Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/35

 THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF THE POPULATION. the five or six successive languages, at least, in which the inhabit- ants of Western Asia expressed their thoughts. These wedge- shaped characters are found in their most primitive and undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts of Meso- potamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which are especially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plastic figuration of Assyria. There is another particular in which the monumental records and the biblical tradition are in accord. During those obscure centuries that saw the work sketched out from which the civilization of the Tigris and Euphrates basin was, in time, to be developed, the Chaldsean population was not homogeneous ; the country was in- habited by tribes who had neither a common origin nor a common language. This we are told in Genesis. The earliest chiefs to o o build cities in Shinar are there personified in the person of Nimroct, who is the son of Cash, and the grandson of Ham. He and his people must be placed, therefore, in the same family as the Ethiopians, the Egyptians, and the Eibyans, the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. 1 A little lower down in the same o'enealoical table we find O O attached to the posterity of Shem that Asshur who, as we are told in the verses quoted above, left the plains of Shinar in order to found Nineveh in the upper country.- So, too, it was from Ur of the Chaldees that Terah, another descendant of Shem, and, through Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people, came up into Canaan. 3 The world has, unhappily, lost the work of Berosus, the Babylonish priest, who, under the Seleucidai, did for Chaldaea what Manetho w r as doing almost at the same moment for Egypt. 4 1 Genesis x. 6-20. - Genesis x. 22 : "The children of Shem." 3 Genesis xi. 27-32. 4 In his paper upon the Date des Ecrits qui portent les Notns de Berose et de ManetJiou (Hachettc, 8vo. 1873), M. ERNKST HAVET has attempted to show that neither of those writers, at least as they are presented in the fragments which have come down to us, deserve the credence which is generally accorded to them. The paper is the production of a vigorous and independent intellect, and there are many observations which should be carefully weighed, but we do not believe that, as a whole, its hypercritical conclusions have any chance of being adopted. All recent progress in Egyptology and Assyriology goes to prove that the fragments in question contain much authentic and precious information, in spite of the carelessness with which they were transcribed, often at second and third hand, by abbreviators of the basse epoque.