The Historians' History of the World 01 [Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia]

A Religious Procession

From the circumstance that in the third millennium before the Christian era the old Babylonian kings who resided in Middle Babylonia (particularly at Nisin and Erech) and in Ur and Larsa bore Semitic names, though the inscriptions that have come down to us from their reigns are written entirely in Sumerian, we are probably justified in concluding that in Middle Babylonia, where the dominant Sumerian population of the south and the dominant Semitic population of the north must have come most directly into contact, the interfusion of the two races was at that time taking place on a very large scale. On the other hand, in northern Babylonia, where Sumerians had lived from the very earliest period, but had never risen to any political importance as compared with the Semitic immigrants, the two must have lived strictly apart down to 2000 B.C. (the latest date of which we can be certain), for not long before that time colonists went out from northern Babylonia and founded the empire of Assyria. The far greater purity of the Semitic type among the Assyrians, together with the absolute identity of their language and civilisation with that of Babylonia, leads inevitably to the inference that the intermixture of Sumerian blood with Semitic in North Babylonia had either not begun, or had as yet proceeded but a very little way.

An Assyrian God

Tested thus by philology, the Assyrio-Babylonian language, together with Canaanitish (under which title we include Phœnician, Hebrew, and Moabitish), Aramaic (Syrian, the so-called Biblical Chaldee, Palmyrene, etc.), and Arabic (and under this heading not only the Sabæan tongue of southern Arabia, but the Ethiopian and Amharic languages of Abyssinia, should be placed), belong to a single well-defined group which we have long been accustomed to call Semitic (cf. Stade’s Geschichte des Volkes Israel) and the races which spoke and speak them are known to ethnology as Semites. From the remotest antiquity down to modern times these races have maintained a singular purity of blood and racial type; the Canaanites represented in Egyptian tombs of the XIIth Dynasty, the Assyrian heads in the bas-reliefs of Nineveh, the features of Jews at the present time living in the midst of Indo-Germanic nations, and the Bedouins who to-day roam the Syrian and Arabian deserts, all exhibit a family likeness so remarkable that we see that throughout the whole course of history they can have mingled but little with alien races. The question of how and from what causes the Semitic type in Assyria came to be preserved in greater purity than in Babylonia itself, whence the Assyrians emigrated, is one that has been briefly touched upon above.

Under these circumstances it is only to be expected that the constant type of character proper to other Semites should be discoverable, or, at least, in part recognisable in the Babylonians and Assyrians; although we are bound to take into account the fact that even in later days the Hebrews retained much of their old nomadic habits, that the Aramæans of the Assyrian period were for the most part nomadic, and that the Arabs are so still; while from the very beginning of their appearance in history the Semitic inhabitants of the regions about the Euphrates and Tigris are a home-dwelling people on a high level of civilisation. Many traits of primitive national character tend to be obliterated or modified by such an advance to a superior stage of civilisation, while others, foreign to the brother or kindred races which remained longer or still remain in the nomadic stage, are developed.

In the Assyrians and Babylonians, as a matter of fact, we must meet with so much that recalls instinctively their kin with those whom the Bible and universal history have long rendered us familiar that it offers the fullest confirmation of the conclusions arrived at by a study of their language and physical type. It is very difficult to compress into a few words a correct description of Semitic national character.

Siege of a City (Nineveh)

Eduard Meyer, in his otherwise admirable Geschichte des Alterthums, says, “A very matter of fact habit of thought, keen observation of detail, a calculating intellect ever directed to practical aims, keeping the creations of the imagination completely under control and averse from any freer flight of the spirit into the Illimitable, such are the characteristics that distinguish the Arabs and Phœnicians, Hebrews and Assyrians,”—a judgment which, though in the main correct, is nevertheless not exhaustive. [Some of Professor Meyer’s other estimates are less satisfactory to Professor Hommel, who quotes the following with entire disapproval, claiming that they quite misrepresent the true character of the Semitic mind: “This same abominably matter-of-fact habit of thought, which dominates the Koran and by means of which it wrought its effect, lies at the root of the human sacrifices of the Canaanites, the religious phrases of the Assyrians, and, finally, of Yahvism” (i.e. the religion of the Old Testament). “The relation of the individual to the god is regarded in a strictly rationalistic and calculating spirit. An ethical or mystical relation to the Deity is wholly alien to the Semitic mind.”] Compare these and other passages of the same sort [Professor Hommel continues] with the fact that, on the contrary, a monotheistic tendency stronger than in any other race in the world, and combining with it the idea of a heartfelt surrender of the whole man to the Deity, was one of the principal characteristics of the Semitic mind as a whole (though most highly developed among the Israelites).