Gesemus had divided Semitish languages, classified as they are too vaguely, into
three main branches : —
1st. The Aramæan, spoken in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia. This is again
divided into East and West Aramæan ; that is, the Chaldee and Syriac.
2d. The Canaanitish, or Hebrew, spoken in Palestine and Phoenicia. Of this the
Punic is a descendant.
3d. The Arabic, of which the Æthiopic is a parallel branch. The Samaritan is a
mixture of the Hebrew and Aramæan.
To the above, Fresnel’s discoveries add a fourth: viz., the “ Ehkèelee” of the inhabitants
of Mirbàt and Zhafâr ; one which he considers among the richest and most
ancient in the worldr-r allied to the Ethiopie, but more archaic ; preserved in Arabia
by a peculiar family (long cut off from the rest of mankind by wild Bédawees of
the Semitic stock, with whom, it is said, the Zhafâritës never intermarry) — descended
probably from the Homeritoe ; in whose name classical annalists have preserved to us
the original word Himyar (Arabicè, Ahmar), ‘ the red-men,’ as the distinguishing title
of the once-great Himyarites of Saba and Mariaba.
“ He who enters Zhafâr Himyarizes” is an ancient Arab proverb, which shows that
the Zhafâritës were different, in some striking peculiarities, from Semitish tribes, and
that visitors were constrained “ to speak the language of the country ; ” as unintelligible
even now to Ishmaelite and Joktanide Arabs as the Basque is to Frenchmen or
Spaniards. Now, this tongue and the tribes that speak it, are considered by M. Fresnel
to be the true relics of KUSA ; owing as much to the abundance of words foreign
to Arabic contained in its dialects, as to the singular characteristics of the speakers
themselves ; whose antiquity at Zhafâr reaches beyond all history. The daring of
Dr. Arnaud, (who, at Fresnel’s instigation, penetrated where no European ever reached
previously to 1844, and copied multitudes of Himyaritic inscriptions on the ruined
edifices of Sana, Khariba, and Mareb,) has nonfirmed, in all important respects, the
existence of these human vestigies of KUSAîtes in their earliest Arabian homestead
“ even unto this day” : and the men, their language and monuments, having now been
found, our results on Xth Genesis may be finally tabulated as follows :—-
1st. That by KUSA the Hebrew chorographer meant dark tribes of Southern Arabia,
who probably inhabited that section of the peninsula prior to immigrations of strictly
Semitish Arabs. They are the Homeritoe of Greek and Roman writers ; Himyarites of
Arab history ; remnants of whom, speaking Ehklli, still residing at Mirbàt and Zhafar,
are living witnesses of the indelibility of primordial types.
2d. That other compilers of Scripture corroborate this view, and prove that in Hebrew
geography the KUSBw — bounded at the extreme west by the “ rivers o i Gusli”
on the Isthmus of Suez — spread across the peninsula to the banks of the Euphrates ;
perhaps eastwardly to Chuzistàn and Susiana. Their settlements, as Forster has shown
with commendable felicity, lay dotted around the Arabian coasts of the Red Sea and
Persian Gulf ; separated originally from the intrusive Joktanides, (as the writer of
Gen. X. accurately remarks, v. 30), by a line drawn from “ Mesha, as thou goest unto
Sephar ” — the former being the Zames Mons in Central Arabia of Ptolemy the' geographer
; the latter, Mount Sephar, at the extreme south-west of thé peninsula, where
in Ptolemy’s time dwelt the Sapharitoe; and where at Zhafâr, Fresnel’s researches
(unquoted by Forster) prove their Ehklli descendants to live still.
3d. That before future hagiographers place KUSA in Africa, as the Hebrew name
for Nigritian races (of whom Cush, scripturally and physically, is no more the father
than Abraham himself), it might be well, perhaps, if they re-read their “ Bibles ” with
a little attention ; and not perversely close their eyes to the new lights that Oriental
science is continually shedding upon an ancient code which, Lanci emphatically and
truthfully observes, “ is the more honored and revered as thought dives into it to
illustrate and comprehend it.”
As Southern Arabia, and as dark (himyar, 1 red ’) Arabian tribes, KUSA takes his
rightful position once more in Xth Genesis.595
16. onyo — MTsKIM — ‘ M izraim.’
