Turning to the third great division of the Iranians—viz., the Semites, who migrated to the Valley of the Euphrates, we find a more or less complicated religious system, varying in accordance with the amount of intercommunication which took place between the Semites and the tribes belonging to the Aryan, Mongolian, and Egyptian families. The earliest Semitic settlement was in the district stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea and Mediterranean, and their religion was, at first, one of pure animistic polydæmonism, varying enormously in details of drama in the different tribes, but exhibiting in all common characteristics. All early Semitic peoples worshipped the sun-god, Shamsh, and all were moon, planet, and star-worshippers to a very large extent; but, as the race became divided into Northern and Southern Semites, a distinct difference gradually arose between the religious cults of the two branches. The Southern, or Arab, tribes, on account of their more isolated situation, retained the original Semitic mythology, worshipping the sun as their chief god, Shamsh, the moon as his consort, and the stars and planets as inferior gods and goddesses, the _Pleiades_ being objects of special homage. Shamsh was father of all, and disappeared to the under-world at night to rest in slumber until awakened into activity in the morning as Yachavah, his son, who became one with his father. The Northern Semites, on penetrating, at a later period, the borders of Mesopotamia, came in contact with a powerful and advanced civilisation, which had been already established by the Akkadian branch of the Northern Mongolian family, and thus the original Semitic religion became very much modified by the introduction into it of many of the Mongol, as well as some also of the Aryan, myths. Very little is known of the Akkadian mythology; but it is pretty certain that they were, at a very early period, acquainted with the science of astronomy, and that the Chaldeans, their successors, who were a mongrel race, partly Akkadian and partly Semitic, invented the cuneiform writing to take the place of the old Mongolian hieroglyphic characters. From what we know of the religion of the old Mongol Chinese empire prior to 1200 B.C., it was a kind of spirit-worship, the Shang-ti, or supreme spirit, being Thian (Heaven), who, in co-operation with Heu-thu (earth), produced everything. Man, according to this cultus, had two souls, one of which ascended after death to heaven, while the other descended into the earth, both being absorbed respectively into Thian and Heu-thu.