Part 933

It should be said with regard to the foregoing classification, that it has been made as general as possible, since it is a matter of great difficulty to make clear-cut divisions on an exact ethnological basis. If a linguistic classification were attempted, a scheme largely different would have to be exhibited. … Again it should be observed that the mixture of races which was continually going on in the Semitic world is not and cannot be indicated by our classification. The Babylonians, for example, received a constant accession from Aramæans encamped on their borders, and even beyond the Tigris; but these, as well as non-Semitic elements from the mountains and plains to the east, they assimilated in speech and customs. The same general remark applies to the Aramæans of Northern Mesopotamia and Syria, while the peoples of Southern and Eastern Palestine, and in fact all the communities that bordered on the Great Desert, from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, were continually absorbing individuals or tribes of Arabian stock. Finally, it must be remarked that in some sub-divisions it is necessary to use a geographical instead of a properly racial distinction; and that is, of course, to be limited chronologically. Thus, for instance, it is impossible to devise a single strictly ethnological term for the two great divisions of the Aramæans. It is now pretty generally admitted that the home of the Semitic race, before its separation into the historical divisions, was Northern Arabia. … The historical distribution of the several families is thus best accounted for. … While among the Southern Semites the various Arab tribes remained for the most part in their desert home for thousands of years as obscure Bedawin, and the Sabæans cultivated the rich soil of the southwest and the southern coast of Arabia, and there developed cities and a flourishing commerce, and the nearly related Ethiopians, migrating across the Red Sea, slowly built up in Abyssinia an isolated civilization of their own, those branches of the race with which we are immediately concerned, after a lengthened residence in common camping grounds, moved northward and westward to engage in more important enterprises. The Babylonians, occupying the region which the Bible makes known to us as the scene of man's creation, and which historical research indicates to have been the seat of the earliest civilization, made their home on the lands of the Lower Euphrates and Tigris, converting them through canalization and irrigation into rich and powerful kingdoms finally united under the rule of Babylon. Before the union was effected, emigrants from among these Babylonians settled along the Middle Tigris, founded the city of Asshur, and later still the group of cities known to history as Nineveh. The Assyrians then, after long struggles, rose to pre-eminence in Western Asia, till after centuries of stern dominion they yielded to the new Babylonian regime founded by the Chaldæans from the shores of the Persian Gulf. The Canaanites, debarred from the riches of the East, turned northwestward at an unknown early date, and while some of them occupied and cultivated the valleys of Palestine, others seized the maritime plain and the western slope of Lebanon. On the coast of the latter region they took advantage of the natural harbours wanting in the former, and tried the resources and possibilities of the sea. As Phœnicians of Sidon and Tyre, they became the great navigators and maritime traders for the nations, and sent forth colonies over the Mediterranean. …

See PHŒNICIA.

Meanwhile the pasture lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates and between the southern desert and the northern mountains were gradually being occupied by the Aramæans, who advanced with flocks and herds along the Euphrates. … While the bulk of the Aramæans adhered to the old pastoral life among the good grazing districts in the confines of the desert, a large number, favoured by their intermediate position between urban and nomadic settlements, addicted themselves to the carrying trade between the East and the West. … This remarkable people, however, never attained to political autonomy on a large scale in their Mesopotamian home, to which for long ages they were confined. After the decline of the Hettite principalities west of the Euphrates [see HITTITES], to which they themselves largely contributed, they rapidly spread in that quarter also. They mingled with the non-Semitic Hettite inhabitants of Carchemish and Hamath, formed settlements along the slopes of Amanus and Anti-Lebanon, and created on the northeast corner of Palestine a powerful state with Damascus as the centre, which was long a rival of Israel, and even stood out against the might of Assyria. Thus the Aramæans really acted a more prominent political part to the west than they did to the east of the Euphrates, and accordingly they have been popularly most closely associated with the name 'Syria.' At the same time they did not abandon their old settlements between the Rivers. … As the latest of the historical divisions of the race to form an independent community, the Hebraic family made their permanent settlement in and about Palestine.

See JEWS.

Their common ancestors of the family of Terah emigrated from Southern Babylonia more than two thousand years before the Christian era. It is highly probable that they were of Aramæan stock."

