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JLJHPaHjs of Bible Bnotoletogi
XVI
The
Races of the Old Testament
A. H. SAYCE, LL.D.
AUTHOR OF
FRESH LIGHT FROM THE MONUMENTS
THE HlTTITES, OR THE STORY OF A FORGOTTEN EMPIRE, ETC.
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY
I ATKRNOSTKK Ko\V. 65 ST. l AUL*S CIIURCHYAkI>
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HORACE HART, PRINTER To THE UNIVERSITY
PREFACE.
THE following pages must be received with the
indulgence due to first attempts in a new field of
research. Ethnology itself is but a young science, still
busied in collecting its facts and arranging its materials ;
biblical ethnology is younger still. Indeed, it is only
within the last three or four years that a study of the
ethnology of the Old Testament has become possible.
We owe the greater part of the materials upon which it
must be based to that prince of living excavators and
practical archaeologists, Mr. Flinders Petrie. The casts
and photographs of the ethnographic types represented
on the Egyptian monuments, which he made for the
British Association in the winter of 1886-7, have at last
given us a solid foundation upon which to work. To
Mr. R. S. Poole belongs the merit of first calling the
attention of anthropologists to the unexplored mine of
facts preserved in the pictures of the ancient Egyptian
artists, and to the leading members of the Anthropo
logical Institute that of obtaining a grant for their
reproduction. But the grant by itself would not have
carried us very far ; there were needed the seeing eye
A 2
4 PREFACE.
and the observing mind of the explorer, to select the
most typical and best preserved examples, and to photo
graph or model them with scientific skill. The results
of Mr. Petrie s labours are given in the Report of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science for
1887, in a report by Mr. Petrie himself on Racial
Photographs from the ancient Egyptian Pictures and
Sculptures, and in a supplementary paper by the Rev.
H. G. Tomkins on the Collection of Ethnographic
Types in Egypt. Further articles on the same subject
have been published by Mr. Tomkins and Mr. Petrie in
the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, and the
Babylonian and Oriental Record, references to which
will be found in the footnotes to the present volume.
With characteristic generosity, Mr. Petrie has allowed
an unrestricted use to be made of his photographs in
illustrating the pages which follow. Those who desire
a complete set of the photographs, which number several
hundreds, can obtain them at the low price of 45^. from
Mr. Browning Hogg, 75 High Street, Bromley, Kent.
Apart from these photographs there is little published
material available for the student of Old Testament
ethnology. Most of the Assyrian and Babylonian
examples must be studied in the original bas-reliefs and
terra-cotta figures in the British Museum ; the figures
of the Armenian soldiers depicted on the bronze gates
of Balawat are reproduced in the plates accompanying
the memoir on The Bronze Ornaments of the Palace Gates
from Balawat, published by the Society of Biblical
PREP ACE. 5
Archaeology ; while the photographs of the early
Chaldacan heads discovered at Tello, and now in the
Louvre, will be found in the beautifully-executed plates
(3, 6, 12, and 22) of de Sarzec and Heuzey s Dhouvertes
en Chaldte.
The pictures and sculptures bequeathed to us by the
Egyptians have, however, an ethnological value far
exceeding that of other similar relics of Oriental anti
quity. The Egyptian artist had an innate gift for
portraiture ; he seized at once the salient traits in an
individual face, and reproduced them with almost photo
graphic fidelity. The trustworthiness of his likenesses
can be proved in numerous instances. Doubtless at
times he may have exaggerated some striking feature in
the head of a foreigner, and Dr. Garson has remarked
to me that in certain cases the forehead is made to
recede unnaturally. But such exaggerations only bring
into stronger relief a racial peculiarity, and it may after
all be questioned whether the exaggeration is as great
as it seems. At all events a comparison of the Hittite
profile as drawn by the Egyptians with the profile as
drawn upon the Hittite monuments by the Hittites
themselves goes to show that the exaggeration was not
on the Egyptian side. We have only to look at the
heads in the inscriptions published by Dr. Wright in his
Empire of the Hittites (plates viii and ix) to assure our
selves of the fact.
The Egyptian artists took as their models the
prisoners whom the Pharaoh had led with him into
6 PREFACE.
Egypt. They drew consequently from life, and it is
astonishing what a close racial resemblance exists in
every instance between the members of a group which
comes from the same locality, in spite of the individual
differences of detail which the artist has been careful to
note. Though the individual face may have peculiarities
of its own, the racial type presented by it can never be
mistaken. Of course in the case of the Egyptians them
selves the ethnologist has an assistance which he does
not possess in the case of their enemies or allies. The
portraits of the natives of the valley of the Nile which
they have bequeathed to us in statuary or in painting,
are supplemented by the mummies in which the actual
features of the dead are still preserved. Professor
Virchow s measurements of the skulls of the Pharaohs,
whose mummies were found at Deir el-Bahari, illustrate
the advantage this has been to the anthropologist.
In the course of the following pages more than one
new fact will be found to be announced for the first
time. Thus the geographical position of the Zakkur
of the Egyptian monuments has at last been settled
by a papyrus obtained last winter by Mr. Golenischeff,
with the further consequence that they must be the
Teukrians of Salamis in Cyprus. A definite habitation
has accordingly been obtained for those enemies of
Egypt who, in the age after the Exodus, descended
upon her from the islands of the north.
Before concluding I must offer an apology for the
repetitions which will be met with in the volume. They
PREFACE. .7
have been due to the necessity of making the book intel
ligible to readers who are not ethnologists by profession.
In fact one of my main difficulties in writing it has been
to present a new department of ethnological study in a
clear and readable form. Terms like dolichocephalic
and leptorrhine must indeed occur, explanations must
be given of the mode in which skulls are measured and
the facial angle determined, but I hope that I have suc
ceeded in making the scientific meaning of such terms
clear to every reader, and in robbing the explanations of
some portion of their repellent character. It must be
remembered, however, that it is impossible to treat a
scientific subject, if it is to be of any scientific value, in
what is called a purely popular manner. We may
make science intelligible to the educated public ; it
ought to be the aim of every man of science to do so ;
but intelligibility is one thing, the inaccurate super
ficiality which is too often signified by popular writing
is another.
In one respect I have ventured to break the rule laid
down for those who wish to gain the ear of a wide
audience. I have given references in the footnotes from
time to time for the statements made in the text. Many
of the conclusions of ethnology are still disputed, and
many of its facts, more especially those bearing on the
races of the Old Testament, are hidden away in learned
journals. For the sake of clearness I have often had to
speak positively where the evidence does not yet amount
to more than preponderant probability, and in such cases
8 PREP ACE.
it is right that those who wish to study the subject more
in detail should know where to look for the facts relating
to it. Where references are not given it means that the
statement in the text is generally accepted, or rests (a.s
in the case of the cuneiform inscriptions) on the authority
of the author, or finally is one on which the Biblical
ethnologist is not called upon to give a decided opinion.
This is fortunately the case as regards the discussions
connected with the prehistoric races of Western Europe.
My aim will be accomplished if I have succeeded in
drawing the attention of Biblical students to a new and
fruitful field of enquiry. Year by year we may expect
fresh materials to be discovered, and new points of view
to be opened up. What is chiefly wanted are workers
and observers to utilise the discoveries that are made.
I shall be content if I have sketched the main outlines
of the path which they should pursue, and have stimu
lated others to investigate the origin and history of the
races of the ancient world ; diverse, indeed, in the eyes
of science, but one in a common humanity and a common
hope.
A. H. SAYCE.
AUGUST, 1891.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAP. PACK
I. THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY 9
II. LANGUAGE AND RACE 28
III. THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS 39
IV. THE SEMITIC RACE 69
V. THE EGYPTIANS . .82
VI. THE PEOPLES OK CANAAN 100
VII. THE HITTITES 130
VIII. AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA 143
IX. CONCLUSIONS 166
TABLE OF RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT . . . 174
APPENDIX . .175
INDEX . 17?
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
SAHOBCBDL. ttflBc of RJBHKS IT-
ae -nrnic 01
>o, i. Head i
So. 3. Tie king of e
5o. 4. FFmrn ieact inm e Gc Hall of Karaak 2t ide , dme
of Ramses EL
5ii. s. Thee HrrtH. r beads iorn die top tbe TrioM of the
S. ade . -me u Ramses EL
So. r Hd )i tiie dnef of Ganaa or GmA oran the oaroie a
lae.atKamMk.
.
IJST 01 II.LVSTRATIOXS.
P. 109. Head of a Menti-Sati (of the Sinaitic Peninsula) from the gate of
Nekht-Hor-heb at Karnak. The type is strongly Jewish.
P. 123. Head of an inhabitant of lanua on the Euphrates, in the country of
Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of Scripture, from the Great
Hall of Karnak, time of Ramses II.
P. 124. Head of a Rutennu of Hittite type, from the Great Hall of Karnak
(north side), time of Ramses II.
P. 125. Head of an inhabitant of Damascus, from the temple of Thothmcs
III at Karnak (southern face of the pylon).
P. 127. Heads of inhabitants of Ashkelon of a Hittite type from the cross-
wall of Karnak.
P. 153. Head of a Shakalsha from the fa9ade of Medmet Habu, time of
Ramses III. The type is Latin, and probably represents a
Sikel.
P. 155. Head of a Shairdana or Sardinian from the fa9ade of Medinet
Habu, time of Ramses III.
P. 156. Head of a Hanivu or Ionian Greek, from the pylon of Hor-em-heb
(Eighteenth Dynasty) at Karnak.
P. 159. Head of a member of the Western (or Libyo-European) race, from
a painting on the wall of the tomb of Meneptah.
THE RACES OF THE OLD
TESTAMENT.
CHAPTER I.
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY.
WE are all familiar with the fact that mankind is
divided into races. Modern literature is full of
allusions to the Anglo-Saxon race, the Keltic race,
the Latin race, and the like. We cannot look at a
negro without feeling that he belongs to a different
species of humanity from ourselves, to a different race
in fact. Racial distinction is one of the first and most
prominent facts which impress themselves upon the
mind of the student of man.
Like most words which are in popular use, the word
race is often employed in a somewhat loose sense.
Scientifically, however, it has a very precise and definite
meaning. In the language of science, the terms race
and species are equivalent in their application to man ;
whatever is signified by the one term is signified also
by the other. In the case of the lower animals we can
speak only of species ; man has appropriated to him
self a special term to denote the species into which he
is divided, and that term is * race. The science of
ethnology is the science which deals with the races of
mankind.
10 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
A race, then, is not a nation or a nationality or a
community, or even a people. A nation may consist
of more than one race ; it is a body of men bound to
gether by the possession of a common government and
a common history, but not necessarily of a common
origin. The British nation is a mixture of various
races ; the political union which has existed among
them for centuries has made this mixture a nation. A
nationality is that part of a nation which has preserved
the memory of its common history. It is that part of
a population which has grown into a community with
similar laws, habits, and language. The possession of
a common language is, in fact, the basis of a nationality,
just as the possession of a common government is the
basis of a nation and the possession of a common origin
the basis of a race. The claims of a nationality must
be decided on linguistic grounds, those of a nation on
political grounds, while racial unity is determined by
kinship in blood and physiological traits. A confusion
of race with nationality has more than once brought
with it disastrous political results.
The term people is wider than those of nation
and nationality. A people is a nation and more than
a nation ; it represents the population, whatever may
be its origin or history, which exists in a particular
geographical locality. On the other hand, its geo
graphical application may cause it to be used in a
narrower sense than the term nation ; the people
of England do not include the whole of the British
nation.
We must at the outset disabuse our minds of the old
fallacy that race and language are synonymous. Lan
guage is no test of race; the same race may speak
THE SCIENCE OP ETHNOLOGY. II
different languages, and different races may speak the
same language. We need not look further than our
own island to discover the truth of this. English is
spoken by men alike of Teutonic, Scandinavian, and
Keltic blood. The Kelts of Cornwall speak the same
language as the Scandinavians of the northern counties,
or the Teutons of the east coast. On the other hand,
the Kelts of Cornwall and Wales speak different lan
guages, while within the limits of Wales itself we have
a Welsh-speaking and an English-speaking population
which nevertheless belongs to the same race. Perhaps
the Jews afford the best proof of the futility of drawing
ethnological conclusions from the evidence of language.
Wherever the Jews have gone they have adopted the
language of the country in which they have settled.
There are numbers of Jews or persons of Jewish descent
in England who know no other language than English,
and who, on philological grounds alone, could not be
distinguished from the ordinary Englishman. The
sacred language of certain communities of Jews in
South-eastern Europe is not Hebrew but old Spanish,
that having been the language of their ancestors
when they were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth
century.
All that is proved by a community of language is
social contact. The fact that the Kelts of Cornwall
speak English proves that they have been socially in
contact with Englishmen. It is astonishing how quickly
and easily languages are borrowed by one people from
another, and there are certain races which seem to
display a peculiar readiness to adopt the language of
others. Usually, of course, it is conquest which causes
a people to adopt the language of another, the slave
12 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
or servant rather than the master being compelled
to understand what is said to him. Latin was spoken
throughout Western Europe and Northern Africa before
the fall of the Roman Empire. But other causes be
sides conquest will bring about the same result. The
Norman conquerors in France and Italy adopted the
languages of the conquered ; the necessities of trade
superseded Hebrew by Aramaic in Palestine in the
last few centuries before the Christian era, and the
spread of Arabic through the eastern world has been
due, not so much to the sword of Islam, as to the
need of reading and understanding the Qoran in its
original tongue.
The utmost that the ethnologist can derive from the
testimony of language is a presumption that where he
finds two peoples or tribes speaking the same language,
further investigation may show him that they also be
long to the same race. Language, we have seen, in
dicates social contact, and social contact often implies
intermarriage as well. The Kelts of Cornwall and
Wales have intermarried for centuries with the neigh
bouring population of England.
Intermarriage, however, produces only a mixed race,
and it is not mixed races but pure races which the
ethnologist wants to investigate. Moreover, as we shall
see, even in a mixed race a large proportion of the
individuals belonging to it fall under the definite types
which characterise the several races of which it is com
posed. Though the race as a whole remains mixed,
the individuals within it have a tendency to revert
to the racial types of their ancestors on either the
paternal or the maternal side. The most superficial
observer has no difficulty in distinguishing at least two
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY. 13
different types among English-speaking Welshmen, one
belonging to a slight, short, and dark race, the other
to a thickly-built blond one.
The attempt to base ethnological conclusions upon
philological evidence, to argue from similarity of lan
guage to similarity of race, has been the bane of
archaeological speculation. We have been told that
the same blood flows in our veins as in those of the
dark-skinned Hindu, because the languages we speak
are related to one another, and it has been assumed
that all those who spoke Semitic languages in the old
world belonged to the same Semitic race. It is there
fore necessary to insist upon the fact that race and
language belong to two wholly independent provinces
of study, and that the endeavour to confound ethnology
and philology can result only in injury to both. The
ethnologist must leave language to the philologist, while
the philologist leaves race to the ethnologist ; it is
only the anthropologist whose sphere of science is wide
enough to embrace both. But we shall have to dwell
more fully upon this matter in the next chapter.
The subject-matter of ethnology, then, are the physio
logical characteristics of man, in so far as they serve to
separate him into distinct species or races. It has to
determine, in the first place, what these characteristics
are, and then by their help to ascertain into how many
races and sub-races the human genus is divided. This
is the practical side of the science, a side which is slowly
being worked out by careful observation and the collec
tion of materials. When the materials have been all
collected, and the observations made, it will be time
to turn to the theoretical side of the science, and specu
late on the origin of races and the causes which have
14 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
led to their creation. At present speculation upon such
matters would carry us but a little way.
One of the most important characteristics that dis
tinguish races one from another is the shape of the
skull. Certain races are what is called dolichocepha
lic or long-headed, while others are brachycephalic or
round-headed. These terms relate to the proportion
of the length of the skull to its breadth. If its transverse
diameter is to its longitudinal in the proportion of from
70 to 80 to 100 the skull is dolichocephalic; if it is in the
proportion of from 80 to 90 to 100 it is brachycephalic.
A skull which is in the proportion of 75 to 100 is a
typically long one ; a skull which is in the proportion
of 85 to 100 is typically broad. Skulls below the pro
portion of 70 to 100 or above that of 90 to 100 are not
met with, and many craniologists regard skulls in which
the proportion is about 80 to 100 as mesocephalic or
medial. Stature often corresponds to the form of the
skull, a tall stature accompanying a long skull and a
short stature a round skull.
Stature, however, is largely dependent on food and
nourishment. Stunted growth is often the result 01
insufficient food, or exposure to insanitary conditions.
Savage tribes which have been remarkable for their
short stature before their contact with European civili
sation, have increased in height and general size when
in receipt of a regular supply of plentiful food. Stature
by itself cannot be regarded as one of those physio
logical traits which separate race from race. It may be
a racial characteristic, and is so in some instances ; but
in other cases it is dependent on the nourishment given
to the growing child.
Even craniology is not always a safe guide. Skulls
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY. 15
may be artificially distorted from their natural form,
and we know of tribes in which such distortions have
been customary. The children of the Flathead Indians
of North America, for instance, were subjected to an
artificial flattening of the skull while their bones were
still soft and plastic. Their heads were placed between
pieces of board, which gradually brought them into the
required shape. In dealing with ancient skulls, there
fore, the craniologist must be on his guard against such
deformations. Here, as elsewhere in science, it is unsafe
to argue from a single instance.
Apart from artificial distortions, however, the shape
of the skull is one of the most marked and permanent
characteristics of race. It is startling to see how un
changeably the same type of skull is reproduced,
generation after generation, in the same race. Where
more than one type of skull appears in a population we
may safely conclude that more than one race is present.
Where we find in the same family a long-headed
member and a round-headed member, we may feel sure
that the blood of two races is running in their veins.
The shape of the skull, in fact, is due to physiological
causes which act from the moment of birth. When the
transverse sutures of the skull unite before the longi
tudinal ones, the skull is dolichocephalic ; where, on the
other hand, the converse is the case, the skull is brachy-
cephalic.
By the sutures of the skull are meant the lines of
union between its various bones. These vary in different
races. In the case of the lower races they are simpler
than in that of the higher races, and disappear at an
earlier period of life. As a consequence of this the skull
becomes as it were a solid mass of bone, and prevents
1 6 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
the expansion of the cavity in which the brain is placed.
Small single bones are sometimes met with in the
sutures ; one of these, called the Inca-bone, and found
towards the back of the head, is characteristic of certain
South American tribes.
The weight and size of the brain are less important
than the convolutions which characterise it. It is true
that on the whole the brains of the lower races weigh
less and occupy less space than the brains of the higher
races, but individual exceptions to the general rule are
so numerous as to make cerebral capacity, so-called, of
little use to the ethnologist. On the other hand the
brains of the higher races are distinguished by more
complex convolutions than those of the inferior races,
and though the subject requires fuller investigation than
has yet been given to it, it is one which the ethnologist
cannot afford to neglect.
Next to the shape of the skull the position of the
jaws is perhaps the most valuable of ethnological tests.
The greater the projection of the jaws beyond the line
of the face, the more animal-like is the latter. Man
alone has a true chin, as the chin disappears where
prognathism or projection of the jaws exists to any
serious extent. Prognathism is characteristic of the
lower races, as it was of the early races whose skulls
have been found in the caves of Northern Europe ; the
higher the race in the scale of humanity the less pro
minent are its jaws. It is not difficult to determine the
degree of prognathism in a given skull. By drawing a
line from the forehead to the most protrusive part of the
jaws, and from that again to the point of the chin, we
obtain what is termed the maxillary angle. The acute-
ness of the angle necessarily depends on the prominence
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY. 17
of the jaws. The ethnological importance of the
measurement may be judged when we find that whereas
in the case of the average European the angle is one of
1 60, in the case of the negro it is only 140. The negro,
in fact, stands almost as much below the European as
he stands above the orang-outang, whose maxillary angle
is 110.
Prominent jaws imply the development of physical
strength and appetite at the expense of the intellectual
faculties. A race which is characterised by prognathism
may be expected to be characterised also by powerful
appetites, muscular vigour, and poverty of thought and
imagination. Individual exceptions will of course be
found to the general rule ; thinkers may arise among
prognathic races, and men of brutish mind may exist
among orthognathic races, but science is concerned, not
with individual exceptions, but with the general rule.
Along with the maxillary angle the ethnologist
must take note of the facial angle. This is formed by
a line drawn from the forehead to the jaws as before,
and a second line drawn at right angles to it which
passes through the aperture of the ear. From the facial
angle we can determine the prominence of the forehead
and the size of the anterior part of the skull. It is a
commonplace that a broad high forehead indicates
intellectual capacity, while the development of the
hinder portion of the head implies a corresponding
development of the coarser animal qualities. It is
instructive, therefore, to see how closely connected the
maxillary and facial angles are with one another. Pro
gnathism is accompanied by a low receding forehead ;
orthognathism by that with which Greek sculpture has
made us familiar. While the facial angle of the Euro-
1 8 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
pean averages 80, that of the negro averages 70, and
that of the orang-outang 40.
The teeth again are often characteristic of a difference
of race. Among some races they are remarkably large
and sound, while other races are distinguished by their
readiness to decay. Climate and food seem to have
little to do with this ; while the Egyptians have always
been celebrated for the excellence of their teeth, their
Nubian neighbours lose them very generally at an early
age. Most of the black-skinned populations have
wisdom-teeth with three fangs, which are cut early and
are lost late, whereas the wisdom-tooth of the European
has but two fangs, is cut late and lost early. The
wisdom-tooth, however, is evidently disappearing from
the mouth of the white race. The oldest skulls found
in Europe have wisdom-teeth with three fangs each like
those which still survive among the less developed races
of mankind, and there is a well-marked tendency among
the upper classes of European society for the wisdom-
teeth to remain embryonic. In a large proportion of
cases they are never cut at all. This may be due to
the decreasing size of the jaw, which grows smaller with
the increased development of the brain ; the smaller the
jaw the greater the difficulty the wisdom-teeth have in
forcing their way through the gums.
The form of the nose and of the eyes may also dis
tinguish one race from another. We are all familiar
with the flat nose and wide nostrils of the negro, with
the somewhat hooked nose of the Jew or the Beduin,
and with the oblique and rounded eyes of the Chinaman
or Japanese. Indeed the orbital index/ as it is techni
cally termed, differs widely in different races. In the
Mongolian the orbit is nearly circular, being sometimes
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY. 19
in the proportion of 93-100, while skulls have been
discovered in the ancient cemeteries of Gaul in which the
proportion is as much as 61-100. The thickness or
fulness of the lips again is a racial feature, characteristic
of the African, and found also in the Egyptian and the
Jew.
Still more distinctive is the character of the hair. In
some races it is straight, in others curly, in others again
like wool. The difference depends upon its form. The
nearer the shape of the individual hair is to a cylinder
the flatter it will be. The woolly hair of the negro is
due to the fact that his hair is oblong in form, while the
hair of the Mongolian or Malay, when examined under
a microscope, proves to be round, and consequently is
straight and lank.
The amount of hair on the body, again, varies in
different races. The Ainos, the aborigines of Japan,
are thickly covered with it so as almost to resemble
animals ; the Mongol and American, on the other hand,
are distinguished by its absence ; while the Australian
and most of the European races possess it in consider
able quantities. Artificial attempts to eradicate it, even
when extended through many generations, do not seem
to produce any effect.
The colour of the hair, moreover, is an important
test for determining racial affinities. The white race is
separated by it into three well-marked varieties. The
Scando-German with his pasty- white complexion has
pale or straw-coloured hair ; the hair of the freckled
Kelt or Kabyle of Northern Africa is of a golden red,
while the other members of the blond race have black
hair, or a red hair which is merely a variety of black.
The darkness of the hair will of course vary in intensity,
B a
20 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
but in all cases it must be distinguished from the brown
or auburn hair which is the result of intermarriage
between a dark-haired and a fair-haired race. Dark
hair is usually accompanied by dark eyes; in the British
Islands, however, and more especially in Ireland and
Scotland, the so-called Goidhelic stock is characterised
by black hair and blue eyes.
The colour of the eyes is of less importance from
the point of view of the ethnologist than the colour of
the hair. Light eyes are one of the characteristics of
the blond race, or at least of that portion of the blond
race which is also characterised by fair hair. But
whereas in the Scando-German stock the normal eye
is pale blue or grey ; in the Keltic stock the blue is deep
and dark. The colour of the eyes, however, seems to
be more readily affected by racial mixture than almost
any other feature of the body, and its evidence, there
fore, must not be pressed too far. Indeed, Dr. Beddoe
has pointed out in his Races of Britain that it largely
depends upon the amount of light to which the eyes are
subjected. In a cloudy sky like that of the west of
Ireland the organ is deprived of a portion of its
colouring matter, blue eyes being the result, whereas
where the sunshine is brilliant and constant the pigment
is needed as a protection and the eyes remain black or
brown.
Closely connected with the colour of the hair and
eyes is the colour of the skin. This is the most obvious
of all the distinctions between race and race, and was
naturally the first to attract notice. The oldest attempt
to construct what we may call an ethnographic chart
that made in the tomb of the Theban prince Rekh-
ma-Ra about a century before the birth of Moses
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY. 21
divides mankind into the black negro, the olive-coloured
Syrian, the red-skinned Egyptian, and the white Libyan.
The inhabitants of southern Arabia and the opposite
coast of Africa are coupled with the Egyptian on
account of their colour, while the inhabitants of the
Greek islands and the shores of Asia Minor are for the
same reason coupled with the Libyan. It is true that
the division is not strictly scientific.; modern researches
have shown that the Syrian and Egyptian belong to the
white race, and that the ruddy skin of the latter is due
to exposure to the sun. The ancient artists of Egypt,
indeed, confessed as much ; it was only the men who
were painted red : the women, whose life was largely
passed indoors, are represented with skins of a pale
yellow.
The dark colour which is characteristic of race has
nothing to do with climatic influences. The colour of
the skin of the American native is pretty much the
same, whether he comes from the cold highlands of
Canada, from the tropical swamps of Central America,
or from the dense forests of Brazil. In Northern Africa
we find the fair-skinned Kabyle and the swarthy Bedawin
living side by side in precisely the same manner and
under the same conditions of climate and food. For the
last six thousand years or more Egyptians and Nubians
have dwelt in the same valley of the Nile ; except where
he has intermarried with his darker neighbour, the
Egyptian still remains a member of the white race, while
the skin of the Nubian is almost as black as that of the
negro.
The dark colour of the black races is due to a pigment
which is spread over the true skin immediately beneath
the epidermis or scarf-skin. Indeed, in the case of the
3,1 THE PACES OF THE OLD TES7AMEN7.
negro, at all events, it is found even in the muscles and
brain. The pigment mainly consists of carbon excreted
by the lungs in the form of carbonic oxide, and
deposited from the capillaries upon the skin and mem
branes. Decreased action of the lungs accordingly
implies an increased deposit of colouring matter. Any
thing which stimulates the capillaries will have the same
result, and it is on this account that exposure to the sun
so frequently tans the skin. Such tanning, however, is
never permanent and cannot be inherited. It is wholly
distinct from the dark tint which distinguishes the skin
of the Italian or Spaniard, and still more from the
brown hue of the Malay and Polynesian.
It is probable that a dark skin was characteristic of
primitive man. We can explain how the black pigment
could have been lost ; it is more difficult to explain how
it could have been acquired. In an arctic climate
animals tend to become what has been called per
manently albinoised ; the bear assumes a white fur and
the fox and hare adopt the colour of the snow around
them. Some years ago an ingenious book was pub
lished by a German writer, Dr. Poesche l , the object of
which was to prove that the white Aryan race originated
in the Rokitno marshes which extend between the
Niemen and the Dniepr in Russia. His theory was
based on the fact that the fauna and flora of the marshes
have acquired for the most part a white or albinoised
hue. The theory has not, however, stood the test of
criticism ; the Aryan stock does not represent the
whole of the white race, and archaeology has made it
clear that Western Europe was inhabited by races akin
to those of the present day long before the Aryan
1 Die Arier. Jena, 1878.
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY. 23
variety could have branched off from them either in the
Rokitno marshes or elsewhere.
Thanks to geology we now know that the appearance
of man in Western Europe was coeval with the period
when the larger part of our continent was still suffering
from the rigours of an arctic climate. The ; glacial age
had not yet passed away ; the British Isles were still the
seat of huge glaciers, and the rivers of Southern France
were frozen during the greater portion of the year. The
conditions of life were the same as those which prevail
in those northern regions of our globe which are
inhabited by the polar bear and the white fox. Now
Europe is, and always has been, pre-eminently the home
of the white race. It would therefore appear probable
that it was in Europe, during the long period covered
by the close of the glacial epoch, that the characteristics
of the white race stereotyped themselves.
The conclusion is confirmed by a fact which has been
observed by travellers as well as by ethnologists. The
colour of the different races of mankind is intimately
connected with the geographical area to which they
belong. Colour, in fact, is, for reasons still obscure to
us, dependent upon geography. Europe and that
portion of Northern Africa and Western Asia which in
the glacial age formed part of Europe, before the
creation of the Mediterranean Sea, are the primitive
home of the white race ; Africa, to which Papua and
Australia must be added, is the cradle of the black
races ; the yellow race is confined to Eastern and
Central Asia ; the brown race to the Malayan district
and Polynesia ; and the copper-coloured race to
America. Brown, copper-coloured, and yellow may
alike be regarded as faded varieties of a primitive black
24 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
tint still retained in its purity by the negro, while the
process of discolouration has proceeded to its furthest
extent in the case of the white. That the characteristic
colours should have been so indelibly imprinted on the
several races to which they belong that mixture of blood
alone has caused them to change since the earliest
period to which we can trace them back on the monu
ments of Egypt, proves the length of time during which
the ancestors of each were once subjected to certain
climatic and geographical influences. The races depicted
by the Egyptian artist four thousand years ago are still
to-day what they were then ; neither in colour nor in
any other of the characteristics which the eye can
readily perceive has there been any change. In the
early youth of mankind the human frame seems to have
been more plastic than in those later ages when the
traits which separate one race from another had been
fixed once for all.
A portion of the white race still bears the traces of its
darker origin. The pigment which is distributed equally
over the whole skin in the darker races, is deposited in
patches only in the case of persons who are freckled. It
is commonly supposed that freckles are the result of sun
burn. This however is an error. Exposure to the sun
will doubtless increase the freckles of the skin by stimu
lating the action of the capillaries ; but the colouring
pigment is already present, and freckles will be found to
exist on portions of the body which have never been ex
posed to sun or air. The freckled Kelto-Libyan race
of North-west Europe and Northern Africa has been
discoloured and albinoised to a less degree than the
Scando-German with its purely white unfreckled skin.
Attempts have often been made to determine the
THE SCIENCE OF ETHNOLOGY. 25
moral and intellectual traits which distinguish the va
rious races of mankind. That such distinguishing traits
exist is admitted on all sides. We talk about the im
pulsive Kelt, the dogged Anglo-Saxon, the brilliant
but unstable Greek. But anything like a scientific de
termination of the psychological character of a race is
at present exceedingly difficult, if not impossible ; the
materials for making it are still wanting. We cannot
even guage the intellectual capacity of a race. It is
generally asserted, for instance, that the intellectual
growth of a negro ceases after the age of thirteen ; and
yet there have been negroes like Toussaint or a recent
ambassador from Liberia 1 who have shown themselves
the equals in intellectual power of the most cultivated
Europeans. The members of the white European race
are apt to consider themselves the intellectual leaders of
mankind ; nevertheless their appearance on the scene of
history was relatively late, and the elements of their
civilisation were derived from the natives of the East.
