proper, that part of Mesopotamia where Babylon was, and south of it,
almost to the Gulf. "They" are descendants of Noah, long after the
Flood. They found the plain and dwelt there, but they did not find the
whole land desert; it had been occupied long before them. How long? For
such remote ages an exact valuation of time in years is not to be
thought of.
2. What people were those whom the descendants of Noah found in the land
to which they came from the East? It seems a simple question, yet no
answer could have been given to it even as lately as fifteen or sixteen
years ago, and when the answer was first suggested by unexpected
discoveries made in the Royal Library at Nineveh, it startled the
discoverers extremely. The only indication on the subject then known was
this, from a Chaldean writer of a late period: "There was originally at
Babylon" (i.e., in the land of Babylon, not the city alone) "a multitude
of men of foreign race who had settled in Chaldea." This is told by
Berosus, a learned priest of Babylon, who lived immediately after
Alexander the Great had conquered the country, and when the Greeks ruled
it (somewhat after 300 B.C.). He wrote a history of it from the most
ancient times, in which he gave an account of the oldest traditions
concerning its beginnings. As he wrote his book in Greek, it is probable
that his object was to acquaint the new masters with the history and
religion of the land and people whom they had come to rule.
Unfortunately the work was lost--as so many valuable works have been, as
long as there was no printing, and books existed only in a few
manuscript copies--and we know of it only some short fragments, quoted
by later writers, in whose time Berosus' history was still accessible.
The above lines are contained in one such fragment, and naturally led to
the question: who were these men of foreign race who came from somewhere
else and settled in Chaldea in immemorial times?
3. One thing appears clear: they belonged to none of the races classed
in the Bible as descended from Noah, but probably to one far older,
which had not been included in the Flood.
4. For it begins to be pretty generally understood nowadays that the
Flood may not have been absolutely universal, but have extended over the
countries _which the Hebrews knew_, which made _their_ world, and that
not literally all living beings except those who are reported to have
been in the Ark may have perished in it. From a negligent habit of
reading Chap. VI.-IX. of Genesis without reference to the texts of other
chapters of the same Book, it has become a general habit to understand
it in this literal manner. Yet the evidence is by no means so positive.
The question was considered an open one by profounder students even in
antiquity, and freely discussed both among the Jews themselves and the
Fathers of the early Christian Church. The following are the statements
given in the Book of Genesis; we have only to take them out of their
several places and connect them.
5. When Cain had killed his brother Abel, God banished him from the
_earth_ which had received his brother's blood and laid a curse on him:
"a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the _earth_"--using another
word than the first time, one which means earth in general (_éréç_), in
opposition to _the_ earth (_adâmâh_), or fruitful land to the east of
Eden, in which Adam and Eve dwelt after their expulsion. Then Cain went
forth, still further East, and dwelt in a land which was called "the
land of Nod," _i.e._, "of wandering" or "exile." He had a son, Enoch,
after whom he named the city which he built,--the first city,--and
descendants. Of these the fifth, Lamech, a fierce and lawless man, had
three sons, two of whom, Jabal and Jubal, led a pastoral and nomadic
life; but the third, Tubalcain, invented the use of metals: he was "the
forger of every cutting instrument of brass and iron." This is what the
Chap. IV. of Genesis tells of Cain, his crime, his exile and immediate
posterity. After that they are heard of no more. Adam, meanwhile, has a
third son, born after he had lost the first two and whom he calls Seth
(more correctly _Sheth_). The descendants of this son are enumerated in
Chap. V.; the list ends with Noah. These are the parallel races: the
accursed and the blest, the proscribed of God and the loved of God, the
one that "goes out of the presence of the Lord" and the one that "calls
on the name of the Lord," and "walks with God." Of the latter race the
last-named, Noah, is "a just man, perfect in his generation," and "finds
grace in the eyes of the Lord."
6. Then comes the narrative of the Flood (Chap. VI.-VIII.), the covenant
of God with Noah and re-peopling of the earth by his posterity (Chap.
IX.). Lastly Chap. X. gives us the list of the generations of Noah's
three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet;--"of these were the nations divided in
the earth after the flood."
7. Now this tenth chapter of Genesis is the oldest and most important
document in existence concerning the origins of races and nations, and
comprises all those with whom the Jews, in the course of their early
history, have had any dealings, at least all those who belonged to the
great white division of mankind. But in order properly to understand it
and appreciate its value and bearing, it must not be forgotten that EACH
NAME IN THE LIST IS THAT OF A RACE, A PEOPLE OR A TRIBE, NOT THAT OF A
MAN. It was a common fashion among the Orientals--a fashion adopted also
by ancient European nations--to express in this manner the kindred
connections of nations among themselves and their differences. Both for
brevity and clearness, such historical genealogies are very convenient.
