Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/38

 1 8 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD/EA AND ASSYRIA. other hand, the name of Ethiopians, often applied by the same authors to the dwellers upon the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, recalls the relationship which attached the Kushites of Asia to those of Africa in the Hebrew genealogies. We have still stronger reasons of the same kind for affirming that the Shemites or Semites occupied an important place in Chaldsea from the very beginning. Linguistic knowledge here comes to the aid of the biblical narrative and confirms its ethno- graphical data. The language in which most of our cuneiform inscriptions are written, the language, that is, that we call Assyrian, is closely allied to the Hebrew. Towards the period of the second Chaldee Empire, another dialect of the same family, the Aramaic, seems to have been in common use from one end of Mesopotamia to the other. A comparative study of the rites and religious beliefs of the Semitic races would lead us to the same result. Finally, there is something very significant in the facility with which classic writers confuse such terms as Chaldaeans, Assyrians, and Syrians ; it would seem that they recognized but one people between the Isthmus of Suez on the south and the Taurus on the north, be- tween the sea-board of Phoenicia on the west and the table lands of Iran in the east. In our day the dominant language over the whole of the vast extent of territory which is inclosed by those boundaries is Arabic, as it was Syriac during the early centuries of our era, and Aramaic under the Persians and the successors of Alexander. From the commencement of historic times the Semitic element has never ceased to play the chief rd/ehom one end of that region to the other. For Syria proper, its pre-eminence is attested by a number of facts which leave no room for doubt. Travellers and historians classed the inhabitants of Mesopotamia with those of Phoenicia and Palestine, because, to their unaccustomed ears, the differences between their languages were hardly perceptible, while their personal characteristics were practically identical. Such affinities and resemblances are only to be explained by a common origin, though the point of junction may have been distant. It has also been asserted that an Aryan element helped to com- pose the population of primitive Chaldaea, that sister tribes to those of India and Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor furnished their con- tingents to the mixed population of Shinar. Some have even declared that a time came when those tribes obtained the chief power. It may have been so, but the evidence upon which the