_J. F. McCurdy, History, Prophecy and the Monuments, book 1, chapter 2 (volume 1)._

"The Hebrews … divided the country of Aram [between the [Mediterranean and the Euphrates] into several regions;

1st Aram Naharaim, or 'Aram of the two rivers,' that is, the Mesopotamia of the Greeks, between the Euphrates and the Tigris;

2d Aram properly so called, that is, Syria, whose most ancient and important city was Damascus; and

3d Aram Zobah, or the region in which in later times was formed the kingdom of Palmyra."

_F. Lenormant and E. Chevalier, Manual of the Ancient History of the East, book 1, chapter 4._

"The Semitic home is distinguished by its central position in geography—between Asia and Africa, and between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, which is Europe; and the rôle in history of the Semitic race has been also intermediary. The Semites have been the great middlemen of the world. Not second-rate in war, they have risen to the first rank in commerce and religion. They have been the carriers between East and West, they have stood between the great ancient civilizations and those which go to make up the modern world; while by a higher gift, for which their conditions neither in place nor in time fully account, they have been mediary between God and man, and proved the religious teachers of the world, through whom have come its three highest faiths, its only universal religions."

_George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, page 5._

{2888}

"If we ask what the Semitic peoples have contributed to this organic and living whole which is called civilization, we shall find, in the first place, that, in polity, we owe them nothing at all. Political life is perhaps the most peculiar and native characteristic of the Indo-European nations. These nations are the only ones that have known liberty, that have reconciled the State with the independence of the individual. … In art and poetry what do we owe to them? In art nothing. These tribes have but little of the artist; our art comes entirely from Greece. In poetry, nevertheless, without being their tributaries, we have with them more than one bond of union. The Psalms have become in some respects one of our sources of poetry. Hebrew poetry has taken a place with us beside Greek poetry, not as having furnished a distinct order of poetry, but as constituting a poetic ideal, a sort of Olympus where in consequence of an accepted prestige everything is suffused with a halo of light. … Here again, however, all the shades of expression, all the delicacy, all the depth is our work. The thing essentially poetic is the destiny of man; his melancholy moods, his restless search after causes, his just complaint to heaven. There was no necessity of going to strangers to learn this. The eternal school here is each man's soul. In science and philosophy we are exclusively Greek. The investigation of causes, knowledge for knowledge's own sake, is a thing of which there is no trace previous to Greece, a thing that we have learned from her alone. Babylon possessed a science, but it had not that pre-eminently scientific principle, the absolute fixedness of natural law. … We owe to the Semitic race neither political life, art, poetry, philosophy, nor science. What then do we owe to them? We owe to them religion. The whole world, if we except India, China, Japan, and tribes altogether savage, has adopted the Semitic religions. The civilized world comprises only Jews, Christians, and Mussulmans. The Indo-European race in particular, excepting the Brahmanic family and the feeble relics of the Parsees, has gone over completely to the Semitic faiths. What has been the cause of this strange phenomenon? How happens it that the nations who hold the supremacy of the world have renounced their own creed to adopt that of the people they have conquered? The primitive worship of the Indo-European race … was charming and profound, like the imagination of the nations themselves. It was like an echo of nature, a sort of naturalistic hymn, in which the idea of one sole cause appears but occasionally and uncertainly. It was a child's religion, full of artlessness and poetry, but destined to crumble at the first demand of thought. Persia first effected its reform (that which is associated with the name of Zoroaster) under influences and at an epoch unknown to us. Greece, in the time of Pisistratus, was already dissatisfied with her religion, and was turning towards the East. In the Roman period, the old pagan worship had become utterly insufficient. It no longer addressed the imagination; it spoke feebly to the moral sense. The old myths on the forces of nature had become changed into fables, not unfrequently amusing and ingenious; but destitute of all religious value. It is precisely at this epoch that the civilized world finds itself face to face with the Jewish faith. Based upon the clear and simple dogma of the divine unity, discarding naturalism and pantheism by the marvellously terse phrase: 'In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,' possessing a law, a book, the depository of grand moral precepts and of an elevated religious poetry, Judaism had an incontestable superiority, and it might have been foreseen then that some day the world would become Jewish, that is to say would forsake the old mythology for Monotheism."

_E. Renan, Studies of Religious History and Criticism, pages 154-160._

SEMITES: Primitive Babylonia.