They must have been suggested by a proceeding most natural in ages of
ignorance, and which consists in a tribe's explaining its own name by
taking it for granted that it was that of its founder. Thus the name of
the Assyrians is really Asshur. Why? Clearly, they would answer, if
asked the question, because their kingdom was founded by one whose name
was Asshur. Another famous nation, the Aramæans, are supposed to be so
called because the name of their founder was Aram; the Hebrews name
themselves from a similarly supposed ancestor, Heber. These three
nations,--and several more, the Arabs among others--spoke languages so
much alike that they could easily understand each other, and had
generally many common features in looks and character. How account for
that? By making their founders, Asshur, and Aram, and Heber, etc., sons
or descendants of one great head or progenitor, Shem, a son of Noah. It
is a kind of parable which is extremely clear once one has the key to
it, when nothing is easier than to translate it into our own sober,
positive forms of speech. The above bit of genealogy would read thus: A
large portion of humanity is distinguished by certain features more or
less peculiar to itself; it is one of several great races, and has been
called for more than a hundred years the Semitic, (better Shemitic)
race, the race of Shem. This race is composed of many different tribes
and nations, who have gone each its own way, have each its own name and
history, speak dialects of the same original language, and have
preserved many common ideas, customs and traits of character,--which all
shows that the race was once united and dwelt together, then, as it
increased in numbers, broke up into fractions, of which some rose to be
great and famous nations and some remained comparatively insignificant
tribes. The same applies to the subdivisions of the great white race
(the whitest of all) to which nearly all the European nations belong,
and which is personified in the Bible under the name of Japhet, third
son of Noah,--and to those of a third great race, also originally white,
which is broken up into very many fractions, both great nations and
scattered tribes, all exhibiting a decided likeness to each other. The
Bible gives the names of all these most carefully, and sums up the whole
of them under the name of the second son of Noah, Ham, whom it calls
their common progenitor.
8. That the genealogies of Chap. X. of Genesis should be understood in
this sense, has long been admitted by scientists and churchmen. St.
Augustine, one of the greatest among the Fathers of the early church,
pointedly says that the names in it represent "nations, not men."[AA] On
the other hand there is also literal truth in them, in this way, that,
if all mankind is descended from one human couple, every fraction of it
must necessarily have had some one particular father or ancestor, only
in so remote a past that his individuality or actual name cannot
possibly have been remembered, when every people, as has been remarked
above, naturally gave him its own name. Of these names many show by
their very nature that they could not have belonged to individuals. Some
are plural, like MIZRAIM, "the Egyptians;" some have the article: "_the_
AMORITE, _the_ HIVITE;" one even is the name of a city: SIDON is called
"the first-born of Canaan;" now Sidon was long the greatest maritime
city of the Canaanites, who held an undisputed supremacy over the rest,
and therefore "the first-born." The name means "fisheries"--an
appropriate one for a city on the sea, which must of course have been at
first a settlement of fishermen. "CANAAN" really is the name of a vast
region, inhabited by a great many nations and tribes, all differing from
each other in many ways, yet manifestly of one race, wherefore they are
called "the sons of Canaan," Canaan being personified in a common
ancestor, given as one of the four sons of Ham. Modern science has, for
convenience' sake, adopted a special word for such imaginary personages,
invented to account for a nation's, tribe's, or city's name, while
summing up, so to speak, its individuality: they are called EPONYMS. The
word is Greek, and means "one from whom or for whom somebody or
something is named," a "namesake." It is not too much to say that, while
popular tradition always claims that the eponymous ancestor or
city-founder gave his name to his family, race, or city, the contrary is
in reality invariably the case, the name of the race or city being
transferred to him. Or, in other words, the eponym is really only that
name, transformed into a traditional person by a bold and vivid poetical
figure of speech, which, if taken for what it is, makes the beginnings
of political history wonderfully plain and easy to grasp and classify.
9. Yet, complete and correct as is the list of Chap. X., within the
limits which the writer has set to himself, it by no means exhausts the
nations of the earth. The reason of the omissions, however, is easily
seen. Among the posterity of Japhet the Greeks indeed are mentioned,
(under the name of JAVAN, which should be pronounced _Yawan_, and some
of his sons), but not a single one of the other ancient peoples of
Europe,--Germans, Italians, Celts, etc.,--who also belonged to that
race, as we, their descendants, do. But then, at the time Chap. X. was
written, these countries, from their remoteness, were outside of the
world in which the Hebrews moved, beyond their horizon, so to speak.
