production of a larger population than it is able
to maintain permanently, especially when its natural resources are
restricted by a succession of abnormally dry years. In tracing the
Akkadians from Arabia, however, we are confronted at the outset with
the difficulty that its prehistoric, and many of its present-day,
inhabitants are not of the characteristic Semitic type. On the Ancient
Egyptian pottery and monuments the Arabs are depicted as men who
closely resembled the representatives of the Mediterranean race in the
Nile valley and elsewhere. They shaved neither scalps nor faces as did
the historic Sumerians and Egyptians, but grew the slight moustache
and chin-tuft beard like the Libyans on the north and the majority of
the men whose bodies have been preserved in pre-Dynastic graves in the
Nile valley. "If", writes Professor Elliot Smith, "the generally
accepted view is true, that Arabia was the original home of the
Semites, the Arab must have undergone a profound change in his
physical characters after he left his homeland and before he reached
Babylonia." This authority is of opinion that the Arabians first
migrated into Palestine and northern Syria, where they mingled with
the southward-migrating Armenoid peoples from Asia Minor. "This blend
of Arabs, kinsmen of the proto-Egyptians and Armenoids, would then
form the big-nosed, long-bearded Semites, so familiar not only on the
ancient Babylonian and Egyptian monuments, but also in the modern
Jews."[19] Such a view is in accord with Dr. Hugo Winckler's
contention that the flow of Arabian migrations was northwards towards
Syria ere it swept through Mesopotamia. It can scarcely be supposed
that these invasions of settled districts did not result in the fusion
and crossment of racial types and the production of a sub-variety with
medium skull form and marked facial characteristics.

Of special interest in this connection is the evidence afforded by
Palestine and Egypt. The former country has ever been subject to
periodic ethnic disturbances and changes. Its racial history has a
remote beginning in the Pleistocene Age. Palaeolithic flints of
Chellean and other primitive types have been found in large numbers,
and a valuable collection of these is being preserved in a French
museum at Jerusalem. In a northern cave fragments of rude pottery,
belonging to an early period in the Late Stone Age, have been
discovered in association with the bones of the woolly rhinoceros.