The Nations Of The Old World

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

WHEN we try and gather into one view the results of our inquiries upon the kindreds and nations of the old world, it must be confessed we are struck rather by the extent of our ignorance than of our knowledge. For all the light we are able to shed, the movements and the passage of the various races in this pre-historic time appear to the eye of the mind most like the movement of great hosts of men seen dimly through a mist. Or shall we say that we are in the position of persons living upon some one of many great military high-ways, while before their eyes pass continually bodies of troops in doubtful progress to and fro, affording to them, where they stand, no indication of the order of battle or plan of the campaign ? Still, to men in such a position there would be more or less of intelligence possible in the way in which they watched the steps of those who passed before them ; and we, too, though we cannot attempt really to follow the track of mankind down from the earliest times, may yet gather some idea of the changing positions which from age to age have been occupied by the larger divisions of our race.

In the Bible narrative continuous history begins, at the earliest, not before the time of Abraham. In the earlier chapters of Genesis we find only scattered notices of individuals who dwelt in one particular corner of the world, nothing to indicate the general distribution of races, or the continuous lapse of time. It is, moreover, a fact that, owing partly to the associations of childhood, we are apt, by a too literal interpretation, to rob the narrative of some part of its historical value. Here, proper names, which we might be inclined to take for the names of single individuals, often stand for whole races, and sometimes for the countries which gave their names to the people dwelling in them. " Son of," too, must not be taken in its most literal meaning, but in the wider, and in old languages the perfectly natural, sense of " descended from." When nations kept the idea of a common ancestor before their minds, in a way to which we of the present day are quite unfamiliar, it was very customary to describe any one person of that people as the "son of " the common ancestor. Thus a Greek who wished to bring before his hearers the common nationality of the Greek people the Hellenes would speak of them as being the sons of Hellen, of the AEolians or Ionians as sons of "Bolus or Ion. In another way, again, an Athenian or Theban might speak of his countrymen as sons of Athens or of Thebes. Such language among any ancient people is not poetical or hyperbolical language, but the usual speech of every day. So it is with the Bible narrative, the earlier events are passed rapidly over. And if the remains of the stone ages lift a little the veil which hides man's earliest doings upon earth, it must be confessed that the light which these can shed is but slight and partial. We catch sight of a portion of the human race making their rude implements of stone and borie, living in caves as hunters and fishers, without domestic animals and without agriculture, but not without faculties which raise them far above the level of the beasts by which they are surrounded. Yet of these early men we may say we know not whence they come or whither they go. We cannot tell whether the picture which we are able to form cf man of the earliest time of the first stone age is a general or a partial picture; whether it represents the majority of his fellow-creatures, or only a particular race strayed from the first home of man.

We must therefore content ourselves to resign the hope of anything like a review of man's life since the beginning. Before we see him clearly, he had probably spread far and wide over the earth, and already separated into the four most important divisions of the race. In the present day, man may be divided into four or five main divisions. The black, white, red, and yellow races of mankind are so named from the colors of their skins, but have each many other peculiarities of form and feature. The black race may again be divided into the negroes of Africa and those of Australia, for these are of quite separate types. These last, the two black races, are the least interesting people to be found over the face of the globe, for there is nothing to show that from the very earliest ages to which we can reascend they were not living just the same savage lives they are living now. Therefore, as they seem to have gone through no changes, and have never, until quite recent days, come into contact with historical peoples, they do not fall within the limit of our inquiry. For similar reasons we may dismiss the red race which peoples the whole continent of America, saving the extreme north. Not that these have never changed or attained to any sort of civilization, for we do find the traces of a certain primitive culture among them, but because we have no means of connecting this civilization with the history of that part of the world which has had a history.

We are therefore left to deal with the two remaining classes, the yellow and the white. The oldest, that is to say apparently the least changed, of these is the yellow race, and perhaps their most typical representatives are the Chinese. The type is a sufficiently familiar one. " The skull of the yellow race is rounded in form. The oval of the head is larger than with Europeans. The cheek-bones are very projecting; the cheeks rise towards the temples, so that the outer corners of the eyes are elevated; the eyelids seem half closed. The forehead is flat above the eyes. The bridge of the nose is flat, the chin short, the ears disproportionately large and projecting from the head. The 'color of the skin is generally yellow, and in some branches turns to brown. There is little hair on the body; beard is rare. The hair of the head is coarse, and, like the eyes, almost always black."' In the present day the different families of the globe have gone through the changes which time and variety of climate slowly bring about in all; and the Yellow race have not escaped these influences. While some of its members have, by a mixture with white races or by gradual improvement, reached a type not easily distinguishable from the European, others have, by the effect of climate, approached more nearly to the characteristics of the black family. We may, however, still class these divergent types under the head of the yellow race which we consequently find extending over a vast portion of our globe. Round the North Pole the Esquimaux, the Lapps, and the Finns form a belt of people belonging to this division of mankind. Over all. Northern and Central Asia the various tribes of Mongolian or Turanian- race inhabiting the plains of Siberia and of Tartary, the Thibetans, the Chinese, Siamese, and other kindred peoples of Eastern Asia, are members of this yellow family. From the Malay peninsula the same race has spread southward, passing from land to land over the countless isles which cover the South Pacific, until they have reached the islands which lie around the Australian continent. A wide tract of land, stretching from Greenland in a curved line, through North America and China, downwards to the southern portion of Van Diemen's Land or New Zealand, and again westward from China through Tartary or Siberia, up to Lapland in the north of Europe.

