[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.