The precedence of Elam in Hebrew tradition, the statement of Berosus that civilisation came from the Persian Gulf, the ancient supremacy of Elam over Babylonia, which we can discover from the Hebrew tradition, and more plainly from the inscriptions, are so many proofs that the oldest seats of culture in the lower lands of the Euphrates and Tigris lay at the mouths of the two rivers. And this conclusion receives further support from the fact that the oldest centres of the Babylonian state were nearer the mouth of the Euphrates. Perhaps we may even go a step further. The Hebrews ascribe the foundation of the Babylonian kingdom to a son of the south. The language and religious conceptions of the Babylonians and Assyrians show a close relationship with the language and religion of the tribes of South Arabia; some of these tribes are in Genesis variously enrolled among the descendants of Shem and of Cush. Hence we may perhaps assume that Arabian tribes on the sea-shore forced their way eastward, to the land at the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris, and then, passing up the stream, settled in the valley of the two rivers, as far as the southern offshoots of the Armenian mountains.[342] Of these Semitic tribes those which remained on the lower Tigris and subjected the old population of Susiana, could not absorb the conquered Kissians (p. 249). The old language retained the upper hand, and developed; and the ruling tribe, the Semitic Elamites, were amalgamated with the ancient population. It was otherwise on the lower Euphrates, where the Semitic immigrants succeeded--probably in a long process of time, since it was late and by slow degrees that they gained the upper hand--in absorbing the old Turanian population, and formed a separate Semitic community, when they had borrowed from their predecessors the basis of civilisation and the system of cuneiform writing which was invented for another language.