he chief power. It may have been so, but the evidence upon
which the hypothesis rests is very slight. Granting that the Aryans did
settle in Chaldaea, they were certainly far less numerous than the other
colonists, and were so rapidly absorbed into the ranks of the majority that
neither history nor language has preserved any sensible trace of their
existence. We may therefore leave them out of the argument until fresh
evidence is forthcoming.

But the students of the inscriptions had another, and, if we accept the
theories of MM. Oppert and Francois Lenormant, a better-founded, surprise
in store for us. It seemed improbable that science would ever succeed in
mounting beyond those remote tribes, the immediate descendants of Kush and
Shem, who occupied Chaldaea at the dawn of history; they formed, to all
appearance, the most distant background, the deepest stratum, to which the
historian could hope to penetrate; and yet, when the most ancient
epigraphic texts began to yield up their secrets, the interpreters were
confronted, as they assure us, with this startling fact: the earliest
language spoken, or, at least, written, in that country, belonged neither
to the Aryan nor to the Semitic family, nor even to those African languages
among which the ancient idiom of Egypt has sometimes been placed; it was,
in an extreme degree, what we now call an _agglutinative language_. By its
grammatical system and by some elements of its vocabulary it suggests a
comparison with Finnish, Turkish, and kindred tongues.

Other indications, such as the social and religious conditions revealed by
the texts, have combined with these characteristics to convince our
Assyriologists that the first dwellers in Chaldaea--the first, that is, who
made any attempt at civilization--were Turanians, were part of that great
family of peoples who still inhabit the north of Europe and Asia, from the
marshes of the Baltic to the banks of the Amoor and the shores of the
Pacific Ocean.[38] The languages of all those peoples, though various
enough, had certain features in common. No one of them reached the delicate
and complex mechanism of internal and terminal inflexion; they were
guiltless of the subtle processes by which Aryans and Semites expressed the
finest shades of thought, and, by declining the substantive and conjugating
the verb, subordinated the secondary to the principal idea; they did not
understand how to unite, in an intimate and organic fashion, th