But in themselves they were all of Babylonian descent.
There is yet one more lesson to be learnt from the revelations of the monuments.

They have made it clear that civilisation in the East is immensely old.

As far back as we can go we find there all the elements of culture; man has already invented a system of writing, and has made some progress in art.

It is true that by the side of all this civilisation there were still races living in the lowest barbarism of the Stone Age, just as there were Tasmanians who employed stone weapons of palaeolithic shape less than sixty years ago; but between the civilised man of the Babylonian plain and the barbarians around him there existed the same gulf that exists to-day between the European and the savage.

The history of the ancient East contains no record of the development of culture out of savagery.