Not every race has the power of being faithful to the tongue of its ancestors. This makes our task still more difficult, when we try to determine the origin or relative value of different human types by the help of philology. Not only do languages change without any obvious reason, at any rate from the racial point of view; but there are also certain nations which give up their own language altogether, when they are brought for some time into contact with a foreign race. This happened, after the conquests of Alexander, in the case of the more enlightened nations of Western Asia, such as the Carians, Cappadocians, and Armenians. The Gauls are another instance, as I have already said. Yet all these peoples brought a foreign element into the conquering tongue, which was transformed in its turn. Thus they could all be regarded as using their own intellectual tools, though to a very imperfect extent; while others, more tenacious of theirs, such as the Basques, the Berbers of Mount Atlas, and the Ekkhilis of Southern Arabia, speak even at the present day the same tongue as was spoken by their most primitive ancestors. But there are certain peoples, the Jews for example, who seem never to have held to their ancestral speech at all; and we can discover this indifference from the time of their earliest migrations. When Terah left the land of his fathers, Ur of the Chaldees, he certainly had not learnt the Canaanitish tongue that henceforth became the national speech of the children of Israel. It was probably influenced to some extent by their earlier recollections, and in their mouth became a special dialect of the very ancient language which was the mother of the earliest Arabic we know, and the lawful inheritance of tribes closely allied to the black Hamites.[128] Yet not even to this language were the Jews to remain faithful. The tribes who were brought back from captivity by Zerubbabel had forgotten it during their short stay of sixty-two years by the rivers of Babylon. Their patriotism was proof against exile, and still burned with its original fire; but the rest had been given up, with remarkable facility, by a people which is at the same time jealous of its own traditions and extremely cosmopolitan. Jerusalem was rebuilt, and its inhabitants reappeared, speaking an Aramaic or Chaldean jargon, which may have had some slight resemblance to the speech of the fathers of Abraham. At the time of Christ, this dialect offered only a feeble resistance to the invasion of Hellenistic Greek, which assailed the Jewish mind on all sides. Henceforth all the works produced by Jewish writers appeared in the new dress, which fitted them more or less elegantly, and copied to some extent the old Attic fashions. The last canonical books of the Old Testament, as well as the works of Philo and Josephus, are Hellenistic in spirit.