From the results of the previous chapter we see that to the yellow race must be attributed all those peoples of Europe and Asia which speak either monosyllabic or agglutinative languages, and therefore that for the white race are left the inflected tongues. These, it will be remembered, we divided into two great families, the Semitic and the Aryan or Japhetic. We thus see that from the earliest times to which we are able to point we have living in Europe and Asia these three divisions of the human family, whom we may look upon as the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. What relationship the other excluded races of mankind, the black and red, bear to the Hamites, Shemites, and Japhetites, is a question as yet too undecided for discussion here. Beyond the pure Shemites, that is in the north of Africa and. on the shores of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, lived in earliest ages a race whom it is difficult to classify under any of these heads. They may have been formed by an admixture of Shemites with the real negroes, or from a like admixture with the Turanian races. A partially Turanian origin we may be pretty sure they had. These people are called in the Bible Cushites, and formed the stock from which the Egyptian and Chaldean nations were mainly formed.

But though from the earliest times there were probably in Asia these three divisions of mankind, their relative position and importance was very different from what it is now. Every year the Turanian races are shrinking and dwindling before the descendants of Japhet. At the moment at which I write it is the Aryan Slaves who are endeavoring to push the Mongolian Turks from their last foothold in Europe;' and great as is the space which the Turanian people now occupy over the face of the globe, there is reason to believe that in early pre-historic times they were still more widely extended. In all probability the men of the polished-stone age in Europe and Asia were of this yellow-skinned Mongolian type. We know that the human remains of this period seem to have come from a round-skulled people; and this roundness of the skull is one of the chief marks of the Mongolians as distinguished from the white races of mankind. We know too that the earliest inhabitants of India belonged to a Turanian, and therefore to a yellow, race; and that Turanians mingled with one of the oldest historical Semitic peoples, and helped to produce the civilization of the Chaldaeans. And as, more-over, we find in various parts of Asia traces of a civilization similar to that of Europe during the latter part of the polished-stone age, it seems not unreasonable, in casting our eye back upon the remotest antiquity on which research sheds any light, to suppose an early widespread Turanian or Mongolian family extending over the greater part of Europe and Asia. These Turanians were in various stages of civilization or barbarism, from the rude condition of the hunters and fishers of the Danish shell-mounds to a higher state reigning in Central and Southern Asia, and similar to that which was afterwards attained towards the end of the polished-stone age in Europe. The earliest home of these pure Turanians was probably a region lying some-where to the east of Lake Aral. "There," says a writer from whom we have already quoted, "from very remote antiquity they had possessed a peculiar civilization, characterized by gross Sabeism, peculiarly materialistic tendencies, and complete want of moral elevation; but at the same time, by an extraordinary development in some branches of knowledge, great progress in material culture in some respects, while in others they remained in an entirely rudimentary state. This strange and incomplete civilization exercised over great part of Asia an absolute preponderance, lasting, according to the historian Justin, 1500 years."

As regards its pre-historic remains, we know that this civilization, or half civilization, was especially distinguished by the raising of enormous grave-mounds and altar-stones, and it must have been characterized by strong, if not by the most elevated, religious ideas, and by a peculiar reverence paid to the dead. Now it is by characteristics very similar to these that the civilization of Egypt is distinguished, and Egypt, of all nations which have possessed a history, is the oldest.

Are we not justified, therefore, in considering this Egyptian civilization, which is in some sort the dawn of history in the world, as the continuation the improvement, no doubt, but still the continuation of the half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on from the Turanian to the Cushite peoples ? W e may look upon this very primitive form of culture as spreading first through Asia, and later on outwards to the west. Four thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the dates disputed over as those of Menes, the first recorded King of Egypt. And Egypt even at this early time seems to have emerged from the age of stone and been possessed, at any rate, of bronze. The second date, 4000 B.C., probably marks the beginning of the more extended stone-age life of Europe. It was therefore with this early culture as it has been with subsequent completed civilizations,

"Nosque ubi prim us equis Oriens afflavit anhelis Illic sera rubens ascendit lumina Vesper."

