These two races mingled, and formed the nation of Chaldæans as known to history; and in time the Semitic element predominated over the Turanian. Nevertheless it was the Accadians who had brought to the common stock the earliest elements of civilization. Their earliest tombs show them in possession of both the metals bronze and iron, though of the latter in such small quantities that it took with them the position of a precious metal; ornaments were made from it as much as from gold. What is far more important, the Accadians possessed a hieroglyphic writing similar in character to that of the Egyptians, and, after their junction with the Semite people, that developed into a syllabic alphabet.[46] We may date the fusion of the Accadian and Aramæan peoples at about 4000 B.C. It is in this country, be it remembered, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. ‘And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.’[47] Here, too, is placed the building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family. Here ruled Nimrod, ‘the son of Cush,’ the first of the kings of this region of whom any authentic mention is made; though we have dynastic lists of supernatural beings who were supposed to have reigned in Chaldæa in far distant ages of the world, as we have in the case of Egypt. Even of Nimrod’s reign no monumental records have yet come to light. The cities which Nimrod built, says the Bible, were Erech [in Accadian, Ounoug, or Ûrûk] and Ur [Accad. Urû]--these two are the present Warkah and Mugheir,--Accad [Agadê] and Calneh. But the earliest human king of whom we have anything like an authentic date is either Sargon I., who may have reigned as early as 3800 B.C., or Ûrbagûs, who seems to have ruled over all Mesopotamia, contemporaneously with the fifth Egyptian dynasty (3900 or 2900 B.C.). The Chaldean buildings of this period, like the contemporary Egyptian ones, are of gigantic proportions, and like them seem to recall bygone days, the grandiose conceptions of the later stone-age, those _tumuli_ and cromlechs which, spread over the face of the world, most undoubtedly have suggested to subsequent nations of mankind the belief in a giant race which had preceded them on earth-- ‘The far-famed hold, Piled by the hands of giants For god-like kings of old.’ And thus, as has already been often said, this earliest civilization in the world looks back to pre-historic days as much as forward to historic ones.