"The Babylonians were … the first of the Semites to enter the arena of history, and they did so by virtue of the civilization to which they attained in and through their settlements on the Lower Euphrates and Tigris. … The unrivalled fertility of the soil of Babylonia was the result not only of the quality of the soil, but of the superadded benefits of the colossal system of drainage and canalization which was begun by the ingenuity of the first civilized inhabitants. Of the natural elements of fertility, the Euphrates contributed by far the larger share. … The … formations of clay, mud, and gypsum, comprising elements of the richest soil, are found in such profusion in Babylonia that in the days of ancient civilization it was the most fruitful portion of the whole earth with the possible exception of the valley of the Nile. It was roughly reckoned by Herodotus to equal in productiveness half the rest of Asia. … The rise of the Semites in Babylonia, like all other origins, is involved in obscurity. The earliest authentic records, drawn as they are from their own monuments, reveal this gifted race as already in possession of a high degree of civilization, with completed systems of national religion, a language already long past its formative period, and a stage of advancement in art that testifies to the existence of a wealthy class of taste and leisure, to whom their nomadic ancestry must have been little more than a vague tradition. The same records also show this Semitic people to have extended their sway in Western Asia as far as the Mediterranean coastland many centuries before Phœnicians or Hebrews or Hettites came before the world in any national or corporate form. Questions of deep interest arise in connection with such facts as these. It is asked: Did the Babylonian Semites develop the elements of their civilization alone, or did they inherit that of another race? … In the absence of direct evidence to the contrary, we are entitled to assume that the same race who in historical times gave proof of high mental endowments reached their unique level of intellectual attainment by a process of self-education. A contrary opinion is held by many scholars of high rank. I refer to the well-known theory that the Semitic Babylonians acquired their civilization from another people who preceded them in the occupation and cultivation of the country.

See BABYLONIA, PRIMITIVE.

{2889}

This hypothetical race is named Sumerian from the term Sumer, generally, but erroneously, supposed to be the designation of Southern Babylonia. With this in the Inscriptions is coupled the name of Akkad, another geographical term properly connoting Northern Babylonia. This appellation has given rise to the name 'Akkadian;' used by most of these modern authorities to designate a supposed subdivision of the same people, speaking a dialect of the main Sumerian language. … The Sumerian theory has played a great role in linguistic and ethnological research during the last twenty years. The general aspect of the supposed language led at once to its being classed with the agglutinative families of speech, and the inevitable 'Turanian' conveniently opened its hospitable doors. … While we are … obliged, until further light shall have been cast upon the subject, to assume that the earliest type of Babylonian culture was mainly of Semitic origin, it would be rash to assert that people of that race were the sole occupants of the lower River country in prehistoric times, or that they received no important contributions to their development from any outside races. … It … remains for us to assume it to be possible that an antecedent or contemporanous people bore a small share with the Semites in the early development of the country, and that, as a result of their contact with the stronger race, they bequeathed to it some of the elements of the surviving religion, mythology, and popular superstition."

_J. F. McCurdy, History, Prophecy and the Monuments, book 2, chapter 1 (volume 1)._

"As to the ancient history of Babylon, it is well to learn to be patient and to wait. The progress of discovery and decipherment is so rapid, that what is true this year is shown to be wrong next year. … This is no discredit to the valiant pioneers in this glorious campaign. On the contrary it speaks well for their perseverance and for their sense of truth. I shall only give you one instance to show what I mean by calling the ancient periods of Babylonian history also constructive rather than authentic. My friend Professor Sayce claims 4000 B. C. as the beginning of Babylonian literature. Nabonidus, he tells us (Hibbert Lectures, page 21), in 550 B. C. explored the great temple of the Sun god at Sippara. This temple was believed to have been founded by Naram Sin, the son of Sargon. Nabonidus, however, lighted upon the actual foundation-stone—a stone, we are told, which had not been seen by any of his predecessors for 3,200 years. On the strength of this the date of 3,200 + 550 years, that is, 3750 B. C., is assigned to Naram Sin, the son of Sargon. These two kings, however, are said to be quite modern, and to have been preceded by a number of so-called Proto-Chaldæan kings, who spoke a Proto-Chaldæan language, long before the Semitic population had entered the land. It is concluded, further, from some old inscriptions on diorite, brought from the Peninsula of Sinai to Chaldæa, that the quarries of Sinai, which were worked by the Egyptians at the time of their third dynasty, say six thousand years ago, may have been visited about the same time by these Proto-Chaldæans. 4000 B. C., we are told, would therefore be a very moderate initial epoch for Babylonian and Egyptian literature. I am the very last person to deny the ingeniousness of these arguments, or to doubt the real antiquity of the early civilization of Babylon or Egypt. All I wish to point out is, that we should always keep before our eyes the constructive character of this ancient history and chronology. To use a foundation-stone, on its own authority, as a stepping-stone over a gap of 3,200 years, is purely constructive chronology, and as such is to be carefully distinguished from what historians mean by authentic history, as when Herodotus or Thucydides tells us what happened during their own lives or before their own eyes."

