7. But there came a time when the small islands were overcrowded with the increased population, and detachments began to cross the water and land at the furthest point of the Gulf, in the land of the great rivers. Here they found a people not unpractised in several primitive arts, and possessed of some important fundamental inventions—writing, irrigation by means of canals—but deplorably deficient in spiritual development, and positively barbarous in the presence of an altogether higher culture. The Cushites rapidly spread through the land of Shumir and Accad, and taught the people with whom they afterwards, as usual, intermarried, until both formed but one nation—with this difference, that towards the north of Chaldea the Cushite element became predominant, while in the south numbers remained on the side of the Turanians. Whether this result was attained altogether peacefully or was preceded by a period of resistance and fighting, we have no means of ascertaining. If there was such a period, it cannot have lasted long, for intellect was on the side of the newcomers, and that is a power which soon wins the day. At all events the final fusion must have been complete and friendly, since the old national legend reported by Berosus cleverly combines the two elements, by attributing the part of teacher and revealer to the Shumiro-Accad's own favorite divine being Êa, while it is not impossible that it alludes to the coming of the Cushites in making the amphibious Oannes rise out of the Persian Gulf, "where it borders on Chaldea." The legend goes on to say that Oannes set down his revelations in books which he consigned into the keeping of men, and that several more divine animals of the same kind continued to appear at long intervals. Who knows but the latter strange detail may have been meant to allude fantastically to the arrival of successive Cushite colonies? In the long run of time, of course all such meaning would be forgotten and the legend remain as a miraculous and inexplicable incident.
8. It would be vain to attempt to fix any dates for events which took place in such remote antiquity, in the absence of any evidence or document that might be grasped. Yet, by close study of facts, by laborious and ingenious comparing of later texts, of every scrap of evidence furnished by monuments, of information contained in the fragments of Berosus and of other writers, mostly Greek, it has been possible, with due caution, to arrive at some approximative dates, which, after all, are all that is needed to classify things in an order intelligible and correct in the main. Even should further discoveries and researches arrive at more exact results, the gain will be comparatively small. At such a distance, differences of a couple of centuries do not matter much. When we look down a long line of houses or trees, the more distant ones appear to run together, and we do not always see where it ends—yet we can perfectly well pursue its direction. The same with the so-called double stars in astronomy: they are stars which, though really separated by thousands of miles, appear as one on account of the immense distance between them and our eye, and only the strongest telescope lenses show them to be separate bodies, though still close together. Yet this is sufficient to assign them their place so correctly on the map of the heavens, that they do not disturb the calculations in which they are included. The same kind of perspective applies to the history of remote antiquity. As the gloom which has covered it so long slowly rolls back before the light of scientific research, we begin to discern outlines and landmarks, at first so dim and wavering as rather to mislead than to instruct; but soon the searcher's eye, sharpened by practice, fixes them sufficiently to bring them into connection with the later and more fully illumined portions of the eternally unrolling picture. Chance, to which all discoverers are so much indebted, frequently supplies such a landmark, and now and then one so firm and distinct as to become a trustworthy centre for a whole group.
9. The annals of the Assyrian king Asshurbanipal (the founder of the great Library at Nineveh) have established beyond a doubt the first positive date that has been secured for the History of Chaldea. That king was for a long time at war with the neighboring kingdom of Elam, and ended by conquering and destroying its capital, Shushan (Susa), after carrying away all the riches from the royal palace and all the statues from the great temple. This happened in the year 645 b.c. In the inscriptions in which he records this event, the king informs us that in that temple he found a statue of the Chaldean goddess Nana, which had been carried away from her own temple in the city of Urukh (Erech, now Warka) by a king of Elam of the name of Khudur-Nankhundi, who invaded the land of Accad 1635 years before, and that he, Asshurbanipal, by the goddess's own express command, took her from where she had dwelt in Elam, "a place not appointed her," and reinstated her in her own sanctuary "which she had delighted in." 1635 added to 645 make 2280, a date not to be disputed. Now if a successful Elamite invasion in 2280 found in Chaldea famous sanctuaries to desecrate, the religion to which these sanctuaries belonged, that of the Cushite, or Semitic colonists, must have been established in the country already for several, if not many, centuries. Indeed, quite recent discoveries show that it had been so considerably over a thousand years, so that we cannot possibly accept a date later than 4000 b.c. for the foreign immigration. The Shumiro-Accadian culture was too firmly rooted then and too completely worked out—as far as it went—to allow less than about 1000 years for its establishment. This takes us as far back as 5000 b.c.—a pretty respectable figure, especially when we think of the vista of time which opens behind it, and for which calculation fairly fails us. For if the Turanian settlers brought the rudiments of that culture from the highlands of Elam, how long had they sojourned there before they descended into the plains? And how long had it taken them to reach that station on their way from the race's mountain home in the far Northeast, in the Altaï valleys?
