beyond that ‘natural’ polytheism which was the earliest creed of our own ancestors the Aryans, and a noble hope and ambition for the future of the soul. Were these higher features due to the influx of Semitic blood? It seems likely, when we remember how from the same race came a chosen people to whom the world is indebted for all that is greatest in religious thought. [Sidenote: Chaldæa.] During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or four thousand years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians do, as we have said, rise up distinctly out of the region of mere conjecture. Three or four thousand years before Christ--five or six thousand years ago: this is no small distance through which to look back to the place where the first mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was doing in the other unseen regions round this mountain? Only probably in one other part of the globe could there have been found at this date a civilization in the smallest degree comparable to that of the Egyptians. This region is the valley of the Tigrus and Euphrates. The Tigro-Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, was in early days as regards appearance and position very similar to the land of Egypt. These two territories are in fact two oases in an immense band of desert, which stretches from the western edge of the great Sahara (which is almost the edge of Africa itself) in a curved sweep, through part of Arabia, part of Persia, up to the great plains of central Asia; in other words, it stretches across more than one-third of the circumference of the globe. The Tigro-Euphrates oasis which the Greeks called Mesopotamia is in the Bible called Chaldæa or the country of the Chaldees. In days known to history, its inhabitants were a mixed people, of whom the oldest element was undoubtedly Turanian; and this section of the nation had probably descended from the country afterwards called Iran to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. These people are called by modern scholars the Accadians, or the Shûmîro-Accadians.[45] They are the Accad of the Bible. Mixed with them were a people of Semitic, or half-Semitic origin, whose language is closely allied to the Hebrew and the Aramæan. If we take the Biblical name for them, we should call them Hamites or Cushites. But the best ethnological name would be that of Aramæans.