■Sill
I
United States. In Arabia, where the mixtures are more complicated, and have been going
on from time immemorial, the result does not appear to have been different. On the Egyptian
monuments, I was unable to detect any change in the races of the human family.
Neither does written history afford evidence of the extinction of one physical race of men,
or of the development of another previously unknown.” 87
Proceeding retrogressively, and closely as the theme can he elucidated,
we present the only bas-relief which, throughout the entire
range of hieroglyphieal or cuneiform discovery hitherto published, in
all probability represents Jews.
F ig. 14.
(2 Kings xviii. 14; Isaiah xxxvi. 2-. About 700 b. c .)
“ Jewish Captives from Lachish” (Pig. 14), disinterred from Sennacherib’s
palace at Kouyunjik, is the title given to the original by
its discoverer,88 who says —
■ Here, therefore, was the actual picture of the taking of Lachish, the city, as we know
frorm the Bible, besieged by Sennacherib, when he sent his generals to demand tribute of
Hezekiah, and which he had captured before their return. . . . The captives were undoubtedly
Jews -—their physiognomy was strikingly indicated in the sculptures; but they had
been stripped of their ornaments and their fine raiment, and were left barefooted and halfclothed.”
Allowance made- for reduction to so small a scale, tbe ethnological
character of this bas-relief is not so
strikingly effective in respect to true
Hebrew physiognomy, as it is (when
compared with other Chaldsean effigies)
to show the pervading character
of many Syrian and Mesopotamian
races 2500 years ago.
These Elamites (Pig. 15) probably,
if not Arabs, “ loading' a
camel,”89 belong to the same age,
and supply one variety; while here
F ig . 15.
“Captives employed by Assyrians”90
(Pig. 16), furnish another.
Divested of heard, other “ captives
in a cart”91 (Pig. 17) portray
characteristics verging toward an
upland, or Armenian, expression;
at the same time that these upon
F ig . 17.
Fig. 16.
an undated “ Babylonian cy- Fia-18-
linder” 93 (Pig. 18), too minute
in size for ethnographical precision,
indicate more of wild
Arab lin e am en tsan inference
which the low-land site
of Babylon, where Mr. Layard
found it, may justify. I f we
contrast these last with (Pig.
19), an Egyptian artistic idea of a “ Canaanite”
(K anawa — b a rb a r ia n the prevalence of this so-
called Semitic fype from the Euphrates, through
Palestine, to the eastern confines of the Nile, becomes
exemplified, back to the twelfth and fifteenth
centuries b. c., as thoroughly as ocular observation
can realize similar features in the same
F ig . 19.
u
regions at the present day.
Each “ canon of art,” 94 in Egypt and in Assyria,
was dogmatically enforced (let it be remembered)
upon principles entirely different: the former, or
anterior, being primitive, and dependent rather
upon its relations to graphical expression, more
rigidly approximates to the ante-monumental age of ‘ ‘ picture-writing. ’ ’
In the latter, we behold a developed, and consequently more florid,
style of art; which, if nothing else existed to demonstrate the truth