The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history - Madison Grant

For Media see the notes to p. 254 : 13.

239 : 12. Assyria and Palestine. Breasted, Ancient Times, p. 173 and Fig. 112; Hall, History of the Near East; Myres, Dawn of History, pp. 114–116, 140; and other histories of the Near East.

239 : 13. Kassites. See Hall, pp. 198–200. Very little is known about the Kassites. Hall declares that there is very little doubt but that they were Indo-European; Prince, from the same information, says this could not possibly be the case. They are supposed to have been an Elamite tribe who were living in the northwestern mountains of Elam, immediately south of Holwan, when Sennacherib attacked them in 702 B. C. They attacked Babylonia in the ninth year of Samsu-iluma, the son of Khammurabi, overran it and founded a dynasty there in 1780 B. C., which lasted 576 years. They became absorbed into the Babylonian population; the kings adopted Semitic names and married into the royal family of Assyria. Like the other languages of the Non-Semitic tribes of Elam, according to Prince, that of the Kassites was agglutinative. That the Kassites had been in contact with the horse-using nomads of the northern steppes, is indicated by the fact that they first introduced the horse into Mesopotamian lands, whence its use for riding and drawing chariots spread into Egypt in 1700 B. C. See Breasted, Ancient Times, p. 138.

239 : 16. Mitanni. Very little is known of the Mitanni. Von Luschan, p. 230, dates them around the fourteenth century B. C. In 1380 they called themselves Harri, from Harri-ya, an old form of the word Aryan. Myres, Dawn of History, says: “The conquest of Syria in 1500 B. C. brought Egypt face to face with a homogeneous state called Mitanni, occupying the whole foothill country east of the Euphrates.... The Egyptian conquest came just in time to relieve the kingdom of Mitanni from severe pressure exerted simultaneously and probably in collusion, by its neighbors in the foothills,—Assyria on the east, and the Hittites west of the Euphrates. Egypt made friends with Mitanni and more than one marriage was arranged between the royal houses. Soon after the treaty between Egypt and Mitanni, Subiluliuma, king of the Hittites of Cappadocia, whom Egyptian scribes conveniently abbreviate as Saplel, was overlord apparently of a number of outpost baronies in north Syria. Assured of their help, and watching his opportunity, he flung his whole force, about 1400 upon Mitanni.... This closed the career of Mitanni.”

The racial affinities of Mitanni are doubtful. Prince, correspondence, says the language of Mitanni was certainly not Aryan. It has been thoroughly analyzed by Ferdinand Bork, in his Die Mitanni Sprache, who compares it with the Georgian or Imeretian branch of the Caucasic linguistic groups. The Mitanni are not to be confused with the Ossetes, who speak a highly archaic, real Aryan language. Mitanni, in structure, is like the polysynthetic North American groups. Feist, 1, p. 14, says the Mitanni were Nordics and inhabited the western mountains of Iran, in Zagros. In 5, p. 406, he places them on the north of the Euphrates during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries B. C. See also Hall, p. 200, the following note and that to p. 213 : 1–23 of this book. Hall also considers them Nordics.

239 : 16 seq. Von Luschan, p. 230, asks: “Can it be mere accident that a few miles north of the actual frontier of modern Kurdish languages there is Boghaz-Köi, the old metropolis of the Hittite Empire, where Hugo Winckler in 1908 found tablets with two political treaties of King Subiluliuma with Mattiuaza, son of Tušrata, king of Mitanni, and in both of these treaties Aryan divinities, Mithra, Varuna, Indra and Nasatya are invoked, together with Hittite divinities, as witnesses and protectors? And in the same inscriptions, which date from about 1380 B. C., the king of Mitanni and his people are called Harri, just as nine centuries later in the Achæmenidian inscriptions Xerxes and Darius call themselves Har-ri-ya, ‘Aryans of Aryan stock.’ So the Kurds,” concludes Von Luschan, “are the descendants of Aryan invaders and have maintained their type and their language for more than 3300 years.”