Human Origins

h later than those of Egypt and Chald?a-Language a

uered Chald?a in 2280 b.c.-Conquered by Assyrians 645 b.c.-Statue of Nana-Cyr

gyptian Monuments 1600 b.c.-Great Movements of Maritime Nations-Invasions of Egypt by Sea and Land, under Menepthah, 1330 b.c

Treaty with Ramses II.-Power rapidly declined-but only finally destroyed 717 b.c. by Sargon II.-Capital Carchemish-Gr

mmerce and Trade-routes-Incense and Spices-Literature-Old Traditions-Oannes-Punt-Seat

s of Ancient Troy-Mycen? and Tiryns-Proof of Civilization and Commerce-Tombs-Absence of Inscription

IN

griculture and skilled in the arts of irrigation; a literary people acquainted with reading and writing; orderly and obedient, organized under an emperor and official hierarchy; paying divine honours to ancestors, and a religious veneration to the moral and ceremonial precepts of sages and philosophers. Addicted to childish superstitions, and yet eminently prosaic, practical, and utilitarian. Unlike other nations they have no traditi

y know with certainty that prior to Chinese civilization there was an aboriginal, semi-savage race, the Miou-tse, remnants of whom are still to be found in the mountainous western provinces; and it had been conjectured from the form of the hieroglyphics to which the Chinese written characters can be traced back, that t

ained. Thus "to speak" is in Accadian gu, in the Mandarin Chinese yu, and in the old form of Chinese spoken in Japan go; night is ye in Chinese, ge in Accadian. The very close connection between Accadian and Chinese civilization is still more conclusively shown by the identity in many matters which could not have been invented independently. Thus the prehistoric period of Chald?a before the Deluge is divided, according to Berosus and the tablets, into ten periods of ten kings, whose reigns lasted for 120 Sari or 432,000 years, a myth which is purely astronomical. The early Chinese writers had a myth of precisely the same number of ten kings and the same period of 432,000 years for their united reigns. Chinese astronomy also, said by their annals to have been invente

cadian civilization must have been imported into China from Chald?a, at what is a comparatively modern date in the history of the latter country. The only approach to a clue to this date is that the great Chinese historian Szema-Tsien says that the first of their emperors was Nai-kwangti, who built an observatory, and by the aid of astronomy "ruled the varied year." The name is singularly like that of Kuder-Na-hangti, who was the Elamite king who conquered Babylonia about 2280 b.c. It is difficult to see how such an intercourse between Chald?a and China could have been established across such an enormous intervening distance

nation of Calmucks migrated under every conceivable difficulty from hostile tribes, pursuing armies, and the extremes of winter cold and summer heat, first from China to the Volga, and then back again from the Volga to China. Nor mu

a gives us no aid in carrying back authentic history for anything like the time for w

L

ncient and renowned city, the name of which survives in the Persian province of Shusistan, as that of Persia proper does in the mountainous district next to the east of Elam, known as Farsistan. The original population was Turanian, speaking an agglutinative language, akin to though not identical with Accadian, and its religion and civilization were apparently the same, or closely similar. As in Chald?a and Assyria, a Semitic element seems to have intruded on the Turanian at an early date, and to have become the ruling race, while much later the Aryan Persians to some extent superseded the Semites. The name "Elam" is said to have the same significance as "Accad," both meaning "Highl

ld?a and other surrounding nations against the rising power of the warlike Assyrian kings of Nineveh. The statue of the goddess Nana, which had been taken by the Elamite conqueror

is conquest of Babylon. He describes himself as "Cyrus the great King, the King of Babylon, the King of Sumir and Accad, the King of the four zones, the son of Kambyses the great King, the King of Elam; the grandson of Cyrus the great King, the King of Elam; the great-grandson of Teispes the great King, the King of Elam; of the Ancient Seed-royal, whose rule has been beloved by Bel and Nebo"; and he goes on to say how by the favour of "Merodach the great lord, the god who raises the dead to life, who benefits all men in difficulty and prayer," he had conquered the men of Kurdistan and all the barbarians, and also the black-headed race (the Accadians), and finally entered Babylon in peace and ruled there righteously, favoured by gods and men, and receiving homage and tribute from all the

ken succession of several generations. He was in fact a later and greater Kudur-Na-hangti, like the early conqueror of that name who founded the first Elamite empire some 1800 years earlier. It may be doubtful whether he was even an Aryan. At any rate this much is certain, that his religion was Babylonian, and that we

rations of Cyrus, and the relations of Greece to the Persian Empire had been close and uninterrupted. His account of its founder Cyrus is not in itself improbable, and is full of details which have every appearance of being histor

