54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to have descended. The selection is made for convenience, because 

 this audience is assumed to be familiar with the Old Testament, 

 so that quotations and citations from it are less necessary ; and 

 also because many of them in this, the Anthropologic Section, are 

 familiar with the Indians, so that the collocation of facts without 

 a prolix statement is sufficient for comparison. 



Although the Indians are divided into fifty-eight linguistic 

 stocks and three hundred languages, and although there is great 

 variety in their manners, customs, and traditions, yet there is suf- 

 ficient generic resemblance between all of them to afford typical 

 instances, where European civilization and missionary influence 

 have not effected serious change, or where the early authorities are 

 reliable. It is essential to examine the other side of the parallel 

 the Israelites at a period coincident in development with that 

 of the Indians. That part of the history and records of the Israel- 

 ites must be chiefly considered which relates to the times before 

 they had formed a nationality and had become sedentary. The 

 general use of writing was nearly contemporaneous with that 

 nationality, and the era of King David is a proper deniarkating 

 line. The Indians never having arrived at the stage of nation- 

 ality, though some of them (as the Iroquois and the Muskoki) 

 were far on the road to it, and never having acquired a written 

 language, their silage of culture at the Columbian discovery shows 

 a degree of development comparable with that of the Israelite 

 patriarchal period and the early Canaanite occupation before the 

 rule of kings. 



It is important to establish the time when writing was first 

 known among the Israelites, because then their traditions would 

 first become fixed. No reliable history can exist before writing. 

 An illiterate people remembers only fables and myths ; from these 

 the history of the years before writing was used must be win- 

 nowed. There is no reason to suppose that the Hebrew language 

 was written at the time of the exodus, though some such mnemon- 

 ic system might have been invented as was used by several of the 

 Indian tribes. If Moses had all the knowledge of the Egyptians, 

 but no more, he could not have used any better mode of writing 

 than their hieratic, in which it was not possible to write intelligibly 

 any long document in the Hebrew language, simply because the 

 advance made by the hieratic, in which the use of phonetics be- 

 gan, was not sufficient to express all the Hebrew vocables. 



There has been an attempt to show that the old Hebrew alpha- 

 bet, which has been classed as partly Phoenician and partly Baby- 

 lonian, was obtained from Assyria at a time before the exodus, 

 but the proposition is not yet established. Even if Assyrian 

 characters adaptable to the Hebrew language did then exist, it is 

 not probable that the Israelite herdsmen and bondmen did so 