The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with Menes, say 4000 B.C., reaches its zenith under the third and fourth dynasty, under the builders of the pyramids some eight hundred or a thousand years afterwards. Then in its full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the past like a giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy plains. It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the Egyptians first come before us everything seems to point them out as a people already old, whether it be their enormous tombs and temples, their elaborately ordered social life, or their complicated religious system, with its long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and thought present two elements of character which may well spring from the union of two distinct nationalities. Its enormous tombs and temples and its excessive care for the bodies of the dead for what are the pyramids but exaggerations of the stoneage grave-mounds and the temples, but improvements upon the megalithic dolmens ?—recall the era of stone-age culture. The evident remains of an early animal worship show a descent from a low form of religion, such a religion as we find among 'Turanian or African races. But with them co-existed some much grander features. The Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree, in the highest degree then known to the world; and, unlike the stone-age men, succeeded in other than merely mechanical arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by but one nation, the Chaldaeans; in painting and sculpture they were at the head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history as of writing itself, not quite of either, as will be seen hereafter. Mixed too with their animal worship were some lofty religious conceptions sketching not only beyond it the animal worship but beyond that "natural," polytheism which was the earliest creed of our own ancestors the Aryans; and a noble hope and ambition for the future of the soul. Were these higher facts due to the influx of Semitic blood ? It seems likely, when we remember how from the same race came a chosen people to whom the world is indebted for all that is greatest in religious thought.

During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or four thousand years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians do, as we have said, rise up distinctly out of the region of mere conjecture. Three or four thousand years before Christ five or six thousand years ago: this is no small distance through which too look back to the place where the first mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was doing in the other unseen regions round this mountain ? Or, in plainer language, what was the life of the other people's of the world at this time ? Perhaps in two places upon the globe and no more might then have been found a civilization at all comparable with that of Egypt. These places are the Tigro-Euphrates valley and China.

The kingdom of the Chaldaeans lay in the lower regions of the Tigris and Euphrates, where these rivers approach their streams to one another and to the Persian Gulf. The land through, which the rivers flow is a broad alluvial plain, lying like Egypt closely encompassed by sandy desert, so as to form the second oasis (Egypt being the first), which breaks the monotonous belt of waste land stretching south-west and north-east, across the whole of our older hemisphere. It was natural that these two fruitful plains rivalling each other in productiveness of soil should be the earliest hotbeds for unfolding the germs of civilization planted by Turanian men.

It is here, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. " And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there." Genesis xi. 2. Here too is placed the building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family. The oldest monuments of the country show it inhabited by a mixed people speaking a language Semitic in form, but Cushite and also Turanian in vocabulary. Here therefore the Turanian element was more marked than upon the banks of the Nile.

The civilization was also later than in Egypt. The earliest chronicles upon which we can place reliance begin about 2234 B.C., with Nimrod "the son of Cush," i.e. of Cushite or Ethiopian race. This was not many hundred years before the time of Abraham. The cities which he built were, says the Bible, Erech and Ur (the present Warka and Mugheir), Accad and Calneh, of all which some monumental remains are still left. After a while the reigning family of Nimrod gave place whether through conquest or not we do not know to another, still of the same race, coming from Elam; a neighbor country including part of the mountainous country north of the Tigro-Euphrates basin; and this country was incorporated with older Chaldaea. The accession of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the kings of the Elamitic line, Kudurlagomer (Chedorlaomer) by name, to aspire towards a wider empire. He sent his armies against the Semitic nations on his west, who were now beginning to settle down in cities, and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt and Chaldaea. These he subdued, but after sixteen years they rebelled; and it was after a second expedition to punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he had conquered the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the prisoners taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was pursued and defeated by the patriarch. " And when Abraham heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people."—Gen. xiv.

The conquest of a powerful Chaldaean king by a handful of wandering Semites seems extraordinary, and might have sounded a note of warning to the ear of the Chaldaeans. Their kingdom was destined soon to be overthrown by another Semitic people. After a duration of about half a thousand years for the Elamite kingdom, and some seven hundred years since the time of Nimrod, the Chaldaean dynasty was overthrown and succeeded by an Arabian one, that is, by a race of nomadic Shemites from the Arabian plains; and after two hundred and forty-five years they in their turn succumbed to another more powerful people of the same race, the Assyrians. The empire thus founded upon the ruins of the old Chaldaean was one of the greatest of the ancient world, as we well know from the records which meet us in the Bible. Politically it may be said to have balanced the power of Egypt. " But the stability of this monarchy rested upon a basis much less firm than that of Egypt; the southern portion the old Chaldaean of which Babylon was the capital, was always ready for revolt, and after about seven hundred years the Babylonians and Medes succeeded in overthrowing their former conquerors. All this belongs to history or at least to chronicle and is therefore scarcely a part of our present inquiry.

