[91]It is sometimes said that the Sumerians, descending from a mountainous region, desired to continue the worship of their gods on “High Places” and therefore proceeded to construct them in the plain. The point is why they considered “High Places” appropriate, especially since the gods worshipped there were not sky gods only but also, and predominantly, chthonic gods. Our interpretation takes its starting-point from “the mountain,” not as a geographical feature, but as a phenomenon charged with religious meaning. Several current theories have taken one or more aspects of “the mountain” as a religious symbol into account and we do not exclude them, but consider them, on the whole, subsidiary to the primary notion that “the mountain” was seen as the normal setting of divine activity.—The whole material referring to the temple towers, and the various interpretations which have been put forward, are conveniently presented in André Parrot, _Ziggurats et Tour de Babel_ (Paris, 1949). [92]The basic work on the subject of early Mesopotamian writing is Adam Falkenstein, _Archaische Texte aus Uruk_ (Leipzig, 1936). [93]A few words may be added here about the early development of writing; although true pictograms—images of the objects (Fig. 13)—occur, many of the most common objects are rendered by simpler tokens: either highly abbreviated (and hence conventional) pictures, such as a figure with two curved lines across one end (No. 4), which represented the horned head of an ox (the sign means “ox”), or, more often, purely arbitrary signs, such as a circle with a cross—the commonest sign of all—meaning “sheep.” The system, therefore, is a collection of abstract tokens eked out with pictograms. The range of notions which could be expressed was enlarged by certain combinations. The sign for “woman” combined with that for “mountain” meant “slave-girl,” since slaves were foreigners generally brought from Persia. The sign for “sun” could also mean “day” or “white.” That for “plough” could mean either the tool or its user, the ploughman. Even so the script was of limited usefulness. It could not render sentences, for it could not indicate grammatical relations. Its signs were ideograms which listed notions; and that was what the script was, first of all, required to do. But even within the Protoliterate period a further step was taken towards writing as the graphic rendering of language. We find that the arrow sign, for instance, was soon regarded, not as a rendering of the notion “arrow,” but as a rendering of the sound “ti,” which means arrow. For the arrow sign was also used to render the notion “life” which likewise sounded “ti.” This shows that the rendering of speech rather than notions had become possible. The development of writing