Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/463

 Reviews, 44^

profess to be an original authority, but trusts to others for his facts. Generally he shows himself a cautious and well-trained critic whose judgment may be depended on. Now and then, however, the inevitable weakness of second-hand information betrays itself, and statements are made which a first-hand acquaintance with the facts would have modified or prevented. Like most of his countrymen, Dr. Paton is a little too ready to accept the latest theory or pro- nouncement, especially if it comes from a German. What he says about the Khabiri is an illustration of this ; whoever else they may have been they could not have been identical with the khabbati or "plunderers." The compound ideograph sa-gaz, khabbatu in Assyrian, is a well-known ideograph ; khabirii is a totally different word.

There are other questions about which more than one view is possible, and where therefore scholars are likely to differ as to which they prefer. Dr. Paton's chronology, for instance, seems to me far too short. Borchardt's date for the twelfth Egyptian dynasty is incompatible with what we already know of the number of the Egyptian kings, and rests on an application of astronomy to chronology which the want of scientific precision in the monu- mental record makes merely illusory. As Wiedemann and Oppert have pointed out, the date is just as likely on the same grounds to be between one and two thousand years earlier. The same is the case as regards Babylonian chronology. Our only authority for it is the native annals, and until we recover the materials that lay before the native annalists we have neither reason nor right to question their categorical statements. We may on purely a priori grounds think that Nabonidos exaggerated when he asserted that Naram-Din lived 3,200 years before his own time, but as long as the historical materials which Nabonidos possessed are not in our hands we have no better date to substitute for it.

Professor Duff's Theology and Ethics of the Hebrews, which forms the fourth volume of the Semitic Series, is a very different sort of work from Dr. Paton's. The crudeness and unsubstantiated character of its statements are equalled only by the confidence with which they are put forward. The Professor knows far more about the Hebrews and their history than the Old Testament writers, though the sources of his knowledge, archaeological or otherwise, would be difficult to find. The nature of the book may be sufficiently gathered from the language its author uses of