It is true that the cruelty of the Assyrians to foreign prisoners of war, which often shocks us and estranges our sympathies from the whole nation, recall certain instances of a like defect among the ancient Israelites too strongly not to tempt us to think of it as a Semitic propensity; but nevertheless these are mere excesses and excrescences which must not be set to the account of national character. The Semite is not naturally cruel. If he were so, the trait must have come out most strongly in the Bedouin Arabs, who for centuries have remained at the barbaric stage in religious matters; whereas this is not so, but rather the reverse. With many races (some of them Indo-Germanic) of whom the most unspeakable horrors and acts of violence are recorded in the course of history, sheer lust of blood and torture has been the motive of such actions (or rather crimes), while the cruelties just referred to sprang from the dark side (revolting, it must be confessed) of a national virtue: true zeal for the Holiest.
THE ORIGINAL HOME OF THE BABYLONIAN SEMITE
On such questions as the degree of kinship in which the Babylonians and Assyrians stood to other Semites, their original home, their last halting-places, and consequently the sequence of Semitic migrations, Eduard Meyer holds the same views as the famous orientalist, Sprenger, to wit, that Arabia, i.e. the desert as distinct from the arable land, used from the very earliest times to send forth the surplus of her predatory and rapacious Bedouin population to the great pastoral districts in the vicinity, that is, to Palestine, the plain of Mesopotamia (Aram), and, in times long out of mind, to northern Babylonia also; that they were, so to speak, deposited there from time to time, and that all Semitic nations whom we meet with in a state of civilisation in the course of subsequent history have come into being in this manner.
“But this ingenious theory has been directly refuted by later investigations set on foot by A. von Kremer, and followed up by Ign. Guidi at Rome, and, more especially, by myself, with a view to discovering what domestic animals and cultivated plants were known to the original Semitic stock. By the year 1879 Guidi and I had come independently and, to some extent, by different ways to the conclusion that the original home of the Semites could not possibly be Arabia, but must be sought farther to the northeast. In the treatise, Die sprachgeschichtliche Stellung des Babylonisch-Assyrischen, I succeeded in proving further that the people who afterwards became the Babylonians and Assyrians must have separated from the common stock in some part of central Asia where the lion was indigenous, and emigrated into northern Babylonia through one of the passes of the Medio-Elamite range certainly no later than the fifth millennium B.C. The rest, however, came by way of the southern shore of the Caspian Sea—probably towards the end of the fourth millennium and at all events later than the Hamites of northern Babylonia—and entered what was afterwards Aramæan Mesopotamia from the north, then occupied it, and spread gradually from thence to Syria, Palestine, and Arabia.” (Hommel.) So, by subsequent offshoots and migrations, they became the Aramæans, Canaanites, and Arabs.
This theory furnishes, on the one hand, the first satisfactory explanation of many points in which Babylonian development, in language and various respects, differs from that of other Semites. On the other hand, it sets the large amount they have in common in a most interesting light, since it proves to be the primitive heritage of the Semitic race.
The whole question of the manner of Semitic migrations and offshoots is one that cannot be a matter of indifference to the historian, as may be objected in some quarters; and for a right understanding of the history of Babylonia in the earliest times, it is of the utmost consequence that we should know whether the Semitic Babylonians were a distinct branch, as compared with their brethren, whose relations among themselves were much closer, and whether the beginning of their migration had led their steps through the land where grew the olive, fig, vine, and other cultivated plants not to be found in Babylonia; and lastly, it is imperative for a right comprehension of the history of Semitic civilisation to arrive at a decision on these questions. The fact that we find in the Assyrio-Babylonian language no trace of the common Semitic name (found in Aramaic, Canaanitish, and Arabic) for the three plants just mentioned, and others of the same nature, constitutes, together with weighty philological considerations, the positive argument in favour of the theory I have set forth: namely, that the route by which the Semitic settlers of the lower Euphrates came did not lie through regions where these plants are indigenous, but that they migrated in advance of the rest of the Semites straight from the east or northeast into anterior Asia and so to their new home of Babylonia.[d]
FOOTNOTES
[16] [Compare, however, Professor Halévy’s Introductory Essay.]
[17] [See Sketch of Semitic Origins, by G. A. Barton, Ph.D. New York and London, 1902.]
[18] [This entire system is now a vast ruin, according to Rogers, who adds: “The great valley has a climate which appears little fitted to produce men of energy and force, for the temperature over its entire surface is very high in the summer season. It is, however, altogether probable that in the period of the ancient history neither the heat nor the sand was such a menace.… During the period of the glory of Babylon these sand waves (from Arabia) had certainly not gone beyond the Euphrates, and they could hardly have reached it.”]