modern philologists as still maintain the Semitic character of the
primitive Chaldaeans principally rely. But it can be proved from the
inscriptions of the country, that between the date of the first
establishment of a Chaldaean kingdom and the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the
language of Lower Mesopotamia underwent an entire change. To whatever
causes this may have been owing--a subject which will be hereafter
investigated--the fact is certain; and it entirely destroys the force of
the argument from the language of the Babylonians at the later period.

Another ground, and that which seems to have had the chief weight with
Niebuhr, is the supposed identity or intimate connection of the
Babylonians with the Assyrians. That the latter people were Semites has
never been denied; and, indeed, it is a point supported by such an amount
of evidence as renders it quite unassailable. If, therefore the
primitive Babylonians were once proved to be a mere portion of the far
greater Assyrian nation, locally and politically, but not ethnically
separate from them, their Semitic character would thereupon be fully
established. Now that this was the belief of Herodotus must be at once
allowed. Not only does that writer regard the later Babylonians as
Assyrians--"Assyrians of Babylon," as he expresses it--and look on
Babylonia as a mere "district of Assyria," but, by adopting the mythic
genealogy, which made Ninus the son of Belus, he throws back the
connection to the very origin of the two nations, and distinctly
pronounces it a connection of race. But Herodotus is a very weak
authority on the antiquities of any nation, even his own; and it is not
surprising that he should have carried back to a remote period a state of
things which he saw existing in his own age. If the later Babylonians
were, in manners and customs, in religion and in language, a close,
counterpart of the Assyrians, he would naturally suppose them descended
from the same stock. It is his habit to transfer back to former times
the condition of things in his own day. Thus he calls the inhabitants of
the Peloponnese before the Dorian invasion "Dorians," regards Athens as
the second city in Greece when Creesus sent his embassies, and describes
as the ancient Persian religion that corrupted form which existed under
Artaxerxes Longimanus. He is an excellent authority for what he had
himself seen, or for what he had laboriously collected by inquiry from
eye witnesses;