PASSAGE 78

　　Archaeological discoveries have led some scholars to believe that the first Mesopotamian inventors of writing may have been a people the later Babylonians called Subarians. According to tradition, they came from the north and moved into Uruk in the south. By about 3100 B.C., they were apparently subjugated in southern Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, whose name became synonymous with the region immediately north of the Persian Gulf, in the fertile lower valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here the Sumerians were already well established by the year 3000 B.C. They had invented bronze, an alloy that could be cast in molds, out of which they made tools and weapons. They lived in cities, and they had begun to acquire and use capital. Perhaps most important, the Sumerians adapted writing (probably from the Subarians) into a flexible tool of communication.

　　Archaeologists have known about the Sumerians for over 150 years. Archaeologists working at Nineveh in northern Mesopotamia in the mid-nineteenth century found many inscribed clay tablets. Some they could decipher because the language was a Semitic one (Akkadian), on which scholars had already been working for a generation. But other tablets were inscribed in another language that was not Semitic and previously unknown. Because these inscriptions made reference to the king of Sumer and Akkad, a scholar suggested that the new language be called Sumerian.

　　But it was not until the 1890's that archaeologists excavating in city-states well to the south of Nineveh found many thousands of tablets inscribed in Sumerian only. Because the Akkadians thought of Sumerian as a classical language (as ancient Greek and Latin are considered today), they taught it to educated persons and they inscribed vocabulary, translation exercises, and other study aids on tablets. Working from known Akkadian to previously unknown Sumerian, scholars since the 1890's have learned how to read the Sumerian language moderately well. Vast quantities of tablets in Sumerian have been unearthed during the intervening years from numerous sites.

　　1. According to the passage , the inventors of written language in Mesopotamia were probably

　　the

　　(A) Babylonians

　　(B) Subarians

　　(C) Akkadians

　　(D) Sumerians

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