ion. These views, which I believe to correspond with the few
notices in the Bible and in ancient history, and to be daily receiving
new confirmations from the investigations of the ancient Assyrian
monuments, enable us to understand many mysterious problems in the
early history of man. They give us reason to suspect that the
_principle_ of the first empire was an imitation of the antediluvian
world, and that its arts and customs were mainly derived from that
source. They show how it happens that Egypt, a country so far removed
from the starting-point of man after the deluge, should appear to be
the cradle of the arts, and they account for the Hamite and perhaps
antediluvian elements, mixed with primeval Biblical ideas, as the
cherubim, etc., in the old heathenism of India, Assyria, and Southern
Europe, and which they share with Egypt, having derived them from the
same source. They also show how it is that in the most remote
antiquity we find two well-developed and opposite religious systems;
the pure theism of Noah, and those who retained his faith, and the
idolatry of those tribes which regarded with adoring veneration the
objects and stages of the creative work, the grander powers and
objects of nature, the mighty Cainites of the world before the flood,
and the postdiluvian leaders who followed them in their violence,
their cultivation of the arts, and their rebellion against God. These
heroes were identified with imaginative conceptions of the heavenly
bodies, animals, and other natural objects, associated with the
fortunes of cities and nations, with particular territories, and with
war and the useful arts, transmitted under different names to one
country after another, and localized in each; and it is only in
comparatively modern times that we have been able to recognize the
full certainty of the view held long since by many ingenious writers,
that among the greater gods of Egypt and Assyria, and of consequence
among those also of Greece and Rome, were Nimrod, Ham, Ashur, Noah,
Mizraim, and other worthies and tyrants of the old world; and to
suspect that Tubalcain and Naamah, and other antediluvian names, were
similarly honored, though subsequently overshadowed by more recent
divinities. The later Assyrian readings of Rawlinson, Hincks, and the
lamented George Smith, and the more recent works on Egyptian
antiquities, are full of pregnant hints on these subjects. It would,
however, lead us too far from our immediate