Discoveries Near Kish Prove Origin of Civilization Was in Mesopotania

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

The great historical importance of the discoveries made at Jemdet Nasr, seventeen miles northeast of Kish, Mesopotania, where fine polychrome pottery and pictographic tablets were found, was emphasized by Professor Langdon in a lecture before the Royal Society of Arts on the discoveries of Herbert Weld and the Field Museum expedition in Mesopotamia.

Professor Langdon rejected the recent attempts to derive the origin of the civilizations in Sumer, Elam and Egypt from Northern Syria and Anatolia. The painted ware and seals of the later area, he said, appear to be more than 2,000 years later than similar ceramic and glyptic designs of Sumer and Elam. The latest date for the magnificent polychrome thick ware of Jemdet Nasr is 3500 before the Christian era, and the preceding period of thin ware now known to have been manufactured in Sumer must go back to 4000 before the Christian era or earlier.

The lecturer maintained that the painted ware and the animal motif of decoration on seals and button seals originated in lower Mesopotamia and were borrowed by Elam. All the evidence to be drawn from the revolutionary discoveries of the expedition tended to prove, he declared, that the Sumerian people. an Armenoid race, arrived in Mesopotamia before 4000 before the Christian era, and founded their city. They owed nothing what-soever to any contemporary culture, he said. None existed at that time in Western Asia. A similar contemporary culture in Syria cannot be proven, said Professor Langdon, and arguments for its existence are fallacious.