The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with Menes, say 5000 B.C., reaches its zenith under the third and fourth dynasty, under the builders of the pyramids some eight hundred or a thousand years afterwards. Then in its full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the past like a giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy plains. It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the Egyptians first come before us everything seems to point them out as a people already old; whether it be their enormous tombs and temples, their elaborately ordered social life, or their complicated religious system, with its long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and thought present two elements of character which may well spring from the union of two distinct nationalities. Its enormous tombs and temples and its excessive care for the bodies of the dead—for what are the pyramids but exaggerations of the stone-age grave-mounds, and the temples but improvements upon the megalithic dolmens?—recall the era of stone-age culture. The evident remains of an early animal worship show a descent from a low form of religion, such a religion as we find among Turanian or African races. But with these co-existed some much grander features. The Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree,—in the highest degree then known to the world; and, unlike the stone-age men, succeeded in other than merely mechanical arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by but one nation, the Chaldæans; in painting and sculpture they were at the head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history as of writing itself,—not quite of either, as will be seen hereafter. Mixed, too, with their animal worship were some lofty religious conceptions stretching not only beyond it—the animal worship—but beyond that ‘natural’ polytheism which was the earliest creed of our own ancestors the Aryans, and a noble hope and ambition for the future of the soul. Were these higher features due to the influx of Semitic blood? It seems likely, when we remember how from the same race came a chosen people to whom the world is indebted for all that is greatest in religious thought.
Chaldæa.
During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or four thousand years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians do, as we have said, rise up distinctly out of the region of mere conjecture. Three or four thousand years before Christ—five or six thousand years ago: this is no small distance through which to look back to the place where the first mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was doing in the other unseen regions round this mountain? Only probably in one other part of the globe could there have been found at this date a civilization in the smallest degree comparable to that of the Egyptians. This region is the valley of the Tigrus and Euphrates.
The Tigro-Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, was in early days as regards appearance and position very similar to the land of Egypt. These two territories are in fact two oases in an immense band of desert, which stretches from the western edge of the great Sahara (which is almost the edge of Africa itself) in a curved sweep, through part of Arabia, part of Persia, up to the great plains of central Asia; in other words, it stretches across more than one-third of the circumference of the globe. The Tigro-Euphrates oasis which the Greeks called Mesopotamia is in the Bible called Chaldæa or the country of the Chaldees. In days known to history, its inhabitants were a mixed people, of whom the oldest element was undoubtedly Turanian; and this section of the nation had probably descended from the country afterwards called Iran to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. These people are called by modern scholars the Accadians, or the Shûmîro-Accadians.[45] They are the Accad of the Bible. Mixed with them were a people of Semitic, or half-Semitic origin, whose language is closely allied to the Hebrew and the Aramæan. If we take the Biblical name for them, we should call them Hamites or Cushites. But the best ethnological name would be that of Aramæans.
These two races mingled, and formed the nation of Chaldæans as known to history; and in time the Semitic element predominated over the Turanian. Nevertheless it was the Accadians who had brought to the common stock the earliest elements of civilization. Their earliest tombs show them in possession of both the metals bronze and iron, though of the latter in such small quantities that it took with them the position of a precious metal; ornaments were made from it as much as from gold. What is far more important, the Accadians possessed a hieroglyphic writing similar in character to that of the Egyptians, and, after their junction with the Semite people, that developed into a syllabic alphabet.[46] We may date the fusion of the Accadian and Aramæan peoples at about 4000 B.C.
It is in this country, be it remembered, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. ‘And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.’[47] Here, too, is placed the building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family. Here ruled Nimrod, ‘the son of Cush,’ the first of the kings of this region of whom any authentic mention is made; though we have dynastic lists of supernatural beings who were supposed to have reigned in Chaldæa in far distant ages of the world, as we have in the case of Egypt. Even of Nimrod’s reign no monumental records have yet come to light. The cities which Nimrod built, says the Bible, were Erech [in Accadian, Ounoug, or Ûrûk] and Ur [Accad. Urû]—these two are the present Warkah and Mugheir,—Accad [Agadê] and Calneh. But the earliest human king of whom we have anything like an authentic date is either Sargon I., who may have reigned as early as 3800 B.C., or Ûrbagûs, who seems to have ruled over all Mesopotamia, contemporaneously with the fifth Egyptian dynasty (3900 or 2900 B.C.).
The Chaldean buildings of this period, like the contemporary Egyptian ones, are of gigantic proportions, and like them seem to recall bygone days, the grandiose conceptions of the later stone-age, those tumuli and cromlechs which, spread over the face of the world, most undoubtedly have suggested to subsequent nations of mankind the belief in a giant race which had preceded them on earth—
‘The far-famed hold,
Piled by the hands of giants
For god-like kings of old.’
And thus, as has already been often said, this earliest civilization in the world looks back to pre-historic days as much as forward to historic ones.
Close beside Chaldæa, in the more mountainous country to the east, but not far from the Persian Gulf, rose another civilization, that of the Elamites, which may possibly have been not much later than the Chaldæan. This, too, we may believe, was in its origin Turanian. The capital of the country of Elam was Susa. Between 2300 and 2280 B.C., a king of Susa, Kurdur-Nankunty, conquered the reigning king of Chaldæa, and henceforward the two districts were incorporated into one country. The accession of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the kings of the Elamitic line, Kudur-lagomer (Chedorlaomer) by name, to aspire towards a wider empire (c. 2200 B.C.). He sent his armies against the Semitic nations on his west, who were now beginning to settle down in cities, and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt and Chaldæa. These he subdued, but after sixteen years they rebelled; and it was after a second expedition to punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he had conquered the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the prisoners taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was pursued and defeated by the patriarch. ‘And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.’[48]