great numbers the terrible Catholic invasion, and though
long overwhelmed by the blow which had fallen on
them, long stupefied by superstitions far inferior to
their ancient religious beliefs, they are now raising
their heads and claiming their place among free
peoples. The rest of the American peoples, the most
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200 Distribution of Languages and Races.
vigorous, the most worthy to live, have perished or are
about to disappear before the greed of the European
immigrants. Without hunting-grounds, without game,
they are condemned to die out. Only the poorest
specimens of American humanity, the Abipones, the
Charruas, the Botocudos, and in the extreme north the
Kienas and the Athabasks, the dwellers in thickets, in
deserts, in the torrid or the frozen zones, may count
upon a respite of a few centuries.
Our summary review of the agglutinative languages
is terminated. We have seen that, simple or complex,
their structure is founded solely upon the addition^ to
one or more invariable themes or radicals, of subordinate
roots, emptied of their proper sense and reduced to
oflSxes, suffixes, infixes, and prefixes. The immense
majority of these languages have never been written :
driven out to the borders of civilisation, into countries
not easily approachable by Europeans, they continue to
vegetate obscurely. But a few more favoured groups,
preserved, and even developed, by civilisation, have
attained to some literary life. Japanese, Mandchu, Mon-
golian, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Dravidian, Malay,
Georgian, Basque, Greenland, Algonquin, Mexican, and
Quicha have all contributed, in very different measure
indeed, to the progress of human intelligence. Their
names are worthy to be remembered.
We pass by an easy transition from the agglutinative
class to the inflected class. We shall find in the latter
all that can be done by suffixation. A single thread
separates inflexion from agglutination — that is, the
possible variation of the root syllable ; a very slight
acquisition, which, while it stops the abuse of suffixa-
tion, allows of the expression of every shade of the idea
without lengthening the word, and also of attaching a
general idea to all the derivatives from the same root.
Digitized by VjOOQIC
CHAPTER VII.
THE SEMITIC WORLD.
Noah, Ham, and Shem— CoDJectures on the origin of the Semites-
Ethnical variety, linguistic unity — Exodus of the Canaanites:
Hyksos, Phoenicians, Hebrews— Jews and Syrians crushed in the
struggle with Egypt and Assyrians — Rule of the Persiaus, Greeks,
and Romans — Appearance of the Arabs — Christianity and Islam —
Tardy revenge of the Semites — Character of the inflexion and
structure of the word in the Semitic languages — Northern branch
of the Semitic family — I. Arameo-Assyrian group: Chaldean,
Nabatean, Syriac, Syro-Chaldean, Assyrian — 2. Canaanitish
group : Phcenician, Punic, Samaritan, Moabitish, &c., Hebrew-
Southern branch : Arabic, Himyarite, Ghez or Ethiopian.
The peoples whom we are accustomed to cair Semitic
have always ignored their relations with the Biblical
patriarch Shem, son of Noah. But if we disregard
the letter of the precious record, compiled and recast
many centuries after the events which are therein
transformed into legendary fables, if we consider in
themselves the names of Noah, Ham, Shem, and Gush,
we shall readily overlook the inexactitude of the name
given by the moderns to the Chaldeans, the Arameans,
the Canaanites, and to the Arabs. For Noah is a
Semitic god of great antiquity, Nouach, a genius with
four outspread wings, god and saviour, the spouse of
Tihavti, the fecundity of the abyss ; Ham was Khemos,
the god of the Moabites, and perhaps identical with
the Egyptian Khem; we find Cush among the Cos-
sians or Kissians of the Euphrates, and among the
southern peoples whom the Pharaohs fought on the
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202 Distribution of Languages and Races.
two shores of the Red Sea ; " the vile Cush," said the
Egyptians ; but they none the less gave to their royal
princes the title of Prince of Cash, which shows the
importance which they attached to the subjugation of
these Cush or Cushites, the Ethiopians of Herodotus,
cut in two by the Semitic expansion ; as for Shem, it
is diflScult not to recognise in him Samas, Samson, the
sun-god of the Assyrian pantheon.
Cusbites, Hamites, Semites are far from being
synonyms ; but it is hardly possible to doubt their
relationship, or at least the intimacy of their primitive
connection. Only it is very diflScult to determine the
vicissitudes of their prehistoric life. Experts diflTer ;
some, M. Renan, for example, assigning to the Semites
a northern origin ; others think, with Echrader, that
the nucleus of the race was formed in the centre and
west of the Arabian peninsula, where the language
approaches most nearly to the supposed mother-tongue,
where the Chaldean legends and divinities have least
penetrated, though they form the common ground of
thought among the other Semites. Finally, since
philologists are agreed in recognising aflSnities, rudi-
mentary but probable, between the Khamito-Berbers
and the Semites, it is hard to conjecture where they
both came from, or where we should place the common
country where they possessed a common idiom.
