“The only logical conclusion justifiable when we give up the inspiration theory is, that Arabs and Syro-Phœnicians were known to Assyrians and Egyptians, and this none would deny. Indeed, we readily grant, with Dr. Birch, that under the nineteenth and twentieth Egyptian dynasties the influence of the Aramæan nations is distinctly marked; that not only by blood and alliances had the Pharaohs been closely united with the princes of Palestine and Syria, but that the language of the period abounds in Semitic words quite different from the Egyptian, with which they were embroidered and intermingled. Could it possibly be otherwise? Is it not so to this day? Is a vast and rapidly-spawning Shemitic continent like Arabia not to influence the narrow delta of a river adjoining it or the wild highlands of Syria to the north? Of course Arabs or Shemites were everywhere spread over Egypt, Syria, and Phœnicia, as well as in their ancient seats of empire in Arabia, Irak (Kaldia), and on the imperial mounds of Kalneh and Koyunjik; but not necessarily as Jews. I cannot find that these last were anything more than a peculiar religious sect of Arabs who settled down from their pristine nomadic habits and obtained a _quasi_ government under petty princes or sheiks, such as we have seen take place in the case of numerous Arabian and Indian sects. “Only about two hundred years or so after their return from Babylon did the Jews seem to consolidate into a nation, and the collection and translation of their old mythic records—deciphered with much difficulty by the diligent librarians of Ptolemy Philadelphus from “old shreds and scraps of leather”—no doubt materially aided in consolidating the people and in welding them into what they became—clans proud of a sort of a mythic history built up by Ezra and other men acquainted with Babylonian records and popular cosmogonies.” No efforts, say the leaders of the Biblical Archaeological Society, have been able to find either amidst the numerous engravings on the rocks of Arabia Petrea or Palestine, _any save Phœnician inscriptions_; not even a record of the Syro-Hebrew character, which was once thought to be the peculiar property of Hebrews. Most of those inscriptions hitherto discovered do not date anterior to the Roman empire. Few, if _any_ monuments (of Jews) have been found in Palestine or the neighboring countries of any useful antiquity save the Moabite Stone, and the value of this last is all in favor of my previous arguments on these points. At the pool of Siloam we have an “inscription in the Phœnician character as old as the time of the Kings;... it is incised upon the walls of a rock-chamber apparently dedicated to Baal, who is mentioned on it. So that here, in a most holy place of this peculiar people, we find only Phœnicians, and these worshipping the Sun-god of Fertility, as was customary on every coast of Europe from unknown times down to the rise of Christianity.”