beneficent; and so their naturalism was on its better side astral rather than solar. Their deities were conceived as mighty, masterly, or sovereign, rather than as bright, genial, or paternal. Their life was a hard struggle against an unpropitious Nature; their religion a belief in gods who were the stern rulers of men.

The nomadic life is not favourable to political unity or progress. As the family grew it would tend to throw out and throw off branches, and so it seems to have divided very early into four, the southern, centrosouthern, northern, and centro-northern. The southern broke into the Himyaritic, Sabean, Ethiopic peoples, and those advanced outposts which have left the sub-Semitic dialects as witnesses of their having been. The centrosouthern branch was the Arabian, the most purely Semitic in growth and character. The northern was the Aramæan. The centro-northern became the BabyloAssyrians, Phoenicians, and Hebrews. These, after breaking from the parent stem, seem to have lived long together, probably settling on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and extending up the Euphrates valley till they reached the ancient civilization that had grown up there. Of this the affinities of their tongues, mythologies, and traditions appear to furnish decisive evidence.* The Assyrian is more akin

* Schrader, ut supra, pp. 401 ff., and in the "Jahrbücher für Protestantische Theologie," No. 1, art. "Semitismus und Babylonismus." Sayce, "Assyrian Grammar," pp. 1-3. Duncker, "Geschichte des Alterthums," vol. i. pp. 194, 285 ff.

to the Hebrew and the Phoenician than to any other Semitic speech. The mythologies are in some respects startingly alike. The original home of the Hebrew patriarch was Ur of the Chaldees, and the Phoenicians represented themselves as having come from the Persian Gulf.* There are, too, similarities in their sciences, arts, and industries that imply their having learned together the rudiments of settled and civilized life.

Of the Semitic peoples those of the northern and two central branches alone became historical in the highest sense. Yet they did not alone become civilized. Those of the southern branch proved themselves capable of great things, achieved great things, have left the monuments of a very advanced civilization. But their opportunities were not equal to their energies. Their geographical position was unfavourable. There was no sister family they could at once stimulate and be stimulated by. And so our present purpose compels us to drop them out of sight.

III.

Here, then, we are face to face with our two races prepared to enter on the great stage of history. And in entering upon it they prove themselves possessed of one quality in common-extraordinary assimilative, imitative, and progressive power. Ever since the Spanish discovery and conquest of America we have been familiar enough with

* Gen. xi. 28, 31. Ur is the modern Mugheir. Strabo, i. 2, 35; xvi, 3, 4; 4, 27. Plin., "Nat. Hist.," iv. 36. Herod., i. 1; vii. 89.

the dismal tale of the less dying out before the more civilized races. But here we meet with a different story. The two branches of each of our two races that were the first to touch the ancient civilizations were the first to become in the higher, in one case, in the highest sense, civilized-the Assyrians and the Phoenicians on the Semitic side, the Iranians and the Greeks on the IndoEuropean. These names, indeed, mark the transition from pre-historic to historic, from Eastern to Western civilization. The Assyrian was the heir of the Accadian culture, but the Iranian of the Assyrian. Phoenicia was the scholar of Egypt and Babylon, but the teacher of Greece. The Semitic civilizations were much older than the IndoEuropean, but much younger than those of the Euphrates and Nile valleys. In the former, possibly centuries before the other family had entered either India or Europe, the Assyrians had met a Turanian or Ural-Altaic people, settled in cities, skilled in architecture, astrology, writing, the arts of peace and war. What they found they appropriated. Their culture terms are mostly Turanian, growths of the earlier soil. Their science, mythology, writing, arts, industries, are in root and essence Accadian.* The children of the desert, vigorous, acquisitive, warlike,

See an interesting paper by Mr. Sayce, "The Origin of Semitic Civilization," in "Transactions of Society of Bib. Archæology," vol. i. pp. 294 ff. Also his art. "Babylonia," "Encyclop. Brit." And Schrader's recent essay, "Ist das Akkadische der Keilinschriften eine Sprache oder eine Schrift?" "Zeitschrift der Morgenl. Gesellschaft," vol. xxix. pp. 6 ff.

imitated the arts and conquered the liberties of their more cultured but weaker neighbours. The Iranians stood related, though less intimately, to the Babylo-Assyrian as the latter to the Accadian. The architecture and sculptures, the cuneiform writing, the chariots and horsemen, the wicker shields we know so well from Herodotos,* all indicate the dependence of Persian art on that which had flourished for ages in the valleys between the two streams. Phoenicia, partly educated in Babylonia and early familiar with Egypt, transplanted their arts to Tyre and Sidon, and, urged by the love of gainful enterprise, carried them over the many-islanded sea to the men of Ionic and Doric blood, who, awakened by the light thus brought from the East, soon became the foremost runners in the race of progress and culture.

But these newer were not simply imitations of the older civilizations. The fresh people brought more than it received; faculties, aptitudes, latent energies, institutions and tendencies that variously modified, amplified, and developed what they found. The old people did not absorb the new: the new, stimulated by a civilization so far in advance of its own, started into fuller life, yet a life determined in all its material elements from within, not from without. The old culture was the suggestive cause, but the efficient was the new people. A people is too like a living organism, with all its parts in continual

* ix. 61. Also Xenophon, "Anab.," i. viii. 89.

interaction, to be capable of being assimilated by a fullbodied civilization. The people may assimilate the civilization; the civilization cannot assimilate the people.

We have then an efficient or real and a suggestive or formal cause. The first is the new people, the second the old cultures. Their relations may be illustrated, if not determined and defined. We have seen that each family had its distinctive political type; the Indo-European was communal, the Semitic was patriarchal. In the one case the family, in the other the father was the political unit. Now, there is nothing that so pervades and so commands a society as the idea latent in the germ from which it was developed. The idea may not be distinctly apprehended by any mind, but it lives a plastic power in all. So the primitive political idea went with the several branches of each family, and governed their development into nations and societies. In the one race monogamy,* in the other polygamy was common, which simply means,—while the one had equal respect to the person and rights of man and woman, the other gave rights to the male and only duties to the female. The communal principle extended from the family to the state becomes a commonwealth, but the patriarchal becomes an absolute monarchy. The common

* Of course, this does not exclude exceptional cases, like that of ancient Persia, where polygamy existed. But even there traces of the original monogamy can be discovered, as in the monarch having only one queen, though several wives, and the authority of the queen-mother. Arrian, Exped. Alex.," ii. 12; Herod., viii. 114; Plut., "Vitæ Artax.," c. 5.

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