We must be content to know that their separation
was accomplished at the time when Menes came down
from Upper Egypt to the Delta to found the ancient
empire and Memphis, about five thousand years before
our era. At that date the languages of the Nile and of
the Libyan desert had reached the extreme limit of the
agglutinative stage, which they have not over-stepped ;
and the Semites were doubtless progressing towards
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The Semitic World. 203
the inflected period. Thenceforward the two races
have no point of contact except the Isthmus of Suez.
The one, without advancing farther than Mount Sinai,
develops its precocious yet enduring civilisation,
builds towns, pyramids, and temples, and, from the
worship of animals and of the Nile, rises to the religion
of the sun, of fire, and to the belief in immortality.
The other, wandering without name or route, given up
to the worship of stones and of the heavenly bodies,
fluctuates between Nedjed and the Euphrates ; for two
thousand years it is lost to history. At most, we may
attribute to some attack on the part of the nomads
the fall of the first Egyptian empire and the retreat
of the Pharaohs to Thebes.
When history first takes cognisance of the Semites,
the practically unchanging unity of their linguistic
organism was constituted, and much more strongly than
the Indo-European unity. The dialectic diflerences do
not aflect either the formation of the words or the
vocabulary, but only a few details of grammar and
pronunciation. But ethnical unity exists no longer.
If the Arab with his high, long head, his slender,
nervous body, his profile at once strongly marked and
refined, may be considered as the faithful guardian of
the racial type, the thick-set build of the Chaldean, the
tendency to fat and the massive face of the Assyrian,
point to various mixtures with more ancient peoples.
We have already mentioned the very probable
existence of non-Semitic races and languages, Shumi-
rians and Elamites, round about the Persian Gulf, in
Babylonia and Susiana. There, in these regions of
ancient civilisation, several Semitic groups obtained
their industrial and religious education. At the time
when the Shumir Likbagas (3000) reigned in Chaldea^
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204 Distribution of Languages and Races.
Bab-ilou, Babylon, the gate of EI, was already a
flourishing city under kings who were also priests;
and the shores and islands of the Gulf of Ormuz were
occupied by the Oanaanites, the Poun, Poeni, Punici,
the future Phoenicians, whose territory on the other
hand reached to the Himyarites of Southern Arabia.
Mesopotamia and Armenia were also full of Semites,
Arameans to the north and west, the future Jews to the
north and in the centre, in Arrapachitis (Arphaxad) ;
lastly, the Assyrians of the middle valley of the Tigris.
It would seem from the legend of Nimrod preserved
by the Bible, that the Assyrians were a Chaldean
tribe, whose national god or eponymous hero, Assour,
was the male of the Canaanitish Aschera. All these
tribes, more or less compact, more or less powerful,
received from Lower Chaldea their gods and their
beliefs, the tradition of the deluge, the worship of
winged bulls, transformed at a later date into cherubim,
the Elohim and Baalim of every species, the goddesses
of fertility and of the spring sunshine (Adonis, Tham-
muz), dead and resuscitated. A cataclysm of which
the causes are not known, an Elamite invasion under
the pressure of the Persians, an incursion of Scythians
from the other side of the Caucasus, destroyed about
the year 2300 B.C. the earliest Assyrian empire, drove
the Arameans back towards Syria, the Israelites
towards Lower Chaldea, and decided the Canaanites
to cross the desert ; while the torrent of the Hyksos
(robber chiefs), bearing onward in its course Edomites,
Ammonites, Moabites, was hurled upon the delta of
the Nile.
The Canaanites, driving before them the ancient
inhabitants of Palestine, the Pelestes or Philistines,
massed themselves upon the Sj^rian coast around Arvad
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The Semitic World, 205
and Tyros ; these were the names of their ancient cities
of the Persian Gulf. Finally, under the name of
Hebrews, people of the other shore, the clan of a
certain Terah and of a certain Nahor, decided to quit
Ur in Chaldea, bearing away their gods like Anchises,
eagerly pursued by the Elamite chieftains or kings ;
among others by Chedorlaomer. The leaders of the
fugitives, Abraham and his nephew Lot, underwent
some misfortunes in the neighbourhood of the Jordan,
of Sodom and Gomorrah ; others whose names have
come down to us, of doubtful wisdom and uncertain
morality, Isaac, the dishonest Laban, Esau the simple,
and the astute Jacob, continued to live with difficulty,
surrounded by other nomads, until famine or their
vagabond habits drove the Hebrews to the confines of
Egypt, into the land of Goshen, beside the Hyksos.
