Now, the earliest of the inscriptions which tell us anything about these people of Babylonia goes back to the time before the Semites had come up from Arabia in the south. Edim, or the plain of Babylonia, from which we may suppose that the name Eden, in Genesis, came, was probably then inhabited by those Sumerians of whom we know very little. We know little, but we find inscriptions by them, and the inscriptions are in {69} a very curious form of writing, a writing which went on being used for thousands of years. It is called cuneiform, from "cuneus," meaning a wedge, because all the lines of the writing are inclined to go into the shape of a wedge. You will remember something about the Egyptian hieroglyphic and picture writing. Probably all writing began in this way, with making pictures. Then it was found troublesome to make a picture of everything that you wanted to say, and a few dashes or lines, very roughly representing the thing, were used instead, and began to be understood as standing for a sign of that thing. This wedge writing of the Babylonians doubtless began in this way. I say doubtless, because some of it is almost picture-writing, and the older the inscriptions the more like actual pictures of the thing as we see it the signs are. Thus, the sign which they made to mean heaven was something like this *, which we call an asterisk, from "aster," meaning a star. They made a drawing like a star to give the idea of heaven, because heaven is the place where the stars are. The rays, as we call them, of the star, were more wedge-shaped than the lines of our asterisk, but that is a small difference. It is said that when the "stilus," which is the tool they used for making the inscriptions, is used to make the mark of a line on wet clay, the shape into which that mark would naturally go is that of a wedge; they had much clay for their bricks, and very likely that is why we see this writing in the form that it has. You may remember how we cited, as an instance of the way in which the Egyptians developed their writing, that we had first the picture of an eye, and then {70} the picture of a bird, and, putting the eye before the bird, we got the idea "I see a bird." Now, in much the same way, in the wedge-writing we find that an arrangement of three upright wedges is taken as the sign which means "water." There is an arrangement of a good many wedges which is the sign that means "mouth," and this arrangement is in such a shape that it must make us think that it came from an original drawing of a mouth. So, having this sign for water and this other sign for a mouth, what these cuneiform writers did when they wanted to make a sign which should mean "drinking" was to put the sign for water inside the sign for mouth. A good idea!