Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/36

16 A HISTORY OF ART- IN CIIALD.EA AKD ASSYRIA. Bcrosus compiled the history of Chakkea from the national chronicles and traditions. The loss of his work is still more to be lamented than that of Manetho. The wedges may never, perhaps, be read with as much certainty as the hieroglyphs ; the remains of Chaldseo- Assyrian antiquity are much less copious and well pre- served than those of the Egyptian civilization, while the gap in the existing documents are more frequent and of a different character. And yet much precious information, especially in these latter days, has been drawn from those fragments of his work which have come down to us. In one of these we find the following evidence as to the mixture of races : " At first there were at Babylon a great number of men belonging to the different nationalities that colonized Chaldcea." How far did that diversity go ? The terms used by Berosus are vague enough, while the Hebraic tradition seems to have pre- served the memory of only two races who lived one after the other in Chaldsea, namely, the Kushites and the Shemites. And may not these groups, though distinct, have been more closely con- nected than the Jews were willing to admit ? We know how bitterly the Jews hated those Canaanitish races against whom they waged their long and destructive wars ; and it is possible that, in order to mark the separation between themselves and their abhorred enemies, they may have shut their eyes to the exaggeration of the distance between the two peoples. More than one historian is inclined to believe that the Kushites and Shemites were less dis- tantly related than the Hebrew writers pretend. Almost every day criticism discovers new points of resemblance between the Jews before the captivity and certain of their neighbours, such as the Phoenicians. Almost the same language was spoken by each ; each had the same arts and the same symbols, while many rites and customs were common to both. Baal and Moloch were adored in Judah and Israel as well as in Tyre and Sidon. This is not the proper place to discuss such a question, but, whatever view we may take of it, it seems that the researches of Assyriologists have led to the following conclusion : That primitive Chaldrca received and retained various ethnic elements upon its fertile soil ; that those elements in time became fused together, and that, even in the 1 See 2 of Fragment i. of BEROSUS, in the Fragmenta Historiconun GraconiHi of CH. MULLKR (Bibliotlitque Gn-cque-Latinc of Didot), vol. ii. p. 496 ; 'Ev Se r-fj