They either did not know them at all, or, having nothing to do with
them, did not take them into consideration. In neither case would they
have been given a place in the great list. The same may be said of
another large portion of the same race, which dwelt to the far East and
South of the Hebrews--the Hindoos, (the white conquerors of India), and
the Persians. There came a time indeed, when the latter not only came
into contact with the Jews, but were their masters; but either that was
after Chap. X. was written or the Persians were identified by the
writers with a kindred nation, the Persians' near neighbor, who had
flourished much earlier and reacted in many ways on the countries
westward of it; this nation was the MEDES, who, under the name of MADAI,
are mentioned as one of the sons of Japhet, with Javan the Greek.
10. More noticeable and more significant than these partial omissions is
the determination with which the authors of Chap. X. consistently ignore
all those divisions of mankind which do not belong to one of the three
great _white_ races. Neither the Black nor the Yellow races are
mentioned at all; they are left without the pale of the Hebrew
brotherhood of nations. Yet the Jews, who staid three or four hundred
years in Egypt, surely learned there to know the real negro, for the
Egyptians were continually fighting with pure-blood black tribes in the
south and south-west, and bringing in thousands of black captives, who
were made to work at their great buildings and in their stone-quarries.
But these people were too utterly barbarous and devoid of all culture or
political importance to be taken into account. Besides, the Jews could
not be aware of the vast extent of the earth occupied by the black race,
since the greater part of Africa was then unknown to the world, and so
were the islands to the south of India, also Australia and its
islands--all seats of different sections of that race.
11. The same could not be said of the Yellow Race. True, its principal
representatives, the nations of the far East of Asia--the Chinese, the
Mongols and the Mandchous,--could not be known to the Hebrews at any
time of antiquity, but there were more than enough representatives of
it who could not be _un_known to them.[AB] For it was both a very old
and extremely numerous race, which early spread over the greater part of
the earth and at one time probably equalled in numbers the rest of
mankind. It seems always to have been broken up into a great many tribes
and peoples, whom it has been found convenient to gather under the
general designation of TURANIANS, from a very ancient name,--TUR or
TURA--which was given them by the white population of Persia and Central
Asia, and which is still preserved in that of one of their principal
surviving branches, the TURKS. All the different members of this great
family have had very striking features in common,--the most
extraordinary being an incapability of reaching the highest culture, of
progressing indefinitely, improving continually. A strange law of their
being seems to have condemned them to stop short, when they had attained
a certain, not very advanced, stage. Thus their speech has remained
extremely imperfect. They spoke, and such Turanian nations as now exist
still speak, languages, which, however they may differ, all have this
peculiarity, that they are composed either entirely of monosyllables,
(the most rudimentary form of speech), or of monosyllables pieced into
words in the stiffest, most unwieldy manner, stuck together, as it
were, with nothing to join them, wherefore this kind of language has
been called _agglutinative_. Chinese belongs to the former class of
languages, the "monosyllabic," Turkish to the latter, the
"agglutinative." Further, the Turanians were probably the first to
invent writing, but never went in that art beyond having one particular
sign for every single word--(such is Chinese writing with its forty
thousand signs or thereabouts, as many as words in the language)--or at
most a sign for every syllable. They had beautiful beginnings of poetry,
but in that also never went beyond beginnings. They were also probably
the first who built cities, but were wanting in the qualities necessary
to organize a society, establish a state on solid and lasting
foundations. At one time they covered the whole of Western Asia, dwelt
there for ages before any other race occupied it,--fifteen hundred
years, according to a very trustworthy tradition,--and were called by
the ancients "the oldest of men;" but they vanish and are not heard of
any more the moment that white invaders come into the land; these drive
the Turanians before them, or bring them into complete subjection, or
mix with them, but, by force of their own superiorly gifted nature,
retain the dominant position, so that the others lose all separate
existence. Thus it was everywhere. For wherever tribes of the three
Biblical races came, they mostly found Turanian populations who had
preceded them. There are now a great number of Turanian tribes, more or
less numerous--Kirghizes, Bashkirs, Ostiaks, Tunguzes, etc.,
etc.--scattered over the vast expanse of Siberia and Eastern Russia,
where they roam at will with their flocks and herds of horses,
occasionally settling down,--fragmentary remnants of a race which, to
this latest time, has preserved its original peculiarities and
imperfections, whose day is done, which has long ceased to improve,
unless it assimilates with the higher white race and adopts their
culture, when all that it lacked is supplied by the nobler element which
mixes with it, as in the case of the Hungarians, one of the most
high-spirited and talented nations of Europe, originally of Turanian
stock. The same may be said, in a lesser degree, of the Finns--the
native inhabitants of the Russian principality of Finland.
12. All this by no means goes to show that the Yellow Race has ever been
devoid of fine faculties and original genius. Quite the contrary; for,
if white races everywhere stepped in, took the work of civilization out
of their hands and carried it on to a perfection of which they were
incapable, still they, the Turanians, had everywhere _begun_ that work,
it was their inventions which the others took up and improved: and we
must remember that it is very much easier to improve than to invent.
