A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volume 1, 3rd ed. / From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

by James Fergusson

III.—SEMITIC RACES.

From the extraordinary influence the Semitic races have had in the religious development of mankind, we are apt to consider them as politically more important than they really ever were. At no period of their history do they seem to have numbered more than twenty or thirty millions of souls. The principal locality in which they developed themselves was the small tract of country between the Tigris, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; but they also existed as a separate race in Abyssinia, and extended their colonies along the northern coast of Africa. Their intellectual development has been in all ages so superior to that of the Turanian races, that they have subdued them mentally wherever they came in contact with them; and notwithstanding their limited geographical extension, they have influenced the intellect of the Aryan tribes to a greater extent than almost any of their own congeners.

If anything were required to justify the ethnographer in treating the various families of mankind as distinct and separate varieties, it would be the study of the history of the Semitic race. What they were in the time of Abraham, that they are at the present day. A large section of them sojourned in Egypt, among people of a different race, and they came out as unmixed as oil would do that is floated on water. For the last two thousand years they have dwelt dispersed among the Gentiles, without a nationality, almost without a common language, yet they remain the same in feature, the same in intellectual development and feeling, they exhibit the same undying repugnance to all except those of their own blood, which characterised the Arab and the Jew when we first recognise their names in history. So unchangeable are they in this respect, that it seems in vain to try to calculate how long this people must have lived by themselves, separated from other races, that they should have thus acquired that distinctive fixity of character nothing can alter or obliterate, and which is perhaps even more wonderful intellectually than are the woolly hair and physical characteristics of the negro, though not so obvious to the superficial observer.

Religion.

From the circumstance of our possessing a complete series of the religious literature of the Semitic race, extending over the two thousand years which elapsed between Moses and Mahomet, we are enabled to speak on this point with more precision than we can regarding the doctrines of almost any other people.

The great and distinguishing tenet of this race when pure is and always seems to have been the unity of God, and his not being born of man. Unlike the gods of the Turanians, their Deity never was man, never reigned or lived on earth, but was the Creator and Preserver of the universe, living before all time, and extending beyond all space; though it must be confessed they have not always expressed this idea with the purity and distinctness which might be desired.

It is uncertain how far they adhered to this purity of belief in Assyria, where they were more mixed up with other races than they have ever been before or since. In Syria, where they were superimposed upon and mixed with a people of Turanian origin, they occasionally worshipped stones and groves, serpents, and even bulls; but they inevitably oscillated back to the true faith and retained it to the last. In Arabia, after they became dominant, they cast off their Turanian idolatries, and rallied as one man to the watchword of their race, “There is no God but God,” expressed with a clearness that nothing can obscure, and clung to it with a tenacity that nothing could shake or change. Since then they have never represented God as man, and hardly ever looked upon Him as actuated by the feelings of humanity.

The channel of communication between God and man has always been, with all the Semitic races, by means of prophecy. Prophets are sent, or are inspired, by God, to communicate His will to man, to propound His laws, and sometimes to foretell events; but in all instances without losing their character as men, or becoming more than messengers for the special service for which they are sent.

With the Jews, but with them only, does there seem to have been a priest caste set aside for the special service of God; not selected from all the people, as would have been the case with the casteless Turanians, but deriving their sanctity from descent, as would have been the case with the Aryans; still they differed from the Aryan institution inasmuch as the Levites always retained the characteristics of a tribe, and never approached the form of an aristocracy. They may therefore be considered ethnographically as an intermediate institution, partaking of the characteristics of the other two races.

The one point in which the Semitic form of religion seems to come in contact with the Turanian is that of sacrifice—human, in early times perhaps, even till the time of Abraham, but afterwards only of oxen and sheep and goats in hecatombs; and this apparently not among the Arabs, but only with the Jews and the less pure Phœnicians.