To this day a Russian peasant cannot be placed on
a higher intellectual level than his Tatar or Mongol
neighbour, and three thousand years ago a Babylonian
or Egyptian traveller in Europe would have had as
much reason for assuming the intellectual inferiority of
the populations he found there as a modern European
traveller has to-day in the wilds of Southern America.
The results of missionary labour among the apparently
helpless Fuegians obliged Darwin to confess that
he had been mistaken in supposing those outcasts
of humanity to be incapable of rising in the social
scale.
It is the same with the moral as with the intellectual
1 Dr. E. W. Blyden.
26 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
qualities. We are often told, for instance, that the
Scando-German has a sense of truth which is not found
among the other races of mankind. But the value of
such general assertions is very doubtful. We do not at
present know how far the character of a people is due
to the racial elements which exist in it, how far to
its past history and the circumstances in which it is
placed.
There is one point, however, in which we can say with
out hesitation that races differ from one another. This
is in susceptibility to disease and the power of bearing
physical pain. The negro is almost impervious to the
yellow fever and malaria which decimate the whites who
live beside him ; on the other hand, the coloured races
are peculiarly subject to small-pox and pneumonia, and
measles are singularly fatal to the natives of Polynesia.
Savages will survive surgical operations which would kill
a European, while they will succumb to diseases which
the European would soon shake off. This is doubtless
due quite as much to difference in culture as to difference
in race. There are cases, however, in which the savage is
found to resemble the European, while among Europeans
themselves the tendency to contract certain diseases is
often confined to particular districts or populations. The
Kelts of Western Britain, for example, seem to have the
same tendency to pneumonia as the Nubians of the
Upper Nile, while the Italians are as free from it as
the natives of Egypt. In such cases the difference can
not be explained merely by a difference in the habits of
daily life. We must call to our aid other causes besides
those which have to do with the degree of culture attained
by a particular race. The Chinaman is on a higher level
of culture than the Berberine boatman of the Nile, yet
THE SCIENCE Of ETHNOLOGY. 27
he will endure physical pain with a stolidity which is
impossible to the Berberine l .
But it must be remembered that the science of ethno
logy is still in its infancy. It is one of the many sciences
of which the nineteenth century has witnessed the birth,
and among these sciences it is one of the youngest. Its
students have already collected a large mass of materials
upon which to build its superstructure; but these ma
terials belong rather to the physiological framework of
man and the external influences that surround him than
to the more subtle forces of the moral and intellectual
world. These latter are difficult to seize, distinguish,
and arrange, and it will be long before the facts con
nected with them can be ascertained with the same
amount of certainty as the relative size of the skull or
the number of convolutions in the brain. For the present,
at least, we must be content with those racial character
istics which can be seen and handled, measured or
weighed ; the scientific appraisement of the mental and
moral characteristics which even now we may fancy we
can trace must be left to the care of the future.
1 It has hitherto been believed that the negroes in the southern states of
North America have, since their emancipation from slavery, been multiplying
much more rapidly than the whites. The census of 1890 has, however,
disproved this supposition, and shown that in reality the white population
has increased at the rate of 24-67 per cent., while the increase in the
coloured element has been only 13-90 per cent. (Census Bulletin, No. 48,
March, 1891.)
CHAPTER II.
LANGUAGE AND RACE.
MAN is separated from the lower animals by the
possession of language. No tribe, however bar
barous, has yet been found which has not a language or
dialect of its own. And not unfrequently the language
of a savage people betrays a delicacy of structure, a
complexity of grammar, and a wealth of vocabulary
which excite the wonder and admiration of the philo
logist. The languages of America possess a grammar
so difficult and complex as almost to baffle the memory
of the learner, and even the wretched Fuegians, who
seemed to the youthful Darwin hardly higher than
brute beasts, proved, when brought under the civilising
influences of missionary effort, to possess vocabularies
of five or six thousand words. On the other hand, none
of the lower animals has ever acquired the faculty of
intelligent speech. The words uttered by the parrot are
uttered with little understanding of their real meaning.
and though the dog may understand the command
addressed to him, he is unable to reply to it except
by action. The cebus azarae of Paraguay, it is true, is
said to utter six different sounds which excite six
different emotions in other members of the species, but
out of these elementary sounds it has never been able
to form an articulate speech. Go where we will, we
find man distinguished from the beasts that perish by
LANGUAGE AND RACE. 29
the gift of speech, just as he is also distinguished from
them by the art of making fire.
But language is a characteristic of man as a whole
and not of any particular section of the human family.
It separates him from the lower animals ; it does not
serve to separate one race of mankind from another. In
other words, language is not a test of race.
The fact has to be kept well in view from the very
outset of our ethnological researches. The confusion
between language and race which marked the earlier
history of the sciences of philology and ethnology has
been productive of infinite injury to both. Amateur
ethnologists are still prone to argue from similarity or
identity of language to similarity or identity of race,
and to discover a relationship in blood between the
dark-skinned populations of Bengal and the white races
of Europe because the languages they now speak can be
traced back to a common source.
It does not require an extensive knowledge of history
to learn how utterly fallacious such an argument is. As
has been already observed in the last chapter, we need
not look beyond the limits of our own islands to see
that races diverse in origin may yet speak the same
language, while different languages may be spoken by
members of the same race. The Kelts of Cornwall have
forgotten the language of their forefathers and now speak
English, while the descendants of the primitive Iberian
population of Ireland speak, some of them English, and
others Erse. The language of the English Jews is Eng
lish, like that of the negroes of the United States. On
the other hand the Scandinavians of the Orkneys and
Shetlands no longer speak the language of their Ice
landic or Norwegian kinsfolk, and in Wales, Ireland, and
30 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Scotland we find a race whose mother-tongue is in some
cases English and in others a Keltic dialect.
What is true of the British Isles is also true of the
rest of the world. Under the Roman Empire the various
races of the West had not only to obey one law, but also
to learn the language of the imperial city, so that when
the empire fell Latin was the common speech alike of
Northern Africa, of Spain and Italy, of Gaul and Britain.
The Teutonic barbarians who poured into the devastated
provinces soon adapted their speech to that of the
subject populations, and the modern languages of France
and Spain and Italy were the ultimate result. At a
later date the Northmen in Normandy and Southern
Italy quickly forgot the language they had brought with
them and adopted that of their conquered vassals ; while
in Britain, on the contrary, the natives accustomed their
lips to the speech of the Saxon or Scandinavian invader,
or even of the French-speaking Norman who followed
him. In the East, Hebrew and Phoenician, Assyrian and
Babylonian, were all supplanted by the dialect of the
Aramaean tribes of Syria and Northern Arabia, and
Aramaic in its turn was supplanted by the Arabic of
Mekka after the triumph of Mohammedanism. Arabic
has succeeded in superseding the old language of Egypt
in spite of the tenacious conservatism of the Egyptian,
the long resistance made to Mohammedanism by Egyp
tian Christianity, and the continued use of Coptic in the
Egyptian Church. For more than two centuries Arabic
has had no rival in the valley of the Nile, although the
Coptic scribe never relinquished his control of the
bureaucracy, and the Christians still outnumber the
Mohammedans in the south of the country. Asia Minor,
again, is a conspicuous illustration of the fallacy of
LANGUAGE AND RACE. 31
arguing from language to race. It was, and still is,
inhabited by a variety of races, and the number of
different languages once spoken in it must have been
large. In the time of St. Paul the ancient language of
Lykaonia still survived, at all events in country places
(Acts xiv. n), and St. Jerome tells 1 us that in his age
there were still Kelts in Galatia and in the neighbourhood
of Treves who spoke a Keltic dialect. But Greek had
long been gaining upon the earlier languages of the
peninsula, and by the sixth century of our era its victory
was complete. The ancient dialects were extinguished
as completely as the ancient language of Etruria. From
one end of Asia Minor to the other Greek, and Greek
only, was known and spoken. Turkish conquests
brought with them another linguistic revolution. Turk
ish took the place of Greek, and at the present day it
is the language of the country and of most of the
towns.
Language, then, is no characteristic or test of race.
What it indicates is not racial descent but social contact.
The fact that the Kelts of Cornwall speak English like
the Jews of London or Manchester proves that the
population with which they have been brought into daily
contact for a long number of years is one that speaks
English. Community of language points to conquest or
servitude, to commercial intercourse or religious influence
on the part of one or other of the populations between
whom it exists. Religion seems the most powerful
instrument for the introduction of a new language among
a people, and next to religion, slavery. Commerce, too,
has a potent influence, and if English is destined to
become the language of the world, as is thought by
1 Prolegomena to the Epistle to the Galatians.
32 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
some, it will be in large measure the effect of English
trade.
Perhaps the chief cause of the belief that language is
an index of race has been a confusion of race and
nationality. Language is the principal bond which
binds and keeps a nationality together ; a common
government and a common law, it is true, are the
external forces which prevent it from breaking apart ;
but a common language appeals to the sympathies and
sentiments of the nation, and where it is absent the
cohesion can never be very close. Empires like that of
Rome have instinctively realised the fact and devoted
their energies towards forcing the imperial language
upon all their subjects. It was the use of the French
language which drew the sympathies of Lorraine and
Alsace towards France rather than towards Germany ;
and the Russian Government has acted wisely from its
own point of view in endeavouring to extirpate the
Polish tongue.
The ethnologist, however, cannot afford to disregard
altogether the evidence of language. In certain cases a
common language raises the presumption that the
populations which speak it are descended from a common
ancestry. It may suggest to the ethnologist a particular
line of investigation which otherwise might have escaped
his notice. It was the philologist, for example, who
first suggested the common origin of the Malayo-
Polynesian race. He found that the languages spoken
by the race implied a common mother-speech at no very
distant period, and thus made it possible that the speakers
also were derived from a common stock. It sometimes
happens that almost the only clue to the affinities of the
peoples of the past are the linguistic records they have
LANGUAGE AND RACE. 33
left behind them, and though these records can prove
nothing more than, the relationship of the languages they
contain, they may yet provide the ethnologist with a
starting-point for his own researches. The fact that the
primitive language of Babylonia was agglutinative points
to the non-Semitic character of the population which
spoke it, a conclusion which is confirmed by the physio
logical traits of the few representations of the human
form in Accadian art which have come down to us.
Social contact, again, where the two populations which
are brought together belong to different races, cannot be
neglected by the ethnologist. Two populations cannot
be in such close touch with one another as for one of
them to borrow the language of the other without a
certain amount of intermarriage taking place. If the
two populations represent two races, the result is mix
ture of blood. But mixture of blood, it is important
to remember, does not produce a new race. The
characteristic features of the various races of mankind
have been so indelibly impressed upon them before the
dawn of history that the fusion of two races has never
been known during the historic period to give birth to a
new race. The mixture of negroes and Europeans in
America results after two or three generations in sterility.
Where this is not the case the children revert to the type
of one or other of the parents, generally of the one who
for some reason or other represents the stronger and
more enduring race. Though the small dark Iberian of
the British Isles intermingled with the blond Aryan
Kelt centuries ago, no new type has been originated.
To the present day the so-called Keltic race preserves
in all their purity the two ethnological types of which
it is composed, and even in the same family it often
C
34 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT,
happens that some of the children belong to the one
type, others to the other. Mixture of blood results only
in sterility or reversion to an ancestral type atavism,
as it is usually termed, not in a new race.
The predominant ancestral type is generally that
which is native to the soil. It has by long-continued
habit adapted itself to the climatic and geographical
conditions of the country more thoroughly than the
races that have followed it. Cromwell planted his
Ironsides in Tipperary, but the children inherited the
ethnic qualities of their Irish mothers. In France and
Southern Germany the short swarthy race whose remains
are found in post-glacial deposits has in large measure
supplanted the tall broad-shouldered Gaul of the classical
age with his blue eyes and yellow hair. To find the
modern brother of the latter we must go to Scandinavia
and Northern Germany or the eastern districts of
England and Scotland.
Here, then, we have an explanation of the fact that we
cannot argue from language to race or from race to
language. We can change our language, we cannot
change our race. The English child born in China and
ignorant of any other language than Chinese neverthe
less remains an Englishman. Let him marry a Chinese
wife ; his children will inherit the racial characteristics
either of himself or of their mother ; they will not
originate a third race which is a cross between the two.
That it is otherwise in language is shown by Pigeon
English, where an English vocabulary has been blended
with a Chinese grammar and a Chinese pronunciation.
In one respect, however, the distinctions of language
follow to a certain extent the distinctions of race.
Languages are classified either genealogically or morpho-
LANGUAGE AND RACE. 35
logically. Genealogically they fall into certain groups or
families, each of which possesses a common grammar and
stock of roots and has no relationship to any other. Thus
the Indo-European languages Greek, Latin, Scando-
Tcutonic, Litho-Slavic, Keltic, Iranic, and Indie form
one family, the Semitic languages another. Families of
language, genealogically distinct, may be morphologi
cally identical. By the morphology of a language is
meant its structure, the mode in which the relations of
grammar are connected with one another in a sentence.
Certain languages, such as the Chinese, are isolating ;
that is to say, the relations of grammar are expressed in
them by the simple juxtaposition of words. Other
languages, like those of America, are polysynthetic. In
these the sentence is represented by a compound, the
parts of speech contained in it being denoted by the
several elements of the compound. A large proportion
of the languages of mankind are agglutinative, the
relations of grammar being expressed by separate words
which more or less retain a concrete meaning of their
own. In some cases the agglutinative elements are
affixed, or even infixed; in other cases they are prefixed.
Certain families of speech, again, are incorporating; in
these the objective cases of the pronouns are in
corporated into the verbal forms, I do a thing, for
example, being expressed by I-it-do a thing. Lastly,
there are the inflectional languages, in which the relations
of grammar are symbolised by syllables which have no
independent signification of their own. The inflectional
languages may either be characterised by pure flection,
like the Semitic idioms, changes of grammatical meaning
being represented by changing the vowels within a word,
or by impure flection, as in the Indo-European idioms,
C 2
36 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
where the grammatical relations are expressed for the
most part by suffixes.
Now the morphological divisions of language are also
geographical. The home of each morphological type of
speech is limited to a certain geographical area. The
polysynthetic languages are confined to America, where
a single type of linguistic structure prevails from north
to south, although the different families of speech, spoken
within its limits and utterly unrelated to one another,
are multitudinous. Languages of the isolating type
belong to Eastern Asia, those of the agglutinative type
which make use of affixes to Central Asia and the islands
of the Pacific, those of the inflectional type to Western
Asia and Europe. An incorporating language is spoken
by the Basques of South-western Europe, while the larger
part of Africa is occupied by tribes whose dialects are
characterised by the use of prefixes. It is evident that
besides families of speech, in the strict sense of the
term, which are connected together genealogically, there
are also morphological families of speech, each of which
has arisen in a separate part of the world. The morpho
logical character of a language is, for reasons unknown
to us, dependent on the geographical and climatic con
ditions of the country in which it originated. We may
therefore regard it as, to a certain extent, a character
istic of race. A person whose mother-tongue is polysynthe
tic may be presumed to be of native American origin,
the speakers of an agglutinative language which makes
use of prefixes is likely to come from Central Africa.
But it is important to remember that it is only from
the morphological point of view that the evidence of
language can be safely employed by the ethnologist.
Otherwise its study must be left to the philologist and
LANGUAGE AND RACE. 37
the historian. The similarities presented by two
dissociated languages one to another are a test only of
social contact. The adoption of a foreign tongue proves
nothing as to the racial affinities of the borrowers. It
throws light on a past epoch in their history; that is all.
It is evidence as to their contact with the speakers of the
foreign language, probably also as to their intermarriages
with the latter. But, as we have seen, intermarriages
do not produce a third race. The children inherit the
peculiarities of either one or other of the parents; mixed
breeds soon die out.
Two conclusions may be drawn from this fact. One
is the remote antiquity to which we must refer the
origin of the various races of mankind. Their several
traits have been fixed once for all at a time when human
nature was more plastic than it is at present, and when
the conditions by which the first men were surrounded
had a more powerful influence upon them than they have
upon ourselves. Moreover, these conditions must have
been in action during a long period of time. During the
historical period man comes before us as an eminently
migratory animal, a restless wanderer, who exchanges
the snows of Siberia for the sun of India, or the deserts
of Arabia for the temperate shores of the Mediterranean.
But in the age when the races of mankind were marked
off one from the other his restless instinct must still have
been curbed. The ancestors of the several races of
mankind must have been content to remain within the
limits of the geographical area in which they found
themselves. When at last they prepared to leave it,
their special features had been already impressed upon
them with an indelible stamp.
The second conclusion is that diversity of race must
38 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
be older than diversity of language. The distinctions of
language do not follow the distinctions of race, and
whereas it is impossible to change one s race there is no
difficulty in changing one s language. Language, in
fact, belongs to the second stage in man s existence,
when he had become what Aristotle calls a social
animal, and was settled in communities, not to the first
stage in which the great distinctions of race first grew up.
That there was such an earlier stage is proved by the
possession of those common characteristics which, in
spite of racial diversities, make all the world akin. We
are all cast in the same mould, we are all, as St. Paul
says, of one blood 1 . Our wants and infirmities, our
desires and hopes, our feelings and emotions, are the
same to whatever race we may belong. There is no
race of mankind, however barbarous, which does not
possess an articulate language, which does not know
how to produce fire or defend itself by artificial weapons,
or which has not some sense of religion. We have only
to educate the most degraded of human races to find
that the gulf which seemed to exist between them and
ourselves was due only to different habits and traditions.
Give the Fuegian the education of an Englishman, and
he becomes an Englishman in ideas and life. Great as
may be the diversity between race and race under the
microscope of the ethnologist, the unity which underlies
it is greater still. God hath made of one blood all
nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.
Black or white, red or yellow, we are all bound together
by a common nature ; we can all alike claim a common
ancestry, and recognise that we have each been made
in the image of the Creator.
1 Acts xvii. 26.
CHAPTER III.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS.
THE tenth chapter of Genesis has been called the
oldest ethnological record in existence. But the
statement is not strictly correct. On the one hand, in a
tomb at Thebes belonging to Rekh-ma-Ra, an Egyptian
prince who lived a century before the Exodus, we find
the races of the known world each depicted with its own
peculiar characteristics. The black-skinned negro, with
all the features which still characterise him, is the
representative of the south ; the white-skinned European
and Libyan, with fair hair and blue eyes, is the repre
sentative of the north and west ; while the Asiatic, with
olive complexion and somewhat aquiline nose, comes from
the east ; and the valley of the Nile, like the land of the
gods in Southern Arabia, is occupied by a race whose
skin has been burnt red by the sun, and who display all
the traits that distinguish the Egyptian of to-day.
Already in the sixteenth century before our era, the
Egyptian artist had accurately noted the outward
features of the several races of mankind so far as they
were known to him.
On the other hand, the tenth chapter of Genesis is
ethnographical rather than ethnological. It does not
profess to give an account of the different races of the
world and to separate them one from another according
to their various characteristics. It is descriptive merely,
40 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
and such races of men as fell within the horizon of the
writer are described from the point of view of the
geographer and not of the ethnologist. The Greeks and
Medes, for example, are grouped along with the Tiba-
rcnian and Moschian tribes because they all alike lived in
the north ; the Egyptian and the Canaanite are similarly
classed together, while the Semitic Assyrian and the
non-Semitic Elamite are both the children of Shem.
We shall never understand the chapter rightly unless we
bear in mind that its main purpose is geographical. In
Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, the relation
between a mother-state to its colony, or of a town or
country to its inhabitants, was expressed in a genea
logical form. The inhabitants of Jerusalem were
regarded as the daughter of Jerusalem, the people of
the east were the children of the district to which they
belonged.
When, therefore, we are told that Canaan begat
Zidon his first-born, and Heth, all that is meant is that
the city of Sidon, and the Hittites to whom reference is
made, were alike to be found in the country called
Canaan. It does not follow that there was any
ethnological kinship between the Phoenician builders of
Sidon and the prognathous Hittites from the north.
Indeed, we know from modern research that there was
none. But the Hittite and Zidonian were both of them
inhabitants of Canaan, or, as we should say, Canaanites ;
they were both, accordingly, the children of Canaan.
So, again, when it is said that Elam and Assur
were the children of Shem, it is to geography, and
not to ethnology, that we must look for an explanation.
Assyria, Elam, and Babylonia, or Arphaxad as it seems
to be called in the Ethnographical Table, all bordered,
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 41
at one time, one upon the other. They constituted the
three great monarchies of the eastern world, and their
three capitals, Nineveh, Susa, and Babylon, were the three
centres which regulated the politics of Western Asia.
They were brethren not because the natives of them
claimed descent from a common father, but because they
occupied the same quarter of the world.
It is now clear in what light we are to regard the
threefold division of the human world, so far as it was
known at the time when the tenth chapter of Genesis
was written. The three sons of Noah are each assigned
a separate place of settlement, Japhet in the north,
Ham in the south, and Shem in the centre, and are
accordingly regarded as the fathers or ancestors of the
nations and cities which occupied the regions belonging
to them. The northern nations are the children of
Japhet, the populations of the south are the children
of Ham, the populations of the centre the children of
Shem. In one case only was it necessary to group the
same tribe under two different ancestors. The South
Arabian tribe of Sheba spread far to the north, through
the sandy deserts of Havilah, and founded a kingdom
which came into conflict with Assyria in the days of
Tiglath-pileser and Sargon. It is consequently named
twice, once as a people of the south under the head
of Ham, once as a people of the centre under the head
of Shem.
Attempts have been made to explain the names of the
three sons of Noah as referring to the colour of the skin.
Japhet has been compared with the Assyrian ippatu
white, Shem with the Assyrian samu olive-coloured/
while in Ham etymologists have seen the Hebrew kham
to be hot. But all such attempts arc of very doubtful
42 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
value. It is, for instance, a long stride from the meaning
of heat to that of blackness a meaning, indeed,
which the Hebrew word never bears. Moreover, the
sons of Ham were none of them black-skinned, with
the possible exception of a part of the population of
Cush. Prof. Virchow has shown that the Egyptian, like
the Canaanite, belongs to the white race, his red skin
being merely the result of sunburn.
The ethnologist, therefore, must be content to leave
the sons of Noah to the historian or the theologian. He
must start from the fact that they were considered to
have settled in each of the three zones of the known
world, and that the nations who inhabited these zones
at a later day were, according to the idiom of a Semitic
language, their children and successors. It is with their
children and not with themselves that the student of
ethnology has to do.
The three zones formed a sort of square. They were
bounded on the north by the Caspian, the mountains of
Armenia, the Black Sea, and the islands of the eastern
Mediterranean ; on the south by the Indian Ocean and
the highlands of Abyssinia ; on the east by the
Caspian and the mountains of Media and Elam ; and
on the west by the Libyan desert westward of the Nile.
The northern zone descended as far south as the island
of Cyprus and the ranges of the Taurus; the central
zone included all Western Asia, except Canaan and
Western and South-western Arabia. These last were
comprised in the southern zone along with Egypt and
the northern portion of the Soudan.
To our modern notions such a world seems very
limited. But, if we put China out of sight, it embraced
all the civilised part of the earth s surface. The civili-
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 43
sations of India and of America had not as yet arisen ;
elsewhere, with the exception of China, all was darkness
and barbarism. It was in the valleys of the Nile and
the Euphrates that the first civilised kingdoms of the
world had grown up, and the first systems of writing
been devised. Small as it may appear on our modern
maps, the world of Genesis was the cradle of culture, the
field in which the seeds of science were first sown, and
the first harvests of human thought and invention were
gathered in.
It was, moreover, a world which formed the meeting-
place of many different races. It is true that the
American, the Australian, and the Chinaman were un
represented in it ; but on the other hand the leading
races of mankind were all to be found there. More
than one variety of the white race had its representa
tives ; the pale-skinned, dark-haired Alarodian, the
blue-eyed Libyan, the dark-complexioned race of
Southern Europe, the Semite of Arabia and Assyria,
the Egyptian with his thick lips and good-tempered
smile. The Turanian was represented by the primi
tive population of Babylonia ; perhaps also by the
mysterious Hittite, with his yellow skin and Mongoloid
features. Among the natives of Cush were black-
skinned negroes and Nubians, though the main bulk of
the population was of Semitic or Egyptian descent.
Truly it was a square of the earth s surface into which
much was crowded that was interesting and important
in the history of man.
Much light has been cast by modern research on the
names of the cities and countries enumerated in the
tenth chapter of Genesis. Almost every year brings
fresh additions to our knowledge on the subject, and
44 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
helps to correct the erroneous or defective conclusions
of earlier enquiry. The cuneiform records of Babylonia
and Assyria and the hieroglyphic monuments of Egypt
are fast clearing up the darkness which has so long en
shrouded them. Nations of whom only the names were
previously known are now, as it were, issuing forth into
the light of day, and we can determine the geographical
position of tribes and towns which have hitherto been the
despair of map-makers.
The geography of Genesis starts from the north. It
was on the mountains of Ararat or Armenia that the
ark rested, and it was accordingly with this region of the
world that our primitive chart begins. The sons of
Japhet, we are told, were Gomer, and Magog, and
Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.
Gomer is the Gimirra of the Assyrian inscriptions, the
Kimmerians of the Greek writers. Their original seat
was on the river Tyras or Dniester, from whence they
were driven by the Skythians shortly before the first
unsuccessful siege of Nineveh by Kyaxares of Media,
and while Psammetikhos I was reigning in Egypt (B.C.
664-6 ic) 1 . In a vast body they fell upon the northern
frontier of Assyria, but there they were signally defeated
by Esar-haddon in B.C. 677, and while some of them
remained behind among the mountains of Kurdistan,
the greater part fled westward into Asia Minor. Here
they sacked the Greek city of Sinope, and finally over
ran Lydia on the shores of the Aegean. Gyges, the
Lydian king, vainly endeavoured to stem the torrent of
their attack ; Sardes, his capital, was burnt by the
barbarians, and he himself fell in battle against them.
It was not until the reign of his son and successor that
1 Herodotos i. 103-106, iv. n, 12.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 45
the Lydians succeeded in freeing themselves from their
invaders, who seem to have been practically exterminated.
The Kimmerians are referred to in the Odyssey (xi. 14),
where they arc described as living on the eastern shores
of the Black Sea, shrouded in the mists and darkness of
an unexplored land. They had not as yet descended
upon Sinope, and so made themselves only too well
known to the Greeks.
For an explanation of Magog we must go to the
prophet Ezekiel. He tells us (xxxviii. 2) that Magog
was the land of Gog, the chief prince of Tubal and
Meshech. Gog is the Gugu of the Assyrian inscriptions,
the Gyges of the Greeks ; and in Magog, therefore, we
must see a title of Lydia. The name is evidently a
compound of that of Gog ; perhaps it represents the
Assyrian Mat Gugi, or country of Gugu. At all events
another northern country known to the Assyrians is
called indifferently on the monuments Zamua and
Mazamua, from which we may infer that the first
syllable was not regarded as a necessary part of the
name.
Madai are the Medes, the Mada of the Assyrians.
We first hear of them in the cuneiform records under
the name of Amada, about B.C. 840, when their country
was invaded by the Assyrian monarch. They were at
that time settled in the Kurdish mountains, considerably
to the east of Lake Urumiyeh. Some fifty years later,
however, we find them in Media Rhagiana, where they
are called no longer Amada but Mada. It was from
the latter form of the name that the Greeks took the
familiar Mcde. The Medes proper were an Aryan
people who claimed relationship to the Aryans of
Northern India and the Aryan populations of Europe,
46 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
and one of the tribes belonging to them was that of the
Persians, who had established themselves further south,
on the eastern shores of the Persian Gulf. But in classical
times the older inhabitants of the regions into which
the Medcs migrated were classed along with them under
the general title of Medes, so that the name ceased to
be distinctive of race. The confusion was doubtless
assisted by the resemblance between the Assyrian name
of the Mada and that of the Manda, or nomads.
It was the Manda, and not the Mada, who founded the
empire which had its capital at Ekbatana and was over
thrown by Cyrus.
Sargon found Medic communities on the southern
shores of the Caspian. They were governed by inde
pendent city-lords, like the small states of Greece, not
by kings. When attacked by an enemy, the cities under
their several chief magistrates combined against the
common foe, but at other times each seems to have
acted independently of the other. This system of
government, in which each small community claims to
manage its own affairs under a local head, is curiously
characteristic of the Aryan race. Wherever this race is
met with in its purity, as, for instance, in modern Norway,
we find the same impatience of external or central
control. Aryan predominance in ancient Greece and
Italy was similarly marked by the development of
municipal freedom and a dislike of centralisation, and
the republics of Northern Italy in the middle ages may
be regarded as another example of the same spirit.
J avail is the Ionian Greek. Cyprus was called the
island of the lonians by the Assyrians, and it is prob
ably to Cyprus rather than to Greece generally that
reference is made in Isaiah Ixvi. 19 and Ezek. xxvii. 19.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS, 47
Cyprus, too, would seem to be meant in Genesis, since we
are told that the sons of Javan were Elishah and Tar-
shish, Kittim and Dodanim. Elishah is doubtless Hellas,
not Elis, as has been sometimes supposed ; in Ezek.
xxvii. 7 it is said that blue and purple were brought
to Tyre from the isles of Elishah, that is to say, from
the isles of Greece. Tarshish is usually identified with
Tartessos in Spain, not far from the modern Gibraltar.
It was the furthest point reached in the western basin of
the Mediterranean by the Phoenician and Greek traders.
The ships which made the voyage were consequently
known as the ships which traded to Tarshish, or more
briefly, ships of Tarshish. The phrase gradually came
to be applied to any kind of merchant vessel, even to
those which had never visited Tarshish at all.
Kittim was Kition in Cyprus, the site of which is now
occupied by Larnaka. It was, however, a Phoenician
and not a Greek settlement, a fact which strikingly
illustrates the geographical character of the tenth chap
ter of Genesis. Kittim was a son of Javan, not because
its inhabitants were Greeks, but because it was situated
in the Ionian island of Cyprus. Dodanim, on the
other hand, may represent a Greek colony. As will
be seen from the margin of the Authorised Version,
Rodanim is an alternative reading of Dodanim, and is
probably the one to be preferred. In this case, it will
denote the natives of the island of Rhodes. Rhodes
had originally been occupied by Phoenicians whose
tombs have been discovered in the ancient cemeteries
of the island, but the Phoenician settlers were subse
quently superseded by Dorian Greeks.
Tubal and Mcshech, whose names follow that of Javan,
are almost always coupled together in the Old Testa-
48 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
mcnt, and were famous for their skill in archery. In the
Assyrian inscriptions the names appear as Tubla and
Muska, and they were known to the classical geo
graphers as Tibareni and Moskhi. In classical days,
however, their seats were further to the north than they
had been in the age of the Assyrian monuments. In
the time of Sargon and Sennacherib their territories still
extended as far south as Cilicia and the northern half of
Komagene. Later they were forced to retreat north
ward towards the Black Sea, and it was in this region
of Asia Minor that Xenophon and his Greek troops
found their scanty remains 1 .