Only there is that strange limitation to their power of progress and
that want of natural refinement, which are as a wall that encloses them
around. Even the Chinese, who, at first sight, are a brilliant
exception, are not so on a closer inspection. True, they have founded
and organized a great empire which still endures; they have a vast
literature, they have made most important inventions--printing,
manufacturing paper out of rags, the use of the compass,
gunpowder--centuries before European nations made them in their turn.
Yet the latter do all those things far better; they have improved these,
to them, new inventions more in a couple of hundred years than the
Chinese in a thousand. In fact it is a good many centuries since the
Chinese have ceased to improve anything at all. Their language and
writing are childishly imperfect, though the oldest in existence. In
government, in the forms of social life, in their ideas generally, they
follow rules laid down for them three thousand years ago or more and
from which to swerve a hair's breadth were blasphemy. As they have
always stubbornly resisted foreign influences, and gone the length of
trying actually to erect material walls between themselves and the rest
of the world, their empire is a perfectly fair specimen of what the
Yellow Race can do, if left entirely to itself, and quite as much of
what it can_not_ do, and now they have for centuries presented that
unique phenomenon--a great nation at a standstill.
13. All this obviously leads us to a very interesting and suggestive
question: what is this great race which we find everywhere at the very
roots of history, so that not only ancient tradition calls them "the
oldest of men," but modern science more and more inclines to the same
opinion? Whence came it? How is it not included in the great family of
nations, of which Chap. X. of Genesis gives so clear and comprehensive a
scheme? Parallel to this question arises another: what became of Cain's
posterity? What, above all, of the descendants of those three sons of
Lamech, whom the writer of Genesis clearly places before us as heads of
nations and thinks of sufficient importance to specify what their
occupations were? (See Genesis iv. 19-22.) Why do we never hear any more
of this entire half of humanity, severed in the very beginning from the
other half--the lineage of the accursed son from that of the blest and
favored son? And may not the answer to this series of questions be the
answer to the first series also?
14. With regard to the second series this answer is plain and decisive.
The descendants of Cain were necessarily out of the pale of the Hebrew
world. The curse of God, in consequence of which their forefather is
said to have gone "out of the presence of the Lord," at once and forever
separated them from the posterity of the pious son, from those who
"walked with God." The writer of Genesis tells us that they lived in the
"Land of Exile" and multiplied, then dismisses them. For what could the
elect, the people of God, or even those other nations who went astray,
who were repeatedly chastised, but whose family bond with the righteous
race was never entirely severed--what could they have in common with the
banished, the castaway, the irretrievably accursed? These did not count,
they were not of humanity. What more probable, therefore, than that,
being excluded from all the other narratives, they should not be
included in that of the Flood? And in that case, who should they be but
that most ancient race, set apart by its color and several striking
peculiarities, which everywhere preceded their white brethren, but were
invariably supplanted by them and not destined to supremacy on the
earth? This supposition has been hazarded by men of great genius, and if
bold, still has much to support it; if confirmed it would solve many
puzzles, throw strong and unexpected light on many obscure points. The
very antiquity of the Yellow Race tallies admirably with the Biblical
narrative, for of the two Biblical brothers Cain was the eldest. And the
doom laid on the race, "a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be on the
earth," has not been revoked through all ages. Wherever pure Turanians
are--they are nomads. And when, fifteen hundred years ago and later,
countless swarms of barbarous people flooded Europe, coming from the
east, and swept all before them, the Turanian hordes could be known
chiefly by this, that they destroyed, burned, laid waste--and passed,
vanished: whereas the others, after treating a country quite as
savagely, usually settled in it and founded states, most of which exist
even now--for, French, German, English, Russian, we are all descended
from some of those barbarous invaders. And this also would fully explain
how it came to pass that, although the Hebrews and their
forefathers--let us say the Semites generally--everywhere found
Turanians on their way, nay, dwelt in the same lands with them, the
sacred historian ignores them completely, as in Gen. xi. 2.
15. For they were Turanians, arrived at a, for them, really high state
of culture, who peopled the land of Shinar, when "_they_"--descendants
of Noah,--journeying in the East, found that plain where they dwelt for
many years.
FOOTNOTES:
[AA] "_Gentes non homines._" (_De Civitate Dei_, XVII., 3.)
[AB] If, as has been suggested, the "land of Sinim" in Isaiah xlix., 12,
is meant for China, such a solitary, incidental and unspecified mention
of a country the name of which may have been vaguely used to express the
remotest East, cannot invalidate the scheme so evidently and
persistently pursued in the composition of Chap. X.
III.
TURANIAN CHALDEA.--SHUMIR AND ACCAD.--THE BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION.