The Meeting-Place of Geology and History Part 9

Such 'rest.i.tutions of decayed intelligence' now meet us on every hand as the results of modern exploration, and are enabling us to bridge over the gaps which have separated the geological ages from the prehistoric and historic human periods in those ancient countries where civilisation seems to have originated.

CHAPTER XII

THE NEANTHROPIC DISPERSION AND ALLIED TOPICS

The remarkable record of the early distribution of the sons of Noah ('Toledoth' of the sons of Noah) in Genesis x. may be regarded, relatively to most of the nations it refers to, as a sc.r.a.p of prehistoric lore of the most intensely interesting character. From the old 'Phaleg' of Bochart to the recent commentaries of Delitzsch and other German scholars, it has received a host of more or less conjectural explanations; and while all agree in extolling its value and importance as a 'Beginning of History,' nothing can be more various than the views taken of it. Only in the light of the recent discoveries and researches already referred to can we arrive at a clear conception of its import; but with these and some common sense we may hope to be more fortunate than the older interpreters. It is necessary, however, to explain here that, for want of a little scientific precision, many modern archaeologists still fail in their interpretations. They tell us that the Toledoth are not properly 'ethnological,' but rather 'ethnographical,' and that we are to regard the doc.u.ment as referring, not to the genealogical affiliations of nations, but to their accidental geographical positions at the time of the record.

Now this is precisely what the writer, with a sure scientific instinct, carefully guards against, and explicitly informs us he did not intend.

He tells us that he gives the '_generations_ of the sons of Noah' and their descendants, and at the ends of the three lists relating to these sons, he is careful to say that he has given them 'in their lands, each according to his language, after their families, in their nations,' or the formula is slightly varied into 'after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, in their nations.' Lastly, in the conclusion of the whole table he reiterates, 'These are the _families_ of the sons of Noah, according to their generations, after their nations.' All these statements, let it be observed, are acknowledged to be parts of one (Elohistic) doc.u.ment. It is clear, therefore, that the writer intends us to understand that the determining elements of his cla.s.sification are neither physical characters nor accidents of geographical distribution, but descent and original language--two primary and scientific grounds of cla.s.sification, and which common sense requires us to adhere to in interpreting the doc.u.ment, whose value will depend on the certainty with which the writer could ascertain facts as to these criteria: criteria which are, of course, less open to the observation of later inquirers, who may find difficulty in ascertaining either descent or _original_ language, and in default of these may be obliged to resort to other grounds of cla.s.sification.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP SHOWING LINES OF POSTDILUVIAN MIGRATIONS FROM SHINAR, AS IN GENESIS X.]

Among modern archaeologists it has been a fruitful source of controversy whether we should cla.s.sify men according to their skulls or to their tongues; in other words, whether physical characters or linguistic should be dominant in our cla.s.sifications. Neither ground is absolutely certain. We may find long and short skulls in the same grave-mound, and there are intermediate forms which defy certain arrangement. In like manner history a.s.sures us that people of one race have often adopted the language of another. True science warns us that we may err unless we give a fair valuation to every available character. The ethnologist of Genesis considers both physical and linguistic characters, but bases his arrangement mainly on the sure ground of descent along with _original_ language.

It may be said, however, that if taken in the sense obviously intended by the writer, the list will not correspond with the facts. A few data have, however, to be taken into the account in order to give this early writer fair play.

1. The record has nothing to do with antediluvian peoples or with survivors of the Deluge other than the sons of Noah, if there were any such. Therefore, those ethnologists who are sceptical as to the historical Deluge, and who postulate an uninterrupted advance of man through long ages of semi-b.e.s.t.i.a.l brutality, have nothing in common with our narrator, and cannot possibly understand his statements.

2. The doc.u.ment does not profess to be a series of ethnological inferences from the present or ancient characters of different nations, but an actual historical statement of the known migrations of men from a common centre in Shinar, the Sumir of the Chaldeans.

3. It relates only to the primary distribution of men from their alleged centre over certain districts of Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Africa, and does not profess to know anything of their subsequent migrations or history.

4. It is thus not responsible for those later, even if very ancient, changes which displaced one race by another, or obliged one race to move on by the pressure of another, nor for any changes of language or mixtures of races which may have occurred in these movements.

