From 1850 onwards, there was a growing suspicion that the Semite inhabitants of Babylon and Assyria were not the inventors of cuneiform system of writing, and that they had instead borrowed it from some other language and culture. In 1850, Edward Hincks published a paper suggesting that cuneiform was instead invented by some non-Semitic people who had preceded the Semites in Babylon. In 1853, Rawlinson came to similar conclusions, texts written in this more ancient language were identified. At first, this language was called "Akkadian" or "Scythian" but it is now known to be Sumerian. This was the first indication to modern scholarship that this older culture and people, the Sumerians, existed at all.