NIC

banon and the sea, stretching from the promontory of Carmel on the south to the Gulf of Antioch on the north. This little strip of about 150 miles in length, and ten to fifteen in breadth, afforded many advantages for a maritime people, owing to the number of islands close to the coast and small indented bays, which afforded excellent harbours and protection from enemies, which was further secured by the precipitous range of the Lebanon sending down steep spurs into the Mediterranean, and thus isolating Ph?nicia from the military route of the great Valley of C?lo-Syria, between the parallel ranges of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, which was taken by armies in the wars between Egypt and Asia. Here the Ph?nicians founded nine cities, of which Byblos or Gebal was reputed to be the most ancient, and first Sidon and then Tyre beca

iest Ph?nician commerce is very uncertain. All we can discern is that, after having enjoyed an undisputed supremacy, the progress of civilization among the Mediterranean races enabled them to develop a maritime power of their own, superior to that of Ph?nicia, and

s of later times. Kopt, or the land of palms, of which Ph?nicia is the Greek translation, is first mentioned in the Egyptian annals of the Middle Empire, and during the rule of the Hyksos the mouth of the Nile had become so thickly populated by Ph?nician emigrants as to be known as Kopt-ur, Caphtor, or greater Ph?nicia. The priests of the temple of Baal Melcart, the patron deity of Tyre, told Herodotus that it had been founded 2300 years b

, b.c. 1600, in his victorious campaigns in Syria, among which are to be found the names of Beyrut and Acco, and two cent

ut 1330 b.c.; the second under Ramses III. of the nineteenth dynasty, about 1250 b.c. The first invasion came from the West, and was headed by the King of the Lybians, a white race, who have been identified with the Numidians and modern Kabyles, but were reinforced to a confederacy of nearly all the Mediterranean races who sent auxiliary contingents b

RAMSES III. (From temple

ed as leaders of the Greek powers, and their place is taken by the Danaoi, confirming the Greek tradition of the substitution of the dynasty of Danaus for that of Inachus, on the throne of Argos and Mycen?. The Ph?nicians alone of the Maritime States do not seem to have taken any part in these invasions, and, on the con

egendary. More than 300 years before the siege of Troy it appears that Asia Minor and the Greek mainland and islands were already inhabited by nations sufficiently advanced in civilization to fit out fleets which commanded the seas, and to form political confederations, to undertake distant expeditions, and to wage war on equal terms with the predominant powers of Asia and of Egypt. But though ancient as

TIT

selling him a piece of land for a sepulchre, and intermarrying with his family-Rebecca's soul being vexed by the contumacious behaviour of her daughters-in-law, "the daughters of Heth." This, however, was only an outlying branch of the nation, whose capital cities, when they appear clearly in history, were further north at Kadesh on the Orontes, and Carchemish on the Upper Euphrates, commanding the fords on that river on the great commercial route between Babylonia and the Mediterranean. They were a Turanian race, whose original

otograph by Flinders Petrie, f

n which reference is made to the Khatti, which probably means Hittites, showing that at this remote period, about

of the Hittites to Amenophus IV., written in cuneiform characters, has proved to be almost identical with Accadian. It seems probable that part of the army which fought in defence o

part of the great Hyksos invasion; but the first certain mention of them occurs in the reign of Thotmes I., about 1600 b.c., and they appear as a leading nation in the time of Thotmes III., w

pt declined, and in the troubled times which followed the attempt of the heretic King Ku-en-Aten to supersede the old religion of Egypt by the worship of the solar disc, the conquered nations threw off the yoke, and the frontiers of Egypt receded to the old limits.

aty of peace between Ramses II. and Kheta-Sira, "the great King of the Hittites," the Hittite text of which was engraved on a silver tablet in the characters of Carchemish, and the Egyptian copy of it was engraved in hieroglyphics on the walls of the templ

part of the land army, which was defeated with great slaughter after an obstinate battle at Pelusium, about 1200 b.c. From this time forward the power both of the Hittites and of Egypt seems to have steadily declined. We hear no more of them as a leading power in Palestine and Syria

sians from their cities of Ilion, the Colchians from the Caucasus, the Syrians from the Orontes, and the Ph?nicians from Arvad are enumerated as sending contingents; and in the invasion of Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., the Hittites headed the

Mediterranean. The commercial importance of Carchemish is attested by the fact that its silver mina became the standard of value at Babylon, and throughout the whole of Western Asia. The Hittites were also great miners, working the silver mines of the Taurus on an extensive scale, and having a plentiful supply of bronze and other metals, as is shown by the large number of chariots attached to their armies from the earliest times. They were also a literary people, and had invented a system of hieroglyphic writing of their own, distinct alike from that of Egypt and from the cuneiform characters of the Accadians. Inscriptions in these peculiar characters, associated w

ite recently thrown much light on the subject, and enabled us partially to decipher some of them, and the recent discovery of papyr

ny names of Hittite kings, and in the same, or a slightly modified form, in Accadian, and survive to the present day in various Turkic and Mongolian dialects. This much appears to be clear, that this Hittite Empire, which vanished so completely from history more than 2500 years ago, had for nearly 1000 years previously exercised a paramount influence in Western Asia, and was one of the principal channels through which Asiatic mythology and art reac

the earliest dates of Egypt and Chald?a, and only confirm these dates incidentally, by sh

AB

the earth. Especially of recent years Moslem fanaticism has made it a closed country to Christian research, and it is only quite lately that a few scientific travellers, taking their lives in their hands, have succeeded in penetrating into the i

nd commerce, existing in Arabia in very ancient times. In the words of Professor Sayce, "the dark past of the Arabian peninsula has been suddenly lighted up, and we find that long before the days

he Sab?a or Saba of the ancient world, though her kingdom, or commercial relations, may have extended over the opposite coast of Abyssinia and Somali-land, and probably far down the east coast of Africa. Assyrian inscriptions show that Saba was a great kingdom in the eighth century b.c., when its frontiers extended so far to the north as to bring it in contact with those of the Empire of Nineveh under Ti

was not the oldest in this district, but rose to power on the decay of a still older nation,

r all Arabia and up to the frontiers of Syria and of Egypt. Three names of these kings have been found at Teima, the Tema of the Old Testament, on the road to Damascus and Sinai; and a votive tablet from Southern Arabia is inscribed by its authors, "in gratitude to Athtar (Istar or Astarte), for their rescue in the war between

utes was a main cause of this extension of fortified posts and wealthy cities, over such a wide extent of territory. From the most ancient times there has always been a stream of traffic between East and West, flowing partly by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and from the ends of these Eastern seas to the Mediterranean, and partly by carava

lue and in constant request. Frankincense and other spices were indispensable in temples where bloody sacrifices formed part of the religion. The atmosphere of Solomon's temple must have been that of a sickening slaughterhouse, and the fumes of incense could alone enable the priests and worshippers to support it. This would apply to thousands of other temples t

om the shores of

Ph?nician written vertically instead of horizontally. Further discoveries and researches have led to the result, which is principally due to Dr. Glaser, that the so-called Himyaritic inscriptions fell into two groups, one of which is distinctly older than the other, containing fuller and more primitive grammatical forms. These are Min?an, while the inscriptions in the later dialect are Sab?an. It is apparent, therefore, that the Min?an rule and literature must have preceded those of Sab?a by a time sufficiently long to have allowed for considerable changes both in words and grammar to have grown up, not by foreign conquest, but by evolution among the tribes of the same race within Arabia itself. Now the Sab

first arts of civilization. The Ph?nicians traced their origin to the Bahrein Islands in the same Gulf. The Egyptians looked with reverence and respect to Punt, which is generally believed to have meant Arabia Felix and Somali-land; and they placed the origin of their letter

elebrated equipment of a fleet by the great queen Hatasu of the nineteenth dynasty, to make a commercial voyage to Punt, and its return with a rich freight, and the king and queen of the country with offerings, on a visit to the Pharaoh, reminding one of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, shows t