5. It affirms nothing as to the physical characters of the races referred to, except as they may be inferred from heredity, but it implies some resemblance in language between the derivatives of the same stock, and this, be it observed, notwithstanding the added narrative of the confusion of tongues at Babel,[77] which the narrator does not regard as interfering with the fact of languages originally forming a few branches proceeding from a common stock.

[77] Held by some to belong to another (Jahvistic) doc.u.ment, but certainly incorporated by the early editor.

6. If we ask what our narrator supposed to be the original or Noachic tongue, we might infer from his three lines of descent, and from the locality of the dispersion and the episode of Nimrod's prehistoric kingdom, that the primitive language of Chaldea would be the original stem; and this we now know from authentic written records to have been an agglutinate language of the type usually known as Turanian, and more closely allied to the Tartar and Chinese tongues than to other kinds of speech. It would follow that what we now call Semitic and Aryan or j.a.phetic forms of speech must, in the view of our ancient authority, date from the sequelae of the great 'confusion of tongues.'

These points being premised, we can clear away the fogs which have been gathered around this little luminous spot in the early history of the world, and can trace at least the princ.i.p.al ethnic lines of radiation from it. Though the writer gives us three main branches of affiliation of the children of Noah, he really refers to six princ.i.p.al lines of migration, three of them belonging to that multifarious progeny of Ham, in which he seems to include both the Turanian and Negroid types of our ordinary cla.s.sifications, as well as some of the brown and yellow races.

One of the lines of affiliation of Ham leads eastward and is not traced; but if the Cus.h.i.te people, who are said to have gone to the land which in earlier antediluvian times was that of 'gold and bedolach and shoham stone,' that is, along the fertile valley of Susiana, were those primitive people, preceding the Elamites of history, who are said to have spoken an agglutinate language,[78] then we have at least one stage of this migration. A second line leads west to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, to Egypt and to North Africa. A third pa.s.ses south-westward through Southern Arabia and across the Red Sea into interior Africa. To the sons of j.a.phet are ascribed two lines of migration, one through Asia Minor and the northern coasts of the Mediterranean; another north-west, around the Black Sea. The Semites would seem to have been a less wandering people at the first, but subsequently to have encroached on and mingled with the Hamites, and especially on that western line of migration leading to the Mediterranean. All this can be gathered from undisputed national names in the several lines of migration above sketched, without touching on the more obscure and doubtful names or referring to tribes which remained near the original centre. We must, however, inquire a little more particularly into the movements bearing on Palestine and Egypt.

[78] Sayce (_Hibbert Lectures_) and Bagster's _Records of the Past_.

Inscriptions of Cyrus published in the last volume of the latter appear to set at rest the vexed questions relating to early Elam. It would seem that in the earliest times Cus.h.i.tes and Semitic Elamites contended for the fertile plains and the mountains east of the Tigris, and were finally subjugated by j.a.phetic Medes and Persians. Thus this region first formed a part of the Cus.h.i.te Nimrodic empire (Genesis ii. 11, x.

8); it then became the seat of a conquering Elamite power (Genesis xiv.

1 to 4); and was finally a central part of the Medo-Persian empire. All this agrees with the Bible and the inscriptions, as well as in the main with Herodotus.

So far as the writer in Genesis is informed, he does not seem to be aware of any sons of j.a.phet having colonised Palestine or Egypt. It was only in the later reflux of population that the sons of Javan gained a foothold in these regions. They were both colonised primarily by Hamites and subsequently intruded on by Semites.

Here a little prehistoric interlude noted by the writer, or by an author whom he quotes, gives a valuable clue not often attended to. The oldest son of Ham, Cush, begat Nimrod, the mighty hunter and prehistoric conqueror, who organised the first empire in that Euphratean plain which subsequently became the nucleus of the Babylonian and a.s.syrian power.

The site of his kingdom cannot be doubted, for cities well known in historic times, Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, were included in it, as well as probably Nineveh. The first point which I wish to make in this connection is that we cannot suppose this to have been a Semitic empire.

