mighty hunter before the Lord_.'

"And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and
Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

"Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city
Rehoboth, and Calah,

"And Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city."[30]

These statements have been confirmed by the architectural and other remains
found in Mesopotamia. Inscriptions from which fresh secrets are wrested day
by day; ruins of buildings whose dates are to be approximately divined from
their plans, their structure, and their decorations; statues, statuettes,
bas-reliefs, and all the various _debris_ of a great civilization, when
studied with the industrious ardour which distinguishes modern science,
enable the critic to realize the vast antiquity of those Chaldaean cities,
in which legend and history are so curiously mingled.

Even before they could decipher their meaning Assyriologists had compared,
from the palaeographic point of view, the different varieties of the written
character known as _cuneiform_--a character which lent itself for some two
thousand years, to the notation of the five or six successive languages,
at least, in which the inhabitants of Western Asia expressed their
thoughts. These wedge-shaped characters are found in their most primitive
and undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts of
Mesopotamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which are
especially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plastic
figuration of Assyria.

There is another particular in which the monumental records and the
biblical tradition are in accord. During those obscure centuries that saw
the work sketched out from which the civilization of the Tigris and
Euphrates basin was, in time, to be developed, the Chaldaean population was
not homogeneous; the country was inhabited by tribes who had neither a
common origin nor a common language. This we are told in Genesis. The
earliest chiefs to build cities in Shinar are there personified in the
person of Nimrod, who is the son of Cush, and the grandson of Ham. He and
his people must be placed, therefore, in the same family as the Ethiopians,
the Egyptians, and the Libyans, the Canaanites and the Phoenicians.[31]

A little lower down in the same genealogical table we find attached to the
posterity of Shem that Asshur who, as we are told in the verses quoted
above, left the plains of Sh