Tiras is the only son of Japhet whose name continues
to be obscure. Perhaps it represents the river Tyras,
the early home of the Kimmerians; perhaps it is con
nected with the names of two countries in the neigh
bourhood of Carchemish mentioned by the Egyptian
king Ramses III, Tarsh-kha and Tarsh-ba. Future
research alone can be expected to settle the question.
Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah are stated to have
been the sons of Gomer. A passage in the book of
Jeremiah (li. 27) makes it pretty clear in what part
of the world we are to look for Ashkenaz. Ararat,
Minni, and Ashkenaz are there called upon to march
together against Babylon ; it is evident, therefore, that
all three countries must have been neighbours one of
the other. The decipherment of the cuneiform inscrip
tions of Armenia has fixed the geographical position of
Ararat and Minni. Ararat was the district which lay
between the Araxes and the mountains south of Lake
Van, while the Minni adjoined the kingdom of Ararat
on the east. Ashkenaz accordingly must have been
1 Anab. v. 5.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 49
precisely where an inscription of Sargon places the
people of the Asguza, and we may therefore feel but
little hesitation in identifying the two together. The
Gimirra, or Kimmerians, are placed in the same locality
by certain cuneiform inscriptions which relate to the
closing days of the Assyrian Empire. In these the
Gimirra are called the allies and companions in arms
of the Minni, the Medes, and the Saparda of Sepharad
(Obad. 20), thus explaining the relation which is said
in Genesis to exist between Gomer and Ashkenaz.
On Riphath no light has as yet been thrown by the
decipherment of the records of the past, and it is
questionable whether the position of Togarmah has
been satisfactorily determined. Prof. Friedrich De-
litzsch has identified it with the Til-Garmi of the
Assyrian inscriptions. This was a city in the district
of Malatiyeh, in the extreme east of Kappadokia. But
it is difficult to discover any connection between Til-
Garmi and the Gimirra. Kappadokia, it is true, is
called Gamir by the Armenian writers ; but the name
belongs to a late period, and is probably due to a
belief that the Gomer of Genesis denoted the Kappa-
dokian highlands. We learn from Ezekiel (xxvii. 14)
that horses were imported from Togarmah ; this, how
ever, does not throw much light on the situation of the
place, since the Kurdish mountains, as well as Asia
Minor, were famous for their breed of horses. Still, it
is probable that Togarmah lay in the western rather
than in the eastern part of the northern zone of Genesis,
since Ezekiel (xxxviii. 6) couples the house of Togar
mah not only with Gomer, but also with Tubal and
Meshech and the land of Gog.
From an ethnological point of view the northern zone
D
50 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
was not inhabited by members of the same race. Kittim,
as we have seen, was a Phoenician colony, and its in
habitants consequently belonged to the Semitic stock.
In Tubal and Meshech we must see representatives of
the so-called Alarodian race, to which the modern
Georgians belong. This race was once in exclusive
possession of the highlands of Armenia, and the cunei
form inscriptions found there were the work of Ala
rodian princes who established a kingdom on the shores
of Lake Van. About B.C. 600 Aryans from Phrygia
entered Armenia, overthrew the old monarchy, and
imposed their rule upon the indigenous population.
The bulk of the Armenians, however, still belong to
the older race, though the language they have adopted
was that of their invaders.
It is true that although Semites, Aryans, and Alaro-
dians represent different races of mankind, they never
theless all alike belong to the white stock, and may thus
be said to be but varieties of one and the same original
race. But even granting it to be probable that the
various white races are all descended from a common
ancestry, the fact cannot be proved, and it is possible
that they may have developed out of more than one
dark race. At any rate the ethnologist is bound to keep
them apart, just as the philologist is bound to separate
families of speech which, though morphologically the
same, are genealogically distinct. The several char
acteristics of the different white races are too clearly
marked out for science to confound them together.
The northern zone of Genesis is a geographical and
not an ethnological division of the world, and hence it
is that while it includes more than one distinct race,
it does not possess a monopoly of the white stock.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 51
The middle and southern zones arc equally the seats
of fair-skinned races.
The southern zone is described before the middle.
The sons of Ham, it is said, were Cush, and Mizraim,
and Phut, and Canaan. Cush embraces not only the
Ethiopia of the classical geographers, but also the south
western coast of Arabia and the opposite coast of Africa
as well. It thus corresponds to the land of Pun of the
Egyptian monuments, as well as to Kesh or Ethiopia.
It was inhabited for the most part by a white race
whose physical characteristics connect them with the
Egyptians. But in the southern valley of the Nile this
race was in contact with two black races, the negroes,
who once extended much further to the north than is
the case at present, and the Nubians. The Nubians, in
spite of their black skins, are usually classed among the
handsomest of mankind, just as the negroes are among
the ugliest. They are tall, spare, and well-proportioned.
The hair is black and fairly straight, and there is very
little of it on the body. The nostrils and lips are thin,
the eyes dark, the nose somewhat aquiline. The flat
feet with which they are credited are not a racial char
acteristic, but are due to their walking without shoes.
As among the Egyptians, the second toe is longer than
the first. Constitutionally the Nubians are delicate, and
are peculiarly sensitive to pneumonia. They suffer also
from early decay of the teeth, and are not a long-lived
race.
It will be seen that in their physical characteristics
they form a striking contrast to the negro, the black
skin and hair alone excepted. The negro is dolicho
cephalic and prognathous, with broad nostrils, large
fine teeth, and woolly hair. His iliac bones are un-
D 4
52 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
usually vertical, his forearm unusually long, the con
volutions of his brain simpler than in the case of a
European. He enjoys a good constitution, enabling
him to withstand the malaria and yellow fever which
arc so fatal to the white man.
Mizraim, the brother of Cush, is the Hebrew name of
Egypt. It signifies the two Mazors, or walls of fortifi
cation. On the Asiatic side Egypt was defended from
attack by a chain of fortresses, sometimes called Shur,
or the wall/ by the Canaanites, and it was from this line
of defence that the name of Mazor was derived. The
name, however, did not apply to the whole of Egypt. It
denoted only Lower or Northern Egypt, which extended
from the sea to the neighbourhood of the modern Cairo.
The rest of the country was Upper Egypt, called Pe-to-
Res, the land of the South/ in ancient Egyptian, the
Pathros of the Old Testament (Isaiah xi. Ji). The
division of Egypt into two provinces dated from pre
historic times, and has been remembered through all
the vicissitudes of Egyptian history down to the present
day. It was essentially the double land, and its
rulers wore a double crown. Hence the use of the dual
form, the two Mazors, in Hebrew. Here and there,
where Lower Egypt is alone alluded to, the singular
Mazor is employed 1 , but otherwise the dual Mizraim
only is found throughout the Old Testament. The
name of the northern province, of that part of the
country which bordered upon Palestine and was there
fore best known to the Jews, has been extended so as
to embrace the southern province as well. But the fact
that it was a southern province distinct from the province
1 As in 2 Kings xix. 24, The Nile-arms of Mazor (A. V. rivers of
besieged places ), Is. xix. 6, xxxvii. 25.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 53
of the north was not forgotten, and Mazor accordingly
became Mizraim. It was otherwise among the Babylo
nians and Assyrians. Here the name of Mizir or
Muzur remained a singular, although it is used to sig
nify not merely Lower Egypt but Upper Egypt as well.
The inhabitants of Egypt arc described as the off
spring of Mizraim. There were the Ludim, the Lydian
mercenaries with whose help the Egyptians had shaken
off the yoke of Assyria and who are mentioned in other
passages of the Old Testament (Jer. xlvi. 9, Ezek. xxvii.
10, xxx. 5); the Anamim, perhaps the inhabitants of
On or Heliopolis ; the Lehabim or Libyan mercenaries,
who became sufficiently powerful to place a dynasty
that of Shishak on the Egyptian throne ; the Naphtu-
him or Memphites, the people of the city of the god
Ptah ; the Pathrusim of Upper Egypt ; the Casluhim in
whom Prof. Ebers sees the coast-men ; and the Caph-
torim. The latter were the natives of the coast-land
Caphtor, a name the explanation of which we owe to
Prof. Ebers. It represents an Egyptian Kaft-ur or
greater Phoenicia, Kaft being the Egyptian title
of Phoenicia. From an early period the coast of
the Delta had been colonised by Phoenicians ; its
population had become almost wholly Phoenician in
blood ; and its extent gave it an importance which was
recognised even by the mother-country. As compared
with the narrow strip of rocky shore on which the
Phoenician cities were built, the broad and fertile coast
of the Delta was a greater and better land. It was
emphatically a greater Phoenicia just as the southern
coast of Italy was in the eyes of the Greek settlers in it
a greater Greece.
Caphtor was the original home of the Philistines, as
54 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
we learn from several passages of the Bible (Deut. ii. 23,
Jer. xlvii. 4, Amos ix. 7). In Genesis the reference to
them has been shifted from its original place ; it should
follow the name of the Caphtorim and not of the
Casluhim. The Philistines, in fact, were the garrison
established by the Egyptian kings on the southern
border of Palestine. The five cities which they held
commanded the coast road from Egypt to Syria (Exod.
xiii. 17), and formed the starting-point of Egyptian con
quest and domination in Asia. It was needful that
they should be inhabited by a population which, though
akin in race to that of Canaan, were yet subjects of the
Egyptian Pharaoh and bound by ties of birth to the
Pharaoh s land. They came indeed from Canaan, but
nevertheless were not of Canaan. As long as Egypt
was strong their devotion to her was unshaken ; when
she deserted them and retreated within the limits of her
own territory they still preserved their individuality and
refused to mix with the population that surrounded
them.
The name which follows that of Mizraim in Genesis is
still enveloped in mystery. Since the days of Josephus
it has been the fashion to identify Phut with the Liby
ans ; but this cannot be correct, since the Lehabim or
Libyans are included among the sons of Mizraim. A
broken fragment of the annals of Nebuchadnezzar has at
last shed a little light on the question. We there read
that the Babylonian king in the 37th year of his reign
marched against Egypt, and defeated the army of
Amasis, the Egyptian monarch, as well as the soldiers
of the city of Phut-Yavan or Phut of the lonians. We
know that Amasis was a Philhellene ; he had granted
special privileges to the Greeks, had surrounded himself
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 55
with a Greek body-guard, and had removed the camp
of the Greek mercenaries from the neighbourhood of
Pelusium to that of Memphis. In the city of Phut-
Yavan, therefore, we must see some city to which the
Greek mercenaries were considered in a special manner
to belong. It may have been the Greek colony of
Kyrene, from whence Amasis had obtained a wife.
However this may be, Phut can no longer be said to
remain without a record save in the Hebrew Scriptures.
It was at one time the head-quarters of some of those
Greek mercenaries who played so important a part in
Egyptian politics in the age of Nebuchadnezzar and
Cyrus, and we can thus understand why Phut is asso
ciated with Lud by the prophets when they threaten
Egypt with its coming overthrow. Jeremiah (xlvi. 9)
describes Egypt as rising up for war with all its mer
cenary troops, the Ethiopians and the men of Phut that
handle the shield, and the Lydians that handle and
bend the bow. So, too, Ezekiel (xxx. 5) declares that
Egypt shall fall with all her forces, Ethiopians and men
of Phut, Lydians and Arabs. Like the Lydians, the
men of Phut offered their services to others besides the
Egyptians, and accordingly we find them along with the
Lydians serving in the ranks of the armies of Tyre
(Ezek. xxvii. 10).
Canaan bordered on Egypt, and the name is usually
explained to mean the lowlands. It originally denoted,
in fact, the narrow strip of land which lies between the
sea and the mountains on the coast of Palestine. Here
the great cities of the Phoenicians were built, and it was
from hence that the Phoenician ships started on their
voyages in search of wealth. As time went on, the
name of Canaan came to be applied to the land beyond
56 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
the mountains on the east. In the letters written from
Palestine to the Egyptian court a century before the
Exodus, and discovered among the ruins of Tel el-
Amarna, Kinakhkhi or Canaan denotes the district
which intervened between the cities of the Philistines
and the country northward of Gebal. The latter was
called the land of the Amorites. In the books of the
Old Testament the word Canaan has acquired an even
greater extent of meaning than it has in the tablets of
Tel el-Amarna. The cities of the Philistines, as well as
the barren region east of them, are alike included in
Canaan. Even the Amorites have become Canaanites,
like the inhabitants of Hamath far away to the north.
In the tenth chapter of Genesis, however, the limits
of Canaan are described as properly extending only
from Zidon in the north to Gaza and Gerar in the
south, with an easterly extension to the Dead Sea.
But afterwards these limits were enlarged. The
families of the Canaanites were spread abroad, so
that Hittites, Amorites and Hamathites were all grouped
among them.
Sidon, the fishers town, was, we are told, the first
born of Canaan. To the south of it was Tyre, the
Rock, built on a small rocky islet at a little distance
from the shore. An Egyptian traveller in the age of
Moses tells us that water had to be brought to it in
boats. Its temple of Baal Melkarth claimed a great
antiquity ; its priest informed Herodotos that it had
been founded 2300 years before his visit to the spot.
Northward of Sidon stood Gebal, called Byblos by the
Greeks, one of the most sacred spots in the Canaanitish
land. Its worship of the goddess Ashtoreth was famous
throughout the civilised world.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 57
The original land of Canaan was called Phoenicia by
the Greeks and Kaft by the Egyptians. It is possible
that both names were derived from the palms which
grew luxuriantly there. Kaph and Kipptih signify a
palm-branch in Hebrew, and phoenix in Greek has the
same meaning. But it is also possible that the latter
word was derived from the name of the country in
which the Greeks first became acquainted with the palm,
not that the country took its name from the tree.
The language of Canaan, as it is called by Isaiah
(xix. 1 8), differed but slightly from Hebrew. The
Hebrew tribes, in fact, like their kindred in Moab and
Ammon, must have exchanged their earlier Aramaic
dialects for the language of the country in which they
settled. In no other way can we explain how it came
about that the Syrian emigrant (Deut. xxvi. 5) should
have acquired the ancient language of Canaan. The
adoption of the new language was doubtless facilitated
by the relationship of the Aramaic dialects to Hebrew
or Phoenician. They belonged to the same family of
speech and bore the same relation to one another that
French bears to Italian.
Heth, the Hittite, who is named next to Sidon as
a son of Canaan, was a stranger in the land. The
primitive seat of the Hittite tribes was in the Taurus
mountains of Asia Minor. From hence they had
descended upon the fertile plains of Syria, and con
quered a considerable part of the Semitic population
they found there. The despatches sent to the Egyptian
king by his governors in Syria about B. C. 1400 are full
of references to the advance of the Hittite armies and
requests for troops to be used against them.
The Jebusites are classed among the Amorites in
; -)8 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Josh. x. 5, 6, according to the correct rendering of the
Hebrew text. They were the inhabitants of Jerusalem
at the time of the entry of the Israelites into Canaan.
But it is probable that they had not been long in the
possession of the city. Some of the Egyptian de
spatches alluded to above came from the priest-king
of Jerusalem, Ebed-tob by name. He was an obedient
vassal of Egypt, but had been appointed to his office,
not by the Egyptian monarch, but by the oracle of the
god Salem, whose temple stood on Mount Moriah.
We learn from his letters that Jerusalem was threatened
by an enemy, who had already despoiled it of a portion
of its territory, and whose head-quarters seem to have
been at Hebron. Ebed-tob declares that if troops are
not sent at once from Egypt, there is no hope of saving
the city. Ebed-tob was the later successor of the priest-
king Melchizedek, and no trace of the name of Jcbusites
appears in his despatches. Since Hebron was an
Amorite town, we may conjecture that the enemy about
whom Ebed-tob writes, consisted, in part at least, of
Amorite Jebusites, and that the withdrawal of the
Egyptian garrisons from Palestine immediately after
the date to which the despatches belong allowed the
Amorite foe to capture Jerusalem. It is possible there
fore that Ebed-tob was the last of the old line of
royal pontiffs.
The Amorite must be left to another chapter like the
Girgasite and the Hivite. The Arkite was the inhabitant
of Arka, a Phoenician city north of Gebal. Sin or Sina,
from which the Sinite derived his name, stood in the
immediate neighbourhood. Arvad, now represented by
the village of Ruad, lay upon the coast and shared in
the maritime trade of Tyre and Sidon. Zemar, on the
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 59
other hand, was inland. It had been the scat of an
Egyptian governor in the time of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, when Palestine and Syria were subject to
Egypt. Subsequently it lost its importance like the
other Phoenician towns w r hich were not situated on the
coast. Hamath, now Hamah, lay outside the borders
of Phoenicia, and was built on the banks of the Orontes,
far to the north. Hittite inscriptions have been found
there, from which we may infer that it was once sub
jected to Hittite domination.
It will be seen that the tribes and cities of which
Canaan is said to have been the father were related to
one another only geographically. The blond Amorite
and the yellow-skinned Hittite of the north had
nothing in common from a racial point of view either
with one another or with the Semitic tribes of Canaan.
Geography and not ethnology has caused them to be
grouped together.
We now pass to the third and last zone into which
the world of Genesis is divided. The children of
Shem, we are told, were Elam and Asshur, and
Arphaxad and Lud and Aram. Elam, the highlands,
was the mountainous country east of Babylonia, of
which Susa or Shushan was the capital. Its population
was non-Semitic and their language was agglutinative.
Asshur, or Assyria, on the other hand, belonged both
in race and language to the Semitic stock. The
features of the Assyrian, as pourtrayed upon his monu
ments, are of a typical Semitic cast, and his mental
and moral characteristics were those of the Semitic
race. The country of Assyria took its name from the
old capital Assur, or Asshur, now represented by the
mounds of Kalah Sherghat, a little to the north of
60 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
the junction of the Tigris with the Lower Zab. It is
the town, rather than the country, which is referred to
in the description of the rivers of Paradise where it is
said of the Hiddekel or Tigris that it goeth eastward
to Asshur (Gen. ii. 14). But elsewhere in the Old
Testament the name of Asshur signifies Assyria 1 .
The founders of the city of Asshur and the kingdom
of Assyria had moved northward from Babylonia. The
Semitic language of Babylonia differed from that of
Assyria only as the dialect of Middlesex differs from
that of Oxfordshire. It was from Babylonia that the
Assyrians had brought their religion, their customs,
their art of writing, their science, and their traditions.
Their gods were the gods of Babylonia, with the sole
exception of the supreme Assur. They built their
houses of brick in a land of stone and raised their
temples and palaces on lofty platforms, because this had
been necessary in the alluvial plain of Babylonia, where
stone did not exist and protection had to be sought
from the floods of winter. It was the ambition of those
Assyrian kings who aimed at empire to be crowned in
Babylon. Only so could their right to dominion out
side the boundaries of Assyria itself be recognised and
made legitimate. To become king of Babylon and
the adopted child of the Babylonian Bel was to the
Assyrian monarch what coronation in Rome was to
the mediaeval German prince. But Babylonia had not
always been in Semitic hands. Its earliest population
belonged to another race, and the language which
1 Except in Gen. xxv. 18 where Asshur must denote the district
occupied by the Asshurim of Gen. xxv. 3. It was to these Asshurim that
Qazarnai belonged who is described in an Egyptian papyrus as a hero who
fought with wild beasts.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 6 1
they spoke was agglutinative. Attempts have been
made of late to show that this language was akin to
that of early China, and that between the first Chinese
emigrants to the Flowery Land and the pre-Semitic
inhabitants of Chaldaea there was a racial as well
as a linguistic relationship. However this may be, it
was the pre-Semitic population, and not the Semitic
intruders, to whom the origin of Chaldaean culture and
civilisation were due. It was this population who were
the inventors of the pictorial characters which developed
into the cuneiform syllabary, they were the first to write
on tablets of clay, they founded the great cities and
temples of the country, and initiated the art and science,
the literature and law, the systems of government and
religion which the Semitic Babylonians afterwards
inherited. Babylonia was divided into the two provinces
of Accad in the north and Sumer or Shinar in the south ;
Accad was the first to fall under Semitic influence and
domination, and it was here that the first Semitic empire
that of Sargon of Accad took its rise. It required
a longer time for the southern province of Sumer, the
Shinar of the Old Testament, to pass into Semitic hands.
The Semitic occupation seems to have been effected
partly by conquest, partly through the channel of trade.
But it was a slow and lengthy process. The older
population was never eradicated. In some parts of the
country it was absorbed into the younger and intrusive
race ; in other parts the younger race was absorbed into
it. The Babylonian people continued to the last to
exhibit signs of their mixed descent ; now it was the
Semitic element which predominated, at other times the
non-Semitic.
But the Babylonian Semites were not left in peaceful
62 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
possession of the country after their political fusion with
its older inhabitants. From time to time invading
hosts rushed down upon them from the neighbouring
mountains of Elam. One such conquest has left its
record in the pages of the Bible. From the I4th chapter
of Genesis we learn that in the age of Abraham the
paramount lord of Babylonia was an Elamite prince.
At a later date the tribe of Kassi obtained a permanent
footing in Babylonia and established a dynasty there
which lasted for several centuries. A cuneiform tablet
gives us a list of the most common words in the Kassite
language, together with their significations. To what
family of speech they belong is quite unknown.
Kassites and Babylonians intermingled together, and
the long continuance of Kassite rule has been thought
to explain the name of Kasdim given to the inhabitants
of Babylonia in the Old Testament. Chesed, of which
Kasdim is the Hebrew plural, has been explained as
Kas-da the country of the Kassites. But the explana
tion is more than doubtful, and it is quite as easy to
derive Kasdim from the Assyrian verb Kasddu to
conquer/ so that the Kasidi or Kasdim would be the
Kassite conquerors of the Chaldaean plain.
In the Septuagint the Hebrew word Kasdim is trans
lated by Chaldaeans. In the Greek period Chaldaean
and Babylonian had become synonymous terms, and
Babylonia had come to be known as Chaldaea. But the
Chaldaeans originally formed no part of the population
of the country. In the inscriptions we first meet with
the name of the Kalda or Chaldaeans in the ninth
century before our era. It was the name of a tribe
which lived in the great salt-marshes at the mouths of
the Euphrates and Tigris southward of Babylonia. This
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 63
tribe, however, was destined to exert an important
influence on the fortunes of Babylonia. Under Mero-
dach-baladan they gained possession of Babylon
(B.C. 721), and for twelve years Merodach-baladan was
the legitimate sovereign of the people of Bel. He
was then forced to fly before Assyrian invaders, and
though he returned once more to Babylon, it was for
but a short time. Sennacherib ravaged Babylonia with
fire and sword, and it became an appanage of the
Assyrian crown.
But the part played by the Kalda in Babylonian
history was not destined to end here. It has recently
been made probable by Dr. Winckler that Nebuchad
nezzar and his family were of Chaldaean descent. This
would fully account for the position attained by the
Chaldaeans in Babylonia and the predominating preva
lence of their name. In the Greek and Latin writers it
takes the place of all others. The whole Babylonian
population is called Chaldaean ; all other elements in
it are forgotten, and the Chaldaean alone survives. Hence
it is that while in Hebrew the Babylonians are known
as Kasdim, in the Greek of the Septuagint they become
Chaldaeans.
It is probable that the Kalda or Chaldaeans belonged
to the Semitic race. This at any rate was the case as
regards the larger part of those who are meant by the
Kasdim in the Old Testament. At the same time we
must not forget that since the name of Kasdim is
frequently used of the whole population of Babylonia it
included other racial elements besides Semitic.
According to Gen. xxii. 21, 22, Chesed, the father of
the Kasdim, was the brother of Huz and Buz and the
uncle of Aram. Huz and Buz are the Khazu and Bazu
64 THE RACES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT.
of the Assyrian inscriptions, Aramaean tribes settled in
the northern district of Arabia. Aram denotes the
Aramaean tribes who extended from the western
frontiers of Babylonia to the highlands of Mesopotamia
and Syria. They are the Arumu, Aramu and Arma of
the Assyrian monuments. Some of them, like the
Puqudu or Pekod (Jer. 1. 21), were even settled in
Babylonia. Hence the relationship that existed be
tween them and the Kasdim, which is expressed in
Hebrew in the usual genealogical form.
In the tenth chapter of Genesis Arphaxad is the
brother of Aram. He is placed next to Asshur with
whom therefore he would have been in geographical con
tact. Now Arphaxad is written in the original Hebrew
Arpha-Chesed, the Arpha of Chesed. What Arpha
means is doubtful. Professor Schrader connects it with
the Arabic urfak and accordingly renders the name
the territory of Chesed. Up to the present no light
has been cast on the word by the Assyrian texts.
The name Lud which follows that of Arphaxad
cannot be correct. The reading must be corrupt,
though it is impossible to conjecture what it could
originally have been. Lud or Lydia belongs to a
different zone from that of the children of Shem,
and, as we have seen, is already referred to under the
name of Magog. There were no Lydians in the service
of the Babylonian kings as there were in Egypt. We
ought to have the name of a people or region which
touched on Babylonia on the one side and on the
Aramaean tribes on the other. What we should expect
would be some name like that of the Manda, or
nomads, the Nod of Gen. iv. 16, who bordered upon
Babylonia in the north-east.
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 65
Arphaxad was the grandfather of Eber or Hebrew.
Unto Eber, we are told, were born two sons ; the
name of one was Peleg ; for in his days was the earth
divided ; and his brother s name was Joktan. The tribes
and districts of South-eastern Arabia traced their descent
to Joktan. Among them we find Hazarmaveth, the
modern Hadhramaut, Ophir, the famous sea-port and
emporium of the goods of the further east, Havilah the
sandy region, compassed by the river Pison (Gen. ii. u),
and occupied by the sons of Ishmael (Gen. xxv. 18),
and Amalek (i Sam. xv. 7), as well as Sheba, the Saba
of the native inscriptions, whose ancient capital is now
represented by the ruins of Mareb in the south-western
corner of Arabia. The kingdom of Sheba arose after
the decay of that of Ma in or the Minaeans, and its
rulers were already masters of Northern Arabia in the
time of Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon (B. C. 733, 715). The
queen of Sheba had heard of the fame of Solomon, for
the northern limit of her dominions adjoined the southern
limit of his.
The northern frontier of the sons of Joktan was Mesha
or Mash. Mash, as we learn from verse 23, was one of
the four sons of Aram, Uz, the land of Job, being
another. In the Assyrian inscriptions the country
of Mas or Mash is frequently referred to. It was the
northern part of Arabia occupying not only Arabia
Petraea but also the Nejd to the south. Sargon tells
us that his conquests had extended throughout the whole
land of Mas as far as the river of Egypt, and Assur-
bani-pal found himself compelled to traverse its
waterless wastes in his march against the Nabatheans.
There is one passage in the Ethnographical Table of
Genesis in which the geographical system on which it is
E
66 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
founded is departed from. This is the passage relating
to Nimrod, the son of Cush, the mighty hunter before
the Lord. The name of Nimrod occurs once more
in the Old Testament. In the Book of Micah (v. 6)
the land of Asshur and the land of Nimrod } are
placed in parallelism one to the other. Both, it would
seem, signify Assyria and consequently justify the
marginal rendering of Gen. x. n : Out of that land he
that is to say, Nimrod went out into Assyria.
But outside the pages of the Old Testament nothing
is known of Nimrod. The monuments of Assyria and
Babylonia have hitherto refused to divulge the name.
Certain scholars indeed imagined that it might be
the pronunciation of the name of the hero of the
great Chaldaean Epic, but we now know that such is not
the case. Nimrod still remains to be discovered in the
cuneiform texts.
The kingdom of Nimrod began in Babylonia. Baby
lon, Erech and Accad in the North, Calneh in the south,
were the chief seats of his power. From thence he
moved northward and founded Nineveh and the
adjoining towns.
Erech, the Uruki of the inscriptions, is now re
presented by the mounds of Warka. It was a centre
of Semitic influence in Babylonia at an early period.
But it was at Accad, in the immediate neighbourhood
of Sippara, that the first Semitic empire was established.
The fact that the only city of Sumir or Shinar in
cluded in the kingdom of Nimrod was the unimportant
town of Kalneh, called Kul-unu in the native texts,
seems to indicate that the kingdom was Semitic. This
would account for the further fact that the future capital
of Assyria was built by the mighty hunter of Baby-
THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 67
Ionia. The name of Nineveh (Ninua) was a Semitic
modification of that of Nina, an ancient city of Baby
lonia. It was from Nina, it would appear, that the
founders of the younger Nineveh were derived.
The remains of Nineveh lie beneath the rubbish
mounds of Kouyunjik and Nebi-Yunus (opposite the
modern city of Mosul). Its walls embraced a vast
circuit of land. Within these stood the palaces of the
kings, the temples of the gods and the houses of
the people, as well as the open squares in which the
markets were held. These public squares are called
Rehoboth Ir in Genesis, mistranslated the city
Rehoboth in the Authorised Version. To the south of
Nineveh, where the mounds of Nimrud now stand, was
Calah. Calah had been built by Shalmaneser I
(B.C. 1300) who had made it for awhile the capital
of the country. Between Calah and Nineveh lay
the hamlet of Res-eni or Resen the head of the spring,
the source of the sweet waters with which the neigh
bouring population was supplied.
These geographical details will show that the passage
relating to Nimrod a departure though it may be from
the general scheme can yet justify its place in the
chapter. It is an episode, but an episode which has a
geographical rather than a historical or an ethnological
interest. Nimrod is introduced, not so much because
he is a hero, as because he is connected with the
geography of Babylonia and Assyria.
Nevertheless the episode is one which does violence to
the general geographical scheme. Assyria and Baby
lonia belong to the central, not to the southern zone,
and are consequently correctly given under the head of
Shem. From a strictly scientific point of view the
E 3
68 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
names of the cities which stood in them ought to be
enumerated after the names of Asshur and Arphaxad.
The introduction of the episode is due to a different
conception from that upon which the rest of the
chapter is based.
Apart from the episode, however, an analysis of the
chapter proves abundantly its true character and
purpose. It lays no claim to being an ethnological
record. On the contrary, it tells us as plainly as
language can speak that with ethnology and the
ethnologist it has nothing to do. There may be
ethnological documents in the Bible, but the tenth
chapter of Genesis is not one of them.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SEMITIC RACE.
THE Semitic Race owes its name to a confusion
of ethnology with philology. A certain family of
speech, composed of languages closely related to one
another and presupposing a common mother-tongue,
received the title of Semitic from the German scholar
Eichhorn. There was some justification for such a name.
The family of speech consists of Hebrew and Phoenician,
of Aramaic, of Assyrian and Babylonian, of Arabian,
of South Arabian and of Ethiopic or Ge ez. Eber,
Aram, and Asshur were all sons of Shem, and the South
Arabian tribes claimed descent from Joktan. In default
of a better title, therefore, Semitic was introduced and
accepted in order to denote the group of languages
of which Hebrew and Aramaic form part.
But whatever justification there may have been for
speaking of a Semitic family of languages there was
none for speaking of a Semitic race. To do so was to
confound language and race, and to perpetuate the old
error which failed to distinguish between the two.
Unfortunately, however, when scholars began to
realise the distinction between language and race,
the mischief was already done. The Semitic race
had become, as it were, a household term of ethnologi
cal science. It was too late to try to displace it ; all we
can do is to define it accurately and distinguish it care-
70 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
fully from the philological term, the Semitic family of
speech.
