inar in order to found Nineveh in the upper
country.[32] So, too, it was from Ur of the Chaldees that Terah, another
descendant of Shem, and, through Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish
people, came up into Canaan.[33]

The world has, unhappily, lost the work of Berosus, the Babylonish priest,
who, under the Seleucidae, did for Chaldaea what Manetho was doing almost at
the same moment for Egypt.[34] Berosus compiled the history of Chaldaea
from the national chronicles and traditions. The loss of his work is still
more to be lamented than that of Manetho. The wedges may never, perhaps, be
read with as much certainty as the hieroglyphs; the remains of
Chaldaeo-Assyrian antiquity are much less copious and well preserved than
those of the Egyptian civilization, while the gap in the existing documents
are more frequent and of a different character. And yet much precious
information, especially in these latter days, has been drawn from those
fragments of his work which have come down to us. In one of these we find
the following evidence as to the mixture of races: "At first there were at
Babylon a great number of men belonging to the different nationalities that
colonized Chaldaea."[35]

How far did that diversity go? The terms used by Berosus are vague enough,
while the Hebraic tradition seems to have preserved the memory of only two
races who lived one after the other in Chaldaea, namely, the Kushites and
the Shemites. And may not these groups, though distinct, have been more
closely connected than the Jews were willing to admit? We know how bitterly
the Jews hated those Canaanitish races against whom they waged their long
and destructive wars; and it is possible that, in order to mark the
separation between themselves and their abhorred enemies, they may have
shut their eyes to the exaggeration of the distance between the two
peoples. More than one historian is inclined to believe that the Kushites
and Shemites were less distantly related than the Hebrew writers pretend.
Almost every day criticism discovers new points of resemblance between the
Jews before the captivity and certain of their neighbours, such as the
Phoenicians. Almost the same language was spoken by each; each had the same
arts and the same symbols, while many rites and customs were common to
both. Baal and Moloch were adored in Judah and Israel as well as in Tyre
and Sidon. This is not the proper place to discuss such a question, but,
whatever view we may