10. However that may be, 5000 b.c. is a moderate and probable date. But ancient nations were not content with such, when they tried to locate and classify their own beginnings. These being necessarily obscure and only vaguely shadowed out in traditions which gained in fancifulness and lost in probability with every succeeding generation that received them and handed them down to the next, they loved to magnify them by enshrouding them in the mystery of innumerable ages. The more appalling the figures, the greater the glory. Thus we gather from some fragments of Berosus that, according to the national Chaldean tradition, there was an interval of over 259,000 years between the first appearance of Oannes and the first king. Then come ten successive kings, each of whom reigns a no less extravagant number of years (one 36,000, another 43,000, even 64,000; 10,800 being the most modest figure), till the aggregate of all these different periods makes up the pretty sum total of 691,200 years, supposed to have elapsed from the first appearance of Oannes to the Deluge. It is so impossible to imagine so prodigious a number of years or couple with it anything at all real, that we might just as well substitute for such a figure the simpler "very, very long ago," or still better, the approved fairy tale beginning, "There was once upon a time, ..." It conveys quite as definite a notion, and would, in such a case, be the more appropriate, that all a nation's most marvellous traditions, most fabulous legends, are naturally placed in those stupendously remote ages which no record could reach, no experience control. Although these traditions and legends generally had a certain body of actual truth and dimly remembered fact in them, which might still be apparent to the learned and the cultivated few, the ignorant masses of the people swallowed the thing whole, as real history, and found things acknowledged as impossible easy to believe, for the simple reason that "it was so very long ago!" A Chaldean of Alexander's time certainly did not expect to meet a divine Man-Fish in his walks along the sea-shore, but—there was no knowing what might or might not have happened seven hundred thousand years ago! In the legend of the six successive apparitions under the first ten long-lived kings, he would not have descried the simple sense so lucidly set forth by Mr. Maspero, one of the most distinguished of French Orientalists:—"The times preceding the Deluge represented an experimental period, during which mankind, being as yet barbarous, had need of divine assistance to overcome the difficulties with which it was surrounded. Those times were filled up with six manifestations of the deity, doubtless answering to the number of sacred books in which the priests saw the most complete expression of revealed law."[AI] This presents another and more probable explanation of the legend than the one suggested above, (end of § 7); but there is no more actual proof of the one than of the other being the correct one.
11. If Chaldea was in after times a battle-ground of nations, it was in the beginning a very nursery and hive of peoples. The various races in their migrations must necessarily have been attracted and arrested by the exceeding fertility of its soil, which it is said, in the times of its highest prosperity and under proper conditions of irrigation, yielded two hundredfold return for the grain it received. Settlement must have followed settlement in rapid succession. But the nomadic element was for a long time still very prevalent, and side by side with the builders of cities and tillers of fields, shepherd tribes roamed peacefully over the face of the land, tolerated and unmolested by the permanent population, with which they mixed but warily, occasionally settling down temporarily, and shifting their settlements as safety or advantage required it,—or wandering off altogether from that common halting-place, to the north, and west, and south-west. This makes it very plain why Chaldea is given as the land where the tongues became confused and the second separation of races took place.
12. Of those principally nomadic tribes the greatest part did not belong, like the Cushites or Canaanites, to the descendants of Ham, "the Dark," but to those of Shem, whose name, signifying "Glory, Renown," stamps him as the eponymous ancestor of that race which has always firmly believed itself to be the chosen one of God. They were Semites. When they arrived on the plains of Chaldea, they were inferior in civilization to the people among whom they came to dwell. They knew nothing of city arts and had all to learn. They did learn, for superior culture always asserts its power,—even to the language of the Cushite settlers, which the latter were rapidly substituting for the rude and poor Turanian idiom of Shumir and Accad. This language, or rather various dialects of it, were common to most Hamitic and Semitic tribes, among whom that from which the Hebrews sprang brought it to its greatest perfection. The others worked it into different kindred dialects—the Assyrian, the Aramaic or Syrian, the Arabic—according to their several peculiarities. The Phœnicians of the sea-shore, and all the Canaanite nations, also spoke languages belonging to the same family, and therefore classed among the so-called Semitic tongues. Thus it has come to pass that philology,—or the Science of Languages,—adopted a wrong name for that entire group, calling the languages belonging to it, "Semitic," while, in reality, they are originally "Hamitic." The reason is that the Hamitic origin of those important languages which have been called Semitic these hundred years had not been discovered until very lately, and to change the name now would produce considerable confusion.