We have already seen that there are members of the
Semitic race who do not speak Semitic languages, and
speakers of Semitic languages who do not belong to the
Semitic race. There are Jews who know only English
or German or Spanish, while Arabic dialects are spoken
by the Maltese and the Nubians of Southern Egypt.
The ancient population of Babylonia was a mixed one,
and it is probable that the predominant element in
it remained non-Semitic to the end, although it had
learned to speak a Semitic idiom. It is questionable
whether the Phoenicians or Canaanites were of purely
Semitic ancestry, and yet it was from them that the
Israelites learned the language which we call Hebrew.
There is a sense, however, in which we may use the
terms Semitic race and Semitic language convertibly.
The Semitic languages are as closely akin to one
another as the modern Romanic languages of Europe,
and imply a parent-speech which stood in the same
relation to them that Latin stands to the Romanic
dialects. At a period so remote that the record of it is
lost, the several Semitic idioms branched off from this
parent-speech. But they were all distinguished by the
same strong family features, more especially by a
characteristic which is met with in none of the other
languages of the world. This is what is usually known
as the triliteralism of Semitic roots. Most Semitic
words are built upon a skeleton of three consonants, the
grammatical meaning of each word depending on the
vowels with the help of which the consonants are pro
nounced. Thus \qatal(a) means he slew, qatil a
slayer, qutdl slain, q tol slay, qatl, gitl, qutl, slaughter.
THE SEMITIC RACE. Jl
The principle of triliteralism is carried out with such
regularity as almost to seem artificial. Even words
which appear to have originally consisted of two con
sonants only have been made to conform to it. Such a
characteristic can have imprinted itself upon the
language only at a time when its speakers were isolated
from the rest of mankind and lived by themselves in a
compact community.
There are many evidences which go to show that this
community lived in North-eastern Arabia and led the
same nomad life as the Bedawin of to-day. The names
of such animals and plants as are found in all the Semitic
dialects point to this part of the world as the cradle of
the stock. On the other hand, there are no indications of
a settled life in a large city. Indeed the word dtu, which
signifies city in Assyro-Babylonian the first of the
Semitic languages to come under the influence of culture
and civilisation is the same as the Hebrew ohel tent,
and primarily meant, not the city of civilised life, but
the tent of the wandering nomad. In Hebrew the word
retained its old signification of home, and when it is
said that the Levite of Beth-lehem was told by his
father-in-law that he might go home (Judg. xix. 9),
the expression literally means go to thy tent. The
house of the primitive Semite was nothing more than
the temporary shelter he erected for himself in the desert ;
when he became acquainted with the palaces of Accadian
Babylonia he had to borrow the non-Semitic term by
which they were described, c-gal or great house, and
adapt it to his own organs of speech, making it ekallu in
Assyrian and hekal in Hebrew.
The circumstances in which it was placed make it
probable that the primitive Semitic community consisted
72 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
practically of only one race. It is true that there may
have been slaves or captured wives in its midst who be
longed to another race ; it is also true that the attractions
of a wandering life may have caused individual members
of neighbouring tribes or nations to join it from time to
time. We know how largely the Gypsies have been re
cruited in such a way. But on the whole these additions
to the community cannot have made much impression
upon it. The geographical conditions of the country it
inhabited preserved it from mixture and kept the race
pure. The offspring of foreign wives would have inherited
the physical characteristics of the stronger parent, and in
this case the stronger parent belonged to the nomad race.
If ever, then, there was an instance in which language
and race were convertible terms it was that of the
primitive Semitic community, The peculiarities which
mark off the Semitic languages from the other languages
of the world, more especially the triliteralism upon
which they are built, are the creation of a single family
of mankind which led a separate and isolated life at the
time when these peculiarities were permanently fixed.
If we would still find the Semitic race in its purity we
must look for it in the locality in which its younger life
was nursed, and among nomad tribes who still preserve,
almost in their entirety, the characteristic features of the
parent Semitic speech.
Northern Arabia was the early home of the Semitic
stock, and it is in Northern Arabia that we still meet
with it but little changed. In Central Arabia the vocalic
terminations may still be heard which distinguished the
three cases of the primitive Semitic noun from one
another, but which have long since been lost elsewhere
in Semitic speech. It is there, too, that we may still
THE SEMITIC RACE. 73
hear the peculiar sounds of the parent-language, which
had already disappeared from cultivated Assyrian four
thousand years ago, pronounced to-day as they were
by the first ancestors of the Semitic race. And there,
moreover, we may still see the Semite leading the life of
his earliest ancestors, wandering with his flocks in search
of pasture, sheltering himself at night under a tent of
camel s hair, or traversing the sands of the desert on a
camel s back.
The Bedawin of Northern Arabia, and to a lesser extent
the settled population of the Hijaz, may therefore be re
garded as presenting us with the purest examples of the
Semitic type. But even the Bedawin are not free from
admixture. In the Sinaitic Peninsula we are able to
trace their past history, and it shows us how difficult it
is to discover anywhere in the world a really unmixed
race. The Towarah, who form the main bulk of the
population of the Peninsula, are emigrants from Central
Arabia. They poured into the country at the time of
the Mohammedan conquests and dispossessed the older
Nabathaean population, the Saracens as they were
called by Christian writers. One tribe only, the Jiba-
liyeh or mountaineers, can claim a different ancestry.
And even these are partly descended from the Egyptian
and Wallachian prisoners whom Justinian attached as
serfs to the Monastery of St. Catherine. The people
who engraved the Sinaitic inscriptions on the rocks in
the earlier centuries of the Christian era have had to
make way for strangers.
It must be remembered, however, that the Sinaitic
Peninsula is but an outlying appanage of the primitive
Semitic domain. It is in a certain measure cut off from
the rest of Arabia, and since the age of the Third and
74 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Fourth Egyptian Dynasties its western coast has been
under the influence of Egypt. Further east there has
been less reason for a mixture or displacement of
population.
If. then, we would trace the racial characteristics of
the Semite it is to Northern and Central Arabia that we
should naturally turn. And that we are right in doing
so is shown by a comparison of the type we find there
with that of the modern Jews on the one hand and of
the ancient Assyrians, as depicted on their monuments,
on the other. The three types agree in all essential
features.
But here again we must be careful to define what we
mean by the modern Jewish type. The Jewish race is by
no means a pure one. It has admitted proselytes from
various nations, and at different periods in its career has
intermarried with other races. There are the black Jews
of Malabar, for example, who are descended from the
Dravidian natives of Southern India, there are the white
Jews of certain parts of Europe whose type is European
rather than Jewish. The Falashas of Abyssinia are Jews
by religion rather than in origin, and it is only by the
aid of intermarriage that we can explain the contrast in
type between the two great divisions of European Jews
the Sephardim of Spain and Italy and the Ashkenazim
of Germany, Poland, and Russia. Indeed we know that
few of the leading Spanish families have not a certain
admixture of Jewish blood in their veins, which implies
a corresponding admixture on the other side.
Even in Biblical times the Jewish race was by no
means a pure one. David, we are told, was blond and
red-haired l , which may possibly indicate an infusion of
1 i Sam. xvii. 42. Compare Ruth i. 4, iv. ip,.
THE SEMITIC RACE. 75
foreign blood. At all events he surrounded himself with
a body-guard of Cherethites or Kretans l , and among
his chief officers we find an Ammonite, an Arabian, and
a Syrian of Maachah 2 . The ark found shelter in the
house of a Philistine of Gath 3 , and one of the most trusty
captains of the Israelitish army, whose wife afterwards
became the ancestress of the kings of Judah, was Uriah
the Hittite. But it is the Egyptian monuments which
have afforded us the most convincing proof of the mixed
character of the population in the Jewish kingdom. The
names of the Jewish towns captured by the Egyptian
king Shishak in his campaign against Rehoboam, and
recorded on the walls of the temple of Karnak, are each
surmounted with the head and shoulders of a prisoner.
Casts have been made of the heads by Mr. Flinders
Petrie. and the racial type represented by them turns
out to be Amorite and not Jewish. We must conclude,
therefore, that even after the revolt of the Ten Tribes
the bulk of the population in Southern Judah continued
to be Amorite. in race, though not in name. The Jewish
type was so scantily represented that the Egyptian artist
passed it over when depicting the prisoners who had
been brought from Judah.
Palestine is but another example of an ethnological
fact which has been observed in Western Europe. A
conquering and intrusive race tends to disappear. It
may survive for many centuries, it may even seem to
have crushed the subject population for ever, and to
have planted itself too firmly in its new possessions to
1 We learn from Sennacherib that the body-guard of Hezekiah which
defended Jerusalem against the Assyrians similarly consisted of Urbi or
Arabians.
* 2 Sam. xxiii. 37, 35, 34.
3 i Sam. vi. 10, n.
76 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
be rooted out. But in France, as has already been
noticed, the blond, broad-shouldered Aryan conqueror,
the only Gaul known to the writers of Greece and Rome,
has had to make way for the older dark, small-limbed
race which has again become the predominant type. In
Britain, in the same way, the darker race, at all events
in the west, is taking its revenge upon its conquerors by
slowly superseding them.
What has happened in Western Europe has happened
also in Palestine. The Jews flourish everywhere except
in the country of which they held possession for so long
a time. The few Jewish colonies which exist there are
mere exotics, influencing the surrounding population as
little as the German colonies that have been founded
beside them. That population is Canaanite. In
physical features, in mental and moral characteristics,
even in its folklore, it is the descendant of the population
which the Israelitish invaders vainly attempted to
extirpate. It has survived, while they have perished or
wandered elsewhere. The Roman succeeded in driving
the Jew from the soil which his fathers had won ; the Jew
never succeeded in driving from it its original possessor.
When the Jew departed from it, whether for exile in
Babylonia, or for the longer exile in the world of a later
day, the older population sprang up again in all its
vigour and freshness, thus asserting its right to be indeed
the child of the soil.
It must have been the same in the northern kingdom
of Samaria. To-day the ethnological types of Northern
Palestine present but little variation from those of the
south. And yet we have contemporary monumental
evidence that the people of the Ten Tribes were of the
purest Semitic race. Among the spoils which the British
THE SEMITIC RACE. 77
Museum has received from the ruins of Nineveh is an
obelisk of black marble whereon the Assyrian king
Shalmaneser II has described the campaigns and
conquests of his reign. Around the upper part of the
obelisk run five lines of miniature bas-reliefs representing
the tribute-bearers who in the year 842 B.C. brought the
gifts of distant countries to the Assyrian monarch.
Among them are the servants of Jehu, King of Samaria.
Each is portrayed with features which mark the typical
Jew of to-day. No modern draughtsman could have
designed them more characteristically. The Israelite of
the northern kingdom possessed all the outward traits by
which we distinguish the pure-blooded Jew among his
fellow men. The fact is remarkable when we remember
that the subjects of Rehoboam are depicted by the
Egyptian artists of Shishak with the features of the
Amorite race. It forces us to the conclusion that the
aboriginal element was stronger in the kingdom of
Rehoboam than in that of Jeroboam. There, too, how
ever, it mostly disappeared with the deportation of the
Ten Tribes. We need not wonder, therefore, if its disap
pearance from Southern Palestine was still more marked
when the dominant class in Judah the Jewish people
themselves were led away into captivity.
The true Semite, whether we meet with him in the
deserts and towns of Arabia, in the bas-reliefs of the
Assyrian palaces, or in the lanes of some European
ghetto, is distinguished by ethnological features as
definite as the philological features which distinguish
the Semitic languages. He belongs to the white race,
using the term race in its broadest sense. But the
division of the white race of which he is a member has
characteristics of its own so marked and peculiar as to
78 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
constitute a special race, or more strictly speaking a
sub-race. The hair is glossy-black, curly and strong,
and is largely developed on the face and head. The
skull is dolichocephalic. It is curious, however, that in
Central Europe an examination of the Jews has shown
that while about 15 per cent, are blonds, only 25 per
cent, are brunettes, the rest being of intermediate type,
and that brachycephalism occurs almost exclusively
among the brunettes. It is difficult to account for this
except on the theory of extensive mixture of blood 1 .
Whenever the race is pure, the nose is prominent, and
somewhat aquiline, the lips are thick, and the face oval.
The skin is of a dull white, which tans but does not
redden under exposure to the sun. There is usually,
however, a good deal of colour in the lips and cheeks.
The eyes are dark like the hair.
Mentally the Semite is clever and versatile, with a
special aptitude for finance. His memory is retentive,
his mode of reasoning deductive rather than inductive.
He is better able to deduce the consequences from a
given premiss, or to expose the weakness of an adver
sary s argument, than to balance the probabilities in
favour of some inductive conclusion. He is consequently
more likely to attain eminence in mathematics or music
than as a pioneer in inductive science.
1 See Fligier, Zur Anthropologie der Semiten in the Mittheilungen
der Wiener anthropol. Gesellschaft , ix. pp. 135 sq. In the Caucasus the
Jews are hyper-brachycephalic, but as brachycephalism characterises the
Caucasian populations intermixture would fully explain the fact. According
to Reclus (vi. p. 225) the Suabian colonies in the Kura valley in the course
of two generations became assimilated in general type to their Caucasian
neighbours, dark hair and eyes included. On the other hand, the Russian
colony planted in the time of the empress Katherine, on the shores of the
Gygaean Lake, near Sardes, remains unchanged, with tall stature, blond
complexion, pale blue eyes and light yellow hair.
THE SEMITIC RACE. 79
In religion the Semite has always been distinguished
by the simplicity of his belief and worship ; in social
matters by his strong family affection. Another of his
characteristics has been fondness of display, to which
must be added the love of acquisition, and unwearied
industry in certain pursuits. But he has little taste for
agriculture, and except perhaps in the case of ancient
Assyria, has always shown a distaste for the discipline
of a military life. Intense to fanaticism, however, he has
proved himself capable, when roused, of carrying on a
heroic struggle in contempt of pain and death. Along
with this intensity of character goes an element of fero
city to which the Assyrian inscriptions give only too
frequent an expression. The love of travel and restless
ness of disposition which further distinguishes the Semite
must probably be traced to the nomadic habits of his
remote forefathers.
Physically he has a strong and enduring constitution.
The Jews have survived and multiplied in the mediaeval
towns of Europe under the most insanitary conditions,
and if we turn to the past we find the reigns of the
Assyrian monarchs averaging an unusually long number
of years. Diseases that prove fatal to the populations
among whom the Jews have lived seem to pass them
over, and like the natives of Arabia they resist malaria
to a remarkable degree.
Is it possible, with the materials at present at our dis
posal, to reach beyond the primeval home of the Semitic
family, that Arabian region where the traits which
characterise the Semitic race and the Semitic languages
became fixed and stereotyped ? Many scholars will
answer in the affirmative. On the linguistic side there
is a distant relationship between the Semitic family of
80 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
speech and the language of ancient Egypt. Structurally,
it is true, there is a wide difference between them, and
Old Egyptian shows no traces of the triliteralism which
distinguishes the Semitic dialects among the languages
of mankind. But the fundamental forms and conceptions
of Semitic and Old Egyptian grammar are the same,
many of the roots in the two groups of speech agree
together, and it is possible that future research may dis
close a similarity between them even in the department
of phonology. On the other hand, the so-called Hamitic
or sub-Semitic languages of Northern Africa also exhibit
resemblances to the language of ancient Egypt as well
as to those of the Semitic family. In the Libyan dialects
we find the same double verbal form employed with the
same double function as in Assyrian, and throughout the
Hamitic languages the causative is denoted by a
prefixed sibilant as it was in the parent Semitic speech.
We cannot argue, however, from language to race,
and as we shall see in a future chapter the Libyans have
ethnologically no connection with the Semites or the
Egyptians. Moreover, in several instances the Hamitic
dialects are spoken by tribes of negro or Nubian origin,
while the physiological characteristics of the Egyptians
are very different from those of the Semite. The
original Semitic family may, indeed, have migrated from
Africa, as many writers maintain ; but if so, it acquired
such new and definite features in its Arabian home as
not only to make it a distinct race, but also to efface the
proofs of its original descent. History knows only of
Semitic migrations from Arabia into Africa which
resulted in the foundation of Ethiopic kingdoms, not of
migrations from Africa into Arabia.
At present, therefore, we must be content with tracing
THE SEMITIC RACE. 8l
the Semitic race no further than its Arabian cradle.
Here it assumed the features which mark it off from the
other races of mankind. All attempts to connect it with
Egyptians or Libyans, and to pass beyond the boundaries
of its primitive desert home, are but guesses unsupported
by the solid evidence which science demands. We know
indeed that it is a branch of the white race, and that its
ancestors must consequently have come in some remote
period of human history from the region in which the
white race had its earliest abode. But within the white
race there are many races which the ethnologist is
unable to unite. They are like the separate families of
speech which exist within the same morphological group
of languages. Each race, like each family of speech, has
its own distinct individuality which it is the purpose of
ethnology to define and accentuate. One of these races
is the Semitic ; it stands apart from all others and con
stitutes for the student of ethnology a peculiar type of
humanity.
CHAPTER V.
THE EGYPTIANS.
E earlier history of Israel is interwoven with that
1 of Egypt. It was to Egypt that Abraham went
down to sojourn, and Hagar the handmaid of Sarah was
Egyptian-born. Egypt forms the centre of the history
of Joseph, and it became the house of bondage of the
children of Israel. In Goshen they first grew into a
nation, and the exodus out of Egypt is the starting-point
of Israelitish history.
Who were these Egyptians with whom the earlier
records of the Old Testament are so deeply concerned ?
At first sight, it does not seem difficult to give an answer
to the question. The ancient inhabitants of the valley
of the Nile have left behind them numberless monu
ments ; painting and sculpture have alike been called
upon to portray the forms and features of the people who
erected them. The museums of Europe are filled with
the statues of Egyptian men and women, executed with
marvellous skill and life-like accuracy, and the painted
walls of the tombs are covered with representations of
the scenes of daily life. Moreover, the modern Egyptian,
throughout a large part of the country, still displays the
physical, the mental, and the moral qualities of his
ancestors. The Copt, or Christian native, more especi
ally, who has not had the same temptation to intermix
with his Arab conquerors as his Mohammedan brother,
often reproduces very exactly the ancient type.
And yet it has not been found very easy to determine
THE EGYPTIANS. 83
the precise characteristics of the Egyptian race. It is
but recently that ethnologists have discovered that the
Egyptian is a member of the white race. Indeed, Pro
fessor Virchow has been the first to prove that such is
the case. The red skin of the Egyptian native is due
to sun-burn ; a newly-born infant or a townsman who
never exposes himself to sun and wind is as white as
a European. In fact, the ordinary Spaniard or South
Italian is darker-skinned than the pure-blooded Egyptian.
The skin of the Egyptian is not unfrequently freckled ;
this is never the case with the true members of the South-
European race. The artists of the Pharaohs acknow
ledged that their countrymen belonged to the white
race. While the skin of the men is painted red, the skin
of the women is a pale yellow or even white. The
women protected themselves from the sun ; the men did
not ; hence alone the difference in the colour of their skin.
As we approach the southern frontiers of Egypt,
the colour of the skin becomes constantly darker.
This is due to long-continued intermixture with the
dark-skinned Nubians, who once occupied the whole
of this region. In a town like Edfu, where the Coptic
population has kept itself comparatively free from
such intermixture, fair complexions are the rule, but
we have only to step into the country to find the
Mohammedan peasantry darkening from brick-red to
a deep copper-brown. The combined effect of ex
posure to the sun and of a strain of Nubian blood is
often a colour which is but a few degrees lighter than
that of the Nubian himself.
But although the pure-blooded Egyptian is a mem
ber of the white race, he is not, like his Libyan
neighbour, a blond. His hair and eyes are black.
F 2
84 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
It is true that red hair, and more especially a red
beard and moustache, are occasionally met with.
They were also met with in ancient Egypt. The
mummy of Ramses II makes it probable that the
oppressor of the Israelites had red hair, and since
we are told by classical writers that red-haired per
sons were sacrificed to Typhon, the belief that such
persons existed in the country must have been general.
The red hair referred to, however, is merely a variety
of black, black hair, when partially deprived of its
pigment, assuming a reddish tinge.
The Egyptian is well-proportioned and muscular,
with delicate hands and feet. Like the Italian, and
in contradistinction to the ancient Greek, the second
toe of his foot is longer than the first. He is of
medium height, and is dolichocephalic. His hair is
straight, and is seldom much developed on the face
or body. His eyes are somewhat small, his nose
straight, though the nostrils like the lips are inclined
to be full. His lower jaw is massive, but the general
expression of his mouth is that of good-temper and
light-heartedness, which is not belied by his actual
character. From the days of the Greek travellers he
has always been celebrated for the size and excellence
of his teeth, and the thickness of his skull.
His disposition is singularly sweet and docile. He
is incapable of bearing a grudge, and his cheerfulness
under the most adverse circumstances has become
proverbial. He is kindly and hospitable, and affec
tionate in his family relations. Alone of ancient
nations, as Sir Gardner Wilkinson has pointed out 1 )
1 The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Birch s edition,
i. p. 364.
THE EGYPTIANS. 85
the Egyptian considered an act of humanity worthy
of record in stone. On the walls of the palace-temple
of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, Egyptian soldiers
are represented as rescuing a drowning crew of the
enemy. Diodoros remarks that in inflicting punish
ments the Egyptians were actuated not by a spirit of
vengeance, but by a desire to reform the offender.
With all their light-heartedness and good-temper,
however, the Egyptians have always been subject to
fits of fanatical excitement and ferocity. They also
possess a considerable share of obstinacy. But they
are industrious and hard-working ; in no other way,
indeed, could they have transformed the pestiferous
swamps at the mouth of the Nile into the luxuriant
garden that it has been since the beginning of his
tory, or year after year have compelled the rising and
falling Nile to feed the desert-land with its fertilising
waters.
The Egyptian is essentially an agriculturist. To
this doubtless we must in great measure ascribe the
utter absence of the military spirit which distinguishes
him, as well as his love of home. The conquests of
the Eighteenth Dynasty, like the conquests of Ibrahim
Pasha in our own age, were mainly made with the
help of foreign mercenaries, aided by the superior
discipline of an Egyptian army. Nubians, negroes,
and Libyans in the past, Turks, Circassians, and Al
banians in modern times, have been the mainstay of
Egyptian success in war. As long as Egypt was
governed by princes of native origin in the days of
the earlier dynasties, it seems to have made no at
tempt to extend its territories beyond the valley and
delta of the Nile.
86 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
The monuments of the past, and more especially
the small articles found in the tombs, are evidences
of the artistic skill and delicate workmanship of the
Egyptian race. This artistic skill has never been
lost, as is proved by the successful imitation of ancient
scarabs and similar objects by the modern peasantry
of Thebes. Along with artistic skill go intellectual
abilities of a high order. The Egyptian is exceed
ingly quick to understand and learn, and nothing can
prove his cleverness more clearly than the fact that
throughout the long centuries of Mohammedan domi
nion the Coptic scribes have contrived to keep the
practical administration of the country in their own
hands. They have constituted the financial bureau
cracy through which Egypt has been governed since
the age of the Arab conquest. Indeed, the Egyptian
shows a special aptitude for mastering the intricacies
of finance, as he also does for acquiring languages.
He makes a better subordinate, however, than
principal. He possesses little of the pioneering spirit
requisite for discoveries in inductive science, and is
unfitted for taking the initiative in practical or intel
lectual movements. He is quick to learn, but he
requires the lesson to be already given to him.
It is in Central Egypt that the Egyptian has best
preserved his purity of blood. That is to say. it is
here that there has been least admixture with the
races who have entered the country since the period
of the Pharaohs. But the question still remains how
far the Egyptian of the age of the Pharaohs himself
belonged to an unmixed race. Was what we call the
Egyptian race the offspring of the conditions under
which the earlier settlers in the valley of Nile were
THE EGYPTIANS. 87
placed, or did these conditions include even in pre
historic times the blending of more than one stock ?
Recent researches have shown that since the dawn
of history, the land of Egypt has been occupied by
two different races. One of these we will term abori
ginal, meaning thereby that it was already in posses
sion of the country when the later immigrants
the Egyptians proper arrived there. Traces of the
earlier stone-age, in the shape of paleolithic weapons,
have been found both in the neighbourhood of Cairo
and on the summit of the hills behind Edfu 1 , and it is
possible that they may be relics of the aboriginal race.
However that may be, the study of ancient Egyptian
religion has long since led enquirers to the belief that
it represents a fusion between two religious concep
tions, so radically different as to imply a difference
of race on the part of those who held them. It is
difficult otherwise to explain the union of a pan
theistic system of religion, of high spiritual character,
with a grossly sensuous beast-worship, characteristic of
the lowest tribes of Africa.
The conclusion arrived at by the student of Egyp
tian religion has been confirmed by the spade of the
excavator. Mr. Rhind at Gizeh, and Mr. Flinders
Petrie at Medum, have found among the tombs of
the Fourth Dynasty interments which point to the ex
istence of another race besides that which we com
monly mean by Egyptian. In these interments there
1 The first was found on the site of the Petrified Forest by Mr. Slopes in
1879, the otlier b y Mr - Petlie in l88 7- The paleolith found by Mr. Petrie
is water-rolled, proving that at the time when it was left where it was
discovered by the explorer, the Libyan plateau which has been a waterless
desert since the beginning of Egyptian history, was well supplied with
streams.
88 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
is no trace of mummification ; the bodies are placed
in the tomb without any covering, and with the knees
crouched up and resting against the chin. It is a
mode of burial which was prevalent among certain of
the tribes of ancient Libya, but it stands in marked
contrast to the Egyptian manner of the disposal of the
dead, and the ideas upon which this rested. More
over, in these interments none of the objects so essen
tial in Egyptian eyes to the repose of the dead are
deposited along with the corpse ; vessels of the rudest
and coarsest earthenware are alone placed in the tomb.
Nevertheless, the tombs in question are scattered
among those which display all the characteristics of
Egyptian burial. The people to whom they belonged
must therefore have lived side by side with the Egyp
tians, though as yet they had not been affected by
Egyptian beliefs and practices, at all events in the
matter of burial. A few centuries later all the in
habitants of Egypt bury their dead alike.
Professor Virchovv has remarked that starting from
the Eleventh Dynasty, or rather from the fall of the
Old Empire at the close of the Sixth Dynasty, the
racial type presented by the statues and mummies
of Egypt is that of the existing peasantry. The
cerebral indices, he says, of all the native inhabi
tants of the valley of the Nile, whether fellahin or
Kopts or Nubians, fluctuate to much the same extent
between dolichocephalism and mesocephalism, as in
the case of the royal mummies of the Theban princes.
All these populations are, speaking generally, straight-
haired and orthognathous ; their relatively narrow
noses project strongly, and their chin is very power
fully developed. I can quote no peculiarity in the
THE EGYPTIANS. 89
skulls in which the modern Egyptian type differs per
manently from the old Egyptian 1 .
None of the skulls are brachycephalic. The Nine
teenth Dynasty to which Ramses II, the oppressor of
the Israelites, belonged, is distinguished by its marked
dolichocephalism or long-headedness. His mummy
shows an index of 74, while the face is oval with an
index of 103. The nose is prominent, but leptorrhine
and aquiline, and the jaws are orthognathous. The
chin is broad, the neck long, like the fingers and nails.
The great king seems to have had red hair.
Ramses III of the Twentieth Dynasty was also
dolichocephalic, with an index of 73. But the monarchs
of the Eighteenth Dynasty were rather inclined to
mesocephalism, Thothmes III, for example, the con
queror of Canaan, having a skull with an index of
78-2 2 .
But when we turn to the monuments of an older period
we find evidences of a brachycephalic population. One
of the most striking relics of the past in the museum of
Cairo is a wooden figure known as the Sheikh el-beled,
or Headman of the Village. It represents a well-to-do
Egyptian of the lower middle class walking over his
fields. An expression of quiet contentment and satis
faction rests upon his face, and his corpulent limbs
show that he was accustomed to good living. The
figure is exceedingly life-like, and is evidently a very
accurate portrait of the individual in whose tomb it was
found. It is as old as the Fifth or Sixth Dynasty, when
Egyptian art had not as yet stiffened into that con-
1 Die Mumien der Konige im Museum von Bulaq (Sitzungsbcrichte der
K. Preussischen Akcuicmif, xxxiv. 1888).
2 The measurements are those of Virchow in the paper quoted above.
90 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
ventional form with which the museums of Europe have
made us familiar.
Now the measurements of Professor Virchow have
proved that the head of the figure is brachycephalic, the
index being as much as 85-7. The nostrils are some
what broad, the nasal index being very much larger
than that of the royal mummies of the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Dynasties. The jaws are orthognathous, the
limbs stout and thick, while the height is that of a man
who was shorter than the Egyptian of to-day. In fact
in the Sheikh el-beled we have a new type, which
differs strikingly from that of a later date.
But by the side of the Sheikh el-beled and other
figures which exhibit a similar type we find statues of
the same age in which the later type is represented.
The statues of King Khephren, for example, the builder
of the second pyramid of Gizeh, are distinctly meso-
cephalic ; it is only where the image is that of a member
of the middle or lower class that brachycephalism
appears. The higher caste of Egyptian society already
tended to dolichocephalism.
Only one conclusion can be drawn from this fact. In
the time of the earlier dynasties it was the ruling class
alone which displayed the physical characteristics of the
typical Egyptian. The lower classes belonged to a
different and a lower race. The civilisation which they
possessed had been given to them by an alien race
which held them in subjection, and compelled them to
execute the monumental works which have made the
name of Egypt famous throughout the world.
In the course of time, however, the two races became
completely amalgamated, and the dolichocephalic type
more and more superseded the brachycephalic. That
THE EGYPTIANS. 91
brachyccphalism and the other characteristics of the
race to which it belonged disappeared altogether, we
cannot believe ; a careful examination of Egyptian
mummies will doubtless bring to light many con
temporaries of Ramses with short-headed skulls. But
the prevailing type became dolichocephalic or meso-
ccphalic to such an extent that so careful an observer as
Virchovv met with no examples of brachycephalism
among the present inhabitants of the valley of the Nile.
They exist, indeed, but in no large quantity.
It is a harder matter to determine the original home
of those Egyptian immigrants to whom the culture of
ancient Egypt was due and who represent the typical
Egyptian race. But materials exist for solving even
this problem of ethnology. Ancient Egyptian tradition
pointed to the divine land of Arabia Felix as that
from which their principal deities had migrated. Hathor
was the goddess of Pun, Ra had journeyed like the
Phoenix from the Arabian land of spices. The divine
land was Southern Arabia, the source of the sweet-
smelling incense which was offered to the gods. It was
also the source, as Dr. Schweinfurth has lately shown,
of the sacred trees which the Egyptians planted beside
the temples of their deities. These trees, such as the
Persea and the sycamore, are now extinct, a manifest
proof that they were not indigenous in the soil of Egypt
and were preserved from extinction there by artificial
protection. When that protection was removed with
the overthrow of Egyptian paganism the sacred trees
also disappeared.
