The Scripture account, which certainly authorizes us to fix upon the highlands of Armenia as the new centre whence the descendants of Noah went forth to people the earth, is confirmed by the most ancient traditions and the most reliable historic records. Josephus tells us there was in Armenia a city which was called Ἀποβατήριον--the Place of Descent[382]--"for the ark being saved in that place, its remains are shown by the inhabitants to this day."[383] He further adds that "all the writers of the barbarian histories make mention of the flood, and of this ark, among whom is Berosus, the Chaldæan,[384] who, when he goes on to describe the circumstances of the flood, remarks, 'it is said there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyæans;' Hieronymus, the Egyptian, who wrote the Phœnician antiquities, and Manases, and indeed a great many others, also make mention of the same. Nay, Nicholas of Damascus, in his ninety-sixth book, hath a particular relation about them, where he speaks thus: 'There is a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which, it is reported,... that one who was carried in an ark came on shore upon the top of it, and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved.'"[385] This concurrent testimony of sacred and profane history, which designates Western Asia as the cradle of the historic nations, has received additional confirmation from the researches of modern ethnologists and philologists. In the tenth chapter of Genesis, the sacred historian sketches the nations of the earth at his time of writing, indicates their ethnic affinities, and marks to some extent their geographical positions. The professor of ancient history in the University of Oxford, George Rawlinson, remarks that "the _Toldoth Beni Noah_ (the Generations of Noah) has excited the admiration of modern ethnologists, who continually find in it the anticipations of their greatest discoveries."[386] Sir Henry Rawlinson assures us that "the Toldoth Beni Noah is undoubtedly the _most authentic_ record we possess of the affiliations of the human race which sprang from the triple stock of the Noachidæ."[387] The same distinguished Oriental scholar in an essay "On the Ethnic Affinities of the Nations of Western Asia," further remarks: "In Western Asia, the cradle of the human race, the several ethnic branches of the human family were more closely intermingled and more evenly balanced than in any other portion of the ancient world. Semitic, Indo-European, and Tâtar or Turanian races not only divided among them this portion of the earth's surface, but lay interspersed and confused upon it in a most remarkable entanglement. It is symptomatic of this curious intermixture that the Persian monarchs, when they wished to communicate to their Asiatic subjects in such a way that it should be generally intelligible, had to put it out not only in three different languages, but in three languages belonging to the