tatod the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks, or relapsed into com
plete barbarism, but never felt any inward impulse of their own to
reproduce nature in sculpture and painting.
Our researches on Shemitic art clearly establish the fact, that, highly
gifted races may he unartistic, and that neither wealth nor love of
display, neither inventive genius nor culture, can create art among
them.
X y .— THE N A T I O N S OF T HE C U N E I F O R M W R I T I N G .
T h e country lying east of the homestead of the Shemites,
embracing the plain of Mesopotamia, and the highlands flanking the
Tigris up to the Persian desert, was in antiquity always the seat of
great empires,—expanding principally towards the west, often threatening
and sometimes subduing the Asiatic coast of the Mediterrar-
nean, <md extending its influence to Europe. The populations dwelling
along the Euphrates and Tigris, and on the Armenian and Persian
table-land—were hot homogeneous. Cushite, Shemitic, Arian,
and Turanian elements struggled here against one another: the sceptre
of the “West Asiatic empire often changed hands amongst them,
hut always within the limits mentioned above; being transferred
from Nineveh to Babylon, from Babylon to Ecbatana and Persepolis;
again to Seleucia, thence to Ctesiphon, and at last to Bagdad. The
national peculiarities of this empire have remained in many respects
a puzzle for the ethnologists. What was the precise character of the
languages of Assyria and Babylonia—what the seat of the Scythians
who invaded the empire, and ruled it for twenty-eight years; and
what the national type of the Medes, and perhaps even of the Par-
thians,—are difficulties not yet solved, which require further investigation.
All modern chronologists and philologists agree about the ancient
Persians, that they were pure and unmixed Japetides, or Indo-
Europeans; so much so, that the name by which they themselves
called their race—Arians or Iranians—has been adopted for designating
the peculiar family of the white race to which they belong.
The Medes118 and the Parthians, on the other side, are classed among
the Turanians, or Scythians, or Turk-Tartars. As to the Assyrians
and Babylonians, the following is the result of the latest researches:
The Chevalier B u n s e n ,—whose eminently suggestive works will
remain of the highest value, even when a more thorough knowledge
of the subjects he treats may have modified many of his hypotheses
118 According to S trabo, the difference of the Mede and Persian languages was a difference
of mere dialect: still, our scholars unanimously designate the Scythian (or Turanian),
second inscription of Behistim, by the word Median.
and conclusions; M ax M ü l l e r , the well-known Sanscrit scholar;
and L e p s iu s , the celebrated Egyptologist; are the foremost of a
school which tries to find out a union between the Shemitic and the
Arian races, and to derive all the languages of Europe and of Asia
from one common original stock. According to their theory, the
languages of the old world may be classed into four distinct families:
Hamitic or Cushite, Shemitic, Turanian (including the Chinese, the
Turk-Tartars and Malays,) and Arian. Proceeding farther, they
assert that the Hamitic is but an earlier form of the Shemitic, whilst
the Arian is for them nothing more than the development of the
Turanian. Having reduced the four families to two, they seek a
union between the Shemitic and Arian, and believe they have
found the traces of this original unity, first in the ancient Egyptian,
and again in the Babylonian and Assyrian.119
However, these conclusions are rather speculative hypotheses than
acquired scientific facts. Lepsius acknowledges that the Coptic
forms a branch as distinct and as distant from the Shemitic, as the Shemitic
is from the Arian; whilst Bunsen and Max Müller admit the
same, by placing that which they call the sacred language of Assyria
and Babylonia “ between Hamitism, or the ante-historical Shemitism
in Egypt, and the historical Shemitic languages ;”120 and again, by
stating that “ the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylon exhibit to us a
language in the transition from primordial to historical Shemitism.”
121
Renan, on the other hand, cannot imagine how any Shemitic
language could have been written in a non-Shemitic alphabet:
“ In early antiquity, language and alphabet are inseparable: the cuneiform characters
may have been adopted by nations having no alphabet of their own; but how should the
imperfect, ideographic, system of Assyria and Babylon have served for writing languages
which had a more developed system of writing of their own ?”
Besides, according to him, the national history of the Assyrians
and Babylonians has no Shemitic characters.
“ Shemitic life is simple and narrow, patriarchal, and hostile to centralization. The
Shemite dislikes manual labor, and the patience and discipline—such as raised gigantio
structures like those of Egypt and Assyria,—are wanting with him. At Nineveh, on the
contrary, we meet with a great development of material civilization, with an absolute
monarchy, with flourishing imitative art, with a grand style of architecture, with a mythology
impregnated with Arian ideas, with a tendency to see an incarnation of Godhead in
the king, and with a spirit of conquest and centralization.”
119 B unsen and Max Müller, Outlines of the Philosophy of History:—Lepsiu s , Ist, Anordnung
und Verwandtschaft des Semitischen, Indischen, Altpersischen und Allcethiopischen Alphabetes;
and Ild, Ursprung und Verwandtschaft der Zahlwörter,
120 Hippolytus, III, p. 183, seqq.: — Outlines, I, p. 183, seqq.
121 Livre I, Chap. II. \ 3, 4.