PUNT AN

artly by the Persian Gulf and partly across the Arabian and Syrian deserts, and by degrees amalgamating with and superseding the previous Accadian population. In Egypt the Semitic element was a late importation which never permanently affected the old Egyptian civilization. In Syria and Palestine, the Ph?nicians, Canaanites, and Hebrews were all immigrants from the Persian Gulf or Arabian frontier, either directly or through the m

have been first developed in the growing civilization which preceded the ancient Min?an Empire, probably as the later stone age was

raise the question whether the Ph?nician alphabet itself and the kindred alphabets of Palestine, Syria, and other countries near the Arabian frontier were not derived from Arabia rather than from Egypt. The Min?an language and letters are certainly older forms of Semitic speech and writing, and it seems more likely that they should have been adopted, with dialectic variations, by other Semitic races, with whom Arabia had a long coterminous position and constant intercourse by car

Israelite invasion, was already a settled and civilized country, with a distinct alphabet and literature of its own, older than those of Ph?nicia; and it may be hoped t

two countries, and especially those of Egypt, as giving us the longest standard of ge

AND M

the later neolithic or earliest bronze ages, while the next, built on the ruins of the first at a level of eleven to twenty feet above it, was a strongly fortified city, which had been destroyed by fire, and which answers almost exactly to the description of Homer's Troy. The citadel hill had been inclosed by massive walls, and was surmounted by a stately palace and other buildings, the foundations of which still remain. It was protected on one side by the river Scamander, and on the other the city extended over the plain at the foot of the citadel, and was itself al

, and the roofs and upper buildings fell in. In one place alone Dr. Schliemann found the celebrated treasure containing sixty articles of gold and silver, which had evidently been packed together in a square wooden box, which had disappeared with the intense heat

same form and weight. The fragments of ordinary pottery are innumerable, the finer and more perfect vases are often of a graceful form, and moulded into shapes of animals

nd as far off as Cyprus and Egypt, where they were doubtless carried by commerce. The existence of an extensive commerce is proved by the profusion of gold which has been found in the vaults and tombs buried under the débris of the ruined city, for gold is not a native product, but must have been obtained from abroad, as also the bronze, copper, and tin required for the manufacture of weapons. The city also evidently owed its importance to its situation on the Isthmus of Corinth, commanding the trade route between the Gulfs of Argos and of Corinth, and thus connecting the

rgotten, or survived only in dim traditions of myths and poetical legends, the reason seems to be that they kept no written records, or at any rate none in the form of enduring inscriptions. We know ancient Egypt from its hieroglyphics, and from Manetho's history; Chald?a and Assyria from the cuneiform writing on clay tablets; China, up to about 2500 b.c., from its written histories; but it is singular that the other ancient civilizations have left few or no inscriptions. This is the more remarkable in the case of the Mycen?an cities explored by Dr. Schliemann, for their date is not so very remote, their jewellery, vases, and signet-rings are profusely decorated, their dead interred in stately tombs with large quantities of gold and silver, and yet not a single insta

f Osiris and Isis, of Thoth and Ammon; or in Chald?a of Bel, Merodach, and Istar, and their other pantheon of gods, each under its own symbolical form, and innumerable little idols or figurines attested their hold on the population. But at Troy, Tiryns, and M

dence. There are also a very few figurines of terra-cotta, which have been thought to be idols, because they are too clumsy to be taken for representations of the human figure by such skilled artists, and beca

the few traces which connect it with Egypt. A scarab?us was found at Mycen? with the name of Queen Ti engraved on it who lived in the thirteenth century b.c. Mycen?an vases have been found of the older type with lines and spirals, in Egyptian tombs of about 1400 b.c., and of the la

mes which carried the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and to the Black Sea; with the rise of the Hittite power which extended far and wide over Asia Minor, and contended on equal terms in Syria with Ramses II.; and with the coalition of naval powers which on two occasions, in the reigns of Menepthah and Ramses III., c

art are Asiatic rather than Hellenic; they have left no clue to their language in any writing or inscription; and the

BATTLE. (From "Warrior Va

res round it, representing on one side attacking warriors hurling spears, and on the other a queen, or female figure, sending out warriors to repel them. The vase is broken, but th

inly they must be faces which the dwellers in Mycen? either copied from nature, or introduced as conventional ideals. They cannot be taken as first childish attempts at drawing the human face, like those of the pal?olithic savages of the grottos of the Vezere, for they are t

SERPENT. (From a Ba

inary Mycen?an faces is afforded by the picture of Adam and Eve, with the S

as possible that, as Mycen?an art was so largely derived from Babylonian, this may have become a conventional type for

onsiderable civilization and commerce must have prevailed in the Eastern Mediterranean at a date long prior to