The Semites, having once obtained a footing in Babylonia, soon assimilated themselves to the more advanced culture of their Sumero-Accadian masters. They borrowed the cuneiform mode of writing, the religion, mythology, and much of the science of that inventive people, and so rapidly increased in numbers and power, that as early as about 3800 B. C. we find a dynasty of Semitic kings under Sargon of Accad and his son Naram-Sin, ruling in northern Babylonia.
THE WANDERING ARAB LOVES THE DESERT SANDS
Warlike by nature, here we see him scouting the silent wastes with his ever faithful companion in peace or war—restless as the shifting sands.
The desert oasis is his place of assembly for recreation or trade. In the above picture we have a view of a desert market held far remote from any city but at the junction of several caravan routes.
Basques (bȧskz).—A race inhabiting the Basque provinces and other parts of Spain in the neighborhood of the Pyrenees, and part of the adjacent territory in France. They were formerly Iberian as to language, the sole non-Aryan language of western Europe. But few now live in the old province of southwestern France, Gascony, formerly called “Vasconia,” after them; about 500,000 still remain in northwestern Spain. They are a fragment, perhaps the only distinct remnant, of the pre-Aryan race of Europe. Recent researches connect them, not with the Mongolian Finns as formerly, but with the Hamitic (Caucasian) Berbers of northern Africa. They are not now easily distinguished in physical appearance from their Spanish or French neighbors, although many still speak the strange Basque tongue. The latter is not inflected, like most European (Aryan) languages, but agglutinative, like the typical languages of northern Asia.
Berbers (bér´bérz).—A race of people constituting, with the Cushites, the Hamitic family, which is found scattered over North Africa and the Sahara, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. The complexion of the Berbers varies from white to dark brown; their features remind one of the Egyptian type; their stature is medium. They have occupied their present habitat since the dawn of history. Never have their indomitable tribes become entirely subject to a foreign master, or lost their racial and linguistic characteristics, in spite of Punic, Roman, Germanic, Arabic, and Saracen conquests. In the mountains they are agricultural; in the Sahara, nomadic. For centuries they have been the middlemen between the Mediterranean coast and the Negro states of the Sudan. In religion the Berbers are nominally Mohammedan. A few tribes have adopted the Arabic, and so have a few Arabs adopted Berber dialects. The Berber languages are often called Libyan. They number at least 7,000,000 in Morocco and Algeria and 500,000 in Tunis and Tripoli.