The Chinese profess to extend their lists of dynasties seven, eight, or even ten thousand years backward, but there is nothing on which to rest such extravagant pretensions. Their earliest known book is believed to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It is therefore not probable that they possessed the art of writing more than fifteen hundred years before our era, and before writing is invented there can be no reliable history. The best record of early times then is to be found in the popular songs of a country, and of these China possessed a considerable number, which were collected into a book the Book of Odes by their sage Confucius.1 The picture which these odes present is of a society so very different from that of the time from which their earliest book the Book of Changes dates, that we cannot refuse to credit it with a high antiquity. From the songs we learn that before China coalesced into the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its inhabitants lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which distinguished the surrounding Turanian nations had already been exchanged for a settled agricultural one, to which houses, and all the civilization which these imply, had long been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have been then, as now, a simple, slow-moving one, but not devoid of piety and domestic affection. This, then, is the third civilization which may have existed in the world when the pyramids were being built. It seems to be remote alike from the half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone age, and from the mixed Turanian-Semitic civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea. To these three may we add a fourth, and believe in the great antiquity of the highest civilization of the red race ? The trace of an early civilization in Mexico and Peru, bearing many remarkable points of resemblance to the civilization of Chaldaea, is undoubted; but there is nothing to show that the identity in some of their features extended to an identity in their respective epochs.

A greater destiny, though a more tardy development, awaited the pure Semitic and Japhetic races. Among the former we might notice many nations which started into life during the thousand years following that date of 3000 B.c., which we have taken as our starting-point. Most conspicuous among these stand the Phoenicians, who, either in their early home upon the sea-coast of Syria, or in their second home, the sea itself, or in one of their countless colonies, came into contact with almost every one of the great nations of antiquity, from the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Israelites, to the Greeks and Romans. But it is upon the life and history of the nomadic Shemites, and among them of one chosen people, that our thoughts chiefly rest. Among the prouder citied nations which inhabited the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, dwelt a numerous people, more or less nomadic in their habits, under the patriarchal form of government which belonged to their mode of life. Among such a people the chief of one particular family or clan was called by God to escape from the influence of the idolatrous nations around, and to live that vagrant pastoral life which was in such an age most fitted for the needs of purity and religious contemplation. It is as something like a wandering Bedouin chieftain that we must picture Abraham, while we watch him, now joining with some small city king against another, now driven by famine to travel with his flocks and herds as far as Egypt. Then again he returns, and settles in the fertile valley of the Jordan, where Lot leaves him, and, seduced by the luxuries of a town life, quits his flocks and herds and settles in Sodom, till driven out again by the destruction of that city. And all through we are not now reading dry dynastic lists, but the very life and thought of that old time) To us whose lives are so unsimple the mere picture of this simple nomadic life of early days would have an interest and a charm; but it has a double charm and interest viewed by the light of the high destiny to which Abraham and his descendants were called. Plying the homely, slighted shepherd's trade, these people for all their glorious destiny lived poor and despised beside the rich monarchies of Egypt or Chaldaea; one more example, if one more were needed, how wide apart lie the empires of spiritual and of material things.

Up to very late times the Children of Israel bore many of the characteristics of a nomadic people. It was as a nation of shepherds that they were excluded from the national life of Egypt. For long years after their departure thence they led a wandering life, and though when they entered Palestine they found cities ready for their occupation for the nations which they dispossessed were for the most part settled people, builders of cities arid inhabited them, and, growing corn and wine, settled partly into an agricultural life, yet the chief wealth of the nation still probably consisted in their flocks, and the greater portion of the people still dwelt in tents. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the people of the north, for even so late as the separation, when the ten tribes determined to free themselves from the tyranny of Rehoboam, we know how Jeroboam cried out, " To your tents, oh Israel." " So Israel departed unto their tents " the narrative continues. After the separation we are told that Jeroboam built several cities in his own dominions. The history of the Israelites generally may be summed up as the constant expression and the ultimate triumph of a wish to exchange their simple life and theocratic government for one which might place them more on a level with their neighbor states. At first it is their religion which they wish to change, whether for the gorgeous ritual of Egypt or for the vicious creeds of Asiatic nations; and after a while, madly forgetful of the tyrannies of a Ramses or a Tiglath-Pileser, they desire a king to reign over them in order that they may "take their place" among the other Oriental monarchies. Still their first two kings have rather the character of military leaders, the monarchy not having become hereditary; the second, the warrior-poet, the greatest of Israel's sons, was himself in the beginning no more than a simple shepherd. But under his son Solomon the monarchical government becomes assured, the country attains (like Rome under Augustus) the summit of its splendor and power, and then enters upon its career of slow and sad decline.