Botany thus corroborates the tradition which brought
the divinities of Egypt from Arabia Felix. The
migration of the divinities implies the migration of their
92 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
worshippers as well. It is not surprising, therefore, ii
the casts taken by Mr. Flinders Petrie of the ethno
logical types represented on the Egyptian monuments
show an intimate connection between the Egyptians and
the people of Pun. Pun is the name under which the
southern coast of Arabia as well as the opposite coast ol
Africa was known to the Egyptians, and in the time of
the Eighteenth Dynasty it was further extended to the
Somali region. In colour, form, and features the
inhabitant of Pun resembles the inhabitant of Egypt.
Like the latter his skin has been burnt red by the sun,
he has the same shapely limbs and medium stature, the
same delicate hands and feet, the same form of skull
and face. In only two respects does he differ from the
subjects of the Pharaoh. His lower jaw is not so
massive as that of the Egyptian, who seems in this
respect to have acquired a Nigritian characteristic, and
the square beards which in Egypt were reserved for the
gods or for the kings who impersonated the gods were
THE EGYPTIANS. 93
worn in Pun by most of the men. This last fact is a
curious confirmation of the Punite descent of the
Egyptian upper classes.
The extraordinary similarity between the representa
tion by the Egyptian of himself and of the people of Pun
it the more striking when we remember the realistic
character of Egyptian drawing and the temptation the
artist was under to depict his countrymen as a peculiar
people unlike the vile barbarians of the rest of the
world. But he drew his subjects from the life, and the
result was that in spite of himself the man of Egypt and
the man of Pun are portrayed in the same fashion.
Nowhere else did the Egyptian find a population which
resembled that of his country ; the nearest in type were
the Phoenicians of Kaft, who in general appearance
remind us of the natives of Pun. But apart from the
Phoenicians of Kaft, among the nations of the world
known to the Egyptians Pun alone contained a popula
tion which in outward form resembled that of Egypt.
The fact will throw light on the philological relation
ship of the Egyptian language to the Semitic idioms.
The fundamental conceptions of grammar, the pronouns
and certain of the roots, are too closely alike in the two
branches of human speech to be the result of mere
coincidence. On the other hand the differences are
numerous and profound. The triliteralism which is
characteristic of the Semitic languages is not to be
discovered in Egyptian, and we find little or no trace of
the sounds peculiar to the Semitic alphabet. It is,
therefore, to the parent Semitic speech, to that lost
mother from which the existing Semitic dialects are
derived, that the ancient language of Egypt was akin.
We may regard them as two sister-tongues, once spoken
94 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
side by side. As we have seen, the primitive home of
the Semitic family of speech, the region where triliteralism
became its stereotyped characteristic, was Northern and
Central Arabia. Southern Arabia, the land of Pun, the
earliest seat of the Egyptian race, would thus have been
geographically in contact with the earliest seat of the
Semitic languages, and the connection which exists
between Egyptian and Semitic grammar would be
satisfactorily explained.
We must conclude, accordingly, that it was from the
southern coast of Arabia, perhaps also from the neigh
bouring shores of Africa, that the Egyptians originally
came. They found the valley of the Nile in the posses
sion of another and a lower race which they were easily
able to subdue and subsequently to amalgamate. They
brought with them the arts of industry and agriculture,
and by slow degrees transformed the brackish marshes
of the Delta into the garden of the ancient world. They
taught the Nile to spread its waters over fields of ripening
crops, and carried them faraway into the desert by means
of canals. In place of the animals to whom alone worship
had hitherto been paid, they introduced the deities of the
divine land, deities of light and gladness and moral attri
butes, and erected temples to them, first of wood and
afterwards of stone. Kingdoms sprang up on the banks
of the Nile, and a system of pictorial writing was in
vented out of which a syllabary and then an alphabet
gradually developed. Great monumental works already
began to be executed, and it is probable that the sphinx
of Gizeh was carved out of a rock in this early age. At
length the whole country was united under the sway of
Menes, the king of This, and the crowns of Upper and
Lower Egypt were placed on the head of a single
THE EGYPTIANS. 95
monarch. The Nile was turned aside from its ancient
course under the Libyan hills by a dyke which still
remains, and on the huge embankment thus won from
the river Memphis, the capital of the united kingdom,
was built. Through six long dynasties the Old Empire
lasted ; then came a period of disaster and decay, and
when Egypt once more appears in history under the
rulers of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties, in the
age of the so-called Middle Empire, its capital has
been shifted from Memphis to Thebes, and the faces of
the kings themselves seem to have undergone a change.
It is probable that foreign elements, perhaps Nubian,
perhaps Libyan, had come to mingle themselves in the
blood of the royal family.
The Middle Empire was overthrown by the invasion
of the Hyksos or Shepherd-kings from Asia. The
native princes sought refuge in the far south, while the
Delta, and at one time Central Egypt, passed under
foreign rule. The exact nationality of the Hyksos is
still a matter of dispute. All we know with certainty is
that they came from Asia, and they brought with them
in their train vast numbers of Semites who occupied the
northern part of Egypt. Comparatively few Hyksos
monuments have as yet been discovered. These exhibit
a peculiar type of features, very unlike that of the
Egyptians. The face is thickly bearded, the hair being
curly, with a pigtail hanging behind the head. The
nose is broad and sub-aquiline, the cheek-bones high,
the forehead square and knitted, the lips prominent
and expressive of intense determination. The kindly
urbanity so characteristic of the Egyptian face in statuary
is replaced by an expression of sternness and vigour.
Among the ethnological types presented by the Egyptian
96 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
sculptures there is only one which can be compared with
that of the Hyksos monuments. This is the type peculiar
to the inhabitants of North-eastern Syria, in the district
called Nahrina by the Egyptians and Aram-Naharaim in
the Old Testament. It was a district of which the centre
was Mitanni in the fifteenth and following centuries
before the Christian era, and since the cuneiform tablets
recently discovered at Tel el-Amarna have disclosed to
us the fact that the language of Mitanni was neither
Semitic nor Indo-European, we may perhaps conclude
that the population which spoke it was also non-Semitic.
However this may be, if we are to regard the so-called
Hyksos sphinxes of San as reproducing the Hyksos type
of countenance, it would follow that the hordes which
overwhelmed Egypt in the twenty-third century B.C.
were led by princes from Northern Syria.
It has been questioned whether the Hyksos monu
ments really represent the features of the Hyksos them
selves, or whether they are not the product of a provincial
art of the time of the Twelfth Dynasty which has been
usurped and appropriated by the foreign invaders. As
Mariette first pointed out, the existing population in the
neighbourhood of San. the Hyksos capital, still exhibits
traits similar to those of the Hyksos statuary. But the
fact would only go to show that the Hyksos population
were never extirpated from the district in which they
had ruled for so many centuries ; indeed it is difficult
otherwise to explain how it is that the physical type of
the population in this part of Egypt should be so different
from what we find elsewhere. Mr. Tomkins 1 remarks
with justice that the colossal head (of the Hyksos
prince) lately found at Bubastis has the very same cast
1 In the Journal of the Anthropological Institute xix. 2, p. 193.
THE EGYPTIANS. 97
of features and expression as that of the monuments
of San, though heightened in all their finer attributes
and softened by Egyptian culture, and that this must
practically settle the question of the Hyksos origin of
the older sphinxes and statues. We must accordingly
return to the old view that the very remarkable type of
head and face presented by the Hyksos monuments was
that which characterised the monarchs whose names are
found upon them. Prof. Flower considers the type to
be Mongoloid ; Prof. Virchow expresses himself more
doubtfully. If. as we have seen, its nearest ana ogue is to
be sought in Northern Syria and Mesopotamia within
the limits of the old kingdom of Mitanni, it is among
the inhabitants of this region of Asia that ethnologists
may expect to discover the racial origin of the Hyksos
conquerors of Egypt.
After 669 years of occupation the Hyksos were finally
driven back into Asia by Ahmes, the founder of the
Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty, and what is known to
Egyptologists as the New Empire was established. The
successors of Ahmes conquered Canaan, and extended
the dominion of Egypt almost to the banks of the
Euphrates. But it is doubtful whether the royal families
who governed the Egyptian people after the expulsion of
the Hyksos were, any of them, of pure blood. The
earlier princes of the Eighteenth Dynasty seem to have
been partly Nubian in descent ; the later kings of the
dynasty intermarried with the royal family of Mitanni,
and eventually endeavoured to impose upon Egypt an
Asiatic faith. The troubles brought about by this
attempt ended in the fall of the dynasty of Ahmes, and
the expulsion or enslavement of the Asiatic foreigners
who had filled the court. The foundation of the
98 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Nineteenth Dynasty marked the triumph of Egyptian
nationalism, and a new king arose which knew not
Joseph. But the Setis and Ramses of the Nineteenth
Dynasty can hardly have been of unmixed ancestry.
Their type of face is European rather than Egyptian,
and it is possible that Hyksos blood may also have
flowed in their veins.
As the New Empire advanced, the dynasties became
more and more foreign in character. The mercenaries
who fought the battles of the Egyptians avenged them
selves from time to time by placing chiefs of their own
upon the throne. The Twenty-second Dynasty, to which
Shishak. the conqueror of Jerusalem, belonged, was of
Libyan ancestry, and the Twenty-fifth consisted of
Ethiopian invaders. Even the Twenty-sixth, which
attempted an antiquarian revival and professed to re
present all that was most national in the Egyptian
character, came from the mixed population of the Delta
and allied itself with the Greeks. Then followed the
ages of Persian and Greek domination, and the estab
lishment of Greek cities and settlements throughout
the country. The preservation of the Egyptian type
has been mainly due to the physical and constitutional
toughness of the Egyptian, and the fact that he was
better adapted to the climatic conditions which sur
rounded him than the strangers who settled in his midst.
To this day the children of Europeans thrive but badly
even in Northern Egypt.
It will thus be seen that the Egypt referred to in the
Old Testament was already full of foreign elements. In
the age of the patriarchs Northern Egypt was governed
by Hyksos kings, and the princes who received Abraham
and Joseph, though they may have adopted Egyptian
THE EGYPTIANS. 99
titles and customs, and even called themselves by
* Egyptian names, were Asiatics in race. Ramses II, the
Pharaoh of the Oppression, has features which declare
his mixed origin, and Shishak, like the Ethiopians So
and Tirhakah 1 , could not claim to be an Egyptian in
the racial sense of the word. It was the subjects of the
Pharaohs, the scribes and the peasantry, and not the
Pharaohs themselves, to whom the Israelite had to look
for the essential characteristics of the Egyptian race.
The fact strikingly exemplifies a leading feature in
the Egyptian character. The Egyptian is a man of
peace, and not of war. The pioneer of civilisation, the
pharos which once shone amid a surrounding night of
barbarism, Egypt has nevertheless been since the days
of the Middle Empire the servant of the nations. It
has, indeed, subdued them by its culture, and even the
rude Hyksos princes submitted at last to assume the
attributes and adopt the manners of the ancient Pharaohs.
But although the foreigner was Egyptianised he remained
a foreigner still. The Egyptian could not govern him
self; the head of the state needed to be possessed of
other qualities than those which distinguished the denizen
of the Nile. The want of the military spirit brought with
it the want also of a power of political initiative.
1 2 Kings xvii. 4, xix. 9.
G 2
CHAPTER VI.
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN.
IN 1888 a remarkable discovery was made among the
ruins of one of the ancient cities of Egypt. The
kings of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty had been
brought by their conquest of Canaan and Syria into con
tact with the kingdom of Nahrina or Mitanni, the Aram-
Naharaim of the Old Testament. They married into
the royal family of Mitanni, and filled their court with
officials not only of Mitannian, but also of Canaanitish
extraction. Amenophis IV, the son of an Asiatic
mother, abjured the faith of his fathers, and endeavoured
to force a new religion upon his unwilling subjects, that
of the Asiatic Baal as adored in the solar disk. The
great offices of state were occupied by foreigners, most
of whom were Semites from Palestine and Syria, and
the king changed his name, which contained that of the
prescribed Egyptian god Amun, into Khu-n-Aten, ; the
glory of the solar disk. The priesthood of Thebes,
however, were powerful enough to withstand the pro
selytising zeal even of the monarch ; he was forced to
quit the capital of his fathers, and to found a new city
for himself and his followers at the spot where the
mounds of Tel el-Amarna now spread along the bank.
Khu-n-Aten s city had but a short existence. His death
was the signal for civil and religious discord, and when
the kingdom once more found itself united under the
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. JOI
strong hand of an acknowledged ruler, the old religion
of Egypt was restored, the foreigner expelled, and the
city of Khu-n-Aten allowed to decay.
The discovery that has been made among its ruins
consists of a number of clay tablets inscribed with the
cuneiform characters of Babylonia. They form a portion
of the archives of Khu-n-Aten and his father, and prove
that in the fifteenth century before our era, not only was
a knowledge of reading and writing widely spread, but
that the common medium of diplomatic intercourse was
the foreign language and complicated script of Baby
lonia. Many of the tablets are letters or despatches
from the Egyptian governors and vassal princes of
Canaan. The chief centres of Egyptian authority were
Gebal and Zemar, Megiddo and Khazi or Gaza near
Shechern (i Chr. vii. 28). Here Egyptian governors of
high rank were stationed. Elsewhere, for the most part,
the native chiefs were permitted to exercise authority in
the name of the Egyptian king. In some cases an
Egyptian governor was appointed by the side of them ;
in other cases the support of an Egyptian garrison and
the occasional visit of an Egyptian Commissioner were
considered sufficient to secure the loyalty of the district.
Jerusalem, for example, was treated in the latter fashion.
We learn from the letters what was the original signi
fication of the geographical term Canaan. It applied
only to a part of the country which subsequently came
to bear the name Kinakhkhi, which corresponds
rather to Khna , the Greek form of the name, than to
the Hebrew form Canaan, and signified the region which
extended from the neighbourhood of Beyrut southwards
to the mountains of Jerusalem. It denoted the low
lands which sloped from the sides of Lebanon to the
102 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
sea, and comprised the plain of Sharon. The Canaanites
were accordingly the southern Phoenicians, and when
Isaiah (xix. i<8) describes the Hebrew language as the
language of Canaan it is to these southern Phoenicians
that reference is primarily made. The country occupied
by them was the Kaft of the Egyptian monuments, in
contradistinction to Khal, or Northern Phoenicia and
Syria, a name which Mr. Tomkins ingeniously connects
with that of the Khal-os, the river of Aleppo. Im
mediately north of Canaan was the land of Amurra or
the Amorites. It is only in this northern region that
the Amorites are known to the writers of the Tel el-
Amarna tablets and to the Egyptian texts. The
Amorites of Southern Palestine do not seem as yet to
have made their name famous. There is no reference to
them in the despatches of Ebed-tob, the priest-king of
Jerusalem, who appears to have been a successor, if not
in lineal descent, at all events in function, of Melchizedek.
It is possible that the city he governed had not yet fallen
into the hands of the Amorite tribe of Jebusites. Had
such been the case we should have expected some
reference to the name of Jebus.
The Canaanite, then, was primarily the Phoenician of
the coast whose oldest city was Zidon, the town of the
fishermen/ Tradition averred that he had come from
the neighbourhood of Babylonia and the Persian Gulf,
and the tradition has been confirmed by the evidence of
language 1 . The language he spoke was a Semitic one,
closely akin to that of Assyria and Babylonia.
1 See Strabo i. 2, 35; xvi. 3, 4; 4, 27 ; Justin xviii. 3, 2 ; Pliny, X. II.
iv. 36 ; Herodotos i. i ; vii. 89 ; Scholiast on Homer, Od. iv. 84. According
to the legend the cause of the migration was an earthquake in the vicinity
of the Assyrian or Syrian Lake; this refers rather to the Persian Gulf
than to the Dead Sea as has sometimes been imagined.
THE PEOPLES OP CANAAN. 103
But the Canaanite did not long remain content with
the narrow strip of coast on which his first settlements
were built. While his ships traversed the Mediterranean
in search of the purple-fish or traded with the barbaric
tribes of Europe and Africa, adventurous spirits made
their way into the fastnesses of the Lebanon, and there
built cities like Zemar and Arka. The neighbouring
populations began to pass under Canaanitish supremacy,
or to intermarry with the Canaanitish race. In this way
the names of Canaan and Canaanite came to be extended
beyond their original frontiers, and the families of the
Canaanites were spread abroad. In the days of the
Israelitish conquest Canaan included the whole country
occupied by the Twelve Tribes, and inhabited by races
of various origin and history. Here and there, it is true,
its limits are more strictly defined, and in Numb. xiii. 29,
we are explicitly told : the Amalekites dwell in the land
of the south ; and the Hittites and the Jebusites and the
Amorites dwell in the mountains ; and the Canaanites
dwell by the sea and by the coast of Jordan.
The people of Kaft are usually represented by the
Egyptians with red skins, like themselves. Mr. Petrie,
however, notes that the chief of Kaft is depicted with
yellow complexion, black eyes, and light brown hair,
though the colour of the hair has probably faded. The
yellow complexion of the chief, however, indicates that
the red tint usually assigned to the skin was the result
of exposure to the sun, as indeed was also the case with
the Egyptians. We may, therefore, regard the Canaanite
of Kaft as the ancient representative of the modern
Syrian, so far as colour is concerned. He was a member
of the white race, but of that darker portion of the white
race which has its seat on the shores of the Mediterranean,
IO4
THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
and his eyes and probably also his hair were black. In
the tomb of Rekh-ma-Ra, a Theban prince who lived in
the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the tribute-bearers
of Kaft have uniformly black hair, with a long curl, or
rather tress, on either side of the face. I am informed
by Mr. Sarrug that in the Lebanon children are frequently
born with black hair, which becomes lighter as they grow
older. The hair is shown by the tress to have been
slightly curly.
The tribute-bearers are handsome men with regular
features, and doubtless presented the same type of face
as the Syrian of to-day. The latter is generally regarded
as dolichocephalic and leptorrhine. though unfortunately
the physiological characteristics of the present population
of Syria are still but imperfectly known. The skulls
brought from the burial-places of Coele-Syria by Sir
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. 1 05
Richard Burton and Mr. Tyrwhitt Drake, and examined
by Dr. Carter Blake, offer two entirely different types, one
dolichocephalic and the other brachycephalic. Some of
the brachycephalic skulls are also prognathous and may
be looked upon as Turko-Tatar, but others exhibit an
aquiline nose and must be assigned to a native origin.
In a female skull from Shakkah the Inca-bone occurs
(see above, p. 6) l .
The people of Kaft who are painted on the walls of
Rekh-ma-Ra s tomb wear richly-embroidered kilts and
embroidered buskins, some of which have upturned toes.
One of the buskins resembles very closely the shoes
depicted on remains lately found in a prehistoric tomb
near Sparta in Greece. Nothing is worn on the head
except a simple fillet. Among the tribute brought from
Kaft to the Egyptian king are rings of precious metal,
and vases with the heads of animals, reminding us of
the owl-headed vases disinterred by Dr. Schliemann at
Hissarlik in the Troad.
Very distinct from the Phoenicians of Kaft are the
Shasu or Bedawin Plunderers of the Egyptian monu
ments. They were the scourge of the settled populations
of Canaan as their descendants are at the present day.
We hear of them as existing from the Egyptian frontier
up to the north of Palestine, the land of the Amorite/
1 Burton and Drake, Unexplored Syria, London, 1872, vol. ii. pp.
227-377. M- Bertholon has described two skulls found in Tunisia with an
index of 77-80 which Dr. Beddoe compares with the dolichocephalic skulls
discovered by Burton at Palmyra as well as with skulls found in Sardinia.
The forehead is narrow, the anterior temporal region flat, the frontal
bosses replaced by a single median prominence, with a certain degree of
paiieto-occipital flattening, and parietal bosses well marked but placed so
far forward as to be immediately above the auricular meatus, so that the
vertical aspect is a kind of lozenge. No such type seems to exist now in
Tunisia Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xx. 4, pp. 350, 351).
106 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
where their place was taken in the fifteenth century
before our era by the invading Hittite. They were pro
perly inhabitants of the desert, who perpetually hovered
on the borders of the cultivated land, taking advantage
of every opportunity to harry and plunder it. When the
government was weak their wandering troops made their
way to the very gates of the cities, and hired their services
to contending chiefs. At times some of them settled in
the plains and adopted village-life, but their savage in
stincts survived, and the settled Bedawi is usually a
mixture of the worst vices of his wilder brother and the
native peasantry. Idle, treacherous, avaricious, cruel,
and cowardly, he deservedly remains an outcast among
the other races of mankind.
The frontier-fortress of Kanana, which has been happily
identified by Capt Conder with Khurbet Kan an, six miles
from Hebron, was defended against Seti I by the Shasu.
It would appear also that they formed part of the garrison
of Hebron at the time of the Israelitish invasion, since
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. 107
Hebron is stated to have been occupied by Ahiman,
Sheshai. and Talmai, the children of Anak, and Sheshai
means the Shasu. Their arms were the spear and the
battle-axe.
The Shasu arc, to use the words of Mr. Tomkins,
sharp-featured, with rather receding foreheads. The
noses are straight, pointed, and look towards the ground,
the nostrils and lips are thin, the eyebrows prominent,
and the face is set in a somewhat full whisker and pointed
beard. A moustache does not seem to have been worn.
At Abu-Simbel, the skin of the Shasu is painted a light
yellow, his eyes are blue, and his hair, eyebrows, and
beard red. It is clear that the Shasu are the same
people as the 37 Asiatics, who brought collyrium to
an Egyptian king of the Twelfth Dynasty 1 under the
leadership of a mountain-chieftain called Absha, and
who are depicted on the walls of the tomb of Nofer-
1 In the sixth year of Usertesen II.
io8
THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
hotep at Beni-Hassan. The followers of Absha have
pale brown or yellow skins with whiskers and beards
similar to those of the Shasu, except that like the hair of
the head they are painted black. Their features also are
precisely the same as those which characterise the Shasu.
THE PEOPLES OP CANAAN.
109
The men wear sandals and embroidered kilts or else
blankets which leave the right shoulder bare. The women
wear shoes and embroidered plaids, as well as a fillet
round the head. Two children are represented carried
in a pannier on the back of a donkey.
The picture has long excited interest since it is the
earliest record we possess of the arrival in Egypt of
a band of Asiatic strangers. The Twelfth Dynasty
flourished long before the days when Abraham or Jacob
went down into Egypt, and in the procession of Absha
and his followers we may perhaps see a representation
of what a patriarchal caravan was like. It should be
noted that the name of Absha is Semitic, identical, in
fact, with that of the Biblical Abishai.
The features of the Shasu recall those of the modern
Bedawin. They differ essentially from the features of
the Menti of Sati, the name given by the Egyptians
[10 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
not only to the hordes who invaded Egypt under the
Hyksos, but also to the nomad population of the Sinaitic
Peninsula and the Hauran. The Menti or Shepherds
are strong-looking men, with hooked noses, rounded at
the point, wide nostrils and full lips. The beard is long,
and the whisker covers all the lower part of the cheek.
The type is Jewish rather than Bedawi, and recalls the
profiles of the tribute-bearers of Jehu on the Assyrian
Black Obelisk found on the site of Calah and now in the
British Museum. Physiologically the Jew thus claims
relationship with the Menti of the Egyptian sculptures
and not with the Shasu. The Menti are mentioned in
the Egyptian inscriptions as inhabiting the Sinaitic
Peninsula as far back as the time of the Fifth Dynasty,
and though the name given to them is merely descrip
tive it seems to have been confined to a particular race.
The term Sati, it .may be added, signifies archers,
and indicates the weapon with which the Sati were
armed 1 .
The Arnorite is called Amar on the Egyptian monu
ments, Amurra in the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna.
As has already been remarked, the name was applied to
the district which lay immediately to the north of Pales
tine, and included the sacred city of Kadesh on the
Orontes, which afterwards became a stronghold of the
Hittites. But we learn from the Old Testament that
Amorites were also to be found in Southern and Central
Palestine, as well as on the eastern side of the Jordan.
In the days of Abraham they lived at Hazezon-tamar
on the western shore of the Dead Sea (Gen. xiv. 5), and
1 It would seem from one of the Tel el-Amama letters that the Sati are the
same as the Suti of the Assyrian inscriptions, who occupied the desert
frontiers of Babylonia from the rising to the setting of the sun.
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. Ill
the Hebrew patriarch was confederate with the three
Amorite brothers who inhabited the plain of Hebron.
According to the more correct translation of Gen. xlviii.
22, Jacob took Shechem out of the hand of the
Amorite, and the Hivite population of Gibeon is stated
to be Amorite in 2 Sam. xxi. 2. Ezekiel declares (xvi.
3, 45) that the mother of Jerusalem was an Hittite, and
its father an Amorite, conformably to the statement in
Josh. x. 5, 6, which makes the inhabitants of Jerusalem,
Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish and Eglon all alike Amorites.
On the eastern side of the Jordan the Amorites had
established two powerful kingdoms in the age of the
Exodus. Og, the Rephaim king of Bashan, is entitled
an Amorite in Deut. iii. 8, while the kingdom of Sihon
at Heshbon was known explicitly as that of ; the Amor
ites. An old song, apparently of Amorite origin, de
scribed how Sihon had conquered the king of Moab and
carried the sons and daughters of his people into captivity
(Numb. xxi. 26-29).
If we combine the information furnished by the Egypt
ian monuments and the Old Testament records, we may
gather that the Amorites had spread from two separate
centres, one to the north and the other in the south of
Palestine. We may also gather that in both localities
they came to be intimately associated with the Hittites.
The Amorite territory of the north was occupied by
Hittite conquerors in the time of Ramses II ; in the
south the Jebusite population of Jerusalem was partly
Hittite and partly Amorite, while the inhabitants of
Hebron arc called sometimes Hittite. sometimes Amor
ite. When the Israelites invaded Canaan they found the
southern portion of the country for the most part in
Amorite hands.
112 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
The cities of the Amorites were great and walled-up
to heaven. The Amorite wall of Lachish has been
discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie at Tel el-Hesy, and it
proves to be of unburnt brick, 28 feet 8 inches in thick
ness l . Such a thickness implies a corresponding height.
The capture of cities so defended well deserved to be a
matter of boasting on the part of the Egyptian monarchs,
and still more so on the part of the children of Israel.
What the Amorite was like we know from the por
traits of him which have been left to us by the artists of
Egypt. His features were handsome and regular, his
nose straight and somewhat pointed, his lips and nostrils
thin, his cheek-bones high, his jaws orthognathous, and
his eyebrows well defined. His skull is apparently doli
chocephalic, he possessed a good forehead, and a fair
amount of whisker which ended in a pointed beard.
Altogether his face expresses intelligence and strength.
At Abu-Simbel his skin is painted a pale yellow, his
eyes blue, and his eyebrows and beard red, while the
hair on the other hand is black. At Medinet Habu the
skin is coloured a light-red, rather pinker than flesh-
colour, unlike the Libyans, who are there painted as red
as the Egyptians themselves.
The profiles of the Amorites, as depicted on the monu
ments of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, are
practically identical with those of the figures at Karnak,
which surmount the names of the cities captured by
Shishak in Southern Judah. It is therefore clear that
the predominant type of population in that part of
Palestine in the reign of Rehoboam was still Amorite.
The Jew held possession of Jerusalem and Hebron, and
1 Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July, 1890,
p. 163.
THE PEOPLES OF C ANA AX. 113
the towns and villages immediately surrounding them ;
elsewhere he would appear to have formed a subordinate
element in the population. The older race was never
extirpated, and we can therefore understand how it was
that the exile of the Jews from Palestine brought with it
the revival of the ancient Amorite stock.
A comparison of the head of an Amorite with that of
a Shasu suggests that the second is a degraded form of
the first. The pointedness of the nose is exaggerated
in the Shasu, and his receding forehead contrasts un
favourably with the profile of the Amorite ; but on the
whole there are certain resemblances between them
which lead to the possibility that both are referable to
the same original type.
However this may be, it is plain that the Amorite
belonged to the blond race. His blue eyes and light
hair prove this incontestably. So also does the colour
of his skin, when compared with that of other races
depicted by the Egyptian artists. At Medinet Habu,
for example, where the skin of the Amorite is a pale
pink, that of the Lebu or Libyan and the Mashuash or
Maxyes is red like that of the Egyptians, though we
know that the Libyans belonged to a distinctively fair-
complexioned race. In a tomb (No. 34) of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, at Thebes, the Amorite chief of Kadesh has a
white skin and light red-brown eyes and hair, his fol
lowers being painted alternately red and white, while
the chief of the Hittitcs has a brown skin and black
hair, and the chief of the Kaft a yellow skin and light
brown hair. In the tomb of Meneptah, where the four
races of the world known to the Egyptians are repre
sented, the populations of Europe have a pale yellow
skin and blue eyes, the Asiatics a light Indian red skin
IT
114 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
and blue eyes ; in the tomb of Seti I, on the other hand,
the skin of the European is yellow, his eyes blue and his
hair dark ; the skin of the Asiatics being in one case
dark yellow, in another red, and in a third white.
Finally, in the tomb of Ramses III, the Europeans are
depicted with yellow skins, red eyes and black hair, and
the Asiatics with light-red skins, blue eyes and black
hair 1 .
It is evident, therefore, that the pale yellow and pink
flesh of the Amorite is intended to denote a lighter skin
than that of the Egyptian, the skin, in fact, of the
blond race. Now the natives of Libya also belonged to
the blond race, and are accordingly classed with the
people of Europe and the Aegean by the Egyptians.
They were specially known as the Tahennu or crystal-
clear/ and according to Lefebure are thus distinguished
from the Tamehu or fair men of the north. More
over, as we have seen, the Shasu, or at all events the
Shasu of Southern Palestine, are represented as belong
ing to the same blond type as the Amorites. We have,
accordingly, a line of blonds extending from the northern
coast of Africa as far as Coele-Syria. and broken only by
the Delta of Egypt. Throughout this region we still
find traces of the race. The Kabyles of Algeria, with
their fair golden hair, their blue eyes and their clear,
freckled skin, strikingly resemble the fair Kelt, and the
Kabyles are but a branch of the Berber population which
is spread over the whole of the mountainous part of
Northern Africa. In Marocco the mountains are occu
pied by the Riffis, large, broad-shouldered men, whose
physical characteristics are those of the Kabyles. The
1 Flinders Petrie in the Report of the British Association, 1887, pp.
445-449-
THE PEOPLES OF C A \~AAN. 115
same race was represented by the Gnanches of the
Canary Idanfh, and is stiO met with in Tunis and
Tripoli I have myself seen fair-haired, blue-eyed chil
dren in the mountain villages of Fill ilinr, and the type
.--.: -...-.-. -.-.:. - : . ..- - . - . .
l^tfffi t a m itMpf fl^SHi who CTKT joined "^ on the
:;-;:": ..::.: - . . - - . " . ~. - " "" . . . -
not only had die complexion, bat also the precise features
attributed by the artist of Ramsrs III to the captive
A ~ --_._._.-
In its surviving members the blond race of the
Mediterranean 5 tall and dolichocephalic. That these
characteristics have always belonged to it is shown by
the skulls found in the cromlechs or dolmens of IE !
: - - . . -. ; : . . . :: -.:
cuuuUy of the Kabyles. as well as by the great stature
of die anrirnt Amorites. By the side of them the
Im-nEiMi spies srrmrd to be but grasshoppers (Numb,
xiii. 33). The Amorite dan of Anakim, who took refuge
in the Philistine cities of Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (Josh.
