Ethiopians, often applied by the same authors
to the dwellers upon the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, recalls the
relationship which attached the Kushites of Asia to those of Africa in the
Hebrew genealogies.

We have still stronger reasons of the same kind for affirming that the
Shemites or Semites occupied an important place in Chaldaea from the very
beginning. Linguistic knowledge here comes to the aid of the biblical
narrative and confirms its ethnographical data. The language in which most
of our cuneiform inscriptions are written, the language, that is, that we
call Assyrian, is closely allied to the Hebrew. Towards the period of the
second Chaldee Empire, another dialect of the same family, the Aramaic,
seems to have been in common use from one end of Mesopotamia to the other.
A comparative study of the rites and religious beliefs of the Semitic races
would lead us to the same result. Finally, there is something very
significant in the facility with which classic writers confuse such terms
as Chaldaeans, Assyrians, and Syrians; it would seem that they recognized
but one people between the Isthmus of Suez on the south and the Taurus on
the north, between the seaboard of Phoenicia on the west and the table
lands of Iran in the east. In our day the dominant language over the whole
of the vast extent of territory which is inclosed by those boundaries is
Arabic, as it was Syriac during the early centuries of our era, and Aramaic
under the Persians and the successors of Alexander. From the commencement
of historic times the Semitic element has never ceased to play the chief
_role_ from one end of that region to the other. For Syria proper, its
pre-eminence is attested by a number of facts which leave no room for
doubt. Travellers and historians classed the inhabitants of Mesopotamia
with those of Phoenicia and Palestine, because, to their unaccustomed ears,
the differences between their languages were hardly perceptible, while
their personal characteristics were practically identical. Such affinities
and resemblances are only to be explained by a common origin, though the
point of junction may have been distant.

It has also been asserted that an Aryan element helped to compose the
population of primitive Chaldaea, that sister tribes to those of India and
Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor furnished their contingents to the mixed
population of Shinar. Some have even declared that a time came when those
tribes obtained t