XIII.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 50 1 



for the nearly complete uniformity of their types, for their dark 

 complexion, for their extreme brachycephalism and for their large 

 and hooked 'Jewish' nose.... The old brachy race [of Syria 

 and Asia Minor], which from the beginning was utterly distinct 

 from any Semitic tribe, can only be identified with the Hittites- 

 the same Hittites mentioned as a Syrian tribe in the Bible, which 

 had been a strong and formidable enemy to Ramses II. \Kheta\ 

 and were finally conquered by Assyrian kings in long wars, as we 

 read in the Assyrian annals from the gth to the yth century B.C. 1 ' 



At Senjirli, i.e. the Sammal mentioned in the Assyrian texts 

 as a Hittite station in north Syria, were found numerous Hittite 

 carvings with figures of strikingly Armenian type, so that " we 

 cannot err if we consider the inhabitants of Sammal as the direct 

 ancestors of the modern Armenians "-. But the presence of Semites 

 in the same old royal city is shown by two inscriptions of the Qth 

 and 8th centuries B.C., both in characters closely resembling those 

 of the famous Moabite inscription, and in a proto- Aramaic or proto- 

 Hebrew language. Here we seem to find Semites and Armenians 

 in actual contact, their fusion resulting in what Von Luschan and 

 Jensen would call Hittites. 



In marked contrast to these mixed Semitic populations of 

 western Asia stand out the Arabs of the Neid 



. . . The Arabs. 



plateau, who have to this day preserved their 

 Semitic type and speech almost in their full integrity, and whose 

 destiny it has been to absorb, or at least impose their language 

 on, all the other members of the Semitic family, the cosmopolitan 

 Jews and the Himyaritic rulers of Abyssinia alone excepted. We 

 have already seen how these fiery nomads, who in Muhammadan 

 times have overrun north Africa, stand related to their remote 

 Hamitic kinsmen, the Berber aborigines of that region. But they 

 have also ranged north to Mesopotamia and Syria, and the great 

 cities of Bagdad, Damascus, and Aleppo have long been centres 

 of Arab cult and culture. Here again Von Luschan points out 

 that of all the Semites the Bedouins alone form a homogeneous 

 unity, such as is represented on the earliest Egyptian monuments, 

 while the oldest Phoenician skulls " seem identical with old and 



1 yews and Hittite!,, Science, Jan. 12, 1894. 



- Ibid, 



