Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/69

 INTRODUCTIOK. lix

Baliel ; and here begins, as I tliink, the first movement of the negro race towards India and consequently towards Australia. Here comes in also the ' Toldoth Bene Noah' o£ Grenosis x.

Accordingly, the position of the Hamitc or black races at the opening of history is, in Greaesis x. G, indicated ethnically by the names Kush and Mizraim and Phut and Canaan, which geogra- phically are the countries we call Ethiopia and Egypt and Nubia and Palestine. The Kushites, however, were not confined to Africa, but were spread in force along the whole northern shores of the Arabian sea ; they were specially numerous on the lower courses of the Euphrates and Tigris, their original seats, and there formed the first germ whence came the great empire of Babylonia. The Akkadians were Turanian in speech, and, it may be, black in ' colour.' In this sense, the later Greek tradition (Odyssey 1-23-24) speaks of both an eastern and a western nation of Ethiopians. And Herodotus tells us (VII-70) that in the army of Xerxes, when he invaded Greece, " the Ethiopians from the sun-rise (for two kinds served in the expedition) were mar- shalled with the Indians, and did not at all differ from the others in appearance, but only in their language and their hair. Eor the eastern Ethopians are straight-haired, but those of Libya have hair more curly than that of any other people."

It is clear, therefore, that the black races, many centuries before the Trojan war, had spread themselves from the banks of the Indus on the east right across to the shores of the Mediter- ranean, while towards the south-west they occupied the whole of Egypt and the Abyssinian highlands. Thus they held two noble coigns of vantage, likely to give them a commanding influence in the making of the history of mankind — the valley cf the Nile, which, through all these ages to the present hour, has never lost its importance — and the luxuriant flat lands of Mesopotamia. A mighty destiny seemed to await them, and already it had begun to show itself; for the Kushites not only made the earliest advances towards civilisation, but under Nimrod, ' that mighty hunter,' smitten with the love of dominion, they threatened at one time to establish a universal empire with Babel as its chief seat. And not without reason ; for the Kushite tribes were stalwart in stature and physique, in disposition vigorous and en- ergetic, eager for war and conquest, and with a capacity and lust for great things both in peace and war. But a time of disaster came wdiich carried them into the remotest parts of the earth — into Central Africa, into the mountains of Southern India, Avhence, after a while, another impulse sent them onwards to- wards our own island-continent ; hither they came, as I think, many centuries before the Chris^tian era, pressed on and on from their original seats by the waves of tribal migration which were so commou in those early days. Similar was the experience of

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