The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic StudyKeary, C. F. (Charles Francis)
History
The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study
Keary, C. F. (Charles Francis)
Archaeology; History, Ancient; Mythology
P. 122. Touching the relationship of the Egyptians to the negroes a
variety of opinions are held. There can be no question that their types
of face forbid us to doubt that there was some relationship between
them; while the representations of negroes upon the ancient monuments of
Egypt show that from the remotest historical period there was a marked
distinction between the peoples, and that from that early time till now
the negroes have not changed in the smallest particular of ethnical
character. On the other hand, many people consider the Egyptians and the
Accadians to have been essentially the same people, the Cushites--or as
some call them Hamites--a race which perhaps anciently spread from
Susiana across Arabia and the Red Sea to Abyssinia and Egypt.
P. 123. The names _Chaldæan_ and _Assyrian_ are used with a variety of
significations by Orientalists, and in a way likely to be confusing to
the general reader. He will do well, therefore, to bear the following
facts in mind:--
1. The Tigris and the Euphrates, after both taking their rise in the
Caleshîn Dagh mountain in the Armenian highlands, soon separate by a
wide sweep, the Euphrates flowing south-west and towards the
Mediterranean, the Tigris flowing south-east towards the Persian Gulf.
But instead of flowing _into_ the Mediterranean, the Euphrates again
turns first due south, then south-east, so that it thenceforward flows
parallel with the Tigris. They approach nearer and nearer, until about
Bagdad they are separated by some twenty miles only; but here they once
more begin to increase the distance between them, and do not again
approach until just before they unite to fall into the Persian Gulf. In
ancient days they never united, as the Persian Gulf spread more than a
hundred miles farther inland than it does to-day.
The territory enclosed between these two great streams, with the
addition of some territory to the east of the Tigris and west of the
Euphrates, is that which the Greeks called Mesopotamia. Lower
Mesopotamia begins about the point where the streams approach the
nearest, and this Lower Mesopotamia is the territory distinguished by
the name _Chaldæa_.
Territorially this Chaldæa was in ancient days divided into two
districts--Shûmir in the south, and Accad in the north.
The earliest known inhabitants of these districts were a Turanian race,
who from their territorial possessions should properly be called the
Shûmir-Accadians or Shûmiro-Accadians. But it is common to call them
simply Accadians (or Accad), and their language, an agglutinative or
Turanian one, Accadian likewise.
Here therefore is the first element of confusion--between the smaller
territorial division, Accadia, and the larger ethnic division, which
includes all the primitive inhabitants of Chaldæa.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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