_F. Max Müller, On the "Enormous Antiquity" of the East (Nineteenth Century, 1891)._

"Dr. Tiele rejects the name 'Accadian,' which has been adopted by so many Assyriologists, and is strongly indisposed to admit Turanian affinities. Yet he is so_far from accepting the alternative theory of Halévy and Guyard, that this so-called Accadian, or Sumerian, is only another way of writing Assyrian, that he can scarcely comprehend how a man of learning and penetration can maintain such a strange position. He seems to consider a positive decision in the present stage of the inquiry premature; but pronounces the hypothesis which lies at the basis of the Accadian theory, namely, that the peculiarities of the cuneiform writing are explicable only by the assumption that it was originally intended for another language than the Assyrian, to be by far the most probable. He calls this language, which may or may not have been non-Semitic, 'Old Chaldee,' because what was later on called Chaldaea 'was certainly its starting-point in Mesopotamia.' The superiority of this name to 'Accadian' or 'Sumerian' is not very obvious, as the name 'Chaldee' is not found before the ninth century B. C., while the oldest title of the Babylonian kings is 'king of Sumir and Accad.' In the interesting account of the provinces and cities of Babylonia and Assyria, … two identifications which have found much favour with Assyriologists are mentioned in a very sceptical way. The 'Ur' of Abraham is generally believed, with Schrader, to be the 'El Mughair' of the Arabs. Dr. Tiele coldly observes that this identification, though not impossible, is not proved. Again, the tower of Babel is identified by Schrader either with Babil on the left side of the river, or with Birs Nimrud (Borsippa) on the right side. Dr. Tiele considers the latter site impossible, because Borsippa is always spoken of as a distinct place, and was too distant from Babylon for the supposed outer wall of the great city to enclose it. He also rejects Schrader's theory that the name Nineveh in later times included Dur Sargon (Khorsabad), Resen, and Calah, as well as Nineveh proper. The history is divided into four periods:

1. The old Babylonian period, from the earliest days down to the time when Assyria was sufficiently strong and independent to contend with Babylon on equal terms.

2. The first Assyrian period down to the accession of Tiglath-pileser II. in 745 B. C.

3. The Second Assyrian Period, from 745 B. C. to the Fall of Nineveh.

4. The New Babylonian Empire.

In treating of the first period, Dr. Tiele makes no attempt to deal with the Deluge Tablets as a source of historical knowledge, putting them on one side apparently as purely mythical. He despairs of tracing Babylonian culture to its earliest home. The belief that it originated on the shores of the Persian Gulf seems to him uncertain, but he is not able to fill the gap with any other satisfactory hypothesis. Babylonian history begins for him with Sargon I., whom he regards as most probably either of Semitic descent or a representative of Semitic sovereignty. He is sceptical about the early date assigned to this king by Nabunahid, the thirty-eighth century B. C., and is disposed to regard the quaint story of his concealment when an infant in a basket of reeds as a solar myth; but he is compelled to admit as solid fact the amazing statements of the inscriptions about his mighty empire 'extending from Elam to the coast of the Mediterranean and the borders of Egypt, nay, even to Cyprus.' So early as 1850 B. C., he thinks, the supremacy of Babylon had been established for centuries."

_Review of Dr. Tiele's History of Babylonia and Assyria (Academy, January 1, 1887)._

ALSO IN: _The Earliest History of Babylonia (Quarterly Review, October, 1894, reviewing "Découvertes en Chaldée, par Ernest de Sarsec)._

{2890}

SEMITES: The First Babylonian Empire.