13. Most of the Semitic tribes who dwelt in Chaldea adopted not only the Cushite language, but the Cushite culture and religion. Asshur carried all three northward, where the Assyrian kingdom arose out of a few Babylonian colonies, and Aram westward to the land which was afterwards called Southern Syria, and where the great city of Damascus long flourished and still exists. But there was one tribe of higher spiritual gifts than the others. It was not numerous, for through many generations it consisted of only one great family governed by its own eldest chief or patriarch. It is true that such a family, with the patriarch's own children and children's children, its wealth of horses, camels, flocks of sheep, its host of servants and slaves, male and female, represented quite a respectable force; Abraham could muster three hundred eighteen armed and trained servants who had been born in his own household. This particular tribe seems to have wandered for some time on the outskirts of Chaldea and in the land itself, as indicated by the name given to its eponym in Chap. X.: Arphaxad (more correctly Arphakshad), corrupted from Areph-Kasdîm, which means, "bordering on the Chaldeans," or perhaps "boundaries"—in the sense of "land"—of the Chaldeans. Generation after generation pushed further westward, traversed the land of Shinar, crossed the Euphrates and reached the city of Ur, in or near which the tribe dwelt many years.
14. Ur was then the greatest city of Southern Chaldea. The earliest known kings of Shumir resided in it, and besides that, it was the principal commercial mart of the country. For, strange as it may appear when we look on a modern map, Ur, the ruins of which are now 150 miles from the sea, was then a maritime city, with harbor and ship docks. The waters of the Gulf reached much further inland than they do now. There was then a distance of many miles between the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Ur lay very near the mouth of the latter river. Like all commercial and maritime cities, it was the resort not only of all the different races which dwelt in the land itself, but also of foreign traders. The active intellectual life of a capital, too, which was at the same time a great religious centre and the seat of a powerful priesthood, must of necessity have favored interchange of ideas, and have exerted an influence on that Semitic tribe of whom the Bible tells us that it "went forth from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan," led by the patriarch Terah and his son Abraham (Genesis xi. 31). The historian of Genesis here, as throughout the narrative, does not mention any date whatever for the event he relates; nor does he hint at the cause of this removal. On the first of these points the study of Chaldean cuneiform monuments throws considerable light, while the latter does not admit of more than guesses—of which something hereafter.
15. Such is a broad and cursory outline of the theory according to which Cushite immigrations preceded the arrival of the Semites in the land of Shumir and Accad. Those who uphold it give several reasons for their opinion, such as that the Bible several times mentions a Cush located in the East and evidently different from the Cush which has been identified as Ethiopia; that, in Chap. X. of Genesis (8-12), Nimrod, the legendary hero, whose empire at first was in "the land of Shinar," and who is said to have "gone forth out of that land into Assyria," is called a son of Cush; that the most ancient Greek poets knew of "Ethiopians" in the far East as opposed to those of the South—and several more. Those scholars who oppose this theory dismiss it wholesale. They will not admit the existence of a Cushite element or migration in the East at all, and put down the expressions in the Bible as simple mistakes, either of the writers or copyists. According to them, there was only one immigration in the land of Shumir and Accad, that of the Semites, achieved through many ages and in numerous instalments. The language which superseded the ancient Shumiro-Accadian idiom is to them a Semitic one in the directest and most exclusive sense; the culture grafted on that of the earlier population is by them called purely "Semitic;" while their opponents frequently use the compound designation of "Cushito-Semitic," to indicate the two distinct elements of which, to them, it appears composed. It must be owned that the anti-Cushite opinion is gaining ground. Yet the Cushite theory cannot be considered as disposed of, only "not proven,"—or not sufficiently so, and therefore in abeyance and fallen into some disfavor. With this proviso we shall adopt the word "Semitic," as the simpler and more generally used.
16. It is only with the rise of Semitic culture in Southern Mesopotamia that we enter on a period which, however remote, misty, and full of blanks, may still be called, in a measure, "historical," because there is a certain number of facts, of which contemporary monuments give positive evidence. True, the connection between those facts is often not apparent; their causes and effects are frequently not to be made out save by more or less daring conjectures; still there are numerous landmarks of proven fact, and with these real history begins. No matter if broad gaps have to be left open or temporarily filled with guesses. New discoveries are almost daily turning up, inscriptions, texts, which unexpectedly here supply a missing link, there confirm or demolish a conjecture, establish or correct dates which had long been puzzles or suggested on insufficient foundations. In short, details may be supplied as yet brokenly and sparingly, but the general outline of the condition of Chaldea may be made out as far back as forty centuries before Christ.