Meanwhile Egypt had not abandoned the hope of
revenge; her national kings had not ceased for five
centuries to harass the foreign conqueror. Ahmes,
the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, finally expelled
from the delta the armies and the government of the
Hyksos ; and his successors, returning upon Asia the
attack which they had thence received, subjugating,
or rather putting to ransom, all the Canaanites of
Judea, Phoenicia, and Syria, crossed the Euphrates
and the Tigris. Nineveh twice fell into their power,
and the whole Semitic world became vassal to the
Pharaohs. The influence of Egypt was real though
temporary, but in the reciprocal dealings which were
the result of the conquests of the Tutnes and the
Araenhoteps, the share of the Semites was on the
whole the larger. Marriages with the daughters of
kings or vassal governors brought into Egypt and
established Asiatic types, ideas, and customs on the
Digitized by VjOOQIC
2o6 Distribulio7i of Languages and Races.
Theban throne. Amenhotep IV. was purely Semitic ;
he endeavoured to replace the religion of Auimon by
the sun-worship of Syria. In 1887 were discovered
the fragmenta of a correspondence exchanged be-
tween the kings of Syria, Armenia, and Babylonia
and the Pharaohs Amenhotep III. and IV. ; all these
letters are written in cuneiform character and in
Semitic or other dialects; it is probable that the
answers were drawn up in the same character and in
the same languages. For the rest, the subjugated
nations had soon recovered. Saryoukin 1. had recon-
stituted the Chaldean empire ; the Assyrians, ever at
war on their eastern and western frontiers, had more
than once crossed the Upper Euphrates and pene-
trated Asia Minor as far as Troad, where the name
Assaracus seems to be a relic of an Assyrian dynasty.
The Hittites or Khetas occupied the north of Syria ;
and when Ramses 11., Sesbstris, desired in the
fifteenth century to renew the exploits of his ances-
tors, he was checked at Kadech by the Hittites and
forced to retreat after an undecided battle. The great
expansion of Egypt was stopped, at least towards the
north. The Semitic peoples, on tlie contrary, were
everywhere in the ascendant. Phoenicia was colonising
the European and Libyan coasts of the Mediterranean ;
Bylos (Gebel), Tyre, and Sidon had commercial settle-
ments in many places, where the potteries, the stuffs,
and the jewels of the East were exchanged for the raw
products of Gaul, Spain, and Africa. Their boats,
navigated by oar and sail, had even passed the Columns
of Hercules and coasted round Europe as far as Eng-
land and Denmark. Not only did they leave with the
Etruscans, the Sards, the Pelasgians, the Siculi, and
the Hellenes of the yEj/ean and of Ionia the rudiments
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The Semitic World. 207
of ttie arts and of philosophy, but they also brought
them an inestimable treasure, the alphabet, sixteen or
eighteen signs, extracted from the chaos of the hiero-
glyphs. It is disputed at the present day whether the
l^hoenicians were really the authors of this famous in-
vention ; but it was certainly they who spread it over
Europe, and who unwittingly, for they considered only
the usefulness of a commercial writing, gave to the
West this necessary instrument of intellectual progress.
As for the great empires of the Euphrates and the
Tigris, in the midst and in spite of bloody revolu-
tions, now pretty well known and dated, they rose to
a considerable degree of power and dignity. The
excavations of recent years have laid bare their palaces
and temples; their books graven on thousands of bricks,
their seals with magical formulas, and the great
triumphal inscriptions engraved by conquering kings
on statues, walls, and on the living rock, have been
deciphered. Their artists excelled in the minute and
in the colossal ; their gigantic statues, rude and
grandiose, sustain comparison with the finest Egyptian
work, and their influence can easily be traced in the
archaic monuments of Asia and Greece.
The Hebrews had as yet held no place in history.
It was only towards the end of the fourteenth century,
under one of the successor's of Sesostris, that, urged by
oppression and by want of room in the land of Goshen,
they left Egypt, with difficulty avoiding disaster on
the sandy shores of the Gulf of Suez. Prom the
peninsula of Sinai they had to pass through the tribes
of Midian, Moab, and of Edom, and then force their
entrance into the promised land ; they returned to it
late, the country was already occupied. Hence those
exterminations, those servitudes, and all the adventures.
