recorded
development of that mound-building instinct which the earlier races
everywhere evince, and which has been a distinguishing characteristic
more especially of the Cushite or Turanian race, and has apparently
made them the teachers of constructive arts to all other peoples.
Perhaps a dread of the total decay and loss of the surviving
antediluvian arts in construction and other matters may have been one
impelling motive to the building of Babel. Perhaps it was connected
with the communistic ideas of the Turanian race, and their conflict
with the patriarchal habits of the Semites. Out of the enterprise at
Babel, however, arose a new type of evil, which, in the forms of
military despotism, the spirit of conquest, hero-worship, and the
alliance of these influences with literature and the arts, has been
handed down through every succeeding age to our own time. The name of
Nimrod, the son of Cush, has been preserved to us in the Bible, and
also apparently in the tablets and inscriptions of Assyria, as the
founder of the first despotism. This bold and ambitious man,
subsequently deified under different names, established a Hamite or
Turanian empire, which appears to have extended its sway over the
tribes occupying Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, everywhere
supporting its power by force of arms, and introducing a debasing
polytheistic hero-worship, and certain forms of art probably derived
from antediluvian times. The centre of this Cushite empire, however,
gave way to the rising power of Assyria or the Ashurite branch of the
sons of Shem, at a period antecedent to the dawn of profane history,
except in its mythical form; and when the light of secular history
first breaks upon us, we find Egypt standing forth as the only stable
representative of the arts, the systems, and the superstitions of the
old Cushite empire, of which it had been the southern branch; while
other remnants of the Hamite races, included in the empire of Nimrod,
were scattered over Western Asia, and, migrating into Europe, with or
after the ruder but less demoralized sons of Japheth, carried with
them their characteristic civilization and mythology, to take root in
new forms in Greece and Italy.[107] Meanwhile the Assyrian and Persian
(Elamite) races were growing in Middle Asia, and probably driving the
more eastern remnants of the Nimrodic empire into India, borrowing at
the same time their superstitions and their claims to universal
domin