HEAD ILLUSTRATING THE MOST ANCIENT TYPE OF CUSHITE TURANIAN, FROM TEL-LOH (after de Sarzec).
The cap is perhaps an imitation of the antediluvian shell-caps, like that of the 'man of Mentorie.'
The answer of archæology is not doubtful. We have in the earliest monuments of Chaldea evidence that there was a pre-Semitic population, to whom, indeed, it is believed that the Semites who invaded the country owed much of their civilisation. A recent writer has said that 'outside of the Bible we know nothing of Nimrod,' but others see a trace of him in the legendary hero of Chaldean tradition, Gisdubar or Gingamos, while others think that, as Na-marod, he may be the original of Merodach, the tutelary god of Babylon. Independently of this, there was certainly an early Chaldean and 'Turanian' empire, which must have had some founder, whatever his name, and which was not Semitic or Aryan, and therefore what an early writer would call Hamitic. Further, our author traces from this region the great Cushite line of migration, which includes such well-known names as Seba, Sabta, Sheba and Dedan, into Arabia on the way to Africa. Here the Egyptian monuments take up the tale, and inform us of a South Arabian and East African people, the people of Pun or Punt, represented as like to themselves and to the Kesh or Ethiopians, and who thus correspond to the Arabian Cushites of Genesis. In accordance with this the Abyssinian of to-day is scarcely distinguishable from the old Punites as represented on the Egyptian monuments. [79]
[79] The recent discoveries of Glaser with reference to the early civilisation of Southern Arabia also bear on this point.
Thus the primitive Cushite kingdom and one of the great lines of Cushite migration are established by ancient monuments. Let it be further observed that, as represented in Egypt, these primitive Ethiopians were not black, but of a reddish or brownish colour, like the Egyptians themselves, and that their migration explains the resemblance of the customs and religion of early Egypt to those of Babylonia, and the ascription by the Egyptians of the origin of their gods to the land of Pun.
The remaining sons of Ham, Mizraim, Put and Canaan, are not mentioned in connection with the old Nimrodic kingdom, and seem to have moved westward at a very early period. They were already 'in the land,' and apparently constituted a considerable citizen population before the migration of Abraham.
Mizraim represents the twin populations of the delta and Lower Egypt, and the Tel-el-Amarna tablets inform us that long before the time of Moses Mitzor was the ordinary name of Egypt, while we know that its early population was closely allied in features and language to the Cushites.
Canaan [80] heads a central line of migration, and Sidon and Cheth are said to have been his leading sons. The first represents the Phœnician maritime power of Northern Syria, the second that great nation known to the Egyptians as Kheta and to the Assyrians as Khatti, whose territory extended from Carchemish on the Euphrates through the plain of Coele-Syria to Hebron in Southern Palestine, and not improbably into the delta. They were a people whose language was allied to that of Cushite Chaldea, [81] whose features were of a coarser type than those of their more southern confrères, and who, according to the Egyptian annals, were closely allied with the Amorites, Jebusites, and other people identified with Canaan in the Old Testament. The Cheta, at one time known only as the sons of Heth in the Old Testament, may be said in our time to have experienced a sudden resurrection, and now bulk so largely in the minds of archæologists that their importance is in danger of being exaggerated.
[80] Canaan with our old historian is the name of a man, but it came to designate first the 'low country' or coast region of Western Palestine, and then the whole of Palestine.
[81] Conder and others call it Turanian.