h can be distinctly
assigned to the early Cushite period. Abundant hair has been noticed in
an early tomb; and this in the later Babylonians, who must have been
descended in great part from the earlier, was very conspicuous; but
otherwise we have as yet no direct evidence with respect to the physical
characteristics of the primitive race. That they were brave and warlike,
ingenious, energetic, and persevering, we have ample evidence, which will
appear in later chapters of this work; but we can do little more than
conjecture their physical appearance, which, however, we may fairly
suppose to have resembled that of other Ethiopian nations.

When the early inhabitants of ChaldAea are pronounced to have belonged to
the same race with the dwellers upon the Upper Nile, the question
naturally arises, which were the primitive people, and which the
colonists? Is the country at the head of the Persian Gulf to be regarded
as the original abode of the Cushite race, whence it spread eastward and
westward, on the one hand to Susiana, Persia Proper, Carmania, Gedrosia,
and India itself; on the other to Arabia and the east coast of Africa?
Or are we to suppose that the migration proceeded in one direction
only--that the Cushites, having occupied the country immediately to the
south of Egypt, sent their colonies along the south coast of Arabia,
whence they crept on into the Persian Gulf, occupying Chaldaea and
Susiana, and thence spreading into Mekran, Kerman, and the regions
bordering upon the Indus? Plausible reasons maybe adduced in support of
either hypothesis. The situation of Babylonia, and its proximity to that
mountain region where man must have first "increased and multiplied"
after the Flood, are in favor of its being the original centre from
which the other Cushite races were derived. The Biblical genealogy of
the sons of Ham points, however, the other way; for it derives Nimrod
from Cush, not Cush from Nimrod. Indeed this document seems to follow
the Hamites from Africa--emphatically "the land of Ham"--in one line
along Southern Arabia to Shinar or Babylonia, in another from Egypt
through Canaan into Syria. The antiquity of civilization in the valley
of the Nile, which preceded by many centuries that even of primitive
Chaldaea, is another argument in favor of the migration having been from
west to east; and the monuments and traditions of the Chaldaeans
themselves have been thought to present some curious indications o