The confusion of tongues was followed by the dispersion of mankind. The earth was again peopled by the descendants of the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Shem is the Assyrian Samu, “olive-coloured,” Ham is Khammu, “burned black,” and Japhet Ippat, “the white race.” The tribes and races which drew their origin from them are enumerated in the tenth chapter of Genesis. The arrangement of this chapter, however, is geographical, not ethnological; the peoples named in it being grouped together according to their geographical position, not according to their relationship in blood or language. Here it is that the non-Semitic Elamites are classed along with the Semitic Assyrians, and that the Phœnicians of Canaan, who spoke the same language as the Hebrews, and originally came from the same ancestors, are associated with the Egyptians. When this fact is recognised, there is no difficulty in showing that the statements of the chapter are fully consistent with the conclusions of modern research. The Assyrian inscriptions have thrown a good deal of light upon the names contained in it. Gomer, the son of Japhet, represents the Gimirrai of the inscriptions, the Kimmerians of classical writers. Pressed by the Scyths of the Russian steppes, they threatened to overrun the Assyrian empire under a leader named Teispes, but were defeated by Esar-haddon, in B.C. 670, in a great battle on the north-eastern frontier of his kingdom, and driven westwards into Asia Minor. There they sacked the Greek town of Sinôpè, and spread like locusts over the fertile plains of Lydia. Among the gifts sent to Nineveh by the Lydian king, Gugu or Gyges—a name in which we may see the Gog of Ezekiel—were two Kimmerian chieftains whom he had captured with his own hand. Gyges was afterwards slain in battle with the barbarians, and it required some years before they could be finally extirpated. Madai are the Medes, a title given by the Assyrians to the multifarious tribes to the east of Kurdistan. They are first mentioned in the inscriptions about 820 B.C., and were partially subdued by Tiglath-Pileser II and his successors. At this time they lived in independent communities, each governed by its “city-chief.” The Median empire, which rose upon the ruins of Nineveh, was really the creation of the kings of Ekbatana, the modern Hamadan. The population of this district was known among the Babylonians as _manda_, or “barbarians;” and through a confusion of the latter word with the proper name Madâ, or “Medes,” historians have been led to suppose that the empire of Ekbatana was a Median one.