Morris Jastrow junior,[166] in studying the religion of Babylonia, was
struck with certain resemblances between the religious practices of
that country and those in vogue in Etruria. Here I will only mention
three points: the Sumerians, like the Etruscans, lived in city states;
the Sumerians were governed by priestly magistrates known as Patesi,
while the Etruscans had similar officials called Lucumons; lastly both
peoples were addicted to the practice of hepatoscopy, or the art of
divining by means of sheeps’ livers, and made models of the livers to
aid their students. Such models have been found in Sumer and Etruria,
and nowhere else except at Boghaz Keui, on the Halys, the ancient
capital of the Hittites.
Relatively few sculptured figures of the Sumerians have come down to
us, but those which have been found show us a sturdy people, not very
tall, short in the neck and with broad heads,[167] and some of the
Etruscan tomb paintings resemble fairly closely some of the Sumerian
reliefs.[168] Besides this some of the small statuettes brought by M.
de Morgan from Susa,[169] show us heads which bear a close resemblance
to those found on the Etruscan alabaster sarcophagi. It is a far cry
from Etruria to Sumer, but tradition brings the Etruscans from Asia
Minor, and Boghaz Keui may have been an intermediate station, though
probably not the only one. But we have seen that the Babylonians were
engaged in trading for tin in the Mediterranean region in 2800 /B.C./,
so that it is not altogether impossible that the Prospectors may have
come in the first instance from the Persian gulf, where they had
been known as Sumerians, though it is, of course, possible that the
Prospector was not the only element of that population.
A very natural reply to such a suggestion is that megalithic monuments
do not occur in Sumer, or, as I should prefer to state it, have
not yet been observed near the Persian gulf. Such absence is not,
however, fatal to our hypothesis. As we have seen it seems likely that
the dolmen is derived from the rock-cut tomb, and such tombs, and
dolmens too, occur in Syria. As yet we know little about the tombs of
Mesopotamia before 3000 /B.C./, and still less of their contents; we
may yet find in that region some sepulchre, perhaps built of sun-dried
brick, perhaps of slabs of stone, which bears a closer resemblance to
the dolmen than does the Egyptian _mastaba_.
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