1 1) were iiuitnl out by then- size from the rest of
:!-.; .- . . ..-.:..
It is rmratilr that a fc*> to the blond Amorite
race is to be fiiimil hi the Old Testament. The void
kkori in Hebrew means - white bread * from a root winch
signifies to be white,* and the most natural way of ex
plaining the name of the Horim or Horites, the prede-
:.-- - -. . . : - .-. - . - : . - - - - - : .:
: - ,- \- - . I- : - A.-"...: ::
: . A.-- - - : _ : .-. .- : .
-
- ,-- - ";- ---
Il6 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
son of Hur (i Chr. ii. 50), and his brother was Ash-hur,
the man of Hur (i Chr. ii. 24). As in the mountains
of Northern Africa, so also in the mountains of the later
Edom, the blond race of Palestine found its natural home,
as well as its surest stronghold against the Semitic invader.
It did not thrive in the hot climate of the plain.
Hence we may explain the early disappearance of the
race from the valley and delta of the Nile. The Egypt
ian immigrants had no difficulty in securing these for
themselves, and so dividing the African and Asiatic
halves of the blond race. That this happened while the
race was still living in the Stone age may be concluded
from the fact that no trace of metal has been discovered
in the early cromlechs of Northern Africa.
The cromlechs, consisting of a cairn of stones ap
proached by a short passage, or of a circle of upright
blocks surmounted by one or more horizontal blocks, are
characteristic of the countries in which the blonds were
once settled. In Africa they are associated with skele
tons which reveal their origin, and similar dolmens are
met with in those parts of Palestine, more especially on
the eastern side of the Jordan, with which the name of
the Amorites is connected. Cromlechs of a like form
exist in Western Spain and France, and even in Britain,
and since the Libyan race, whose remains they cover in
Africa, claims physiological relationship with the Red
Kelt, it is permissible to regard them as marking the
former presence of the race to which the Amorites
belonged. The scientific study of megalithic structures
is still in its infancy, but the day may not be far distant
when the shape of the cromlech will enable the enquirer
to determine by what population or race it was built.
Cromlechs are not found in Europe east of a line drawn
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. 117
through Dresden, but they occur again in Circassia, and
it would be interesting to discover whether here too they
indicate the existence in prehistoric days of the blond
Mediterranean race.
In the first record we possess of his history (Gen.
xiv. 7) the Amorite is the northern neighbour of the
Amalekitcs of Kadesh-barnea. He is thus in the close
neighbourhood of that fortress of Kanana, which was
defended against the father of Ramses II by blue-eyed
Shasu. It thus becomes probable that the blond Shasu
of the Egyptian monuments were an Amorite tribe of
nomadic habits who were on that account classed with
the other Plunderers or Bedawin of the desert by the
Egyptian scribes. At all events the passage in Genesis
shows that the Amorites and Amalekites were distinct
from one another. The Amalekites would seem to be
included among the Menti of the Egyptian texts.
The Amalekites were usually regarded as a branch of
the Edomites or Red-skins 1 . Amalek, like Kenaz,
the father of the Kenizzitcs or Hunters, was the
grandson of Esau (Gen. xxxvi. 12, 16). He thus be
longed to the group of nations, Edomites, Ammonites,
and Moabites, who stood in a relation of close kin
ship to Israel. But they had preceded the Israelites in
dispossessing the older inhabitants of the land, and
establishing themselves in their place. ;The Edomites
had partly destroyed, partly amalgamated the Horites
of Mount Seir (Deut. ii. 12) ; the Moabites had done the
same to the Emim, a people great and many, and tall
as the Anakim (Ucut. ii. 10), while the Ammonites had
1 This i-; the ino-^t probable interpretation of the name which is written
Udumu in Assyrian. The proper name Obed-Edom, Servant of Edom.
shows the Edom, like Assur, was worshipped as a god.
Il8 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
extirpated and succeeded to the Rephaim or Giants,
who in that part of the country were termed Zamzum-
mim (Deut. ii. 20 ; Gen. xiv. 5). Edom, however, stood
in a closer relation to Israel than its two more northerly
neighbours. Esau had been the brother of Jacob, and
as in the case of the Egyptians the children of the
Edomites were allowed to enter into the congregation
of the Lord in their third generation (Deut. xxiii. 8).
Indeed, a large portion of the population of Southern
Judah was of Edomite descent. Caleb, like Othniel,
was a Kenizzite (Numb, xxxii. 12 ; Josh. xv. 17), and
we learn from the earlier chapters of the Book of
Chronicles that not only the district surrounding Hebron
and Kirjath-sepher, but also a considerable portion of
the territory to the south of them was in the hands of
Caleb s descendants. Even Salma the father of Beth
lehem was the son of Caleb (i Chr. ii. 51). Like the
Israelites the Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites had
adopted the language of Canaan ; this had already been
inferred from their proper names, and the discovery of
the Moabite Stone with its inscription in the dialect of
Moab has confirmed the inference.
Separate from the Edomites or Amalekites were the
Kenites or wandering smiths 1 . They formed an im
portant Guild in an age when the art of metallurgy was
confined to a few. In the time of Saul we hear of them
as camping among the Amalekites (i Sam. xv. 6), while
the prophecy of Balaam seems to imply that they had
established themselves at Petra (Numb. xxii. 20, 21). A
portion of them went up out of the city of palm-trees
with the children of Judah into the wilderness of Judah
(Judg. i. 16), while Heber the Kenite pitched his tent
1 See Academy, Nov. 27, 1886, p. 364.
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. 119
in the neighbourhood of Kadesh of Naphtali (Judg. iv.
11). It would even appear from i Chr. ii. 55 that the
Rechabites were of Kenite origin. The Kenites were, in
fact, the gypsies and travelling tinkers of the old Oriental
world. Some of the tribe had doubtless found their way
into Palestine before the period of the Israelitish invasion.
In an account of an Egyptian tourist s adventures in
that country in the time of Ramses II, special mention
is made of the iron-smith who repaired the broken chariot
of the traveller. The art of working iron was one which
required peculiar skill and strength, and the secrets it in
volved were jealously preserved among certain nomad
families. As culture advanced the art became more
widely known and practised, the Kenites ceased to have
the monopoly of the trade, and degenerated into mere
nomads who refused to adopt a settled life. Their very
name came to disappear, and their stronghold in the
southern desert was wasted by the armies of Assyria.
The Kenites, it will thus be seen, did not constitute
a race, or even a tribe. They were, at most, a caste.
But they had originally come, like the Israelites or the
Edomites, from those barren regions of Northern Arabia
which were peopled by the Menti of the Egyptian in
scriptions. Racially, therefore, we may regard them as
allied to the descendants of Abraham.
While the Kenites and Amalckites were thus Semitic
in their origin, the Hivites or Villagers are specially
associated with Amorites. It may be that they repre
sent the mixed population of Amorites and Canaanites
who lived in the immediate vicinity of the great Amorite
stronghold. We hear of the Hivites under Mount Her-
mon (Josh. xi. 3) that dwelt in Mount Lebanon, from
Mount Baal-Hermon unto the entering in of Hamath
120 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
(Judg. iii. 3 ; 2 Sam. xxiv. 7). This was the country
of the Amorites according to the Egyptian texts and the
tablets of Tel el-Amarna. But we also hear of them
further south, at Gibeon (Josh. ix. 7 ; xi. 19) and Shechem
(Gen. xxxiv. 2), which are called Amorite elsewhere
(2 Sam. xxi. 2 ; Gen. xlviii. 22). Like the Horites, there
fore, we may regard them as predominantly Amorite in
race. The name does not appear in the Egyptian texts ; it
is very doubtful if it does so in the cuneiform documents.
In Gen. xv. 19-21 and similar passages of the Old
Testament, where a list of the older inhabitants of Pales
tine is given, mention is made of the Perizzites. The
Perizzites, however, did not represent either a race or a
tribe. They were the people of the cultivated plain,
the agriculturists of that part of the country which was
capable of tillage, like the modern fcllahin of Egypt.
They belonged accordingly to various races and nation
alities ; there were Israelitish Perizzim as well as
Canaanitish or Amorite Perizzim. The name was a
descriptive one, like that of Kadmonite or Eastern which
denoted the population on the eastern side of the Jordan.
The Rephaim, who are mentioned along with the
Perizzites, are more difficult to determine. The name
is translated Giants in the Authorised Version of the
Bible, but the only support for this is the gigantic size
of the Amorite Anakim in the Philistine cities who are
said to have been the descendants of Rapha(2 Sam. xxi.
16-22). The size of the sarcophagus of Og, the king of
the Rephaim in Bashan (Deut. iii. n), proves nothing
as to the size of the king himself. There are traces of
the Rephaim in several parts of the Holy Land. On
the south-western side of Jerusalem itself was a valley
of the Rephaim (Josh. xv. 8, &c.), there was a Beth-
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. 121
Rapha or House of Rapha in Southern Judah (i Chr.
iv. 12), and the Emim and Zamzummim, who preceded
the Moabites and Ammonites, were also reckoned among
the Rephaim (Deut. ii. u, 20). In the fourteenth chapter
of Genesis, the Zamzummim are called Zuzim, and men
tioned immediately after the Rephaim of Ashtcroth-
Karnaim. Mr. Tomkins has shown that the latter place
is named by Thothmes III of the Eighteenth Egyptian
Dynasty, among the towns captured by himself in Pales
tine. It appears in his list under the form of Astartu,
and is followed by the name of Anau-Rapa or On-
Rapha. The two cities are now represented by Tell
Ashtarah and Er-rafeh, the Raphon or Arpha of classical
geography.
It will be noticed that the districts occupied by the
Rephaim were those with which the Amorites were con
nected. We may therefore consider them to have been
a branch of the Amorite stock, a conclusion which is
confirmed by the fact that the same tall stature is
ascribed to both Amorites and Rephaim. It marked
them out from the other inhabitants of the land, and
was the racial characteristic which most impressed itself
on the Israelitish invaders.
It is possible that the Jebusites, like the Rephaim,
were also an Amorite tribe. We must remember, how
ever, that in Numb. xiii. 29 they are distinguished from
the Amorites as well as from the Hittites, though this
may be merely due to the important position they occu
pied as the possessors of the strong fortress of Jerusalem.
At all events, Ezekiel, as we have seen, makes the older
population of Jerusalem partly Hittitc and partly Amo
rite, and knows of no other clement in it. Moreover,
the lengthy letters written by the priest-king of Jeru-
T22 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
salem about 1400 B.C., and discovered in the mounds of
Tel el-Amarna, agree with the history of Melchizedek in
making no reference to the name of Jebusite. On the
other hand, from the time of the entrance of the Israel
ites into Canaan down to the day when Jerusalem was
captured by David, its name was commonly known as
Jebus, and its inhabitants as Jebusites. It would seem,
therefore, that in the century which elapsed between
the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence and the
Exodus of Israel, Jerusalem had passed into the hands
of a combined force of Amorites and Hittites to whom
the local name of Jebusite was attached. Such, at least,
is the most probable explanation of the facts which we
possess at present.
As for the Girgashite who is coupled with the Jebusite
(Gen. xv. 21), his place has been already fixed by the
ethnographical table of Genesis. He there appears be
tween the Amorite and the Hivite, and consequently in
that northern part of the country in which the Hivites
were more especially found. Further than this conjecture
alone can lead us. In the Assyrian inscriptions the
district of which Damascus was the centre is called
Gar-Emeris, and since the name of the Hittite capital
Carchemish is written Gar-Gamis in the Assyrian texts,
it is possible that Gar-Emeris was a Hittite title signi
fying the Place of the Amorites. In this case we might
see in the name of the Girgashite a Hittite Gar-Gis. the
place of the Guans, 5 a people whose chief seat, as we
learn from the cuneiform records, was on the shores of
the Gulf of Antioch. All this, however, is but guess
work ; at present we must be content with admitting
that we do not know to what race the Girgashites be
longed or the precise locality in which they dwelt.
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN.
123
Syria, in the widest sense of the word, was known
to the Egyptians as the country of the Rutennu or
Lutennu ] . It was divided into Upper and Lower, the
Lower Rutennu extending from the ranges of the
Lebanon as far as Mesopotamia. What is meant by
the Upper Rutennu is made clear in an inscription of
Thothmes III, in which the towns he had conquered,
from Kadesh on the Orontes to the southern boundaries
of Palestine, are described as cities of the Upper Rutennu.
As might have been expected from the vague geo
graphical sense in which the term is used, the physical
types represented by the Rutennu belong to more than
one race. On the one hand we have a type which is
pronouncedly Semitic, on the other hand a type which
is just as pronouncedly Hittite. There is further the
1 No ilUtinction was made between r and / in ancient K^yptian
pronunciation.
124
THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
type which resembles that of the Hyksos, as well as an
other type which stands by itself and is of a remarkably
high and refined character. This is the type presented
by the defenders of lanua, a city which Mr. Tomkins
has identified with Einya on the Euphrates. The nose
is mesorrhine and straight, the lips thin and well-formed,
the cheek-bones are high, the eyebrows prominent, the
forehead high. There is but little hair on the face be
yond a moustache. The hair itself appears to be straight.
Are we to see in the face the features of the subjects of
the Mitannian king?
At Karnak the skin of the Rutennu is painted orange
like that of the Hittites, and in the tomb of Rckh-ma-Ra
it is light yellow in some cases, pink in others. The
men are represented with beards and long-sleeved robes,
which reach to he ankles, a cap being on the head,
bound round with a fillet : the women wear a long
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. 125
flounced dress, with a cape over the shoulders. But the
faces resemble those of the Shasu, and it is probable that
they belonged to a population allied to the Shasu in
blood. Unless we know the exact locality from which
the Rutennu represented on a particular monument may
have come, the pictures given of them by the Egyptian
artist have but little value from an ethnological point of
view. The same must be said of the people of Lemanen
or Lebanon, who have the cape and long robe of the
Rutennu, and the beard and features of the Amorites.
Special mention, however, must be made of a head
which we learn was that of an inhabitant of Damascus
in the time of Thothmes III. The features are those of
the natives of Pun, even to the short straight beard.
126 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
The type is a handsome one, with high forehead, straight
nose and thin lips. Its close resemblance to the Punite
type raises many interesting questions, and inclines us
to the belief that Lepsius was right in connecting the
Phoenicians, the Puni or Poeni of Latin writers, with the
Punites of Southern Arabia. At all events it offers a
remarkable confirmation of the tradition which brought
the Phoenicians from the western shores and islands of
the Persian Gulf 1 .
Of the populations of Palestine and Southern Syria
mentioned in the Old Testament or portrayed on the
monuments of Egypt, two only now remain, the Hittites
and the Philistines. The Hittites must be reserved for
another chapter ; the Philistines have already been dis
cussed (supra, pp. 53, 54). The Philistines are the Pulista
of the Egyptian inscriptions, the Piliste and Palastu of
the Assyrian annals, and their name still survives in
geography in the shape of Palestine. As has been
said, they were in origin Phoenicians of Caphtor on the
coast of the Delta, and after their settlement in the five
chief cities of Southern Judaea they formed the Asiatic
outpost of the Egyptian monarchy. We find their
portraits at Medinet Habu on the temple-walls erected
by Ramses III. Their features are regular and some
what small, the nose is straight, the eyebrows unde
veloped, no depression being visible between the forehead
and the nose, the upper lip prominent, and the chin small
and receding. They have no hair on the face, and wear
on the head a helmet or cap of peculiar shape, like that
worn by their allies the Zakkur and Danauna, of whom
we shall have to speak hereafter. The physiological type
they present is remarkable, and it is difficult to say to
1 Cf. Lepsius, Nubische Grainmatik (i88o\ pp. xcix. sq.
/ ///: PEOPLES OF CANAAN.
127
what it can be attached. The ethnological problem is
further complicated by the fact that the people of Ash-
kelon a century earlier, in the time of Ramses II, had
a physiognomy which resembles that of the Hittites.
Chabas sought a solution of the difficulty by denying
the identity of the Pulista with the Philistines, and seeing
in them the Pelasgi of Krete. But the recent progress
of Egyptian studies has made such a solution impossible.
The Pulista who attacked Ramses III by sea came from
the near neighbourhood of the Asiatic continent, and a
papyrus lately acquired by Mr. GolenischefT places the
land of Zakkur in the sea of Khal, and at no great
distance from the city of Gebal. We must therefore
fall back on the explanation that the Philistines, or
Foreigners as they are called in the Septuagint, were
a mixed race. They came indeed from Caphtor, from
the Phoenician settlements in the Delta, but their ranks
128 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
were chiefly recruited not by Phoenicians but by strangers
of unknown origin. The Hittite type of countenance
which we notice in the people of Ashkelon must be due
to the same cause as that which brought Hittites to
Hebron and Jerusalem.
Apart from the Hittites and the Philistines it will thus
be seen that the ancient population of Palestine fell
ethnologically under three heads. In the earliest ages
to which our records reach back Amorite clans over
spread the country under names like Anakim, Rephaim,
and Zamzummim. They belonged to the blond race,
and claimed relationship with the cromlech-builders of
Northern Africa and Western Europe. By the side of
the Amorites we find the Canaanites, settled mainly on
the coast and in the valleys, who were traders rather than
agriculturists, and lived in towns rather than in villages.
They belonged to the Semitic race, but to a portion of
the race which had separated from the parent-stock at
an early period, and they exhibited strong physiological
resemblances to the people of Southern Arabia.
Lastly came the invading Semitic races, Edomites,
Moabites, Ammonites, and Israelites, whose kindred are
depicted by the artists of Egypt under the name of the
Menti or Shepherds. They had left the life of the
desert and the free wanderer behind them at a com
paratively recent period ; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
were still dwellers in tents, moving restlessly from place
to place like the Bedawin of to-day.
Of course it is very possible that among the older
population, which for want of fuller information we are
obliged to group together under the common head of
Amorite, there may have been tribes which did not
belong to the blond race. The enormous preponderance
THE PEOPLES OF CANAAN. 129
of dark whites over blond whites in modern Syria can
scarcely be accounted for except on such a supposition.
Moreover, it is not probable that the blond race was the
first possessor of Palestine. It must have arrived there
from the west, from Western Europe and the coast of
Africa, not from the east or north. But we have no
means of discovering who it was that preceded the
arrival of the Amorites, or what relics of the aboriginal
population survived to a later day. When history first
begins the Amorite and the Canaanite are already in the
land, though the Amorite is retreating from the Canaanite
into the fastnesses of the mountains. Like the Kelt in
Wales or the Basque in the Pyrenees, it is only there
that he was able to maintain his independence. In the
troublous times which followed the overthrow of the
Egyptian empire in Canaan he may indeed have de
scended into the plain and built himself cities with huge
walls like those of Lachish and Heshbon, but his enjoy
ment of them was not destined to be long. The Israelite
invader was at hand, and Lachish and its sister cities
became ruinous heaps. It was only in Mount Heres
that the Amorites successfully resisted the attack of their
enemies (Judg. i. 35) ; in the plain it was the Canaanites
and not the Amorites who could not be driven out.
CHAPTER VII.
THE HITTITES AND THE POPULATIONS IN THE VALLEYS
OF THE EUPHRATES AND TIGRIS.
IN the tenth chapter of Genesis Heth, the Hittite,
is made a son of Canaan. This expresses the fact
that Hittite tribes were to be found within the limits
of Canaan. Jerusalem itself had a Hittite mother, and
it was from the Hittites of Hebron that Abraham
bought the field of Machpelah. We learn from the
cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna that in the closing
days of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty Hittite in
vaders were advancing from the north into the dis
trict which lay at the back of the cities of Phoenicia,
and in the reign of Ramses II we find them firmly
established at Kadesh on the Lake of Horns in the
near vicinity of the Arkite and the Sinite. One
of David s most trusted captains was the Hittite Uriah,
and according to the corrected reading of 2 Sam. xxiv. 6
his kingdom touched on the north on the land of the
Hittites of Kadesh.
Ethnologically, however, the Hittite was in no way
connected with the other inhabitants of Palestine. The
decipherment of the inscriptions of Egypt and Assyria
has poured a flood of light on his character and origin,
and his own monuments have been discovered not
only in Syria, but also in Kappadokia and other parts of
THE HITTITES. 131
Asia Minor 1 . The monuments display a peculiar style
of art, ultimately of Babylonian and Assyrian derivation,
and are usually accompanied by inscriptions in a
peculiar system of hieroglyphic writing which we are
but just beginning to decipher.
The Hittites, in Hebrew Khittim, are called Khata
in Egyptian, Khatta in Assyrian, and Khate in the
cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Armenia. Their
primitive seats were in the ranges of the Taurus
mountains and the country at the head of the Gulf
of Antioch. From hence they spread northward and
westward into Asia Minor, southward into Syria. At
Boghaz Keui and Eyuk in Kappadokia the ruins of
a city and of a temple or palace which they erected
still exist. The city was large and important ; it
appears in the pages of the Greek historian Herodotos
under the name of Pteria, and Professor Ramsay has
shown that it was the meeting-place of the high-roads
which in early times traversed Asia Minor. It was along
these high-roads that the armies of the Hittite princes
marched as far as the shores of the Aegean, carrying
with them a culture and art which exercised its influence
on that of prehistoric Greece.
Glimpses of the southward advance of the Hittite have
been revealed to us by the letters found at Tel el-
Amarna. The Egyptian governors in Syria despatched
urgent requests to the Egyptian monarch for help
against the enemy. The help, however, was not forth
coming, and the older Aramaean population of Syria
had to succumb to the northern invader. Carchemish,
now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, became a Hittite
1 Sec The lliltitcs, Ike Story of a Forgotten i:nipirc ^ Religious Tract
Society, [888 ,
i a
132 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
capital ; Pethor, the city of Balaam, a few miles to the
south of it, passed into Hittite hands ; Hamath, as we
may infer from the Hittite inscriptions discovered there,
was captured; and Kadcsh on the Orontes, in the land of
the Amorites, formed the southern frontier of their
empire. They brought with them the manners and
customs of the north. Even at Kadesh, in the hot
plain of Syria, they continued to wear the snow-shoes
with upturned ends to which they had been accustomed
in their mountain homes.
Beyond the limits of the Hittite empire an advance-
guard of the nation had made its way to the vicinity of
Egypt itself. Doubts have frequently been cast on the
statement of Scripture that a Hittite tribe existed in
the extreme south of Palestine. But the truth of the
statement is thoroughly vindicated by a study of the
ethnological types represented on the Egyptian monu
ments. The heads of the inhabitants of Ashkelon,
pictured on the walls of Karnak, differ in the most
marked manner from those of the other inhabitants of
Southern Palestine. They are, however, distinctively of
the Hittite type, and the fact is rendered still more
evident by the three tresses of hair which hang from
them. Unlike its sister cities, Ashkelon must therefore
have been garrisoned by Hittites, whose presence in the
south is thus indicated in an unexpected way.
We now know pretty exactly their physiological type.
It is reproduced in astonishing harmony alike by the
Egyptian artists and by the Hittite sculptors themselves
in their bas-reliefs and hieroglyphics. The face is so
repulsively ugly that we might have imputed to the
Egyptians a desire to caricature their enemies had it
not been drawn in precisely the same way on their own
THE HITTITES. 133
monuments. The agreement is a proof at once of the
faithfulness of the representation and of the fact that
the Khata of the Egyptian records and the authors
of the Hittite monuments were one and the same
people.
Mr. Tomkins has called the Hittite face snouty. It
is marked by an excessive prognathism, which we look
for in vain among the other populations of Western
Asia. The nose is straight, though somewhat broad,
the lips full, the cheek-bones high, the eyebrows fairly
prominent, the forehead receding like the chin, and
the face hairless. The hair of the head was arranged in
three plaited tails, one hanging over each shoulder and
the third down the back, an arrangement which, as
Mr. Tomkins has noted, still survives among the savages
of the Lake of Huleh a . In figure the Hittite was stout
and thick-limbed, and apparently of no great height. On
the Egyptian monuments the Hittites are represented
with yellow skins, like the Mongols, except in the tomb
of Rekh-ma-Ra, where the Hittite chiefs have brown
skins, though that of a child is yellow. The hair is
black, the eyes dark brown. The dress of the men
consisted of a long sleeveless robe reaching to the ankles,
but open on one side to allow of the free use of the leg.
A cape was sometimes thrown over it, and underneath
was probably a tunic, which descended half way down
the thigh, and which was usually worn without the robe
by the lower classes. The head was encased in a cap,
and at times in a tiara with ribbons resembling horns.
The legs were protected by boots with upturned toes,
and long-sleeved gloves also seem to have been oc
casionally used. A short dirk was carried in the belt,
Rob Key on the Jordan, p. 241.
134 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
and a characteristic Hittite weapon was the double-
headed battle-axe.
It must be remembered, however, that the Egyptians
sometimes included among the Hittites the natives of
the Syrian countries in which they formed only the
ruling caste, while on the other hand figures which
display all the features of the Hittite type are given
under the head of Rutennu. Thus we find bearded
Aramaeans among the beardless Hittite enemies of the
Egyptian king, and in the great hall of Karnak
portraits are given of the Rutennu of Northern Syria
which are manifestly those of Hittite prisoners. The
Egyptian artist was not an ethnologist, and he con
sequently did not trouble himself to distinguish into
their racial elements the armies of the Hittite king.
So far as the evidence of proper names can be trusted,
it is probable that the dialects spoken among the
various Hittite tribes and kingdoms belonged to the
Alarodian family of speech of which Georgian is a
modern representative. At all events reasons exist for
connecting them with the language of the cuneiform
inscriptions of Van in Armenia, as well as with that of
the long letter in the language of Mitanni which has
been found among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna.
Community of language, however, does not imply
community of race.
In fact, if the Hittites and the people of Mitanni were
allied in language to the populations to the north and
east of them, it is pretty certain that they were only
partially allied to them in race. The racial type of the
early inhabitants of Ararat or Armenia, as sculptured on
the walls of the palace of the Assyrian king, agrees with
that of the present inhabitants of the country. The
THE HITTITES. 135
ambassadors from Ararat who came to visit Assur-bani-
pal at Nineveh are dolichocephalic, with high foreheads,
long curved noses terminating in a point, thin lips, well-
formed chin, and somewhat short stature. On the
bronze gates of Balawat, the soldiers of Ararat are
represented as wearing crested helmets of the Greek
shape, tunics which reach just above the knee, and boots
with upturned ends, while in their hands they carry a
small round target. But here two ethnological types
are represented among them ; one resembling that
of the ambassadors to Assur-bani-pal with the ad
dition of whiskers and beard ; the other, smooth
faced and prognathous, with profiles like those of the
Hittites.
In neither of these types can we discover the Aryan.
The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions of Van
has shown that the speakers of the Indo-European
language of which modern Armenian is the descendant
did not enter the country until after the downfall of the
Assyrian empire. They thus confirm the statements
of the Greek writers according to which the Aryan
Armenians were a colony of Phrygians from the west,
who made their way into Armenia at no long period
before the age of Herodotos 1 .
1 It is singular that the ambassadors to Assur-bani-pal should be re
presented as dolichocephalic, since the modern Armenian type is distinctly
brachycephalic, the average index rising to 85-7. IJrachycephalism char
acterises the Caucasian nations generally, as has been shown by von
Krckert s measurements, though the average index of the Circassians comes
down to 8 1 -8 and that of the Ossetes to 80. Von I.uschan finds a similar
brachycephalic type among the modern inhabitants of l.ykia, the people
ot" Greek nationality there presenting two types, dolichocephalic and
brachycephalic, while the Takhtajis and Hcktash, in whom he recognises the
ancient l.ykians, arc all brachyccphalic Journal of the Anthropological
Institute, xx. 41.
136 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Biainas was the name of the kingdom ruled over by
the princes who have left behind them the Vannic
inscriptions and who fixed their capital at Van. Van,
in fact, is the modern form of the name Biainas. its name
in the days of the Vannic princes having been Dhuspas,
which still survives in that of the district of Tosp. The
kingdom, which lasted from the ninth to the seventh
centuries before the Christian era, was known to the
Assyrians as Urardhu. the Ararat of the Old Testament.
It extended as far northward as the Araxes and had its
capital at Van. As in so many other cases, the name of
Ararat has shifted its position and is now applied to a
mountain which rises to the north of the highlands of
the ancient Urardhu.
The mountainous regions of Kurdistan to the south of
Lake Van were inhabited by tribes who spoke much tlie
same language as that of the people of Ararat and were
presumably of the same race. The country was often
referred to by the Assyrians under the general title of
Nahri or River -land. South of it again came the
kingdom of Assyria.
We have seen in a previous chapter that the founders
of this kingdom belonged to the Semitic race and had
originally come from Babylonia. Their physiological
type is very pronounced. They were thick-set and
muscular, with abundance of black wavy hair on the
face as well as on the head. The skull was dolicho
cephalic, the forehead straight, the lips full, the nose
aquiline and leptorrhinian, the eyebrows prominent and
beetling. The hair was black and artificially curled in
the whiskers and beard. The eyes also were black, the
skin white but easily burnt red or brown when exposed
to the sun and wind. In character and intellectual
THE HITTITES. Itf
capacity the Assyrian was a typical Semite, and his
favourite occupations were commerce and war.
But the Assyrian remained to the last merely a
conquering caste. His superiority, physical and mental,
to the older population of the country had made his
first invasion of it irresistible, and the iron discipline and
political organisation which he subsequently maintained
enabled him to preserve his power. He has been called
the Roman of the East, and in many respects the
comparison is just. Like the Roman he had a genius
for organising and administering, for making and
obeying laws, and for submitting to the restraints of an
inexorable discipline. The armies of Assyria swept all
before them, and the conception of a centralised empire
was first formed and realised by the Assyrian kings.
The exhaustion of the upper classes, of that conquer
ing caste which had created the kingdom of Assyria,
brought with it the downfall of the Assyrian empire and
even the extinction of the Assyrian name. The older
population became predominant, the Assyrian language
was superseded by Aramaic, and another racial type
prevailed. This was the ancient type which had existed
before the arrival of the Semitic Assyrians, and had
continued to exist by the side of them. From time to
time we see it represented on the monuments. The
head is small and round, the forehead low and receding,
the cheek-bones high, the jaws prognathous, the nose
prominent and leptorrhine, the eyebrows well marked,
the chin retreating, the hair frizly, the stature short.
Unlike the Semitic Assyrian, the aboriginal of the
country had comparatively little hair on the face.
We meet with the same racial type in Babylonia. It
is found on one of the oldest monuments of Chaldaean
138 THE RACES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT.
art yet known, discovered at Tello and now in the
Louvre, and may be detected in the Babylonian soldiers
in the Assyrian armies. We also meet with it in Elam.
In Elam, in fact, it seems to have been the prevailing if
not the only type. Among the numerous representa
tions of Elamites which occur in the bas-reliefs of the
Assyrian palaces the head is uniformly of a brachy-
cephalic and prognathous character. In the case of the
ruling family, it is true, the lines are softened, the hair
being straight and not curly, and the nose sub-aquiline ;
but in all important points the traits remain the same.
We are therefore justified in looking upon this particular
type as that which originally occupied the southern
valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris as well as the
mountains of Elam to the east of them. What its
further affinities may have been it is at present im
possible to say.