Its nucleus must have been composed of Nimrod's tribal connections, who were Hamites and presumably Cus.h.i.tes. He is, indeed, said to have gone into or invaded the land of Ashur, and if by this is meant the Semitic Ashur, he must have been hostile to these people, as indeed the Chaldeans were in later times. The next point to be noted is that the Nimrodic empire must have originated at a time when the Cus.h.i.tes were still strong on the Lower Euphrates, and before that great movement of these people which carried them across Arabia to the Upper Nile, and ultimately caused the name Cush or Kesh to be almost exclusively applied to the Ethiopians of Africa. Now is this history, or mere legend?

[Ill.u.s.tration: HEAD ILl.u.s.tRATING THE MOST ANCIENT TYPE OF CUs.h.i.tE TURANIAN, FROM TEL-LOH (after de Sarzec). The cap is perhaps an imitation of the antediluvian sh.e.l.l-caps, like that of the 'man of Mentorie.']

The answer of archaeology is not doubtful. We have in the earliest monuments of Chaldea evidence that there was a pre-Semitic population, to whom, indeed, it is believed that the Semites who invaded the country owed much of their civilisation. A recent writer has said that 'outside of the Bible we know nothing of Nimrod,' but others see a trace of him in the legendary hero of Chaldean tradition, Gisdubar or Gingamos, while others think that, as Na-marod, he may be the original of Merodach, the tutelary G.o.d of Babylon. Independently of this, there was certainly an early Chaldean and 'Turanian' empire, which must have had some founder, whatever his name, and which was not Semitic or Aryan, and therefore what an early writer would call Hamitic. Further, our author traces from this region the great Cus.h.i.te line of migration, which includes such well-known names as Seba, Sabta, Sheba and Dedan, into Arabia on the way to Africa. Here the Egyptian monuments take up the tale, and inform us of a South Arabian and East African people, the people of Pun or Punt, represented as like to themselves and to the Kesh or Ethiopians, and who thus correspond to the Arabian Cus.h.i.tes of Genesis. In accordance with this the Abyssinian of to-day is scarcely distinguishable from the old Punites as represented on the Egyptian monuments.[79]

[79] The recent discoveries of Glaser with reference to the early civilisation of Southern Arabia also bear on this point.

Thus the primitive Cus.h.i.te kingdom and one of the great lines of Cus.h.i.te migration are established by ancient monuments. Let it be further observed that, as represented in Egypt, these primitive Ethiopians were not black, but of a reddish or brownish colour, like the Egyptians themselves, and that their migration explains the resemblance of the customs and religion of early Egypt to those of Babylonia, and the ascription by the Egyptians of the origin of their G.o.ds to the land of Pun.

The remaining sons of Ham, Mizraim, Put and Canaan, are not mentioned in connection with the old Nimrodic kingdom, and seem to have moved westward at a very early period. They were already 'in the land,' and apparently const.i.tuted a considerable citizen population before the migration of Abraham.

Mizraim represents the twin populations of the delta and Lower Egypt, and the Tel-el-Amarna tablets inform us that long before the time of Moses Mitzor was the ordinary name of Egypt, while we know that its early population was closely allied in features and language to the Cus.h.i.tes.

Canaan[80] heads a central line of migration, and Sidon and Cheth are said to have been his leading sons. The first represents the Phnician maritime power of Northern Syria, the second that great nation known to the Egyptians as Kheta and to the a.s.syrians as Khatti, whose territory extended from Carchemish on the Euphrates through the plain of Coele-Syria to Hebron in Southern Palestine, and not improbably into the delta. They were a people whose language was allied to that of Cus.h.i.te Chaldea,[81] whose features were of a coa.r.s.er type than those of their more southern _confreres_, and who, according to the Egyptian annals, were closely allied with the Amorites, Jebusites, and other people identified with Canaan in the Old Testament. The Cheta, at one time known only as the sons of Heth in the Old Testament, may be said in our time to have experienced a sudden resurrection, and now bulk so largely in the minds of archaeologists that their importance is in danger of being exaggerated.

[80] Canaan with our old historian is the name of a man, but it came to designate first the 'low country' or coast region of Western Palestine, and then the whole of Palestine.

[81] Conder and others call it Turanian.

