The Meeting-Place of Geology and History

by Sir John William Dawson

A significant note is added: 'Afterwards were the families of the Canaanites scattered abroad.' How could this be? Their line of migration and settlement led directly to the great sea, and was hemmed in by that of the Japhetites on the north and of the Cushites on the south; but they made the sea their highway, and soon there was no coast from end to end of the Mediterranean, and far along the European and African shores of the Atlantic, that was not familiar with the Phœnician Canaanite. But it may be said these Phœnicians were a Semitic people. They certainly spoke a Semitic language allied to the Hebrew, but what right have we to attribute Semitic languages solely to the descendants of the Biblical Shem? Even if these languages originated with them they may have spread to other peoples, as we know they replaced the old Turanian speech of Babylonia, just as the Arabic has extinguished other languages in Egypt itself. In whatever way the Phœnicians acquired a Semitic tongue, in physical character they were not Semitic, but closely allied to the Hittites, the Philistines, and the people of Mitzor, or Egypt. The Egyptian sculptures prove this, and the celebrated Capuan bust of Hannibal reminds us of the features of the old Hyksos kings of Egypt, who were no doubt of Hamite or Turanian stock.

Finally, what relation does the record in Genesis x. bear to the prehistoric peoples of the neanthropic age? These must have been in the main the advanced colonists and straggling adventurers of the leading lines of migration. We find such people recorded in the Pentateuch, and also in the caverns and shelters of Phœnicia, as preceding the Canaanites in Syria; and such nomads and hunters must have streamed out into Europe and Africa in advance of the more settled and slowly advancing agricultural peoples. At first they must have been few, rude, and users of stone implements only, living chiefly by hunting and fishing; but some of them may have taken with them domestic animals and seeds of grains, and so have established here and there civilised communities. In later times, new colonists and commerce introduced among them bronze and iron and more advanced arts. Thus these early neanthropic peoples belonged to one or other of the great lines of migration indicated in our old record; though by virtue of physical changes and dialectic differences induced by isolation and new conditions of life, and which in such circumstances would arise with a rapidity unexampled in later times, as well as the want of historical annals, it has in many cases become difficult or impossible precisely to trace their affinities. Even in Palestine, at the time of the Exodus, peoples of this kind (Horites, Avvites, &c.) [82] were known, whose affinities had been lost; and it is not necessary to suppose that these were remnants of antediluvians, since what we know in modern times of the wanderers on the outskirts of great migrations sufficiently accounts for their existence.

This is, I think, a fair summary of the testimony of the writer of Genesis x., as compared with the general evidence of history and archæology. But we have something further to learn from what may be called the fossil remains of prehistoric peoples as embodied in the Egyptian monuments, which are conversant with all the nations around the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

The Egyptians divided the nations known to them into four groups, of which they have given us several representations in tombs and public buildings. One of these consisted of their own race. The other three were as follows: (1) Southern peoples mostly of dark complexions, ranging from light brown to black. These included the Cushites, Punites, and negroes. (2) Western peoples mostly of fair complexions inhabiting the islands and northern coasts of the Mediterranean, the 'Hanebu' or chiefs of the north or of the isles, with some populations of North Africa, the so-called white Lybians and Maxyans. (3) Northern or north-eastern peoples, or those of Syria and the neighbouring parts of Western Asia, Amorites, Hittites, Edomites, Arabs, &c., usually represented as of yellowish complexion.

[82] Deuteronomy ii.

The first of these divisions evidently corresponds with the line of Cushite migration of Genesis, extending from Shinar through Southern Arabia, Nubia, and Ethiopia, and of which the negroes are apparently degraded members pushed in advance of the others, while the populations of Pun and Kesh, the southern Arabians and their relatives in Africa, closely resemble, as figured in the monuments, the Egyptians themselves.

The second group of the Egyptian classification represents those so-called Aryan peoples of Europe and its islands, and parts of Northern Africa, of whom the Greeks are a typical race, and who in Genesis are said to have possessed the 'Isles of the Gentiles'; though in the wave of migration from the east they were in many places preceded by non-Aryan races, Pelasgians, Iberians, &c., possibly wandering Hamitic tribes, while they were also invaded by that scattering abroad of the Phœnician Canaanites referred to in Genesis. They are represented in the monuments as people with European features, fair complexions, and sometimes fair hair and blue eyes.

The third group is the most varied of the whole, because its seat in Syria was a meeting-place of many tribes. Its most ancient members, the Phœnicians and allied nations, were, according to the monuments, men resembling the Egyptian and Cushite type, and these, no doubt, were those pre-Semitic and prehistoric nations of Canaan referred to in the remarkable notes regarding the Emim, Zuzim, &c., in the second chapter of Deuteronomy, which may be regarded as a foot-note to the Toledoth of Genesis x. These aborigines were invaded by men of different types. First, we find in the monuments that the Amorites of the Palestine hills were a fair people with somewhat European features, like some of the present populations of the Lebanon. When returning over the Lebanon in 1884 we met a large company of men with camels and donkeys carrying merchandise. They were fair-complexioned and with brown hair, and from their features I might have supposed they were Scottish Highlanders. I was told they were Druses, and they were evidently much like, as are indeed many of the modern fellaheen of the Palestine hills, the Amar as they are pictured in Egypt. These white peoples, though reckoned in the Bible as Hamites, may have had a mixture of Aryan blood. It is to be noted here that the Amorite chiefs, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre, named as confederate with Abraham, have non-Semitic names.

A later inroad was that of the Hittites, evidently a people having affinity with the Philistines and Egyptians, but whose chiefs and nobles seem to have been of Tartar blood, like the modern Turks. The names of their kings seem also to have been non-Semitic. Later, the great westward migration of Semitic peoples, to which that of Abraham himself belongs, not only introduced the Israelites but many nations of Semitic or mixed blood, the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Ishmaelites, &c., whom we find figuring in the Egyptian monuments as yellow or brownish people with a Jewish style of features, and all of whom, as mentioned above, would be known to the Egyptians and Canaanites as 'Hebrews.' [83]