[Footnote 7: The old colonial customs and legal regulations in America, fully confirm the above statements. _White_ servants, with or without indenture, were kept in bondage by their masters, as were other chattels, and sometimes, though rarely, these servants were even sold. Without, therefore, going back to any European origin, it may be peremptorily asserted that it is comparatively a short time since the sires of many haughty militant slavery defenders were bondsmen on American soil.] [Footnote 8: Flavius Josephus says, that under the Herods, Judea contained double the population established by the census of David. Perhaps this account is exaggerated; but, at any rate, it shows a great and positive increase.] VI. NABATHEANS. AUTHORITIES: _Lassen, Quatremère, Laborde, Oppert, Chwolsohn, Perceval, etc._ In the gray morning of time, behind the obscurity hovering over the origin of Assyria, and preceding even the first great epoch of Babylon, dawns the fully-developed Nabathean civilization. In proportion as scientific investigation imagines it has reached a positive epoch in the ethnology and history of our race, a new cloud ever rises behind it, which is but of this service--unerringly to indicate the limits of the space already investigated. Thus legends, traditions, and tracings sink helpless and hopeless into mythus, and the investigator is lost in the "dark backward and abysm of time." The Eastern legends hanging over Fore-Asia (or the lands between the Himalayas and Assyria), present traditions of epochs and civilizations which had traversed the periods of youth, maturity, and decline, before Brahmins, Assyrians, or Hebrews even dawned on the historical horizon. The Nabatheans are supposed to have been Shemites or pure Chaldeans.[9] They dwelt in ancient Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and also in what afterward constituted a part of Syria and Assyria; and their branches or colonies extended to Arabia and to eastern Mesopotamia. They were probably the primitive white dwellers in these regions, and the founders of Babylon and of her first--almost pre-historic--epoch of glory, down to the time when they were conquered by the Assyrians or by Aryanized Nabatheans and Chaldeans.