In the fertile plain of Babylonia this aboriginal type
was mingled with several others. Berossos, the Chal-
daean historian, tells us that since the beginning of
history Babylonia was the meeting-place of different
races, and its geographical position makes it easy to
believe the statement. The cuneiform records have
shown us that the civilisation and culture of the country
were founded, and the cuneiform system of writing itself
invented, by a population which spoke agglutinative
dialects in no way related to the Semitic languages, and
which consequently was probably not of the Semitic
race.
The probability is raised to a certainty by a study
of the documents which the Accado-Sumerians have
bequeathed to us. They reveal religious ideas and
practices foreign to those of the Semites. They reveal
THE HIT7ITES. 139
also the existence of a matriarchate, in which the mother
and not the father stood at the head of the family, in
marked contrast to the Semitic degradation of the
woman as the mere reflection and helpmeet of the man.
Even in so trifling a matter as the reckoning of time we
find a difference between the Accado-Sumerians and
their Semitic successors. While with the Semite time
is reckoned from sunset to sunset, with the Accadian it
was reckoned from dawn to dawn.
The question therefore arises whether the peculiar
physiological type which we have found existing in
Assyria, in Babylonia and in Elam, and which for want
of a better name we may term Elamite, represents the
type of the Accado-Sumerians. Unfortunately our
materials are at present too scanty to allow this question
to be answered satisfactorily ; on the whole, however, it
is probable that it does not. The figures and heads of
the early Sumerian rulers which have been disinterred
at Tello, are of a totally different character. Certain
heads on terra-cotta cones remind us curiously of the
Chinese representations of old men, though the effect is
perhaps produced by the form of the beard, the heads
being apparently long and not round. In one case,
however, we have a carefully finished head in stone.
Here the head seems to be round, but the forehead
is straight, the jaws orthognathous, the cheek-bones
prominent, the nose large, straight and slightly platyr-
rhine. The hair on the head is curly, the face itself
being smooth. A similar type is presented by the head
of king Khammurabi (B. C. 2400), except that there is
here a good deal of hair on the face, and the nose is
prominent and leptorrhine. Khammurabi, moreover,
may have been of Kassite origin, though his profile
140 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
resembles that on the terra-cotta cones alluded to
above.
It will thus be seen that the ethnological affinities of
the pre-Semitic population of Babylonia offer many
difficulties which cannot at present be cleared up. We
must wait until skulls of indubitably Sumerian origin are
found and examined, either at Tello or in some other
burial-ground of the Chaldaean plain. Meanwhile we
have to be content with the confirmation afforded by
such monuments as we possess of the statement made
by Berossos that Babylonia was the home of many
races.
We have indications, however, that these races inter
mingled freely during the historical period. Thus a
bas-relief of king Merodach-iddin-akhi, who reigned
B.C. 1 1 oo, presents us with a profile which is Semitic in
its main features, but dashed with a trace of the Elamite
type. On the other hand, the Babylonians who fought
in the service of Assur-bani-pal belong to neither type.
They are dolichocephalic, with high foreheads, straight
leptorrhine noses, flat cheeks, orthognathous mouths,
wavy hair and tall stature. Their features recall those
of the Persian guard whose portraits have been dis
covered by M. Dieulafoy at Susa, though they also
recall to a less extent those of the pre-Semitic heads on
the terra-cotta cones of Tello. Of course it is not
certain that these soldiers were really Babylonian by
race, though they came from Babylonia and wore the
Babylonian dress.
Westward of Babylonia were the desert regions
roamed over by Semitic nomads. They spoke
Aramaic dialects, for the most part, and may be con
sidered as belonging to the Aramaic branch of the
THE HI7TITES. \^\
Semitic family both linguistically and ethnologically.
From time to time some of their tribes made their way
into Babylonia itself, and led there a half-settled life like
certain of the Bedawin at the present day in Egypt.
These Aramaic Arabs were specially employed by the
Babylonians in herding cattle and tending their flocks of
sheep. We are reminded of Jacob s similar occupation
in Syria ; Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he
kept sheep (Hos. xii. 1 2).
It is dangerous to speculate where our materials are
still scanty, and a fresh discovery may at any moment
upset the provisional conclusions at which we arrive.
But the general result of the facts we have been
reviewing seems to be that the valleys of the Tigris and
Euphrates, from the sources of the two rivers in the
north as far as their mouths in the Persian Gulf, were
primitively occupied by a prognathous and brachy-
cephalic race, of low type, with receding forehead and
comparatively smooth face. The race was divided into
two branches, one northern and the other southern ; the
northern surviving in the Hittites and the beardless race
of Ararat, while the other mingled with the Semites in
Assyria and Babylonia, but preserved its characteristics
with tolerable purity among the mountains of Elam.
In Babylonia, if not elsewhere, another race of refined
and intellectual character, which we will call Accadian,
supervened upon the aboriginal inhabitants of the
country, and developed a culture similar to that of
Egypt. Subsequently the Semites of Arabia entered
the country, gradually amalgamated with its older
inhabitants, and assimilated the culture of the Accado-
Sumerians, at the same time improving upon it and
giving it a Semitic form. The ultimate result was the
142 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
civilisation and literature which the spade of the ex
cavator and the skill of the decipherer have revealed to
our nineteenth century 1 .
This is not the place in which to dwell upon the
influence which Babylonian culture has exercised upon
us of the modern world. It has come to us through the
Jews of the Exile and the Greeks of the Alexandrine
age. The decipherment of the clay records of Chaldaea
is beginning to make clear the obligations of the Chosen
People to their Babylonian conquerors. Even the later
Jewish names of the months were borrowed from Baby
lonia, and the leader of the returning exiles bore the
Babylonian name of Zorobabel, Zeru-Babili, the seed
of Babylon. Like all mixed races, the mixed race of
Chaldaea was vigorous in mind and body, and has exerted
a lasting influence upon the intellectual history of man
kind.
1 See Berlin, The Races of the Babylonian Empire in the Journal of
the Anthropological Institute, xviii. 2.
CHAPTER VIII.
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA.
CUSH, the brother of Mizraim, has already come
before us in a former chapter l . The name Cush
was of Egyptian origin. Kash vaguely denoted the
country which lay between the First Cataract and the
mountains of Abyssinia, and from the reign of Thothmes
I to the fall of the Twentieth Egyptian Dynasty the
eldest son of the Egyptian monarch bore the title of
Royal Son or Prince of Kash. In the reign of
Mcneptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, one of these
Princes of Kash had the name of Mes, and may thus
have originated the Jewish legend reported by Josephus,
according to which Moses, the adopted son of an
Egyptian princess, conquered the land of Cush.
As the Assyrians transformed Mizri or Mizraim,
Egypt, into Muzri, so too they transformed the name
of Kash into Kusu. It is this Assyrian pronunciation
which has been followed in the Old Testament. Pro
fessor Schrader has supposed that the pronunciation
was of Canaanitish derivation, but the supposition has
been disproved by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, which
show that in Canaan, as in Egypt, the pronunciation
was Kas.
Kas or Cush was thus, properly speaking, the region
known as Ethiopia to the geographers of Greece and
144 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Rome. But it was only by degrees that the name came
to cover so wide an extent of country. At the outset
it denoted only a small district on the southern side of
the Second Cataract. Near Wady Helfa an inscription
has been found enumerating the tribes conquered by
Usertesen, of the Twelfth Dynasty, as he marched from
the boundaries of Egypt up the Nile. Almost at the
head of them stands the tribe or district of Kash.
In the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, however, the
term already includes the whole of Nubia. From this
time onwards for several centuries Cush formed a vassal
province of Egypt. But in the troublous days which
ushered in that Twenty-first Dynasty with which
Solomon allied himself in marriage, Cush regained its
independence. As in our time, the tribes of the Soudan
successfully threw off the Egyptian yoke, and found
themselves free to turn their arms one against another.
With the rise of the Twenty-second Dynasty, the
Dynasty of Shishak, the fortunes of Cush underwent
another change. Certain members of the high-priestly
family at Thebes had fled to Ethiopia, and there in the
city of Napata, under the sacred shadow of Mount
Barkal, established the worship of the Theban god,
Amun, and a kingdom of Cush. The kingdom lasted
long, and in the persons of Sabako and Taharka, the
So and Tirhakah of the Old Testament, reduced Egypt
itself to subjection. The so-called Ethiopian Dynasty
of Egypt really consisted of kings of Cush.
These kings, like the court which surrounded them,
belonged to the white race. They were of Egyptian
descent, and their language and habits were at first
Egyptian. Gradually, however, there came a change.
The Egyptian language was superseded by Nubian, and
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA. 145
the customs and manners of the court continually be
came less foreign. It is clear that intermarriages with
the natives had taken place, and that the purity of the
Egyptian blood was beginning to be contaminated.
The physiological characteristics of the Nubians have
been described on an earlier page. Racially and lin
guistically they stand apart from the rest of mankind.
Just as their languages form an isolated family of speech,
so too, on the ethnological side, they form a separate
race. It may be that their earliest home was in the
mountains of Abyssinia, it may be that their racial
peculiarities became stereotyped in what is now the
desert of the Sahara, at a time when it was still a well-
watered and well-wooded plateau. It is useless to
speculate on the subject ; the materials for arriving at a
conclusion are entirely wanting.
The Egyptian records, however, seem to establish one
fact. The negro race once extended much further to
the north than it does to-day in the valley of the Nile, and
the ground occupied by the Nubians must have been
proportionately smaller. There was a period when
Negroes, as well as Nubians, were comprised within the
frontiers of Cush.
The negro race is practically limited by the Equator
on the south, and the Tropic of Cancer in the north.
We find it east of Sennaar, on the White Nile, in the
neighbourhood of Lake Chad, on the banks of the Niger
and the Senegal, and on the coast of Guinea. To the
south of it is the Ban-tu or Kaffir race, occupying the
larger part of Southern Africa, and constituting a race
apart.
The negro is dolichocephalic, and highly prognathous,
with a corresponding recession of the chin. His nose is
K
146 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
flat with wide nostrils, his lips fleshy, his teeth large and
good. The wisdom-teeth appear early and are lost
late. The cranial sutures are simple, the arm long, the
calf of the leg deficient, the tibia flattened, and the great
toe prehensile. As has been already observed, the
black colouring matter of the negro extends to his
muscles, and even his brain, the convolutions of which
are comparatively simple. He has but little sympathy
for art, except music, of which he is passionately fond.
He is moved by emotion rather than by argument, and
it is alleged that negro children seldom advance in their
studies after the age of fourteen. In character the
negro is indolent, superstitious, affectionate, and faithful.
The two latter qualities have caused him to be sought
after as slave or servant. From the age of the first
Egyptian dynasties armed expeditions were organised
against the land of Cush, chiefly with the purpose of
carrying off negro slaves, and the number of negro
slaves in Egypt must at all times have been very great.
Ebed-melech, the Ethiopian, who saved the life of
Jeremiah, was probably a negro (Jer. xxxviii. 7-13), like
Cushi the Cushite, the great grandfather of Jehudi
the Jew (Jer. xxxvi. 14). Although in contact with
Egyptian civilisation for so many centuries, the negro
learnt little or nothing from it, except perhaps the art of
smelting iron. In the case of several tribes an iron age
has followed immediately upon a stone age, without the
intervening use of copper or bronze.
The negro is eminently imitative. It is, therefore,
singular that he has never displayed any aptitude for
drawing. In this he differs profoundly not only from
the cultured Egyptian, but also from the degraded
Bushmen of the extreme south of Africa. The paint-
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA. 147
ings of animals on the walls of the Bushman rock-
shelters are extremely spirited, and some of them would
not disgrace a European artist. These paintings raise
a question which bears on the early history of the negro
race.
In the south of Egypt the sandstone rocks are covered
with the figures of animals and men, some of them
manifestly of modern date, but others as manifestly of
prehistoric antiquity. On the same stone we meet with
these figures as well as with inscriptions of the Fifth
Dynasty, and whereas in the case of the latter the
weathering of the stone has been so slight as to make
them appear the work of yesterday, the weathering
undergone by the figures indicates an enormous lapse of
time. Moreover, among the figures, that of the giraffe
constantly appears. Now the presence of the giraffe
shows that the country which has been a barren desert
since the beginning of Egyptian history must once have
been a well-watered plateau covered with the brushwood,
upon which the giraffe is accustomed to browse. The
ostrich is as common a figure as the giraffe, and yet the
absence of the ostrich from the hieroglyphic syllabary,
where the birds of Egypt are so plentifully represented,
implies that it was unknown to the inventors of the
ancient Egyptian system of writing. It would, there
fore, seem that Mr. Flinders Petrie is right in seeing in
these prehistoric drawings the memorials of the pre
decessors of the Egyptians in the valley of the Nile l .
His view is corroborated by the discoveries made by
travellers in other parts of Northern Africa. To the
south of Tunisia, of Oran and of Marocco, similar
drawings are met with on the rocks. In one instance
1 Flinders Petric, A Season in Egypt (1888), pp. 15, 16.
K 2
148 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
their relative age has been satisfactorily determined.
Dr. Bonnet 1 , in Oran, has found the actual stone instru
ments by means of which they had been engraved,
lying at the foot of a rock where they occur, and at no
great distance was the neolithic manufactory where the
graver s tools were fashioned. Consequently the figures
belong to the period when as yet the use of stone as a
cutting material had not been superseded by metal. In
Egypt, at all events, this takes us back to a very early
age indeed.
It seems possible, therefore, that at an epoch when
the Sahara was still a fertile land, and the Delta of
Egypt an arm of the sea, a race of men allied to the
Bushmen ranged along the southern slopes of the Atlas
mountains, and extended from the shores of the Atlantic
on the one side to the banks of the Nile on the other.
Of this race the brachycephalic Akkas and other dwarf
tribes of Central Africa would be surviving relics. They
were driven from their primitive haunts by the negro
invasion, and finally forced into the extreme south of
the continent by the pressure of the Ban-tu or Kaffir
tribes. Physically, if not morally, they were inferior to
their enemies, but they possessed an art in which both
Kaffirs and negroes were deficient, the art of drawing.
The negro, indeed, could not have designed, much less
achieved, either the rock-paintings of the Bushmen, or
the rock-engravings of Northern Africa.
The mountains which bound the region of the Sahara
1 Revue cT Ethnographic, viii. For the drawings on the rocks in Marocco
see Lenz ( Timbuktu, ii. pp. 10, 367), in the district between Tripoli and
Ghadames Rohlfs (Qucr (lurch Afrika, i. p. 52), in the country of the Tibbu
Nachtigal (Sahara wtd Sudan, i. p. 307), and in Kordofan Lejean (Hart-
mann, Nigritier, i. p. 41). C f. my letter to \hz* Academy, Aug. 9, 1890,
p. 117.
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA. 149
on the north have been occupied from time immemorial
by Libyan tribes. We have already described these
tribes, and shown that they belong to a well-marked
variety of the white race. So far as outward appearance
is concerned, the Kabyles or Riffis of to-day might be
found in an English or Irish village. The antiquity of
the type which they exhibit is evidenced by the monu
ments of Egypt, where their ancestors are portrayed
with the same blond features that they still display.
Dolichocephalic, fair-haired, blue-eyed and white-
skinned, they might be mistaken for that branch of
the Kelts who are distinguished for their golden hair and
their clear and freckled skin. Professor de Quatrefages
believes that they are the lineal descendants of the race
whose remains have been discovered in the caverns of
Cro-Magnon in the French province of Perigord, along
with paleolithic implements and the bones of the mam
moth and the reindeer. If so, we shall have to trace the
race, of which the Amorites were the easterly continua
tion, back to the north-western part of Europe. From
hence they would have made their way through Western
France and Spain into Africa, at a time, it may be, when
the Straits of Gibraltar had not as yet been formed. It
is probable that the fair Basques of the Pyrenees
are descendants from them, modified by admixture with
the dark Basques. That the type could be modified
by intermarriage is evident from the case of the Guanches
of the Canary Islands, tall and handsome men, with
yellow hair reaching below their waists, whose skulls
were nevertheless sub-dolichocephalic in contrast with
the pronounced dolichocephalism of the Kabyle and
other Berber tribes.
If de Quatrefages is right, the ancestors of the Libyans
150 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
will have left traces of themselves in the refuse-heaps on
the Portuguese coast, since skulls have been found in
them similar to those of the Basques. But it must be
remembered that the peculiarly oval skull which charac
terises the dark Basque, goes along with black hair
and eyes and a dark complexion, features which are
incompatible with relationship to the Libyan race. On
the other hand the Libyan resembles the Basque in
many of his intellectual and moral qualities. He is
intelligent, industrious, and honest, brave and hardy, and
attached to his own country. Monogamy, moreover, is
the rule in spite of the permission given by Moham
medanism to marry many wives.
The Libyan tribes go under the general name of
Tahennu or white -men in the Egyptian inscriptions.
Twice they invaded Egypt in concert with other nations
from the north and east, and it needed all the decaying
power and discipline of the Egyptian empire to ward off
the attack. The first invasion took place in the reign
of Meneptah I, the Pharaoh of the Exodus. In the
5th year of the king, Maraiui, the Libyan prince, de
scended upon the Delta with a vast host of allies.
Besides the Lebu or Libyans themselves and the Ma-
shuash or Maxyes, there were also the peoples of the
north, the Kaikash, the Aqaiusha, the Shairdana, the
Shakalsha or Shakarsha, the Tulsha or Tuirsha. the
Zakkur, the Liku and the Uashash.
A century later, in the reign of Ramses III, Egypt
was again invaded. Libyan princes again led their
armies against the Pharaoh, and again were signally
defeated. On this occasion their northern allies were
late in joining them. Three years elapsed before the
Egyptians had to face the northern foe. We are told
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA. 151
that the northern populations had spread from their
coasts and islands and had marched through Syria and
Palestine, bringing with them the Hittitcs of Carchemish
and the Amorites of Kadesh. The Pulosata or Philistines,
the Zakkur, the Shakalsha, the Daanau and the Uashuash
were leagued together to destroy Egypt. But a great
naval battle was fought off the Egyptian coast, and the
valley of the Nile was saved. Three years afterwards
the Maxyes once more fell upon the Delta : they were,
however, utterly exterminated, and the danger of Libyan
conquest was past.
The identification of the Libyan allies has occasioned
a good deal of controversy. About the Mashuash there
is no dispute. They are the Maxyes of Herodotos
(iv. 191) in the modern Tunisia, of whom we are told
that they left a long lock of hair on the right side of the
head and painted their bodies red 1 . We learn from the
Egyptian texts that while the Lebu were circumcised, the
Mashuash were not-. The lock of hair which charac
terises them on the Egyptian monuments is also wanting
in the case of the Lebu. But like the Lebu they have
a good deal of hair on the face, the eyebrows are well-
defined, and the nose is straight and leptorrhine. The
forehead is high, the lips thin, and the jaws orthogna-
thous.
But who were the peoples of the north ? The coasts
and shores from which they descended upon Northern
Syria point to Asia Minor and the adjacent islands.
1 The Lebu chief is represented by the Egyptian artist with ornamental
patterns on his arms and legs. These may have been tattooed, but they
may also have been merely stained. lie wears two ostrich feathers on his
head, whereas each of his followers has but one.
a See Max Miiller in the Proceedings of the Society oj IHblical Arclucology,
Jan. 7, i8S8.
152 THE RACES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT.
In the Aqaiusha of the sea, accordingly, scholars have
seen the Akhaeans of Greek history, and have pointed to
the fact that in the age of Ramses III their name is
replaced by that of the Daanau or Danaans. But the
Daanau are already mentioned in the reign of Thothmes
III, to whom a poem declares that the isles of the
Daanau shall be subject. If, therefore, the Aqaiusha
are to be identified with the Akhaeans of the Greeks, it
is better to see in them the Hyp-Akhaeans of Kilikia,
or the Greek colonists in Cyprus, than the Akhaeans of
Homeric legend.
The Zakkur cannot be the Teukrians of the Troad, as
has often been imagined. Not only are they asso
ciated with the Pulosata or Philistines, but their face
and head-dress is also Philistine. The head-dress is a
peculiar one, and apparently represents a helmet with
a quilted cloth cap set in a frame of bronze. A similar
head-dress, it may be observed, is worn also by the
Daanau. The dress consists of a Greek tunic and girdle,
and the arms carried by the soldiers are a spear, broad
sword, and round shield. The geographical position of
the Zakkur has now been settled by a papyrus recently
acquired by Mr. Golenischeff. It describes an embassy
sent by Hir-Hor of the Twenty-first Dynasty to the king
of Gebal, and states that on the way to their destina
tion the ambassadors stopped on the coast of the Zakkur
in the sea of Khal. The Zakkur must consequently
have lived on the eastern coast of Cyprus, where Teukros
was the legendary founder of Salamis, and the royal
family were called Teukrids. Light is thus thrown on
the Aqaiusha with whom the Zakkur were united in their
invasion of Egypt. They would have come from the
shore of the Akhaeans, which, as we learn from the
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA.
153
Greek geographer Strabo (p. 682), represented the north
eastern coast of Cyprus l .
The Shakalsha or Shakarsha belong to a different type
from that of the Zakkur. Their features, as depicted on
the walls of Medinet Habu, remind us forcibly of those
of the ancient Romans. The hair on the face is curly,
SHAKALSHA.
not straight like that of the Zakkur and the Libyans,
the eyebrows arc prominent and meet over the nose, the
nose itself is sub-aquiline, and the lips are expressive of
1 None of the northern faces are Semitic in type. Thi* is the more
striking as von Luschan has found that the skulls of some of the modern
inhabitants of Lykia as well as of the neighbourhood of Adalia are .similar
to those of the Bedawin. The Solymi of Lykia were supposed by the
Greeks to be of Phoenician descent on account of the likeness of their name
to that of Hiero-Solyma, the Greek form of Jerusalem. The poet Chaerilos,
as quoted by Josephus (Cont. Ap. i. 22, Whiston s tr.), says of them that
they spake the Phoenician tongue with their mouths . . . their heads \\ere
sooty, they had round rasures on them ; they wore flayed horses heads also
that had been hardened in the smoke.
154 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
firmness and determination. The forehead, on the other
hand, is somewhat receding. They wore cloth caps of
cylindrical shape which fell behind the head, and were
clad in kilts, carrying in their hands spears and a weapon
which resembles the blade of a scythe. They have been
identified with the Sikels of Sicily, but in spite of their
extraordinary ethnological similarity to the ancient Latin
it is perhaps better to regard them, with Professor Mas-
pero, as deriving their name from the Pisidian city of
Sagalassos in Asia Minor.
The Tulsha or Tuirsha are said to have been of the
sea. It was accordingly from the European side of the
Mediterranean that they had originally come, probably
from the coasts or islands of Asia Minor. They wore
beards, their noses were sub-aquiline, and their heads
were encased in a pointed cap from the top of which
hung a waving ribbon.
The Liku may have been the Lykians, if the name of
Lykian goes back to the age of Meneptah. This, how
ever, is more than doubtful. At all events the Lykians
called themselves Tramele in their own inscriptions, and
Lykian may have been a word of Greek invention.
What the personal appearance of the Liku was like we
do not know.
It is otherwise with the Shardina or Shairdana, called
Serdani in one of the tablets of Tel el-Amarna 1 . The
portraits made of them by the Egyptian artists leave us
in no doubt as to their features and their dress. The
nose was straight and leptorrhine, the lips thin, the upper
1 Mittheilnngcn aiis den orientalischen Sammlttngen, ii. 47. The writer,
Rib-Hadad, the governor of Gebal, informs the Egyptian king that men
of the country of the Sute had come against him and slain a Serdanian
who was apparently in his service.
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA.
155
lip being somewhat long, the forehead was high, and the
face in one case beardless. In another case a short
pointed beard is worn. Altogether the face is that of a
member of a dolichocephalic European race. The
Shardina were clad in a tunic like that of the Tuirsha
and carried the same round shields, spears, and broad
swords. But the helmet they wore on the head was of
a peculiar character. A spike projected from it before
and behind, while on the top was another spike crowned
with a metal ball. Now a similar helmet characterised
another people of antiquity. The bronze figures dis
covered in Sardinia show that the early inhabitants of the
island used a helmet with horns on cither side like that
of the Shardina. It seems impossible to avoid the con
clusion that the Shardina of the Egyptian records really
came from Sardinia. In this way we shall be able to
explain most easily the occurrence of scarabs and other
relics of Egyptian art among the prehistoric remains of
156
THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Sardinia. We shall also be able to explain the close
alliance between the Shardina and the Maxyes of the
Tunisian Gulf.
The Shardina were famous for their military qualities
and became an important element among the mercenary
troops of Egypt. Already in the time of Ramses II we
find them serving in the army of the Pharaoh.
,*!
HANIVU (GREEK).
We may conclude, then, that among the allies of the
Libyans were included some of the populations of
Southern Europe and Asia Minor, whose lineaments
have been preserved for us by Egyptian art. These
populations were comprised under the general title of
Hanivu, the meaning of which came in the Ptolemaic
APRICA^ EUROPE, AND ARABIA. 157
age to be confined to the lonians or Greeks. The name
is already met with in the pyramid-texts of the Sixth
Dynasty, where the Mediterranean is termed the circle
which surrounds Hanivu. The figure of a woman be
longing to the Hanivu is given on the pylon of Hor-em-
heb at Karnak, and it offers a typically Greek head. The
profile indeed might be that of the statue of some Greek
goddess in the classical days of Greek art. The nose,
lips, and chin to which Greek art has accustomed us are
already present. A long wavy tress of hair falls upon
the shoulder, the rest of the hair being trained over the
back. The portrait is of great value as showing that
already in the age of the last monarch of the Eighteenth
Egyptian Dynasty the northern lands which lay opposite
to Egypt were occupied by a race that was typicallyGreek.
We need not here enter upon the controversy as to
whether this Greek type was the type of the primitive
Aryan, or whether it was the Aryan type modified
by mixture with another race. The physical charac
teristics of the genuine Aryan are still a disputed point.
But the tendency of recent research is to identify him
with that blond dolichocephalic race, whose purest
representatives are now to be found in the Scandinavian
peninsula. It must be remembered, however, that by
the genuine Aryan is meant the speaker of the parent-
speech out of which the various languages of the
Indo-European family have developed, and that it is by
no means certain that the race which spoke the parent-
speech was an unmixed one. Granting that it was
so, it is only in Southern Scandinavia that it has
remained pure. Here only do we find a people whose
language has belonged to the Indo-European family
of speech from time immemorial, and whose skulls are
158 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
the same as those found in the earliest sepulchres of the
country. In the tall, broad-shouldered Scandinavian,
with his flaxen hair, his light blue eyes, his long head
and mealy-white skin, we may see the modern repre
sentative of the primitive Aryan.
Scandinavia has ever been a nursery of heroes. Its
glaciers and fiords have from age to age sent forth men
of irresistible bodily strength and adventurous courage
whom their native land could no longer support. In
historical times they became the Vikings and Norsemen
who were for so long a period the scourge of Christen
dom. In prehistoric times, before the sail or sagulum
had been borrowed from Rome, their migrations must
have moved along the lines of the great rivers. Wher
ever they went, they became the dominant and ruling
caste, like the followers of Rollo in Normandy and
of Roger Guiscard in Sicily. Except where the lan
guage of the conquered was protected by religion, law,
and literature, the populations they subdued were forced
to learn the language of their new masters. To the
difficulties they experienced in doing so we may ascribe
many of the phonetic peculiarities which separate, the
chief Indo-European languages from one another. To
the same cause we must also ascribe many of the words
which in Greek or Latin, or the other Indo-European
languages of the old world, cannot be traced to an Indo-
European etymology. They will have belonged to the
languages spoken before the arrival of the Aryan race 1 .
1 After an analysis of the classical Greek lexicon Mr. Wharton finds that
while 641 words are borrowed and 1580 can be assigned an Indo-European
etymology, there remain about 520 for which no such etymology can be
discovered. We may therefore regard a large part of them as belonging
to the language, or languages, spoken in Greece before the arrival of the
Aryans (Etyma Graeca, p. vi).
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA.
159
The further the race advanced from their primeval
home, the less pure their blood became, and the greater
was their tendency to die out or be absorbed in the
aboriginal population. It is only in the extreme north
west of India that it is still possible to meet with
members of the Aryan race ; elsewhere in the peninsula
Indo-European languages are spoken by those who have
little or no Aryan blood in their veins. It is question
able how far the ancient Greek was of pure Aryan
descent ; it is certain that the typical modern Greek,
with his black hair and eyes and dark complexion,
belongs to another stock 1 .
1 Mr. Risley, in reporting the chief results of the recent ethnographic
enquiry in India, states that three main types are to be found in the
160 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Let us not forget, however, that the primitive Aryan
and the modern Greek are alike members of the white
race, and that the primitive Aryan was but the member
of the race who had his dwelling-place in north-eastern
Europe and there spoke the language from which the
Indo-European languages are derived. Archaeology
has shown that Western Europe has been the home
of four distinct varieties of this white race. We have
first of all a blond race, tall, dolichocephalic and ortho-
gnathous, with blue eyes, light hair, full beard, well
developed chin, narrow eyes, prominent eyebrows, and
straight, leptorrhine nose. One section of it is represented
by the Scandinavian, another by the Kelto-Libyan,
Secondly, there is a race tall in stature, with reddish hair,
fair, freckled skin, brachycephalic skull, somewhat pro
gnathous jaws, prominent cheek-bones, round eyes, and
square chin. It has been called the Kymric type, under
the belief that the majority of the Welsh and ancient
population of the country: (i) A leptorrhine, pro-opic, dolichocephalic
type, of tall stature, light build, long and narrow face, comparatively fair
complexion and high facial angle. This type is most marked in the Panjab.
(2) A platyrrhine, mesopic or nearly platyopic, dolichocephalic type, of low
stature, thickset make, very dark complexion, relatively broad face, usually
low facial angle. This type is most distinct in Chota Nagpore and the
Central Provinces. (3) A mesorrhine, platyopic, brachycephalic type of
low or medium stature, sturdy build, yellowish complexion, broad face and
low facial angle. This type is found along the northern and eastern
frontiers of Bengal and is of Mongoloid origin. In the dolichocephalic
leptorrhine type of the Panjnb and north-western frontier at the present day
we may recognise the descendants of the invading Aryans of 3000 years
ago, changed no doubt in hair, eyes, and complexion, but retaining the more
enduring characteristics of their race in the shape of their head, their
stature, and the finely cut proportions of their nose. Survivals of fair or
rather reddish hair, grey eyes, and reddish blonde completion are moreover
still to be found, as Penka has pointed out, and as I myself have seen,
among the Kafirs from beyond the Panjab frontier (Journal of the
Anthropological Institute, xx. 3).
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA. l6l
Britons have belonged to it 1 . A third race is repre
sented by the dark Kelts, and more especially by the
inhabitants of Auvergne. In this the skull is more
brachycephalic than in the Kymric race, the stature is
short, the eyes round and dark, the hair black, the
complexion brunette, the jaws fairly orthognathous, and
the forehead large. This race has been termed some
times Keltic, sometimes Ligurian. The fourth and
last race is the Euskarian or Basque. Here the
stature is medium, the skull dolichocephalic, the length
being in the back part of the head, the face oval, the
hair and eyes dark, and the complexion sallow.
These four types have been in close contact with one
another for unnumbered centuries. The result has been
intermixture on a large scale. In the same family we
find one individual member who belongs to one of the
four types, another member who belongs to another.
