Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/39

 THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF THE POPULATION. 10 hypothesis rests is very slight. Granting that the Aryans did settle in Chaldaea, they were certainly far less numerous than the other colonists, and were so rapidly absorbed into the ranks of the majority that neither history nor language has preserved any sensible trace of their existence. We may therefore leave them out of the argument until fresh evidence is forthcoming. But the students of the inscriptions had another, and, if we accept the theories of MM. Oppert and Fra^ois Lenormant, a better- founded, surprise in store for us. It seemed improbable that science would ever succeed in mounting beyond those remote tribes, the immediate descendants of Kush and Shem, who occu- pied Chaldsea at the dawn of history ; they formed, to all appear- ance, the most distant background, the deepest stratum, to which the historian could hope to penetrate ; and yet, when the most ancient epigraphic texts began to yield up their secrets, the inter- preters were confronted, as they assure us, with this startling fact : the earliest language spoken, or, at least, written, in that country, belonged neither to the Aryan nor to the Semitic family, nor even to those African languages among which the ancient idiom of Egypt has sometimes been placed ; it was, in an extreme degree, what we now call an agglutinative language. By its grammatical system and by some elements of its vocabulary it suggests a comparison with Finnish, Turkish, and kindred tongues. Other indications, such as the social and religious conditions revealed by the texts, have combined with these characteristics to convince our Assyriologists that the first dwellers in Chaldaea the first, that is, who made any attempt at civilization were Turanians, were part of that great family of peoples who still inhabit the north of Europe and Asia, from the marshes of the Baltic to the banks of the A moor and the shores of the Pacific Ocean. 1 The 1 A single voice, that of M. Halevy, is now raised to combat this opinion. He denies that there is need to search for any language but a Semitic one in the oldest of the Chaldsean inscriptions. According to him, the writing under which a Turanian idiom is said to lurk, is no more than a variation upon the Assyrian fashion of noting words, than an early form of writing which owed its preservation to the quasi-sacred character imparted by its extreme antiquity. We have no intention of discussing his thesis in these pages ; we must refer those who are interested in the problem to M. HALEVY'S dissertation in -z Journal A siatique for June 1874 : Observa- tions critiques sur ks prctendns Touraniens de la Babylonie. M. Stanislas Guyard shares the ideas of M. Hale'vy, to whom his accurate knowledge and fine critical powers afford no little support.