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

It is true that the cruelty of the Assyrians to foreign prisoners of war, which often shocks us and estranges our sympathies from the whole nation, recall certain instances of a like defect among the ancient Israelites too strongly not to tempt us to think of it as a Semitic propensity; but nevertheless these are mere excesses and excrescences which must not be set to the account of national character. The Semite is not naturally cruel. If he were so, the trait must have come out most strongly in the Bedouin Arabs, who for centuries have remained at the barbaric stage in religious matters; whereas this is not so, but rather the reverse. With many races (some of them Indo-Germanic) of whom the most unspeakable horrors and acts of violence are recorded in the course of history, sheer lust of blood and torture has been the motive of such actions (or rather crimes), while the cruelties just referred to sprang from the dark side (revolting, it must be confessed) of a national virtue: true zeal for the Holiest.

THE ORIGINAL HOME OF THE BABYLONIAN SEMITE

On such questions as the degree of kinship in which the Babylonians and Assyrians stood to other Semites, their original home, their last halting-places, and consequently the sequence of Semitic migrations, Eduard Meyer holds the same views as the famous orientalist, Sprenger, to wit, that Arabia, i.e. the desert as distinct from the arable land, used from the very earliest times to send forth the surplus of her predatory and rapacious Bedouin population to the great pastoral districts in the vicinity, that is, to Palestine, the plain of Mesopotamia (Aram), and, in times long out of mind, to northern Babylonia also; that they were, so to speak, deposited there from time to time, and that all Semitic nations whom we meet with in a state of civilisation in the course of subsequent history have come into being in this manner.

“But this ingenious theory has been directly refuted by later investigations set on foot by A. von Kremer, and followed up by Ign. Guidi at Rome, and, more especially, by myself, with a view to discovering what domestic animals and cultivated plants were known to the original Semitic stock. By the year 1879 Guidi and I had come independently and, to some extent, by different ways to the conclusion that the original home of the Semites could not possibly be Arabia, but must be sought farther to the northeast. In the treatise, Die sprachgeschichtliche Stellung des Babylonisch-Assyrischen, I succeeded in proving further that the people who afterwards became the Babylonians and Assyrians must have separated from the common stock in some part of central Asia where the lion was indigenous, and emigrated into northern Babylonia through one of the passes of the Medio-Elamite range certainly no later than the fifth millennium B.C. The rest, however, came by way of the southern shore of the Caspian Sea—probably towards the end of the fourth millennium and at all events later than the Hamites of northern Babylonia—and entered what was afterwards Aramæan Mesopotamia from the north, then occupied it, and spread gradually from thence to Syria, Palestine, and Arabia.” (Hommel.) So, by subsequent offshoots and migrations, they became the Aramæans, Canaanites, and Arabs.