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2o8 Distribution of Languages and Races.
naively exaggerated later in the Book of Judges, which
is often legendary, but fall of interest from the double
point of view of ethnography and ethics. By courage
and perseverance the Benou-Israel to the north and
east, the sons of Benjamin and Judah to the south,
ended by subduing and absorbing in part the other
Canaanites who had preceded them, without passing
the bounds of Syria on the one hand, and on the other
the Philistine towns, without piercing the narrow
band of the Phoenicians. Like all the Semites of the
north, they had their sacred stones, their Baalim, male
and female, Baal, Moloch, Aschera, Dagon, their
winged gods with bulls' heads, their bronze lions and
serpents, worshipped in the high places ; but they all
rallied more or less round a coffer or ark, which con-
tained their national god, who was of the heavens or
solar, named El Jahve, the Phoenician Jao, and vari-
ous symbolical objects, a seven-branched candlestick
(representing the seven planets), a table, bread, and
sacerdotal ornaments. Their neighbours had also
their favourite patron, some Dagon, others Astarte,
Marna, Derketo, Moloch, or Chemos. We see what
becomes of the primitive monotheism of the Hebrews.
It was not till the tenth century, when the brave and
not very virtuous David, and his son, the splendid and
not less voluptuous Solomon, had, thanks to favourable
but ephemeral circumstances, constituted the brilliant
and brief Jewish empire, that the ark, transported
with great pomp to the newly conquered capital,
became the obligatory centre of religion. Even in
the temple of Solomon (if this wonder of the world
ever really existed), there were quarters reserved for
prostitutes and eunuchs, the sacred servants of the
goddess Aschera ; not to mention the great serpent.
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The Semitic World. 209
the cherubim, and other animals representing the
ancient creed of polytheism. Jahve had to himself
only the holy of holies. The unity of creed was,
moreover, so little established that the jealousies raised
by the pretensions of the high priest brought about the
division and the ruin of the empire ; and in the little
principality of Judah, retained by the tribe of Judah,
together with the Levites or sacerdotal tribe, the elo-
quence of the prophets and the efforts of two pious
kings, Hezekiah and Josiah (622), could not assure to
Jahve a complete triumph over the strange gods. This
triumph was only secured to him by the ruin of the
people chosen by him from all eternity.
The existence of the Jewish tribes had always been
precarious and threatened by many foes. Unable to
engage in serious strife even with the kings of Syria,
their position was hopeless when, divided against
themselves, they became the battlefield for the two great
rivals, Assyria and Egypt. Towards the eighth cen-
tury the victory declared itself in favour of the Assyrians,
who in the following century invaded Egypt ; then
the latter, reanimated by the Ethiopian princes, renewed
the fatal war, of which one result was the destruction
of Samaria by Saryoukin and the ruin of the kingdom
of Israel. All who did not perish in the massacre
were transported into Mesopotamia at the end of the
eighth century, 708-710. A few fugitives gained
Jerusalem and Egypt. Finally, in tlie sixth century,
587—581, Jerusalem, attacked by Nebuchadnezzar, the
greatest king of a new Chaldean empire, was taken and
burned. The fierce courage of the unhappy Zedekiah,
the last prince of Judah, could not prevent the second
captivity. It was in humiliation and misery that the
relics of this much -tried race put together their tradi-
Digitized by VjOOQIC
2 lo Distribution of Languages and Races.
tions, not without some admixture of foreign elements,
and rallied for ever to their god Jahve.
Assyria had been conquered by the Medes ; Chaldea
fell In her turn before the Persiaus (536 B.C.). Then it
was that Zerubbabel, Esdras, aod Nehemiah, 536-430,
were able in the course of a hundred years to bring
back two or three columns of exiles to reconstruct the
Temple with great difficulty, and finally to compile
those ancient fragments, completing them, interpolat-
ing them, reconciling them as best they could with
orthodoxy, the poems adjudged to David and Solo-
mon, and the dithyrambs and revelations attributed to
the different prophets. This work, which was nearly
finished at the time of the Greek translation of the
Septuagint, was begun under the Ptolemies for the
AlexandrineJews,and continued through the timeof the
Maccabees and up to the beginning of the Cliristian era.
Meantime the Jewish nationality outlived that of the
powerful Semites who thought to destroy it, and sur-
vived alone ; alone it kept a species of independence.
