Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/70

 Ix INTEODTJCTIOy.

the Kelts, a very ancient tribe; soon after their first arrival in Enrope. we find tliem occupying Thrace and the countries about the moutli of the Danube; but fresh immigration from the Cau- casus plateau pushed them up the Danube, then into Belgium and France, thence into Britain, and last of all the invading Faxons drove them westwards into Ireland, and into the moun- tains of Wales and Scotland. So the successive steps of the Ivushite displacement, in my opinion, were these: — first into the valley of the Granges, where they were the original inhabitants, then into the Dekkan and into Further India, then into Ceylon, the Andaman Islands, and the Sunda Islands, and thence into Australia. These stages I will examine presently more in detail. But, meanwhile, let us look at the old Babylonian kingdom. Its ethnic basis was Kusliite; its ruling dynasty continued to be Ivushite probably down to the time of the birth of Abraham, about 20U0 B.C. But before that date, the Babylonian population had been materially changed. Nimrod had conquered Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar; an /Vkkadian or Turanian element was thus incorporated with his empire; he had built jSTineveh and liehoboth and Calah and Kesen (Genesis x. 11); a Shemite element was thus or in some other way superadded; other Turanians and Shemites and Japhetian Aryans too, perhaps at- tracted by the easy luxuriance of life on these fertile jjlains, had all assembled in Chalda3a and Babylonia. In consequence, we find that, about twenty centuries B.C., the Ivushite kingdom had become a mixed conglomerate of four essentially different races — Ilamite, Turanian, Shemite, and Japhetian — which on the in- scriptions are called Kiprat-arlat, 'the four quarters.' Then, as the Babylonian worship of Mulitta demanded free intercourse as a religious duty, a strange mixture of pliysical types must have been developed among the children of these races, the Ethiopian, Scythic, Shemitic, and Iranian all blending — a rare study to the eye of a physiologist, who would have seen sometimes the one type sometimes the other predominating in the child. This Chalda*an monarchy — the first of the five great monarchies of ancient history — was overthrown by an irruption of Arab (Shemitic) tribes about the year 1500 B.C. And now, as I think, another wave of population began to move towards our shores; for t^iese Arabs were pure mouotheists, and in their religious zeal must have dashed to pieces the polytheistic and sensual fabric which the Babylonian conquests had extended from the confines of India westwards to the Mediterranean (cf. Chedorlaomer's expedition, Genesis xiv. 9). Those portions of the Chalda-o-Babylouian people that were unable to escape from the dominion of the Arabs were absorbed in the new empire, just as many of the Keltic Britons were in the sixth and seventh centuries merged in the newly-formed Saxon kingdoms. But the rupture of the Babylo-

�� �