were ruder Semitic tribes, it is true, who continued to live their own nomad life on the western bank of the Euphrates or in the marshes that bordered the Persian Gulf. But like the Bedâwîn of to-day on the outskirts of Egypt they were little, if at all, affected by the civilization at their sides. They remained the same wild savages of the desert as their descendants who encamp in the swamps of modern Babylonia; they neither traded nor tilled the ground, and the language they spoke was not the same as that of their Babylonian kindred. They served, however, as the herdsmen and shepherds of their Babylonian neighbours, and the vast flocks whose wool was so important an article of Babylonian trade, were entrusted to their care. But Bedâwîn they were born, and Bedâwîn they continued to be. Even the Aramæan tribes of the coast-land kept apart from the Babylonians, whether Sumerian or Semitic, until the day when one of their tribes, the Kaldâ or Chaldæans, made themselves masters of Babylon under their prince Merodach-baladan, and from henceforward became an integral factor in the Babylonian population. They must have settled on the borders of Babylonia at a comparatively late date, when Semitic Babylonian had definitely marked itself off from its sister-tongues and the Babylonian Semite had acquired distinctive characteristics of his own. The West-Semitic elements in the population of Babylonia could have entered the country only long after the mixture of Sumerian and Semite had produced the Babylonian of history. The Babylonian of history came to forget that he had ever had another fatherland than the Babylonian plain, the Eden of the Old Testament, the land whose southern border was formed by “the salt river” or Persian Gulf of early Sumerian geography, with its four branches which were themselves “heads.” Here the first man Adamu[87] had been created in Eridu, “the good city,” and here therefore the Babylonian Semite placed the home of the first ancestor of his race. But it was a borrowed belief, borrowed along with the other elements of Babylonian culture, and no argument can be drawn from it as to the actual cradle of the Semitic race. Like the story of the deluge, it was part of the Sumerian heritage into which the Semite had entered.