Some ethnic groups can smoothly share the same territory with others. Such is the case before 2000 bce for the Sumerians and Akkadians in southern Mesopotamia. The word Sumerians generally means people who spoke the Sumerian language while Akkadians are people who spoke a Semitic language. There was no racial distinction, and there is no evidence of supposed conflict between the groups.
In ancient Mesopotamia the most important division was the opposition between nomadic and sedentary peoples, and that between city dwellers and rural folk. On the other hand, the Mesopotamians did not feel required to respect endogamy, the practice of marrying only within the group. It is also not likely that they referred to racial or biological criteria. In Mesopotamia there is no racial opposition based on physical features: the stature of foreigners, the form of the face, of the eyes, of the nose, or the color of the skin are never described. Also it is not possible to find any solidly based archaeological criteria for identifying physical remains with particular ethnic groups (Cleziou 2000: 151-7).
The Semitic population we call Akkadian dated back to time immemorial and had not posed real problems for many centuries for the Sumerians. Perhaps the Semitic people founded the towns with the Sumerians, or arrived at nearly the same time. The Akkadians settled in the northern part of the country, and the Sumerians were the majority in the south (Heimpel 1974: 171-4).
In the course of time both the Sumerians and the Akkadians adopted the same religious beliefs and rites, the same traditions, and cuneiform writing, so that only with great difficulty can we distinguish how each of them contributed to the development of their culture. Can we say that one of these cultures prevailed against the other? This would mean that the first forced its way oflife, its traditions, and even its religion on the second. There was not, I think, an assimilation but an integration of both of them.
Perhaps we should take into account a third ethnic group in the earliest periods that is supposed to be the substratum on which the civilization was developed. Some traces of it are to be observed, for example in the place names, and the words for most craftsmen, like s i m u g ‘‘smith,’’ e n g a r ‘‘farmer,’’ and a s g a b ‘‘leather worker,’’ words which are clearly neither Sumerian nor Akkadian. There is a strong probability that a new ethnic group, the Sumero-Akkadian, was created by ethnogenesis, by superimposition, or by mixing, but how is unclear. Situations of this kind were not unusual in Mesopotamia; for example, the Hurrians who were present among Semitic peoples in northern Mesopotamia, and later, the deported people who were settled in Babylonia and Assyria all assimilated into their new environments.
In the first millennium, in contrast, the Babylonians were anxious to set themselves apart from the Chaldeans dwelling in the southern part of the country, even if both their languages belonged to the Semitic group, and this similarity was not a minor point. In the towns the different ethnic groups tolerated each other more easily than in the countryside.
World History
