CHAPTER V.
Brugsch, Recueils de Monuments Égyptiens.
Brugsch, Histoire d’Égypt.
Brugsch, Matériaux pour servir, etc.
Bunsen, Egypt’s Place, etc. (ed. Dr. Birch).
Ebers, Egyptian History.
Flower, W. H., Races of Men.
Legge, Chinese Classics, with Introduction, etc.
Lenormant, Manual of the Ancient History of the East (trs.).
Lepsius, Chronologie der Egypten.
Mariette Pasha, Abrégé de l’Histoire d’Égypte.
Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de l’Orient.
Maury, Le Livre et l’Homme.
Rawlinson, Herodotus, with Notes.
Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, etc.
Rougé (Vte. de), Examen de l’Ouvrage de M. Bunsen.
Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East.
Tylor, Anthropology.
[P. 119]. The word Turanian is untenable as an ethnic term. It can be used—though with a somewhat loose signification—to distinguish those languages which are in the agglutinative stage. But the reader must be careful not to suppose that it comprises a class of nearly allied peoples, as the Aryan and Semitic families of language, upon the whole, do. The only race which includes the Turanian peoples of Europe and Asia includes also those who speak monosyllabic languages: this is the yellow race, and is of course a division of the widest possible kind.
[P. 122]. Touching the relationship of the Egyptians to the negroes a variety of opinions are held. There can be no question that their types of face forbid us to doubt that there was some relationship between them; while the representations of negroes upon the ancient monuments of Egypt show that from the remotest historical period there was a marked distinction between the peoples, and that from that early time till now the negroes have not changed in the smallest particular of ethnical character. On the other hand, many people consider the Egyptians and the Accadians to have been essentially the same people, the Cushites—or as some call them Hamites—a race which perhaps anciently spread from Susiana across Arabia and the Red Sea to Abyssinia and Egypt.
[P. 123]. The names Chaldæan and Assyrian are used with a variety of significations by Orientalists, and in a way likely to be confusing to the general reader. He will do well, therefore, to bear the following facts in mind:—
1. The Tigris and the Euphrates, after both taking their rise in the Caleshîn Dagh mountain in the Armenian highlands, soon separate by a wide sweep, the Euphrates flowing south-west and towards the Mediterranean, the Tigris flowing south-east towards the Persian Gulf. But instead of flowing into the Mediterranean, the Euphrates again turns first due south, then south-east, so that it thenceforward flows parallel with the Tigris. They approach nearer and nearer, until about Bagdad they are separated by some twenty miles only; but here they once more begin to increase the distance between them, and do not again approach until just before they unite to fall into the Persian Gulf. In ancient days they never united, as the Persian Gulf spread more than a hundred miles farther inland than it does to-day.
The territory enclosed between these two great streams, with the addition of some territory to the east of the Tigris and west of the Euphrates, is that which the Greeks called Mesopotamia. Lower Mesopotamia begins about the point where the streams approach the nearest, and this Lower Mesopotamia is the territory distinguished by the name Chaldæa.
Territorially this Chaldæa was in ancient days divided into two districts—Shûmir in the south, and Accad in the north.
The earliest known inhabitants of these districts were a Turanian race, who from their territorial possessions should properly be called the Shûmir-Accadians or Shûmiro-Accadians. But it is common to call them simply Accadians (or Accad), and their language, an agglutinative or Turanian one, Accadian likewise.
Here therefore is the first element of confusion—between the smaller territorial division, Accadia, and the larger ethnic division, which includes all the primitive inhabitants of Chaldæa.
2. But there mingled with these primitive Accadians a Semitic race, and gradually transformed them, so that the speech of the country changed from being a Turanian or agglutinative, to being a Semitic and inflected language.
Now, these Semitic people are probably the Chaldæans of the Bible; at any rate the Bible seems to take no account of the primitive Turanian stock. Its Chaldæans are a people allied by nationality to the Shemites, though perhaps so far mixed with an earlier stock as to be what we may call proto-Semitic.
Here is the second element of confusion, a confusion between the unchanged land of Chaldæa and the two races who in succession inhabited it.
3. Finally, the language of the Semitic (or proto-Semitic) Chaldæans was practically the same as that of the people who rose into a nation in Upper Mesopotamia, viz. the Assyrians. The Assyrians, as is said in Chapter V., founded an empire which overthrew the ancient Chaldæan or Babylonian empire,—for from its largest town the empire is also called the Babylonian—and was in its turn overthrown by an alliance between the revolted Babylon and the King of Media.
The third element of confusion then arises from applying to the language of the Semitic Chaldæans the name Assyrian, which involves no participation in the empire of the Assyrians.
It is probable that these elements of confusion have not always been avoided in the preceding chapters. But with the aid of this note they will no longer present difficulties to the reader.
It will be seen that both the Egyptians and Chaldæans of Genesis, chap. x., are a Semitic people so far as regards the character of their language, and belong in the main to the white race. So far as regards their ethnic character, they were probably more mixed than the peoples (Hebrews, Assyrians proper, etc.) who are called the children of Shem, and therefore we may call them proto-Semitic.
The term Hamitic is altogether misleading, and had better be unused in ethnical classifications. The real meaning, if we follow the intention of its use in the Bible, is to distinguish from the purer Semites (Hebrews, Moabites, etc.) what we may call the proto-Semites; that is, a number of races, such as the Egyptians and Chaldæans, as well as the Canaanites generally, who spoke Semitic languages, but were very probably of impure blood, very likely of Semitic and Turanian intermixture. If the word Hamitic be used to include the rest of the inhabitants of the world who were not Semitic or Aryan, then, though it will not be very useful, no objection can be taken to its employment. But in that case we shall be obliged, forming our classification by the known rather than by the unknown, to include the Canaanites (who spoke Semitic languages) in the Semitic family; and this will be in direct contradiction to the use of Hamitic in the Bible narrative.