150 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



spent in carrying on such investigations in likely equatorial forest re- 

 gions. 



It would be a pity that for want of enterprise a chance, however 

 slight, should be missed of settling a question so vital to anthropol- 

 ogy. 



While the problem of primitive man thus remains obscure, a some- 

 what more distinct opinion may be formed on the problem of primitive 

 civilized man. When it is asked what races of mankind first attained 

 to civilization, it may be answered that the earliest nations known to 

 have had the ai't of writing, the great mark of civilization as distin- 

 guished from barbarism, were the Egyptians and Babylonians, who in 

 the remotest ages of history appear as nations advanced to the civilized 

 stage in arts and social organization. The question is, under what 

 races to class them ? What the ancient Egyptians were like is well 

 known from the monuments, which show how closely much of the pres- 

 ent fellah population, as little changed in features as in climate and 

 life, represent their ancestors of the times of the Pharaohs. Their 

 reddish-brown skin, and features tending toward the negroid, have led 

 Hartmann, the latest anthropologist who has carefully studied them, 

 to adopt the classification of them as belonging to the African rather 

 than the Asiatic peoples, and especially to insist on their connection 

 with the Berber type, a view which seems to have been held by Blu- 

 menbach. The contrast of the brown Egyptians with the dark-white 

 Syi'O- Arabians on their frontiers is strongly marked, and the portraits 

 on the monuments show how distinctly the Egyptian knew himself to 

 be of diflPerent race from the Semite. Yet there was mixture between the 

 two races, and, what is most remarkable, there is a deep-seated Semitic 

 element in the Egyptian language, only to be accounted for by some 

 extremely ancient and intimate connection. On the whole, the Egyj)- 

 tians may be a mixed race, mainly of African origin, perhaps from the 

 southern Somauli-land, whence the Egyptian tradition was that the 

 gods came, while their African type may have since been modified by 

 Asiatic admixture. Next, as to the early relations of Babylonia and 

 Media, a different problem presents itself. The languages of these 

 nations, the so-called Akkadian and the early Medic, were certainly 

 not of the same family with either the Assyrian or the Persian which 

 afterward prevailed in their districts. Their connection with the Tartar 

 or Turanian family of languages, asserted twenty years ago by Oppert, 

 has since been further maintained by Lenormant and Sayce, and seems, 

 if not conclusively settled, at any rate to have much evidence for it, not 

 depending merely on similarity of words, such as the term for " god," 

 Akkadian dingira, being like the Tartar tengri, but also on the simi- 

 larity of pronouns and grammatical structure by post-positions. Now 

 language, though not a conclusive argument as to race, always proves 

 more or less as to connection. The comparison of the Akkadian lan- 

 guage to that of the Tartar family is at any rate prima facie evidence 



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