Now let us turn to the Japhetic people the Aryans. It is curious that the date of three thousand years before Christ, from which we started in our glance over the world, should also be considered about that of the separation of the Aryan people. Till that time they had continued to live since when we know not in their early home near the Oxus and Jaxartes, and we are able by the help of comparative philology to gain some little picture of their life at the time immediately preceding the separation. For taking a word out of one of the Aryan languages and making allowance for the changed form which it would wear in the other tongues, if we find the same word with the same meaning reappearing in all the languages of the family, we may fairly assume that the thing for which it stands was known to the old Aryans before the separation. And if again we find a word which runs through all the European languages, but is not found in the Sanskrit and Persian, we guess that in this case the thing was known only to the Yavanas, the first separating body of younger Aryans, from whom it will be remembered all the European branches are descended. Thus we get a very interesting list of words, and the means of drawing a picture of the life of our primaeval ancestors. The earliest appearance of the Aryans is as a pastoral people, for words derived from the pastoral life have left the deepest traces on their language. Daughter, we saw, meant originally "the milker"; the name of money, and of booty, in many Aryan languages is derived from that of cattle; ' words which have since come to mean lord or prince originally meant the guardian of the cattle; 2 and others which have expanded into words for district or country, or even for the whole earth, meant at first simply the pasturage. So not without reason did we say that the king had grown out of the head of the family, and the pens of their sheepfolds expanded into walled cities. But though a pastoral, they do not seem to have been a nomadic race, and in this respect they differed from the Shemites of the same period, and from the Turanians, by whom they were surrounded. For the Turanian civilization had pretty well departed from Asia by that time, and having taught its lessons to Egypt and Chaldaea, lived on, if at all, in Europe only. There it faded before the advance of the Kelts and other Aryan people, who came bringing with them the use of bronze weapons and the civilization which belonged to the bronze age. The stone age lingered in the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as we thought, till about two thousand years before Christ, and it may be that this date, which is also nearly that of Abraham, represents within a few hundred years the entry of the Aryans into Europe. The Greeks are generally believed to have appeared in Greece, or at least in Asia Minor, about the nineteenth century before our era, and they were probably preceded by the Latin branch of the Pelasgic family, as well as by the Kelts in the north of Europe. So that the period of one thousand years which intervened between our starting-point and the call of Abraham, the starting-point of the Hebrew history, and which saw the growth and change of many great Asiatic monarchies, must for the Japhetites be only darkly filled up by the gradual separation of the different nations, and their unknown life between this separation and the time when they again become known to history.

The general result then of our inquiries into the grouping of nations of the world in pre-historic times may be sketched in rough outline. At a very early date, say 4000 or 5000 B.C., arose an extensive Turanian half-civilization, which, flourishing probably in Southern Asia, spread in time to India and China upon one side, on the other side to Europe. This was through-out, so far as we can tell, a stone age, and was especially distinguished by the raising of great tombs and grave-mounds. This civilization was communicated to the Egyptians and Chaldaeans, a mixed people Semite, Turanian, Ethiopian who were not strangers to the use of metals. As early as 3000 years before our era the civilization of Egypt had attained its full growth, and had probably even then a considerable past. Chaldaea too and China were both advanced out of their primitive state; possibly so also were Peru and Mexico. But the pure Semite people, the ancestors of the Jews, and the Aryans, were still pastoral races, the one by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the other by the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. The first of these continued pastoral and nomadic for hundreds of years, but about this time the Western Aryans separated from those of the East, and soon after added some use of agriculture to their shepherd life. Then between 3000 and 2000 B.C. came the separation of the various peoples of the Western Aryans and their migration towards Europe, where they began to appear at the latter date. After all the Western Aryans had left the East, the older Aryans seem to have lived on for some little time together, and at last to have separated into the nations of Iranians and Hindus, the first migrating southward, and the second crossing the Hindoo Koosh and descending into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges. Thence they drove away or exterminated most of the older Turanian inhabitants, as their brethren had a short time before done to the Turanians whom they found in Europe. Such were the doings of the different kindreds and nations and languages of the old world in times long before history.