Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/37

THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF THE POPULATION. 17 beginning, the diversities that distinguished them one from another were less marked than a literal acceptance of the tenth chapter of Genesis might lead us to believe. We cannot here undertake to explain all the conjectures to which this point has given rise. We are without some, at least, of the qualifications necessary for the due appreciation of the proofs, or rather of the probabilities, which are relied on by the exponents of this or that hypothesis. We must refer curious readers to the works of contemporary Assyriologists ; or they may, if they will, find all the chief facts brought together in the writings of MM. Maspero and Francois Lenormant, whom we shall often have occasion to quote. 1 We shall be content with giving, in as few words as possible, the theory which appears at present to be generally admitted. There is no doubt as to the presence in Chaldaea of the Kushite tribes. It is the Kushites, as represented by Nimrod, who are mentioned in Genesis before any of the others ; a piece of evidence which is indirectly confirmed by the nomenclature of the Greek writers. They often employed the terms Ktcro-ouot and Kiaaioi to denote the peoples who belonged to this very part of Asia,' 2 terms under which it is easy to recognize imperfect transliterations of a name that began its last syllable in the Semitic tongues with the sound we render by sk. As the Greeks had no letters cor- responding to our h and/, they had to do the best they could with breathings. Their descendants had to make the same shifts when they became subject to the Turks, and had to express every word of their conqueror's language without possessing any signs for those sounds of sk and/ in which it abounded. The same vocable is preserved to our day in the name borne by one of the provinces of Persia, Khouzistan. The objection that the Ktcrcratot or KtoWot of the classic writers and poets were placed in Susiana rather than in Chaldsea will no longer be made. Susiana borders upon Chalckea and belongs, like it, to the basin of the Tigris. There is no natural frontier between the two countries, which were closely connected both in peace and war. On the 1 Gaston MASPERO, Ilistoire andenne des Peuples de r Orient, liv. ii. ch. iv. La dial dee. Frangois LENORMANT, Manuel (T Histoire ancienm de f Orient, liv. iv. ch. i. (3rd edition). 2 The principal texts in which these terms are to be met with are brought together in the Worterbuch der Griechischen Eigennamen of PAPE (31^ edition), under the words Kicrcrta, Kt<r<rtot, Kocrcratot. D