The brunettes, however, are steadily increasing at the
expense of the blonds. Where, for instance, a brunette
is married to a blond, it has been found that ten per
cent, more of the offspring take after the brunette than
after the blond. This points to the conclusion that
Western Europe was not the original cradle of the
blonds, and that their earliest home must be sought
rather to the north-east.
Until lately it has been believed that all four types
1 The name of Belgic has also been given to it from the Belgae who
settled in the southern part of Britain two centuries before the invasion of
Julius Caesar. It may have been represented by the brachycephalic race
who introduced the use of bronze into this country and constructed the round
barrows. But the skulls of this race agree with those which are found in
Denmark from the beginning of the stone age down to the present time, as
well as with the Helvetic skulls discovered at Sion in Switzerland and
with those of the modern Walloons in the Ardennes.
L
j62 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
are represented among the remains of the so-called
quaternary epoch, when man in Western Europe was
a contemporary of the mammoth, and his only tpol and
weapon was a large block of chipped flint for which
a handle had not as yet been invented. Now, however,
it is alleged that this is a mistake, and that no brachy-
cephalic skulls can be assigned to that remote period
of European history 1 . If so, we shall have to seek the
origin of the brachycephalic types elsewhere than in
Western Europe, and regard them as emigrants from
the east.
The Aryan race once exercised an important influence
upon the fortunes of the Jewish people. The conquest
of Babylonia by Cyrus restored the exiles of Judaea
to their own country, but not to political freedom. For
two hundred years, down to the fall of the Persian
empire, Palestine remained a Persian province, and the
habits and ideas of its inhabitants were modified by the
laws and civilisation of Persia. The Persians spoke an
Indo-European language, and further belonged to the
Aryan race. The physical type of the countrymen of
Darius and Xerxes, like that of their modern descen
dants, was Aryan in all its traits. Travellers still speak
of the fair-complexioned, blue-eyed populations met
with in the Persian highlands, though the mass of the
people belong to the dolichocephalic brunette type with
black hair and eyes 2 . The Persians were at the outset
1 Salmon, Les Races humaines prehistoriqties, p. 20 (1888).
2 Penka {Die Herkunft der Arier, pp. ill sq^} quotes from General
Schindler (1879) that among the inhabitants of the province of Gilan on
the Caspian Sea individuals with blond hair are to be found, while
one of the Kurdish chiefs at Khorremabad had blue eyes and a blond beard.
Blonds are also to be seen among the Armenians of Feridan. The blond
type exists, according to Pietremont, in all parts of Persia, so that as
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA. 163
a Median tribe. They had pushed further south than
the rest of their kinsmen and established themselves
in the rear of Elam, on the eastern shores of the Persian
Gulf. They thus formed part of that Aryan wave of
migration which moved eastward till it was arrested by
the hot suns and burning plains of Hindustan. In the
districts to the south of the Caspian M. de Morgan has
discovered the tombs and relics of the early emigrants.
They were still, it would seem, in the stone age when
their first leaders were buried in the tumuli he has
opened. But intercourse with the civilised kingdom
of Assyria soon introduced them to the use of bronze
and iron, and even to the glazed pottery of Nineveh.
When the Aryans of India first entered the Punjab, they
already wielded iron weapons, and knew how to smelt
the metal in the fire.
If Bruce may be trusted, the blond race can be traced
as far as the mountains of Yemen in Southern Arabia.
Here, he was told, individuals might be met with who
had blue eyes and reddish hair. However this may be,
even if no stray waifs of the blond race have found their
way so far south, Southern Arabia has always been the
home of a portion of the white race. As we have seen,
it was included in the regions called Pun by the Egypt
ians and Cush by the Hebrews. The Punite type
represented on the monuments of Egypt resembles the
Egyptian, excepting only that the massive lower jaw
and full lips of the Egyptian are absent from it. They
amongst ourselves the members of the same family may be some of them
brunettes and others blonds (Bulletins de la Societe d? anthropologie de Paris,
y ser. ii. p. 406). A considerable portion of the Kurds are tall men with blue
eyes and blond hair (Schweiger-Lerchenfeld in Petermann s Mittlu-ilun^cn,
45, p. u). Further east the blond Kafirs or Siah-Posh in Afghanistan are
well known (see Biddulph, Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh, p. 128).
L a
l6~4 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
may have been acquired from the Nigritian aborigines
whom the first Egyptian settlers found in the valley of
the Nile. At all events the Punite profile may be de
scribed as a refined duplicate of the Egyptian profile,
befitting the inhabitants of a country from which the
Egyptians believed that their gods had come and to
which they gave the title of the divine land. The
native of Southern Arabia still corresponds in .outward
appearance to the Punite of old time. We are told that
his skull is dolichocephalic, his nose straight, his features
handsome, his hair dark and wavy or straight, his lips
thin, his stature medium, his complexion reddened by
the sun. From time to time he has migrated to the
neighbouring shores of Africa, and there mingled his
blood with that of the earlier populations. It is to this
mingling that we must trace the typical Abyssinian of
to-day, with his handsome features, straight or wavy hair,
thin nose and lips, and dark Nigritian colour. In fact,
apart from colour he has preserved all the characteristics
of the race from which the main bulk of his ancestors
were sprung. But unlike the people of Southern Arabia
who have exchanged the Christianity or the Judaism
they once professed for the religion of Mohammed, the
Abyssinian has remained faithful to the Christianity of
his fathers. Though the conversion of the Nubian tribes
to Mohammedanism in the twelfth century cut him off
from the Coptic Church of Egypt, he has successfully
resisted the influence and armed assaults of Islam on the
one side and of paganism on the other. The language
which he speaks is still Semitic, and the faith which he
professes is still Christian.
The queen of Sheba came from the utmost parts of
the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon ; the descen-
AFRICA, EUROPE, AND ARABIA. 165
dants in Africa of the emigrants from Sheba received the
teaching of a greater than Solomon. Though the
Ethiopians over whom Candace ruled (Acts viii. 27) may
have been Nubians rather than Abyssinians, the message
of the Gospel carried by her eunuch to Africa doubtless
penetrated to the mountains of Abyssinia. It was not
indeed till the fourth century that the regions of the
Upper Nile received their first bishop, but by that time
the new faith had won numerous adherents among their
mingled populations, and the words of the Psalmist had
been fulfilled that Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her
hands unto God/
CHAPTER IX.
CONCLUSIONS.
OUR task is now at an end. We have reviewed the
ethnological world of the Old Testament, so far as
materials we possess allow us to do so. It was not a
very large world according to modern ideas, but it was
a world in which the most important parts of the drama
of human history have been played, and in which a
large variety of races have appeared upon the stage.
Only one civilised kingdom of the ancient world is
excluded from it. China lies beyond the horizon of the
Biblical Scriptures, as it is now agreed that the Sinim of
Isaiah Ixix. 12 if it be a correct reading has nothing
to do with the Chinese. According to Professor de
Lacouperie it denotes the Shinas of the Hindu-Kush 1 .
Isolated in the seclusion of the extreme east, China
pursued her course, unafifecting and unaffected by the
current of human life in Western Asia. But it is
probable that some at least of the Mongoloid race, to
which the Chinese belong, may have served in the
armies of the Persian kings or even settled in the lands
which adjoined the Assyrian empire. If so, their
physical appearance must at once have arrested the
attention of the populations of the west from its striking
peculiarity. Of medium height the Mongoloid, whether
Chinaman, Mongol or Tatar, is brachycephalic with
1 Babylonian and Oriental Record, i. n (1887).
CONCLUSIONS. 167
flattened nose, high cheek-bones, and small black eyes
which are contracted at the inner angle, the result of
arrested muscular development where it occurs in other
races, and giving the eye the appearance of obliquity.
The hair of the head is black, coarse and abundant, but
there is little on the face and still less on the rest of the
body, the skin of which is of a yellow colour. The legs
are distinguished by their thinness.
Such is the general type of a race which extends over
so large a part of the continent of Asia. But we look in
vain for representations of it on the monuments of
Egypt, Babylonia or Persia. It has been said that the
Hittite face belongs to it ; if so, the type has been
so profoundly modified as to be hardly recognisable.
Apart from this doubtful case, the races known to the
Old Testament are those whose descendants still occupy
the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. With the
exception of the negroes and the Nubians, they belong
essentially to that historical sea. With the exception of
the negroes and the Nubians, also, they are all divisions
of the white race.
The fact that the white races are all divisions of the
white race introduces us to one of those defects in
ethnological terminology which show how young the
science of ethnology must still be. It has not as yet
acquired a settled and definite terminology, such as shall
be understood alike by the ethnological student and the
ordinary educated reader. Just as in the science of
language we want some term which shall distinguish
the genealogical families of speech from the morpholo
gical classes or groups into which they fall, so in the
science of ethnology we want some term which shall
distinguish a race, in the usual acceptation of the word,
1 68 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
from those larger divisions of mankind which stand to
them in the relation of a genus to a species.
In his Lectures on Races and Peoples Dr. Brinton
has proposed to confine the name of race to those
larger divisions of mankind, a race in the usual sense
of the term being called a branch, and divided into a
number of stocks. The stocks would be again
divided into tribes, peoples or nations *. Thus he con
stitutes an Eurafrican race, characterised by white
skin, wavy hair and narrow nose, and divided into two
branches, one being South Mediterranean and the
other North Mediterranean. The South Mediterranean
branch includes the Hamitic and Semitic stocks, the
Libyan, Egyptian, and East African groups being
classed under the Hamitic stock, while the Arabian,
Abyssinian and Chaldaean groups are classed under
the Semitic stock. The North Mediterranean branch
comprises three stocks/ Euskaric or Basque, Aryac or
Indo-European, and Caucasic, the latter representing the
different populations of the Caucasus.
But there are grave objections to this scheme. It
restricts the term race unduly, and has to substitute
for it other words in cases where the usage of the
English language has determined that race alone
should be employed. Who would understand what a
writer meant who spoke of the Egyptian group ?
Moreover, it starts from the genus rather than from the
species, and it is the species that is primarily signified
by race both in ordinary language and in ethnology.
The higher units or genera the white race, the black
race, the yellow race, the copper-coloured race are not
the primary object of the ethnologist s investigations any
1 Races and Peoples, pp. 98, 99.
CONCL US IONS. 169
more than the morphological classes of language are the
primary object of the philologist s researches. What we
want to investigate, if we are ethnologists, are the races
who are separated from one another by physiological
and mental characteristics, and whom with our present
materials we cannot reduce to a single type. These are
the races with which we have primarily to deal, to
determine the points wherein they differ or agree, and
to trace their history as far back as is possible. If we
are to distinguish the genus from the species, the higher
unit from the race in the common acceptation of the
word, it is for the higher unit that we ought to find some
other designation. Instead of speaking of a white
race or a black race, it would be well if we could use
some such term as stock.
The foregoing pages will have impressed another fact
upon our minds. While anthropologists have abundant
information in regard to the savages and barbarians of
the modern world, and while the caves and gravel-beds
of Europe have been ransacked in order that they may
tell us what were the character and condition of the
races who inhabited our continent in prehistoric days,
little of a scientific nature has been done for the lands
of the Bible. Egypt excepted, it is just where the
fullest information might have been expected that we
find it to be the most meagre. Less is known about the
ethnology of modern Syria than about the ethnology of
the North American Indians. Among the thousands of
tourists who visit Palestine, and the numerous explorers
who have lived or travelled in its midst, there has been
none who has devoted himself to the task of studying
the physiological characteristics of the people themselves.
Burton and Tyrwhitt Drake, indeed, excavated on the
170 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
sites of several old cemeteries, and brought to England
the skulls they found ; but there was nothing to show in
most cases whether the skulls belonged to Turkish
conquerors or to the indigenous population, and until
further researches of the same kind are made it is
dangerous to draw from them ethnological conclusions.
Yet ethnological observations are within the reach of
almost every traveller. Like the geologist who can find
materials for his study wherever he may go, the traveller
in Syria or the Holy Land is brought into daily, if not
hourly, contact with the human subjects of ethnological
research. To measure and take such observations as
shall be serviceable to the anthropologist requires but
little previous knowledge and involves but little labour.
In Professor Paul Topinard s Elements d AntJiropolo-
gie ghierale will be found all the instructions requisie
for enabling the observer to make the measurements
which shall be of use to science. Even if the traveller
is unwilling to measure the skull or determine the facial
angle, he can at least photograph the profiles of the
natives with whom he meets. We have seen what light
has been cast on the dark past of Biblical ethnology by
the portraits taken by the Egyptian artists of their foes
and prisoners ; and a still greater light would be cast on
the present ethnology of Bible lands by a judicious use
of the photographic camera.
Without a fuller knowledge of Palestinian and Syrian
ethnology there are many questions which must be left
unanswered, and problems which cannot be solved.
Even so elementary a point as the prevalent form of the
skull in modern Syria is still uncertain. It is usually
assumed that the skull is dolichocephalic, but the as
sumption rests on a small number of measurements,
CONCLUSIONS. i;i
some of them of doubtful value. The question acquires
importance in view of the fact that whereas the Arab is
dolichocephalic, a large proportion of the Jews at the
present day are brachycephalic. Putting aside the ex
aggerated brachycephalism of the Jews of the Caucasus,
due, doubtless, to intermixture with the brachycephalic
natives, statistics have shown that in Central Europe an
overwhelming proportion of the Jews have broad, round
heads. Dolichocephalism is found only among the blonds,
and the blonds form but 15 percent, of the whole Jewish
community 1 . If, therefore, dolichocephalism is the rule
in modern Palestine, it would be a decisive proof
that the Jewish element has been stamped out of its
population.
Until I drew attention to it, no traveller seems to have
observed that a blond race with the features ascribed to
the Amorites by the Egyptian sculptors still exists in
Southern Palestine. Yet it might have been thought
that such a fact could not have escaped the notice of the
least observant tourist. But the ethnologist had not
been in the country, and the physical appearance of its
people was the last thing which the ordinary traveller
had cared to note or record.
Every year the countries of the Old Testament are
becoming more and more accessible. What Virchow
has done for Egypt in the course of a single journey up
the Nile, others will be found to do for Palestine and
Syria and the districts further east. The neglect of the
past will be replaced by an abundance of ethnological
data. Questions which now perplex us will be cleared
up, or at any rate partially answered. We shall learn
whether the Phoenician type of countenance, such as it is
1 See above, p. 78.
172 THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
portrayed for us on the monuments of Egypt, still sur
vives on the Phoenician coast, or whether the population
of Damascus in the century before the Exodus was really
allied to that of Southern Arabia, as a remarkable face
on the walls of Karnak would lead us to infer. Mean
while, we can only state the problems in the hope that
they may stimulate some to go forth and solve them. It
is given to few to survey and measure the sacred soil of
Palestine; it is given to still fewer to disinter from beneath
it the ruins of its buried cities ; but there is no one among
its visitors who could not help the ethnologist of the Old
Testament in collecting his facts.
Let us not forget, however, that, thanks more especially
to Mr. Petrie s exertions, much has been already gained
and learned, of which but a few years ago we could not
even dream. Who, for instance, could have imagined
that as late as the reign of Rehoboam the inhabitants of
Southern Judaea were still predominantly Amorite in
blood ? Or, who could have guessed that the blond race
with whom the Egyptians once contended, as the French
conquerors of Algeria have contended in these later times,
had found a home in Palestine, and were the Amorites of
sacred history ? Other surprises such as these are doubt
less in store for us, and we shall come to learn more about
the populations which have left so deep an impress on the
history of the people of Israel, and through them on the
history of the Christian world.
The study of ethnology has a practical as well as a
theoretical side. Racial traits once fixed do not dis
appear, and these traits include not only physical cha
racteristics but mental and moral qualities as well. It
has been argued by an able and cultivated writer, himself
a negro and a Christian, that Mohammedanism is better
CONCLUSIONS. 173
adapted than Christianity to the negro race. The answer
to such arguments must be sought in ethnology. This
alone can teach us the true value of the assertions so
often made about racial aptitudes and defects, and the
respective influence of education and inheritance upon
a race. More especially does it concern us to know
what were the affinities and characteristics, the natural
tendencies and mental qualifications of the people to
whom were committed the oracles of the Old Testa
ment. Theirs was the race from which the Messiah
sprang, and in whose midst the Christian Church was
first established.
174 TABLE OF RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
_ g
_
Israelites
Edomites,
w
o ^
-11
APPENDIX.
ETHNOLOGICAL TERMS.
Dolichocephalic or long-headed, brachycephalic or short
(round) headed/ mesocephalic medium-headed. The ce
phalic index is the transverse diameter of the skull multiplied
by 100 and divided by the longitudinal diameter. Following
Topinard, dolichocephalic skulls (subdivided into ultra, hyper,
dolicho and sub-doh cho) are those in which the proportion of the
transverse to the longitudinal diameter is 55-75 to 100, meso
cephalic where it is 7580 to 100, brachycephalic (subdivided
into sub-brachy, brachy, hyper and ultra] where it is 80-100
to 100.
The height of the skull multiplied by 100 and divided by the
length gives hypsicephalic skulls where the proportion is above
75 to 100, chamaecephalic, or platycephalic, where it is below 70
to 100, and orthocephalic where it is 70-75 to 100.
Maxillary angle : the angle formed by drawing lines from the
most prominent part of the maxillaries to the most prominent
parts of the forehead and chin.
Facial angle : the angle formed by drawing a line from the
most prominent part of the upper jaw to the most prominent
part of the forehead, and a second line at right angles to it
through the centre of the aperture of the ear.
The nasal index : when the nasal aperture is wide, the nose
which is large and flat is platyrrhine; when narrow the nose
which is thin and prominent is leptorrhine ; noses of inter
mediate form are mesorrhine. Following Collignon, the nasal
1 7 6 APPENDIX.
index or proportion of the breadth of the nose at the base to its
height multiplied by 100 is ultra-leptorrhine when 40 or under,
hyper-leptorrhine when 40-54, leptorrhine 55-69, mesorrhine
7084, platvrrhine 8599, hyper-platyrrhine 100-114, ultra-
platyrrhine 115 and more.
Prognathism : when the maxillaries (upper and lower jaws)
project.
Orthognathism : when the projection is slight.
Euthycomic : with straight hair (of cylindrical shape).
Euplococomic : with wavy hair.
Eriocomic : with woolly hair (of flattened shape).
Lophocomic : with bushy hair.
The naso-malar index : when the height of the nose and
cheek is multiplied by 100 and divided by their breadth, the face
is platyopic, and has an index below 107^, mesopic with an
index from 107 \ to no, and pro-opic with an index above no.
Megasemic : with round eyes (the proportion of the short to
the long diameter of the orbit being 90-95 to 100).
Mesosemic : with medium eyes (80-90 to 100).
Microsemic : with narrow eyes (60-80 to 100).
The white race is sometimes described as Leuco-chroic, the
black race as Melano-chroic, the yellow race as Xantho-chroic,
and the red race as Erythro-chroic.
INDEX.
Abyssinia, 145, 164.
Accad, 61, 66.
Accado-Sumerians, 138 sq.
Aegean Sea, 114, 131.
Ahmes (king), 97.
Akkas, 148.
Alarodian, 43, 50, 137 sq.
albinoism, 22.
Amalekites, 117.
Amenophis IV (king), 100.
Ammonites, 28.
Amorites, 56, 59, 75, 102, 103, no
sq., 119, 121, 125, 128, 149, mi,
171.
Anakim, 107, 115, 128.
Anamim, 53.
Aqaiusha (Akhaeans), 150, 1^2.
Arabs, 75, 141, 171.
Aram, 63, 64, 69.
Aram-Naharaim (or Mitanni), 96,
100.
Aramaeans, 134, 140, 141.
Ararat (Armenia), 44,48, 135, 136.
Araxes, the, 136.
Arkite, 58, 103, 130.
Armenians, 135.
Arphaxad, 59, 64.
Aryans, origin of, 22, 45, 157 sq.
Ashkelon, 127, 128, 132.
Ashkenaz, 48.
Ashteroth-Kamaim, 121.
Asshur, 59, 69.
Asshurim, 60.
Assyrians, 40, 59, 137 sq.
Babylonia, 60, 61.
Babylonians, 137 sq.
Balawat, gates of, 135.
Basques, 36, 149, 150.
Bedawin, 72, 105 sq., 117, 128, 141,
153-
Beddoe, Dr., 20, 105.
Belgic type, 161.
Beni-Hassan tomb, 108.
Berossos, 138, 140.
Bertholon, M., 105.
Berlin, Mr., 142.
Biainas (Van\ 136.
black skin, cause of, 21.
Blake, Dr. Carter, 105.
Blyden, Dr., 25.
Bonnet, Dr., 148.
brachycephalism, 14, 162, 175.
Brinton, Dr., 168.
Bruce, Mr., 163.
Burton, Sir R., 105.
Bushmen, 146.
Buz, 63.
Calah, 67.
Canaan, Canaanites, 40, 55 sq., 101,
103.
language of, 57, 118.
Caphtor, 53, 126.
Carchemish, 131, 151.
Casluhim, 53.
Chabas, M., 127.
Chaldaeans, 62.
Cherethites, 75.
Chesed, 62, 63.
China, 166.
Circassians, 135.
circumcision, 151.
colour of races depends on geo
graphy, 23.
in Egyptian tombs, 113.
Conder, Capt., 106.
Cro-magnon, 149.
cromlechs, range of, 115, 116, 128.
Cush (see Kash), 43, 51, 143.
Cyprus, 47, 152.
Damascus, 122, 125.
Danauna, Daanau, 126, 151, 152.
David, racial type of, 74.
Dieulafoy, M., 140.
Diodoros, 85.
disease, susceptibility to, 26.
Dodanim (or Rodanim), 47.
dolichocephalism, 14, 171, 175.
Drake, Mr. Tyrwhitt, 105.
178
INDEX.
Ebed-melech, 146.
Ebed-tob, 57, 102.
Eber (Hebrews), 65, 69.
Edomites, 117, 128.
E sypt> 52 sq- m
two races in, 87.
Egyptians, 21, 39, 43, 82 sq., 144.
origin of, 91.
language of, 93.
Eichhorn, Prof., 69.
Elamites, 40, 59, 138 sq.
Elishah (Hellas), 47.
Emim, 117, 121.
Erech, 66.
Ethiopia, 143, 144, 165.
Euskarian type, IOI.
eyes, the, 18, 20, 176.
facial angle, the, 17, 175.
Flathead Indians, 15.
Flower, Prof., 97.
freckles, cause of, 24.
Fuegians, 25, 28.
Gaul, 35.
Gaza, near Shechem, 101.
Gebal, 56, 101, 127, 152, 154.
Girgashites, 122.
Gog (Gyges), 45, 49.
Goleniscneff, Mr., 127, 152.
Gomer (Kimmerians), 44, 49.
Greeks, 40, 46, 157, 159.
Guanches, 115, 149.
Gyges (Gog), 44.
hair, the, 19, 176.
Ham, 41.
Hamath, 59, 132.
Hamitic languages, 80.
Hanivu (lonians), 156.
Havilah, 41, 65.
Hazarmaveth (Hadramaut), 65.
Hebron, 130.
Helvetic type, 161.
Herodotos, 131, 135, 151.
Heth, 40, 57.
Hittites, 40, 43, 59, 103, no, rai,
124, 126, 128, 130 sq.
Hivites, 119, 122.
Horites, 115, 117, 120.
Huz, 63.
Hyksos, 95 sq., 124.
hypsicephalic, 175.
lanua, 124.
Inca-bone, 16, 105.
India, 159.
Indo-European languages, 35, 158,
160, 162.
Israelites, 128.
Japhet, 41.
Javan (Ionian , 46.
Jebusites, 57, 102, 103, in, 121.
Jehu, tribute of, 77, no.
Jerome, St., 31.
Jerusalem, 58, 102, 1 1 1, 1 1 2, 1 22,130.
Jews, the, n, 29,70, 74, 76, 110,171.
in the Caucasus, 78.
Joktan, 65, 69.
Josephus, 153.
Kabyles in Algeria, 19, 21, 114, 149.
Kadesh on Orontes, 113, 130.
Kadesh-barnea, 117.
Kadmonites, 120.
Kaffirs, 145, 148.
Kaft (Phoenicia), 53, 57, 102, 103,
105, 113.
Kalneh, 66.
Kanana, 106, 117.
Kappadokia, 130, 131.
Kasdim of Babylonia, 62.
Kash, or Cush, 143.
Kassites, 62, 139.
Kelts, 26, 29, 31, 33, 114, 161.
Kenites, or smiths, 1 1 8 sq.
Kenizzites, 117.
Khal, 102, 127, 152.
Khammurabi, 139. , .
Khephren (king), 90.
khori, 115.
Kimmerians (Gomer), 45.
Kinakhkhi (Canaan), 101.
Kittim (Kition), 47, 50.
Kurdistan, 136.
Kurds, 162, 163.
Kymric type, 160.
Lachish, in, 129.
Lacouperie, Prof, de, 166.
language and race, 10, 28 sq.
morphology of, 35, 36.
Lebanon, people of, 125.
Lefe bure, M., 114.
INDEX.
79
Lehabim (Libyans), 53, 54.
Lepsins, Prof., 126.
leptorrhine, 175.
Libyans, or Lcbu, 39, 43, 53, 80, 83,
88, 112, 149 sq.
Ligurian type, 161.
Xiku, the, 154.
-Lud, 64.
Ludim (Lydians), 53.
Lydia, Lydians, 44, 33, 55.
Lykaonia, language of, 31.
Lykians, 135, 153, 154.
Magog (Lydia), 45.
Malay o-Polynesians, 32.
Manda, or nomads, 46, 64.
Mariette, M., 96.
Mash (Mesha\ 65.
Mashuash, or Maxyes, 150, 151, 156.
Maspero, Prof., 154.
Max Mtiller, Dr., 151.
maxillary angle, the, 16, 175.
Mazor (Lower Egypt\ 52.
Medes (Mada), 40, 45, 46, 163.
megasemic, 176.
Megiddo, 101.
Melchizedek, $8, 102, 122.
Meneptah I, 143, 150.
MentiofSati, 109, 119, 128.
Mesha (Mash), 65.
Meshech (Moschians), 47, 50.
mesocephalism, 14, 175.
mesopic, 176.
mesorrhine, 175.
mesosemic, 176.
microsemic, 176.
Minaeans, 65.
Minni, the, 48.
Mitanni (Aram-Naharaim), 96, 97,
100, 124, 134.
Mizraim, 52, 143.
Moabites, 128.
Mongoloid type, 166, 167.
Mongols, 133.
Morgan, M. de, 163.
Moschians (Meshech), 40, 48.
Napata, 144.
Naphtuhim, 53.
nation, 10.
nationality, 10, 3.1.
Nebuchadrezzar, 54, 63.
Negroes, 1 7, 1 8, 26, 2 7, 39, 5 1 , 1 45 */.
mix with Europeans, 33.
Nimrod, 66.
Nineveh, 67.
Nod, 64.
Nubians, 51, 70,80,83,144, 145, 164.
Og, in, 121.
Ophir, 65.
orthocephalic, 175.
orthognathism, 176.
Ossetes, 135.
pain, endurance of, 26.
palaeoliths in Egypt, 87-
Palestine, origin of name, 126.
Pathros, 52, 53.
Penka, Dr., 162.
people, a, 10.
Perizzites, 120.
Persians, 162.
Pethor, 132.
Petrie, Mr. Flinders, 87, 92, 103,
112, 114, [47, 172.
Philistines (Pulosata), 53, 54, 126
sq., 151.
Phoenicia, 53, 57, 93.
Phoenicians, 40, 70, 126.
Phrygians, 135.
Phut, 54, 55.
Pigeon- English, 34.
platycephalic, 175.
platyopic, 176.
platyrrhine, 175.
Poesche, Dr., 22.
prognathism, 16, 176.
proopic, 176.
Pun, Punites, 91, 92, 94, 125, 163,
164.
Quatrefages, Prof, de, 149.
race, 9, 168.
mixed, 12.
races, antiquity and permanence of,
Ramsay, Prof., 131.
Ramses II, 84, 89,99, I", "7, >9,
13, 5 r >-
Ramses III, 85, 89, 114, 126, 127,
15- -
Rechabite.;, i nj.
M 2
iHo
INDEX.
Kekh-ma-Ra, tomb of, 20, 39, 104,
105, 124, 133.
Rephaim, in, 118, 120, 121, 128.
Resen, 67.
Rhind, Mr., 87.
Rhodians, 47.
Riphath, 49.
Risley, Mr., 159.
rock-drawings, 147 sq.
Roknia, cromlechs of, 115.
Rutennu, 123 sq., 134.
sacred trees in Egypt, 91.
Sagalassos, 154.
Sahara, desert of, 145, 148.
Salmon, M., 162.
Sarrug, Mr., 104.
Scandinavia, 158.
Schliemann, Dr., 105.
Schrader, Prof., 143.
Semites, characteristics of, 77 sq.
Semitic race, cradle of, 71, 72.
languages, 70.
Sepharad, 49.
Shairdana, or Shardina (Sardinian;,
150,154.??
Shakalsha (Sikels), 150, 151, 153.
Shasu ^Bedawin), 105 sq., 113, 114,
117.
Sheba (Saba), 65, 164.
Shechem, in, 120.
Sheikh el-beled, 89, 90.
Shem, 40, 41, 59.
Sheshai, 107.
Shinar, 61, 66.
Shishak, 75, 77, 98, 99, 112, 144.
Sidon, or Zidon, 40, 56, 102.
Sihon (king), in.
Sikels, 154.
Sinaitic Peninsula, 73, no.
Sinim, 166.
Sinite, 58, 130.
skin, colour of, 20.
So (king), 99, 144.
Solymi, 153.
stature, 14.
Slopes, Mr., 87.
Strabo, 153.
Sumerians, or Accadians, 140.
Susa (Shushan), 140.
sutures of the skull, 15.
Syria, 123, 164.
Syrian type, 104.
Tamehu, 114.
Tarshish, 47.
teeth, 1 8.
Tehennu, Tahennu, 114, 150.
Tel el-Amarna, tablets found at, 56,
96, 100, IO2, IIO, 120, 122, 130,
131, 134, 143, 154.
Tello, 13 sq.
Teukrians, 152.
Thothmes III, 89, 121, 125.
Tibarenians (Tubal), 40, 48.
Tires, 48.
Tirhakah, 99, 144.
Togarmah, 49.
Tomkins, Rev. H. G., 96, 107, 121,
124, 133-
Topinard, Dr. Paul, 170, 175.
Tosp, 136.
triliteralism, 70, 72.
Tubal (Tibarenians), 47, 50.
Tulsha, or Tuirsha, 150, 154, 155.
Tyre, 55, 56.
Uashash, or Uashuasha, 150, 151.
Uz, land of, 65.
Van, 134 sq.
Virchow, Prof., 42, 83, 88, 91, 97,
171.
von Erckert, 135.
von Luschan, 135, 153.
Wharton, Mr., 158.
white race of Palestine, 114 sq.
Wilkinson, Sir G., 84.
Yemen, blonds in, 163.
Zakkur (Teukrians), 126, 127, 150 sq.
Zamzummim, 118, 121, 128.
Zemar, 58, 101.
Zorobabel, 142.
Zuzim, 121.
i^?V/
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