The Story of Genesis Relative to the First Settlement in Shumir.
"And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel;[2] because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
"And Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord; wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calnch, in the land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah. And Resen between Nineveh and Calah; the same is a great city.
"And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there."—Genesis 10 and 11.
The first great Semitic invasion took place probably about the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C., and it seems impossible to assign to it a more definite date. The later Babylonians, like the Chinese, gave great antiquity to their nation, reckoning back into hundreds of thousands of years. Their beginnings belonged to so remote a time that adding years inconceivably was but another way of saying that certain events happened very long ago, so long, indeed, that no record or monument remained to give evidence of events which had survived only in stories handed down, from father to son, for thousands of generations.
Like the Hebrews and Arabs, these people belonged to the Semitic race, and from whence they came has long been a matter of conjecture. Scholars are now agreed that Arabia had been their home and that there they had lived as shepherds and herdsmen. They poured in overwhelming forces into the land of Chaldea, killing some of the inhabitants, driving others out of the country, and assimilating the rest.
The Chaldeans had reached a much higher degree of culture than their conquerors, who rapidly took on the civilization of their adopted country. As in England the Saxon and Norman for some generations after the conquest pursued each his native life and customs, little influenced by the other, so in Chaldea at first the Semitic herdsman followed his pastoral life outside the brick-walled cities of the Chaldeans.
Some have thought that an invasion of Cushites, or Ethiopians, had preceded the invasion of the Semites in Chaldea, and have claimed that the language, customs and culture in the land when conquered by the Semites was the result of a blending of Turanian and Ethiopian. The theory has been vigorously opposed by other authorities who contend that the invading Semites found only pure Turanian stock. However that may be, the civilization and culture of Chaldea, whether simply Turanian, or Turanian-Cushite, was soon taken on by the newcomers. Adopting the Chaldean language, they used it for all their inscriptions, writings and literature. Even after the speech of the people had become quite a different tongue, as a result of its assimilation with the Semitic, still in all written records the early Chaldean language—or Sumerian, as it is generally called—was alone used. Assyriologists have often noted that "while the language was Sumerian, the spirit of the writings was Semitic."
Because the land of Chaldea was so accessible, and offered advantages so superior to surrounding countries—plentiful water and a fertile soil,—it became a veritable bee-hive of humanity. When the Semites first came thither, they were a fierce, warlike people; but soon, under new conditions, they became peace-loving, as the Turanians before them had been. Shortly they were unable to hold the valley against new tribes that unceasingly swarmed into the country.
Prior to 2000 B.C. Ashur had been settled probably in part at least, by emigrants from the south who may have united with other Semites from North Mesopotamia and in time they founded the state of Assyria. Somewhat later, the ancestors of the Hebrews, according to one of the O. T. traditions, departed from the land of Chaldea for Harran in Mesopotamia, and later entered Canaan, on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Each of these little bands founded states which developed such peculiar characteristics, that after the lapse of a few ages, it would scarcely have occurred to an observer that the ancestry, early environment, and traditions of all had been the same.
It was not strange, then, that the Hebrews of later time, trying to account for the diversity of languages and nations, made this swarming valley the site of the scattering of the tribes and the confusion of tongues.
Those who remained in Chaldea became a peaceful farming people, caring not at all for war. The Assyrians, while of the same stock, developed very differently. There were several reasons for this. First, their country was less accessible than Chaldea, whose shore was washed by the Persian Gulf, and so it suffered less from invasions, and was allowed to keep a more purely Semitic civilization. Again, having gone out from Chaldea before they became devoted to peaceful pursuits, the Assyrians retained and fostered their original warlike dispositions. The more temperate climate of Assyria was more invigorating and produced men of greater endurance than did the kingdom to the south.
Both Chaldea and Assyria alike, developed small states, each led by a city in which had been built a temple sacred to some local deity. Each community was presided over by one who combined the duties of king and priest.
Such was the condition of affairs when the first written records, more or less complete, bring some degree of certainty and less conjecture into the development of these nations. And here we arrive at the beginning of Mesopotamian history, properly so-called.
A JAR-SHAPED COFFIN OF CLAY.
[1] Ragozin: Chaldea.
[2] This is a late popular etymology. Babel means "the gate of God," and has no connection with the Hebrew verb balal "to confound."