The Persian monarchy, the brilliant passage of Alex-
ander, the Seleucid^, the dominion of the Parthians,
had already buried the ancient glory of Assyria and
Chaldea; even the language of Sargon and Nebu-
chadnezzar had ceased to be spoken above Babylon.
Syria and Phoenicia had accepted in turn the yoke of
Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Finally, the cruel siege
and sack of Jerusalem by Titus, and a last convulsion
under Hadrian, put an end to the unhappy destiny
of the people of Israel, or rather marked the beginning
of a long and terrible agony, borne with invincible
energy and patience. In fact, the three northern
groups, Aramaic, Chaldean, Canaanitish, had been
destroyed at the time of the Persian conquest, and
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The Semitic World. 2 1 1
the sceptre of the civilised world had passed into the
hands of the Indo-Europeans. And it was long
before men saw that the maladies inherited by the
peoples of the West from these dying nations, — Baby-
lonian corruption, orgiastic religions of Asia Minor,
the enervating mysticism of despairing souls, assured
but too well the vengeance of the conquered.
Moreover, the Semites of the south, the Arabs, had
not been touched. The Pharaohs by the Red Sea, the
Sargonides by the desert, had attacked, pierced even
here and there, this block of Arabia, and had annexed
it to their empires. But this mattered little to the
nomad Bedouin, to the hardly formed tribes which
floated about Mecca and Medina. Some carried their
tents into another part of the desert, the others fell
back or paid some small tribute, and continued to
make war among themselves for women or horses.
From the time when the Syrian dynasty came to
hasten the decomposition of the Roman empire, and
especially when Zenobia and Odenatus all but realised
their dream of an Oriental empire, the Arabs of the
north, with whom were mixed the half Jewish Canaan-
itish tribes, Idumeans, Moabites, &c., began to take
some part in Western life, and to be influenced by
Judaism and Christianity. Mahomet appeared with
his incoherent and inoffensive book, but also with his
terrible doctrine of the identity of the two powers,,
religious and civil ; and Islam, let loose upon a world
still shaken by the fall of the Roman empire and by
the struggle for its territory of the swarming new
races, Islam gave a tremendous power to the Semitic
races, a power far more fatal to the Mediterranean
world than the domination of the cruel Assyrians or
that of the superstitious Chaldeans. In less than a
Digitized by VjOOQIC
2 1 2 Distribniion of Languages and Races.
hundred years the Arabs had conquered Syria and
Persia, Egypt, the African coast and Spain, and France
as far at Poitiers. This conquest of the East and
South by races which had not attained a high degree of
intellectual culture jeopardised the future of the worhl,
until the day when John Sobieski, in the seventeenth
century, forced the Ottoman vizier to raise the siege of
Vienna. It is true, indeed, that the part played by
the Arabs was not lacking in brilliancy, and the evils
of which they were the cause are not without compen-
sation. There was a brief and splendid civilisation at
Bagdad, at Cairo, at Kairouan, at Tlemcen, iat Fez, at
Cordova, and Granada ; a rich literature ; an active
commerce which reached to China, the Malay Archi-
pelago, and India ; finally, a shock which, sending
back upon Ijurope the translations of forgotten Greek
authors, driving from Constantinople the last custodians
of Hellenic science, determined the Renaissance in
Italy, France, and Germany, the revolt against' the
humiliating, stupefying yoke of the Ckristian theocracy.
But, and the fact is curious, that which is commonly
called Arab philosophy, astronomy, and architecture,
belongs in truth to the peoples roughly awakened by
the sword of the Arab, to the people of Bactriana, of
Mazenderan, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, of Barbary,
and Spain. The Arab, unlike the Assyrian, is no
artist : no Arab has ever painted or carved the human
face. He is a musician and a poet, a witty story-
teller, with a taste for maxims, anecdotes, apologues,
and pithy sentences ; but his mind lacks both breadth
and concentration. No dogma could suit him better
than the arid and empty formulae of Islam, than the
Koran with its medley of maxims and narratives, its
contradictions, its idle and endless controversies. At
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The Semitic World. 2 1 3
the present dav, Sernitisni may be occasionally a source
of trouble, but it is no longer a danger ; even Mussul-
man fanaticism, its te rible creation, though it may
spread among the inferior races of Africa, seems only
an anachronism, which we must know how to reckon
with indeed, but which is powerless against civilised
Europe, and its allies America and Australia. For
the second nd the last time, Indo-European culture