90

THE RACES OF EUROPE

acted as feeders of immigrants to Mesopotamia were themselves similar racially. The plateau people of Iran, therefore, were probably in the main long-headed. The inhabitants of northern Arabia who had entered the valley from time to time, and who still come to the banks of the Euphrates to water their flocks, belong likewise to the general Mediterranean family, and examples of both Afghanian and Mediterranean types may be selected from the living tribes without difficulty. It is quite possible that the first appearance of the finer and smaller Mediterranean type in Mesopotamia came with the arrival or assimilation of the Semites.

The Sumerian sculptors have left behind them records in stone which may piece out the evidence of the skulls. These records consist of bas re-

liefs, which are of conventional type, and some really excellent portraits in the round. The reliefs show wiry, ath- letic men with large, often aquiline noses. They are obviously normal white men of some Near Eastern va- riety, just as one would expect. The portrait busts, of which three examples are shown (Figs. 17, 18, and 19), seem really to depict individual men rather than conventional types or ideals. Figure 18 represents the oft- sculpted King Gudea, who has a roundish face and a nose less promi- nent than the bas-relief ideal. Figure

17. which looks less posed, bears the sly expression of a Baghdad shop- keeper of the present day. In both heads the browridges are absent, and

the eyebrows concurrent. In these as in most examples of Sumerian sculpture, there is no evidence of hair distribution or hair form which is, however, conventionally shown in archaic statues of gods (Fig. 20), dating from early dynastic times. In these, the beards are full, the hair straight or wavy.¹⁰

In the later Babylonian and Assyrian sculptures, which depict Semitic- speaking populations, we find a profusion of beard and head hair as with the early Sumerian gods; the hair is wavy or curly, and the beard ex­aggeratedly abundant. (See Fig. 21.) The eyebrows meet over the root of

10 Frankfort, h., “Oriental Institute Discoveries in Iraq, 1933-34,” Fourth Prelim­inary Report, coic #19, 1935,

Speiser, E., New York Times, Jan. 27, 1937.

Fig. 21. Assyrian.

After Schafer, H., and Andrae, W., Die Kunst des alien Orients, 1925, p. 521.