A significant note is added: 'Afterwards were the families of the Canaanites scattered abroad.' How could this be? Their line of migration and settlement led directly to the great sea, and was hemmed in by that of the j.a.phet.i.tes on the north and of the Cus.h.i.tes on the south; but they made the sea their highway, and soon there was no coast from end to end of the Mediterranean, and far along the European and African sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic, that was not familiar with the Phnician Canaanite. But it may be said these Phnicians were a Semitic people. They certainly spoke a Semitic language allied to the Hebrew, but what right have we to attribute Semitic languages solely to the descendants of the Biblical Shem? Even if these languages originated with them they may have spread to other peoples, as we know they replaced the old Turanian speech of Babylonia, just as the Arabic has extinguished other languages in Egypt itself. In whatever way the Phnicians acquired a Semitic tongue, in physical character they were not Semitic, but closely allied to the Hitt.i.tes, the Philistines, and the people of Mitzor, or Egypt. The Egyptian sculptures prove this, and the celebrated Capuan bust of Hannibal reminds us of the features of the old Hyksos kings of Egypt, who were no doubt of Hamite or Turanian stock.

Finally, what relation does the record in Genesis x. bear to the prehistoric peoples of the neanthropic age? These must have been in the main the advanced colonists and straggling adventurers of the leading lines of migration. We find such people recorded in the Pentateuch, and also in the caverns and shelters of Phnicia, as preceding the Canaanites in Syria; and such nomads and hunters must have streamed out into Europe and Africa in advance of the more settled and slowly advancing agricultural peoples. At first they must have been few, rude, and users of stone implements only, living chiefly by hunting and fishing; but some of them may have taken with them domestic animals and seeds of grains, and so have established here and there civilised communities. In later times, new colonists and commerce introduced among them bronze and iron and more advanced arts. Thus these early neanthropic peoples belonged to one or other of the great lines of migration indicated in our old record; though by virtue of physical changes and dialectic differences induced by isolation and new conditions of life, and which in such circ.u.mstances would arise with a rapidity unexampled in later times, as well as the want of historical annals, it has in many cases become difficult or impossible precisely to trace their affinities. Even in Palestine, at the time of the Exodus, peoples of this kind (Horites, Avvites, &c.)[82] were known, whose affinities had been lost; and it is not necessary to suppose that these were remnants of antediluvians, since what we know in modern times of the wanderers on the outskirts of great migrations sufficiently accounts for their existence.

This is, I think, a fair summary of the testimony of the writer of Genesis x., as compared with the general evidence of history and archaeology. But we have something further to learn from what may be called the fossil remains of prehistoric peoples as embodied in the Egyptian monuments, which are conversant with all the nations around the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

The Egyptians divided the nations known to them into four groups, of which they have given us several representations in tombs and public buildings. One of these consisted of their own race. The other three were as follows: (1) Southern peoples mostly of dark complexions, ranging from light brown to black. These included the Cus.h.i.tes, Punites, and negroes. (2) Western peoples mostly of fair complexions inhabiting the islands and northern coasts of the Mediterranean, the 'Hanebu' or chiefs of the north or of the isles, with some populations of North Africa, the so-called white Lybians and Maxyans. (3) Northern or north-eastern peoples, or those of Syria and the neighbouring parts of Western Asia, Amorites, Hitt.i.tes, Edomites, Arabs, &c., usually represented as of yellowish complexion.

[82] Deuteronomy ii.

The first of these divisions evidently corresponds with the line of Cus.h.i.te migration of Genesis, extending from Shinar through Southern Arabia, Nubia, and Ethiopia, and of which the negroes are apparently degraded members pushed in advance of the others, while the populations of Pun and Kesh, the southern Arabians and their relatives in Africa, closely resemble, as figured in the monuments, the Egyptians themselves.

The second group of the Egyptian cla.s.sification represents those so-called Aryan peoples of Europe and its islands, and parts of Northern Africa, of whom the Greeks are a typical race, and who in Genesis are said to have possessed the 'Isles of the Gentiles'; though in the wave of migration from the east they were in many places preceded by non-Aryan races, Pelasgians, Iberians, &c., possibly wandering Hamitic tribes, while they were also invaded by that scattering abroad of the Phnician Canaanites referred to in Genesis. They are represented in the monuments as people with European features, fair complexions, and sometimes fair hair and blue eyes.