Semitic ; but certainly not the Hebrew ‘tribulation,’ &c.
As it stands, is the plural of MTsR. With the Masoretic points, added since the
sixth century after Christ, it is a dual, M i t s b a im , meaning the two MTsRs. In the
singular, MTsUR, it is the name (by modern natives referred also to the city of Cairo,)
through which Egypt is designated in the form M u s s ’r , not merely by her present
Arabicized people, but by all Oriental nations : and there being no dispute as to the
application of MTsUR by Semitic races to the land of .Egypt, from the present hour
back to the remotest period for which we possess records, our genesiacal purposes
would be served sufficiently on reading Egypt for MTsRalm, were it not for foolish
rabbinical notions, vulgarly current, that, misunderstanding the principle of Oriental
personifications, still treat of ‘ ‘ Mizraim ” in Xth Genesis as if he had been really a man,
“ son of Ham,” another individual! One might as reasonably maintain that all the
Eussias, or the “ two Russias,” mean a human being actually resident in Muscovy!
Pandering to no such historical falsehoods, we briefly set the reader on the “ royal
road” to their refutation.
The earliest personification of Matzur, the singular of MTsRIM, is not in the Bible,
but in Sancouiathon; a very ancient Phoenician writer, who flourished (none will dispute)
some time before Philo Byblius, about the second century after c., translated into
Greek such fragments of his works as reach our day through Athenseus, Porphyry, Eusebius,
and other transcribers. Whether Sanconiathon be a mythe, as some maintain,
or whether such a person really lived and wrote between St. Martin’s adopted era,
1400 B. 0., and Philo Byblius’s age, is indifferent; so long as it remains historical,
that, under the name “ Sanconiathon,” we possess some exuvm of Phoenician traditions
antedating Christian harmonizings, that cannot have been written alphabetically,
according to the laws of palaeography) earlier than the seventh to tenth century B. c . ,
nor later historically than the second century after the Christian era. We have no
hypothesis to sustain beyond establishing, through these fragments, that “ Misor ” was
the ancestor of the Egyptian god Thoth, Hermes-Trismegistus (Her-Mes == ‘ begotten
of Horus’) of the Greeks; and consequently, that this Grseco-Phoenician legend is our
most valid authority for making a man out of the “ two Egypts ” — Upper and Lower
; Sit— personified in Xth Genesis by commentators as Mitzbaim.
The context of Ps. cv. 23, (and wherever else in canonical Hebrew records the singular
form MTsUR occurs,) suffices to prove that, by MTsUR, each Jewish writer meant
Egypt as a country. If the singular number, MTsUR, in Hebrew grammar and history,
signifies merely a geographical locality, upon what principle can the dual or plural
forms of the same word constitute a man ?
Among the multitude of appellatives given to Egypt by other foreigners, the present
name M u s s ’r reappears in the Phoenician Uvapa — suspected to be an error of copyist
for Musraiti- of Stephanus Byzantinus; in the Mcorpaia of George the Syncellus ; in
the M e s s r e d j of the Persian “ Boundehesch-Pahlevi ” ; and so on backwards to the
Persepolitan cuneiform inscriptions, of Darius, carved at Behistfin early in the fifth
century b. of where it is orthographed M’u d r f iy a. Two centuries earlier, the name
MASR, or Madr (also Mesrahouan), is chiselled in Assyrian cuneatics on the thresholds
of Khorsabad, among the conquests of Asarhaddon, between B. 0. 709 and 667; and it
may exist perhaps on older sculptures of the ninth century B .C ., discovered by Rawlinson.
Albeit, 700 years b . o. are ample for our object; inasmuch as they prove that a
singular form of the name Muss’r existed in Asia, in days parallel with, and probably
anterior to, those passages in the Hebrew Text where MTsUR is its homonyme. ^ Its
dual or plural representative in Xth Genesis, MTsRIM, is either a later amplification,
or meaning simply the Muss’rites, people of JfassV, Egypt, excludes the supernatural
idea that M i z r a im was a man.
In this concrete sense of Egyptians, we find the correspondent of Mizraim in the