The third group is the most varied of the whole, because its seat in Syria was a meeting-place of many tribes. Its most ancient members, the Phnicians and allied nations, were, according to the monuments, men resembling the Egyptian and Cus.h.i.te type, and these, no doubt, were those pre-Semitic and prehistoric nations of Canaan referred to in the remarkable notes regarding the Emim, Zuzim, &c., in the second chapter of Deuteronomy, which may be regarded as a foot-note to the Toledoth of Genesis x. These aborigines were invaded by men of different types.

First, we find in the monuments that the Amorites of the Palestine hills were a fair people with somewhat European features, like some of the present populations of the Lebanon. When returning over the Lebanon in 1884 we met a large company of men with camels and donkeys carrying merchandise. They were fair-complexioned and with brown hair, and from their features I might have supposed they were Scottish Highlanders. I was told they were Druses, and they were evidently much like, as are indeed many of the modern fellaheen of the Palestine hills, the Amar as they are pictured in Egypt. These white peoples, though reckoned in the Bible as Hamites, may have had a mixture of Aryan blood. It is to be noted here that the Amorite chiefs, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre, named as confederate with Abraham, have non-Semitic names.

A later inroad was that of the Hitt.i.tes, evidently a people having affinity with the Philistines and Egyptians, but whose chiefs and n.o.bles seem to have been of Tartar blood, like the modern Turks. The names of their kings seem also to have been non-Semitic. Later, the great westward migration of Semitic peoples, to which that of Abraham himself belongs, not only introduced the Israelites but many nations of Semitic or mixed blood, the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Ishmaelites, &c., whom we find figuring in the Egyptian monuments as yellow or brownish people with a Jewish style of features, and all of whom, as mentioned above, would be known to the Egyptians and Canaanites as 'Hebrews.'[83]

[83] This is independent of the question whether we regard the name Eber as that of an ancestor, or merely of men from beyond the Euphrates.

Thus the monuments confirm the Jewish record, and the confusion which some ethnologists have introduced into the matter arises from their applying in an arbitrary manner the special tests of physical and philological characteristics, and neglecting to distinguish the primary migrations of men from subsequent intrusions.

Another singular point of agreement is that, just as in Egypt we find men civilised from the first, so we find elsewhere. In Egypt writing and literature date from before the time of Abraham. In like manner we have no monumental evidence of any time when the Accadian people of Babylonia were dest.i.tute of writing and science, and we now find that there were learned scribes in all the cities of Canaan, and that the Phnicians and Southern Arabians knew their alphabet ages before Moses, while even the Greeks seem to have known alphabetic writing long before the Mosaic age.[84] These men, in short, were descendants of the survivors of the Noachian Deluge, and therefore civilised from the first; and though we have no certain evidence of letters before the Flood, except the statement of the author of the Babylonian deluge tablets, that Noah hid written archives at Sippara before going into the ark, yet it is quite certain that men who could build Noah's ship are not unworthy ancestors of the Phnician seamen, who probably launched their barks on the Mediterranean before the death of Noah himself. Thus, whatever value we may attach to the record in Genesis, we cannot refuse to admit that it is thoroughly consistent with itself and with the testimony of the oldest monuments of Asia and Africa, as it is also with the evidence of the geological changes of the pleistocene and early modern epoch.

[84] Petrie, _Illahun, Kahun and Garob_, 1891.

In like manner the Egyptian inscriptions of the conquests of Thothmes III. give us a pre-Mosaic record of Palestinian geography corresponding with that of the Hebrew conquest, and the pictures of sieges coincide with the excavations of Petrie at Lachish in restoring those Canaanite towns, 'walled up to heaven,' which excited the fear of the Israelites.

Neither can we scoff at the illiteracy of men who were carrying on diplomatic correspondence in written despatches before Genesis itself was compiled. Nor can we doubt the military prowess of these people, their chariot forces, their sculptured idols and images, their wealth of gold and silver, their agricultural and artistic skill. All these are amply proved by the monuments of the Egyptians and the Hitt.i.tes.[85]

[85] Bliss, in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund for April 1892, figures many interesting objects, found in the lower or Amorite stratum of the mound of Tell-el-Hesy (Lachish). We have here a bronze battle-axe and heads of javelins that may have been used against the soldiers of Joshua, and axes and pottery of equally early date, along with mult.i.tudes of flint flakes, arrow heads, &c., used at this early time. It is to be hoped that the further exploration of this site may yield yet more interesting results.